If war 'breaks out'

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There was a suggestion last week that the UK should launch a 21^st Century version of the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign which saw gardens and parks turned over to food production during the Second World War. Given the threats from climate change and extreme weather, increasing food production in the UK is not a bad suggestion – and there would almost certainly be some health benefits as well. That wasn’t the stimulus suggested by the proposers, who were more concerned about the apparently  impending war with Russia, but the mere fact that it was a reaction to the wrong stimulus shouldn’t lead us to reject the idea itself.

What caught my eye, though, was to do with the stimulus rather than the proposal – or rather the terms in which it was couched. As the headline states, it was seen as part of preparation to boost food supplies “… if a war with Russia breaks out”. It’s a turn of phrase which is increasingly being used, but my issue with it is the implicit denial of agency. Wars don’t just ‘break out’; they are started by deliberate decisions. Trump and Netanyahu started the war against Iran; Putin started the war in Ukraine. The decision might rarely be mutual, but there’s always a decision taken by someone, somewhere to fire the first shot. Denying agency, with its implication that a war is completely beyond our control, is all part of the softening up process to prepare opinion for the war which some people on both sides seem to be actively seeking. But here’s the thing: if all wars are ultimately started by human decisions, the humans who take those decisions could equally decide not to take them. All wars are preventable. And as humanity never seems quite able to learn, not starting one is easier than stopping one after it has started.

That Putin and some of the people around him harbour a dream about restoring the Russian Empire to its greatest extent is probably true. That means he has a somewhat romantic and idealised view of the past. But, unless we believe that he is also incredibly stupid, he will surely have learned something from the war in Ukraine about the limits of raw military power. That doesn’t mean that he won’t continue his efforts to weaken and disrupt what he sees as an anti-Russian alliance through cyber attacks, election interference, and maybe even sabotage, particularly targeted at disrupting support for Ukraine. It is not, however, something which more guns, tanks, planes and ships is going to be much of a defence against. If we assume instead that he is reasonably intelligent and able to calculate the risks, benefits and relative strengths before taking any course of action, then the two likeliest reasons for him to launch an attack are either a miscalculation of those risks, benefits, and relative strengths or (much more likely) a belief (misplaced or otherwise) that ‘the enemy’ is preparing to attack him and that his best defence is to strike first.

From ‘our’ perspective, a belief that ‘we’ are preparing to attack Russia looks like nonsense, but the more politicians, generals and others talk up the prospect of war, the more threatening it will look to the Kremlin. They tell us that the best way to prevent a war is to prepare for it. I’m not at all sure that history concurs with that.