Scarcely a week passes without some media pundit or attention-seeking historian warning that a ‘Great War’ is nigh. As always, there are enough signs to make that sort of prediction plausible, but it’s rarely correct. In fact, it hasn’t been correct now for 79 years.
We’re talking about a really big war involving all or at least most of the great powers, like the two World Wars; Ukraine times a hundred; Gaza times a thousand. And these days, such a war would surely be nuclear.
To argue that a ‘Great War is coming’, the doom-mongers have to pretend that such a war will be necessary to stop Russia. That’s why they always bring up ‘Munich’.
The ‘Munich’ syndrome has been used to justify a great deal of subsequent follies — from Vietnam to Iraq. It’s a fantasy version of the origins of the Second World War, which only got so big because Britain and France didn’t realise Hitler had to be stopped by force.
Instead, the cowards tried to ‘appease’ Hitler at the Munich summit in 1938 by giving him Czechoslovakia, and after that, it was too late to stop him. So the West has to vanquish the Russians now in Ukraine, or else Putin will also try to conquer the world.
Where to begin with this nonsense? Maybe start with 1932, when the British government abandoned the Ten-Year Rule. Adopted after the Allied victory in 1918, it said that no “great war” was expected in the next 10 years, and, thus, little money needed to be spent on armaments. But the rule was dropped in 1932, months before Hitler came to power in Germany.
In real life, Britain had decided by 1933 that Germany was a major threat and doubled its spending on the Royal Air Force. The first Hurricane fighters entered service in RAF squadrons just as the much-maligned ‘appeaser’ Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in 1937.
Chamberlain doubled defence spending in 1938 and then again in 1939. He and the French prime minister, Édouard Daladier, sold the Czechs out to Hitler partly because they hoped it was Hitler’s “last territorial demand in Europe”, but mostly because they needed more time to rearm.
The first Spitfires entered squadron service in 1938, the war came in 1939, and the Germans lost the Battle of Britain in 1940. Britain managed to hang on alone against Germany until the Soviet Union and the United States of America were dragged into the war in 1941. That’s how the Second World War really got underway, and it doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to what is happening today. ‘Munich’ is irrelevant. All that history is irrelevant.
The advent of nuclear weapons has changed things considerably. There has been only one time since 1945 when we even came close to a full-scale war between the great powers: the 1962 Cuban crisis.
That was truly dangerous because the principles of nuclear deterrence were not yet fully understood and accepted. Nevertheless, the two sides managed to think their way through and avoided Armageddon.
By now everybody knows the steps of the dance and the nuclear doctrines take explicit account of human psychology. Even non-nuclear confrontations are managed in ways that minimise the risk of escalation. For example, look at how the confrontation between Israel and Iran in April was handled.
The Iranians felt they had to strike back when Israel killed two of their top generals in a missile attack on their consulate in Damascus, but they gave the US enough details about the timing and the targets of their retaliatory strike that their missiles were almost all shot down. ‘Honour’ was satisfied, and very few people were hurt.
Or consider the war in Ukraine, now more than two years old. There has been some escalation, but very cautious. Moscow occasionally makes vague threats about nuclear weapons, but nobody panics; NATO countries don’t mention them at all.
That’s how we got through the past 79 years, one crisis at a time. Aggression needs to be contained, but nobody is trying to conquer the world, so don’t ever risk the whole world by using nukes. And keep working on building the international rule of law, no matter how futile that often seems.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth
