>> of world will I leave for my children?”
comes up a lot around dinner party tables and
mum-heavy Facebook threads. Newspapers
often talk of one thing or another being “a
parent’s worst nightmare”, but I’ve been
a parent for ages and for most of that time
my worst nightmare has been being served
fish mousse. Now I’m sensing a different fear,
or rather the return of a familiar one. Climate
change is a catastrophe we can predict with
some assurance, whereas war is something
you fear in the pit of your stomach, knowing
that it’s waiting somewhere around the corner- a top-hatted Jack The Ripper emerging from
the fog. The human race has a compulsive
personality disorder. It just can’t help itself.
Iused to watch repeats of The World
At War as a history enthusiast. Now
it’s as a weepy father who glimpses
footage of soldiers separating children
from their parents through embarrassed
tears. But the same horrors are taking place
around the world right now in Syria, in Yemen
and the civil wars of central Africa. When I
look at my children and think, “You don’t
know how lucky you are,” I am stating two
empirical facts: firstly they are bloody lucky
and, secondly, of course they don’t know it.
They’re children.
I’m as spoilt as they are. After all, civilians
in the West have enjoyed four generations
without conflict. Call it the impossibility of
war in the mind of the peaceful. With no
sense of jeopardy, without even the tiniest
inkling of what the human consequences of
war are, it is easier to get behind leaders who
promise security through aggression or easy
solutions to intractable problems.
The sight of self-styled men of destiny
and their macho regimes (the US included)
riding the tiger of ethnic nationalism and
facing off in the South China Sea, the Strait
Of Hormuz or the Crimea is depressing as
well as frightening. The historian AJP Taylor
said, “Great men can be splendid in wartime,
even essential, but they can be dangerous
in peacetime.”
So while citizens of liberal democracies
argue about whether Greta Thunberg is the
new Joan Of Arc or just a child who’s missing
too much school, the illiberal regimes of the
world pursue their aims regardless.
Of course, climate change is itself a threat
to world peace and always has been, as
explained in Geoffrey Parker’s epic book,
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change And
Catastrophe In The Seventeenth Century, in
which the links between conflicts around the
world and climatic disasters are explored with
alarming clarity. In the 17th century they
blamed comets and witches for everything
that went wrong. What’s our excuse?When even the West won’t uphold
Western values, the world seems a much
scarier place. If there must be a war it would
be nice if there was something to fight for,
to make it a little less darkly absurd. Cold
War One was so beautifully delineated you
always knew who was on whose side. Cold
War Two resembles more the fragmented
international struggles of the 19th century:
all “spheres of influence” and the precarious
balance of power. Bad Vlad Putin presaged
the latest G20 summit by saying liberalism
was “obsolete” and had “outlived its purpose”
as an ideology. It shows his confidence.
It has been so easy for China, Russia, Iran
and others to push back against the “triumph
of the West”, which has been unravelling
since its Nineties honeymoon, blindsided by
Francis Fukuyama’s “End Of History” thesis
that liberal democracy was the end point of
human development. This isn’t hindsight.
Anyone who knew history knew history
wouldn’t succumb easily to the idea that it
no longer matters. You can’t say history is
over and then invade Iraq.The assumption that a grateful world
would lap up freedom of speech, a free
press, pluralism and tolerance now looks
as foolish as investing in Blockbuster. In
fact, the reverse is happening, as the West
reacts to posturing tyrants with strong men
and conspiracy peddling of its own. The ne
plus ultra of this is how the rise of the new
right and the new left in the US and Europe
has combined – with gleeful opportunism
on one side and wilful forgetfulness on the
other – to revive anti-Semitism. It’s not only
obscene in itself, but is a sign of laziness, of
how easily we become lotus eaters. It is the
kind of thought process that leads, when
extrapolated on a national scale, to conflict.
A Great Power war is always the triumph of
forgetting over memory.
A cold war with China is not an obvious
battle of ideologies, as with the Soviets,
but a battle of interests or, God forbid, a
clash of civilisations. China considers
itself a homogenous ethnic, territorial and
cultural bloc and is of a mind to insist on its
power being acknowledged, which appears
dangerous only when its interests rub up
against those of others (Japan, South Korea,the US). But a scruple-free China’s great
advantage is its ability to plan 40 or 50 years
into the future, a luxury not afforded by
the short-termism of a true democracy. The
race for technological supremacy is still on,
but the problem for the US is not simply
China’s carefully managed aggression but
that it always seems one step ahead. Powers
in decline are just as, if not more, dangerous
than powers in ascent.Where once I lived in fear
of nuclear weapons, now I
pin my hopes on them. No
Great Power would allow
itself to lose a war without
resorting to the nuclear option. So although
a tech-cyber conflict seems sexier these days
than actual bombs and guns, if a nation ever
felt its survival was at stake then actual bombs
it must be. All you need is a couple of angry
soldiers and a mobile missile launcher.
When I was 12 – about the same time
Threads was on television and Frankie Goes
To Hollywood were at No1 with “Two Tribes”- I saw a repeat of AJP Taylor’s televised
lecture How Wars Begin. His parting words
have spooked me ever since. “People ask
me will there be another world war and I
am inclined to answer, ‘If men behave in
the future as they have done in the past,
there will be another world war.’ It’s always
possible that men may behave differently.
As a personal hunch I think it’s unlikely and
there will be a third world war. One day, the
deterrent will fail to deter.” They don’t call
me happy-go-lucky in the office for nothing.
If there is one thing we can be sure of
it’s that the great nations of today are no
less myopic, selfish and greedy than those
of 150 years ago. A Great Power war feels
inevitable. Overdue, even. It is an odd, cold
comfort that mutually assured destruction
may be our only saving grace. That’s what
some people believed in 1984 (the year, not
the book). Nuclear weapons should make
victory and defeat impossible. The trouble is,
human beings love a challenge. And I must
spend more time at the beach. That will take
my mind off it. G
It’s an odd, coldcomfort thatmutually assureddestruction may beour saving graceTheresa May’s China Visit Signals Britain’s
Weaker Place In A Post-Brexit World
(Matt Kelly, January 2018)
Trump And Kim Jong-Un’s Battle Of The
Buttons Is The Reality Show We’re All
Watching (Tanya Gold, January 2018)
Garry Kasparov On Putin, Trump And Their
Deal To Carve Up Europe (Alastair Campbell,
December 2017)More from G For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk /magazineGQ FOREWORD09-19Foreword.indd 50 05/07/2019 15:03
46 GQ.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2019