by BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS
I am addressing young people as someone who, because of his age, is not going to fight in the next world war (World War III) and may not even witness its beginning. I just wanted to share with you the following ideas, which I believe to be well-founded: I am convinced that a Third World War is approaching; unlike previous ones, the battlefield will be the entire planet and, for the first time, it will include US territory; no matter how sophisticated the military technology and the Artificial Intelligence that supports it, soldiers will be needed on the ground who will die by the millions, along with innocent civilian populations. More than in any previous war; these soldiers will be young people and not the warlords, be they politicians (who will never put the decision to wage war to a referendum) or businessmen and shareholders in the companies of the military-industrial complex; the only certainty we have about war is that we know when it starts, but not when it ends; the specificity of the Third World War is that, when it ends (all wars end), not only the survival of the human species, but the non-human life of the planet will be at risk for the first time. It’s a dystopian prediction, but realistic enough for religions centered on the idea of the apocalypse to proliferate today. Unlike theirs, my message is Spinosian, that is, it is based on the dialectic of fear and hope. I know that most young people, when they look to the future, have a lot of fear and little hope. If they want to have more hope, they need to be prepared to instill fear in the powerful of this world who, apparently, are no longer afraid of their enemies and live in an orgy of hope. Before I go any further, I want to say to the young people that, although I was born in Europe, I speak from the global South through the lens of the epistemologies of the South. And for this reason, what I have said above is only half-true. Seen from the global South, World War III has already begun (just keep Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria in mind). When I talk about the future Third World War, I only mean that the scale of the existing war will increase exponentially and that it will also reach the countries of the global North, the sine-qua-non condition for something to become global, be it a war or a pandemic.
The interest in promoting war
In every war, there is a country or empire that is particularly interested in promoting the war. In the First World War, the most aggressive was the German empire; in the Second World War, Hitler’s Germany. No one in the global South believes that Russia or China are interested in promoting war. Rising empires prefer positive-sum relationships to zero-sum ones (such as war). Their rise and increase in influence are based on providing real advantages to new allies, even if they are subject to conditions of subordination. That’s why they favor diplomacy and multilateralism. It may seem strange to say that Russia is not interested in war, when it was Russia that invaded Ukraine in 2022. All peace activists, including myself, condemned that invasion, even though they said from the start (which was later confirmed) that the invasion was provoked by the US with preparations dating back to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The aim from the outset was to weaken Russia and provoke its dismemberment. In 1997,
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