Friday, February 17, 2023

ISPI (Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale ) Are We Heading Back to an Age of Traditional Wars Between Major Powers? Valter Coralluzzo

Are We Heading Back to an Age of Traditional Wars Between Major Powers?

Valter Coralluzzo


In the aftermath of the “five-day war” between Russia and 

Georgia (8-12 August 2008) ‒ which in practice was a major 

offensive by Russian armed forces on Georgian territory, in the 

name of defending the separatist republics of South Ossetia 

and Abkhazia, of which Tbilisi was seeking to regain control 

through military power ‒ Robert Kagan, a leading figure in 

American neo-conservative circles, observed that the conflict 

represented no less significant a turning point in recent history 

than the fall of the Berlin Wall. It marked, he wrote, “the 

official return of history... to an almost XIX century style of 

great-power competition, complete with virulent nationalisms, 

battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and 

territory, and even — though it shocks our XXI century 

sensibilities — the use of military power to obtain geopolitical 

objectives”.1


Furthermore, this confirmed the central thesis of 

the book that Kagan had just published,2

in which he scorned  the optimistic and widely cherished illusion 

that the end of the Cold War had spawned a new international order, 

characterised by the disappearance of any serious reason for conflict between 

states. Instead, he argued that those years had been “just a 


1

 R. Kagan, “Il pretesto del nazionalismo”, Corriere della Sera, 21 August 2008. 2

 Id., The Return of History and the End of Dreams, 2008; Italian translation Il ritorno 

della storia e la fine dei sogni, Milan, Mondadori, 2008.

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momentary pause in the eternal competition between peoples 

and nations”3  and that in the decades to come, the traditional 

geopolitical contest between major powers would return to the 

fore, in a global context increasingly marked by the perennial 

clash between democracies and autocracies. 


Kagan’s commentary on the “August War” between Russia 

and Georgia is a perfect fit for the current context. Many 

features of what can be rightly seen as Europe’s first (albeit 

underestimated) war of the XXI century are in fact being 

amplified in the ongoing war of aggression in Ukraine, which 

is generally depicted as a classical, conventional, symmetrical, 

high-intensity, large-scale conflict between regular armies 

(albeit backed up by private military groups) striving to conquer 

territory and positions of advantage by making widespread 

use of armoured vehicles and heavy artillery: in other words, 

a conflict that has undoubtedly brought traditional war back 

to the heart of Europe, in a form that resembles the two world 

wars in many respects. Public opinion, the media, political 

decision-makers and various analysts were clearly taken aback: 

until the very last moment and despite the US’s well-founded 

forewarnings of an imminent attack by Russia on Ukraine, 

many denied that such an event could actually happen. For 

others, however, Russia’s attack came as a surprise only in its 

form, not its substance, because it could easily be seen as a 

natural (and hence predictable) step in the development of post

Soviet Russian foreign policy, which had long been focused on 

the increasingly aggressive and unscrupulous struggle to gain 

recognition of its status as a major power.

The Decline-of-War Thesis


To fully understand why there is a stubborn refusal to see a war 

of the type unleashed by Putin’s Russia at dawn on 24 February 

2022 as a real possibility ‒ despite the fact that this was no bolt 

3 Ivi, p. 14.

Are We Heading Back to an Age of Traditional Wars Between Major Powers? 45


from the blue, but a sharp escalation of the conflict that had 

been going on in the Donbass since 2014 ‒ it is worth bearing 

in mind that all of us, like the Gauls who opposed Caesar, 

tend to be bound by the logic under which “men willingly 

believe what they wish”.4

 It is no coincidence that the cognitive 

sciences used for the purposes of prediction and strategic 

decision-making warn of the danger posed by factors (such as 

beliefs, values and illusions) that act as a filter on the impartial 

examination of facts, thus undermining our ability to question 

our beliefs and causing us to fall into cognitive traps (giving 

credence only to information that confirms our expectations, 

or fitting incoming information to our existing world-views) 

that generate a skewed picture of reality. In this case, the RussiaUkraine 

conflict seriously calls into question a number of deepseated beliefs about 

war, its recent transformations and its  future development. Shaped by the 

lively debate on these issues  over recent decades, especially in strategic 

and international studies, these beliefs are based on two assumptions that have 

gained broad (but not unanimous) consensus among scholars: 

firstly that the age of traditional wars between sovereign states 

is over, and secondly that wars between major powers have 

been consigned to history. Usually lumped together under the 

more general and inclusive heading “the decline of war”, these 

assumptions, which appear to accurately reflect the historical 

experience of the Cold War and post-bipolar eras, warrant 

careful consideration.

Over a century has passed since George Gooch, a British 

historian, wrote: “We can now look forward with something 

like confidence to the time when war between civilised nations 

will be as antiquated as the duel”.5


 The most authoritative conflict datasets give reason to believe that this time 

has come, which is why, a few years ago, Thomas Barnett claimed that 

4

 J. Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Book III, 18, 6. 5

 G.P. Gooch, History of Our Time, 1885-1911, London, Williams and Norgate, 

1911, pp. 248-249.

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“state-on-state war has gone the way of the dinosaur”.6

 These data  sets clearly show that since 1945, despite a large rise in the 

number of states, the number of classical international wars 

‒ i.e. conventional, symmetrical conflicts between sovereign 

states fought around a military front by regular armies using 

comparable weapons, tactics and strategies – has fallen so 

drastically, that such wars have become rare and, in certain 

parts of the world, a thing of the past. This has spawned the 

idea of a world of two halves, in which zones of peace (within the 

confines of the Euro-Atlantic security community), benefiting 

from economic development, political stability and liberal 

democracy, co-exist with zones of turmoil (the rest of the world), 

where in “strong” states (i.e. states capable of fulfilling their 

sovereign functions), power politics and the security dilemma 

dictate the rules of the game, and in “weak” states (i.e. states 

unable to acquire legitimacy by providing security and other 

services), civil wars and territorial fragmentation proliferate7

.

While the two-worlds narrative may look somewhat 

contrived, the fact remains that the few interstate conflicts 

fought in recent decades ‒ whether minor conflicts or those 

classified as full-scale wars on the basis that they have exceeded 

the conventional threshold of 1,000 deaths in battle per year8

‒ have been geographically confined to peripheral or semiperipheral

 areas of the international system. Furthermore, these 

conflicts have almost invariably involved minor actors. Where 

they have involved the system’s major powers, they have never 

developed into direct conflicts on the ground between those 

powers, but only into proxy wars (i.e. wars between minor 

players each protected by a major power). Alternatively, they 

have involved indirect, covert, unconventional or hybrid forms 

6

 T.P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004, 

p. 271.

7

 M. Singer and A. Wildavski, The Real World Order. Zones of Peaces, 

Zones of Turmoil, Chatham (NJ), Chatham House, 1993. 

8

 Battle-related deaths include military and civilian fatalities caused by traditional 

battlefield fighting, guerrilla activities and bombardments of all types.

Are We Heading Back to an Age of Traditional Wars Between Major Powers? 47

of warfare. In other cases again, they have pitted a major power 

(perhaps at the head of a broad coalition of states) against a 

minor power or non-state actors of a criminal or terrorist 

nature. This latter category takes the name “policing wars”,9



by 

which western countries (first and foremost the United States) 

have attempted to restore order in nations torn by civil war, 

destabilise nations deemed to be “rogue states” (to the point 

of regime change, by playing the Nazi card against the dictator 

of the day), or counter the activity of criminal or terrorist 

organisations by military means. Even Mary Kaldor, whose 

best-known book10 occasionally appears to stereotype postbipolar 

wars as “new wars” ‒ which are basically domestic wars 

fought in the context of failing states (failing due to the impact 

of globalisation), by non-state actors in the name of identity 

politics ‒ has referred to this type of conflict as “spectacle war” 

and “neo-modern war”11. The former is the remote, hypertechnological, casualty-free form of 

warfare typical of a “postheroic” western world12 whose citizens are no longer willing to 

sacrifice their lives in war, but get involved in it only as distant 

spectators (because it is reduced to a kind of virtual simulation 

attracting a disproportionate amount of media attention). The 

latter can take the form of a limited interstate war, usually 

attributable to border disputes; or a counter-insurgency war 

triggered by the increasing political polarisation of fear and 

hatred that characterises “new wars”.

Interstate war is becoming rarer, but seeing this as 

confirmation of its actual or imminent demise may be wishful 

thinking. The latest evidence, in fact, points to an increase in 

the frequency and lethality of inter-state conflicts.13 There is 



9

 C. Holmqvist, Policing Wars. On Military Intervention in the Twenty-First Century, 

London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

10 M. Kaldor, New and Old Wars. Organized violence in a Global Era, 1999. 11 Id., Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, 2003. 12 E.N. Luttwak, Towards Post-Heroic Warfare, in “Foreign Affairs”, vol. 74, no. 3, 

1995

13 S. Davies, T. Pettersson, and M. Öberg, “Organized Violence 1989-2021 and 

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no doubt, however, that many factors militate against recourse 

to this type of war. Firstly, war has become more destructive 

and less cost-effective ‒ a classically liberal idea expressed by 

Norman Angell at the beginning of the XX century.14 Secondly, 

the use of force has gradually lost legitimacy and war itself has 

become a taboo. According to John Mueller, therefore, war is 

not only “rationally” but also “subconsciously inconceivable”,15

to the extent that those who still have recourse to it feel obliged 

to conceal it behind euphemisms such as “peace-enforcing”, 

“humanitarian intervention” and “international policing 

operations”, or to restore its legitimacy by opportunistically 

leveraging the idea of the “just war”.16 Thirdly, under the 

current international system, it has become impracticable to 

pursue territorial conquest, which has always been one of the 

main objectives of interstate wars but now seems to have been 

eradicated, because the right to territorial integrity is so rooted 

in the international political and legal order that it is obvious 

to anyone that state borders cannot be unilaterally changed 

and that any attempt to seize territory by force, even if it wins 

domestic approval, will be considered illegitimate and seriously 

damaging to the international reputation of a state, its ruling 

elite or its leader. These factors ‒ alongside others, such as the 

role played by democratisation, international institutions, the 

deterrence mechanism and the “benevolent” hegemony of the 

United States, whose “peacemaking” effect, however, appears to 

have been diminishing for some time ‒ all play an important 

role in explaining the decline of the classic interstate war and, 

even more so, war between major powers. Many commentators, 

meanwhile, have claimed that major war is a thing of the past, 


Drone Warfare”, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 59, no. 4, 2022, pp. 593-610. 14 N. Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National 

Advantage, 1910. 15 J. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War, New York, Basic 

Books, 1989, p. 240.

16 A. Colombo, “La guerra in Ucraina e il trionfo contemporaneo della guerra 

giusta”, La fionda, no. 2, 2022, pp. 28-40.

Are We Heading Back to an Age of Traditional Wars Between Major Powers? 


49

on the basis that there is virtually no risk of such conflict 

occurring today or in the foreseeable.17 But how far is this really true? 

There can be no doubt that, since 1945, humankind 

has enjoyed a “long peace”,18 which the system of nuclear 

deterrence based on Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) 

helped strengthen, by radically and irreversibly changing the 

rational calculus of the costs and benefits of war and making 

it “unthinkable”. Let us not forget, however, that history offers 

other examples of long episodes of peace destined, nonetheless, 

to end. The Cold War itself can certainly be regarded as a major 

war, unlike all others in its form but similar in its consequences, 

because it spawned a new international order built around the 

hegemony of the United States. The fact that the Cold War 

came to an end “without a single shot being fired in its main 

theatre (Europe)”, however, “made it unable to give birth to an 

actual constitutive peace: as if once again, as always and bitterly, 

only a bloody victory won on the battlefield could transform 

the power of the hegemon into legitimate authority”.19 To put it 

another way, if a true international order can only be spawned by 

a major war (which ruthlessly separates victor from vanquished, 

and dominant from dominated), then “it follows that periods 

of history without major wars are destined to witness great 

disorder”.20 And it is an established fact that the end of the 



17 The leading exponent of this school of thought is John Mueller. 20 years 

after the publication of his best-known book (Retreat from Doomsday), he has 

emphatically reiterated his arguments (J. Mueller, “War has almost ceased to exist: 

An Assessment”, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 124, No. 2, 2009, pp. 297-321). 

For an opposing opinion, see J.W. Forsyth Jr. and T.E. Griffith Jr., “Through 

the Glass Darkly: The Unlikely Demise of Great-Power War”, Strategic Studies 

Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 96-115. 18 J.L. Gaddis, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International 

System”, International Security, vol. 10, no. 4, 1986, pp. 99-142. 19 V.E. Parsi, Il sistema politico globale: da uno a molti, in Id. (ed.), Che differenza può fare 

un giorno, Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 2003, p. 103. 20 L. Bonanate, Il futuro della guerra e le guerre del futuro, in Tullio Gregory (ed.), XXI 

secolo, Roma, Istituto Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, 2009, vol. 3, p. 434.

50 Back to the Future


“short century” marked the beginning of a period of increasing 

disorder, complexity and unpredictability in international 

politics. So in a context characterised thus far by the absence 

of conflict (or even the mere expectation of war) between the 

system’s major powers, how can we rule out the possibility of a 

major war becoming at least “conceivable” again?

Like Alessandro Colombo, we could also ask ourselves 

whether it still makes sense to use the term “major war” solely 

to describe a war between major powers on a global scale, or 

whether it should also apply to war between the major powers 

of each regional system. This changes the picture dramatically: 

although the prospect of a global war does not seem plausible, 

“the same is not at all true if we shift the perspective to the 

level of individual regions, with the sole and usual exception 

of Europe and America”.21 This exception no longer seems 

to apply, however, in light of what is happening in Ukraine, 

where a local dyadic conflict (with several, generally overlooked 

features typical of a civil war) has been transformed (since the 

attrition of the Russian army made it clear to the Americans that 

Ukraine was no longer a lost cause but a strategic opportunity 

to weaken and marginalise Russia) into an anomalous proxy 

war22 with growing potential for global destabilisation ‒ in other 

words, a proxy war between Russia, whose claims for status 

have triggered a kind of anti-Western crusade in the name of 

multipolarism that seems capable of uniting all the revisionist 

powers against the existing international order, and the United 

States, which is committed to defending a world order in which 

right trumps might (despite having resorted to “might” more 

than once itself) ‒ not to say a “clash of civilisations” between 



21 A. Colombo, “Guerra e discontinuità nelle relazioni internazionali. Il dibattito 

sul declino della guerra e i suoi limiti”, Rivista italiana di scienza politica», vol. XLII, 

no. 3, 2012, pp. 452-453

22 A. Giannuli offers a convincing explanation of why the widespread use of the 

term “proxy war” to describe the Russia-Ukraine conflict is approximate and 

inadequate in Spie in Ucraina, Milan, Ponte alle Grazie, 2022, pp. 157-158 and 

182-185. 

Are We Heading Back to an Age of Traditional Wars Between Major Powers? 


51

the West and the non-West (see statements to this effect by 

Putin and Kirill I, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox 

Church).23 As Ian Morris points out, at present “any move that 

carries a risk of open war with the United States still requires 

a good dose of folly”, but in the future “the possible benefits 

may look very different to the emerging powers of 2030 and 

2040”, and if so, we are likely to face an era that has “much 

in common with the decade after 1910”.24 This confirms the 

view of John Mearsheimer, one of the most radical critics of the 

decline-of-war thesis, who maintains that the end of the Cold 

War “did not lead to any attenuation in the anarchic structure 

of the [international] system ‒ if anything it did the opposite ‒ 

and there is therefore no reason to expect the major powers to 

behave very differently in the new century from the way they 

behaved in the previous two centuries”.25


But another issue is also worth raising. It has been said that 

the Russia-Ukraine conflict marks the return of traditional war 

to the heart of Europe: but is this conflict really so “traditional” 

and eccentric compared with the paradigm of “new wars”? 

The current map of organised violence features a prevalence 

of conflicts ‒ regardless of whether we call them post-national 

wars, peoples’ wars, wars of the third kind, hybrid wars, fourthor fifth-generation wars, post-heroic 

wars, post-modern wars or simply new wars ‒ fought in a global, multi-dimensional 

context in which the war’s connection with the Clausewitzian 

trinity of state, army and people has become decidedly loose, 

in the sense that these conflicts involve the presence of nonstate actors, the blurring of the boundary between battlespace and non-battle space and the coordinated, simultaneous 

use of a wide range of military and non-military instruments

 

(conventional weapons, irregular tactics, criminal acts, terrorism,

 

23 M. Rubboli, La guerra santa di Putin e Kirill, Chieti, Edizioni GBU, 2022. 24 I. Morris, War – 

What Is It Good For?, 2014; cited by G. Breccia, La grande storia della guerra, Rome, Newton

 Compton Editori, 2020, pp. 354-355. 25 J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001; 

Italian translation La logica di potenza, Milan, Università Bocconi Editore, 2003, p. 328


52 Back to the Future

indiscriminate violence, highly sophisticated technology, classic 

disinformation and propaganda techniques and acts of cyber, 

communication, psycho-cognitive, economic, commercial and 

financial war). If “hybrid warfare” is one of the most widely 

used terms to describe the reality of today’s conflicts, this is 

because those conflicts do not involve “fighting a single type 

of war; instead, various categories (or ‘generations’) of wars 

converge and develop simultaneously”.26

In this respect, the war in Ukraine is no exception. On 

the one hand, it looks increasingly like countless past wars, 

characterised by continuous, bloody confrontations that yield 

no decisive victory to either party, but give rise only to a war 

of attrition, whose outcome will be determined by the collapse 

of the government, the economy or the will to fight, in one of 

the warring countries. On the other hand, the Russia-Ukraine 

war has other features ‒ including the presence of private and 

semi-private entities (such as foreign fighters, Wagner Group 

mercenaries and Chechen kadyrovcy), the extension of the 

battlefield to the whole of Ukrainian society, recourse to a wide 

range of non-conventional instruments (e.g. the weaponisation 

of energy), large-scale use of drones and high-tech weapon 

systems, and the increased importance of the cyber and cognitive 

domains (hackering and psyops respectively) ‒ which are 

entirely in line with the aforementioned predominant features 

of contemporary conflicts. In certain respects, in fact, it could 

be argued that the Russia-Ukraine conflict (with reference to 

Ukraine more than Russia) is propelling us towards the future 

and towards the next and final frontier of contemporary warfare: 

the war to control the minds of the masses (not transiently or 

partially, but semi-permanently and totally).

While the Gulf War of 1991 was the first conflict covered 

in real time by TV cameras, and the Arab Spring saw the 

first revolutions coordinated on social networks, Ukraine will 


26 C. Jean, La strategia nelle guerre di quinta generazione, in L. Bozzo (editor), 

Studi di strategia, Milan, EGEA, 2012, p. 59. 

Are We Heading Back to an Age of Traditional Wars Between Major Powers? 


53

certainly be remembered as the first theatre of war in which 

the sixth dimension of conflict – the cognitive dimension – 

played an equally (or more) important role as that of the other 

five dimensions (land, sea, air, outer space and cyberspace), 

by generating tangible, real-world effects. In fact, the RussiaUkraine war is “

the first conflict fought with weapons that 

include memes, virtual appeals and advertising-style outputs 

representing a cross between war propaganda and viral 

marketing”.27 This unexpectedly and outstandingly effective mix 

has enabled President Zelensky, the first online wartime leader, to 

achieve two goals: firstly to generate such a vast “rallying effect” 

around the Ukrainian flag as to encourage widespread, tenacious 

civil resistance to Russian aggression; and secondly to awaken 

the slumbering conscience of an uncertain West, to the point 

of winning its firm and growing support (diplomatic, political, 

economic and above all military) for the Ukrainian cause, 

which in practice reversed an outcome (the rapid capitulation 

of Kiev) that everyone (first and foremost Putin) had taken for 

granted. In this respect, “while international relations will be 

marked by a pre- and post-Ukraine demarcation line, hybrid 

wars will be marked by a pre- and post-Zelensky demarcation 

line”.28 Having studied the shrewd and unconstrained way 

in which Zelensky has leveraged the technological advantage 

afforded by the strategic use of digital platforms, Zhan Shi, a 

Chinese analyst, came to describe the Russia-Ukraine war as 

“the first metaverse war”: a “dispersed, digitised, interconnected 

and smart” war that is being waged both online and offline 

and makes “the Russian tactic, with its huge war machine, 

comparable to that of the Second World War, look clumsy 

and outdated”.29 But other aspects of the war in Ukraine also 

appear to be steering us towards a future fraught with risks and 

unknowns. Let us focus on just two of these. The first relates to

 

27 E. Pietrobon, Zelinskij. La storia dell’uomo che ha cambiato (per sempre) il modo di fare 

la guerra, Rome, Castelvecchi, 2022, p. 74. 28 Ivi, back cover. 29 Z. Shi, “La prima guerra del Metaverso”, Limes, no. 4, 2022, p. 201.


54 Back to the Future

the process of democratisation (or apparent democratisation?) 

unleashed by the systematic use of Open-Source Intelligence 

resources, which has made the progress of field operations more 

transparent and made “information that used to be held secretly 

in the hands of governments, which decided how much of it to 

disseminate, now largely available to anyone with an internet 

connection”.30 The second relates to the prominent role played 

by the aerospace capabilities of private actors such as Elon 

Musk, who, by granting the Ukrainian armed forces free use 

of Starlink, the satellite system of SpaceX, a global corporation 

that he owns, has pushed the process of privatising war to the 

extreme at which a private citizen can declare de facto war on 

a nation, by choosing not merely to influence, but to actually 

determine the outcome of, a conflict between sovereign states.


Conclusion

In light of the processes in international relations that the war 

in Ukraine has set in motion (or revitalised) ‒ from a worrying 

re-militarisation of relations between states to a growing 

bipolarisation of the international system along the lines of 

democracies versus autocracies, which nonetheless looks difficult 

to reconcile with the tendency to form self-sufficient regional 

resource and technology blocs, spawned by the “rethinking” of 

globalisation that has received a fresh boost from the war ‒ it is 

likely to be remembered as the real watershed event of the first 

part of the XXI century. According to Françoise Heisbourg ‒ 

who as far back as 1997 wrote an ominous essay on the future 

of war31 ‒ the Russia-Ukraine conflict, after the fall of the 

Berlin Wall and the attacks of 11 September 2001, represents 

“the third major historical watershed event of the past fifty 


30 M. Spagnulo, “L’invisibile battaglia spaziale nella guerra d’Ucraina”, Limes, no. 

7, 2022, p. 223.

31 F. Heisbourg, The Future of War, 1997; Italian translation Il futuro della guerra, 

Milan, Garzanti, 1999, p. 23.

Are We Heading Back to an Age of Traditional Wars Between Major Powers? 


55

years”, which posterity will see as the beginning of a new “era 

of war”.32 Some even think that Putin’s decision to resolve the 

“Ukrainian question” by force is “rapidly welding together 

the parts of the creeping Third World War denounced by Pope 

Francis”,33 bringing the world dangerously close to midnight 

on the Doomsday Clock – all the more so if Russia’s threat to 

use nuclear weapons materialises. Attempting to predict how 

the situation will evolve, either in Ukraine or worldwide, is of 

course a daunting task: there are too many variables to consider; 

and too many “black swans” ‒ rare events of immense impact 

that can only be seen coming with the benefit of hindsight – 

have taken to the troubled waters of the post-bipolar world. 

What is certain is that the post-modern illusion cherished 

for decades by Europe, as a “civil power”, in the belief that 

neighbouring regions (and eventually the entire international 

system) could be reshaped and pacified on the basis of its own 

experience, has been crushed (probably beyond repair) under 

the overwhelming weight of the security dilemma and the 

ruthless laws of power politics, which have exposed Europe’s 

strategic vulnerabilities. As for the future of war, which now 

“seems more dynamic and chameleon-like than ever before”,34

and the form that any global confrontation between the major 

powers might take, Colin Gray notes that “it is a perennial 

vice of unimaginative theorists to sketch out a future that is 

identical to the present ‘but a bit more so’”, but “it is a parallel 

mistake to predict a future that shares few points of contact 

with reality as we know it”.35 So the words written by Edgar 

Morin a few years ago sound more prescient than ever: “We’re 

experiencing the beginning of a beginning”, so to understand


32 Id., “La Russia alla perdita dell’impero”, Aspenia, no. 99, 2002, pp. 136-137. 33 V. Ilari, “Perché l’indipendenza economica non impedisce la guerra”, Domino, 

no. 4, 2022, p. 105.

34 M. Evans, “From Kadesh to Kandahar: Military Theory and the Future of 

War”, Naval War College Review, vol. 56, no. 3, 2003, p. 132. 35 C.S. Gray, Another Bloody Century. Future Warfare, London, Weidenfeld and 

Nicolson, 2005, p. 21. 


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the meaning and direction of the changes taking place, “we must 

avoid dogmatism, in other words setting our ideas in stone and 

refusing to measure them against experience”.36 If, however, we 

cling to the belief that our theories and certainties are beyond 

question, we risk ending up “like a penguin, drifting out to sea 

on a melting bed of premises”.37


36 E. Morin, Penser global. L’homme et son univers, 2015; Italian translation Sette lezioni sul pensiero globale, Milan, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2016, pp. 113-14. 37 E. Levenson, The Ambiguity of Change, 1983; Italian translation L’ambiguità del cambiamento, Rome, Astrolabio Ubaldini, 1985, p. 16


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