Back where we started from

The 20^th century resounded with the clash of empires. By 1900, the planet had been divided up, so that further expansion depended on encroachments. The secular invasion and colonisation of foreign lands could no longer continue without confronting another coloniser. An early case occurred in 1898 at Fashoda in South Sudan, between French and British occupants. Things would warm up in Morocco, and finally explode over Serbia in 1914. Europeans would do their utmost to kill each other for the following four years. And a few millions did die, killed by bullets, shrapnel, poisonous gas, malnutrition, influenza and ensuing civil wars. The winners plundered the losers. The Ottoman domains in the Middle East became French and British mandates, German possessions in Africa were taken by France and Britain, and the Hapsburg Empire was split into a medley of nations in search of identities. The two other members of the victorious alliance got none of the spoils. America had supplied plenty of financial assistance but had only joined the fighting at the end, while Russia had stopped fighting separately and was in the throes of revolutionary upheavals. However, when the European empires went to war a second time, with Japan joining in, the US and the USSR would divide the planet in two.

Europe’s colonial empires did not fall apart immediately after the war’s final whistle was blown over Nagasaki, on August the 9^th 1945. In fact it took more than twenty years, and some are still waiting. As dozens of new nations managed to escape European (mostly French and British) clutches, the US and the USSR competed to clutch them back. Some tried to avoid this Manichean choice. Non-alignment was proclaimed by twenty-nine countries at the Bandung Conference of 1955, and a Tri-continental alliance was formed in Havana in 1966. But the two super-powers overshadowed both events, choices had to be made. And, by the time Reagan moved into the White House, lines were drawn that would only last another decade. The US had abandoned South-East Asia, but Egypt and Iraq had severed ties with Moscow. Iran had rebelled, but was under attack by Iraq, while Soviet troupes were getting bogged down in Afghanistan. The Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations ramped up economic and ideological pressures on the Soviet Union and, in 1989, the Berlin wall was breached. Two years later, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR no longer existed. 1991 was also the year when the first Gulf War was fought, and when the US and its European allies began their military build-up in the region.

For the last decade of the 20^th century America was hegemonic. The ex-Soviet Union’s economy had collapsed and its military was outdated. China’s primitive production still had a long way to go. Japan was (already) piling up a huge public debt. And the European Union was struggling to accommodate all its new members from the East. Ah, those Clinton years! Garage start-up wizards, Wall Street’s Golden Boys, everything seemed possible, even peace in Palestine. But reality struck back with the dotcom debacle and 9/11. Optimism gave way to pessimism, doubts and growing fears. The new millennium has seen America wage perpetual war to impose its rule, and the rise of Russia and China as potential opponents. The US and its allies won the Cold War by default and paid no attention to the chaos and misery that engulfed the defeated. This is precisely what happened after WW1, and when Germany finally managed to rebuild itself, its justified resentment fuelled rearmament and another total war. WW1 led to WW2, just as Cold War One has led to Cold War Two. The hubris of victors makes them blind to the fate of the vanquished, so the enmity is perpetuated and war comes back on the agenda. It turned out that evolving technology made WW2 far more widespread, destructive and deadly than WW1. How will history compare the two Cold Wars?