In his poem The War to Come, published on the eve of World War II, Bertolt Brecht offered an unsettling insight into the nature of modern warfare. Wars, he suggested, are not necessarily battles between absolute good and absolute evil. More often, they are clashes between rival systems of power – systems driven by interests, each presenting its struggle as a moral necessity.

Even when real differences exist between the sides, the social outcome of war rarely transforms the lives of those who bear its heaviest burden. Victors and vanquished may change places, but the suffering of ordinary people remains. As Brecht put it: “Among the defeated, the poor went hungry; among the victors, the poor went hungry too”.

Wars cannot be sustained for long if they are presented as struggles over interests – economic, territorial or geopolitical. No one goes to war for a “regional balance of power”. War requires a different language: a language of historical justice, destiny and redemption. It depends on organizing concepts such as an “Axis of Evil”, “Total Victory”, or an “Existential Struggle”. These are not merely interpretations of........

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