Can the spread of war be stopped?

By David Ignatius

As the new year begins, Post Opinions columnists are writing about the biggest questions on their beats for 2024 and beyond. At the dawn of 2024, we should recognize that violence is ravaging our planet and the mechanisms to prevent it are failing badly. U.N. peacekeeping resolutions are routinely vetoed by combatants or their protectors; “deterrence” doesn’t deter Russia, Hamas or the Houthis. The “rules-based order” that President Biden proclaims has become a slogan rather than a fact.

The folly of war is the belief that it solves problems. Israelis and Palestinians have been battling for more than 50 years without gaining lasting security. Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine began as a fever dream of President Vladimir Putin. He failed to conquer Kyiv, thanks to brave Ukrainian resistance, but the bloody war of attrition has cost Russia an estimated 320,000 casualties and Ukraine an estimated 170,000 to 190,000.

The biggest national security question for 2024 and beyond is how to craft new mechanisms that would actually combat the spread of war. Drums are already beating for future conflicts that would be far more deadly even than the current round: a battle between the United States and China over Taiwan, for example, or a military campaign to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

As we think about avoiding future wars, a good guide is President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a heroic commander in World War II and a determined opponent of what he called the “military-industrial complex.” “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity,” he said in 1946.

“The only way to win the next world war is to prevent it,” Ike said in 1956 as president. He succeeded in avoiding a nuclear catastrophe, and every subsequent commander in chief has echoed his message. The latest version was President Biden’s reported avowal with Chinese President Xi Jinping that “a nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won.”

Under its nuclear umbrella, the United States pays lip service to conflict resolution. But in reality, we’ve been an enabler of limited wars nearly as much as Russia, thanks to use of the U.N. veto power. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the U.N. Security Council immediately crafted a resolution calling for withdrawal; Moscow vetoed it. In December 2023, as the civilian death toll in Gaza climbed toward 20,000, the Security Council crafted a cease-fire resolution with broad support. Washington vetoed it.

Yes, I know, there are reasons to oppose a cease-fire now in Gaza. Hamas remains a threat; Israel has killed less than half of the CIA’s prewar estimate of the group’s 20,000 fighters. But Israel doesn’t have a good plan for obliterating the rest and “winning” this conflict. Israel needs the United States as a stabilizer and bridge-builder in Gaza, not just an arms dealer.

The United States embraces the “rules-based order” when it suits its purposes. When President George W. Bush wanted to wage a misconceived war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, he steered around U.N. objections; when he wanted to battle the Taliban in what proved a fruitless 20-year war in Afghanistan, he used the shopworn authorization of military force from Sept. 11, 2001, along with a beefy coalition from NATO. The United States insists on the primacy of international law but won’t join the International Criminal Court for fear its officials might be targeted.

America has often invoked its values in going to war or supporting insurgencies. That interventionist spirit is infused with idealism, and often I’ve shared it. But it has led to an almost unbroken chain of U.S. involvement in conflict overseas, from Vietnam to Central America to the Balkans and, most of all, to the Middle East.

Putin is wrong about most things. But there was an element of truth in his 2015 address to the United Nations about the effects of U.S. intervention in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt: “Rather than bringing about reforms, an aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions and the lifestyle itself. Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster.”

Because the United States has been so willing to intervene abroad to help its friends and values, it creates a kind of moral hazard for smaller, weaker countries or political groups. They start wars they can’t finish, expecting the United States will come to their aid. That was true in the Balkans in the 1990s and in the Middle East during the Arab Spring of the 2010s, and I fear it might become true again as Israel moves toward a direct confrontation with Iran. America isn’t good at saying no.

Deterrence has kept the peace between superpowers, but even here, technology is chipping away at restraint and reason. As China builds its strategic forces, it disguises nuclear and nonnuclear missiles so that it’s hard to know which kind has been launched. Russia has developed hypersonic cruise missiles that shorten decision times and prevent assessment of whether the intended target is civilian or military. Artificial intelligence will evolve radically new strategies. And space weapons will allow first movers to blind and cripple their adversaries.

Worse, deterrence is increasingly a one-way street. The United States acts with restraint, but its adversaries don’t. That’s what we’ve seen with Russian nuclear saber-rattling in the Ukraine conflict: America is checked from providing weapons that could prove escalatory, and Russia keeps on committing war crimes.

Military strategists always insist that the best way to prevent war is to prepare for it. But we have to admit to ourselves, as another year of bloody conflict begins, that the current model isn’t working. We need new rules at the United Nations to stop wars and a new framework for crisis management with allies and adversaries. Otherwise, in 2024 and beyond, we’ll have to think about the unthinkable.