Before the Shooting War Erupts, the Silent War Festers

History teaches, but do we ever learn?

I increasingly turn to the pages of history not for tales of battlefield heroism, but to understand the years and decades of growing divide that preceded the eruption of war. In every major conflict—from the American Civil War to the still-burning Middle East—war follows a predictable pattern: a long, silent corrosion followed by catastrophic violence.

In every major conflict—whether the American Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, or the ongoing struggles in the Middle East—peace gives way to war not suddenly, but through the slow unraveling of trust. The transition from peace to a shooting war followed the pattern of catastrophe: a long period of protracted but growing tension that ultimately erupts into the tragedies of war. Before the earthquake brought its devastation, many tremors were felt.

History does not sleep between battles—it seethes, grows, and festers. The clash of arms is never sudden; it is preceded by a quiet corrosion, a breakdown of trust, identity, and shared reality. By the time the first shots are fired, war has already commenced in the hearts and minds of divided people.

In the two decades before the attack on Fort Sumter, Americans lived through a widening social chasm. Each compromise, intended to preserve the Union, only exposed its fault lines. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act only postponed the inevitable as resentment and hatred deepened, until the narratives embraced by opponents became uncoupled from reality, designed not to honor truth, but rather what must be true to dehumanize the enemy.

Anecdotes carried the weight of prophecy—John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Bleeding Kansas, as pro and anti-abolitionists clashed, and the Dred Scott decision, each signaling the growing and irreconcilable moral chasm between North and South.

By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, the center had all but vanished, replaced by the competing and uncompromising beliefs in their respective absolutes. The eruption of 1861 was not a war that suddenly broke out, but was a war that had matured long before, and which inevitably must find its expression and conclusion by cannon and musket.

A similar silent war unfolded before the first trenches were dug in World War I. Between 1890 and 1914, Europe tied itself in knots of hyper-nationalism, colonial rivalries, and secret alliances against perceived enemies. The Moroccan Crisis, the annexation of Bosnia by Austria-Hungary, and the Balkan Wars all served as tremors before the earthquake. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand merely struck the match; the tinder had been accumulating for years.

Before World War II, the world watched as Germany rebuilt itself with resentment and revanchism born from humiliation and economic despair. The Treaty of Versailles, followed by a global depression, created a fertile ground for extremism. Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Italy's conquest of Ethiopia in 1935, and Hitler's defiance in the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia all signaled that the post-World War I order was collapsing. Yet the other world sought appeasement, hoping time and silence would suffice. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, war was not provoked—it had finally been acknowledged.

Even the Cold War’s proxy conflicts had long preludes. In Korea, the peninsula was divided in 1945, but it took five years of ideological entrenchment and mutual suspicion before the North invaded the South. In Vietnam, American involvement stretched back to the 1950s, through the fall of French Indochina, the partition of the country, and the rise of guerrilla insurgency. The Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 gave political cover to a war that had long been creeping forward. In typical historical form, that event provided the narrative necessary to resort to death and destruction of a dehumanized enemy.

In the Middle East, the pattern repeats with almost tragic fidelity. In 1948, the Arab-Israeli War was preceded by decades of British imperial retreat, rising Zionism, and Arab resistance. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 followed six years of unresolved tension after the Six-Day War, where Arab nations plotted retaliation in silence. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 followed a long period of post-Iran-Iraq War militarization and regional posturing. The 9/11 attacks were preceded by years of escalating ideological conflict, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the embassy attacks in 1998 and the USS Cole bombing in 2000. The War on Terror, too, had its silent prelude.

In all these cases, war did not begin with the first bullet. War began with polarization, grievance, the breakdown of dialogue, and the popular acceptance of the necessary narrative to dehumanize the perceived enemy. The shooting war is only the final stage—the visible eruption of an invisible cancer.

Today, that same silent war again seems to be festering, increasingly throwing out perceptible tremors that always precede our resort to guns and bombs.

We see it in our loss of a shared national identity, as citizens now inhabit divergent realities shaped by curated media ecosystems and ideological echo chambers. Trust in democratic institutions has eroded, with both major parties accusing each other of subverting elections and weaponizing the legal system.

On the cultural front, speech is policed through informal censorship, cancel culture, and algorithmic suppression, while language is redefined to suit political agendas.

Urban centers struggle under the weight of rising crime, homelessness, and drug addiction, often ignored or justified by political leadership. Economic pressures mount—wages stagnate, debt explodes, and the basic necessities slip beyond the reach of many, fueling growing resentment toward perceived elites.

Geopolitically, tensions with China, Russia, and Iran simmer dangerously, meanwhile, at home, a growing undercurrent of political violence—whether through riots, lone-wolf attacks, or heavily armed standoffs—reveals how close we already are to rupture.

Each of these developments is a tremor in its own right, but together they suggest something deeper: a society no longer in disagreement, but in decay.

Reconciliation is a door that narrows with time. History warns that the longer we linger in this silent war, the more likely the path ahead leads to open conflict. Civil wars do not begin when gunfire rings out—they begin when conversations end.

If we are wise, we will treat this moment not as an interlude but as a final chance to turn back the tide, silence the tremors, and reconcile our differences in peace. Once momentum builds beyond certain limits, and we never know exactly what those limits are, enemy factions must commit to victory through violence, when reason, restraint, and mercy will arrive too late.

The lesson of history is chillingly simple: we will either speak now in humility and peace or destroy each other in resentment and hatred.

"What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel