WHY CONTAINMENT IS NOT ENOUGH
The three major threats to our survival as humans are the ecological crisis, the uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence, and the danger of military self-destruction.
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It is becoming common knowledge that the three major threats to our survival as humans are the ecological crisis, the uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence, and the danger of military self-destruction. Following the news about these threats, I soon noticed that the same word recurs in how our media report on them: containment. While the threats are accepted as facts of our lives, the main worry is that, when they explode into an actual crisis, they will become uncontainable.
Let’s begin with wars. Both the US and Russia—or, more precisely, Trump and Putin—do not like to use the term “war”: Putin speaks of a “limited military operation” in Ukraine, destined to prevent the true big war (a NATO attack on Russia), while Trump once described his attack on Iran as an “excursion” intended to prevent a true big war (Iran nuking Israel). The paradox is, of course, that this reluctance to use the term “war,” even when hundreds of thousands are killed and the infrastructure of a country is destroyed, serves to normalize the state of war(s) we are in.
This is clearly a strategy of containment: an effort to keep military conflicts below the level at which they would become an actual new world war. The fear is that the Ukraine war will explode into an all-European nuclear battle, or that the US-Iran war will engulf the entire Middle East. The problem is, of course, that we can never be sure such containment will work: we cannot exclude the possibility that what one side of the conflict perceives as its own still-limited aggressive act, the other side will take as crossing the red line and respond to with nuclear strikes.
