And It Goes On.

We don't get to say when it stops.

Given that about ninety per cent of all those who have ever written about international relations, war and conflict studies and military-strategic issues are alive and writing now, you might be surprised to learn that we still know very little about the principal causes of real-world conflicts, and even less than that about why and how they end. Moreover, we lack even an agreed definition of what a “conflict” is, which means that various attempts to calculate the frequency and length of conflicts, as well as to identify their end, give wildly different results. Yet the problem is not inadequate research or too few resources, or even too few publications. Thousands of people, at least, with PhDs, are beavering away producing millions of words a year on all aspects of conflict, yet the field doesn’t actually seem to advance. We don’t appear to learn anything, and we don’t understand any of these issues better than we did fifty years ago.

Now I should say straight away that I don’t include myself in the “we” here. I have never believed in the utility of generic explanations for conflict, and indeed I have unsuccessfully urged people for many years to stop talking about “conflict,” and to look at individual “conflicts”, from which it might be possible to draw some tentative wider conclusions. The problem is that there are many different lobbies with different normative universalising ideas about conflict, working at cross-purposes with each other, and basing themselves on different examples that they may anyway not properly understand. What turns this confusion from just being a waste of money and effort into something much more dangerous at the moment, is that it greatly handicaps our ability to understand what is going on in the Ukraine and Iran conflicts, and especially how, if at all, they may end. We (they) are like scientists trying to take readings with instruments that are out-of-date and in many cases inappropriate , and then arguing about the results. So today I’ll briefly set out the problem, give some examples, and then try to see what history and even poor old common sense can tell us about the way these conflicts may eventually end, assuming that we can even decide what “end” means here.

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There is probably no major conflict in modern history where experts completely agree on the “causes.” In turn, this is because the very structure and definition of such conflicts is often contested. If you believe that there is an organic and causal relationship between the Second Word War in Asia and that in Europe, then you will argue that the War started in the early 1930s, and look for causal connections between the two episodes. If (like me) you regard these as two separate wars with some thematic connections and a degree of influence on each other, then you will prefer different dates, different end-points and different emphases in accounts of the period. Even in the more geographically constricted First World War, there are huge differences in emphasis, and a debate that can never be settled about the ‘“causes,” both immediate and long-term. The causal chain between the assassination of an Austrian Archduke by Serb nationalists in Sarajevo, and fighting between British and German colonial troops in what was then Tanganyika, has about the strength of a cotton thread, and it is questionable in the end if we are even talking about the same conflict.

Likewise, it’s not always obvious when wars “end.” (The fighting did not stop everywhere in November 1918 for example.) How many wars have there been in the Middle East since 1948? Some would argue only one, with long pauses and changes of battlefront. Did any of these wars actually “end?” Was the Lebanese Civil War a separate event whose causes were primarily domestic, even if outside powers like Syria intervened from the start? Was it one war or several, with pauses and reconfigurations? Did that War actually end in 1990, or did exhaustion just produce a long pause where war does not seem attractive? And if there is, in fact, an underlying and insoluble crisis which occasionally takes the form of conflict, should we not be giving more of our attention to the crisis in question, and less to the periodic conflicts?

These questions have no definitive answer, and therefore any attempt to generalise from the proposed answers, or to try to squash historical events into a framework that can be applied elsewhere, is doomed to failure from the start. But the attempts continue, largely because of what is called Cognitive Bias: broadly, we see and give importance to those elements of a situation that we can understand, and have some experience of or special interest in. Notoriously, economists always see economic causes of conflict. Human rights advocates will tell you that neglect of human rights is responsible. Diplomats see a failure of diplomacy. International lawyers blame a disregard for international law, opponents of political extremism and nationalism will blame political extremism and nationalism, and others will blame arms manufacturers, “entrepreneurs of violence” or foreign interference, depending on their political prejudices. Such is the variety of conflicts, that many of these factors have an influence in certain cases. (Ironically the one that certainly doesn’t is the founding myth of the modern international security ideology: the idea that wars are caused by popular hatred between nations, that they are the fault of people like you and me.)

This incoherence means that wildly different theories about causes, and even understandings of, wars are all circulating at the same time, and, whilst believed by their supporters to be generic, are actually highly specific in their origins with certain cases and certain interest groups. Imagine going to a western government, for example, and saying “isn’t Ukraine one of those cases you are always talking about where a military solution isn’t appropriate, and we should be trying to deal with the underlying issues?” Or how about “isn’t it time for ordinary Americans and ordinary Iranians to sit down together to try to resolve their differences peacefully?” Well, you wouldn’t get far, but this is what could happen when you have distinct, self-standing and conflicting discourses milling around in the same conceptual space, supported by different interest groups for different purposes, and frequently colliding with each other.

To this you have to add problems of sheer unfamiliarity with major politico-military crises that actually affect your home country, and thus of recent experience on which to draw, and of any capacity to evaluate all these confident normative theories. A Chief of Defence of a major western nation may perhaps have commanded a battalion during the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan, but that’s about it. He may have served at an international headquarters at a higher level, but will have had no experience of large-scale conventional warfare, simply because there was none to be had. Likewise, there was little point, a decade ago, in teaching military officers about high-intensity combat or missile attack, since their countries did not have the capability to do such things, and they did not expect to fight anyone who had. That was then. And of course, the civilian politicians he advises will know only what they have seen on TV or in cinemas. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are stupid, it just means that they have nothing to draw upon except stereotypes and political and military folklore.

The confusion begins at the most basic of levels. For example, up until 1945 nations could and did “declare war” on each other, and there was a body of law and precedent to govern such situations and the behaviour of nations. But the UN Charter, by reserving this right to actions approved by the Security Council, has created a huge grey area (in which almost all actual conflict now takes place) not properly covered by any international legal framework. We now have “armed conflicts,” a term from International Humanitarian Law and helpfully not properly defined, whose purpose is to identify situations where the type and level of conflict mean that IHL and the so-called “laws of war” apply. But beyond that, such questions as whether one side has the right to sink the other side’s shipping (which was clear before 1945) have become obscure now, and have to be inferred from other treaties with contested interpretations, since the kind of war now taking place between the US and Iran was never supposed to happen.

But this doesn’t stop politicians, and especially pundits, from continuing to use the vocabulary of a century ago, and talking about “acts of war”, “state of war,” “belligerents”, casus belli, “war crimes,” and so on, although strictly speaking none of that applies any more. And on the battlefield, we don’t have anything more than the traditional formulation, most recently reproduced in Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions (1979) which says that “attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives” which are

“those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.”

Other than adding that in case of doubt objects such as houses and schools that might be used for military purposes should be assumed not to be, that’s all there is. As I always say, the Geneva Conventions are quite a good guide to how the First World War should have been fought, but don’t begin to grapple with the complexities of warfare today. So what are these “civilian targets” we are always hearing about, you may ask? Well, they are not defined as such, they are just objects that are not military targets. Thank you.

Classically, Wars began with a formal Declaration and ended with a negotiated Treaty. Modern political culture still clings to the idea that Treaties end wars, as opposed to being signals that they have already ended. From this, comes the obsession with “negotiations,” “agreements” and “deals” that has taken up so much media space over the last few years, as though such documents were a kind of magic spell that could by itself bring an end to the fighting. I’ve written enough about this subject that it’s not worth me going into it further here, but I’ll just observe that there’s no sign that politicians and pundits understand the situation better than they previously did, or that they have taken to heart modern examples of how conflicts do in fact end, irrespective of whether the ending is decorated with pieces of paper or not.

Against this background of ignorance and dubious understanding, it’s not surprising to find a whole range of intellectual sins, of omission and commission, all originating in basic misunderstandings and in inherited mythology based on outdated ideas whose origins go back decades or even generations.This massively complicates western understanding of where we are in these conflicts, and therefore of how close to the end we are. It would be tedious to list them all, but I’ll go through a few, and you will see the common threads that link them.

Slowly, the concept of attrition is starting to make its way back into western strategic consciousness. I say “back” because of course the First World War was essentially an attrition war, where superior numbers, access to raw materials and productive capacity ultimately wore the Central Powers down to the point where they began to fall apart. But the First World War has largely disappeared from popular and even elite memory except as a cartoon parody of pointless butchery, and so we believe there are no lessons to learn from it. (The resources devoted to studying and writing about the First World War are massively smaller than those devoted to the Second, although there was much more combat on the Western Front in 1914-18 than in the later conflict.) Even in studies of the Second World War, issues of war production, access to raw materials and the allied advantage in having substantial colonial manpower reserves are generally left to specialists, in favour of writing about big, exciting battles. Yet that is where the decisive advantage finally lay. (Strategic bombing was a failed attrition strategy because it was not accurate enough to destroy German industrial production.)

We therefore do not understand that a war may effectively “end” when one side is no longer able to field sufficient numbers of human beings and equipment, and no longer has access to the fuel, ammunition and even food to support them, or the means to transport it. But this doesn’t have to mean total annihilation. Even in May 1945, the Wehrmacht could put some five million personnel in the field, but few of them were in the right place. And a few months later, when Japan surrendered, it had a fair number of aircraft left, but no fuel for them. So part of Russian strategy in Ukraine at the moment seems to be to destroy Ukrainian capability to actually deploy the troops and drones they do have, by attacking fuel depots, transport links and infrastructure. If you can’t actually get your forces into contact with the enemy, they are not much use. Likewise, attrition related to certain key capabilities may be enough. The US and Israel are approaching the point where they will no longer have sufficient missiles left to do any damage to Iran. Once that stage is reached, the number of ships of aircraft in the region is irrelevant, because, unless Iran has already collapsed first, they will have lost.

Some have found the fact that the US is running out of missiles shocking, but actually it’s a natural result of doctrine and expectations. During the Cold War, a conflict with the Warsaw Pact was not expected to last long. The air forces of both sides would be largely junk after a fairly short period, and there was no point in buying missiles you would never use. Likewise, in the brief and sometimes violent conflicts after 1990, large stocks of missiles were not needed. After all, larger stocks meant building more storage, employing more people, organising more transport, and anyway assuming that the platforms themselves would last long enough to use the extra weapons. The Russians, with a completely different military tradition, and a historical emphasis on attrition warfare, retained immense stocks of everything, because you never knew.

Although there are moves now to increase stocks of key weapons, the West can never fight an attrition war against Russia successfully, because the necessary industrial and engineering infrastructure does not exist, and cannot be re-created. Indeed, it’s doubtful if it ever even existed on the necessary scale in the first place. This applies irrespective of the technical capability of western equipment, and the (limited) potential for increasing the size of western forces. The political consequences of this are enormous, and do not seem to have been considered at all. And by sending its weapons to Ukraine, the West is simply making the longer-term problem worse. (Drones will not help, since the Russians will always have a manufacturing advantage: and anyway see the next paragraphs.) Moreover, the military market is so internationalised now that western countries typically import at least 50% of their components and sub-assemblies, not to mention raw materials. There are probably half a dozen countries in the world that could bring F-35 production and maintenance to a screaming halt.

One of the most curious western doctrinal blind-spots involves an underestimation of the value of indirect fire, which is having enormous consequences if only people would sit up and take notice. Whilst artillery has always formed part of western force structures (Napoleon was an artillery officer as it happens) it was never given the same primacy as in the Russian and later Soviet traditions. After World War 2 this primacy began to include missiles. The Soviet Union captured thousands of German scientists and engineers, many with experience of working on the V-2 rocket, and set them to work producing a clone, which was first a copy, then a development of the V-2, known in the West as the SCUD. Throughout the Cold War the Soviet Union produced more and better missiles with longer ranges, and the technology was widely exported. But it was never a priority for the West, which preferred manned aircraft, and neglected conventional offensive missiles almost entirely. Whilst the number and quality of Russian missiles came as a shock after 2022 (they had been dismissed until then as just prototypes and technology demonstrators) western reaction has not been to develop similar technologies, which would require a complete rethinking of its strategic posture, and is not going to happen. Rather, the reaction has been to ignore the existence of this capability as far as possible, and then to propose to deal with it by anti-missile systems. The fact that countries as allegedly technically inferior as North Korea and Iran could field such missiles, against which the West has little defence, does not really seem to have percolated yet.

But there’s another problem here, and it’s actually related to the concept of attrition. Until very recently, air attack was difficult and expensive and air defence was cheap. A World War 2 bomber was an expensive and complex machine, carrying a crew that took several years to train. It could be brought down by cheap anti-aircraft rounds, or at the most by a much cheaper night-fighter. Even today, an F-35 is vulnerable to mass-produced missiles costing a fraction of its price. Highly accurate offensive missiles reverse the equation. Defending against such missiles is a costly and laborious process, involving groupings of complex systems, and relatively small numbers of missiles can overwhelm them. Moreover, if radars are destroyed (as in the current war with Iran) or stocks of missiles are simply exhausted, then the system no longer functions. In any conflict with the West, the Russians would be able to flood such missile defences as the West might have with huge numbers of drones and decoys, using up defensive missiles and leaving targets largely defenceless.

It’s hard to convey how foreign this is to western experience and ways of thinking, but let’s try, through a homely analogy: that of cricket. (USians can think of baseball.) Here is the batsman in front of the wicket. While he wants to score runs, his first priority is to protect his wicket. For this, he has situational awareness. He knows who the bowlers are and where the ball is coming from. He knows how the field is placed and thus in which directions it is safe to hit. He knows the type of bowler he is facing and when to expect the ball. Even so, he has only a second or so to decide how to play the ball once it is launched at him. Now imagine a situation like that of missile defence, against an attack that has already destroyed long-range radars. Our batsman does not know which of the opposing players has the ball and how and when they will bowl it. He does not know from which direction the ball will come, or when, or at what speed and height. However, it’s actually worse than that, because many balls may be bowled at him at the same time, and he has to judge which ones are dangerous. And several other opposing players are pretending to bowl balls without actually doing so.

Like all analogies it can’t be taken too far, but I just want to emphasise the extramely short period for decision-making. The faster the ball is bowled, the less time there is. As missiles become faster and faster, and are able to manoeuvre as well, there may come a point where interception is physically impossible in the time available, bearing in mind that the defender has to calculate not where the missile is, but where the missile will be when the defending missile arrives, and the defending missile has to have the time to get get there. (Imagine a batsman facing a ball that comes too fast for him to actually see, and swerves to approach from the other side of the wicket.) A number of nations in the world, not necessarily friendly to the West, now have this kind of technology. Individual missiles can perhaps be countered reliably: salvoes of missiles, as we have already seen, cannot be. Only one ball has to hit the wicket.

Each of these blind-spots is in turn the product of a lack of interest in military affairs and military technology by a ruling class which no longer did military service, or had any family recollections of conflict. (President Chirac served as a paratrooper in Algeria. He was about the last.) The “military culture” of both the ruling class and the punditocracy (let’s be kind and call it that) is made up of vaguely recalled history books from the Tuchman or Shirer era, Hollywood war films, political folk-tales from the past, YouTube documentaries and bits and pieces they have come across on the Internet, all given the same epistemological weight and mixed up with each other. Much is inherited sort-of-wisdom from generations ago. Nothing else, for example, can explain bizarre ideas of “escorting” ships through the Straits of Hormuz. This is a concept which goes back to the wars of the previous century, when the threat to merchant shipping was from German submarines, and so ships were grouped together and protected by escorting vessels, thus sharply reducing losses. Today’s threat is not from individual vessels but from swarms of drones and missiles, which, as we have seen, cannot be defended against at scale. Moreover, the purpose of the attack is not necessarily to sink ships but to discourage them from sailing. In the circumstances, “escorts” provide more targets, but very little protection. But at least people comfort themselves that they know what the words mean.

This is one of the multiple reasons why talk of “rearmament” as opposed to small increases in the strength of forces should not be taken seriously. As I’ve often argued, the real problems the West face today are primarily conceptual and psychological, including an over-dependence on abstract thinking and adherence to a series of norms derived from the past, as with the example just discussed. The West no longer knows what it wants military forces for, or how it would employ them. “Defending against Russia” is a slogan, not a mission, and is itself the result of the uncritical revival of tired old clichés from the political folklore of the 1930s to the 1980s, because that’s all its leaders know. The consequence is that, in spite of the lessons of Ukraine and Iran, the enormous inertia of the system continues to move it in one direction: that which is already known.

Take, for example, the mysterious US F-47 programme, designed to produce the air superiority aircraft of the mid-century. The very existence of the programme, you could argue, shows that no serious attempt has been made to learn the lessons of Ukraine and Iran. An air-superiority aircraft implies an environment where other aircraft are contesting that superiority. If opponents are increasingly moving to the use of missiles to dominate airspace, then it’s questionable whether a programme like the F-47 has much meaning. Of course, defence programmes run for decades and you can’t change everything overnight, but somebody, at least, should be thinking about whether the era of the manned fighter aircraft is finally coming to an end. This is especially important if, as I argue, the “end” of the current Ukraine crisis is very far away and that, after the Russians have succeeded in their immediate goals, they are likely to use technologies they have and we haven’t for political intimidation. (That said, I don’t have that much faith in the ability of western leaderships even to realise they have been intimidated.)

This in turn is an aspect of a larger problem, which is the historical tendency to view the West as the norm. If the Russians and the Iranians are doing something different from us, they must be wrong. If we are, by definition, doing the right thing, then we should win, and so we do not need to change anything substantial. The West follows fashions in military thinking (drones are the latest), but there’s no sign that it is happy with fundamental reviews of its strategy. (Having taken part in a few alleged ones myself it’s strange how often the conclusion is that we are doing basically the right thing anyway.) This is itself part of a massive over-estimate of western norms and western power in the world, which has survived decades of disappointment, and is still very powerful, largely because we know little about strategic issues and concerns outside the West, and cannot be bothered to find out. We make assumptions about western power and influence which are normatively rather than pragmatically based. We assume that people who sound as though they might think like us actually do think like us, because our way of thinking is just superior. We assume that western doctrine, training and equipment is the best, because we have never seriously researched others, and we look for someone to blame when any of these are shown to be inadequate.

It follows that we massively overestimate our capacity to influence how crises evolve, and especially how they end, and we arrogantly claim responsibility for things over which we have in reality had little influence. This is a particular problem in Washington, where the sheer size and complexity of the system, and the relentless personal struggles for control of every issue, mean that the rest of the world has only a walk-on part. I’m sure there genuinely were people in Washington who believed that deliveries of arms and money to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan via Pakistan helped to bring down the Soviet Union, just as there are no doubt people there today who think that a handful of US troops in Northern Syria brought down Assad and installed the current regime in Damascus. It’s career suicide in Washington to suggest that anyone else but the US has agency in such situations, especially the locals. A consensual hallucination of this kind can be very attractive, of course, unless and until it stubs its toe on reality.

More generally, trying to actually get to grips with the fiendish complexity of, say, Middle East or West African politics is a life’s work for specialists, and western capitals are in general simply not interested in that level of detail. For generations now, it has been easier to invoke Great Power arguments than to attend to actual circumstances on the ground, and nothing much changes. From the 1970s, western powers claimed that independence movements in Africa, because they had looked to the Soviet Union for support, were therefore nothing but tools of Moscow. (As late as 1990, the BBC was furiously criticised by some right-wing politicians for its live coverage of the release of the “terrorist” Mandela.) And “interference” by the Soviet Union was seen everywhere: right-wing journalists, prompted by unidentified “intelligence sources” claimed in the 1970s that De Gaulle’s decision to withdraw French forces from the NATO Integrated Military Structure had been masterminded by the KGB. Political folklore being as unimaginative and unoriginal it is, fundamentally the same kinds of ideas circulate today, enabling politicians and pundits to avoid the complexities of real life, and to luxuriate in the idea of a mysterious and glamorous world of “psyops” and “colour revolutions” and “cut-outs” which they know, in reality, almost nothing about. And if we get it wrong, well the consequences don’t affect us.

At least, they didn’t. When Chalmers Johnson coined the term “blowback” he was thinking of wider political disapproval of the US and damage to its interests as a result of its behaviour. But more recently, we have finally begun to understand that countries we have made enemies of, may be developing the ability to demonstrate their displeasure in practical, and even kinetic, terms. Iranian missiles can probably already reach South-East Europe, and North Korea appears to be building at least one nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, theoretically capable of threatening much of the world. The result is the usual mixture of denial and incipient panic. The world isn’t supposed to be like that, and it never occurred to us to imagine what would happen if it did.

The panic arises from the dawning understanding that western actions can have real consequences. For several decades, talking and acting tough against China, Russia or Iran has been essentially playing to a domestic audience, seeking to appear more radical and hard-line than the next actor. What the targets of this behaviour may themselves have thought was irrelevant, and anyway there was nothing they could do about it. That’s changed now, of course, but habits of generations die hard. It’s not that western governments are trying to “provoke a war” with China, it’s that they can’t abandon the habit of threatening and insulting that country, secure in the belief that there will never be any practical consequences. Until now, though, the subtlety with which the Chinese are conducting themselves is obviously more than western political systems can easily understand.

It follows that the West has now largely lost the ability to determine how crises will unfold, and especially when and how they will finish. This does not mean that other states have become all-powerful either, it simply means that permanent western primacy cannot just be assumed. This applies both at the day-to-day level of control of the evolution of the conflict (the so-called Boyd Cycle, about which I have written before) and in the longer-term as well. But there is no sign that the West has realised this, or that its decision-making systems are able to genuinely understand and into account the objectives and capabilities of others. The fixation continues to be on what western political systems can accept, as though this was all that mattered, and on the consequent belief that the West can announce how a crisis will end, and reality will obediently come into line. Let’s conclude by reverting to the two current examples where we’ll see the problems I have described above playing out.

In the case of Ukraine, the West chose to disbelieve warnings from Moscow about possible consequences of their behaviour. This was partly based on an illusion of western strength and Russian weakness, but partly also on the political unacceptability of NATO actually altering its behaviour to take account of the views of others. The West failed to understand the nature of the war from the beginning, opting to interpret it as a war of conquest, when it was first intended as a political shock, and then morphed into an attrition war for which the Russians had prepared. The West couldn’t really be bothered to understand: the war would soon be over anyway. But it wasn’t, and the sheer length of the fighting became a problem in itself, as it revealed important industrial weaknesses in the West. The Russian use of missiles surprised everyone, but for the moment it has been parked in the Too Difficult to Think About category. Most of all, hung up on traditional notions of war and peace, the West still clings to the idea that there will be an End to the crisis, through a peace conference whose terms it can dictate, after which things will rapidly revert to normal and Russia will be begging to be allowed back into the “international system.”

Ludicrous as this is, it represents the most that the Western system is able to envisage for the moment. In reality, it will be the Russians who decide when it stops, and we do not know (and they may not yet have decided) what form the post-war situation will take. But we can look forward to the intimidatory use of military capability, to serial political crises within NATO and between NATO and Russia, and other fun and games. Western options for avoiding this are few and decrease with every day’s bellicose posturing. I’ve seen fantasies of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, but this isn’t the 1950s, and it only shows how firm is the grip of memories of a long-ago, half-understood, past on the problems of the present. There isn’t going to be an endless war against Russia, any more than there was after 2021 in Afghanistan, where pundits were insisting that the US would continue the war from across the border and never withdraw. When was the last time you heard some US decision-maker even mention the country? And the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex: won’t they force the war to continue? Maybe not so dreaded: of the largest US companies listed by revenue in Fortune magazine, none of the military companies are in the top fifty. Much economic power lies elsewhere, and anyway you can’t escalate with things you haven’t got.

Much the same is true of Iran, where the Iranians, whilst by no means the winners yet, have the initiative, and where the US itself cannot win. (That’s why it’s disturbing to see US pundits already trying to map out some kind of future renewed conflict with Iran, as though that were possible.) This failure results from a mixture of arrogance, the inherited military and political folklore mentioned earlier, and a simple disinclination to study Iranian military capability, because in the end who cared? The Iranian political system and the nature of its society did not need to be studied: they could be assumed. And the thought of effective Iranian retaliation, if even entertained, could be dismissed, because it would cast doubt on the ability of the whole enterprise. All of this was predictable, and to some extent predicted in general terms. And now, the future evolution of the crisis depends primarily on Iran, which is an uncomfortable and unfamiliar place for the West to find itself in.

Nothing in our inherited and archaic understanding of war and peace, of the causes of conflict and the reasons conflicts end, is of any use in this situation. In each case, the most likely result will be a long period of low-level tension, which would suit the Russians and Iranians respectively, but would strain, and probably irreparably fracture, western cohesion. It’s not over yet, in other words, and it won’t be the West that decides when it stops.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.