The Logic of Forever War Includes Nuclear Brinkmanship

PAINTING: War, painting by Evi Sarantea.

By Evaggelos Vallianatos

Prologue

For a variety of reasons, humans often resort to killing each other. Instead of resolving their differences peacefully, they arm themselves and kill each other until one of them wins the conflict, that is, he has killed most of his opponents. This deadly tradition survives and thrives to this day – in 2026.

Despite international organizations designed to prevent wars like the United Nations, there are alliances like NATO and the European Union, which still prepare  and crown war. NATO is basically an American war alliance against the Soviet Union / Russia. It is an extension of US hegemony in Europe. Meanwhile,  deadly conflicts are wrecking Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The war in Ukraine is to some degree WWIII. It has been funded and armed by NATO. This abhorrent race to war justifies the sixth century BCE philosopher Herakleitos who said, “War is the father and king of all” (Hippolytos, Refutation 9.9.4).

True, it is, but why? Wars have been the greatest forces shaping civilization and history. The question is, why are humans incapable of learning to live with each other without mayhem? Such behavior negates civilization. Therefore, what we call civilization to praise ourselves has become civilized barbarism.

Wars in Hellas / Greece

The Greeks discovered democracy, philosophy, science, advanced technology and beautiful culture. They tried to avoid war through the Olympics and other Panhellenic games and festivals as well as the Oracle at Delphi, which constantly reminded them of their eusebeia / piety for the gods, the speaking of the same Greek language and their Hellenic identity. But these worthwhile institutions and efforts of reconciliation often failed. The result was a series of dehumanizing and de-Hellenizing civil wars like the Peloponnesian War, 431- 404 BCE. This very destructive mayhem started not because of any aggression on the part of the strongest Hellenic city states: Athens, Sparta, Thebes or Corinth. No. The spark for the war came from Sparta because of its fear of rising Athenian influence and power. And once the deadly conflict started, Persia funded Sparta.

After the Greek victories over the Persian invasions of Hellas in 490 and 480-479 BCE, Athens allied with other city states in Ionia / Asia Minor and the Aegean concerned about more Persian invasions. This leadership of Athens gave it international prestige, influence and money with which Athens rebuilt the Parthenon, which the Persians had burned. Sparta did not appreciate a strong rival in Hellas, hence it started the Peloponnesian War that had catastrophic consequences for all Greeks.

The internal strife in Hellas weakened the Greeks and invited conquerors like the Greek Macedonians from Northern Greece and the  Romans from the West. The Roman emperor Constantine embraced Christianity in the fourth century. That caused a political and cultural  earthquake that demolished nearly all of Hellenic civilization. Christians and other barbarians undid Hellas, overthrowing its temples, architecture, science, schools, libraries and way of life. The Christianization of Hellas was a global catastrophe that sunk Western Europe into darkness: the burning of libraries, crusades and the triumph of barbarism for several centuries.

A very small number of Greek manuscripts survived the march of Christianity into Hellas. These treasures sparked the Renaissance among the Arabs in the 8^th century and among the Western Europeans in the 15^th century. But the Greeks themselves, made Christians by force, failed to repel the attacks of the Mongol Turks and, in 1453, they lost their freedom. The Western Christian Europeans did not go to the assistance of the Greeks because of theological divisions. Some 400 years later, in the 1820s, the Greeks fought a heroic struggle and won their freedom.

Wars in Europe

Wars continued in Europe. The Greeks spent most of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries to recapture their land. World War I and especially WWII almost annihilate Greece. In addition, the British and the Germans sowed the seeds of civil war in Greece, 1943-1949. Communist class struggle and American and British capitalist ideologies fought a ferocious conflict in impoverished Greece.

The United States founded the European militarist alliance of NATO, that also included the perennial enemy of Greece, Turkey. This meant that the hot wars of the first half of the 20^th century would continue as Cold War conflicts between NATO and the Soviet Union, both armed with the genocidal and extermination nuclear bombs. Islamic Turkey was the only beneficiary of this meaningless regime of tensions and conflicts in Europe. Turkey continued to play one Western Christian country against another and against the communist Soviet Union.

As for Greece, the game was desperate. German occupation, 1941-1944, almost wiped out the country. The civil war, 1943-1949, became another Peloponnesian War: destructive and fratricidal. And just like the Mongol conquest of 1453, when most Greek scholars escaped to Florence, Padua, Venice and Rome, many Greeks left their country in the 1950s and 1960s for other countries in Europe, Australia and America, especially America.

The misfortunes of modern Greece started in 1831. Local enemies of the first president of modern Greece, Ioannes Kapodistrias, did not like him. He came to Greece in 1828 after a brilliant career in Russia, where he was the Secretary of State, 1816-1822. Kapodistrias was also the preeminent diplomat of Europe. In Greece, he tried to create an independent nation state. However, he set the foundations of the modern Greek national state, using his own wealth and Philhellenic contributions for funding the army, schools, courts, hospitals, post office and the expansion of the national borders. He was just to the landless peasants by giving them land. Nevertheless, on September 27, 1831, his local and foreign enemies assassinated him. Britain might have funded the assassins.

After Kapodistrias, the “great” European powers (Britain, France, Russia) sent kings and monarchical institutions to Greece, which undermined the country’s democracy, facilitated the looting of Greek archaeological treasures and weakened ancient traditions. The outcome, as I said, was NATO that included Turkey.

The US, Turkey and NATO

The US was so incense by the influence of the gigantic communist Soviet Union that overlooked the genocidal legacy and policy of Turkey. Like Britain, the US treated Turkey as a fence for the Soviet Union. This blind bias encouraged Turkey’s 1955 pogrom against 85,000 Greek residents of Constantinople / Istanbul. Turkish state-led mobs, armed with torches, knives and iron rods, smashed everything Greek: churches, cemeteries, schools, hospitals, orphanages and thousands of business and commercial stores.

The same disregard for Greece and admiration for Turkey was the reason the US ordered Greece to remove its army from Cyprus. To facilitate such a cowardly act, the Greek army took over the government from 1967 to 1974. The Greek military gave the green light to Turkey, which, in 1974, invaded Cyprus and occupied about 40 percent of the Greek island.

Meanwhile, NATO and the European Union remain silent about Turkish aggression. Even the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis downplays the Turkish war threat. If his country dares to expand sovereignty to sea waters that belong to Greece in the Aegean, Turkey threatens war. Mitsotakis mumbled this apocryphal message in early July 2026 NATO conference in Ankara: “My country is in a very delicate neighborhood, facing geopolitical challenges.” NATO and the EU are well aware of this “delicate” situation developing into a volcano in the Aegean but keep silent. The United Nations also treat Turkey like a “normal” state, more than 50 years after Turkey occupied Greek and EU territory.

The Trump administration also has no trouble with genocidal Turkey. In fact, Trump seems to like Erdogan, who continues threatening Greece. Erdogan reads the lips of Trump. In the Ankara NATO meeting, July 7-8, 2026, Erdogan welcomed his distinguished guests with music from an Ottoman-era orchestra.

Evolution of war

Demetrios Karkamanis, a Greek war expert who spent his professional life in the Swedish armed forces, published a couple of articles about the immorality of NATO. None of its nation state members had the courage to raise the human rights violations the government of Erdogan inflicted on Turkish citizens primarily because of the NATO summit in Ankara, much less the systematic violence Turkey has been inflicting on the Greek population and institutions in occupied northern Cyprus for more than 50 years. NATO in early July 2026 was repeating the Trump obsession of spending about $ 50 billion for additional armaments. One wonders all these new guns are going to fight whom? Certainly the Europeans are not deluded or insane to think of fighting Russia directly, though they have been doing that indirectly through the arming and destruction of Ukraine.

The Greek Swedish military expert talked extensively on what Greece needs to do to face the inevitable military confrontation with NATO-embolden Turkey.

I read Karkamanis carefully. He is a strategic thinker. He knows the weapons manufactured and used today. He agreed it was a good idea that Greece purchased 4 very advanced technology warships from France, the so-called Belharra. But he raised critical questions about warfare and strategy. He said that Greece must become self-reliant in weapons and the manufacture of weapons. Her dangerous neighbor, Turkey, has been investing in its military industry and especially in the development of drones, sea and air drones carrying explosives for the annihilation of the enemies they attack. Would the French warships in the Greek navy be able to withstand the ferocity of the drone attacks, the explosive powers of wave after wave of explosives-armed kamikaze drones? And what if the warship destroyed the cheap drones with expensive bullets or missiles? And then he speculated about the algorithmic warfare of tomorrow. Where would such mechanical killing nightmare push humans? Back to the dark ages and mountain caves?

Extinction is the other side of the high tech warfare coin, the  potential outcome of still maintaining thousands of “modernized” nuclear weapons by several nation states: US, Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Britain, France, North Korea and Israel: flying them in military aircraft and filling submarines with missiles loaded with dozens of the dreadful weapons of extinction; keeping them in air force bases and elsewhere. But  instead of discussing disarmament, showing off nukes is becoming fashionable once again.

Nuke fever is unsettling Britain. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which for decades is acting like the canary in the mine, is warning that Britain is up to something dangerous: “In the last five years,” the Bulletin says, “Britain has quietly moved to increase the maximum size of its nuclear stockpile and revise its nuclear doctrine, and it is now acquiring an additional nuclear capability. In concert with the United States, the UK government is expanding the deployment of non-strategic (tactical) nuclear weapons in a way that could destabilize the strategic balance in Europe.”

Yes, but why is Britain moving around “tactical” nukes? To scare Iran? Ireland? Russia? the EU? We don’t know the depths of insanity behind this extremely dangerous and provocative “doctrine” and policy of Britain. The Bulletin warns that it was wrong for the US to station in Britain US “tactical” nuclear weapons Britain would fly around in US aircraft. The message of these dangerous activities would raise anxieties in Russia, thus increasing the dangers of nuclear war. “This nuclear brinkmanship, “ says the Bulletin, “directly pertinent to the Ukraine war, offers the false promise of security for some at the cost of dooming security for all.”

Of course, Britain works closely with its younger brother, the United States, which she educated so well that the US replaced her as world hegemon.

Epilogue

The dogma of Britain to display American nuclear weapons and rearm its nuclear forces confirms that war is not about to take a vacation. In fact, the fighting between the US and Iran is making war a forever war. “The United States expects financial attrition and military degradation to exhaust Tehran’s. Neither has a path to victory. Yet each may feel compelled to prove that it can endure more pain than the other. That is the logic of a forever war: Each side uses violence to test the other’s endurance. War becomes negotiation by other means.”

In such a new jungle of enemies armed to the teeth with a variety of high tech AI weapons fighting forever wars, Hellas / Greece must merge her ancient virtues of daring, courage and passion for freedom with the latest high tech technologies of war. No doubt, fighting Turkey in the Aegean will be complex, demanding weapons, daring and strategy. The geography of the Aegean is a tremendous asset to Hellas. Arm each island to defend and fight any invader. The Greeks defeated much larger armies and navies because they had centuries of experience fighting for their freedom. They had studied their potential enemies and knew their strength and weakness. The Turks have a large army but very little experience in fighting naval battles. The Greeks practically lived in the sea for millennia. Belharra, drones, submarines, missiles, air force, electronic warfare and radars become heroic if they are monitored and guided by heroes.

I am not praising warfare. But we live surrounded by danger and enemies. The Greeks are not aggressive. They prefer peace to war. However, their neighbors, the Turks, want what the Greeks have. That’s why the Greeks must develop a strategy to defeat the Turks decisively.

Turkey does not belong to the West and NATO. It’s a jihadist Islamic state that has been oppressing non Turks and non-Muslims for centuries. Why is the US and its Western allies refuse to learn this simple truth? Don’t they learn from history? It would be a good idea to talk to the Armenians and Kurds.

But the ultimate question for war, civilization and human survival depends on nuclear disarmament. These weapons, tactical or strategic, don’t belong among humans. They are anthropogenic monsters of extinction. We no longer have heroes like Perseus with his flying horse Pegasos to slay the nuclear Chimaira. We need to do that ourselves. Nuclear brinkmanship leads to nuclear war.

=============

Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., is a historian and ecological and political theorist. He studied zoology and history at the University of Illinois and University of Wisconsin and did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard Oniversity. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency. He taught at several universities and authored hundreds of articles and 9 books, including Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Out Backyards (World Scientific, 2026).