The world is not fighting one global war. It is doing something almost as dangerous. It is learning to live with many wars at once.

Ukraine enters another year of destruction. Gaza remains devastated while the Palestinian question is still unresolved. Sudan has produced the world’s largest internal displacement crisis. Eastern Congo continues to bleed beneath the weight of armed groups, regional rivalries and mineral wealth. Myanmar’s civil war has become one of Asia’s deadliest conflicts. Across the Sahel, military governments fight insurgencies they promised to defeat.

Each conflict has its own history. It would be intellectually lazy to reduce them all to a single cause. Ukraine is not Gaza. Sudan is not the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Myanmar is not Haiti. Yet they share features that reveal the condition of the international order.

Power is increasingly unconstrained. International law is applied selectively. Institutions designed to prevent war are paralysed by the same states expected to protect peace. Civilian suffering has become background noise.

The Russia-Ukraine war marked the return of large-scale interstate warfare to Europe. For Ukraine, the issue is national survival and sovereignty. For Russia, the war is bound to territorial ambition, security claims and its determination to resist a Western-led order. Behind the soldiers lies a much wider confrontation involving NATO, sanctions, weapons supplies and nuclear deterrence.

The battlefield is Ukrainian. The strategic contest is global.

The Middle East presents a different but equally dangerous reality. The attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza deepened a conflict whose roots long predate both events. Israeli security and Palestinian freedom are too often presented as competing moral choices. They are not. Neither people can achieve lasting peace through the permanent insecurity of the other.

Ceasefires may reduce the killing, but they cannot substitute for a political settlement. So long as Palestinians remain without viable statehood and Israelis remain convinced that overwhelming military power is their only protection, war will continue to reproduce itself.

Africa’s conflicts expose another inequality. Sudan has displaced millions and produced catastrophic hunger, yet it rarely commands sustained global attention. In eastern Congo, communities have endured decades of violence while armed groups compete for territory and access to valuable minerals. The world wants Congo’s cobalt and coltan. It is less interested in the Congolese lives buried beneath their extraction.

Not every death receives the same diplomatic urgency.

This inequality is embedded in the structure of global power. Africa has 54 states but no permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. The five permanent members retain veto powers inherited from the settlement reached after the Second World War. They may block collective action when it threatens their interests or those of their allies.

The result is not merely institutional frustration. It is impunity.

Meanwhile, military expenditure continues to rise. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that the world spent about $2.9 trillion on armed forces in 2025, the eleventh consecutive annual increase. Governments insist that this spending produces security, yet the number and complexity of conflicts suggest that weapons are multiplying faster than political solutions.

War also travels. A missile strike thousands of kilometres away can appear in South Africa as a higher fuel price, a more expensive loaf of bread or a disrupted shipping route. Conflict drives migration, weakens currencies, interrupts trade and diverts public money from health, education and climate resilience.

South Africa cannot afford selective morality. We cannot defend sovereignty in one region while ignoring occupation in another. We cannot condemn Western violations and excuse abuses committed by governments we consider historical allies. Principle matters most when it is inconvenient.

The world is not short of peace declarations. It is short of consistent rules, credible institutions and political courage. The danger is not only that wars continue. It is that humanity becomes accustomed to watching them.

Once permanent conflict becomes normal, peace begins to look unrealistic. That is how the world loses it.