Civil wars will still occur, mostly in poor weak states with autocratic dictatorships in Africa and the Middle East. But wars between states would be over with. The tide of history is clearly moving in this direction. Once democracy gets implanted into a society it does not get removed. The arrow of history moves in one direction. While Putin and Xi remain in power in Russia and China, the US will still have to maintain global military supremacy at the head of an alliance of democracies. But once Russia and China evolve internally, the world will move into a new reality. One in which war will be considered as absurd as slavery is today. This will happen sometime in the next fifty years – ImageKRC Times
World Peace Is Possible
By Nayyer Ali MD
For centuries, idealists have dreamed of world peace. A world in which war has come to a complete end and no country attacks another. A world in which several trillion dollars a year is not wasted on defense spending as every nation feels it must be capable of defending itself. A world in which war becomes as anachronistic as slavery has become. Is such a world possible? What needs to happen to get there?
For most of human existence people took for granted certain human institutions and relationships. But in the last two hundred years, we have advanced and left many of these artifacts of the past in the dustbin of history. Slavery is the most prominent example. To someone living five hundred years ago, the idea that slavery would be banned around the world would seem completely fanciful. But not only is slavery banned, there is no chance we will ever revive that horrible institution.
Other concepts such as every citizen of a state is equal in rights, or that government rests on the consent of the governed have also dramatically advanced. They are not present in every nation, but we can see these concepts are steadily making progress.
War is also a human construct in which we agree that two states can murder each other’s citizens until one side “wins”. When a state of war exists, it is acceptable to bomb and shell another nation, although we do consider deliberate attacks on civilians to be war crimes, though there is very little capacity to hold war criminals to account.
Wars used to be fought by kings seeking to expand their realms and increase their power by absorbing land and peasants from whom taxes could be extracted. But those days are pretty much over. It is impossible for a state to take over another and subjugate permanently its inhabitants. As such, wars have disappeared from much of the world. North and South America already live in an environment where war is pretty much unthinkable. Europe outside Ukraine is also free of war.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it seemed like we could be reaching world peace. But there were some unique factors that prevented that. First was Saddam Hussein and his takeover of Kuwait, which was defeated by US forces in 1991. Then came 9/11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan, followed two years later by the misbegotten invasion of Iraq. Meanwhile, Iraqi Sunnis organized under Al-Qaeda tried to set up a state under ISIS ten years ago and had to be defeated by the US and Iraqi and Kurdish forces.
While the US remained the sole superpower, China’s relative power has surged as had its economy over the last 35 years. It is now possible that a Chinese Communist leadership could consider launching an invasion of Taiwan. Putin had reassembled Russian military power and seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, then invaded Ukraine in 2022 in an attempt to absorb Ukraine into Russia. Fortunately, the Ukrainians have resisted successfully, though they have not actually fully defeated Putin’s invasion.
There are two major flashpoints where war is also possible. One is Kashmir, where nuclear armed Pakistan and India both claim sovereignty. But Pakistan is too weak to seize Kashmir with a conventional war, so it is essentially a frozen conflict. The second is Palestine and Israel. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, has led to the destruction of Gaza, and it appears that Palestinians have turned against Hamas and its claim that violence will lead to freedom for the Palestinians from Israeli subjugation.
So, what would it take to get to world peace? Essentially, five major breakthroughs would need to occur. First would be a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would mean creating a Palestinian state and Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. Second would be an Indo-Pakistani deal that brings the status of Kashmir to a final end. Pakistan cannot change the border through violence, so accepting the LoC as the permanent border appears to be the only route forward. Steps three, four, and five all share the same basic element. The governments of Russia, China, and Iran need to become real democracies. Such a thing seems impossible for now, but who thought the Soviet Union was going to collapse back in 1985? In six years, it was gone entirely. One truism in international relations is that democracies do not go to war with each other. Because the government answers its people, and because democracies have free press, any conflict with another democracy will always be settled by negotiations, with war completely ridiculous.
If China, Russia, and Iran were to become democracies, that would mean that Eurasia would join the Americas in widespread peace. Africa is also notable for the fact that African states do not go to war with each other. There is really nothing for them to argue over, they need to focus on development and progress.
These five steps would mean we live in a world that is genuinely at peace. Civil wars will still occur, mostly in poor weak states with autocratic dictatorships in Africa and the Middle East. But wars between states would be over with. The tide of history is clearly moving in this direction. Once democracy gets implanted into a society it does not get removed. The arrow of history moves in one direction. While Putin and Xi remain in power in Russia and China, the US will still have to maintain global military supremacy at the head of an alliance of democracies. But once Russia and China evolve internally, the world will move into a new reality. One in which war will be considered as absurd as slavery is today. This will happen sometime in the next fifty years.
