Can anyone still believe that short wars exist?

Aside from the fact that when the word turns to weapons and diplomacy fades, making predictions about the duration of a war is truly a gamble at the table of the banality of evil, bordering on stupidity. Yet it has happened so often, with a common thread that almost ties together these encounters with history at its most tragic.

The French and German military commanders had convinced their respective governments that the First World War would be very short, lasting only a few months: it dragged on for four years, leaving in its wake a global cemetery with 16-18 million victims. Benito Mussolini decided to enter the war, and we have the Second World War as a continuation of the First, convinced that it would last only long enough to reap the benefits of victory. Like a good peasant, he understood nothing, and his decision cost the Italian people a trail of blood. Yet a cultured journalist, Giovanni Ansaldo, had warned him with a brilliant quip, when Mussolini called him to inform him of a decision that was by no means obligatory: "Duce, I'm at attention, but allow me to ask you a question: have you ever seen the New York telephone directory?"

Many years later, another dictator, Vladimir Putin, miscalculated, imagining a short and victorious war involving the annexation of Ukraine. With truly unforgivable naivety, he and the regime's oligarchs thought they could end the war in a few weeks. But he underestimated the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people (the same mistake the Americans naively made during the Vietnam War), and their firm intention not to capitulate to a war criminal.

And do we want to talk about Donald Trump's naivety? For him, war is a general's cap on his head, a command room where he can bully, and a series of warnings. stop and goEverything should always be resolved in a few hours, but things never work out that way. Yet recent history should have shown naive Americans that it's impossible in scenarios like the Middle East to wage a short-term conflict with easy solutions. And it's pure wishful thinking, both the empty and deceptive rhetoric of exporting democracy: that way it only ends up in some quagmire, as happened in Iraq, Libya, and Iran itself, where in 1979 the Americans looked on with unscrupulous (and naive) acquiescence to the revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and redesigned the entire geopolitical architecture of the Middle East.

Naiveté in war doesn't preclude violence, but rather fuels it. The more errors in vision, strategy, and forecasting accumulate, the more the macabre toll of deaths and injuries caused by a war that drags on, while the direction of events slips out of the hands of those who unleashed them. Naiveté, combined with ferocity for its own sake, begets fragile leaderships, barricades to defend their own interests, light years removed from the fundamental vision of politics as the "art of the possible." Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Abu Mazen are paralyzed by the asphyxiating idea that they can resolve the age-old Middle Eastern conflict through attacks and bombings. They lie knowing they're lying, and their naiveté serves to mask their weakness. Netanyahu has convinced himself that only war can save him from the wreckage of unpopularity and an electoral defeat that, for him, it could even mean a trial, a conviction and prison. Ninety-year-old Abu Mazen clings with his blood-stained hands to an ephemeral, irresponsible, and corrupt power, through which he has dragged an entire people into the void of isolation and unrestrained destruction. Netanyahu and Mazen similarly express the naive idea that conflicts can only be resolved through the use of force (bombs or attacks), without any diplomatic mediation. This is the opposite of what leaders of the stature and caliber of Yitzhak Rabin believed, who paid with his life for his obsessive pursuit of a gradual yet transparent compromise. for the coexistence of two peoples in two states, the only possible solution in the light of reason and realism.

Naivety also masks an ambition to reshape the balance of power on a global scale. A prudent and measured leader like China's Xi Jinping made precisely this miscalculation when he walked out of the negotiating table to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine (just as he has no intention of contributing to international measures on environmental issues), convinced that the war would be beneficial to him because it would keep America and a feeble Europe busy, thus giving China the opportunity, in the meantime, to build its web of alliances in preparation for a final showdown with the United States. The American response was swift, and the war fronts have multiplied, with the United States intending to plant its flag on each of them, representing an empire that, contrary to what many analysts believe, does not appear destined for definitive decline, as occurred in the final phase of the Roman Empire.

It will take time to put together the pieces of a world shattered by violent and narcissistic autocrats, as naive and precarious as they are, and this is the mandate that awaits the new generations: but history leads us to use the optimism of the will, and we know that after "the darkest hour", sooner or later, the light always comes.

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