In the run-up to the Great Financial Crisis, the Western world was at the zenith of the unipolar moment. American strength and dominance was taken for granted, and the countries that today have become the US’s bitter rivals – Russia and China – were still imagined to be on the path to becoming assimilated into the Western economic and political order.
As a result, Western defence planners envisioned only two ways in which the West would have to fight in the years ahead. Firstly, the West saw itself engaging in short, sharp and stunningly high-tech interventions against “rogue states” such as North Korea, Libya and Iran. Secondly, the West would be engaged in “peacekeeping missions”; fighting various counter-insurgency battles in the more benighted corners of the world, all in the service of eventually bringing the rest of humanity into the liberal democracy and market economy model that was hailed as the last word in human political and social development. In the age after the end of history, this was how war was meant to be fought.
These dreams are now obsolete. Worse yet, in 2023 they appear to have been downright foolish, even suicidal for the collective West. The conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated that industrial warfare is back; in truth, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it never went away. Russia was derided as an economy the size of Belgium and the Netherlands at the onset of the war, and experts around the West were certain that such a relatively small economy could not endure a drawn-out conflict. The Russians would run out of missiles, and then they would run out of shells, and then eventually they’d run out of bullets and hand grenades and shovels as well.