We (don't) want War

But it may well already have started

One of my earliest memories at school is of joining in a ritual that felt confusingly uncomfortable at the time. I would have been seven or eight, so that would put me at Marston Green Junior School, on the outskirts of Birmingham, where we lived from 1969 to 1973.

During break, a small group of two or maybe three boys (always boys) would walk around the playground, arms over each other’s shoulders, shouting either Cowboys and Indians - usually after a western had been show on TV the previous weekend, or: We Want War - Kenneth More or Jack Hawkins the probable inspiration, in this case.

As someone who didn’t make friends easily, I would usually wait until six or seven boys had joined the chain (mainly to check on who was ‘playing’) before assuming my position at one end.

We would then continue around the playground, adding new volunteers until someone decided we had enough, at which point those on the left of the originator would assume the role of Indians or Germans, while those on the right would be the goodies.

The whole thing would then descend into chaos as twenty-odd boys ran in all directions, making noises associated with: machine guns / rifles / hand grenades / bows and arrows (delete as appropriate). This mayhem would continue until the whistle was blown to signal the end of break.

For reasons that weren’t clear to me then, I was much happier joining in Cowboys and Indians that I was War, presumably because the killing depicted in westerns seemed so remote from the world I inhabited. When we played ‘War’, we were essentially acting out scenes from battles that my grandfathers had taken part in, and would talk about when we visited.

Me and my fellow playground warriors were immensely fortunate to be born when we were. My school year was made up of kids born in 1963 and 1964, we were tail-end boomers, born into a world in which the devastation of war, and the horrors of the Holocaust, were still fresh in the memories of our parents, and of politicians.

Although Britain had troops based in Germany, frighteningly well-prepared¹ to counter any incursion from the Soviet Union; and was fighting a de facto war against the IRA in Northern Ireland; and sent a huge fleet to take back the Falkland Islands in my last year at school; growing up, it never felt like Britain was at war. Wars happened in other places, usually far away. Even Northern Ireland felt like another country.

Nonetheless, as I marched around the playground shouting ‘We Want War’, hoping to ingratiate myself with the boys I wasn’t friends with, often including one or other of the playground bullies, I had the distinct feeling that I shouldn’t really be doing this. And in any case, why would anyone want war?

This all came flooding back to me yesterday, when I read Simon Nixon’s excellent weekly news analysis, which opened with a story about this week’s crucial meeting of the Council of Europe. As Simon begins:

European Council summits are often described as make-or-break for the European Union but the one that will take place in Brussels next week really is shaping up to be a defining moment for the continent. It takes place at a time when, according to the secretary general of NATO, Europe is already effectively at war with Russia and when Ukraine is under intense pressure from the newly-aligned US and Russian governments to accept a deeply one-sided “peace deal” that will leave the country highly vulnerable to future Russian attack.

Europe is effectively already at war with Russia is one hell of a thing to say on the part of the Secretary General of NATO, which has played a pivotal role in ensuring that western Europe remained free of war since its founding in 1949. But it’s true, and we need urgently to wake up to this new reality.

For too long, European governments have assumed they can show support for Ukraine without properly helping with the cost of its defence. Presumably in the hope that, with a bit of good fortune, the plucky Ukrainians will somehow repel Putin’s army of thugs, and things will go back to normal.

There is no going back: as the German Chancellor, Frederich Merz, suggested this weekend, Ukraine is Putin’s Sudetenland. It’s his test of European resolve. If Ukraine is allowed to fall, or is forced into accepting the kind of ‘peace’ that Donald Trump is now threatening to impose, a peace that would likely be very temporary, then all the Russian leader will see is a massive green light.

With Trump’s United States now way beyond the status of an unreliable partner, the chickens, long expected in some quarters, are well and truly coming home to roost.

Europe has failed Ukraine, and in the process left itself woefully unprepared to resist the Russian threat, whether it comes in the shape of Putin’s ambitions for territorial expansion, or from anonymous cyber-assailants rendering the technological infrastructure on which every facet of modern life depends, essentially inoperable. The British Library? Marks and Spencer? Jaguar Landrover? We ain’t seen nothing yet.

As Edward Lucas wrote in The Times last week, in a piece entitled Sorry Ukraine, we’ve treated you shamefully:

The more we displayed weakness, the more we encouraged Putin to keep going. Yes, the damage to Russia’s economy is colossal, as are its casualties. But Putin won’t stop until he is stopped. We won’t do that. Perhaps you still can. We would appreciate that, because our own defence and deterrence, on current form, will not be ready for at least a decade.

It’s not too late to take the fight to Putin, but we have to throw off the chains of conventional thinking when it comes to funding the requisite increase in defence spending, and equipping Ukraine with the weapons and the support it needs to finish the job.

It may sound like a cliché, but where is today’s Winston Churchill, the man who spent much of the 1930s warning of the Nazi threat, and urging the government to ramp up defence spending in preparation for the inevitable?

Comparing the response of the UK Government to that of Germany’s Chancellor Merz, Simon Nixon writes:

One can only wish that Sir Keir Starmer - or indeed any of the growing cast of Labour panjandrums who are more or less openly jockeying to replace him - would speak similarly forcefully about the crisis facing the continent and the consequences for Britain of Trump’s pivot away from Europe to side with Russia.

Keir Starmer has a choice. He can either behave like I did in the playground fifty-odd years ago, and sit on the sidelines ruminating about why the world isn’t the kind, gentle, easy-to-govern place he would like it to be, before eventually joining in to impress the tough kids.

Or he can stand up: not to say ‘We Want War’, but to show the kind of once-in-a-generation leadership the current situation demands, and do whatever it takes to free the world of the most dangerous playground bully since Hitler.

Some of the boys in the playground never progress past the seven-year old level of emotional and moral development. They never learn empathy. They have no qualms about taking decisions that will lead to the deaths of thousands of people, many of them women and children. So much of the world’s suffering results from the fact that too many of these ‘boys’ end up running countries and controlling billions of dollars worth of military hardware. Like all bullies, we have to stand up to them.

1. I suspect few people are aware that during the Cold War, the British Army on the Rhine carried US-supplied MGR-1 Honest John rockets, tactical nuclear weapons for use in the event that conventional operations failed to hold back a Soviet advance. And the Royal Navy and RAF were equipped with WE.177 bombs for the same purpose.