It’s Not Just Ukraine and Gaza: War Is on the Rise Everywhere
An authoritative new study finds there are 183 regional and local conflicts underway in 2023, the highest number in three decades.
Mali has become so dangerous UN peacekeepers are leaving this month.
Photographer: Kambou Sia/AFP/Getty Images
“It’ll all be over by Christmas” has become one of the most derided prophesies in history. It was made by wiseacres in London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Europe as the First World War exploded in August 1914. These misguided optimists founded their projection on recent experience: Europe had suffered no long, big conflicts since the fall of Napoleon a century earlier.
Yet as everybody knows today, far from being over before Santa Claus called, the terrible struggle that began with Austria’s invasion of Serbia lasted four years and killed around 20 million people before the 1918 armistice.