The futility of war in the 21st century is starkly evident

livemint.com:

Brigades of Hamas and the al-Quds Brigade of the Islamic Jihad. Hamas has held political control of the Gaza Strip since 2007 and has fought several ‘wars’ with Israel already. Even though it began with an absolutist position on an Islamic Palestinian state over the whole region (with no space for Israel), in 2017 it modified its position in favour of a two-state solution on the lines of the pre-1967 borders.

Warfare in the 21st century resembles the tribalism that Samuel Huntington spoke about in his famous 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. He correctly predicted that much conflict in a post-Cold War world will arise from religious and cultural identities. He suggested that ideology-led wars were a 20th century aberration, and that the world would return to more primitive sources of conflict.

Huntington has been widely critiqued for his cultural determinism, but alas, he has largely been proven right, at least in the three decades or so since the end of the Cold War. Huntington’s descriptive accuracy does not imply that these conflicts will prove successful for the aggressors. The world appears to be entering a phase of lose-lose-lose wars, for the perpetrator, victim and abettors on both sides.