NEWSLETTER (£)
European leaders keep predicting a new world war – we have lost sight of what such a conflict is really like
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European political and military leaders are ushering in 2026 with bellicose speeches that recall 1914, greeting the prospect of military conflict with Russia with a lack of trepidation amounting at times to relish.
“If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children,” warned the new French army chief of staff General Fabien Mandon, “then we are indeed at risk.” His call to arms was echoed by UK Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, who called on the “whole of society” to be ready “to fight” with the understanding that “more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means”.
Politicians vie with each other in ratcheting up war fever. Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte predicts that Russia may attack the alliance within five years, when “we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great grandparents endured”. He is clearly talking about the First and Second World Wars, but German defence minister Boris Pistorius goes an alarming step further, claiming that Russia might attack in 2028 or earlier, and “we may already have lived through our last peaceful summer”.
Chilling words like these come not from hysterical jingoistic outliers, but from senior political and defence chiefs of the most powerful countries in Europe – Germany, UK and France – and from the heads of the European Union and Nato. They show astoundingly little concern about the prospect of a war on the scale of 1914-18 and 1939-45. The enemy this time around will be Russia, which has 5,500 nuclear warheads, the largest such arsenal in the world, and the means to deliver them.
Why do European leaders blithely predict a near imminent Russian attack, apparently inescapable without full-scale European remilitarisation? The most obvious reason is that they believe what they say about Vladimir Putin being an updated version of Kaiser Wilhelm II or Hitler, a warlord who is planning a wider assault against the rest of Europe. They cite his invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 as proof of his aggressive intentions towards Europe as a whole.
Putin does indeed share some traits with the Kaiser, notably hubris and poor judgement. In reality, the Ukraine war is proof of Russian weakness rather than strength, aside from its nuclear weapons. The initial invasion of Ukraine was a fiasco and nearly four years on the Russian front line has scarcely advanced. The war has proved a strategic calamity for Russia.
What other explanations could there be for the explosion of warmongering among European elites, a response so much in excess of real evidence for a Russian attack? EU and Nato policy is certainly skewed by east European states with a visceral hatred of Moscow born out of Soviet and Tsarist occupation. Former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas, now EU foreign policy chief, is notorious for her anti-Russian outbursts, having to row back on her suggestion that a defeated Russia should be broken up into separate states.
Possibly the leading European states may be using an inflated Russian threat to power national unity at home and glue together the dysfunctional and fragmented EU and Nato alliances. Ceaseless meetings produce bombastic declarations of eternal unity against the Russian foe. But belligerent posturing can easily slip out of control and into a real shooting war, as notoriously happened prior to the First World War.
Most significant perhaps is the lack of any public outcry in Europe as its leaders glibly speak of another devastating pan-European war approaching fast over the horizon. Europeans have forgotten what such a conflict is like. During the 1914-18 war, some seven million German soldiers, six million French and 2.5 million British soldiers were killed or wounded.
Horrific figures like these are dehumanising; individuals and family loss is swallowed up in the general blood-soaked catastrophe. Anybody who wants to get a sense of what these tragedies felt like at the time, and may do so again, should read Three Sons for the Kaiser: A German family’s sacrifice in the First World War by Hazel Strouts. It is based on an archive built up by her great-grandfather, Philipp Gercke, which detailed through letters, documents and his own account the peacetime lives and wartime deaths of his three sons – Hermann, Georg and Walderman – who were killed between 1914 and 1918.
Philipp was a naval officer who had once commanded Kaiser Wilhelm II’s yacht, before losing the job because of colour-blindness and heavy drinking. An amiable man with a close and affectionate family, holding normal German patriotic opinions, he went on to edit a naval magazine publicising and promoting the expansion of the German navy.
After the war, Philipp turned against the Kaiser who had once befriended him, and began chronicling everything about his dead children, though he never published anything. Based on his research and memories, Strouts’s account gives a feel seldom equalled about how people – soldiers and civilians – get caught up in a war which destroys them.
The youngest son, Waldemar, was the first to die. As he marches into Belgium and then France in the first great German offensive, his letters to his fiancée are reassuring and upbeat, expressing an optimism about the future that sounds a little overdone: “Do not worry about me at all, dearest girl. I am all right. Sleeping rough is, in some ways, quite fun. I shall be home soon anyway. We can make plans. What a wonderful life lies before us. Once this war is over.”
But for him the war was never over. Wounded in the leg in the Battle of the Marne, he returned to the front where he attended a New Year’s Eve service in a church that turned out to be within range of French artillery. As the Germans left the church, a shell struck a nearby building spraying them with shrapnel and fatally wounding Waldemar in the head.
His brother Georg was a painter living in Paris when he was called up by the German army, forcing him to abandon his paintings, none of which survive. He returned to France as a soldier to take part in the Battle of Verdun in 1916, leading his company in an attack against a French machine-gun post. The Germans were using a flamethrower and a soldier with Georg described how a hand grenade hit the fuel tank, incinerating one of the group and dismaying the troops. Georg stood up to rally them and was shot in the stomach.
Hermann – the grandfather of the author – was a professional navy officer who volunteered to train as a commander of a U-boat which he saw as Germany’s last hope of winning the war. In practice, it was a death sentence since the British had broken the code with which the U-boats communicated with their headquarters, giving their exact position. Though Hermann had a strong suspicion that this was happening, he kept a rendezvous with other U-boats near the Azores where a waiting British submarine torpedoed his U-boat, killing him and his crew.
This is what “losing children” and “family sacrifice” – miseries that Generals Mandon and Knighton say we must prepare to endure once again – mean in real life. We must all remember that.
Further Thoughts
Peter Arnett, one the best of war correspondents I have ever known, died in California last month at the age of 91. I admired him because he was intrepid in reporting the news in 17 wars, first for AP primarily in Vietnam, where he won a Pulitzer Prize, and later for CNN, doing his most famous work in Iraq. He showed physical bravery and ingenuity in getting the story, but above all else he was automatically suspicious of what the US government and anybody else in authority told him.
He determinedly stood up to those who tried to pressure or sucker him into confirming some official narrative about which he was suspicious. I have always found that editors are pleased to have a real scoop, but are nervous when they find it is in the nature of things that scoops mean that they are out there on their own. Editorial trepidation rises another few notches when the scoop disproves what the government is claiming hand on heart.
A prime example of this, which ought to be taught in every journalistic school, was Arnett’s reportage about the US bombing of an Iraqi baby milk factory – which Washington said was an Iraqi biological weapons (BW) manufacturing plant – on the outskirts of Baghdad at the start of the US-Iraq war in January 1991.
I had gone with Arnett and other journalists on an Iraqi government-organised trip to what they said was the remains of the baby milk plant at Abu Ghraib. Walking around the wreckage, I found a smashed-up desk with letters showing that the plant had indeed been producing “infant formula” milk powder. Much of the correspondence was about the dire finances of the plant which was on the verge of bankruptcy. I doubted if the Iraqi government had the subtlety to fabricate such evidence.
I reported as such, failing to realise until much later – we were somewhat isolated in Baghdad – that exactly what was being manufactured in the Abu Ghraib plant had become a topic of furious controversy in the US.
Arnett had reported mildly that “whatever else it [the plant] did, it produced infant formula”. He had seen a lot of powdered milk. The Pentagon claimed that the place was guarded like a fortress, but we saw only one guard at the gate. Arnett had not denied the US government’s claim that the place was a BW plant, but nor did he confirm it, simply saying that “it looked innocent enough from what we could see”.
Mild as it was, such scepticism was met with fury in Washington. The US chief of staff, Colin Powell, expressed certainty that the Abu Ghraib plant had manufactured BW. The US Air Force said that it had multiple sources of information proving the same thing.
Arnett and CNN stood by their story but it took years for the official version to fall apart. A 1993 Congressional report on US intelligence successes and failures in the Gulf War revealed the shaky reasoning behind the decision to bomb the Abu Ghraib site. “Mottled camouflage” had been used on the roofs of two known BW facilities. The report said: “the same camouflage scheme was applied to the roof of the [Abu Ghraib] milk plant”. US government claims about multiple sources of intelligence were lies.
Finally, an unclassified CIA paper on Iraq’s BW programme revealed that another plant, the real centre of Saddam Hussein’s BW effort, had been unknown to the US-led coalition and “was not attacked during the war, unlike the Abu Ghurayb [sic] Infant Formula Plant (the Baby Milk Factory) that the Coalition destroyed by bombing in the mistaken belief that it was a key BW facility”.
CNN’s reputation was much enhanced by Arnett’s independent-minded reporting, but I sensed that they were never comfortable with somebody who said what he thought so forthrightly – and a few years later he parted from them.
Beneath the Radar
The role of money in US elections is usually misunderstood. The focus is generally on the amount spent by rival candidates to buy ads on TV and on social media. Political consultants prefer this type of expenditure because they get a fee (sometimes 15 per cent of the total ad spend), though the evidence is that such ads have surprisingly little impact.
Adam Bonica, Professor of Political Science at Stanford, has written a penetrating article called “Money doesn’t buy elections. It does something worse”. He explains how “we tend to imagine corruption as a transaction: money buying votes, quid pro quos in backrooms. But money’s real power is quieter and deeper. It decides which candidates get to run, which policies are thinkable, and whose voices get amplified or ignored.”
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Cockburn’s Picks
At one moment most talking heads on television and radio or quoted in the press portray Russia as powerful enough to sweep into eastern Europe like the Red Army in 1944-45, and at another the Russian army is a basket case that will collapse with one more push. Interviewers seldom call these supposed experts out on this obvious contradiction.
One of the few former UK military officials to express balanced and well-informed views on what is happening in the war is John Foreman, a former naval commander who became British defence attaché in Moscow shortly before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I share his view, expressed in this interview with The Economist, that for Russia the attack was “a strategic disaster” and a sign of Russian weakness further underlined by their failure to advance over the last four years.