That day the world illuminated something radically new for the current European generations, but at the same time as old as the world.
The experience of classical war reached the heart of the Old Continent, the place where it was born and also where almost everyone had already forgotten it.
Suddenly, the images arrived again of bombed cities taken not far from home, endless columns of armored vehicles, masses of soldiers advancing, retreating or entrenching themselves among the urban ruins and in the fortifications of the battlefields, massacres of civilians. , underground stations and basements full of families, long lines of refugees, cruel images of wounded and mutilated in hospitals...
There had always been wars, even in the heart of Europe three decades ago, in the Balkans, in Donbas itself, but limited and even encapsulated.
New conflicts of a hybrid nature had also appeared, asymmetrical terrorist attacks, invasions of entire countries with hardly any resistance, systematic aerial bombardments, selective assassinations or the counterinsurgency of the occupying powers against local guerrillas.
But that very old novelty that returned two years ago, in the early hours of February 24, 2022, is something different, at the same time familiar and unrecognizable, unreal even, one would say it came from television and film screens in a mixture of old and new images of horror.
And that has been so because the return has occurred where the most wars have been fought in history, all the wars, and perhaps the only place where war lay completely forgotten and thrown away as a usual instrument of conflict resolution.
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The world faces the worst war scenario in half a century
The figure of the ancient and ferocious warrior monster has returned, which the notable war thinker Raymond Aron used in a pioneering book in the study of 20th century conflicts, titled
Chain Wars
, from 1951. It is hyperbolic war. , dominated by industry and technology, which involves entire societies, with civilians in the front row, in a brutal clash, existential in fact, between two countries that squander lives, wealth and even the future, in a bloody auction in in order to prevail over the enemy and obtain victory.
The scare caused by the arrival of this ghost has been tremendous for a good part of the European generations born in the peaceful post-war period, accustomed to subletting the burden of security to the United States, protected by a powerful social State and dedicated to sweet commerce. to the construction of prosperous economies, to the good life, cradled in oblivion of the continuous tribute of blood demanded of young people until 1945.
Perhaps it caught even those who summoned the ghost by surprise, believing that they could limit the brutality of the invasion to a quick and sober technical-military operation to neutralize the Ukrainian army, overthrow Zelensky's Government and change the democratic regime for an authoritarian one at their service. .
Good proof of the unexpected shock was offered by the hasty escapes of hundreds of Russian oligarchs, associates and accomplices of Putin, scattered across their yachts, estates and luxury hotels in the Western world, who were not aware of the magnitude and significance of the failures. Kremlin's military plans and the sudden rupture of Russian globalization, punished by sanctions in response to the aggression.
Military training in the Donetsk region this February 13.
José Colón (Anadolu/Getty Images)
War is the greatest and most brutal engine of change.
Everything has changed.
Ukraine and Russia, the most.
Also the regional order: Europe has woken up from the dream of stability.
And the world order: a war is the first domino that drives the fall of the following ones.
Also its institutions, largely paralyzed, as is the case with the United Nations, the organization that prohibits war and ensures peace - unfortunately only on paper -, and its Security Council, blocked for two years by the veto of Russia to any measure or statement that affects its action in Ukraine.
The army of a nuclear superpower—recognized as the largest in the world at least until the day of the invasion—gave a terrible and disheartening example of what the political power of a country can do when it is willing to use force to resolve its difficulties. politics or disputes with neighbors.
It is the type of war defined by Aron as the organizer of international relations, since it involves “the existence, creation or destruction of States”, in this case Ukraine, as in the case of Gaza, Israel and Palestine.
Precisely because the idea of an international order governed by law and multilateral cooperation is what is at the basis of the European Union, only scandal and repugnance could arouse this Putin war on European territory.
For Europe it is not just a question of setting the limits of the EU and NATO and the scope of the hegemonies of Moscow and Brussels.
Nor is it really about the two models of society and the two ideologies, one democratic and the other authoritarian.
What clashes are two conceptions of the international order, one based on diplomacy, negotiation and institutions for the resolution of conflicts, and another that only believes in the correlation of forces and in the reason that the strongest imposes on force. of reason.
In the end, it is a war against the very idea of Europe as a space of cooperation, peace and prosperity.
It is not only the European order that has come to disturb the war, but the entire international order, unipolar in the last 30 years of hegemony of the United States, after the four decades of balance of power and bipolarity of the Cold War between Moscow and the United States.
Now there are several powers, of different calibers, but all of them with margins to hinder the old hegemonies and impose their own conditions.
Current multipolarity is the old disorder of the world, which only knew some rules of the game within sovereign countries and functioned, with limited and recent exceptions, according to the law of the jungle.
Two people mourn the family with three children killed in a fire caused by Russian drones in Kharkiv (Ukraine), this February 9.
Vladyslav Musiienko (REUTERS)
The phenomenon is very ancient.
Thucydides described it in his
History of the Peloponnesian War
, the first compendium of the cruelest political realism: the strong does what he wants and the weak what he must.
It is the same old story, but also a new story, because this war, like all wars, is also changing the way they are fought.
On the sepia images that come to us from the revived past of the ruins where there once were cities, the destroyed bodies and the shots in the back of the head, the hypersonic missiles, the guided and suicidal drones, and the mobile phones of cyber warfare now appear superimposed. .
As in all technologies, those of death do not change, but rather accumulate and amalgamate under new forms.
Russian troops advance or get stuck, in images that seem taken from the world wars of the 20th century, but another invisible war, perhaps more decisive, is being fought in parallel in cyberspace, with satellites, geolocation of the enemy, artificial intelligence, farms of bots and information infiltrations into the enemy.
In the old war now reborn, the rule of ascension to extremes governs as always.
When the peaceful avenues of politics and diplomacy are exhausted, someone decides to take the middle path.
It is the one with the greatest uncertainty, but also the most effective in destroying the reality that is intended to be modified.
Violence and chance will decide.
Hence this bid in which each contestant throws to the bonfire everything he has at hand, his young people, his population, his resources, dedicated body and soul to destroying the adversary not only on the battlefield, but in the rearguard, in its economy, its supplies, its trade, also in its alliances, until leaving it without a country if possible.
The total war that returns with giant strides is like the ones before but worse, because now it is also global, the first global war of the 21st century, with an expansive capacity in the immediate environment, but also in the planet as a whole.
Because of the bad example that always spreads, but, above all, because of the imbalance that it introduces into the precarious world order, and because of the new alignments and divisions of the world that it causes.
Putin denounces a collective West around the United States as the enemy attacking Russia through the interposed force of Ukraine.
A new anti-Western axis is taking shape between Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang, from which Beijing is now approaching and moving away.
A third party in discord or in search of balance is configured around the Global South, with countries like India, Indonesia or Brazil, with claims to weigh more in a future world order in which the United States and its partners will no longer be able to rule as they have until now. .
For the moment at least, NATO is strengthened, expanded with two new partners, Finland and Sweden, and its doors are opened to Ukraine, which thus obtains its first victory over Putin: it invaded it to prevent it.
It has also modified the European Union, stronger in its chronic weakness, which has improvised for the first time financial mechanisms to provide weapons and ammunition to Kiev, negotiates Ukraine's entry into the Brussels club and includes aid for the country at war of 50,000 million euros in their strategic budgets for the next seven years.
War calls for war, with or without reason, especially when there is no longer a hegemonic superpower to prevent it.
If Russia can against Ukraine, so can Azerbaijan against Armenia and Israel against Gaza.
It could even be Venezuela with Guyana, China with Taiwan or North Korea with South Korea.
Each war escalates on its own and constitutes a widespread danger of escalation.
The interdependencies of globalization change meaning, in which security was tied to the prosperity of all, today converted into instruments of threat and even siege.
The return of the warrior monster calls for an arms race and widespread rearmament, especially where investment in weapons had declined the most, as is the case in Europe.
In these two years, stocks of weapons and ammunition have been exhausted.
The call for investments by the death industry has been colossal, which flourishes everywhere, and especially in dictatorships like Iran and North Korea, factories specialized in making up for Russia's industrial weaknesses.
But also in Europe, alarmed by the isolationist reflex that drives the United States to abandon its transatlantic commitment, especially if Trump wins the presidential elections.
The economic effects go beyond the military industry.
They disrupt supply chains and prices increase.
Famines threaten poor countries due to a lack of Ukrainian wheat, while rich countries stop receiving cheap energy.
Populations are displaced en masse, sometimes due to the pushes of one of the contenders, converted into weapons of globalized war.
The business is not only in weapons, but in any technology, merchandise or service.
Just as there is an internet of things, now the war of things works: everything can be a weapon.
This global war unleashed by Putin is also an appeal to nuclear proliferation.
Russia has invaded Ukraine under the protection of its atomic arsenal, wielded on several occasions to intimidate Kiev's allies, force a prudent and gradual supply of war material - artillery, tanks and aircraft above all - and also limit the war on the territory of Ukraine.
The value of the nuclear weapon, never used since 1945, lies in its threatening capacity, in this case in a type of aggressive deterrence, which other powers will want to use in the future.
The warrior monster destroys the present, but at the same time signals his sinister intentions of settling among us for a long future.
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