Ross Douthat(CREDIT: Josh Haner/The New York Times)

Between 1936 and 1939, the Spanish Civil War condensed the awful drama of the 1930s into one conflict. Spain was where left-wing illusions about Stalinism went to die, where Hitler’s war machine tuned up for the blitzkrieg, where aerial bombardments of civilians and politically motivated “cleansing” were normalized. It was a proxy war for the totalitarian powers, a magnet for volunteers from around the Western world and an object lesson in the impotence of Europe’s liberal democracies.

As with Spain, so now with Syria. Once again we have a divided country bled by an ideological proxy war — this time between the Salafism of the Gulf states and the Twelver Shi’ism of the Iranian regime, with other regional and global powers hovering in the background. Once again we have the escalating atrocities — chemical warfare, massacres and religious persecutions, the return of beheadings, slavery and crucifixion. Once again we have ideologically motivated volunteers rushing in from far and wide; once again we have liberal powers seemingly helpless to bring the conflict to an end.

But then there is this illuminating difference. The Spanish Civil War actually ended relatively swiftly; after less than three years of fighting, Franco’s nationalists had won. The Syrian conflict, though, is in its fifth year and counting.

In part, this difference is actually a grim sort of good news — not for Syria, obviously, but for the world. One reason Spain’s civil war ended quickly was the sheer effectiveness of the military aid the Axis powers sent to the nationalist cause. Spain proved (or seemed to prove) the effectiveness of total war as a tool of ideologically motivated statecraft: The left was crushed, Franco’s regime established, and looking from afar Adolf Hitler could draw an obvious lesson for his own terrible ambitions.

In Syria, the lessons are very different. The war is endless, the factions barely competent, and neither of the main ideological forces invested in the conflict seem capable of actually winning it. The Iranian mullahs have helped President Bashar Assad survive but not prosper. The Gulf states have lost control over their own Sunni proxies and now face an Islamic State that threatens them as well.

This means that neither Tehran nor Riyadh can look at Syria and see a template for regional expansion or grand ideological victory. And that, in turn, makes a Middle Eastern version of the massive conflict that followed the Spanish Civil War seem relatively unlikely.

Of the powers involved in Syria that are strong enough to start a wider war, meanwhile — Russia, the United States, France and Turkey — it’s not at all clear what they would hope to get out of it. The West can barely decide which Syrian faction we should be bombing. That doesn’t make a blundering sort of war impossible. But unlike in Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin does aspire to hold territory, in Syria and its environs none of the outside powers seem to want responsibility for anything. And so long as there’s no ground they’re willing to fight over or even occupy, the risk of sustained great power conflict seems moderately remote.

Which is happy news relative to where things stood in Europe as the Spanish Civil War was winding down. But if Syria is (probably) not a harbinger of a full-scale third world war, it is a harbinger of a different set of evils — institutional collapse, permanent disorder, and the inability of global institutions to master the problems they supposedly exist to solve.

If the war in Spain was a proving ground for Eastern Front-style total war, the war in Syria is a training ground for Paris-style terrorists.

If the war in Spain was a dress rehearsal for World War II — well, the truth about Syria is that it’s probably not a rehearsal for anything. It’s the main event, and nobody can foresee when it will end.

— Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.