Like in 1914 or 1939, we may be sleepwalking towards a global war that nothing can stop
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Catastrophe can come out of the blue. Shortly before Britain was dragged into the devastating French revolutionary wars, the then prime minister William Pitt reassured the House of Commons that ‘there never was a time in the history of this country when ... we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace.’ In 1938, Neville Chamberlain won global plaudits for securing ‘peace for our time’. In 1914, just before the German army marched in, the French public was wholly absorbed by the trial of a politician’s wife who had killed an indiscreet journalist. (She got off.)
Might future generations wonder how we in our turn could be so focused on omicron and apparently illegal Christmas parties while Russian armies mustered, the Chinese airforce menaced Taiwan, and Iran stood on the brink of making the nuclear weapons that Israel had sworn it would never permit?
There are lessons from these past disasters, not all of them encouraging.
First is that a potential disturber of the peace mu...
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