The storm that is coming. Chaos and speed: the wars of drones, AI and Starlink

That Bergoglian talk of a ‘world war in pieces’ was a reticent and self-contradictory notion. If it is ‘world’, it is not ‘in pieces’, and if it is ‘in pieces’, it is not ‘world’. It was a bit like the first batch of the wartime survival kit for the British, which seemed to many to be the usual eccentricity of that courageous island community, obsessed with memories and grand traditions. More generally, when it comes to the world war – understood as the situation into which we are clearly heading, ‘the gathering storm’ – we are not quite sure what to think or what to do. As is always the case when things are going well – and more than well – in cyclical economies, the financial markets may seem threatening – the famous bubble – but only when concrete evidence emerges do concern and panic set in; and the markets demonstrate the vitality of an interconnected system in the short and medium term, reassuring us within certain limits, because, as Maynard Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead. The tendency towards what is often described as an ‘apocalyptic’ view of the world is widespread, but it focuses on the climate and its consequences in a battle of sensibilities and interpretations that ultimately concern holidays or the price of courgettes and blueberries even more than the unliveability of our planet due to energy shortages and the global cost of climate change.

China is in turmoil; Western democracies lack firm leadership – far from it – and devastating so-called regional crises are proliferating, whilst the entire technological arsenal of warfare is undergoing a revolution that is, to a certain extent, decipherable and comprehensible. The state of the world and of the West – which was the linchpin of the balance of power whilst it lasted – is dire. Russia talks and rants about the fatal "end-of-the-world" weapon, and comes across as odiously threatening both when it is seen as strong and when it is regarded as weak amidst the carnage in Ukraine. But how should we interpret the assessment of Bret Stephens, who is convinced that the very same general conditions that led, following the invasion of Poland in 1939, to the Second World War have now gathered and are rapidly coming to a head? Stephens is a well-informed man; he reasons with the same ease and precision as a sharp knife cutting through butter, skilfully piling up precedents, examples and the simple, increasingly convincing predictive elements of so-called forecasting models, and he does so meticulously in The New York Times, concluding that we have finally reached that point. Everything is shrouded in mystery and alarm, from the CIA director’s visit to Moscow to the new security rules imposed by the government in London, whilst threats are mounting – threats that no longer concern only the narrow front in Ukraine but a wider arc in which other military sites and other borders also feature prominently, and not only in Central and Eastern Europe. Without necessarily believing it, one no longer feels like looking the other way. But it is truly complicated to make sense of the war that is upon us by thinking of it as a continuation of the war or wars of the last century. It takes a great deal of imagination to make sense of reality when it arrives. The current upheaval has features that cannot be reduced to the historical pattern of the 20th-century wars as we know them; it has a different flavour, alludes to other dangers, and everything is confusing and moving at such an extraordinary pace. In our old way of thinking, ‘world war’ means Europe, armoured vehicles and cluster bombs, aerial battles led by pilots, maps being redrawn, masses organised in a hierarchical order, goose-stepping, and totalitarian regimes at least as powerful as political democracies.

And what’s more, for mythomaniacs, the expansion to the United States led by a liberal patrician and to imperial and decadent Japan is like another piece of Europe being added; everything revolves around London, Paris and Berlin, everything hinges on identity and race, on the murderous and fanatical myths of the Führerprinzip, on the immense libraries of the nineteenth-century nation and the psychology of the crowd; the Jews are two-millennia-old cannon fodder without a state to protect them, they are the heroism of a Warsaw ghetto and the sacrifice of the innocents in armoured trains, war is an immense black and white; the world excluded from its scope is vast enough; it is the "storm of steel" devoid of the longed-for lightness that finally arrives, more deadly than heaviness, with drone warfare and artificial intelligence deployed, and intelligence having become Martian with Starlink – forget the Battle of the Ardennes or Coventry or "Bridge of Spies".