Do we mean what they mean?
War, it appears, is in the air, or at least on the horizon, or if not that, maybe in the offing. Even if we have no clear idea where exactly it may be located, “War” is apparently “likely,” if not inevitable, between the United States, Israel or both and Iran, and also between the United States and China, even if the causes and the nature of such a war are unclear. Pundits worry about whether western support for Ukraine means that we are “at war” with Russia. Politicians insist that this is not the case. For several years, other pundits have been gloomily predicting that the Ukraine crisis will lead inevitably to a nuclear war, possibly by accident, or possibly because of some unstoppable inherent momentum beyond mere human control.
In one of my earlier essays, I tried to put fears about escalation and nuclear war in perspective, and to explain that escalation models do not reflect what happens in the real world, nor does “War” as a concept have agency. Wars do not just “break out,” nor is escalation towards some armageddon or other inevitable. But I see that there is still a lot of confusion about these subjects, and, as often, confusion in the use of words betrays a deeper confusion of ideas and concepts.
So in this essay I will try to do two things. One is to explain in simple terms the words and concepts involved in this “debate,” and to set out what people would actually mean, if they were only capable of using them correctly. The other is to ask what all this talk of “war with Iran” and “war with China” actually signifies, and whether those who talk airily of such things have any idea what they are talking about. (Short answer, no.)
I’m going to skip over the immense literature on the causes of war, because most of it isn’t very enlightening, and much of it depends on the highly dubious assumption that wars are caused by the natural human aggression of people like you and me: an argument I have dealt with roughy several times. Likewise, you can read about the history of war—a fascinating subject—in books like John Keegan’s classic. There are many definitions of war available, all pretty similar, and there’s little point in listing them or trying to judge between them. Essentially, they all refer to episodes of sustained organised violence between structured political entities for particular objectives, generally characterised by short episodes of more extreme violence which we call “battles.”
One reason for not dwelling too much on definitions is that all of them are flaky around the edges. Many wars are actually closer to episodes of mass violence and banditry, some stop and start, some are at very low levels of intensity, “civil wars” for control of a state may take place at the same time as wars between states, different factions within a state may fight on different sides with different other states, and both the beginnings and ends of wars are subjects of frequent disagreements between experts. Some episodes historically called “wars” between colonial powers and indigenous people (eg the Arab conquests) are arguably more complicated than that, whereas some more recent episodes (such as the Algerian independence saga) have some characteristics of wars, but not necessarily all. And in many cases, “war” is a term applied for convenience by later historians. No-one, I think, was conscious of living through the Thirty Years’ War, let alone the Hundred Years’ War (“only another thirty-three years to go, thank God!”) which are disputed labels placed somewhat arbitrarily by historians on long and complex trains of events, frequently involving truces, ceasefires, betrayals, negotiations, shifting coalitions and episodes of mindless cruelty.
Historians generally place the first recorded war in history in 2700 BC in Mesopotamia, between Elam and Sumer. We don’t know much about the war, but significantly it was between kingdoms and, for thousands of years war was a central preoccupation and activity of Kings and Princes: for Alexander of Macedon, it was pretty much all he did, apart from founding cities. War was then, and remained until very recently, a prerogative option of states, an extreme case of the rivalry and ambitions that pitted them against each other, and sometimes led them to act as allies.
However, certain customs of war were widely adhered to. Some form of justification, or at least pretext, was typical, such as a rightful claim to a throne (think of the first act of Shakespeare’ Henry V) or provocation by another state. As time passed, surprise attacks that begun wars without warning (as with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05) were increasingly considered unsporting. Pretty much the final form of this approach was enshrined in a little-known document, the 1907 Hague Convention III, relative to the Opening of Hostilities. As its name implies, this document is concerned with what happens before a war, and has nothing to do with how a war is conducted: a point I return to briefly below. The document itself is interesting as a glimpse of a departed world, where war was something that states just did.
The preamble does, to be sure, assert that it is “important, in order to ensure the maintenance of pacific relations, that hostilities should not commence without previous warning,” but that’s all the references there are to peace. The rest of the (short) text obliges the contracting parties to recognise that
“…hostilities between themselves must not commence without previous and explicit warning, in the form either of a declaration of war, giving reasons, or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war” and that the
“existence of a state of war must be notified to the neutral Powers without delay,”
The rest of the Convention is concerned with administrative issues. Whilst the Convention only bound its signatories, like all such accords, it does give a clear picture of how states saw war and peace before 1945. Indeed, when Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, they followed exactly this procedure: ultimatum followed by declaration with reasons. In addition, there were a series of conventional measures usually taken: closure of Embassies, repatriation or internment of foreign nationals, seizure of shipping, and so forth.
What this means is that “War” is a state of affairs brought into existence by a speech act. Five minutes before Neville Chamberlain broadcast to the British people on 3 September 1939, Britain and Germany were not at war. Five minutes later, they were. Declarations of war might, or might not, be supported by demands, ultimata and justifications, but they were essentially unilateral: the other party did not have to agree to be declared upon. The original definition of war was therefore essentially a legal and verbal one, and a “belligerent” in this sense is just a state that considers itself to be at war.
These ideas date back to the days when all educated people spoke Latin, and so the justifications would include what was then (and often still is) called a casus belli, which literally means “case of war.” However, it’s important to understand that this means “pretext” or “reason” for war: it does not mean “example or “instance.” So, the British and French governments had said that a German invasion of Poland would for them be a casus belli, and issued an ultimatum threatening to declare war if the invasion was not stopped. The ultimatum was ignored, and therefore the casus belli was activated. But there is no such thing as a casus belli in and of itself.
All this, I hopes, puts into context some of the wilder statements recently about the “risk of war” with Russia, or whether the West is effectively “at war” with that country, or whether for example direct western involvement with Ukrainian attacks could be considered “an act of war.” These questions are essentially meaningless, because the Russians can, if they want to, simply proclaim that a state of war exists at any point. Likewise, there is no automaticity: the Russians can ignore western actions; it’s entirely up to them. Direct clashes between forces of different countries are not frequent, but they have happened. So the American U2 flights over the Soviet Union during the Cold War were violations of national territory, and could have constituted a casus belli had the Soviet Union wanted to treat them as such, but they did not. Likewise, the shooting-down of a U2 in May 1960 caused a major diplomatic crisis, but neither side regarded it as a pretext for war. At the other end of the scale, there were major land and air battles in Angola during the 1980s, involving the South Africans, Angolans, Cubans and Russians, but none of these countries considered itself “at war” with any other.
So what are these “acts of war” that we hear about? As always there are multiple competing definitions, and as often, they say basically the same thing. An “act of war” is a military act that takes place during war. Well, thanks for that. These days, as I’ll explain in a moment, “war” is viewed rather flexibly, but even so, the issue is not what a given act is, but how it is treated by the country that suffers it.
After 1945, the Nuremberg Trials and the Charter of the United Nations, then with a screeching of brakes and the smell of burning rubber, the approved international discourse on war changed completely. What are in effect declarations of war are reserved to the Security Council, and it is they who should intervene to put a stop to conflicts. The only exception to this is Art 51 of the Charter, which recognises that the inherent right of self-defence that all states have always had is not affected. Thus, if Israel invades Lebanon, the Lebanese retain the right to defend themselves while awaiting the arrival of UN forces to expel the invaders.
Now this is essentially a political and legal change only. Large-scale conflicts still occur in the world, and we speak colloquially of the Vietnam War, the Iraq Wars, and generically of Civil Wars and Wars of Independence. In terms of substance, there is no real difference from the past, but in terms of structure and rhetoric, declarations of war as such are now out of fashion, and the official use of the term itself has been very limited in recent years.
One of the problems of this subject is that the most interested and motivated group for discussing these changes and developments are lawyers, This means that quite rapidly, general discussions of changes in the nature of warfare turn into exercises in trying to decide which law applies to which situation. This can be fascinating in its own way, but does not help our purpose very much here. However, since much of this debate trickles into the political arena and is picked up and clumsily kicked around by various pundits, I will just say a word about it.
The Hague Convention, the UN Charter, and indeed all international agreements between states, are examples of what is called International Law, which in principle governs the relationships of states with each other. I’ve written several times about the controversy over International Law, and whether it’s really law, since it can’t be enforced. Nonetheless, to the extent that there is a body of written custom and practice that influences how states behave, this is it. And “violations” of International Law are violations by states, not their governments, which is why all those pundits who were wondering publicly for so many years why Tony Blair was not prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq had not understood the question. As we have seen recently, the International Court of Justice in The Hague can rule on disputes between states, but on essentially technical issues. The South African case against Israel was cleverly constructed to take advantage of the Court’s ability to rule on a dispute between states (in this case who was right about Gaza) but in spite of what you might read, no-one can “file a complaint” about the behaviour of a state at the ICJ.
International Law (if it is that) is thus concerned here with the behaviour of states in times of conflict, and this is usually expressed in one more Latin phrase ius ad bellum, which is probably best understood as “the law concerning the behaviour of states with respect to conflicts.” Again, it applies to the acts of states, and is quite different from yet one more concept normally expressed in Latin, ius in bello. Here, we are concerned with the law relating to the conduct of individual people, in circumstances where this law applies. The phrase ordinarily employed to describe these circumstances is an Armed Conflict. Now an armed conflict and a war are conceptually distinct, although the first has largely replaced the second in technical texts, and most dictionaries now include armed conflicts under the general heading of “War.” (The confusion here is thus as much on the supply as the demand side.)
The simple distinction is that, as the ICRC puts it, an armed conflict is “a de facto state of hostilities dependent on neither a declaration nor recognition of the existence of “war” by its parties.” It is therefore an objective state of affairs, not the result of a speech act, and an armed conflict can exist even if a government denies that this is the case. Armed conflicts do not require the formal recognition of states, and there may be an armed conflict in one area of a country (for example the Eastern DRC) but not elsewhere. Moreover armed conflicts preemptively require certain laws to be respected.
It may not surprise you to learn that, in spite of the term being used very widely for nearly eighty years now, there is no generally-agreed definition of an “armed conflict,” and for much of that period there was no particular attempt to produce one. But this in turn was because the focus was on creating and refining a legal framework for regulating such conflicts in principle, rather than actually researching the characteristics of real ones. It was not until the Yugoslavia Tribunal began trials of individuals in connection with the fighting in that country and its successors, that a definition was necessary, to demonstrate that the Court had jurisdiction over the alleged crimes. In what is known as the Tadic judgement, the Court defined an armed conflict as occurring “whenever there is a resort to armed force between States or protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups within a State.” Now inevitably much depends on how you define words like “protracted” and “organised,” but this definition, which has been influential if not universally accepted, does helpfully point out that there is a type of situation of large-scale violence whose existence is an objective fact, and does not have to correspond to the traditional sense of all-out “war.” (Indeed, because an armed conflict is defined by activity, one could argue paradoxically that there was no armed conflict in most of Europe from September 1939 to May 1940, although there was certainly a state of war.)
This point is important for our purposes, because it shows that the old model, where some provocation or dispute would lead to general war between states is now outdated, and has been for a good while. Theoretically, Chinese and US aircraft could fight each other over Taiwan, as they did over Korea during the conflict there, without either side considering that they were “at war” with the other, nor some automatic escalatory process being engaged in the direction of armageddon. In the case of the East of Ukraine from 2014, then International Humanitarian Law applies, since that conflict was self-evidently protracted and between organised groups. But this law (or more precisely its subset the Law of Armed Conflict) applies to individuals, not states, which is why talk of “filing a case” against a state at the International Criminal Court, for example, is meaningless.
That’s all I’m going to say about the terminology and the law. If you think that in spite of these explanations both remain a bit of a mess, you could be forgiven. The key point, though, which really does need emphasising, is that there are three broad possible types of situation. The first is small-scale hostilities between countries, which are essentially diplomatic incidents and don’t by any standards meet the armed conflict threshold. The second is where an armed conflict actually exists and different states are involved, but where that situation is contained, and there are political and geographical limitations on what is allowed to happen. This is the situation in Ukraine today, where the fighting is restricted to certain areas, and where even the principal actors have imposed some limitation on their actions. The third—which has not been seen really since 1945—is a General War, where the full resources of the antagonists are involved in military action which is aimed at the total defeat and often occupation of the enemy.
The fact that these distinctions are not really understood, or even necessarily recognised, accounts for a lot of the confusion surrounding possible conflicts involving western powers, and explains to some degree the mixture of ignorant bellicosity and irrational sweating fear that characterises the coverage of such potential conflicts in the western media.
That being so, I want to move on logically now to try to deconstruct some of the wilder ideas circulating at the moment about a “war” between the US and Iran, probably with support from Israel, possibly with support from other states, and some kind of a “war” between the US and China over Taiwan. It’s not clear to me that in either case, the proponents (and for that matter the opponents) of such military adventures understand what the words they are using actually mean, or that they are using the words in the same sense.
For a start, who envisages a “war” between China and the US in the traditional sense of the term? Who believes that the government of the US is complacently expecting to see Washington, New York and many other cities turned to smoking rubble, in the hope of being able to claim some “victory” over China? Indeed, can anybody say what “victory” over China would actually mean? Nobody, I suspect, which is why all the loose thinking and talking is so potentially dangerous.
We are all victims of our past experiences to some extent, and never more so when issues of war and peace are involved. It’s common to criticise the military and governments for fighting the last war (as it is to criticise them for not learning from history) but ultimately past experience has to be at least a partial guide, since attempts to guess “the future of war” in the abstract are almost always disastrously wrong. Certainly, nobody predicted what the war in Ukraine would actually be like in any detail. During the Cold War, the western (and for that matter Soviet) expectation was of a World War 2 on steroids, which may well have been correct. Since then, the very concept of “war” itself has become somewhat blurred. It isn’t just the western experience of Afghanistan and Iraq being generalised, although that’s important, it’s also the fact that conflict around the world in the thirty years that followed 1990, was essentially low-technology, generally involving militias or poorly-trained forces. Often (as in both Mali and the DRC in 2013, and in Iraq a year later) conventional armies collapsed completely in the face of determined irregular forces. The only effective countermeasures—against the Islamic State for example—seemed to be high-precision sophisticated warfare, with big investments in intelligence, drones, and special forces.
It’s not simply that today’s military have been brought up and spent their careers in this kind of operation, it’s also, and perhaps more importantly, that political leaders, advisers, pundits and government officials have grown up with a whole set of assumptions about war which, as with most such assumptions in most ages, they have assumed to be permanent features. And to be fair, there was actually no need for a massive conventional air/land war in Ukraine in the first place: to arrange it required considerable time, effort, and stupidity.
What are these assumptions? The first and most important is that war happens Over There. War is not actually “war” in any traditional sense, but rather a limited application of overwhelming force against an enemy incapable of threatening us in a similar manner. This has actually been true from Gulf War I onwards, when Iraq could not actually threaten the territories or vital interests of nations attacking its forces. Casualties in both Gulf Wars were massively lower than expected, and none were inflicted on the home countries. Whilst this certainly encouraged an arrogance and a misplaced feeling of superiority among western states, it more importantly changed fundamentally the way in which war itself was understood by their decision-makers.
The second assumption was that the beginning, scope, and duration of any war was very much up to the West to decide. Unlike the Cold War, where the West expected to be defending against a deliberate Soviet attack (albeit with some warning), all use of military force since then has been the result of political decisions in western capitals. These have not always been entirely free choices (think of the immense public pressure put on France by the states in the region to intervene in Mali, for example), but they could in theory have been made differently. There was the time and space to assemble coalitions, generate forces, conduct training and deploy to a region without interference. Once there, western forces would generally have the initiative, the choice of means to employ and an overwhelming superiority in firepower and mobility. Whilst western forces could be directly attacked, usually through Improvised Explosive Devices or suicide bombers, and whilst in Kabul or Basra Embassies and military HQs could be bombarded, serious firefights were relatively rare, and generally small-scale. Likewise, when it became clear that certain wars could not actually be won, the West was able to withdraw, if not always in good order, then at least more or less when it wanted to. It was assumed that such was the inherent nature of war, at least from now on.
The third is that, as mentioned above, the human and material costs of war would be relatively low compared to wars of the past. The French lost 25,000 dead and 65,000 wounded in Algeria from 1954-62, the US lost 60,000 dead and twice that number wounded in Vietnam. By contrast, in twenty years of operations in Afghanistan, the US lost some 2,500 dead, and other nations substantially less. What’s important here is not just the difference in the human cost—the casualties were not a major factor in the decision to withdraw, unlike in earlier conflicts—but rather the belief that this would be the model for the future. Units could be sent on operational tours and would come back basically intact. The idea that—as now in Ukraine—whole units could be wiped out or rendered operationally useless, had disappeared from the understanding of the Western Strategic Class. The Russian preparedness to take significant casualties in support of major, long-term political objectives has caused variously fear, disbelief and incomprehension in the West. Likewise, whilst some equipment would be lost, often due to accidents, there was no need to think of wholesale equipment replacement programmes. And similarly, consumption of ammunition was low, and could be made up from stocks. It was assumed that war would be similarly economical in the future.
Finally, whilst the forces deployed in such conflicts were in aggregate quite large, they were generally employed in small packages. Campaigns were complex, international politico-military affairs, with a strong humanitarian dimension, not the traditional campaigns of large-scale co-ordinated military operations. The very idea of organising and commanding tens of thousands of troops on operations simultaneously had effectively disappeared from the mental world of western militaries and their leaders, except for historical examples and theoretical wars in the future. A western General today might once have commanded a battalion on operations, but probably nothing more. Likewise, aircraft, helicopters and artillery units were employed in small numbers in precision attacks. For that reason, ammunition and spares stocks did not need to be very large. Likewise, equipment was optimised for ease and speed of movement, not protection against kinetic attack. So heavy, protected self-propelled guns were not needed, and probably more trouble than they were worth. Lighter, more mobile guns were used instead, and barrel-life, for example, was not a problem because they were unlikely to fire that many rounds.
As I’ve suggested a number of times, this wasn’t necessarily a false set of conclusions, but it did rely on political circumstances remaining relatively benign, and there being no risk of a major land/air war. After all, transitioning down from high-intensity to low-intensity operations is much easier than transitioning up the other way. And in fact, it’s still not clear what the “lessons” from the Ukraine conflict for the future actually are, and it may not be for some time. For example, the apparent dominance of drones may turn out to be deceptive in the longer run: the Russians appear to be fielding drone-protected tanks with mine rollers and space to embark infantry: the battlefield of the future may well resemble naval warfare of a century ago. Or then again it may not.
So the real problem here is a failure of imagination, coupled with a lack of curiosity about what words actually mean. So far as I can tell, those who talk about “war” with China don’t mean by that term anything a military historian would recognise. They appear to envisage a naval engagement in and around the Taiwan Straits to frustrate a Chinese invasion. But it’s not at all clear that this is what the Chinese would want to do, nor that they would sportingly agree to have the kind of war that the US wanted, with its air-to-air combat and carrier battle-groups, and supposed superiority of US technology and capability. (It’s always worth finding out what the adverse party thinks a war is, before you plan to participate in one.) The assumption that the West can always control the nature of some hypothetical war is anyway not borne out by actual experience. By contrast, a selective blockade of Taiwan, the noose slowly tightening over a period of months, would be much more complicated to deal with. Whilst it’s important not to take the results of war-games too seriously—they depend greatly on the initial assumptions you feed in—it does appear that such war-games in the US have correctly identified a major weakness, which is the limited time that their Navy can actually spend deployed in a particular area before they have to leave to resupply. It’s also fairly clear that the amount of ammunition available to a carrier battle group, notably for its self-protection, is also likely to limit the time for which ships can be used before they are at risk of being overwhelmed. This is partly a feature of geography (Taiwan is near China) and partly of the assumptions set out above.
The result is that the US appears to have identified a type of military engagement which would be, in the terminology we reviewed above, an armed conflict, and a localised one at that, fought according to rules that it would be able to impose. It’s not clear whether anyone has thought that China might strike US bases in Japan, or even in the United States itself, or satellite and other intelligence-gathering systems, because such possibilities are simply outside the experience, or even the imagination of those involved. Likewise, it’s not very obvious what the political objectives of such a war would be: Taiwan would probably be terribly damaged in any such “war,” even if the Chinese tried to avoid collateral damage as much as possible.
Those who talk about “war” with Iran seem also to assume that they can dictate what kind of war (in our terms “armed conflict”) it would be. Here, the assumption is apparently that the US (and Israel perhaps) would mount attacks on Iran, probably targeting what are assumed to be uranium enrichment facilities. The End. Whilst no doubt US aircraft would have to dodge some air defence missiles, the bombardment of Iran, like that of Yemen or Somalia, is assumed to be a self-justifying activity, and the Iranians would meekly accept their punishment. Although various ambitious political objectives have been floated, including the end of Iran’s civil nuclear programme and most of its missile programmes, no-one has explained which, if any, of these various objectives some form of bombardment is intended to serve, let alone by what steps air attack is going to deliver the results sought. And there isn’t very much else that can be tried. A land invasion of a mountainous country of 80 million people doesn’t even bear thinking about, and seapower would be of no value even if it were not so vulnerable.
In fact, there is no reason at all why Iran should refrain from bombarding US bases in the region, and perhaps launching a massive attack on Israel. There is no consensus about the exact range of Iranian missiles, still less their effective range, but that isn’t really the point. The fact is that, so far as I can see, possible Iranian reactions have simply been discounted. Here, I suspect, a major influence is the experience of the two Gulf Wars. It’s often forgotten that, especially in 1991, Iraq’s defences were modern and looked formidable, but on both occasions, the Iraqi military put up far weaker resistance than had been expected, essentially because its heavily centralised and control system simply didn’t work. The chemical weapons that the Iraqi Army possessed, and the West was concerned about in 1991, were never used because the order never came. By analogy, other non-western militaries are therefore expected to perform equally poorly, or rather, there is no institutional experience and thus consciousness of them performing effectively. Equally, the fall of the Assad regime seems to be encouraging wild expectations of something similar happening in Iran. But whilst there’s a lot of unhappiness and discontent with the regime of the Mullahs, there’s absolutely no indication that foreign attacks would incite some kind of popular uprising.
So we are dealing in part with limited horizons, limited imagination and limited experiences. But there’s one other final factor to mention. The US system is recognised to be sprawling, conflictual and, partly as a result, largely impervious to outside influence and even reality. Bureaucratic energy is devoted almost entirely to internal struggles, which are carried out by shifting coalitions in the administration, in Congress in Punditland and in the media. But these struggles are in general about power and influence, not the inherent merits of an issue, and require no actual expertise or knowledge. Famously, and to the intense irritation of Europeans, the Clinton administration’s Bosnia policy was the product of furious power struggles between rival NGO and Human Rights alumni, none of whom knew anything about the region or had ever been there.
The system is large and complex enough that you can make a career as an “Iran expert,” say, inside and outside government, without ever having visited the country or speaking the language, and by simply recycling standard wisdom in a way that will attract patronage. You will be fighting battles with other supposed experts, within a very confined intellectual perimeter, where only certain conclusions are acceptable. For example, an analysis that concluded that the US could not win a “war” against Iran, or would suffer prohibitive casualties even if it won, would imply that therefore the US should not attack Iran, which is politically unacceptable as a conclusion.
All nations suffer from groupthink to a degree, especially those with very large government systems, and those with a degree of isolation from the outside world. The last days of the Soviet Union are one example, and even today the sheer size of the Chinese system makes understanding much of the rest of the world complicated. But the US is a paradoxical example of a state which has a presence everywhere, without being much affected by the consequences of this presence. The Washington system is so big and so clumsy that I sometimes feel that taking account of the rest of the world is just too much additional trouble.
In such circumstances, the real risk is that the United States, perhaps dragging other countries behind it, will get involved in something it doesn’t understand and cannot control. Under the belief that it’s fighting Gulf War 3,0 or Somalia 7,4, it risks involving itself in conflicts that could have incalculably dangerous consequences for all of us. Yes, the military power of the US is massively greater than that of Iran in aggregate terms, but no, that doesn’t matter here. The issue is that Iran can inflict unacceptable damage on US forces and armies, and the US cannot damage Iran enough to guarantee even minimalist political objectives. Yes, the maritime and maritime air capability of the US is greater than that of China, but no, that doesn’t matter here. The issue is that China can inflict unacceptable damage on US forces and allies, and the US cannot effectively touch mainland China at all. This seems obvious to me, and I expect it seems obvious to you. For many in Washington, I fear, it’s not so much that it’s not obvious as that such ideas never crossed their minds.
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