The daily reports of fighting, civil wars and suicide bombings hide a positive development: The world’s wars are decreasing – not increasing – in intensity and number. Excerpt from the program on September 21, 2011.
JOSHUA GOLDSTEIN, Ph.D., Author; Professor Emeritus of International Relations, American University
Peace has been the dream of humanity for thousands of years, but the reality of human history has been recurrent war. War has been such a central part of the human story that it’s easy to think that it’s permanent, [that] we’ll always have it, and if anything, people think it’s getting worse through time. I’m here to tell you that’s not the case.
The dream of peace hasn’t died, and in the last 60 years, and especially the last 20 years, we’ve made remarkable progress toward peace. I don’t mean peace [as in] the absolute end of all wars, peace and harmony in the world; but peace as in fewer wars, smaller wars, fewer people dying in wars. That’s a story where we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress.
That’s a counterintuitive idea for people, because everybody thinks war’s getting worse; we see it on the TV all the time. So I want to start out just by talking about three generations. My father’s generation, mine and [that of] my 17-year-old son: the generations of the world wars, the Cold War and the post-Cold War era.
We’ve all lived in war time, but consider the differences between them: My father’s war, World War II, killed more than 5 million people per year. That’s a really high rate of war deaths. The Cold War battlegrounds, including Vietnam, my generation’s war, killed hundreds of thousands per year. And today’s wars kill a little bit more than 50,000 per year. In terms of fatalities alone, we’re seeing a dramatic decline over these generations.
In terms of America’s own war fatalities, we also see a dramatic decline. World War II killed about 300,000 Americans in battle, Vietnam about 50,000, Afghanistan and Iraq about 6,000. Now, each life is precious, and one war death is one too many, but in a country of 300 million people, the number of Americans killed in war last year was fewer than the number who died falling out of bed.
Better than yesterday
The question we should ask about today’s terrible bloody conflicts is not [how they] compare to an ideal world, aren’t they terrible; but [how they] compare to any time in the past. Vietnam, World War II. The Thirty Years War. And then we’ll see progress is being made. It is not just the scale of warfare that is changing, but also the character of war. During my father’s war, World War II, the Americans and British firebombed German and Japanese cities, killing tens of thousands of civilians in a single night, and doing this repeatedly, doing it scientifically, deliberately: This was not collateral damage, this was strategy. The atrocities that Nazis and Japanese war criminals committed against civilians were far worse than that. During my war, Vietnam, the My Lai massacre killed hundreds of civilians. It was a lot smaller scale; and atrocities in wars like Bangladesh in 1971 also were very terrible, but smaller scale than World War II. In the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians, and that was terrible. In my son’s time there are also atrocities in war. We see suicide bombings and air strikes, and they kill scores of civilians or even hundreds at a time. If you’re in the middle of one of the atrocities, they’re just as atrocious as ever, but the scale of them is getting smaller worldwide as time goes by.
The truth is that civilian and military deaths are about 50-50 through the last couple of centuries, the number’s not changing much through time, though it does vary a lot from one war to another. Some are harder on civilians, like the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; some are harder on military, such as the Eritrean-Ethiopian war, which was mostly trench warfare out in the desert.
What about the ultimate atrocity, nuclear war? In my father’s time, two entire cities with their inhabitants were bombed with nuclear weapons, killing hundreds of thousands of people. In my lifetime, nuclear weapons were never used, thankfully, but tens of thousands of them were poised to destroy the world; this seemed a real possibility, and when I was a kid, we practiced hiding our heads under the desks in school to be ready for when that happened. In my son’s time, we’re not worried about the world being destroyed with nuclear weapons; we’re worried about one nuclear weapon maybe getting in the wrong hands, and blowing up a city. That’s terrible, and I do worry about that. But it’s still progress compared to blowing up the entire world. More important, the arsenal of tens of thousands of weapons on both sides has been reduced by three quarters, just in the last 30 years. This is a historic phenomenon, disarming three quarters of the nuclear weapons, and the new START treaty that’s just been ratified on both sides is going to reduce these stockpiles further.
We’ve also made progress in organizing the world’s countries to stop fighting and to control conflict and manage violence. My father was born in the same year as the League of Nations. It was a complete failure; it didn’t stop the aggression in the 1930s, it didn’t prevent World War II, the United States didn’t even belong to it. When I was growing up, the United Nations was young, and, of course, it started right here in San Francisco. Everyone belonged to it, and it symbolized humanity; we used to go out when I was a kid with orange boxes to collect money for UNICEF on Halloween. But the Security Council was stalemated by the Cold War standoff and not very effective. Today, the Security Council is much more effective. My son is growing up in a world where the UN has 100,000 peacekeepers deployed around the world, helping fragile societies as they try to emerge from wars, trying to keep ceasefires from breaking down. The UN still has a lot of problems, but it’s also had great successes.
There’s also now an International Criminal Court that didn’t exist in previous generations, and an emerging doctrine of responsibility to protect, which means that the international community has some responsibility to civilians if their own government doesn’t protect them.
From generation to generation, from my father’s to mine to my son’s, peace is increasing and war is decreasing.
Preparing a better tomorrow
America’s wars went the opposite direction in the last decade, because we had a relatively peaceful 1990s, and a relatively war-like past decade. But now that’s also reversing. Between now and the end of the year, 50,000 American troops are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’ve started the process of withdrawal from Afghanistan that’s supposed to end in a few years. As President Obama put it in June, “The tide of war is receding.”
In fact, these trends have created a world today that’s very different from the past. The biggest difference is that historically, the big wars, the lethal destructive wars have been those of national, regular, uniformed armies, one against the other, with their tanks, with their artillery, with their airplanes: Iraq versus Iran, India versus Pakistan. Those are extremely destructive and very lethal wars. Today in the world, nowhere are those national armies fighting each other. Nowhere in the world. This is a remarkable development. Though the countries of the world remain armed to the teeth, with 20 million soldiers, they all have these heavy weapons, but they’re not using them against each other.
People worry about China as the next big threat: You know, China is growing, China is modernizing its military, China is building an aircraft carrier, so does that make it inevitable that China will go to war with the United States as it grows? China hasn’t fought a single military battle in 25 years. It’s the only member of the Security Council at the UN that can say that. Twenty-five years – no fighting. China is rising on what it self-consciously calls “a peaceful rise strategy.” That economics and prosperity is what gives the leaders of China their legitimacy, not nationalism and riling up of the population for war. They have to deliver on prosperity and the way to do that is not to go to war; that would be a disaster for China. The way to do that is to have a peaceful world where they can trade, where they can make money from their biggest trading partner, the United States.
The remaining armed conflicts in the world are civil wars: wars of governments on one side with rebels or insurgents on the other side. Sometimes those rebel or insurgent forces have another government supporting them financially but never with soldiers from the other country.
These civil wars are smaller than the interstate wars. Even then, we have smaller civil wars than in the past and fewer of them. Big wars, such as in South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka have ended in the last 10 years, and they haven’t been replaced with equally big wars anywhere in the world. [Of] the wars that are still going on, there are only five of them that rise to the level of daily sustained fighting. Those are in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and the Congo. Even these are not big wars like Vietnam and Korea, much less the Napoleonic wars, and even these are all diminishing and becoming more localized in fighting, except for the mess in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the dog that didn’t bark: the wars that are not happening. Whole regions of the world that used to be consumed by war a couple of decades ago [are] now completely at peace.
