When Two Elephants Fight, It Is the Grass That Gets Trampled

In August 1914 German armies crossed into Belgium on their way to France, though Germany had signed a treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. The German chancellor dismissed the treaty to the British ambassador as a scrap of paper. Belgium had no quarrel with either side. Within weeks the city of Leuven was in flames and its university library, with centuries of manuscripts, was destroyed. A small country was trampled because two large ones had a plan. The proverb, widely credited to East Africa, describes the pattern in a single sentence.

The Cold War turned the pattern into a system. The two superpowers never fought each other directly, and so the fighting was done elsewhere. Millions of Koreans, Vietnamese and Afghans died in wars whose causes were shaped in distant capitals, and in Angola and Mozambique a struggle for independence became a testing ground for rival ideologies. The elephants stayed unharmed and the grass paid. Villages were bombed, fields were mined and generations were displaced, often for aims that the people living there had not chosen and could not influence.

The economic version is subtler and more global. Russia and Ukraine together supplied roughly a quarter of the world's wheat exports before 2022. When war began, prices rose to record levels and countries that had bought most of their imported wheat from the two belligerents, such as Egypt, faced shortages and unrest. Far from the front, India saw its costs for fertiliser and fuel rise. The grass did not choose the battlefield, but it paid for the battle.

The grass did not choose the battlefield, but it paid for the battle.

Technology and trade offer a quieter example. When Washington and Beijing imposed tariffs and export controls on each other, factories in countries such as Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam found themselves squeezed between two customers who were also two competitors. Companies were asked to choose which supply chain to belong to, and a wrong choice could cost them a market. Small economies cannot win such a contest, and they cannot opt out of it, since their prosperity was built on supplying both sides.

Climate change shows the same asymmetry in slow motion. The largest emitters have argued over responsibility for decades, while island states such as Tuvalu, whose highest point is under five metres above sea level, have contributed almost nothing to global emissions and yet face the loss of their land. These states have refused to remain silent grass. The Alliance of Small Island States, formed in 1990, pressed for the stricter goal of limiting warming to one and a half degrees during the negotiations that produced the Paris Agreement in 2015, and it won a place for that goal in the text.

The same logic operates inside states. When two levels of government or two political parties quarrel, citizens bear the cost. Every winter the smog over Delhi has been accompanied by a dispute among neighbouring states and the Centre about who is responsible for stubble burning, and residents have breathed the smoke while the argument continued. The farmer who burns the stubble is also grass, since he is poor, indebted and short of affordable alternatives, and he is blamed by both sides. Machines that clear the field cost more than many smallholders can pay, and the price of the paddy he sells is set by a procurement system that neither quarrelling government is willing to redesign in a hurry.

Yet the proverb is incomplete, and the grass has sometimes found ways to protect itself. The Bandung conference in 1955 and the Belgrade summit in 1961 brought together states that refused to join either bloc, and the policy of nonalignment that emerged allowed India and others to take help from both sides. India's steel plant at Bhilai was built with Soviet assistance, the one at Rourkela with West German help, and American wheat arrived under PL 480 during the same decades. Yugoslavia under Tito and Singapore in a later era showed that small states can bargain between powers, provided that they are useful, well governed and unwilling to become dependent on one patron. Today India describes the same instinct as strategic autonomy, buying oil from one partner while joining security groupings with another.

A sceptic will say that such leverage is a luxury of large or well placed states. Belgium was not asked its opinion, and countries without ports, mineral wealth or armies have little to bargain with. The objection is correct. Nonalignment worked for India because of its size, its position and its leaders' standing, and many smaller countries that tried the same course were drawn into wars they did not want. But the objection proves less than it seems. The weak were not helpless even when they were small. Collective action through regional groupings, multilateral rules and international courts has given smaller states a voice that they could not have had alone. In 1986 Nicaragua brought a case against the United States before the International Court of Justice, which found that Washington had violated international law by mining Nicaraguan harbours and supporting armed rebels. The judgment could not be enforced and the United States ignored it, which shows the limits of the method. It also shows that even the largest elephant was forced to defend itself in public, and rules that restrain the elephants are most valuable to the grass.

The proverb also forgets that elephants live on grass. The strong depend on the weak for markets, for votes, for labour and for the ordinary conditions that make power worth having. A great power that ruins the countries around it eventually discovers that it has ruined its own supply chains, its own food prices and its own security. The 2022 wheat shock was felt in the capitals of the elephants as well, in the form of inflation and political discontent.

Whether this dependence is enough to restrain the strong is the uncertain part. History offers both reassurance and warning, with Belgium in 1914 on one side and the long peace among nuclear powers on the other. It remains unclear whether the grass will learn to hold the elephants to account or the elephants will learn to see the grass as part of their own field, and the quarrel at present underway may settle which.