A new concept has emerged to haunt us – the forever war.

It’s just one aspect of the bleak global picture today: more armed conflicts than at any time since the second World War; higher military spending than at any time ever; a new nuclear arms race getting under way; ecological crisis on a scale never experienced before in human history.

And the further problem is the apparent incapacity of our international institutions to address these challenges properly, combined with the melange of ambition and dunder-headedness of key political leaders that actively make things worse. 

But is ‘forever war’ the right term?

The term is often used to describe US actions in what came to be called the ‘war on terror‘ after 9/11. It has also been described as an outgrowth of the Obama years, when there seemed no ways out of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has been applied to Israel’s eight-decade long war with Palestine, and to Middle Eastern conflicts more generally. And one of Britain’s foremost military historians has applied it to a much broader range of wars and armed conflicts, arguing that it is a characteristic of wars that they often slip into a ‘forever’ mode for which military leaders and governments are unprepared.

Armed conflict today

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the standard tracker of armed conflicts, records 65 armed conflicts in 2025, the highest number since World War II. These are armed conflicts with a state involved on at least one side. The Uppsala team tracks two other kinds of armed conflicts – ones in which no state is involved, and ones in which a state or an organized group is attacking civilians who are not organized as a fighting force. Taking all three kinds together, the total is a whisker short of 200.

Among these armed and violent conflicts, there is no single pattern that stands out as dominant. There is more inter-state war in the 2020s than earlier in this century, there continue to be proxy wars, there is gang violence that is as destructive as any war, such as in Haiti, there are wars of insurrection and counter-insurgency. The methods of warfare are evolving and insurgents often have access now to technology that only a decade or so ago was regarded as out of their reach, such as drones. And there is that category of prolonged and intractable war that is increasingly referred to as Forever Wars.

A few forever wars

• In the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is not one civil war but multiple conflicts between armed groups of different sizes. Lack of effective state presence in the eastern regions of this vast country and a culture of impunity have allowed, even encouraged, well over 100 militia groups to operate, some of them for decades. Structural causes are interlinked and deeply rooted in colonial and post-colonial history. They involve power, land, identity and insecurity. While these remain unaddressed, conflicts that have been active at least since independence in 1960 will continue. A ‘peace roadmap’ agreed in August by the government and the M23 rebels has not yet diminished the violence.
• Against Iran, Trump has engaged the US in war, without for a moment seeming to realise what he was doing, reportedly heavily influenced by Netanyahu of Israel. The US President given contradictory explanations of reasons for the war and ridiculous assessments of how victory is close or already achieved. Though Iran has been battered by the US-Israeli bombardment and though its economy is in terrible condition, the Iranian leadership has the strategic upper hand. By not losing it wins, whereas by not winning the USA loses (and the blow to its global influence will be long-lasting). But this short and intense war is, for Iran, only the current moment of a five-decade conflict – a forever confrontation, perhaps. Iran has a strategy for this conflict.* The USA does not. It has goals – stopping Iran owning nuclear weapons and punishing it for the humiliation of the 1979-1981 Embassy hostage siege. But it has no clear idea on how to achieve its goals, which is why the conflict is currently in a space somewhere between war and peace, characterised by sporadic strikes and counter-strikes. In one form or another, it will likely continue for a long time.
• Israel’s conflicts are notably prolonged:
  • In Gaza, having displaced 90 percent of the population and damaged or destroyed over 80 percent of the buildings, Israel continues to expand the area it occupies. It occupied 60 percent of Gaza by mid-May, while aiming for 70 percent in the near future, or maybe 100 percent with all Palestinians expelled according to Israel’s national security minister. All of this violates ordinary morality, International Humanitarian Law and the effectively dead Trump ceasefire agreed last October.
  • On the West Bank, nearly sixty years of war is continuing at more intense levels than ever. In August 2026, Israeli settlers carried out 2030 attacks on Palestinians and their communities. Their aggression is vicious, incessant and, of course, supported by Israel’s government. The New York Times reports retired Israeli generals opposing this terrorism by extremist settler militias.
  • Even if Israel were to expel all Palestinians from Gaza and occupy the whole territory, the war would continue, as it has for eight decades. Over many years, solutions have been proposed, often agreed, and even implemented for a time before failing. Today, they hang in the shadows, mocking those who have tried to help bring an end to the conflict, deterring those who would try anew to find peace and justice.**
• In Lebanon, Israel is destroying villages and occupying land it destroyed and occupied in the early 1980s. The June 2026 ceasefire – an odd agreement because it was between Israel and the government of Lebanon who were not fighting each other, excluding Hezbollah which is fighting Israel – reduced the fighting but did not end it. There may be another lull coming, which may even last for a period of months or years, but it is unlikely to solve anything. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is in a spiral where military action by either side makes future action by the other inevitable.
• In Myanmar, the military coup in 2021 put an end to a ten-year experiment with a limited form of democracy. It aimed to restore the order that had been ushered in by the military coup in 1962. It sparked a new civil war. But Myanmar has not known a single year without armed conflict since independence in 1948. 
• In Sudan, with the exception of an 11-year period between 1972 and 1983, there has been armed conflict all the time since independence in 1955. Colonial and post-colonial history form a central part of what drove the north-south civil wars of 1955-1972 and 1983-2005, and likewise the war in Darfur of 2003-2020, and therefore of the warfare tearing the country apart again since 2023. The role of outside powers is crucial in keeping the destruction and inhumanity going.
• In Ukraine, Russia is fighting a war of its government’s choice that current evidence suggests it cannot win on the battlefield though it can keep attacking the people. Ukraine is fighting an existential war its government cannot afford to lose. It seems likely there will be some kind of escalation in the coming autumn and winter. A US effort to broker a ceasefire was under way as I wrote this. The war began in 2014 when Russia seized Ukraine and territory in eastern Donbas. It escalated in 2022 when Russia launched a full scale invasion and was rebuffed. The human cost is huge, the tactical gains since autumn 2022 are small, but the prospects for agreement are slim. If there is a ceasefire, the reason is more likely to be exhaustion than agreement, and the result will only be a pause.

The problem with these wars is not only their longevity. In them, almost everything to do with law, ethics or common humanity has long since been abandoned. As a recent comprehensive report on armed conflicts concluded, international humanitarian law ‘is at a critical breaking point.’ From restrictions on humanitarian aid, to open use of sexual violence as a weapon, to launching unprovoked aggression on another state, to the use of starvation as a weapon of war, at every level, rules that were once bent or circumvented are now simply broken.

Nothing is forever

The concept of ‘forever wars’ is quite loose and, from an analytical and a scholarly point of view does not have much to recommend it, but the choice of term is interesting. It has been customary to refer to the conflicts listed above and others as ‘protracted’ and/or ‘intractable’. That is rather more turgid vocabulary and in the current climate of crisis and a weakening world order, many people seem to feel ‘forever’ is more direct and more fitting.

I always prefer to focus on the content rather than the label, so I’m generally not too fussed about specific vocabulary, but this time I do have a terminological reservation.

It is, it seems to me, potentially risky to call some conflicts ‘forever wars’. There is a class of chemical pollutants known for short as PFAS.*** They are commonly known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they are very long-lasting (years in the body, centuries in the ecosphere). As with chemicals, so with wars – the word ‘forever’ connotes a kind of helplessness.

And helplessness – well, it’s not helpful.

A refrain I have heard so many times in my lifetime many times in my lifetime lies behind ‘forever wars’ language: there’s nothing to be done, negotiations are impossible, they (one side or the other or both) are unreasonable. And indeed, it often is the case that nothing can be done.

Until it can be.

In Northern Ireland, in the Cold War between the USA and the USSR, between the USA and China before the 1970s, in South Africa until the early 1990s, in Colombia until the 2010s, in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the first half of the 1990s, between Iran and Iraq from 1980 to 1988, in Mozambique from the 1970s to the early 1990s: it was impossible to do anything until it was not.

That list could include other conflicts in which talks and agreement were followed by a reversion to violence, like Israel and the Palestinians, but though those cases are tragic, they are also cases that by definition show talks and agreement were not impossible. The possibility was there but in the end could not be fully utilised.

Deficient conflict management

The idea of forever wars points to a twofold problem:

1. These are horrible, brutal, protracted wars;
2. The international system seems increasingly unable to manage conflicts, to restrain them, to bring them to a pause and then to an end, and to build the foundations for a durable peace thereafter.

There is no single reason why the conflicts are intrinsically hard to bring to end or even to contain. Two reasons arise frequently. The first is that the structural causes of conflict – and perhaps, the legacy in people’s lives that the conflict is leaving – often make it difficult to find the basis for durable solutions. The second is that the conflict parties and their leaders are too powerful and resistant to influence for any attempt at mediation to gain real traction, especially if they have more to gain through fighting on, or more to lose if they stop. These are not new problems. There is a rich literature addressing them from the mid-1990s on. For a while, with the UN Peacebuilding Commission and Peacebuilding Fund and with the commitment of development assistance to Peacebuilding, we thought we were learning how to solve these problems.

Then geopolitics stepped in.

The combination of pressures and problems has clearly taxed international peacemaking capacity to the limits. And thanks to the behaviour of Russia and the USA in the UN, that peacemaking capacity is much narrower than it used to be and than we need it to be.

And therein lies the first hint about a way out of the problem of what are pessimistically called the forever wars. The great powers do indeed have great power but instead of alternately wailing about it and cuddling up to one of them, the rest of the world needs to figure out a way to moderate great power behaviour, which begins, imho, by working out how to save international law even if some of the institutions that were invented to uphold it may now be dysfunctional. To do that, we need national politics to develop a sense of purpose in cooperation and solidarity. And to do that, we need to find some optimism.

It’s okay to call them forever wars as long as we insist it doesn’t mean forever.

NOTES

* To understand Iranian strategy, I wholeheartedly recommend Vali Nasr’s outstanding study, Iran’s Grand Strategy (Princeton University Press, 2025).

** A study that is both brilliant and heart-breaking on the long and winding deadend path of the peace process is by Hussein Agha & Robert Malley: Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel / Palestine (Macmillan, 2025).

*** ‘Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances’ is the long version.