Australians, blessed by geography and good fortune, often imagine war as something that happens elsewhere –something decided as matters of policy, principle or moral courage. In truth, the most consequential wars are seldom chosen. They choose us. The distinction between wars of choice and those that choose us is not semantic. It marks the line between agency and inevitability, between power freely exercised and power forced into service. Wars of choice are discretionary, undertaken by decision. The wars that choose us ignite when societies lose the ability to decide at all.

For a generation after the Cold War, the West fought wars of choice – elective adventures, moral in tone and optional in timing. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – each promised to export end-of-history optimism but instead imported history’s revenge.

Particularly clear in the case of somewhere like the United Kingdom, the authorities waged a ‘war on terror’ abroad while accommodating the ideologies that nurtured it at home. Across the West, we sought to transform others while unravelling ourselves. The contradictions were glaring: muscular abroad, masochistic at home. We dismantled regimes overseas while indulging preachers of intolerance in our own cities. Every campaign meant to make the problem smaller made it larger. The West returned from its moral crusades neither triumphant nor wiser – only more brittle, more divided and less sure of what it believed.

Now the West is drifting from the wars we choose to the wars that choose us. They are not expeditionary but domestic; not ideological but structural. They erupt from within, born of fractures we refuse to confront. When voters believe their decisions no longer count, democracy ceases to be persuasive and becomes coercive. Brexit was an obvious example: a clear democratic verdict resisted by elites who found it distasteful. Across Europe, referenda that produced the ‘wrong’ results – in Denmark, Ireland (twice), France, and the Netherlands – were rerun or ignored. The message to citizens was unmistakable: your vote matters only when it agrees with your betters.

Furthermore, when economic decline removes the last cushion, those fractures will no longer be padded by prosperity; even polite societies will start to feel the springs. Western youth face futures poorer than their parents’. The tacit promise of progress – more opportunity, more security, more prosperity – has been broken. ‘Elite overproduction’ means too many degrees chasing too few positions. Resulting frustration seeks meaning in ideology, and ideology finds expression in conflict.

Meanwhile, digital networks have enabled mobilisation without hierarchy – riots without leaders. To take two recent examples, the gilets jaunes in France and the violent unrest after the Southport killings of 2024 – all exploded organically: no manifestos, no vanguards, only the sudden detonation of chronic discontent. For governments, this is a nightmare: you can’t arrest a hashtag.

Beneath the rhetoric of progress lies a class fracture – between David Goodhart’s ‘Somewheres’ and ‘Anywheres’. The first still think in terms of nation and place; the second in flights and conferences. For the Anywheres, multiculturalism is a secular gospel: a new political religion promising redemption through diversity. It offers a moral identity to those who have lost every other kind. It promises inclusion but delivers division – replacing solidarity with suspicion. It professes tolerance so long as you do not dissent and celebrates diversity while eroding the bonds that make belonging possible. Those who feel displaced in their own countries are told their unease is bigotry – an excellent way of confirming it.

The temples of the Anywhere class are the global cities – London, Paris, New York, Sydney. They are less metropolises than ecosystems of dependency, sustained by constant motion and consumption. When food, fuel or trust runs short, the illusion of permanence begins to fray. The next crisis, whatever its trigger, will test how resilient or precarious our cosmopolitan fortresses are.

The same logic extends to the digital sphere, where motion and consumption are constant, but meaning is scarce. In this environment, social media, unconstrained migration, and the collapse of civic trust converge to produce a perfect storm. Robert Putnam warned in Bowling Alone (2000) that diversity without cohesion corrodes social capital. Two decades later, it has. The result is a civilisation permanently online, permanently outraged, permanently mobilised – and therefore permanently unstable.

The descent has been visible for years, but few wished to see it. The modern virtue-signalling academy drew the blinds and called the sunlight reactionary. To question the liberal-multicultural order is to risk excommunication. Better to write another paper on ‘critical security’ than note the fire in the basement. Yet the signs accumulate. What was dismissed as doomsaying a decade ago now looks like prophecy. Yesterday’s alarmists are today’s panellists. Every orthodoxy ends the same way – in the embarrassment of belated recognition.

Yet there are exceptions – or at least, delays. The decline has not been uniform. Among Western nations, Australia remains a fortunate outlier – for now. Distance, resources and institutional ballast still confer stability. The so-called tyranny of distance has become its greatest strategic gift: remoteness remains Australia’s most effective policy innovation. Stricter migration controls, a federal system that disperses power, short election cycles and compulsory voting all, by happy accident, keep politics on a shorter leash than systems elsewhere – especially Britain’s, which conjure vast majorities from ever smaller mandates, (mandates, of course, they are not). It may not produce inspired leadership, but mediocrity in Canberra is, for the time being, vastly preferable to madness elsewhere.

So far, Australia is the lucky laggard –spared the convulsions that have shaken its allies but in danger of mistaking delay for immunity. Its armed forces still look outward, focused on deterrence and the Indo-Pacific balance – because they can. Elsewhere, luck is running out. Across much of the West, militaries are beginning to turn inward. By mid-century, some may find themselves less worried about deterring China or Russia than about deterring their own citizens. The divide between outward- and inward-looking societies will define the next era – and the fallout will not be evenly shared. If allies such as the US, UK and France become consumed by domestic disorder, their capacity for collective defence will wither. Australia may find itself more strategically exposed, even as its internal calm endures.

Wars of choice flatter our sense of agency; wars that choose us expose our self-deception. The West spent decades exercising moral discretion abroad while neglecting moral decay at home. The result is a civilisation that talks endlessly of values but no longer agrees on what they are for. Australia still has something rare – time to observe, to learn, and to act before the pressures become unmanageable. But time is not a renewable resource. Once legitimacy, cohesion, and confidence begin to rot, the luxury of discretion disappears. The test for Australia – and for what remains of the liberal West – is whether it can act while there is still room for choice. Once the wars that choose us arrive, they do not wait for permission. We may not be interested in them – but rest assured, they are already interested in us.