May 18, 2018
The End of War
There are roughly 7 billion people alive today, and we are a lucky 7 billion. Scientific estimates suggest about 125 billion people have ever lived, with a third of them dying before their fifth birthday. For almost all of human history, we have been stalked by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, disease, famine, war, and death. Disease and famine have been tamed in the last hundred years by our scientific advances, but surprisingly, war too has come to an end.
As long as there have been human groups, even as small as hunter-gatherer bands, there has been violence and war. Excavations of prehistoric sites show a very large death toll from violence, with adult males facing a 30% chance of being killed at the hands of another. In hunter-gatherer societies that still exist such as in the Amazon jungle, fights with other bands kill roughly 1 in 200 every year. If America had that much violence, over 1.5 million people would be murdered annually, compared to less than 20,000 in reality.
Once we began to organize into kingdoms and empires, the normal state of affairs was a free-for-all where everyone was essentially constantly at war with everyone else. Peace was a short-lived phenomenon. Europe spent almost the entire stretch from the Roman Empire to the 19th century at war, and the same was true in the Middle East and Asia, along with the settled regions of the Americas.
But in the last hundred years, it became clear that war no longer served a purpose. There has been a huge change in how we see the world and our place in it, and what is really in our interests. In the past, rulers always sought to expand their control, because wealth and power was derived basically from population and arable land. The more you had, the more power and wealth you had. And if you chose not to fight, your neighbor would just take advantage of your passivity to attack you. For the average peasant, who ruled did not matter, either way you would be taxed and your sons would get forced into military service. If you left a strong neighbor on your border, you always worried they would strike you first.
This basic truth resulted in the world gradually coalescing into larger and larger empires. By the 19th century there was the British, French, German, Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman Turks that divided pretty much all Europe among themselves, while most of Africa and Asia had fallen under European colonial rule. China and Japan existed in the East, while the Americas were dominated by the rising United States.
By 1900 though, some new truths were beginning to emerge. First was the notion that people wanted to rule themselves, and not be the imperial subjects of whoever had the biggest army. To manage their colonies, the Europeans needed to train locals, which is why Mohandas Gandhi and Mohammad Ali Jinnah both became highly educated lawyers. But instead of serving British rule, they were able to lead their people to demand independence. The French experienced the same thing in Vietnam at the hands of Ho Chi Minh, who was educated in Paris where he became a communist.
This new demand for self-rule made the whole colonial project untenable in the long run, because there were never enough British or French administrators and soldiers to run these colonies. The whole system did in fact collapse entirely by 1960. This leads to an obvious conclusion: a war cannot actually expand your country in a permanent way, because the people of any conquered territory will rebel against your rule. The attempted American occupation of Iraq demonstrated that in spades, and that was not even an effort to make Iraq part of the US.
The second truth is that economic success does not come from subjugating others but from free commerce. Nazi Germany tried to ruthlessly exploit all of occupied Europe during World War Two, but with only limited success, as local populations had no desire to work hard for Germans to confiscate their wealth. Conversely, a peaceful Germany has become extraordinarily wealthy by trading with its European neighbors in the 70 years after World War Two, far beyond the wildest dreams of any German back then. Why go to war, when you can achieve prosperity through commerce and trade?
The third truth was that modern war was total war, costing societies tremendous loss of lives and treasure, far beyond whatever gains would accrue from victory. Even the “winners” could not actually win in a war. In World War One, the destruction was so appalling that the war came to be called “The War to End All Wars”. Two million German soldiers died, as did almost a million British and French. Russian losses were even higher, and in all 17 million people died. Of the big six empires that began World War One, the Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German all collapsed at the end, without even a pyrrhic victory to justify the colossal waste of blood and treasure. The French and British survived, but gained nothing material from the war. The French, in a punitive move that backfired and laid the seed for the rise of Hitler, imposed a harsh peace on Germany, and laid on it a reparations fine equal to almost 100% of German GDP.
Despite this catastrophe, the world engaged in another global conflict 20 years later. This war was ultimately the result of the diabolical desires of Adolf Hitler, who was consumed by a strange blend of crackpot racial theories about how all nations are engaged in a ruthless Darwinian struggle for survival, the superiority of Germans above all others, and how the rest of Europe should be subjugated for German benefit. He had a particular hatred for Jews, who he saw as vermin that infected humanity like the plague and needed to be destroyed, but he also planned to murder 40 million Poles and Ukrainians to create a vast “living space” in the east for Germans to settle and build a power that could rival the United States with its continental scale. The Japanese joined Germany in making the war global as they coveted the European colonies in Asia, and wanted to turn China into a Japanese colony too. In the end, the two powers were utterly defeated, but not before 65 million people died, and Europe and East Asia were left shattered and destitute. But the victors had no gains to speak of, other than the relief of crushing fascism. The Soviet Union in particular was devastated, with its war deaths estimated at 20 million people.
A war as bad as the First World War today would kill 70 million people, and one as bad as the Second would kill 175 million people. What possible gain could any country get from going to war to justify this scale of slaughter? You cannot keep the territory, and the war would cost more than any possible gain.
In the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, it was often assumed that nuclear weapons kept the peace. But even without those weapons, it would have been nonsensical for the USSR to attack NATO or vice versa. The USSR extracted no benefit from controlling the Soviet puppet states of Eastern Europe, and trying to add France or Britain to that would have brought them nothing. A full scale war between the US and the USSR without nuclear weapons would still have been a horrendous thing that neither side would benefit from.
Would a rising China and the US ever go to war? Over what exactly and what would be the war aims? Would either country really conceive of conquering the other, and to what end? Both nations derive enormous economic benefit from their trade relations. Totally destroying that would be a folly.
The only places in the world where war remains a possibility is where one country seeks to change a border they see as unfair. This is true in Kashmir, and is also true in Palestine. Israel in fact is the only nation since 1960 that has seized land by warfare and is trying to settle its citizens on the conquered land so it can incorporate it permanently. But no country, even the US, recognizes Israel’s desires to annex the Golan Heights and West Bank. And there is zero chance of Israel trying to seize even more land. The US still uses military force, but it does so in civil wars, not in wars between two nations. The strikes in Iraq and Syria have been to defeat ISIS, and the US supports the Afghan government against the Taliban.
The unprovoked invasion of Iraq is the one exception to this new paradigm. But even there, the US had no intent of annexing Iraq or trying to rule it or extract its resources and draft its men to serve in the US Army. Saddam was overthrown, but in the end the US simply left. The debacle of the US occupation has made it impossible for a future American President to try anything similar. The rest of the world has refused to validate the US action, and it never got support at the UN. At a cost of several trillion dollars and tens of thousands of casualties, the American public will never again go along with this sort of adventure.
War is now obsolete. Currently there is no place on Earth where two nations are fighting each other in a war. The few wars that still go on are civil wars between guerrilla groups and central governments. They are driven mainly by either an oppressive government (Assad in Syria) or a breakdown in order (Somalia) or by an ideological group that has an agenda that drives it to try to seize power (ISIS or the Taliban). Eventually as these nations evolve these civil wars will end too, making war truly a thing of the past.
