For decades, Europe lived in a historic gap. We believed that economic interdependence, regional integration and multilateralism would be sufficient to contain violence between States. Prosperity seemed to replace rivalry and rules seemed to tame power. This interval ended and war returned to being a normal instrument of international relations.
4 years ago, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was more than a territorial conflict. It represented a deliberate attempt to review the European security architecture and a frontal challenge to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. What was at stake was not just territory, but the very idea that the international order is based on norms and not on force. Sovereignty is no longer based primarily on legal guarantees and once again depends on deterrence and military capacity.
In the Middle East, after the Hamas attack and the devastation in Gaza, the escalation reached a new level, with bombings carried out by Israel and the United States against Iran this weekend, with consequences that, at the time of writing, remain unpredictable. But it will now be possible to state that the increasing geographical extent of the conflict confirms that the logic of surgical containment of military interventions has lost its effectiveness.
In the Indo-Pacific, Sino-American rivalry keeps the international system in permanent deterrence, in which the balance is less based on trust and more on strategic calculation. In the Sahel, Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia or Myanmar, prolonged wars erode states, destroy economies and fuel massive displacements of people trying to save their lives. The difference compared to the wars in Europe and the Middle East lies in political and media invisibility, not in the intensity of violence.
The distinctive feature of the current moment is the convergence between conventional warfare, interconnected regional conflicts and hybrid warfare. Cyberattacks, energy sabotage, information manipulation and migratory instrumentalization have become regular extensions of the confrontation. Critical infrastructures, supply chains and electoral processes are now strategic targets.
In addition to physical violence and its human and material consequences, there is another defeat: the multilateral framework. When two permanent members of the Security Council act outside an unequivocal mandate of the system created by the United Nations to preserve peace, the Charter remains formally valid, but its constraining power disappears. When the guarantors of order themselves bypass collective mechanisms, they become functionally obsolete.
The absence of effective rules generates strategic uncertainty. And uncertainty encourages the accelerated reinforcement of military capabilities. The process is cumulative: one State arms itself out of prudence and the rest do so out of necessity. Individual rationality produces systemic insecurity. In this environment, a disturbing conclusion is being consolidated in several capitals: only the possession of maximum deterrent capacity, including nuclear weapons, ultimately guarantees national security.
If this perception becomes widespread, the global non-proliferation regime will continue to be progressively weakened. War will no longer be just normal but will become structurally integrated into an international system, in which force replaces rule as the ultimate foundation of security.
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