Europe – not Africa, not the Middle East – now has the most (numerically) important war

The rule of thumb that drives humanitarian work and diplomacy is that the most people die in Africa, but that the biggest financial cost is from war in the Middle East. Thanks to the Russian meat grinder, that is no longer true.

It is unpopular in the mainstream to the extent that I’ve had editors decline analysis pieces such as this for fear of the outraged letters that would follow. So let’s postulate that every death is a tragedy, and every violent death is an atrocity.

However. In a world of finite resources and attention, you need to triage. And there are two ways to rank armed conflict: by body count, and by economic cost. It is hard, and politically sensitive, but NGOs and diplomats have to do it.

One of the things that makes it difficult is that the two rarely overlap much. A war that kills hundreds of thousands of people in a least-developed country can have a minimal economic cost compared to a low-casualty conflict somewhere rich and oil-soaked.

Used to be, though, that you didn’t really have to do the math.