Required Resources Read/review the following resources for this activity:
· Textbook: Chapter 15, 16, 17
· Lesson
Instructions Your country just overthrew its dictator, and you are the newly elected President. Unfortunately, due to the divisions in the country and the years of war, economic, military, and political structures are non-existent. A group of loyalists to the old dictator have been detonating bombs, murdering civilians, assassinating leaders, and terrorizing towns with help from a neighboring country’s dictator.
Create a comprehensive plan for your new government. While creating this government identify 1) the governing style of your government and the principles that govern your leaders (see rubric); 2) the functions of various branches of government; 3) how to maintain public good in domestic areas through at least two programs; 4) an economic structure that is most beneficial to your citizens; 5) ways to create national unity; 6) ways to combat terrorism and violence; and, 6) international organizations to join.
See rubric for specific ways to meet the requirements of the paper.
Paper headings: (Use of APA paper format with headings required!)
· Introduction (1 paragraph)
· Introduce your country
· Briefly outline all of the parts of the paper
· Domestic Concerns (1-2 pages)
· Identify governing style and principles that correlate to this style
· Identify the branches of government and its functions
· Development of two public good domestic programs and how they will meet the public good
· Economic structure and reason why this should be used
· Socializing citizens is noted with rationale for how it creates national unity
· Foreign Concerns (1-2 pages)
· Two international organizations are noted, one for economics and one for security
· Descriptions of both organizations
· Rationales for joining these organizations
· Steps to joining
· Two ways your country will combat the neighboring country’s terrorist threat and the domestic threat
· Two ways these will be effective
· Conclusion (1 paragraph)
· Summarize information
Writing Requirements (APA format)
· Length: 3-4 pages (not including title page or references page)
· 1-inch margins
· Double spaced
· 12-point Times New Roman font
· Title page
· References page (minimum of 2 scholarly sources)
Grading
Chapter 15. War Politics by Other Means
Learning Objectives
· 1Identify and discuss three theories on the causes of war (Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke).
· 2Contrast World Wars I and II with previous wars in history.
· 3Explain how and why war has fundamentally changed since World War II.
· 4Identify the different types of war most relevant in world politics now, and explain one or two in detail.
· 5Expand on the “just war” theory.
· 6Explain the role of ethics and morality in the conduct of modern warfare.
· 7Make a case for or against the relevance of international treaties on rules and limits in war.
War is the central problem of world politics. In the famous words of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” If anarchy is the absence of government and the rule of law, then world politics is an arena where anarchy reigns. Small wonder that state actors are always conscious of war as an ever-present possibility and view peace as a precarious and perilous condition.
When people think of war, they usually have in mind interstate wars—that is, conflicts between two or more nation-states. Civil wars are conflicts within a single country; they have become more common than international wars today. Guerrilla warfare is a low-tech form of fighting usually waged in rural areas by small, lightly armed mobile squads (often fed and sheltered by sympathetic villagers). Guerrillas typically carry out selective acts of violence, primarily against the army, the police, and the government, in an attempt to weaken or topple the ruler(s). Low-intensity conflicts, a fourth category, occur when one state finances, sponsors, or promotes the sporadic or prolonged use of violence in a rival country (by hiring mercenaries or underwriting guerrillas, for example).
In terms of lives lost, property damaged or destroyed, and money drained away, war is undeniably the most destructive and wasteful of all human activities. One recent study of conflict in today’s world found that 13.4% of global GDP ($14.3 trillion) went into fighting wars in 2014, while 180,000 people were killed in various conflicts (compared with 49,000 in 2010).* Estimates of the war dead in the last century alone fall in the range of 35 million, including 25 million civilians.* General William Tecumseh Sherman knew firsthand the horror of war. As a military leader, he had, in fact, been a fearsome practitioner of it. In a speech delivered fifteen years after the American Civil War, Sherman declared, “There is many a boy who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is hell.”
But not everyone sees war the way an older and wiser General Sherman did. Some of history’s most illustrious (or infamous) personalities have reveled in the “glory” of war or acknowledged its perverse attractions. In the eighth century BCE, the Greek poet Homer noted that men grow tired of sleep, love, singing, and dancing sooner than they do of war. In his poetry, he celebrated the self-sacrifice and courage war demanded. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing some five hundred years later, listed courage as the first, though not the foremost, human virtue. To Aristotle, courage in battle ennobled human beings because it represented the morally correct response to fear in the face of mortal danger—danger that, in turn, imperiled the political community.
Perhaps no writer in modern times rationalized war better than the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who argued, “If states disagree and their particular wills cannot be harmonized, the matter can only be settled by war.” Hegel argued war is necessary because “corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual’ peace.” During times of peace, Hegel reasoned, society too easily grows soft and contentious: “As a result of war, nations are strengthened, but peoples involved in civil strife also acquire peace at home through making war abroad.”*
Hegel contended that “world history is the world court.” For Hegel, the measure of a nation is not some abstract moral standard, but power and prowess. It’s a small step from that notion to the belief that might makes right.
Similarly, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) disdained conventional morality in general and despised the Christian ethic of humility in particular. Thus, Nietzsche celebrated the will to power and praised the curative effects of war on nations and civilizations.*
This theme would be revived with a vengeance half a century later by Adolf Hitler and his ally, Benito Mussolini. Like Hegel and Nietzsche, Mussolini scoffed at pacifism. Said the father of Italian fascism, “War alone brings to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.”*
Although war is a constant in human affairs, it has evolved over time. Technology has transformed its ways and means without mitigating its lethal effects or destructive consequences—indeed, quite the opposite. Today, old forms of guerrilla warfare coexist with ultra high-tech robots, drones, and cyberwar.
This ever-present reality of war persists side by side with the dream of a world without war. Throughout the ages, philosophers and theologians have pondered the possibility of perpetual peace. But if war is ever to be eradicated, we must first isolate its causes.
The Causes of War
Why war? There is no simple answer. An observer living in Europe or the Middle East in the twelfth century would probably have attributed the frequency and ferocity of war at that time to religious zealotry. The Crusades, which began at the end of the eleventh century and continued for two hundred years, were marked by the kind of unmerciful slaughter that, paradoxically, has often accompanied the conviction that “God is on our side.”
But while religion did help fuel many regional and local wars, it played only a minor role in most of the major wars of the twentieth century. Many observers attribute the outbreak of World War I to nationalism run amok. Others stress it was the arms race that preceded that war. Still others blame imperialism—the mad scramble for colonial territories in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Ideology was a factor in World War II, but the main “ism” behind the aggressive policies of Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II was ultranationalism, or what scholar Hans J. Morgenthau called nationalistic universalism. The Korean Conflict (1950–1953) and the Vietnam War (1963–1975) were fought for both geopolitical reasons, or reasons of state, and ideological reasons. Some historians have seen this mix of pragmatism and idealism as a factor in determining the outcome of both of these wars because strategic military decisions were distorted by a crusading anticommunism that defined U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War.
Philosophers and theologians have long sought to discover war’s root causes in hope of finding a cure. After World War II, the most destructive war in history, political scientists used statistical and mathematical models to try to learn more. John Vasquez, a leading advocate of this approach, claimed that philosophy had yielded no breakthroughs: “A substantial advancement in our understanding came only with the development and application of the scientific method.”* In this view, mathematical rigor has “helped refine thinking about war and raised serious questions about existing explanations of war.”*
Other political scientists are not so sure.* James Dougherty and Robert Pfaltzgraff conclude, “Despite the proliferation of statistical studies of war (both inductive and deductive), … [most] are more likely to be relegated to footnotes [in the long run] than regarded as classics.”* Another scholar, Greg Cashman, argues that “social scientific research has not been completely fruitless.” He concedes such studies “have not culminated in the creation of a single, unified theory of war” but thinks they have “certainly added greatly to our understanding.”*
Clearly, there is no simple explanation for war. To probe deeper, we turn to three broad theories of causation. One emphasizes flaws in human nature. A second stresses defects in society and its institutions. A third sees scarcity as the cause of conflict.* After examining each, we look at the findings of several quantitative studies to corroborate or refute them.
Christianity—notably the idea of original sin—has had a profound influence on Western political thought through the ages. According to Saint Augustine (354–430), an early Christian theologian, war is a product of our corrupt nature. Many secular thinkers display a similar pessimism, without citing original sin as the cause. The Greek philosopher Plato attributed wars, at least in part, to the human passion for worldly possessions and creature comforts. The sixteenth-century Italian thinker Niccoló Machiavelli painted an equally depressing picture of the interaction between human nature and politics. In The Prince, he asserted that political success and moral rectitude are often inversely related: rulers tend to prosper in direct proportion to the dirty politics they practice for the sake of self-gratifying political ends.
Whereas some have looked to religion and others to philosophy for an explanation of aggressive human tendencies, still others have turned to psychology. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, believed human beings are born with a “death wish,” or innate self-destructive tendencies, that they redirect into other activities most of the time. During times of conflict, Freud theorized, combatants direct these destructive tendencies against each other. Thus, wars serve a psychotherapeutic function: They offer an outlet for otherwise self-destructive impulses. Critics argue this theory is too clever by half—the soldiers who do the fighting and killing are not the ones who decide to go to war, and the decision makers, careful to stay out of harm’s way, are not the ones who fight. Most soldiers kill because they have a job to do and because they do not want to be killed, not because they are violent or destructive by nature.
Other psychologists have called aggression an innate human drive constantly seeking an outlet, a normal human response to frustration, or the same “territorial imperative” that supposedly accounts for aggressive behavior in the animal kingdom. According to the territorial imperative theory, latent aggressions are lodged deep in human nature (see “Politics and Pop Culture”), and threats to an individual’s or group’s territory (property, loved ones, and so on) can trigger aggressive action.
Politics and Pop Culture War: Coming to a Theater Near You
The term “war theater” denotes a real place where armed conflict takes place. One popular dictionary, for example, defines it as “the entire land, sea, and air area that is or may become involved directly in war operations.” But war often comes to theaters of a different kind too—theaters that have box offices and movie screens.
War is hell, but films about war can be heavenly for movie studios. Gone with the Wind, released in 1939 and set against the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction, was the highest-grossing film ever for a quarter of a century. Adjusted for inflation, it would still be at the very top.
An epic war film about World War II, Saving Private Ryan, grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide and was the second most profitable movie released in 1998. Saving Private Ryan was notable for its grim realism. It gave Steven Spielberg a second Academy Award for Best Director—one of five awards it won. In 2014, the National Film Registry declared it worthy of preservation in the Library of Congress.
Gallipoli (1981) is another equally true-to-life war film—this one set in World War I. The Allies’ failed Gallipoli campaign in 1915 was a killing field in which more than 113,000 soldiers died and 123,598 were wounded in just eight months and two weeks of fighting. The film stars Mel Gibson and Mark Lee as two Australian sprinters who join the army despite being underage.
War is also a popular theme in science fiction films. At its peak, Star Wars was the second highest-grossing film of all time, and it still makes the Top 20. James Cameron’s 2009 science fiction film, Avatar, the biggest box office success of all time, is a story about love and war, a kind of antiwar allegory. In fact, Cameron admits that his intent was to raise questions about the U.S. resort to war after 9/11 and the use of “stand-off” weapons (drones, for example) that separate the person pulling the trigger from the target of the attack: “We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don’t know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America.”
Historically, war is second only to romance in the film industry. Of course, the role of war in popular culture is not confined to movies. If you want learn more about this subject, check out the War and Pop Culture websites at the end of this chapter.
· If war is hell, what does it say about human nature that many of the most popular war movies present realistic depictions of the blood and gore of battle? Think about it.
(Hint: Read “The Neuroscience of Aggression: Why Humans Are Drawn to Violence” and “What Attracts People to Violent Movies” in ScienceDaily at www.science-daily.com.)
Still other observers find the ultimate cause of war not in the human soul or psyche but rather in the brain. People are neither depraved nor disturbed but obtuse—too stupid to understand the futility of war. In the words of a prominent pacifist writing between World Wars I and II:
The obstacle in our path … is not in the moral sphere, but in the intellectual…. It is not because men are ill-disposed that they cannot be educated into a world social consciousness. It is because they—let us be honest and say “we”—are beings of conservative temper and limited intelligence.*
Human Nature
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), living during the Puritan Revolution in England, had a different, but hardly more flattering, explanation for war. He was, above all, a realist who sought to understand human nature as it is, not as it ought to be. The only way to know what people are really like, Hobbes believed, is to look at how they would behave outside civil society as we know it—that is, as brutes of limited intelligence in a state of nature. The conclusions he drew from this exercise are fascinating and continue to influence how we think about politics, war, and the possibility of peace even today.
According to Hobbes, life in the state of nature would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Human beings, like other earth-bound creatures, are governed by a keen instinct for self-preservation. They fear death above all and especially sudden, violent death. This fear does not, however, result in meekness or passivity; on the contrary, aggression and violent behavior are the norm. Hobbes identified “three principal causes” of war:
First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory. The first maketh man invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation. The first cause [men to turn to] Violence to make themselves Masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattell; and the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, at a word, a smile, a different opinion, and other signe of undervalue.*
The state of nature, for Hobbes, is a state of war—what he famously called a “war of every man, against every man.”
Hobbes applied this same logic to international politics in his own time, which was a perpetual state of war. Just as individuals in the state of nature are governed by base motives and drives, he declared, leaders with similar motives and drives govern nations. And just as the state of nature lacks a government to protect people from each other, so the international system lacks a government to protect nations from each other.
Hobbes theorized that three kinds of disputes correspond to the three defects in human nature: aggressive wars, caused by competitive instincts; defensive wars, caused by fears; and agonistic wars, caused by pride and vanity. Through this compact theory, Hobbes sought to explain not only how human beings would act outside the civilizing influence of society and government (human beings constantly at each other’s throats if not for government-imposed law and order) but also why nations sometimes go to war over issues that make no sense to outsiders.
The Hobbesian Legacy
Hans Morgenthau, like Hobbes, argued forcefully that human beings are deeply flawed. According to Morgenthau, “Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover these laws,” and “politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.”* The key to understanding the operation of these laws is the “concept of interest defined as power.” This means human beings are motivated by self-interest, which predisposes human behavior toward an eternal “struggle for power.” Morgenthau made this point particularly clear when he stated, “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.” Like Hobbes before him, Morgenthau rejected the idealist view that “assumes the essential goodness and infinite malleability of human nature.” Instead, he embraced the realist view “that the world, imperfect as it is from the rational point of view, is the result of forces inherent in human nature.”*
According to Morgenthau and the realist school of political theory his writings inspired, human nature and the drive for self-aggrandizement are leading, if not the leading, causes of competition and conflict. Compelling, though not flattering, this view of humankind is not the only plausible explanation of why wars are fought.
Society
Not all political thinkers attribute war to the human psyche or human nature. Some blame modern society in general, organized into a state (an exclusive or “members only” political association), while others contend that particular kinds of political states pose disproportionate dangers to peace. In this section, we examine the different approaches of political theorists and leaders who blame society or the state (the political framework of society) for war’s destructiveness.
Rousseau
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” With this attack on the modern nation-state, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) began the first chapter of his classic Social Contract (1762), in which he directly challenged Hobbes’s assertion that human beings are naturally cunning and violent. Rousseau started from the premise that human beings are naturally “stupid but peaceful” creatures, quite capable of feeling pity for those who are suffering. Hobbes simply erred, in this view, in attributing ambition, fear, and pride to human beings in the state of nature. Rousseau was convinced these are attributes of social man, not natural man (here the term man is used in the classic sense to mean all humans, irrespective of gender). Antisocial behaviors, paradoxically, have social causes; they are sure signs of human corruption. Society, not human nature, is to blame. Rousseau is quite explicit on this point: “It is clear that … to society, must be attributed the assassinations, poisonings, highway robberies, and even the punishments of these crimes.”*
Indeed, Rousseau believed society is the cause of all kinds of problems, including war. Specifically, he blamed the institution of private property—a preoccupation of all eighteenth-century European societies—for the miseries that have beset the human race since it abandoned its natural innocence for the false pleasures of civilization. Property divides human beings, he argued, by creating unnecessary inequalities in wealth, status, and power among citizens within particular nations and, eventually, among nations:
The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared by some-one who, uprooting the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow-men: Beware of listening to this imposter, you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and the earth to no one.*
Specifically, Rousseau postulated that just as the creation of private property led to the founding of the first political society, that founding mandated the creation of additional nation-states. And because each of these nations faced all the others in a state of nature, great tensions arose that eventually led to the “national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals, which make nature tremble and shock reason.”* With the “division of the human race into different societies,” Rousseau concluded:
The most decent men learned to consider it one of their duties to murder their fellow men; at length men were seen to massacre each other by the thousands without knowing why; more murders were committed on a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the entire race of the earth.*
Rousseau’s view that private property is the root of all evil has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. Even political thinkers who reject his specific diagnosis of the nation-state have widely accepted his general theory that “man is good but men are bad.” Several twentieth-century variations on this theme have appeared. As we shall see, each differs in substantial ways from the others, but all assume the fatal flaw leading to war resides in society rather than in human nature.
Nationalism and War
Many modern thinkers hold that war is inherent in the very existence of separate societies with sovereign governments. The manifestation of these potent separatist tendencies is nationalism, the patriotic sentiments citizens feel toward their homeland (sometimes referred to, in its most extreme forms, as jingoism or chauvinism). According to one authority:
Each nation has its own rose-colored mirror. It is the particular quality of such mirrors to reflect images flatteringly: the harsh lines are removed but the character and beauty shine through! To each nation none is so fair as itself…. Each nation considers (to itself or proclaims aloud, depending upon its temperament and inclination) that it is “God’s chosen people” and dwells in “God’s country.”*
Small wonder that nationalism has been called an idolatrous religion. Although it may foster unity and a spirit of self-sacrifice within a society, between societies it has led, directly or indirectly, to militarism, xenophobia, and mutual distrust.
Nationalism can be manipulated in support of a war policy, and warfare can be used to intensify nationalism. The chemistry between them is sufficiently volatile to have caused many internationalists, or theorists favoring peace and cooperation among nations through the active participation of all governments in some sort of world organization, to single out nationalism as the main obstacle to achieving peace and harmony in the world.
To the extent that nationalism is an artificial passion—one socially conditioned rather than inborn—political society is to blame for war. This type of reasoning has led some to suggest a radically simple formula for eliminating war: Do away with the nation-state and you do away with nationalism; do away with nationalism and you do away with war. Others have sought more practical remedies—fix the nation-state rather than abolish it.
Tyranny and War: Wilson
Many identify nationalism as the major cause of modern conflict, but others blame despotism for the two calamitous world wars of the last century. President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) championed this notion and actually tried to build a new world order on its conceptual foundations.
After World War I, Wilson sought to secure lasting peace through a treaty based on his Fourteen Points—principles he hoped would lead to a world without war. The cornerstone of this proposed new world order was the right of national self-determination, or the right of people everywhere to choose the government they wished to live under. Wilson expected self-determination to lead to the creation of democracies, which he viewed as being naturally more prone to peace than dictatorships.
But why should democracies be any more reluctant to go to war than dictatorships? The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first provided the explanation, one that appears to have deeply impressed Wilson. So germane are Kant’s writings to Wilson’s ideas that one authority suggested, “Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were a faithful transcription of both the letter and spirit of Kant’s Perpetual Peace.”*
Kant postulated that to remain strong, nations must promote education, commerce, and civic freedom. Education, he theorized, would lead to popular enlightenment, and commerce would produce worldwide economic interdependence, all of which would advance the cause of peace. Most important, through expanded political freedom, individual citizens would become more competent in public affairs. And because liberty is most pronounced in republican regimes, such governments would be the most peace loving by nature. The reason is simple: in republics—unlike monarchies or aristocracies—the citizens who decide whether to support a war are the same citizens who must then do the fighting. In Kant’s own words:
A republican constitution does offer the prospect of [peace-loving behavior], and the reason is as follows: If … the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide whether there should be war or not, nothing is more natural than that those who would have to decide to undergo all the deprivations of war will very much hesitate to start such an evil game…. By contrast, under a constitution where the subject is not a citizen and which is therefore not republican, it is the easiest thing in the world to start a war … as a kind of amusement on very insignificant grounds.*
Kant envisioned an evolution, through steady if imperceptible progress, toward a peaceful world order as governments everywhere became increasingly responsive to popular majorities. Eventually, he felt, war would become little more than a historical curiosity.
Kant’s linking of republicanism and peacefulness became Wilson’s political credo. Both Kant and Wilson looked to the reconstruction of the nation-state as the key to a world without war. More specifically, both called for the global extension of democracy, education, and free trade to promote peace. Wilson, in particular, placed enormous faith in the morality and common sense of the ordinary person; he became convinced the ideal of national self-determination would be the key to humanity’s political salvation. He also believed if the world’s peoples were allowed to choose among alternative forms of government, they would universally choose liberal democracy and peace. Finally, if democratic institutions existed in all nations, Wilson felt the moral force of both domestic and world public opinion would serve as a powerful deterrent to armed aggression.
Capitalism, Imperialism, and War: Lenin
Among those who did not agree with Wilson was his contemporary, V. I. Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution and the first ruler of the former Soviet Union. Lenin was as violently opposed to bourgeois democracy as Wilson was enthusiastic about it. Although both supported national self-determination, they held very different interpretations of it. Wilson assumed any nation would choose democracy over any other system. In contrast, Lenin assumed that given a choice between capitalism and Communism, any nation should choose Communism. For Wilson, the pursuit of power was an end in itself and both a necessary and sufficient cause of war; for Lenin, as a follower of Karl Marx, wars were waged solely in the interest of the monopoly capitalists.
In a famous tract titled Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin advanced the Marxist thesis that Western imperialism—the late-nineteenth century scramble for colonial territories—was an unmistakable sign that capitalism was teetering on the brink of extinction. Imperialism, according to Lenin, was a logical outgrowth of the cutthroat competition characteristic of monopoly capitalism. Lenin theorized (correctly) that capitalists would always seek foreign markets, where they can make profitable investments and sell (or dump) industrial surpluses. Thus, through their financial power and the political influence that accompanies it, monopoly capitalists push their societies into war for their own selfish purposes. In Lenin’s words:
When the colonies of the European powers in Africa, for instance, comprised only one-tenth of that territory (as was the case in 1876), colonial policy was able to develop by methods other than those of monopoly—by the “free grabbing” of territories, so to speak. But when nine-tenths of Africa had been seized (approximately by 1900), when the whole world had been divided up, there was inevitably ushered in a period of colonial monopoly and, consequently, a period of particularly intense struggle for the division and the re-division of the world.*
In sum, Lenin held that because war is good business for the capitalists of the world, capitalists make it their business to promote war.
Lenin’s analysis of the causes of war seems far removed from the Wilsonian thesis that tyranny leads inevitably to international conflicts, and yet the two views coincide at one crucial point. Lenin and Wilson both believed a particular defect of a certain type of nation-state produces wars—the form of government for Wilson, the economy and resulting social structure (classes divisions) for Lenin. If it could be eradicated, lasting world peace would ensue. Change is the key.
The Environment
Other theorists argue that war is caused by scarcity and the insecurity brought by fear of cold, hunger, disease, snakes, storms, and the like. This view accords with the ideas of philosopher John Locke.
Locke
In his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), Locke argued forcefully that wars reflect conditions inherent in nature that place human beings in do-or-die situations and make conflict inevitable, rather than defects in human nature or society. Like Hobbes before him, Locke saw the imperfections in human beings and believed self-preservation was the most basic human instinct. At this point, however, the two thinkers diverged. In the words of one authority:
Locke’s state of nature is not as violent as Hobbes’s. If, as it seems, force will commonly be used without right in Locke’s state of nature, it is not because most men are vicious or savage and bloodthirsty; Locke does not, as Hobbes does, speak of every man as the potential murderer of every other man. The main threat to the preservation of life in the state of nature lies not in the murderous tendencies of men but rather … in the poverty and hardship of their natural condition.*
Locke believed poverty and hardship are inevitable in the state of nature because great exertions are required to provide for our daily needs. Then we still have to protect our property, coveted by neighbors who have less and by others who are hungry and poor. Locke thus saw circumstances rooted in scarce resources as the principal cause of human conflict.
Locke’s views on human beings, society, and nature have great bearing on the issues of war and peace. If the origins of war lie within human beings, as Hobbes believed, we can eradicate war only by changing the “inner self.” If the problem lies in society, as Rousseau and Lenin contended, the solution is to reconstitute society (or the state) to remove the particular defects giving rise to aggressive behavior. If the problem lies neither in humans nor in society but in nature, the solution must be to transform nature.
The transformation of nature was precisely how Locke proposed to end human conflict in domestic society. Civil government, he asserted, must create the conditions to encourage economic development. Through economic development, a major cause of social tension—that is, the natural “penury” of the human condition—would be greatly eased. At the same time, if the formal rules of organized society replaced the uncertainties of nature, the need for every human being to constantly guard against the depredations of others would be lessened. Human beings would thus finally leave the state of nature, with all its anarchy and danger.
But in leaving one state of nature, humanity ironically found itself inhabiting another—the often-brutal world of international politics. Although Locke did not apply his theory of politics to the realm of international relations, his reasoning lends itself readily to such an application. Before the invention of government, human beings lived in domestic anarchy; likewise, in the absence of an effective world government, nations exist in international anarchy. In this sense, the relationships among nation-states differ little from relationships among individuals before the formation of civil society. The international state of nature, no less than the original, is a perpetual state of potential war. Thus, each nation-state behaves according to the dictates of self-preservation in an environment of hostility and insecurity, just as each individual presumably did in the state of nature.
One of the most common spoils of war is territory. From all appearances, the desire for more land and resources—property, in the Lockean sense—is one of the most common objectives of war. Recall that Lenin attributed the European scramble for colonial territories toward the end of the nineteenth century to the search for new markets, cheap labor, and raw materials—that is, property. Significantly, Lenin held that the propensity to accumulate capital (money and property) that Locke described was directly responsible for imperialism, which Lenin predicted would lead inevitably to war. Even if Lenin overstated the case against capitalism, one thing is certain: Territoriality has always been associated with war, and it always will be.
When Locke wrote, plenty of land in the world remained unclaimed by Europeans and uncultivated. He noted that even in the state of nature, human relations were probably fairly harmonious, so long as no one crowded anyone else. It stands to reason, however, that as growing populations begin to place ever-greater pressures on easily available resources, the drawing of property lines becomes progressively more important. If, as Locke’s analysis suggests, prehistoric people felt threatened by the pressures of finite resources, imagine how much greater those pressures have become in modern times.
Nature’s Scarcity: Malthusian Nightmares
Many contemporary writers have elaborated on the theme of resource scarcity propounded by Locke and, later, by Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) in his famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Richard Falk, for example, identified “four dimensions of planetary danger,” including the “war system, population pressures, resource scarcities, and environmental overload.”* According to Falk, these are interrelated aspects of a single problem that must be treated as a group.
Falk’s assumptions about the causes of international conflict are consistent with Locke’s political understanding:
International society is, of course, an extreme example of a war system. Conflicts abound. Vital interests are constantly at stake. Inequalities of resources and power create incentives to acquire what a neighboring state possesses.*
Just as humans were constantly vulnerable to the depredations of others in the state of nature, so predatory neighbors continually threaten nation-states. Throughout history, then, violence has played a vital role in the conduct of foreign affairs, because, Falk argued, conditions beyond the control of individual nation-states compel them to regard their own security as directly proportionate to their neighbors’ distress.
Hence, even after the unprecedented destruction wrought by World Wars I and II, “many efforts were made, often with success, to moderate the scope and barbarism of war, but no serious assault was mounted to remove the conditions that cause war.”* What exactly are these conditions? Professor Falk argued that access to food and water supplies had a great bearing on the earliest wars. These considerations remain relevant in the modern world:
Given the present situation of mass undernourishment (more than two-thirds of the world population), it is worth taking account of the ancient link between war and control of food surplus, as well as the age-old human practice of protecting positions of political and economic privilege by military means.*
The population explosion exacerbates problems of food and water in the least developed countries (LDCs). Population pressures underlie the entire crisis of planetary organization, especially in light of what we now know about the linkages between economic development and urbanization, urbanization and pollution, and pollution and global warming. Nor are the LDCs the only (or primary) source of the problem.
Developed countries, led by the United States, are by far the biggest global polluters. China and India, both emerging economic giants, have a combined population of 2.4 billion, roughly three times that of the United States and the European Union put together, and China and India are exempt from the carbon-emission limits established under the Kyoto Protocol (see Chapter 13). Under such conditions, no nation, no matter how powerful, feels terribly secure in our times. The 2008–2009 world financial crisis served as a dramatic reminder of the vulnerability of even the richest and most powerful countries. Not only oil, but also many other raw materials, such as bauxite, copper, and tin, are unequally distributed and in short supply. At the same time, the poorest countries continue to experience shortages in the most basic of all raw materials—food.
In Search of a Definitive Theory
The three alternative views on the ultimate causes of war identified in this chapter are based on one of the most fundamental concepts in Western political philosophy: the role of the individual in society, the role of society in shaping individual behavior, and the role of nature in shaping the individual and society. All three theoretical approaches have some validity, and together they point to a multilevel theory on the origins of war. Individually or together, they help explain why war or the threat of war hangs over every nation like a dreaded sword of Damocles. As long as war continues to plague humankind, the search for solutions and for a definitive theory will continue.
Beyond Politics
It seems reasonable to assume that, all else being equal, nations exhibiting intense nationalism are more warlike than are politically apathetic nations. But all else is seldom equal. Indeed, explanations that depend on nationalism “have done a relatively poor job in explaining the incidence of war.”*
But what about the Wilsonian view that democracies are naturally peaceful, and tyranny is the primary cause of war in the modern world? Through the ages, political thinkers have stressed the relationship between dictatorial rule and belligerent or aggressive behavior. Aristotle called tyrants warmongers who plunge their nations into war “with the object of keeping their subjects constantly occupied and continually in need of a leader.”* Some modern writers, such as Hannah Arendt, argue that totalitarian governments are inherently aggressive.* Two major modern conflicts—World War II and the Korean War—were initiated by totalitarian dictatorships. Stalin in the 1930s, Hitler in the 1940s, Mao in the early 1950s, and Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979 all waged war in the form of bloody purges and mass murder at home. These episodes of lethal state behavior strongly suggest totalitarian rulers are prone to coercive force.
Dictators also exercise absolute control over the armed forces, police, and instruments of propaganda. They have often been war heroes who rode to power on the wings of military victory—successful soldiers who take over governments are rarely squeamish about the use of force. For them, war can provide a popular diversion from the tedium and rigors of everyday life; it can act as an outlet for pent-up domestic hostilities that might otherwise be directed at the dictator; it can help unify society and justify a crackdown on dissidents; and finally, it can rejuvenate a stagnant economy or an uninspired citizenry.
But these observations do not prove despotism often or always causes wars. The Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations blamed the Vietnam War on communist aggression. Critics of U.S. foreign policy, however, blamed it on misguided or provocative U.S. actions in Southeast Asia. Thus, depending on the evidence we accept, the Vietnam War can “prove” either that dictatorships are more prone to war than democracies or that democracies are no more immune to crusading militarism than are dictatorships.
Democracies have not been notably successful at avoiding war. In the second half of the twentieth century, for example, India, the world’s largest democracy, waged several bloody wars against Pakistan, and the United States fought major wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. More recently, the United States spearheaded large-scale military actions against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). Nor have democratic nations always been unwilling participants in war. The United States did not go out of its way to avoid fighting the Spanish-American War of 1898. And it is difficult to overlook U.S. intervention in the Mexican Revolution in 1914, when President Wilson ordered U.S. Marines to seize the Mexican port of Veracruz and later sent a punitive expedition into Mexico against the forces of Pancho Villa.
Research shows democratic nations are not less warlike than either authoritarian or totalitarian states.* In fact, democratic nations engage in military action about as often as other types of government; some evidence suggests they may start wars less frequently but join them more often.* In one respect, however, the Kantian-Wilsonian prodemocracy, antidictatorship theory of war does hold true: In the so-called paradox of democratic peace, democratic states rarely, if ever, fight one another.* There has not been a real war between democracies in more than a century and a half.* One explanation for this paradox goes as follows:
Expectations of war and threats of war between democracies are almost certainly reduced by the presence of a common political culture, by a mutual identity and sympathy, by stronger people-to-people and elite-to-elite bonds, by the ability of interest groups within these countries to form transnational coalitions, by more frequent communication, and by more positive mutual perceptions.*
Public opinion comes into play because government is limited in constitutional democracies, political power is more-or-less widely distributed, popularly elected leaders are inclined to emphasize compromise over confrontation, and constitutional democracies generally respect the individual’s rights. All these factors tend to promote the peaceful resolution of political disputes between democracies.
When democracies go to war, they fight nondemocratic states. This suggests that the degree of political difference (or distance) between governments, as well as economic and cultural differences, may be important.* Such findings support Wilson’s conclusion that dictatorial regimes are the natural enemies of democracies, as well as Lenin’s view that capitalist and communist nations are incompatible. As one study of Latin American politics noted, “The more similar two nations are in economic development, political orientation, Catholic culture, and density, the more aligned their voting in the UN” and the less conflict there will be between them. By the same token, “The more dissimilar two nations are in economic development and size and the greater their joint technological capability to span geographic distance is, the more overt conflict they have with each other.”*
Beyond Economics
If politics provides only a partial and limited explanation for conflict, Lenin’s theory that wars are caused by economic factors, particularly capitalism, explains even less. One problem with this proposition is that wars preceded both capitalism and imperialism, proving that capitalism is certainly not the only cause of war.* Furthermore, there is little in the historical evidence to support Lenin’s economic theory that capitalist states (as opposed to socialist or communist states) are particularly warlike. Although some wars can be explained by national economic motives such as imperialism, most cannot.*
The relationship between capitalism and imperialism is not clear or consistent. Some capitalist states have practiced imperialism and waged war, while others, like Sweden and Switzerland, have avoided both. Lenin’s economic theory has difficulty accounting for such differences or explaining why some socialist states have engaged in unprovoked armed aggression. Examples include the Soviet invasion of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland in 1939; North Korea’s attack on South Korea in 1950; the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979); and China’s attack on Tibet (1956), India (1962), and Vietnam (1979).*
There is little doubt that economics is a cause of specific wars, if not war in general. For instance, the U.S.-led coalition in the Iraq War was driven in part by economic motives: to protect the vast oil fields of Arabia and to keep the vital lifelines linking the Middle East with Europe, Asia, and North America from Saddam Hussein’s control. But other motives are almost always present as well. In the Iraq War these were the belief (false, as it turned out) that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), that he was aiding and abetting international terrorists, that he represented a clear and present danger to Israel, and so on.
There is surprisingly little evidence to support the thesis that one kind of economic system or a country’s particular stage of economic development or economics in general is decisive in motivating nations to fight wars. When academic studies point to economics as a contributing cause of war, they often rely solely on a statistical correlation between economics and war, which, as every scientist knows, does not prove causality.
Since World War II, wars have been fought within the territory of developing states. Does this mean countries with less-advanced economies are more warlike? Not necessarily, because it also appears these wars have often been instigated or even fought by industrialized nations. Post–World War II examples of such conflicts include those fought in Suez, Algeria, the Congo, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Falkland Islands, and Iraq. Although we cannot make a strong correlation between economic development and the frequency of military conflicts, some evidence suggests nations with more-developed economies actually have greater warlike tendencies than countries with less-developed economies.*
The Danger of Oversimplification
Simplistic theories of war abound. Some quantitative theorists have described in fine detail recurring patterns that often lead to war-making military alliances, which are then followed by military buildups, the making of threats, a series of crises, and so on.* Such studies have also shown that certain actions political leaders take in an effort to reduce the possibility of war (for example, making alliances) may actually increase its likelihood.* However, none of these studies proves that making or joining military alliances or any of the other steps associated with the pattern leading to war actually causes war. Fear of war, for example, causes countries to join alliances, but joining alliances does not inevitably lead to war. Thus, virtually all Western democracies joined the NATO alliance and all Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe joined the Warsaw Pact, but NATO and the Warsaw Pact never fought a war. Furthermore, the “typical” pattern is itself somewhat limited, as it represents only those conflicts fought between major states of approximately equal power.*
Most war theorists have long believed large states are more inclined to war than are small states,* and powerful states more inclined to fight than weak ones. That nations confident of winning are most inclined to fight wars makes intuitive sense.* However, defining a state’s power is difficult; political leaders may overestimate their own strength and underestimate the adversary’s (the Vietnam War is a sterling example).* Nations experiencing internal violence are also more likely to be war prone for several reasons. A war may help unify the nation, or internal conflict may make it an easy target.* Nations headed by risk-takers are also more likely to go to war.
Another relevant factor is common borders, particularly when there are many or when they are shared by long-standing rivals.* Nations with large and growing populations, limited access to necessary resources, and a high level of technology have an obvious environmental incentive to pursue expansionist foreign policy, whereas sparsely populated countries tend to fight fewer wars regardless of technology or access to natural resources. When these latter countries do fight, they tend to be victims rather than aggressors.* In sum, a large, powerful nation with a rapidly expanding population and advanced technology, that shares many borders with neighboring states or one border with a traditional enemy (or both), and is governed by a risk-oriented leader is a prime candidate for aggressive war, especially if it faces civil strife or armed rebellion.
Many of the factors we’ve discussed, from human nature to scarce resources, and many of the characteristics associated with war, including population size, economic development, and border problems, are difficult or impossible to change, especially in the short run. The humorist Will Rogers once suggested that world peace could be advanced if nations—like people—could move, but they can’t (although populations can, and do, migrate).
In fact, the false belief that we can eradicate conflict or trace it to a single factor may increase the possibility of war. As European history from 1919 to 1939 illustrates, concentrating solely on rearranging the international system while ignoring the role of human nature can have the unintended effect of clearing obstacles from the path of megalomaniacs bent on aggression.* Had U.S., French, and British leaders in the 1930s heeded Churchill’s warnings about the threat posed by Hitler and stood up to him earlier, they might have been able to defeat Nazi Germany quickly or prevent the war altogether. World War II had multiple causes, which does not mean it was inevitable.
An understanding of the complex causes and factors of war can modestly improve the international system of conflict management by dispelling illusions about the prospects for peace. In such important matters, simple solutions can be worse than no solutions at all; some of history’s foremost political simplifiers have also been among the foremost contributors to war.
Total War: Wars Everybody Fights
Total war is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. It is different from the limited wars of the distant past in several crucial respects. First, it is unlimited in that one or more of the belligerents seek total victory and will stop at nothing short of unconditional surrender. Second, total war is unlimited as to means. States use advanced technology to enhance the range, accuracy, and killing power of modern weapons. Third, total war is unlimited as to participation: whole societies engage in the war effort.
The Napoleonic Wars are the prototype of total war and the first such war ever fought. Napoléon waged an all-out drive for hegemony that recognized no limits on ends or means. He sought total domination of Europe, and he possessed all the resources available to a modern, centralized state at that time. Of course, there were then no weapons of mass destruction, except conventional armies that could be used to this end once the enemy was defeated. Thus, Napoléon’s forces burned much of Moscow, including the Kremlin, to the ground after Russia’s defeat. Most important, Napoléon introduced the idea of mass conscription, drafting thousands of young men into the modern world’s first people’s army. (Prior armies had consisted of professional soldiers and paid mercenaries.) Napoléon also used nationalism, propaganda, and patriotic symbols to mobilize the entire society behind the war effort. These innovations were all harbingers of the future: We can consider the total wars fought in the first half of the twentieth century a single event with an interlude between two incredibly violent spasms—the horrific culmination of processes set in motion more than a century earlier.
After World War II, the concept of total war took on an even more ominous meaning due to major advances in the science and technology of war-fighting capabilities. The advent of the nuclear age utterly transformed both the strategy and tactics of war, the logic of military force and the battlefield. Like the new face of war itself, this transformation was total.
Accidental War: Wars Nobody Wants
We like to think our leaders always know what they are doing, especially when it comes to matters of war and peace. But accidents do happen. What if a Pakistani arms smuggler were passing through India with a package containing “weaponized” anthrax? What if the spores were released in the center of New Delhi, the capital of India, when the Kashmiri taxi driver ran a red light and collided with a truck at a busy intersection? And what if that happened during a crisis with Pakistan? Might India think Pakistan was launching an all-out war? Pakistan had nothing to do with the incident, but India might decide to retaliate immediately and ask questions later (waiting would be extremely risky in such a situation). In this scenario, an all-out nuclear war could result from accident and misperception, rather than from any rational choice on either side.
War by misperception, or war resulting from the misreading of a situation, is perhaps the most common kind of war nobody wants. accidental war is another possibility. An incorrect translation, a message not delivered, a diplomatic signal missed or misinterpreted—accidents of this kind precipitated unintended wars well before the advent of space-age weapons systems. In a technological era dominated by nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, the danger of war by accidental means has gone up dramatically, as have the stakes. Nuclear war by escalation could begin as a limited (and presumably localized) conflict between two nations in which neither side originally intended to use its most destructive weapons. But as casualties mount and battlefield reverses occur, one side (most likely the one losing) could be tempted to up the ante by introducing more powerful weapons, which the other side would have little choice but to match. If both sides possess nuclear weapons, the dynamics could move them toward nuclear war.
Catalytic war can also generate violence and destruction well beyond any nation’s intention. Historically, such wars reflected alliance arrangements. If one member of the alliance was attacked, the other(s) sprang to its defense, enlarging the war. Nowadays, a catalytic war might originate as a localized conflict between, say, two developing countries that have powerful allies. Local wars have always had the potential to turn into regional or even global wars (as happened in both world wars). Or a saboteur or madman might somehow manage to “pull the nuclear trigger.” All such scenarios—sabotage, misperception, accident, escalation, or a catalytic event—show how war can occur without any premeditation or intent.
Nuclear War: Wars Nobody Wins
Weapons of mass destruction have been used only once. The United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. President Truman waited for Japan’s High Command to surrender after the first bomb leveled Hiroshima. When three days later they had not, he gave the order to drop the second bomb. This time Japan surrendered. But it would be a mistake to try to repeat that winning strategy. The reason is very simple. When the U.S. president decided to “go nuclear” in 1945, there were only two atomic bombs in the world, and they were both in the U.S. arsenal. Truman did not have to risk massive retaliation (a response in kind) from Japan or any other country. The United States had a (short-lived) nuclear monopoly.
The former Soviet Union quickly developed its nuclear weapons program. By the end of the 1950s, it had an arsenal of mass-destruction armaments and was even building long-range rockets called intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Moscow actually beat the United States into outer space by launching Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, in 1957. During the 1960s, the United States lost not only its nuclear monopoly (if it had not already been lost a decade earlier), but also its aura of invulnerability. The era of massive retaliation and brinkmanship—reliance on nuclear weapons to intimidate adversaries—was superseded by the era of mutual assured destruction (MAD), or mutual deterrence, in which both superpowers had the ability to withstand a nuclear first strike and still be capable of delivering a second strike that would result in unacceptable damage to the aggressor.
Neither superpower spared any effort to get (or stay) ahead in the nuclear arms race. By the early 1970s, both sides had a tremendous overkill capability; that is, each had enough weapons of mass destruction to destroy the other many times over. Even more alarming, both sides had built nuclear submarines to act as mobile platforms for launching ICBMs and were putting multiple warheads—called multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs)—on both land- and sea-based ICBMs (technically known as submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). But whereas both sides wanted to win the arms race, neither wanted to lose a war with the other, and both knew there would be no winners if deterrence ever failed. This almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1963); it was a close call. As a result, the two sworn enemies quickly established the now-famous hotline—a direct communications link between the White House and the Kremlin—to avert a future calamity, one that might just happen by accident.
Proxy Wars: Wars Others Fight
Civil wars and guerrilla wars typically pit established governments on one side against rebels or insurgents on the other. During the Cold War, the two superpowers frequently intervened directly or indirectly in civil wars or insurgencies in Third World countries. Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s and Afghanistan in the 1970s are two notable examples. In Vietnam, the United States intervened directly with military forces, and the Soviet Union intervened indirectly by sending massive amounts of military and economic aid. In Afghanistan, it was the other way around—the Soviet Union launched a military invasion, and the United States backed the freedom fighters (the mujahideen). Similarly, the Soviet Union intervened in Angola’s civil war in the 1970s, and the United States intervened in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s. These conflicts were sometimes called proxy wars because the superpowers would each back one side while relying on indigenous forces to do the fighting with the help of U.S. or Soviet “advisors.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, only one superpower remained, and the ideological rivalry that fueled the Cold War became a thing of the past. Whether a proxy war will occur again is an open question; if so, it will be in a very different context and, in all likelihood, for different principles.
Just Wars: Wars Others Start
So far, we have been looking at war primarily from the standpoint of the perpetrators of aggression. But what about the victims? Few observers would dispute that nations have the right to resist armed aggression. When national survival is at stake, self-defense is morally justified. So, despite Benjamin Franklin’s assertion that “there was never a good war or a bad peace,” some wars may be both necessary and proper, but which ones? Who is to say? And how can we know for sure?
The Just War Doctrine
The venerable doctrine of the just war holds that, under certain circumstances, a war can be “good”—not pleasant or intrinsically desirable, but serving the welfare of a nation and the cause of justice. This concept was advanced by early Christian theologians such as Saint Augustine and refined by medieval philosophers. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and other natural law theorists later reformulated it.
Those who favor the concept of just war unanimously agree defensive wars are justified. A nation that suffers an unprovoked attack is justified in waging war against its assailant. Some theorists further give third-party nations the right to interfere on behalf of hapless victims of military aggression. The 1991 Persian Gulf War, preceded by Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait, is a case in point.
Earlier writers did not always limit the just war doctrine to defensive wars. Saint Augustine abhorred war in all its guises, but he justified even aggressive wars under some circumstances, as when a state “has failed either to make reparation for an injurious action committed by its citizens or to return what has been appropriated.”* Another early Christian theologian, Saint Ambrose (339–397 CE), argued that nations have a moral obligation, not simply a right, to wage aggressive war for the sake of higher principle. “Man has a moral duty,” he wrote, “to employ force to resist active wickedness, for to refrain from hindering evil when possible is tantamount to promoting it.”* Ambrose was aware of the need for limitations on this kind of war. Aggressive wars, he declared, should be fought only for a clearly just cause.
The just war doctrine has five postulates. First, war must be the last resort of a legitimate government; there must be no other effective political alternatives available. Second, the conflict must be just, fought only for deterring or repelling aggression or righting a wrong. Third, the war cannot be futile; there must be some probability the nation undertaking it can succeed. Fourth, the war’s purpose must justify the cost in money and lives; the means employed must be appropriate to the reason the war is fought. Finally, a just war must minimize injury and death to civilians.
In contrast to the simplistic nationalism represented by such slogans as “My country right or wrong,” the just war concept suggests a standard of moral responsibility that transcends narrow national interest. Early Christian theologians based their notions of justice on theological doctrines and scriptural teachings. Modern versions of the doctrine are grounded in a natural-law philosophy holding there are self-evident truths about human welfare that, taken together, point toward the true meaning of the ideal of “justice for all.”
Evaluating the Just War Doctrine
Of the criticisms leveled against the just war doctrine, we focus on three of the most substantial: that the doctrine represents moral relativism, that it embodies an ethnocentric bias, and that it is politically unrealistic.
Moral Relativism
Some critics contend the concept of the just war is based on highly subjective, and hence unverifiable, value judgments. Because governments rarely admit to starting wars and almost always blame the other side, any attempt to assign moral responsibility is bound to reflect the opinions of the observer more than the often uncertain facts of the situation. The only way to avoid this moral relativism is to confine ourselves to describing what happened before and during wars, sticking to accurate and verifiable facts.
Ethnocentric or Nationalistic Bias
Critics also say Western just war theorists reflect only their own culture, ignoring justifications for war advanced by other cultures or ideologies—an accusation of ethnocentric bias. For instance, the traditional Islamic concept of a jihad (“struggle” or “holy war”) against temptation, evil, apostasy, or “infidels” offers a moral rationale for aggressive war rarely acknowledged by Western proponents of the just war doctrine. Just war theorists were similarly criticized for rejecting an interpretation advanced until recently by the former Soviet Union—that just wars are waged by the working class against their oppressors, wars of “national liberation” fought by colonized peoples of the Third World against Western “imperialists,” and wars waged to prevent the overthrow of socialist governments in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
Political Naiveté
Several opponents of the just war doctrine raise the practical objection that even a universally accepted standard governing them would be extremely difficult to apply fairly. Just as individuals are not good judges in their own cases, it is argued, so nations are not competent to pass judgment on controversies involving their own interests and well-being. Without an impartial referee, critics contend, the just war doctrine remains a sham advanced by aggressor nations to justify self-serving policies and military interventionism.
Landmarks in History The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials
Following World War II, in history’s most famous attempt to apply moral standards to wartime conduct, Nazi leaders were charged in Nuremberg, Germany, for several types of crimes. First, they were accused of crimes against peace, because they had waged aggressive war in violation of international treaties and obligations. Second, they were charged with war crimes, which encompassed violations of the accepted rules of war, such as brutality toward prisoners of war, wanton destruction of towns, and mistreatment of civilians in conquered lands. Third, they were accused of crimes against humanity, including the persecution and mass murder of huge numbers of noncombatants. Crimes against peace and war crimes were categories widely accepted under the just war doctrine; the category of crimes against humanity was designed to deal with a specific instance of genocide, the Holocaust.
The decision to punish Nazi leaders for genocide was prompted by an understandable desire for retribution. German actions could not be justified by the exigencies of war (which, of course, Hitler had started). The crimes against humanity concept provided firm support for the just war doctrine (and vice versa).
The Nuremberg trials were justifiable, but it is no simple task to apply the crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity labels to concrete and often unique situations. The death camps of the Holocaust violated all standards of law, justice, and decency, (see Figure 15.1). But what about the Allied firebombing of Dresden and many other German cities? Or the brutalities against German civilians tolerated (if not encouraged) by the Soviet army? Or the American firebombing of Japanese cities and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? These acts, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, were not covered under the war crimes labels. Critics argue this fact illustrates an important point: the victors write the history of a war. By the same token, the victors alone decide what is and what is not a war crime.
The United States is quick to label auto-genocide in Cambodia or “ethnic cleansing” (a euphemism for genocide) in Bosnia or genocide in Rwanda and Sudan as war crimes. On the other hand, when U.S. drone attacks targeting Taliban fighters in villages along the Afghan-Pakistan border kill civilians, it is labeled “collateral damage”—which makes it legal. Critics of the Bush administration have argued that the methods used in the war on terror—“extraordinary rendition” (seizing suspected terrorists on foreign soil), leaving detainees in legal limbo by creating a new classification of “illegal combatants,” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding—were war crimes.
As a candidate for the presidency, Barack Obama criticized the harsh methods President Bush approved in carrying out his war on terror. But as Bush’s successor, President Obama disappointed many of his most ardent supporters by failing to close the infamous “Gitmo” detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And in the spring of 2011, Obama backed off another key campaign pledge when he decided to resume military trials for terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Defenders of the just war doctrine point out that moral judgments concerning the conduct of wars have long been thought both natural and necessary: natural in the sense that “for as long as men and women have talked about war, they have talked about it in terms of right and wrong,”* and necessary because without them, all wars would have to be considered equally objectionable (or praiseworthy). Admittedly, we cannot prove scientifically that aggressive wars are any worse than preemptive or preventive wars; nor do we need to prove cold-blooded murder is more reprehensible than killing in self-defense—a distinction both criminal law and common sense support.
In the real world, heads of state often engage in moral talk and immoral behavior. The idea of the just war is worth keeping, therefore, if not as a means of controlling that behavior, then as a method of evaluating it (see “Landmarks in History”).
A War on What? The Politics of Hyperbole
The Bush administration’s response to 9/11 was to declare a “war on terror” (see Chapter 16). But terror is not a state—not a place on the map. Waging “war” on terror is thus not like waging traditional war. In fact, calling it war raises major conceptual and strategic problems. President Bush was not the first U.S. commander-in-chief to use the term war loosely. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy declared a “war on organized crime” in 1961, and every president since John F. Kennedy (Robert’s brother) has embraced the “war on crime” as his own. President Lyndon Baines Johnson waged a “war on poverty.” LBJ’s successor in the White House, Richard Nixon, declared a “war on drugs,” calling drug abuse “public enemy number one in the United States.” These and other domestic “wars” arguably made war appear a kind of permanent condition in a perilous world rather than an extreme step taken only in the most extreme circumstances.
The war on terror identified a subversive organization—al Qaeda—as the source of all evil and a single individual—Osama bin Laden—as the mastermind behind it. Al Qaeda thus became the functional equivalent of world communism, and bin Laden was the new Stalin.
The Bush administration further linked several existing governments—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—to this conspiratorial organization and branded these states the “axis of evil.” (In the 1980s, President Reagan famously called the Soviet Union the “evil empire.”) In addition, the war on terror, like the Cold War before it, would be open-ended. Unlike wars of the past, it would go on for generations, possibly forever. Finally, this new “war” was cast as a contest between good and evil, thus turning it into a religious-ideological crusade in much the same way as the Cold War was cast as a struggle between freedom and capitalism, and totalitarian tyranny and Communism.
The means for fighting the war on terror are also reminiscent of the Cold War, including a major military buildup, a soaring defense budget, and a wholesale reorganization of the nation’s intelligence, police, and defense establishment. The “national security state” was transformed by creating a new Department of Homeland Security. The central idea of this new department was to integrate the operational procedures of agencies, especially the FBI and CIA, which had operated independently or even competitively during the Cold War.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, what began as a surgical military operation to wipe out terrorist training camps in Afghanistan became a new global crusade pitting the United States and its allies against the so-called Axis of Evil—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Arguably, the prudent course of action was a limited response aimed at a finite evil and a specific target.
Not surprisingly, different observers interpreted the war on terror in very different ways. Conservatives were much more likely than liberals to accept the reasons given for launching an all-out “war” after 9/11, especially for the controversial decision to invade Iraq. But, in fairness, the war was not opposed by leading Democrats in Congress, and even liberal politicians, such as then-Senator Hillary Clinton, supported it. It was only after the occupation turned into a civil war that politicians of all stripes began to jump ship.
What are the lessons of this war? What does it tell us about war in general?
First, the Iraq war combined aspects of various war scenarios discussed earlier in this chapter—inadvertent war (war resulting from misperception, misinformation, or miscalculation), accidental war (war touched off unintentionally), catalytic war (war that starts small and gets bigger as other powers are drawn in), and ABC war (a war involving atomic, biological, or chemical weapons, otherwise known as weapons of mass destruction). The concept of a just war also came into play because the attack on Iraq was (wrongly) linked to 9/11. Thus, the war was rationalized as a righteous way to punish an aggressor or to avenge a heinous act.
Second, the invasion of Iraq was conceived of as part of a larger war; a war not against a specific enemy but against a disembodied “ism.” Terrorism, like poverty or crime, is a condition, a fact of life. It does not have a beginning or an end and therefore cannot be eradicated by military means. At best, it can be managed or brought under control. Whether the military as presently constituted is the best instrument for dealing with this type of threat is debatable. In Iraq, traditional military instruments—fighter-bombers, tanks, artillery, and the like—proved highly effective in defeating the Iraqi army but virtually useless in dealing with the guerrilla-style insurrection that followed.
Third, during the course of this war, the Bush administration switched enemies and changed the rationale for fighting. The real enemy was a secretive organization known as al Qaeda rather than another state. To the extent that this enemy had a face, it was the face of Osama bin Laden. For all its military might, the United States was unable to defeat al Qaeda by invading Afghanistan or even to bring the renegade bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 attacks, to justice for a decade until a U.S. Navy Seal team finally killed him in 2011. Instead, the Bush administration shifted the focus of attention from Afghanistan and bin Laden to Iraq and Saddam—in other words, from an elusive enemy who could not be defeated militarily to one who could, or so the architects of the Iraq war believed.
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