“The British fought to preserve the empire. The U.S. was content to see it collapse. The Soviet Union was intent on fomenting uprising in Britain and the United States, but both supported Soviet military operations against the Germans”

On June 4-7, it will be 75 years since the Battle of Midway, the battle in which the United States won the war in the Pacific and prevented the defeat of Britain and Russia. Guadalcanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad followed, all mostly fought in the second half of 1942. Over two years of horror would remain – neither Japan nor Germany was prepared to concede the point – but the war was won by the beginning of 1943.

These were extraordinary battles in an extraordinary war. I want to devote some time this year to considering the battles on their anniversaries and, I want to try to explain how these battles were an interlocking whole – really a single, rolling, global battle that collectively decided the war. By the end of the year, my goal is to show that a single global battle, beginning at Midway and ending at Stalingrad, defined the fate of humanity.

This is not simply antiquarian interest, although surely June 1942 to February 1943 must rank with Salamis, where the Greeks stopped the Persian surge into Europe; Teutoburg, where the Germans halted the Roman advance; or Lepanto, where Christian Europe halted Muslim Ottoman expansion. These battles defined the future of a civilisation; June 1942 to February 1943 defined the future of the entire world.

World War II defined the global civilisation in which we now live. It ended Europe’s imperial project, opened the door to American global power, created what was called the Third World and set the stage for the emergence of the Asian mainland as a significant global player. The war also bred a distrust of nationalism, gave rise to multinational institutions and turned an interest in technology into an obsession with its redemptive powers. We live in the shadow of World War II and are now in a global revolt against the world it created.

All of this must be discussed, but to understand a war, we must understand it on its own terms, its own grammar. Many talk of wars without wanting to understand their logic, from the details of an artillery barrage to the tonnage of supplies that must flow to the battlefield. War, as all things, is a matter of detail, and the detail must be framed by both the logic of a war and its purpose.

World War II had a unique logic. Many Americans long for the days when Americans were united in war. They mistake World War II as the way in which Americans once fought wars, with shared values. That was never the case. The American Revolution, the Mexican-American War, of course the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War were all fought with a vocal and angry faction opposing the war while it was underway. The dissent of Vietnam or Iraq was the norm of American warfighting, and World War II (and to a lesser extent World War I) was unique in its unity. That’s because it was a unique war.

I divide wars into two types: political wars, of which there are many, and systemic wars, of which there are only a handful. Political wars are those intended to achieve limited ends. The ends may be important but not existential. The loss of the war does not mean disaster for the nation. Most wars are like this, and many have idiosyncratic or diffuse ends. The Korean War was intended to demonstrate the will of the United States in resisting communism. The Vietnam War sought to shore up the U.S. position in Southeast Asia – a significant but not decisive goal – and to maintain the credibility of the U.S. commitment to the alliance system it depended on. Throughout the history of all powerful nations, political wars abound. They are frequently not intended to be won in a conventional sense but to signal resolve or achieve limited political goals. A defeat is manageable. Such wars appear frivolous and unnecessary to segments of the population and therefore breed dissent – which is tolerated, since the wars are not worth the price of silencing dissenters.

Systemic wars differ in two ways. First, avoiding them is usually not an option. Second, losing them can be catastrophic. They aren’t rooted in transitory political interests but in tectonic shifts in the global system. The shifts are not driven by the intent of a nation but by the inevitable rise and decline of nations, the imbalances this creates, and the inevitable rebalancing, which frequently leads to wars. These wars are rare because tectonic shifts take a long time to occur, longer to mature, and longer still to lead to changes in power that are both widespread enough and consequential enough to end in war.

The Napoleonic Wars in Europe in the 19th century were systemic, as was the Seven Years’ War in the 18th century. Mongol invasions, European imperialism and the like all were systemic events containing decisive wars. World War II was a systemic war. Some argue that it was a continuation of World War I, and in Europe this was true. But World War II was different from World War I in an important way: the Pacific war between the Japanese and Americans added a new dimension.

Yet, both world wars flowed from the rise and fall of powers. In the 19th century, three new powers began to emerge: Germany, Japan and the United States. Germany destabilised Europe. Japan destabilised East Asia. The United States destabilised the world. The unification of Germany in 1871 created a power of enormous economic dynamism, but one extremely vulnerable to simultaneous military attack