Harry Readhead
The American writer and thinker Michael Lind thinks we ought to stop invoking the two world wars. For him, pointing to the appeasement of Hitler, or the stoutheartedness of Churchill or the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – what Christopher Hitchens called the “midnight of the century” – just muddies the water. Our present conditions are different, says Lind. The upshot of making such comparisons is bad foreign policy.
He may well be on to something.
A client tells me that on his latest trip to Ukraine, he saw “a drone, entirely autonomous, flying around with an AK-47, hunting Russians.” We did not see that in 1914 or 1939. Though tanks and bombs and bullets might still exist, war on the whole looks very different – so different, in fact, that we might not even see it as such. Hence, why one might make a disquieting suggestion: That we – NATO, perhaps the West – are already at war.
Some are more sure of themselves. In June, the British government’s defense advisor Fiona Hill gave an interview in which she flatly said that Britain, and by extension our NATO allies, are at war with Russia, adding “that we’re in pretty big trouble.” Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, said in September that she broadly agreed, even if it was “a different sort of war.”
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