This year’s Munich Security Conference returned to the theme of great power conflict, which many thought had ended with the cold war almost three decades ago. Against a morbid backdrop of three aircraft — Russian, Turkish and Israeli — being downed over Syria, Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of this gathering of defence and security policymakers, said that “at no time since the collapse of the Soviet Union has the risk of armed conflict between major powers been as high as it is today”.
That seems right. In Syria there is a real risk of clashes between Nato allies Turkey and the US, and between the US and Russia. These can probably be contained through the use of proxies, which was how the US and Soviet Union fought each other across Africa, Asia and Latin America during the cold war. Yet Middle Eastern crises have a habit of ricocheting out of the region. While the cold war balance of nuclear terror obtained, the two sides managed the risks: notably during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the 1982 confrontation between Israel and Syria.
But in the era of presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, with everything from diplomatic protocols to deconfliction hotlines in question, it is hard to be optimistic. Two weeks after US air strikes in eastern Syria killed an unknown number of Russian “contractors”, US secretary of defence Jim Mattis confesses to being puzzled about what happened. The Kremlin at first feigned ignorance, but on Tuesday acknowledged Russian citizens were wounded in the incident.