World in Danger. Wolfgang Ischinger
served on the governing board, in 2019 global military spending rose to unprecedented levels, indicating a crisis of growing tensions and bloody conflicts.
In Syria, whose coast is just 125 kilometers from the European Union (EU) member Cyprus, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the last eight years. Millions have been displaced. The United Nations (UN) has stopped counting the casualties of this conflict, because the lack of access to the country makes it impossible to verify this information. In April 2016, Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, estimated 400,000 dead by that time. The latest figures estimate around half a million fatalities. That is about the population of Dresden, Germany, or Oakland, California.
Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, more than 6 million people have been displaced within the country and 5.6 million more have fled its borders. These two groups of refugees comprise more than half of Syria’s population. And we are still receiving reports about atrocities like barrel bombs thrown over residential areas and the use of chemical weapons. Syria, once a destination for culture tourists from all over the world, has become a country in a permanent state of emergency; city names like Aleppo, Afrin, and Eastern Ghouta have now become synonymous with horror, suffering, and death.
Syria is only the most terrible example of the many internationalized civil wars—that is, wars in which a conflict starts as a confrontation between local actors but gradually involves ever more external powers. A terrible war of this kind is raging in Yemen, too, where regional powers are muscling in—Iran on one side and Saudi Arabia on the other.
The neighboring continent of Africa has several countries in a permanent state of violence: just think of Mali, Sudan, Congo, or Somalia. Another hotspot is located right at the gate of the European Union, no further from Berlin than Paris: A military conflict is raging in Ukraine, which shares a border with Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Over 2,500 civilians have been killed there since Russia began its military operation in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Even after four years of international negotiations on pacifying the situation, shots are fired on a regular basis.
Mind you, those are only the wars and conflicts that manage to attract international attention. Under this visible peak of the iceberg of violence is extremely thick pack ice, made up of numerous violent conflicts all over the world that receive less attention. Among them are the civil war in South Sudan, attacks in the Sinai in Egypt, the collapse of the state in Libya, the drug war in the Philippines, the conflict with the Taliban in Northwest Pakistan, and the war against Islamists in Mali. The list could go on forever.
Beyond the “crises of the day” are the “eternal” hotspots, including the confrontations between Turkey and the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), which have been conducted militarily and practically without interruption since 1984; the Somalian civil war, which has been raging for thirty years; the conflict over Tibet that has been simmering since 1950; the equally old conflict between China and Taiwan, and the territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Resolution seems just as far away in Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, and South Ossetia and Abkhazia, breakaway regions of Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Georgia, respectively; Russia’s conflict with Chechnya; the interethnic tensions in the West Balkans, including the still contentious status of Kosovo; the disputes about Iran’s nuclear program; the turbulent relations between North and South Korea, which have been based on a truce but no peace treaty for 75 years; and, last but not least, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And, finally, there are also those countries that have suffered through traumatizing civil wars which were ended only with great difficulty, and that are now struggling to rebuild a stable state—places where old conflicts could flare up again at any time: Rwanda, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Congo, and Sri Lanka, to name a few examples.
There is also great concern with those countries that may not be at war but can hardly be regarded as stable. Turkey was at the threshold of civil war during the attempted coup in summer 2015; since then it has persisted in a state of emergency that seems to be becoming increasingly authoritarian.
Joining the ranks of crises, military conflicts, and political instability are terror attacks all over the world. Their best-known perpetrators include the Islamic State, Boko Haram, al Qaida, and the Taliban. The large majority of these attacks in recent years were committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria.
Fortunately, as of this writing, Germany has not yet been a main terrorist target. Nevertheless, there have been attacks ranging from the insidious murders and robberies committed by the right-wing radical National Socialist Underground (NSU) to serious Islamist attacks with trucks or knives. Here at home the fear may be greater than the actual danger, but the Germans’ increasingly anxious view of the chaotic global situation is certainly justified.
JUST MINUTES FROM A MAJOR WAR
The unusual abundance of dangerous and bloody crises and conflicts is “crowned” by a persistent nuclear threat, which has become so normal that it seldom attracts any political attention.
In Germany, the country where hundreds of thousands of people marched in the 1980s to protest against new intermediate-range nuclear missiles and for peace, one thing seems to have slipped everyone’s mind: that the danger of a confrontation between the great powers, and of nuclear escalation, has by no means been averted. That the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to opponents of nuclear armaments in 2017 is, thus, especially gratifying—although this will hardly prompt the nuclear powers to disarm.
While we here in Germany are in the midst of a heated discussion about whether the budget for the German Army should be increased at all, in many parts of the world an arms race is well underway. China’s increasingly self-assertive behavior is being reflected ever more clearly in its demands for military respect. Beijing is upgrading its armaments. And in pursuing a more powerful role for China in Asia and the world, President Xi Jinping seems to not shun the risk of antagonizing others—most importantly the United States.2 This raises the question, will the further rise of China take place peacefully or will it someday lead to violent conflict?
There are also new initiatives to upgrade defense efforts in Russia and the United States, especially in the area of nuclear weapons. Old nuclear bombs are being modernized, and completely new weapons systems are being developed as well. At the same time, there have been several near collisions between Russian military aircraft and NATO in recent years—occurrences that can easily get out of control in the tense situation the world is currently facing. How do we ensure that a misunderstanding does not spiral directly into escalation?
Last year, North Korea and the United States threatened each other with the deployment of nuclear weapons, and in the Middle East, rivaling powers that are armed to the teeth—for instance, Saudi Arabia and Iran—moved ever closer to the brink of conflict. What can be done to reduce the danger of an escalation that it might not be possible to harness?
A massive reduction in the number of nuclear weapons has occurred in the last decades, most recently initiated by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) negotiated by Putin and Barack Obama. But as we observed in the Munich Security Report 2019, these “arms control treaties, still following a bipolar logic, are unraveling, while there is not yet a new multilateral framework for arms control that would be fit for the emerging international system.” The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty is dead, and with New START unlikely to be extended beyond 2024, “another element which limited dangerous competition between Russia and the United States is likewise imperiled.”3 Meanwhile, the United States and Russia still maintain a total of around 13,000 nuclear warheads so that they can react in the case of a hostile military offensive.4
Many believe that nuclear war is a mere specter of the past or a dramatically orchestrated backdrop from a James Bond movie. But the nuclear threat is real: Around the world there are about 1,800 nuclear warheads just a button away from deployment, standing ready day and night.5
We should keep in mind how often militarily relevant incidents have occurred in recent years. I am a member of the European Leadership Network (ELN), which has issued a series of publications that warn about such dangers and document how often there were near collisions or unnecessary provocations between Russian and Western airplanes or ships. According to ELN, sixty such near collisions