Nothing has changed. Beneath the transformative veneer of technology, from the bronze shields at Marathon to the flying missiles over the Middle East, war’s fundamental essence remains constant: it is a human endeavour driven by unchanging desires, fears, and follies, where the core dynamics of conflict have merely shifted expression across the ages. This timeless struggle, a constant rhythm of life in Classical Greece where city-states battled for supremacy through the collective discipline of the phalanx, evolved through Rome’s institutional learning from catastrophic defeat into relentless conquest.

By the twentieth century, this dynamic had transformed again, first into the industrialised slaughter of World War I, where the ‘cult of the offensive’ met its match in the machine gun, and then into World War II’s Blitzkrieg, which solved the riddle of the trenches by restoring mobility through combined arms, a progression that culminated in the atomic bomb and the paradoxical state of Mutually Assured Destruction, where the capacity to win a war ultimately rendered major war unwinnable.

Since 1945, major-power war has been shackled by the nuclear deterrent. Conflict migrated to the periphery, becoming a game of proxies and insurgencies. The current Middle East conflict illustrates this dynamic. Triggered by the October 2023 Hamas attack, it has expanded beyond a conventional clash. It is multi-layered: a powerful state facing a network of non-state actors—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Shia militias. The battlefields are cities; the tools range from precision airstrikes to makeshift rockets; the calculus involves domestic opinion and global energy prices. The dynamic is one of calibrated escalation, where all sides probe for advantage while trying to avoid a conflagration no one can control.

This raises an unsettling question: have we glamorised war? From Homer’s *Iliad* to Hollywood’s *Saving Private Ryan*, we celebrate the warrior and the noble cause. We have built our identities on the battles our ancestors fought. War becomes not merely a tool of statecraft but the forge of identity itself. If that is true, then the peace we claim to desire would require us to surrender the very stories that tell us who we are.

When leaders claim they alone can end conflict, they tap into a deep human craving: the desire for a single saviour. Yet wars do not have a single ‘commencer’ or a lone ‘saviour’. The current Middle East war has deep roots in 1948, the occupation of Palestinian territories, and the rise of Iranian power. To ascribe its initiation to one person is to overemphasise individual agency while underestimating systemic forces. Moreover, we reward the firefighter, not the architect. The leader who secures a ceasefire is celebrated, while the diplomats who spent decades building the foundations of peace are forgotten. We prefer dramatic rescue to mundane prevention.

Is power the deciding factor, then? Realism dictates that military might is the ultimate arbiter. But if power were everything, we would not speak of justice. The cynic says that justice is the mask the strong wear to pacify the weak. Yet there is a more nuanced truth: justice is the mechanism by which power stabilises itself. Raw power alone is exhausting. An empire built on force must constantly fight to maintain order. Justice, fairness, and law are not constraints on power; they are force multipliers. They convert enemies into allies and victory into legitimacy. The Romans understood this: they did not merely defeat their enemies; they incorporated them. Justice is not the opposite of power; it is power’s most durable form. Hence, justice is the mechanism by which power rationalises and stabilises itself, making it efficient rather than merely brutal.

Question: why does the human mind resist accepting war’s permanence? Because accepting that peace is fragile is to live in permanent anxiety. The human psyche is not built for that. Instead, we construct elaborate fictions such as the ‘war to end all wars’, the march of progress, essentially to shield ourselves from history’s cyclical nature. We prefer the illusion of a perfectible world to the reality of one that must be perpetually managed.

For weaker nations, survival depends on navigating the gap between power and its narratives. They can form coalitions, as the Greek city-states did. They can develop asymmetric capabilities, nuclear ambitions or insurgency, to raise the cost of aggression. The Houthis’ ability to threaten Red Sea shipping is a textbook example. But the most subtle option is to weaponise the narratives of the powerful themselves. When a weak nation appeals to ‘international law’, it exploits the gap between the powerful’s self-image and their actions. It holds up a mirror and demands, “You claim to be civilised. Act like it.” This was the strategy of Nelson Mandela, of every movement that understood that the empire’s conscience, however dormant, remains a weak point in its armour.

Deduction: war endures not because power demands it, but because identity does. We have made conflict the forge of our stories, the measure of our heroes, the crucible of nations. Until we are willing to surrender those stories, the cycle will continue; not because we cannot stop it, but because we do not truly want to.

An African proverb observes that a cat dreaming of becoming a lion must lose its appetite for rats. Yet even if the cat forsakes such prey, the lion’s form remains elusive. Perhaps greater wisdom lies not in yearning for transformation, but in recognising that certain truths, war among them, will always be with us, no matter how fiercely we might wish them away. One wonders, then: why do the powerful persist in waging war, even knowing it resolves little and begets only new suffering? Perhaps the cat simply cannot resist the lure of becoming a lion.

Najm us SaqibThe writer is a former Ambassador of Pakistan and author of eight books in three languages. He can be reached at najmussaqib1960@msn.com

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