The Peace We Have Mistaken for Permanence

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 11 November 2026

For a reader in London, Toronto or Paris, Ukraine’s war can still be placed in a separate compartment of life. It is terrible, consequential and deserving of sympathy, but it happens elsewhere. The railway station remains open. The children go to school. Electricity arrives without anyone thinking about the infrastructure required to deliver it. War appears on a screen, while ordinary life continues around it.

From Lviv, this distinction looks considerably less secure. Ukraine also possessed an ordinary life. Her people made plans whose fulfilment depended upon tomorrow resembling yesterday. The discovery that this assumption could be destroyed was accompanied by the discovery that many people elsewhere regarded the destruction as a peculiarly Ukrainian misfortune.

That is a dangerous way for the rest of Europe to understand what has happened.

The question is whether the conditions that protect Western societies from a comparable catastrophe are as durable as their populations have come to suppose. A society may enjoy peace for so long that it forgets which arrangements sustain it, what those arrangements cost and how quickly they can deteriorate.

John Lewis Gaddis’s expression “the Long Peace” described the remarkable absence of direct great-power war during the decades following 1945. It did not mean that those decades were peaceful for everyone. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and numerous other countries experienced violence on an appalling scale. Nor was the expression a promise about the future. Gaddis subsequently stressed that his work had been history rather than prophecy. A period of stability could deserve explanation without possessing any guarantee of permanence.

Yet permanence is precisely what peace can come to resemble from inside a comfortable society. Defence becomes one spending priority among many, with benefits that are difficult to demonstrate because success produces no event. A hospital treats identifiable patients. A successful deterrent prevents a war whose victims never acquire names.

Democratic politics has difficulty accounting for lives saved by things that did not happen.

This helps explain the distance between the language of strategic assessments and the assumptions governing everyday life. Security specialists consider military production, mobilisation, alliance cohesion and the time required to replace losses. Citizens understandably consider mortgages, employment and the next election. Both inhabit the same world, but they are often working with different expectations about its continuity.

The warnings deserve attention without being inflated into predictions. In its 2025 assessment of European defence, the International Institute for Strategic Studies described national estimates of a potential Russian military threat to NATO Europe generally falling within a horizon of two to five years. That was an assessment of capabilities and preparedness, not a timetable for an invasion. Nevertheless, such periods are short when measured against the time required to expand factories, train formations and build air defences.

An adversary’s ability to wage war does not establish his intention to do so. Intentions can also change more quickly than the material capacity to resist them. Responsible government must attend to both.

The expression “symmetrical war” requires similar care. A future conflict would hardly involve identical armies exchanging identical blows. The relevant distinction is that Western states could face opponents capable of attacking their bases, disrupting their communications and destroying equipment faster than peacetime industry can replace it. Operations against a much weaker adversary offer an incomplete preparation for fighting a state able to inflict sustained damage upon the society supporting the armed forces.

Such a war could become systemic because its effects would extend through trade, finance, energy and alliances. A confrontation in Europe could compete with an Asian crisis for American attention, ammunition and naval resources. This does not require Moscow and Beijing to possess a single operational plan. Separate governments pursuing separate objectives can create mutually reinforcing pressures.

Their differences matter. Russia and China have distinct economic interests, strategic priorities and tolerances for risk. Treating them as interchangeable obscures the decisions each is making. Nevertheless, NATO’s 2024 Washington declaration identified Chinese support for Russia’s defence industrial base as a significant contribution to the continuation of the war. The connection between European and Asian security therefore has a material foundation, even without assuming a coordinated plan for global conflict.

Grey zone activity complicates this picture further. The term describes coercion conducted in the space below the threshold at which governments are prepared to acknowledge armed conflict and respond accordingly. Its attraction lies partly in the uncertainty it creates. Attribution takes time. Allies disagree about significance. Each incident can be treated as too limited to justify a substantial response.

In October 2024, MI5’s Director General publicly attributed arson and sabotage in Britain and Europe to Russian military intelligence. Such warnings concern acts within Western societies, not merely dangers approaching their geographical boundaries.

It would nevertheless be a mistake to assume that every such operation is an attempt to discover the precise point at which general war begins. Coercion can seek concessions while deliberately avoiding war. Sabotage may aim to obstruct assistance to Ukraine, impose costs or intimidate governments. These purposes are dangerous enough without inventing certainty about a larger design.

The risk is that repeated coercion changes expectations. An aggressor may conclude that further action will also be tolerated. A defending government may eventually decide that another incident requires a much stronger response. Each may believe that the other understands limits which have never, in fact, been agreed.

There is no reason to expect the transition to a wider conflict to arrive with sufficient notice for every necessary preparation.

For the public, the implications should be explained in familiar terms. A serious security crisis could interrupt payments, freight deliveries, medicines or electricity before it produces anything resembling the conventional image of a battlefield. These are possible consequences, not forecasts. They explain why civilian preparedness belongs beside military preparedness: hospitals need dependable power, public authorities need workable emergency communications and essential services need arrangements for operating when their usual systems fail.

Governments should make those arrangements openly. Citizens deserve an account of the threat that distinguishes evidence from inference and explains what public expenditure is intended to achieve. Assertions that everything is under control encourage passivity; indiscriminate warnings of imminent catastrophe encourage exhaustion. Neither produces durable consent for difficult decisions.

Ukraine belongs at the centre of this discussion as a sovereign country whose survival matters in itself. She must not be reduced to a buffer whose suffering purchases time for wealthier neighbours. Her people are entitled to seek a durable peace and to determine the sacrifices they can bear.

Nevertheless, the outcome of Russia’s aggression will influence calculations elsewhere. Governments considering coercion will examine what territorial conquest achieved, what resistance cost and whether external supporters sustained their commitments. Western assistance to Ukraine therefore carries consequences for the security of the countries providing it.

Those countries must also undertake their own preparations. They need functioning forces, adequate stocks, reliable infrastructure and diplomacy capable of communicating both resolve and restraint. Readiness should give governments more room to prevent escalation and negotiate securely. It should never become an excuse to treat war as inevitable.

The warning from Ukraine is that the ordinary world can be broken. Preventing that destruction requires decisions taken while ordinary life still makes them seem unnecessary.

For those who have inherited the Long Peace, this is the responsibility inheritance brings.