AS WE mark Christmas 2024, wars rage across the world. That is more the norm than the exception for the 21st century, which began in the shadow of Nato’s assault on Yugoslavia, the first of a series of US-led invasions, occupations, bombardments and regime change operations.
That was acknowledged even by outgoing President of the United States Joe Biden, who claimed the collapse of the occupation of Afghanistan showed he was the US leader who would end the “forever wars.”
Yet if Washington belatedly recognised defeat in Afghanistan, it was only with an eye to marshalling its forces for still greater wars. Every step taken in 2024 has taken us closer to world war.
2025 will mark 80 years since the end of the last such global conflict. World War II ended with the beginning of the atomic age, when the United States dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing well over 200,000 civilians.
Fears of nuclear war stalked the following decades. The early 1960s and early 1980s saw the world come perilously close to the reality of “mutually assured destruction.”
We avoided that fate because of what the late great journalist John Pilger, whom we lost at the end of last year, called “the other superpower,” the ordinary people prepared to stand up for peace.
People whose protests and peace camps from the Aldermaston or Greenham Common mobilisations here to the huge movement against the Vietnam war in the US showed politicians what they could not do.
Today we must rebuild such a movement. In many ways it is already taking shape.
The biggest political movement of 2023 in Britain has been the solidarity movement for Palestine.
There is no room for complacency on that score. The need for such a movement stems from the unbearable horror inflicted on the Palestinian people day in, day out for the last 14 months and counting, as Israel’s armies incinerate hospitals and schools, gun down journalists and aid workers, kill the equivalent of an entire classroom of children on average every single day, in a genocide facilitated by Britain and the United States.
We have not ended the killing, and until we do we are not doing enough for Palestine. Under Donald Trump this war, which has already spread from Gaza to the West Bank, into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and even Iran, could easily escalate further: the incoming US leader openly supports Israel’s annexation of its neighbours’ territory. Here is one potential flashpoint for World War III.
Another is the war of attrition in Ukraine. Hopes that Trump might negotiate an end to it are at best premature. Already, we see a worst-of-both-worlds scenario taking shape, with Britain and European Nato states agreeing to Trump’s demands to ratchet up military spending in return for Washington’s continued support for the war.
A third looms in the Far East, where Britain has joined the US in deploying warships along China’s coasts. Belligerent spooks and hysterical media continually hype up a supposed “China threat.”
This stuff is dangerous. Our politicians are not those of the cold war, brought up amid the destruction of great power conflict. They are a generation used to the West being able to push other countries around with impunity.
This makes them reckless. In conflict after conflict, our politicians show they do not understand the emerging multipolar world: they remain wedded to Western supremacy, and are prepared to use force to extend it.
That is ultimately futile: the West is economically weaker each year, its main powers enfeebled by social decline and a pervasive sense of political illegitimacy.
But the inability to win a war for the old world order is not an inability to start one. The human cost of a conflict on this scale would be incalculable. In 2025 we must dedicate ourselves to stopping it.
