In WW1, the empires of Britain, France, and Russia went to war against those of Germany, Austria, and Turkey, for a variety of motives on all sides. This was 19th-century Great Power politics come to a head, three great empires against three other great empires in a world-shaking clash of arms, with no ideological or religious principle at stake. Woodrow Wilson’s assertion that it was a war for “democracy” was preposterous: Both Germany and Austria were more democratic than Russia; and in fact, the German and Austrian empires, taken as a whole, were more democratic than the British and French empires, taken as a whole.

In WW2 the militarized dictatorships of Germany and Japan (with some lesser allies) sought to impose their wills on, respectively, Europe and Asia. There was a strong ideological component in Germany’s case (racial destiny, hatred of Bolshevism), and a lesser one in Japan’s (hatred of European colonialism, cultural arrogance), but the other parties were just trying to grab spoils, or save themselves — even Stalin’s Russia, which fought its war largely in a spirit of atavistic nationalism, not Bolshevik evangelism. WW2 was mostly just Great Power politics run amok — another tremendous clash of national arms, fired up with some 19th-century intellectual pathologies.

In the current conflict, all the modern industrialized nations are opposed by a loose rabble of religious fanatics, whose sole claim on our attention so far has been (1) to conduct some sensational, but suicidal, and — by comparison with WWs 1, 2, and 3, trivial — raids into civilized territory, and (2) to seize control of some worthless countries (Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia) and, by misgovernment, make them even more worthless. This is not a war, and by calling it one, we flatter the jihadists far beyond their deserts. No jihadist nation — let alone any jihadist group — can field an army against us. We are frightening ourselves with bogeymen.