PARA BELLUM?

I don't love war.

Not anymore, at least, even though my generation grew up playing with toy soldiers and watching American war movies.

Von Clausewitz once said — with perhaps an involuntary cynicism — that war is simply the continuation of politics by other means.

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Today, I tend to see it more as a replacement for politics when politics has failed. Still, I can't quite bring myself to embrace absolute pacifism, either.

Maybe because I lack direct experience with blood, mutilation, and death — realities that many committed pacifists, like Gino Scala, knew firsthand. Not the "living room pacifists" we see too often today.

Si vis pacem, para bellum: in fact, this is the message that a good part of the European national and international leadership is carefully passing on to us — against an opposite message, just as carefully promoted by others, and by "others" I don't just mean the above-mentioned pacifists, but also one of the belligerents, that happen to fund some of them.

It's easy to point out that the phrase was coined by an expansive imperial power like Rome. Yet it's also true that, even after that expansion stopped, it was the legions stationed at the borders that maintained peace — and when that tension loosened, trouble began.

So, should Europe rearm?

I don't have an answer — only many questions.

What is war today? And what purpose does it serve?

If the war in Ukraine has taught us anything — but really, all recent wars have — it's that wars are no longer won with boots on the ground.

Drones and new-generation weapons have turned conflicts into grinding wars of attrition, where even militarily weaker nations can resist in a once unthinkable way.

If they're willing to pay a high human cost, they become nearly unbeatable against opponents whose societies are no longer ready to sacrifice as much.

Of course, as the film Leave the World Behind (to whose screenplay interestingly Obama contributed) reminded us, satellites and cyber technologies can cripple a country's defensive and infrastructural systems — but only if no one thought to maintain an analog backbone, a lesson the Americans should have painfully learned from General Van Riper in the Millennium Challenge.

And victory doesn't come from superweapons like the atomic bomb either: in my opinion, no head of state, not even a dictator like Kim, wants to go down in history as the one who used nuclear weapons first.

The Russians, originators of mixed warfare, should perhaps recognize that what really works is not the massive hardware of weapons but the software of fake news, propaganda, and puppet governments — "democratically" elected — that manage to keep their people in check, with the support of part of that same people.

Nor does war seem to help with territorial expansion. In the last century, no country has secured lasting territorial gains — perhaps with the sole exception of Tibet, and even that was not a real state.

So maybe war today mainly serves to empty the warehouses of old weapons and keep the military-industrial system alive — the same system President Eisenhower (a former general himself) warned about back in 1961.

Proponents of rearmament, however, argue that every euro invested in that system has a multiplier effect greater than one, meaning a positive return for investing countries.

Indeed, history shows that wars have often been massive accelerators of innovation, with significant spillover effects on civilian life.

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But this raises another question:

Is it really impossible to find alternatives? 

Here too, projects like the moon missions have shown how high returns and widespread benefits can come from ambitious, peaceful endeavours.

If the Apollo mission had generated thousands of patents that we still use today, wouldn't it have been worth launching an equally ambitious mission — say, closing Europe's gap in artificial intelligence?

An investment that could also become extremely useful in the case of unconventional warfare?

Another question:

What will the impact be on the European Union?

Which brings along two more: What timeline should we move on? and What trade-offs will rearming force upon us?

In my view, there are only two possible scenarios:

* The first could ironically be a positive one, overcoming national selfishness and creating more structured forms of cooperation — alternatives to the unanimity requirement that paralyzes the EU today.

There's an old "false etymology," into which even JFK fell, claiming that in Chinese, the word for crisis is made up of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity."

Even if linguistically inaccurate, the idea is sound — particularly so in this case.

But turning danger into opportunity requires strong leadership, and that seems to be in short supply these days in an era of influencer politicians — leadership able to balance national egos with continental interests.

* The second scenario would be a definitive blow to the EU, causing the collapse of a union that, to some extent (but not as much as biased social media narratives suggest), has failed to deliver on many of its promises and hopes — paralyzed on vital issues and overpowered by a self-referential bureaucracy grown around ideological dogmas and fundamentally unaccountable.

The disintegration of the EU would obviously serve the interests of external autocracies, uneasy with the idea of a politically and socially assertive continent.

It would also serve internal autocracies — like Orban's Hungary, Fico's Slovakia, and maybe even Meloni's Italy — eager to saw off the branch they're sitting on, hoping to fall into the orbit of a larger autocracy.

Fast rearmament would effectively mean transferring enormous resources to the United States, which is currently the only real provider of integrated advanced weapon systems.

A slower one — at least over a decade — could instead be an opportunity to build a strong, autonomous European defense industry.

But only if it involves the difficult balance mentioned above — and at the cost of sacrificing some national defense autonomy.

And in any case, it would leave us dangerously vulnerable in the short term.

 At what price?

What will Europe have to give up to rearm?

Even if the resources were additional — finally financed through common European debt — would it really be a good use of money, considering all the doubts raised above?

One of the few things I've learned about strategy in times of complexity and black swans is that you must choose the option that works across as many scenarios as possible, even if it's suboptimal in a specific one.

Wouldn't it be wiser to invest in research (especially AI), education, social security, sustainability, development cooperation to manage migration flows (another powerful weapon in autocrats' hands), cyber capabilities, and fighting fake news?

My 10 cents.

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Post Scriptum.

In the meantime, another war has broken out — a trade war over tariffs — which risks becoming a free-for-all but paradoxically reinforces many of the points discussed above.

In some ways, it actually strengthens the arguments made here.

What do you think?