There was little joy in many parts of the world this New Year as explosions and gunfire continued to reverberate in armed conflicts.

Ukraine and Gaza are not the only war-torn areas. Fighting also intensified last year, and remains unresolved in Myanmar and Sudan.

Figures compiled by Sweden’s Uppsala University show that armed conflicts showed a steady decrease following the end of the Cold War but began to rise again after 2010. According to the university’s latest count, 187 active conflicts are raging around the world right now.

Once the spark has been ignited, a conflict tends to last for between eight and 11 years, according to scholars.

In 2010, U.S. foreign policy turned inward during Barack Obama’s first term as president due to the lingering effects of a global recession triggered by the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers.

There was no hiding the dark sign that had begun to form over Pax Americana. China, in the meantime, forged ahead with aspirations to become a big power.

Subsequent years saw the rise of India and other nonaligned countries that maintain a distance from either Washington and Beijing.

As a result, the post-Cold War international order was fundamentally shaken, and the world, which had lost its “policeman,” became unstable. That ignited not only a succession of tensions that had previously been contained but also regional conflicts that had been forgotten by the world’s advanced nations.

In Africa, for example, eight military coups have already been waged in the 2020s.

SHORTAGES OF BASICS

The accompanying photo was taken late last year by Mohammed Mansour, an Asahi Shimbun correspondent who lives in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.

Five armed conflicts have broken out in Gaza since Hamas took effective control of the strip in 2007. Mansour, who has lived through all of them, said the latest round is the most intense yet.

So many evacuees have descended on the southern Gaza city of Rafah that there are not enough places or tents to house them. All elementary schools are jam-packed with displaced people.

As many as 80 evacuees are crammed into each classroom, so there is no way of containing the spread of infectious diseases, Mansour said.

Asked what assistance supplies are needed urgently, Mansour cited drinking water before everything else. He said everyone is struggling due to rationing that allows only the equivalent of three plastic bottles of water per person after standing in a line for water supply for many hours.

Drugs, food and fuel are also running out. If things continue at this pace, hospitals will be unable to save babies born prematurely, Mansour said.

We are startled by the depth of hatred that Palestinians and Israelis harbor toward each other. Remarks by senior Israeli officials, in particular, have a relentless ring about them.

“We are fighting human animals,” Israel’s defense minister said as he compared Palestinian fighters to beasts.

A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces confirmed that around two civilians had been killed in battle for every Hamas fighter slain. In citing the difficulty of street warfare, he declared that the ratio was “tremendously positive.”

None of these remarks would have been tolerated in the light of peacetime reason. That leads us to contemplate how cruel humans can be in war.

Are humans inherently good or evil? Is the natural state peace or war?

These conundrums discussed by Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant and other thinkers are looming, unsettled, in front of all of us.

DON’T LET GUARD DOWN

At least two lessons should be drawn from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

One is the hard reality that nobody can stop a war once it has started. The parties involved also miss opportunities for halting their attacks.

The United Nations, which should be the venue of ceasefire talks, remains dysfunctional due to discord among the Security Council’s permanent members. That leaves us profoundly disappointed.

The community of humankind, however, cannot afford right now to give up on the United Nations.

Even if the organization remains impotent to halt wars, it still has a raft of knowledge on ways to relieve people’s pain and fear by providing food, health care and other forms of humanitarian aid and by keeping watch over war crimes.

“The United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell,” said Dag Hammarskjold, who served as U.N. secretary-general when the drawn-out Korean War was raising distrust of the global organization.

We have only to hope that a helping hand will reach the people of Gaza and Ukraine who are literally standing on the cusp of hell. The United Nations should draw on the confidence it has earned through its down-to-earth work to embark on reforms to strengthen its functions.

Another lesson is that war feeds off accumulated hatred and distrust.

The roots of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine lie in events from 10 years ago. Walls and fences were maintained to keep Palestinians and Israelis separate. This did away with any foundation upon which the two sides could have sympathized with each other as fellow human beings.

We should keep watch on any unjustness that is being overlooked or not taken seriously.

We should remember this New Year to pay attention, and be ready to get involved, so any conflict will be nipped in the bud.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 1