Bringing war back home? The return of great power war and remote control war

Abstract One of the most significant trends in Western military intervention is modes and methods of intervention that do not involve Western militaries (other than in small numbers) and Western publics directly. This trend has been addressed in a number of different ways since the 1990s but the contemporary academic debate has been framed as remote control war. This analysis has highlighted that there is spatial, temporal, social and political distancing of the sites of the interventions from the main militaries and publics of the states conducting the interventions. Western states have used small groups of specialised military personnel, generally referred to as special forces or private military contractors, and methods such as drones, air strikes and using proxy forces. For the duration of the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, these remote control conflicts led by Western states occurred within and against weaker states. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and an increasingly active China, there has been an emerging argument that we are entering a period of great power competition. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 Western states have propagated a narrative that we are in a ‘pre war’ era and there have been discussions about conscription and other preparations for war that will in principle involve large sections of the military and Western citizens. This suggests an important shift away from remote control conflict, which is premised on methods that avoid engaging significant numbers of military and Western citizens. The contribution of this article is to highlight the wider geo-political context as a permissive enabler of remote control war, by emphasising remote control war in the context of the period of Western dominance post-Cold War, the ‘unipolar moment’. A key consequence is that in the post-Cold War context, the terms of conflict have been set by the more powerful states, thus allowing Western states a free hand to conduct and frame interventions without involving their publics other than as spectators and using only small numbers of specialised military forces. Western states have had military and epistemic control over remote control conflicts. The shift to a multipolar order and the potential return of great power conflict is a return to a situation in which Western states can no longer set the terms of conflicts and keep the interventions away from their own publics.