On the inevitability of war

A perennial myth among well-educated, well-off, mostly-liberal Americans is that we can end war if only we work hard enough at it. It certainly would be nice if we could end war as an instrument of policy, but it simply isn’t possible, however much some people would like to believe that it is.

This is one of those areas where the poor have a much better grasp of reality than the well-off. The poor often live in neighborhoods ruled by gangs or drug lords, so they understand the fundamental laws of the jungle that have prevailed in most of the world throughout all of history. The strong take what they will and the weak suffer. The only way not to be exploited by the strong and dangerous is to be stronger and more dangerous yourself, or at least allied with stronger and more dangerous forces. I understand why young men join gangs in tough neighborhoods – they do it out of self-preservation. Alone they are prey – as a member of a gang they have alliances that make them safer.

The well-off can believe in their myths of a peaceful world only because strong police and strong armies maintain a peaceful world around them. Were the police and armies to disappear some night, it wouldn’t be too long before less pleasant people would appear to divest the well-off of all their material wealth and destroy their peaceful world.

The same is true of the world stage. There is never a lack of ruthless, ambitious people willing to use force to get what they want or advance their particular theological or political view. Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, a number of Roman emperors, Napoleon, more than a few of the early and medieval Popes, a succession of English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Persian, and Turkish monarchs, Mohammad and a number of his successors, Hitler, Stalin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and innumerable petty tyrants and local warlords – the list is endless, and more than a few of these kind of people are alive and in power today around the world. None of these people would have been swayed in the least by “appeals to common humanity”, any more than today’s ruthless drug lords or Islamic militants would respond to such appeals.

Among nations, as among people, the way – the only way – to be safe from attack, exploitation and despoliation by greedy, ambitious neighbors is to be sufficiently strong to deter attack. The Roman writer Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus summed it up succinctly almost 2000 years ago: "Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum." (if you want peace, prepare for war).

The world survived the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union primarily because it armed itself sufficiently to make it unattractive for Stalin to attack. If we had not armed ourselves, there is little question that Stalin would have taken as much of Western Europe as he could, just as Hitler tried to do before him.

Hitler did as much damage as he did primarily because European nations, still affected by the terrible losses of World War I, couldn’t bring themselves to arm and face him down early when he invaded the Rhineland in 1936. Since no one opposed him there, he pressed on with an invasion of Poland in 1939, and then of France, and World War II was the result.

America is safe today because of our military power. That is not to say that America has always used its military power wisely. There are times when military action is the appropriate response, and there are times when other measures are more appropriate. Our political system, driven by some of the more unrealistic ideologies and emotions that periodically sweep through the American public, doesn’t always respond pragmatically to events.

Nonetheless, the reason we Americans can sleep soundly in our beds is because we are a mighty nation with a powerful military, so we aren’t living in fear each night. If we lived in Somalia, for example, a weak failed state at the mercy of its neighbors and the local thugs, we certainly wouldn’t sleep as peacefully at night.

This is another example of the problem of the “bubble of illusion” I have written about before. The anti-war people assume that everyone thinks the way they do, since certainly most of the people they know think the same way – we tend to pick our friends among those who agree with us. But in fact, most of the world doesn’t think the way they do, or see the world the way they do, so their fundamental assumption is wrong.