Abacus | Trade, sanctions, gas, people: the weapons of choice in our new world war of economics and alliances
- It may not be ‘war’ by its standard definition, or even a cold war, but geopolitical conflict in this century is being waged through weaponisation of relationships and people
- Perhaps the disappointing path of globalisation in the 2020s heralds the beginning of the end of interdependencies that have ultimately come back to hurt us
I am a sixties child and have never been in the thick of any armed conflict. My parents were born in the 1930s and were caught up in World War II as children, being evacuated from suburban London as the German V-1 flying bomb menaced them from overhead. My grandparents were caught up in both world wars, having been born just before the first one kicked off, with my grandfather shooting German bomber aircraft out of the sky in the second one.
As a young clerical assistant in the City of London, I followed the Falklands war through newspaper and TV reports. And stuck at home during a bout of glandular fever, I watched the Gulf War on TV a decade later, but that was as near as I got.
After the two “big ones” of the last century, the world has managed to avoid armed conflicts on anything near their scale. There have certainly been localised wars around the planet, and the Korean and Vietnam wars took place in the context of the Cold War’s global power struggle. But close as we may have come at times, World War III never happened.
Yet in the absence of “hot” conflicts between countries, perhaps we’ve just found new ways to attack each other, with the aim being the same as always: to exert influence and pressure on other nations. If we broaden the definition of war to include 21st century methods, who is at war with whom in 2022?
China
