All Thunder.

No rain.

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1. Mara Karlin:

Every age had its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions,” the defense theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the early nineteenth century. There is no doubt that Clausewitz was right. When war changes, the new shape it takes almost always comes as a surprise.

For most of the second half of the twentieth century, American strategic planners faced a fairly static challenge: a Cold War in which superpower conflict was kept on ice by nuclear deterrence, turning hot only in proxy fights that were costly but containable. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought that era to an end. In Washington during the 1990s, war became a matter of assembling coalitions to intervene in discrete conflicts when bad actors invaded their neighbors, stoked civil or ethnic violence, or massacred civilians.

After the shock of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, attention shifted to terrorist organizations, insurgents, and other nonstate groups. The resulting “war on terror” pushed thinking about state-on-state conflict onto the sidelines. But it was a highly circumscribed phenomenon, often limited in scale and waged in remote locations against shadowy adversaries.

Then, in 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And although forces under Russian and Ukrainian command are the only troops fighting on the ground, the war has reshaped geopolitics by drawing in dozens of other countries. The United States and its NATO allies have offered unprecedented financial and materiel support to Ukraine; meanwhile, China, Iran, and North Korea have all assisted Russia in crucial ways. Less than two years after Russia’s invasion, Hamas carried out its brutal October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, provoking a highly lethal and destructive Israeli assault on Gaza. The conflict quickly widened into a complex regional affair, involving multiple states and a number of capable nonstate actors.

In both Ukraine and the Middle East, what has become clear is that the relatively narrow scope that defined war during the post-9/11 era has dramatically widened. An era of limited war has ended; an age of comprehensive conflict has begun. Indeed, what the world is witnessing today is akin to what theorists in the past have called “total war,” in which combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, attack a broad variety of targets, and reshape their economies and those of other countries. But owing to new technologies and the deep links of the globalized economy, today’s wars are not merely a repeat of older conflicts. (Sources: sais.jhu.edu, foreignaffairs.com)

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