THIS was the question a friend of mine in his late 20s asked me when we woke up on April 14 to the news that Iran had launched over 300 drones and missiles towards Israel.
Apart from the war in Ukraine and the underreported conflicts in South Sudan and Central Africa, no other war in recent times has riveted the world like the one in Gaza. For all the talk about the potential escalation into a wider regional conflict, it didn’t seem likely that the Israeli-Palestinian war would spread beyond shadow attacks by Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, until Israeli air strike killed seven Iranians in the Iranian Embassy in Damascus and six Syrians.
Of course, the murder of the Archduke may have been the tipping point, but a web of other factors also contributed, from the competition for territories and economic rivalries to militarism, and from the unstable alliances to the crisis in the Balkans. The Sarajevo murder was only the last straw.God knows just how many more straws before we reach another breaking point.
It suggests that in spite of the sabre-rattling in the world’s former war-mongering capitals – Washington, Berlin, London, Paris, Tokyo and Moscow – the dominance of older, wealthier populations in these countries combined with concerns about managing their ageing populations have reduced their appetite for war.
Although Ukraine is not too far from becoming a meat grinder and the death toll in Gaza has topped 32,000 studies suggest that, thanks to the better angels of our nature, there has been a reduction in battle deaths per 100,000 in state-based conflicts since the Second World War. War historians say that outside the Pax Romana, and the Golden Age of Islam, the post-World War II era is probably the most peaceful time in world history.