Over 70 days into the Ukraine war, no one knows how it’s going to end. But the one thing that we can be sure of is that it’s going to pick up again where it ends this time around.
The war is the latest episode of a nationalist territorial conflict going back centuries. And those don’t go away until the people fighting them do. Progressive theories of history spent the last century predicting that wars were on the way out in a more enlightened age. Then two world wars shattered the civilized world and nearly led to a third even more devastating conflict.
And yet westerners are still prone to believing that war, which has been around for as long as mankind, is one of those old-fashioned barbaric things, like mutton chops, disco, and Joe Biden, that is about to go out of style in the wonderfully enlightened world of tomorrow.
It’s not.
Very few of our conflicts are even new. Most are “endless wars” of tribe, race, religion or national identity that have been around for hundreds or even thousands of years.
The War on Terror is not a recent phenomenon in response to, as leftists and libertarians allege, the oil industry, Mohammed cartoons, colonialism or miniskirts.
It’s just the latest episode in the Islamic conquests that date back over a thousand years.
By the 7th century, the Arab Muslim invaders were fighting what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire. By the 8th century, they defeated Chinese forces during the Battle of Talas when the Turkic mercs joined the Muslim side. The wars have started and stopped since then, but they’ve never actually gone away. And it’s unlikely that they ever will. At least not for centuries more.
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| Putin dreams of new Russian empire |
The 'Führerprinzip' fallacy assumes that wars are begun by leaders. In Ukraine, it’s tempting to attribute the conflict to Vladimir Putin. And while Putin’s desire for a quick legacy led to the massive overreach and a bloody war, any strong Russian leader would have done the same.
The Russians, like the Chinese and Arab Muslims, want the restoration of an old empire. And they’re not alone. While westerners decided that they wanted to move on to an exciting borderless future defined not by territory, but technology, the rest of the world does not.
Western weakness spurred the resumption of tribal conflicts all over the world. The United Nations, international law, the spread of democracy and other western solutions have not only failed to stem the violence, they have actually encouraged it. The international house of cards is built on the implausible notion that most countries and peoples don’t really want wars.
History, even the most recent history, makes it painfully clear that they do.Read the rest from Daniel Greenfield HERE
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