Vladimir Putin went to the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand, hoping to receive some backing for his invasion of Ukraine. But, far from succeeding, he returned home with a double reprimand. Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his country's concern to him and asked for an explanation for the course of the war. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was more explicit and warned him: “This is not the time for wars”. China and India are not two countries in the heap. Both have nuclear weapons and, in total, add up to about 2,800 million human beings, a third of the earth's population.
To say that this is not the time for war is a statement that collides with reality. In addition to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which Putin now wants to widen, there are fifty live war conflicts in the world, most of them in Africa and Asia. But to say that this is not the time for wars is also a statement full of meaning, deserving of the greatest echo. Although it was pronounced by Modi, a politician discredited for his autocratic drift and his exacerbated nationalism, a source of ethnic and religious violence.
War is as old as humanity, but today's world suffers more ailments and requires more care than when the Sumerian cities of Lagash and Umma fought for a century, 4,500 years ago. Or the one from when Athens and Sparta fought in the Peloponnesian War, almost 2,500 years ago. Or the one from when the great world conflagrations of the 20th century took place. The last few years have been one of accelerated environmental destruction. The temperatures are already oppressive, the poles are melting, the glaciers are breaking, the extreme meteorological phenomena of unusual fury follow one another. Hail kills. At this rate, even battlefields will become impassable spaces, devastated more by the climate crisis than by enemy fire.
This is not the time for wars, regardless of their scope, whether they confront tribes in an unknown corner of the Amazon or large blocks on the global board. It is not because humanity has other priorities: it must respond in concert to colossal common challenges, such as the fight against inequality and, in particular, the fight against the climate crisis. Otherwise, the supply of food, water, energy and other essential resources will be in danger, and more so in a world that is overexploited and overheated, weakened and with diminishing resistance.
The invasion of Ukraine shows us that the war, even if it takes place in a single country, can today be an attack against the whole world. Environmental awareness is already rooted in the new generations. But not so much in Putin's, a satrap who runs the Kremlin as if he were both the KGB and the mafia (see the revealing Putin's Men, by Catherine Belton, in Peninsula), and has embarked on an anachronistic invasion , which causes the usual damage and, in addition, dynamite efforts and environmental consensus. The invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the clean energy transition. In the absence of Russian gas, coal and nuclear are back on the table in Europe, when months ago they were considered amortized sources and unaffordable ecological cost.
It is not time for wars. Neither civil nor international, neither ethnic nor conquest, neither lightning nor wear. Because any particular rival shrinks visibly if we compare them with the great collective rival, inescapable, and who knows if at this point already unbeatable, which is the destruction of the planet fueled by greed, discord and stupidity.
It should never be time for wars, except when the tyrant tries to impose his law: the idea of fighting to conquer a country at the cost of the lives of its inhabitants – and of their own – is a macabre joke. Bertrand Russell, imprisoned for standing firm in his pacifism, said that if man does not end war, war will end him. Today he might say that if human beings get stuck in neighborhood fights, instead of uniting to defeat the common enemy that is the climate crisis, it will kill us all.
