Whatever the outcome of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the crisis it triggered may have one lasting effect: the return of war as a routine instrument of politics on a global scale.
Before the invasion, there was an implicit consensus that war was something that happened in the so-called “developing world,” where Arabs fought Israelis, Africans slaughtered Africans, and Indian and Pakistanis were at each other’s throats.
Europe, however, was believed to have closed its book of wars for good. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were regarded as a multi-layered civil war involving component parts of the failed Yugoslav state.
