War
written on December 13, 2025
In December of 2021 I had been listening to the news. US intelligence reports were warning about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. It sounded distant, abstract and implausible. The invasion would not happen for another few months, but my mind was occupied with the thoughts of war and its consequences. Particularly I was thinking about how it must feel to make long-term plans like buying a car while something catastrophic was visibly assembling in the background.
Until the moment when the first bombs dropped, life continued as normal. I did not think much of my note, but I did think back about it a few times since. That note felt like a quiet indictment: the world was offering all the signals, and we were still behaving as if nothing fundamental could break. We’re in year three of the war, and the war is now the new normal. Except the discourse got worse and worse.
I read Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday once more. It is his memoir of Europe before and between the wars. Zweig describes a Vienna confident in progress, convinced that tolerance, trade, and culture had made war obsolete. What gives the book its power is not hindsight, but how sincere that belief was. His world did not feel fragile to the people living in it — until it all came crashing down. The book contrasts the time and freedom of the author before the wars with the horrors that followed.
The book is quite eerie to read in 2025 and map to current events. Who wants a war? Who can think of a war? Yet the rhetoric of war was there, in December of 2021, and it became real in February of 2022. Kyiv as a city has meaning to us. My wife’s and my first real date was there. We have a map of the city hanging in our living room.
The war itself is distant, but I am reminded of it every day. Ukrainian license plates are commonplace in Vienna, my kids go to kindergarten and school with Ukrainian refugees. The news shows power outages, fires, explosions, destruction — every day. We learned about deaths of distance acquaintances, we know of sons and fathers who are prevented from leaving the country.
Even though I grew up with the concept of war — after all, Austria bordered former Yugoslavia which had a hot war throughout my childhood — I did not really have a clear image of it. I did not appreciate the nuances of what life in a country at war looks like. Social media gives you a view into the lives of people there. The absurd normalcy of people celebrating weddings, giving birth, bringing their kids to school and having nights out, while bombs are dropping.
But for all the good parts of social media letting people share their pain, it mostly just brings out the worst in us. Particularly now, as this year something else has shifted. The tone is no longer that of a war that must be stopped. The online discourse has hardened and simplified against the backdrop of the US becoming, for lack of a better word, annoyed with the fact that Ukraine keeps defending itself.
Perhaps not only because of Ukraine, but unmistakably alongside it, we seem to be losing the liberal order many of us assumed was stable. Realpolitik has returned with a vengeance. The aggressor is no longer clearly framed as the problem. Worst of all for me, Europe’s perceived ally, the United States, is itself falling victim to authoritarian tendencies.
I grew up with a naive belief in peace and cooperation between nations. In the project of the European Union, which can bridge division and ignorance. That we would not see something like the Yugoslav wars of my childhood if we were all part of an economic union. Sadly, it progressively looks like there was not much that supported that belief. The signs of disturbance were there years ago, but their dramatic effects and fast acceleration were not clear to me.
Who wants a war? The tone in news and on social media couldn’t be more binary. New lines are drawn and sides are taken. Allies of half a century are now becoming enemies. For minerals, energy and data, new alliances are being formed and old ones broken. The US and Europe are no longer on the same side. The US would rather see Europe splintered into small pieces to have one fewer rival to deal with. Whatever forces are pushing towards the dissolution of European bonds are also acting from within. For years now, even educated Europeans have been projecting all failures towards Brussels.
What unsettles me the most is that this shift is no longer confined to one theater or one aggressor. The war in Gaza, the bombing of Iran, the eruption of yet another conflict in Venezuela — taken individually, each is explained away. Taken together, they read differently. They suggest a world in which force is once again a legitimate first resort, and where legal and moral constraints are treated as optional depending on who acts. The language used to justify these actions has changed completely. It is no longer evasive or apologetic; it is openly authoritarian. Nothing is hidden anymore. Civilian deaths are brushed aside as inevitable. Online discourse argues them away as the product of AI image manipulation. International law has lost any meaning.
Reading Zweig is unsettling because it reminds you how quickly confidence dissolves. Today the possibility that the war spreads no longer feels like paranoia; it feels like something that would once again be described as “unthinkable” until it isn’t.
“Barbaric relapses, such as wars between the peoples of Europe, seemed no more believable than witches or ghosts; our fathers held fast to their faith in the irresistibly binding force of tolerance and conciliation. They honestly believed that the lines dividing nations and creeds would gradually blur into a common humanity, and that peace and security, the highest goods, would thereby be granted to all humankind.”
— Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
