Grant Shapps is right – the world must do all it can to avoid a global conflict

Editorial: Europe, Japan, South Korea, the Gulf states and others must be bound together much more closely in economic, diplomatic and military solidarity, and all must contribute to the cost of collective security

Grant Shapps said that ‘we find ourselves at the dawn of a new era’ and that we are ‘moving from a post-war to a pre-war world’ (BBC)

In a remarkably candid speech the other day, defence secretary Grant Shapps, reflecting on the conflicts that have built up around the world since the end of the Cold War, said that “we find ourselves at the dawn of a new era” and that we are “moving from a post-war to a pre-war world”.

It was intended as a warning, if not an apocalyptic prophecy – but it was, if anything, understated, and it already feels out of date. The war in Ukraine is, after all, almost two years old, with little sign of an early conclusion – and Europe feels threatened. It is also more than three months since Hamas launched its war on Israel, and Israel responded with unprecedented (and often disproportionate) force.

Again, there is no early end in sight, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to continue the conflict and reject the principle of Palestinian statehood has exacerbated tensions once again. That conflict has spread to Yemen, where Houthi forces – effectively a de facto government in much of that country – have waged a sporadic war against international shipping in the Red Sea, in support of Hamas.

The Houthis weren’t shy about attacking US and British warships, and the allies have been equally unashamed of hitting Houthi bases on Yemeni territory. Meanwhile, the Israelis have been lobbing missiles at Syria and Lebanon in targeted assassinations of Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders and their Hezbollah allies; and the Iranians have retaliated with sponsored attacks carried out by allied militia on an American base in Iraq.

As if this wasn’t enough to keep the ayatollahs busy, they’ve also found themselves swapping fire with the Pakistanis on their eastern flank. And all of this is set against a heightening of tensions in east Asia, after elections in Taiwan provoked the usual bellicose noises from Beijing; and a simulated nuclear attack on South Korea ordered by Kim Jong-un, the ever-troublesome Dear Leader.

If that’s what “pre-war” feels like, you might say, then the world should be just as worried as Mr Shapps is about what the real thing – the next war between great powers – might bring, and when it might bring it.

For a pessimist, the echoes now of the almost casual approach of the First World War are as loud as a Howitzer. Before 1914, it was regional rivalries in the Balkans about territory and ethnic rights, fuelled by historic grievances, that inevitably dragged more powerful sponsors bound in alliances into a conflict that had long been feared – but which, at the precise moment that a shot rang out in Sarajevo, still seemed distant.

There are, of course, no rules about how wars begin, even if they look inevitable in retrospect. It may be that, as in the case of, say, the long proxy war fought and suffered by the people of Yemen on behalf of Iran and Saudi Arabia, such a conflict can be contained. Low-level violence, including assassinations, between Iran, Israel, the United States and their various allies, has been a feature of world affairs for almost half a century; and it may remain that way, despite the recent increase in the seriousness and frequency of attacks.

Yet the links between the world’s trouble spots, and the strains they create – particularly for the United States, which is having to support and defend key allies from Finland to Taiwan and from Ukraine to Israel – are adding to the instability. At the centre of so much of the aggression is an axis of powers that represent the greatest threat to global peace and the international rules-based system since 1945.

If, in other words, Russia, Iran, North Korea and, to a lesser degree, China – all nuclear or near-nuclear powers – ceased to menace their neighbours, the world would indeed be that much further way from thermonuclear destruction. It is as if Vladimir Putin and the theocrats of Tehran were the greedy spiders at the centre of a great global web of intrigue, terror and expansionism, so pervasive is their malign influence.

In the past few decades, America, as the sole true superpower, has used its power to try to deter aggression, and to intervene against its enemies – not with unalloyed success. Now the US faces the problem of overreach and overstretch, fighting on too many fronts against too many threats. It simply no longer enjoys the industrial and economic heft to sustain what passes for Pax Americana.

With the likes of supposed friends such as Mr Netanyahu, the US has much less chance of keeping the peace and defending free nations. Indeed, at the moment it is Mr Netanyahu, with his conduct of the war in Gaza and his defiant rhetoric, who represents the greatest threat to peace far beyond the West Bank.

Complex and interrelated as the situation is, an end to the war in Gaza would constitute the biggest single factor in de-escalating an increasingly volatile and accident-prone geopolitical scene, and in restraining the aggressors.

A sustainable ceasefire in Gaza cannot be one-sided, but the reality now is that were Israel to wind down its operations and withdraw its forces, Hamas would probably not be inclined to launch another wave of atrocities on Israeli civilians. The Biden administration would then be able to concentrate on brokering some sort of uneasy peace in the Middle East, defeating Mr Putin, and defusing the simmering rhetorical conflict it is engaged in with China.

Mr Shapps is also right in suggesting that America can no longer carry this burden alone. Europe, Japan, South Korea, the Gulf states and others must be bound together much more closely in economic, diplomatic and military solidarity, and all must contribute to the cost of collective security.

If they do not, and America turns once again to isolationism and protectionism under Donald Trump, then the world will be in still more jeopardy. From what can be discerned from his record, and his campaign pronouncements, Mr Trump would simultaneously appease Russia and North Korea, plunge the US into a Cold War with China, back Mr Netanyahu, reject the two-state solution in the Middle East, and go to war with Iran.

Britain’s military, for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem well prepared to deter, nor to deal with, such a future.