War and Peace II – The New Unrest

After publishing my first column on Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the context of the Russia–Ukraine war, the real events began to unfold faster than anyone could meaningfully interpret. It felt as if the thoughts themselves had become heavier than the pages. Today, we no longer face a single conflict but two major wars in which two global powers act as the primary players. War and peace are not opposites; instead, they are two states of the same world, two sides of a coin that never stops turning. Yet while the powerful make their moves, the question remains where the average person stands in this game and what this coin ultimately means for them.

Rereading War and Peace

The war in Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East, and the rising tensions in the Indo‑Pacific are not isolated events. Rather, they are symptoms of a world order that no longer exists in the form we once knew. History rarely tilts in a single moment. Instead, it tilts when many small steps can no longer be reversed, when habits, illusions, and political routines overlap for so long that reality eventually catches up with them.

Ray Dalio describes how all empires follow the same patterns of rise and decline. We are living precisely in that transitional space. The United States appears late‑cycle, China rises as a new actor, Russia is in decline, India is ascending, Europe remains fragmented, and Iran pursues ambitious goals. It is the kind of transitional phase Dalio calls chaotic, dangerous, and inevitable.

The new unrest is not accidental; it is the result of a world losing its order and rearranging its centers of power.

The Iran–Israel conflict is therefore not merely a regional war but a symptom of a global shift in power. Just as 1918 was not the end of the First World War but the beginning of three years of chaos in Eastern Europe. Prit Buttar describes that period as a web of nationalism, revenge, power vacuums, and countless local wars. Today, we witness something similar, except that we observe it in real time.

A Network of Actors

From a game‑theoretical perspective, we are no longer in a system with two players but in a network of many actors whose moves influence one another. The present no longer resembles a single chessboard but ten chessboards operating simultaneously, with every move altering all of them. Iran and Israel, the United States and China, Russia and Ukraine, Turkey and the Kurds, China and Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, states and militias — everything is interconnected.

A signal sent to one actor is read by all others, and each interprets it differently. Consequently, this is precisely the material from which escalations emerge. Tolstoy would argue that history is not made by great men but by countless small decisions. Today, these decisions take the form of drone strikes, sanctions, proxy operations, cyberattacks, and misunderstandings.

The world is not dangerous because it is evil; it is dangerous because it is crowded with actors who misread one another.

Buttar shows how, after 1918, armies in Eastern Europe dissolved, militias emerged, borders blurred, and identities were reinvented. He describes officers who woke up in a world where their army existed one day and no longer existed the next. This mechanism is timeless. When order collapses, peace does not emerge; instead, a vacuum emerges. And vacuum is the natural enemy of stability.

Fear, Morality, and Old Philosophies

Philosophically, we are witnessing a return to very old questions. Kant believed in a world where peace arises from law, treaties, reason, and shared rules. Hobbes, however, describes a world in which security always comes first. Whenever people or states feel threatened, they act not out of morality but out of fear.

This is exactly what we see today. States act not because they want to but because they believe they must. Deterrence replaces trust. Security replaces values. Power replaces arguments. Morality remains important, yet it only works when it is protected.

Fear replaces morality today because security has become the new religion — and everyone believes they must defend it.

Modern Warfare and Expanding Frontlines

War is no longer a battlefield one can enter or leave. Instead, it is a network of drone swarms, cyberattacks, disruptions of navigation systems, artificial intelligence, militias, propaganda, and information warfare. The battlefields have not disappeared; they have multiplied. The front no longer runs only between armies but also between networks, data streams, power lines, satellites, and infrastructures that sustain our daily lives.

While all this unfolds, people in wealthy nations feel a new and unfamiliar fear. Many have grown accustomed to a world that was historically unnaturally stable. Now, however, this illusion is crumbling. And it feels like the destruction of a dream — or a dream world.

Prosperity was politically enforced, militarily secured, and geographically favored. When these pillars begin to shake, everything shakes. The average citizen senses this without being able to explain it. They see rising prices, unstable supply chains, geopolitical tensions, burning tankers, drones over refineries. They see a world becoming restless and feel that their lives depend on it, even though they control none of it.

Geography and the Mechanics of Decline

Geography plays a larger role than many want to admit. Caesar knew this and wrote extensively about how seasons, nature, and topography determine whether a campaign succeeds or fails. Buttar shows the same when he describes how rivers, swamps, and plains shaped the Eastern Front. The present confirms it.

Ukraine remains unconquerable. Iran is a plateau, a mountain range, a labyrinth. And the Strait of Hormuz is a bottleneck capable of strangling the global economy.

Decline does not begin with the fall of a capital or the collapse of a currency. Instead, it begins when a society stops investing its energy in the future and redirects it toward surviving the present. This is exactly what we see today: high debt, stagnating innovation, geopolitical overload.

Whenever states feel threatened, their time horizon shrinks. They stop thinking in decades and begin thinking in months. They stop focusing on innovation and instead cling to stability or the status quo. This inevitably leads to a loss of prosperity. The more resources flow into conflict, the fewer remain for a better future. And the fewer future perspectives exist, the more conflicts emerge — a closed and dangerous cycle.

Strategic Patience: China and India

While Russia and the United States are openly entangled in conflicts and while Europe reacts nervously to every escalation, two emerging world powers appear remarkably calm. China and India observe the situation with a composure that many in the West find unsettling. Yet this calm is not a sign of indifference. Instead, it is a mixture of strategic patience and historical experience.

China thinks in long timeframes — not in election cycles but in centuries. India thinks in civilizational arcs rather than alliance structures. Both nations have learned that great powers do not rise through impulsive decisions but through the careful exploitation of others’ mistakes.

One could say it is the calm before the storm. One could also say it is the calm of civilizations that understand that wars rarely produce winners. While the West escalates in real time, India and China wait. Not out of weakness but out of calculation. Not out of fear but out of experience. Their silence is not retreat; it is a form of power.

The Desire for a Different Future

When one reads these old texts closely, one feels that everything repeats and that the future awaiting us has already been described. Personally, I do not want us to repeat all the same mistakes. Yet as an average person, I lack the solution — a way out, a future that is good for everyone, a future in which peace remains the side of the coin that guides humanity.

In the end, the hope remains that the coin will someday turn back to the right side — peace.