War Is Not a Science: Finding Reason in 2026

History is a terrible mathematician.

I say this as a physicist who finds comfort in the absolute certainty of equations. Sitting here in my wheelchair in Tirana, watching the last grey light of 2025 fade behind the Dajti mountains, I often wish human events followed the same rigid laws as gravity. But they don't. I was reading a profound reflection by Corrado Augias this morning that shook me. We tend to believe that if we apply the right formula to diplomacy, we get peace. Yet, as Augias points out, war and peace are not a science; what is true in one moment dissolves into a lie in the next
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The variables keep changing.

We are taught from childhood that violence is the ultimate evil. It is a belief I hold dear, especially as someone whose physical vulnerability makes the idea of force terrifying. However, the Israeli writer Amos Oz challenged this pacifist comfort zone. He argued that violence itself isn't the absolute evil—aggression is . Oz believed that oppression is the "mother of all violence," and sometimes, you need a "big stick" to stop it . It is a hard pill to swallow. But when you look at the images of the sky over Kiev, lit up by Russian drones just days ago, you realize that the old Latin motto Si vis pacem para bellum isn't about itching for a fight. It means that if you want to maintain peace, you must be prepared to defend it.

This brings us to a strange paradox we face as we enter 2026.

We usually assume that war is the playground of the young and reckless, while the old are the gatekeepers of wisdom. But history loves to invert our logic. Augias reminds us of the days before World War I in Italy. Back then, it was the young people—inflamed by the poetic shouting of Gabriele D’Annunzio—who filled the streets screaming for conflict . It was the "old man," the statesman Giovanni Giolitti, who tried desperately to keep Italy out of the slaughter, knowing the price would be too high . He was right, of course. The war destroyed the economy and paved the highway for fascism.

Today, the script has flipped entirely.

Now, the drums of war are beaten by the "old white males" of power. We see Vladimir Putin relentlessly pushing forward, and we see Donald Trump, who recently renamed the Department of Defense to the "Ministry of War"—a chilling embrace of honesty . Meanwhile, the youth of Europe are the ones clinging to peace. This generational inversion proves that there is no scientific constant in human nature. The "young" are not always the progressive ones, and the "old" are not always the cautious ones.

There is a metallic taste to the idea that disaster is sometimes a requirement for progress.

It sounds cruel to even think it. But consider the collapse of Napoleon III in 1870. His defeat by the Prussians was a national humiliation for France, with young nationalists chanting "To Berlin!" only to see their own capital besieged . Yet, that very defeat was the stroke of luck Italy needed. It allowed Italian soldiers to breach Porta Pia and finally unify Rome with the rest of the country . One nation's tragedy was another's birth.

Even the philosophers knew this. Karl Marx called violence the "midwife of history," and Hegel viewed war as a necessary tool to preserve the vitality of states . These are dark, heavy thoughts to hold in your head while watching families buy groceries for New Year's Eve. But we cannot deny that the Italy I love, the Italy of freedom and constitution, was born from the rubble of World War II . The trauma of Mussolini’s "wrong war" was the shock therapy that forced a nation to change its destiny .

So, where does that leave us now?

We are living through a quiet crisis of identity. The "embryo of Union" in Europe has gifted us eighty years of peace, a miracle on a continent previously addicted to slaughter . But this long silence of the guns may have caused a "genetic mutation" in us . If you asked a young European today if they would pick up a rifle to defend democracy, the answer would likely be a confused silence. Peace is the only reality they have ever known; it is rooted so deep in their imagination that the alternative feels like a movie script rather than a possibility .

I wonder if this refusal to fight is a higher state of evolution or a fatal weakness.

Aristophanes, centuries ago in Lysistrata, joked that women should manage these things because they prioritize life over conquest . Perhaps he was right. War is not a science, and it doesn't care about my physics equations or our logic. It is a human flaw, unpredictable and messy. As 2026 approaches, my hope is not for a perfect formula, but for a return to reason—and perhaps enough respect to keep the sky dark and quiet.