Author Archives: Haig Hovaness

Since decolonization, Africa has experienced a succession of wars whose combined death toll likely reaches into the tens of millions—mostly from indirect causes such as displacement, famine, and state collapse rather than combat itself. This article surveys major post-1960 conflicts, argues against monocausal explanations, and examines how persistent misreading of African political dynamics has led to repeated and costly foreign policy failures, particularly by the United States.

In 1982, the Falklands War rescued Margaret Thatcher from political collapse and turned her into a wartime icon. But the deeper lesson of that conflict is more dangerous: diversionary war is appealing to failing leaders, whether democratic or authoritarian. Donald Trump’s long-standing fascination with invading Venezuela, documented in his first term and now echoed by renewed U.S. deployments, a favored opposition proxy, and drug-war legal framing, fits the same dual pattern that produced the Falklands: a desperate leader seeking escape through external confrontation, and the hope of political resurrection through a short, decisive victory. The Falklands Effect turned crisis into triumph for Thatcher, but a Venezuelan conflict today could result in disaster for Trump. The danger is serious, but the power of Trump’s temptation is quietly growing.

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have exposed a new reality: the battlefield is becoming too transparent, too fast, and too automated for mass, low-skill infantry to survive. In that environment, militaries will not get rid of human fighters — they will narrow them. The future elite will be smaller, more cognitively trained, and embedded inside human–machine combat cells that can sense, decide, and act without higher headquarters. Their defining virtue won’t be brute courage but restraint: the ability to override automation, to make lawful and proportional choices when AI reaches its limits. But we should not mistake this refinement for stability. As more states adopt AI-enabled elite formations, the competition for speed, autonomy, and informational dominance may actually make escalation easier, not harder.