How the Seven Years’ War Can Help Us Understand Today’s Conflicts

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The “world war” of the 18th century, with its shifting coalitions and proxy fronts, is more akin to the 21st century’s wars than the 20th century’s.

At the close of the classic 1990 episode of The Simpsons, “Bart the General,” Bart Simpson solemnly intones that there are no “good” wars, except for the American Revolution, World War II, and the original Star Wars trilogy. In a case of life imitating art, many US politicians and pundits tend to default to World War II as the template for how the United States should understand conflict in the international system. It is certainly reflected in the well-established tradition of identifying every US foe and antagonist since 1945 as “the next Adolf Hitler.” It also manifests itself in the preference to cast every group of challengers to the United States as some sort of “axis”—an “Axis of Evil,” an “Axis of Authoritarianism,” and an “Axis of Upheaval,” and so on.

At a recent Center for the National Interest discussion, University of Chicago Professor Paul Poast presented his assessment that, over the past several years, the world has moved from a “world at war” to the opening stages of a “world war”—where formerly separate and disparate conflicts are beginning to merge into a larger whole. The problem, as I see it, is not with his analysis, but how it is likely to be interpreted. If we are in the first stages of a new world war, we are prone to misinterpret and misdiagnose if our template for world war is World War II.

The “World War II” template, in particular, posits the emergence of two well-defined camps—the Axis on one side, the Allies (or, more accurately, the “United Nations”) on the other. By 1942, most individual countries in the Axis and the Allies had declared war on each other, reinforcing the view that the war was a single, apocalyptic struggle. (Of course, in reality, Japan, as a member of the Axis, did not declare war against the USSR in 1941 when the Germans attacked and honored its non-aggression pact. Similarly, the USSR did not enter the war against Japan on the side of its putative US and UK allies until August 1945. Applied to today’s situation, the World War II template shoehorns........

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