AUGUST 1914 - AUGUST 2024

"Anxious but seeing nothing, haunted by their dreams but blind to the reality of the horrors they were about to unleash on the world..." This is how Australian historian Christopher Clark describes the leaders of 1914 in The Sleepwalkers (2014), who, without truly intending to, led Europe into the immense tragedy of the First World War through a series of miscalculations. Similarly, American historian Barbara Tuchman, in her classic The Guns of August (1962), describes how these leaders, confident in the power of free trade, deemed war impossible and, in any case, expected it to be a brief affair—a matter of months, they thought.

Please forgive me for revisiting history from 110 years ago... Isn't it said that history does not repeat itself? Wouldn't it be better to celebrate the French triumph at the Paris Olympics? Or to enjoy the end of summer? Why spoil the party unless you belong to those "killjoys" so elegantly criticized by the great Madame Hidalgo?

Yet history stutters: in Europe, a proxy war has raged for three years at the heart of the continent, with its half a million dead and wounded. Here, Ukraine's fate hangs between NATO and Russia. In the Middle East, after ten months of war in Gaza in response to the massive pogrom of October 7, 2023, which claimed 40,000 lives, a generalized conflict threatens to engulf the entire region, immediately drawing in Americans and Europeans...

This time, it's not the great chancelleries pulling the strings, but their protégés, determined to pursue their own strategies. Though armed by the West, they risk—or seek—to drag their protectors into escalation.

In just a few days, at the very end of July and the beginning of August, two besieged leaders decided to go all-in: Netanyahu, by eliminating the military leader of Hezbollah in Beirut, and the next day, the political leader of Hamas in Tehran, thereby demonstrating his resolve to end Iran's strategy of strangling Israel; at the same time, Zelensky, aiming to halt the slow but relentless advance of the Russian army in Donbas, decided in early August to launch a bold incursion into Russian territory in the Kursk region. In both cases, Washington was neither informed nor consulted. The same goes for the Europeans... Yet in each instance, weapons supplied by their protectors are being used, facing the same adversaries united against the "collective West": Russia, Iran, China...

But in this August of 2024, the so-called West is a headless chicken, with its leaders preoccupied with domestic issues: immigration and its associated violence for Starmer in the UK, the budget and coalition survival for Scholz in Germany, the interminable Macron saga in France over the appointment of a new Prime Minister, and of course, the unpredictable U.S. election campaign.

Asked about the Ukrainian offensive, an outgoing Joe Biden mumbled that he didn't intend to "comment at this stage." Meanwhile, Trump and Harris are debating the tax exemption of restaurant tips, an important point of agreement between the two... Biden, however, has dispatched CIA Director William Burns and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Middle East for the ninth time (!) in an effort to broker an agreement on Gaza, a much-anticipated success that Democrats could tout while avoiding further Iranian escalation.

As for Ukraine, everyone is waiting, and hoping, without saying it, that Putin, too, will stop there...

A strange August, indeed...
 

Pierre Lellouche

VA Editorial, 20/08/24