Total War Without End — Permanent Conflict as a Method of Rule

Sunday 15 February 2026

In 1949, as Europe was still excavating herself from the rubble of the Second World War, George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel whose reputation has grown with each decade that has followed. The book is remembered for its vocabulary — Newspeak, doublethink, Big Brother — but at its heart lies a geopolitical idea: the notion of permanent war. In Orwell’s fictional world, Oceania is locked in endless conflict with Eurasia or Eastasia. The alliances shift, the enemies change, but the war never ends. It is not designed to be won. It is designed to continue.

Orwell’s permanent war is not primarily about territory. It is about internal discipline. The war absorbs surplus production, justifies rationing, and provides a permanent pretext for surveillance and repression. In one of the novel’s most chilling passages, the Party intellectual Emmanuel Goldstein explains that modern war, unlike the wars of earlier centuries, is waged by each ruling class against its own subjects. The bombs may fall abroad, but the political function of war is domestic.

The idea was not Orwell’s invention. It drew upon his observation of totalitarian systems in the twentieth century — above all Nazi Germany and Soviet Union — in which mass mobilisation, ideological struggle, and the construction of existential enemies served as instruments of internal cohesion. War, or the preparation for it, provided a grammar for society. The citizen became a soldier; the economy became an arsenal; dissent became treason.

Total war in its classical form — the mobilisation of an entire society’s economic, industrial and human resources for military purposes — was a phenomenon of the twentieth century. The First and Second World Wars demonstrated how industrial states could reorient their entire production capacity towards armaments, while simultaneously regimenting civilian life through rationing, censorship and propaganda. Yet those wars, devastating as they were, were finite. They ended. The armistices were signed.

Permanent war is a different species. It is war detached from the objective of victory. Its purpose is structural. It provides a justification for emergency powers that never expire. It establishes a psychology of siege in which political pluralism appears as weakness and opposition appears as collaboration with the enemy.

Orwell’s genius lay in perceiving that in a nuclear age, the great powers might reach a tacit equilibrium in which outright annihilation is avoided, but low-intensity, shifting conflicts endure indefinitely. The war in 1984 is geographically distant from most citizens of Oceania. It is simultaneously omnipresent and abstract. It is reported in bulletins, reinforced in propaganda, and embedded in daily ritual — but it does not fundamentally threaten the regime. On the contrary, it sustains it.

The permanent war paradigm has echoed through subsequent history. The Cold War, although it did not become a direct global conflagration, created a condition of chronic emergency in both East and West. In the Soviet bloc, the language of encirclement by capitalist enemies justified extensive internal security structures. In the United States, the fear of communist infiltration fuelled episodes such as McCarthyism. Yet the Cold War also contained institutional counterweights — independent courts, competitive elections, and a pluralist press in the West — that limited the consolidation of total domestic repression.

It is when those counterweights are absent that permanent war becomes most potent as an instrument of rule.

In contemporary Russia, the concept of war has undergone a transformation since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. What was initially framed by the Kremlin as a limited “special military operation” has progressively been narrated as a civilisational struggle against the collective West. The language has shifted from tactical objectives to existential survival. The conflict is presented not as a policy choice but as an inevitability forced upon Russia by hostile external powers.

This narrative has profound domestic implications. If the state is engaged in an existential war, then dissent can be characterised as sabotage. Independent journalism becomes an auxiliary to the enemy. Alternative political visions become luxuries that the nation cannot afford. Emergency legislation — initially introduced as temporary wartime measures — acquires a permanent quality.

One observes, in this regard, the gradual thickening of Russia’s internal security apparatus. Laws against “discrediting the armed forces” broaden the scope of punishable speech. Media outlets are closed or compelled into exile. Civil society organisations are designated as “foreign agents”. The justification is consistent: the country is at war. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary unity.

Yet the war in Ukraine, brutal and costly as it is, does not threaten the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation in the manner of 1941. It does not approach Moscow’s gates as the Wehrmacht once did. Rather it functions — politically — as a theatre in which sacrifice can be ritualised and loyalty can be measured. The front line is both real and symbolic.

There is a further economic dimension reminiscent of Orwell’s analysis. War absorbs resources. It directs industrial production towards armaments. It enables the state to prioritise military expenditure without conceding that civilian standards of living may stagnate or decline. In a permanent-war framework, economic hardship is not evidence of policy failure; it is proof of patriotic endurance.

At the same time, permanent war requires careful calibration. A regime cannot allow military defeat so visible or catastrophic that it undermines the mythology of strength. Nor can it permit victory so decisive that the emergency dissolves. The equilibrium is delicate: enough conflict to justify control, not enough to threaten survival.

Is Russia, then, engaged in Orwellian permanent war? The answer is necessarily nuanced. The war in Ukraine is undeniably real, not a theatrical fabrication. It involves vast casualties and genuine territorial stakes. It is not a purely symbolic conflict invented for domestic consumption.

Yet the political utilisation of the war increasingly resembles the logic Orwell described. The conflict is narrated as open-ended. The adversary is diffuse — “the West” rather than a single state — which ensures that the war cannot easily be concluded by a treaty. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation and proxy struggles reinforce the sense of enduring confrontation. Even were the front lines in Ukraine to freeze, the broader framing of Russia as locked in civilisational struggle could persist.

The danger of permanent war as a governing principle lies not only in repression but in epistemology. When society is conditioned to believe that it exists in a state of perpetual emergency, truth becomes subordinate to necessity. Facts are assessed not on their accuracy but on their utility to the war effort. History is rewritten to serve mobilisation. The boundary between external conflict and internal discourse dissolves.

Orwell feared precisely this erosion. In 1984 the Party does not merely suppress dissent; it abolishes the possibility of independent thought by restructuring language itself. War is the scaffolding upon which this mental architecture is built. Without war, the apparatus would lose its rationale.

The applicability of this model to contemporary Russia is not exact, but it is instructive. The Kremlin’s consolidation of power long predates 2022. However the war has accelerated and legitimised trends that were already present — centralisation, media control and the narrowing of permissible political space. It has provided an encompassing narrative into which disparate policies can be woven.

Permanent war is not sustainable indefinitely without cost. Demographic strain, economic distortion and the psychological fatigue of mobilisation accumulate over time. The Soviet Union herself demonstrated that a state cannot forever subordinate civilian vitality to military competition. Yet for extended periods, the paradigm can function with chilling efficiency.

Orwell’s warning was not that war would never end, but that rulers might discover its utility in perpetuating their own authority. In societies where institutional constraints are weak, the temptation to transform temporary emergency into permanent structure is strong.

For Russia the question is whether the war in Ukraine will remain a finite campaign with definable political objectives, or whether it will crystallise into a doctrine of endless confrontation — a permanent horizon against which domestic life is organised. If the latter prevails, then Orwell’s fiction will have moved another step closer to documentary.

Permanent war is not merely a military condition. It is a constitutional one. And once normalised, it reshapes not only the state but the inner life of her citizens.