When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.

The Grass Remembers

In the spring of 2022, a baker in Cairo watched the price of a sack of flour climb within weeks. He had no stake in the war between Russia and Ukraine, yet Egypt, one of the world's largest wheat importers, bought the bulk of its grain from those two countries. When Black Sea ports shut, the bill reached his oven. The Swahili proverb that when two elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled describes his predicament exactly. The elephants are the powerful: great powers, rival generals, corporate giants, quarrelling parents. The grass is everyone who lives beneath them and has no say in the fight. Conflict between the mighty is never a private affair; its heaviest costs fall on the weak who never chose it, and the task of a just order is to give the grass both a shield and a voice.

The proverb rests on a simple asymmetry. When elephants fight, both usually walk away; the grass does not. The grass did not choose the fight, it cannot leave the field, and its damage is incidental, unnoticed by combatants who are absorbed in each other. Thucydides recorded the same logic twenty-four centuries ago in the Melian Dialogue, where Athenian envoys tell the small island of Melos that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. The collateral cost of rivalry is not an accident; it is built into any contest where the parties are large and the bystanders many.

History confirms the pattern across ages. The Mahabharata's Stri Parva closes the war not with triumph but with the lament of Gandhari and the widows of Kurukshetra. The twentieth century's longest rivalry, the Cold War, was called cold only because the two superpowers never fought each other directly. Their fight was conducted on other people's soil. Korea was divided, Vietnam was bombed for a decade, and Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion of 1979 became a field into which both camps poured weapons. Afghans paid with a generation of war and an extremism that outlived the Soviet Union itself. The proxy war is the elephants' fight in its purest form, with the costs exported to the grass.

The pattern did not fade when the Cold War ended. Before 2022, Russia and Ukraine together supplied close to a third of the world's traded wheat, so a war between them raised food prices from North Africa to South Asia. The Black Sea Grain Initiative, brokered by the United Nations and Turkey in July 2022, eased the pressure for a year before Russia withdrew from it in July 2023. In Sudan, the war that broke out in April 2023 between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, two armed rivals led by two generals, has driven millions from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine. In Yemen, a war sustained by a regional rivalry produced what the United Nations repeatedly called one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

Moreover, elephants today fight with tariffs, sanctions and export controls as often as with tanks. The trade war that the United States and China opened in 2018 raised costs along supply chains that run through dozens of smaller economies. American restrictions on exports of advanced chips to China from October 2022 pushed third countries and firms to pick a side in a contest they did not start. Sanctions aimed at regimes often land on hospitals short of medicines. In 2022, importers of fuel and fertiliser saw their bills soar without firing a shot, and the poor, who spend most of their income on food and energy, felt it first.

Building upon this, rivalry among the powerful paralyses the very institutions meant to protect the weak. The veto in the United Nations Security Council lets any one of five permanent members block action, and where those members back opposing sides the Council has repeatedly failed to act, from Syria to Ukraine. The World Trade Organization's Appellate Body has been unable to hear appeals since December 2019 because the United States blocked the appointment of new members. A large economy shrugs this off; a small exporter that relied on rules to resist a bigger partner's tariffs loses its only level playing field. When elephants quarrel, even the fences built around the grass are trampled.

The proverb is not only about nations. Within India, the long dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery waters has repeatedly turned into a contest of political pride, while farmers on both sides waited for water that a tribunal and finally the Supreme Court in 2018 had to allocate. When a session of Parliament ends in stalemate, citizens lose the scrutiny they elected their representatives to provide. In a bitter divorce the child is the grass, which is why family law across the world rests on the principle of the best interests of the child: parents locked in conflict often forget them.

Yet the proverb, read too literally, invites a fatalism that history does not support, because the grass is not always passive. At Bandung in 1955 and Belgrade in 1961, newly independent nations led by Nehru, Nasser, Tito and Sukarno chose non-alignment, refusing to become the turf on which the Cold War was fought. Small and middle states have since learned to turn rivalry into leverage. When great powers compete for partners, a nimble country can secure investment, technology and arms from more than one side, as India has done since 2022 by buying discounted Russian energy while deepening Western partnerships and attracting manufacturing leaving China. A wry corollary of the proverb also warns that the grass suffers when elephants make love, since collusion among the powerful, through a cartel or a carve-up of spheres of influence, hurts as much as their quarrels. The deeper problem, then, is not conflict alone but power that answers to no one.

If the grass cannot always escape, it can be protected and given a voice. International humanitarian law, from the Geneva Conventions of 1949 onward, exists to separate combatants from civilians; its weakness is enforcement, not principle. India has pressed this case: it convened the Voice of the Global South Summit in January 2023, and under its presidency the African Union became a permanent member of the G20 at the New Delhi summit in September 2023, bringing fifty-five countries to the table where their fate is discussed. Within nations, the same logic argues for river boards that share water by data rather than agitation, mediation in family disputes, and competition law that stops giants from crushing the small.

Ultimately, the remedy lies also in the elephant's conscience. Ashoka, after witnessing the slaughter at Kalinga, renounced conquest by war and inscribed his remorse on stone, a rare victor who counted the grass. The ethic of restraint asks every powerful actor to weigh the bystanders before choosing the fight. Gandhi's talisman, which asks a decision-maker to recall the face of the poorest person he has seen and ask whether the step he contemplates will help that person, is in essence an instruction to look down at the grass before stepping forward.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed

Dwight Eisenhower, a general turned President, said this in April 1953, as an arms race between two giants began; the Cairo baker of 2022 would have understood him. Grass recovers, and grass outnumbers elephants; a world order that shields civilians in war, keeps its rules working when the great powers quarrel, and seats the weak in the rooms where fights begin may find that fewer fights begin at all. The measure of an international system is not how splendidly its elephants fight, but how well its grass survives them.