How to end all wars – the Left-wing way

Telegraph

14-04-2025

When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, there were widespread predictions that state-on-state confrontation was finally a thing of the past, and that a New World Order would bring harmony between the major powers. Such hopes are now but a distant memory. The world is experiencing an alarming upsurge in global warfare. The potential for a catastrophic conflict to provoke a Third World War grows stronger by the day, as events in Gaza and Ukraine have amply proved.
For, in both those cases, conflicts that began as primarily local concerns between (respectively) Israel and Palestinian terrorists, and Ukraine and its Russian invaders, have escalated frighteningly. Israel's willingness to confront Iran directly over its support for Hamas and other Islamist terror groups has raised the possibility of a nuclear confrontation. And Western military support for Ukraine has caused Russian president Vladimir Putin to make numerous sabre-rattling references to the devastating potential of the Kremlin's nuclear arsenal.
In such circumstances, it is only natural that there should be renewed interest in preventing conflict in order to place the world on a more stable, and potentially more prosperous, footing. There has seldom been a greater need to develop new and more effective methods of conflict resolution. It's a subject that the German Left-wing politician and former Greenpeace activist Jan van Aken explores in considerable depth in his book, How Wars End: A Hopeful History of Making Peace; it's a shame, then, that his somewhat Panglossian analysis seems detached from the reality of the threats we face today.
Van Aken, who was also one of the UN inspectors responsible for investigating Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction, begins by stating a number of self-evident truths. For instance: negotiations can only get underway when the conditions are 'ripe' for talks. Circumstances that provide such an opening include wars reaching a stalemate in which both sides realise they cannot win, as was the case during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, or where a threat arises of foreign powers intervening with overwhelming military force to end the bloodshed, as was the case in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
Paraphrasing the famous dictum of the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz that war is the continuation of politics by other means, van Aken quotes a Kenyan general who observes that 'negotiations are the continuation of war in a different theatre of operations'. In certain circumstances, such as the talks that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the desire to end hostilities can lead to a lasting accord. Yet in more intractable disputes, such as the long-running Israel/Palestinian saga, van Aken contends that peace talks are not the end result, but merely part of a process aimed at ending hostilities.
Given his Left-wing credentials, van Aken has some predictable hobby-horses, such as his dislike of using the term 'terrorist' to describe those who carry out acts of mass murder against innocent civilians. He argues that peace negotiations would be far more likely to succeed if more women participated in the process. And he clearly believes that the very act of showing willingness to engage in peace talks, irrespective of the conflict's origins or the terrible bloodshed an aggressor has caused, is the answer to many of the world's travails.
He objects, for example, to the refusal of Angela Merkel's German government to engage in 'yoga mat' diplomacy with the fanatical supporters of Islamic State, at a moment when the latter were happily beheading Western captives and filming their atrocities on their mobile phones. Yet at the same time, he believes that all arms exports, even when they are to be used to defend a country's sovereignty against brutal aggression, are nothing more than 'blood money'.
Unsurprisingly, he takes issue with the military support the Western powers have provided to Ukraine since Russia's unprovoked invasion in 2022, arguing that Europe would have been better advised to accept Chinese efforts to mediate a peace settlement in the conflict. Given that Beijing has been a key supporter of Russia's war efforts, it's unlikely that China would have been interested in a settlement that was acceptable to Kyiv. A far better way of achieving a decisive outcome would have been for the West to provide Kyiv with the military means to win the war – and quickly – rather than merely aiding it to defend itself.
Van Aken clearly believes that if he and his peace-activist associates had their way, all conflicts could be resolved and all bloodshed averted. This ignores the fact that there are rogue states, such as Russia, and terrorist organisations, such as Hamas, that show absolutely no interest in playing by the rules of civilisation – let alone diplomacy. About the only benefit to be derived from How Wars End, then, is to grasp how, should pacifist Greens ever succeed in achieving power in the West, the world would be in even greater peril than it is today.