War: What is it good for? (57 page)

The story only moves onto a firmer numerical footing in the middle of the second millennium
A.D.
, when Leviathans—especially in Europe—once again revived as guns closed the steppe highway and long-distance shipping opened up the oceans. Both inventions were made in East Asia but perfected in western Europe, where they broke the cycle of productive and counterproductive wars.

The reason for this, I suggested in
Chapter 4
, once again had more to do with geography than with a Western way of war. On the one hand, Europe's political geography—with lots of small kingdoms, constantly at war—rewarded societies that built better guns; on the other hand, Europe's physical geography—the fact that it was twice as close as East Asia to the Americas—made it easier for Europeans than for Asians to discover, plunder, and colonize the New World. Europeans began their Five Hundred Years' War on the world not because they were more dynamic (or more wicked) than anyone else but because geography made it easier for them than for anyone else.

The Five Hundred Years' War forced Europeans to reinvent productive war, because the sheer size of the societies their conquests produced changed the rules of the game. In an age of intercontinental empires, they discovered, the wealth of nations could be increased most not by plundering or even
taxing downtrodden subjects but by using state power to make as many people as possible as free as possible to trade in bigger and bigger markets.

Beginning in northwestern Europe, relentless competition forced Leviathans to embrace open-access order, which brought the market's invisible hand and government's invisible fist into harmony. Britain, after stumbling into an industrial revolution in the 1780s, emerged as the first globocop, its ships, money, and diplomats policing a worldwide order. But although rates of violent death fell to new lows and prosperity climbed toward new highs, even the globocop had a culminating point. The Pax Britannica produced so many rivals that the globocop could no longer do its job. After 1914, the worst wars in history overthrew it—only for the United States to emerge as victor seventy-five years later, at the head of an even bigger open-access order, producing even lower rates of violent death and even more wealth.

This is a big story, only visible if we look at all of human history across the entire planet and pursue all four of the approaches (personal, military-historical, technical, and evolutionary) that I identified in the introduction. This alone, I suggest, will show what war has been good for—and what the costs have been.

The answer to the question in this book's title is both paradoxical and horrible. War has been good for making humanity safer and richer, but it has done so through mass murder. But because war
has
been good for something, we must recognize that all this misery and death was not in vain. Given a choice of how to get from the poor, violent Stone Age to the peace and prosperity of
Figures 7.1
and
7.2
, few of us, I am sure, would want war to be the way, but evolution—which is what human history is—is not driven by what we want. In the end, the only thing that matters is the grim logic of the game of death.

Looking at how that logic has played out since the end of the Ice Age, it seems obvious where it should take us next. We have moved from bands of foragers via Leviathans to a globocop; the next step, surely, should be to a world government that drives the payoffs from violence down to zero. Everyone should get to Denmark, and despite all the horrors in its pages this book should have a happy ending after all—almost as happy, in fact, as the ending of Norman Angell's
Great Illusion,
which I mentioned at the start of
Chapter 5
. In 1910, when that book appeared, there had been no major great-power wars for ninety-five years. Across that period, global incomes had doubled, and in Europe, at least, the murder rate had halved.
The implication, Angell and his admirers concluded, was that a world without war was just around the corner.

It was not, but
The Great Illusion
remains worth reading anyway, because the reasons Angell was wrong apply to our own age too. As we saw in
Chapter 5
, the nineteenth century's march toward Denmark was unsustainable. The better the globocop did its job, the more rivals it created, and the more rivals it created, the more difficult its job became.
Figure 7.2
suggests that history is repeating itself. The American colossus bestrides the world in the 2010s even more completely than the British version bestrode it in the 1860s, but the United States seems to be rerunning the United Kingdom's experience. The better that Washington keeps global order, the richer and stronger its potential rivals become. Unknown unknowns are proliferating and gamblers are already taking chances. The closer we get to Denmark, the further away it seems.

The first time I ever visited New England, a lifetime resident told me an ancient joke about the orneriness of the region's residents. A tourist (in most versions, from New York) gets hopelessly lost in darkest Massachusetts (or perhaps Maine). After driving in circles for an hour, he stops to ask directions. A wizened local reflects on, but then rejects, one possible route after another. Finally, with a weary shake of his head, he tells the tourist, “You can't get there from here.”

Unhelpful advice, to be sure, but the similarities between
Figure 7.2
and the graphs that opened
Chapter 5
suggest it might be a better description of the world we live in than Angell's upbeat interpretation. Perhaps we face not a Red Queen Effect but a Tortoise and Hare Effect. By running very fast, humanity
has
gotten somewhere: rates of violent death have fallen, and prosperity has risen. But although we keep getting closer to Denmark, we will never quite get there from here. The Hare races forward, but the Tortoise always crawls just a little farther ahead, creating new rivals, new unknown unknowns, and perhaps even new storms of steel. So much for the happy ending.

In this final chapter, I want to suggest that neither Angell's happy ending nor the New Englander's unhappy one is actually much of a guide to the shape of things to come. Angell's idea—that economic interconnection makes war unthinkable—was wrong a hundred years ago, and it is still wrong today, but so too is the New Englander's claim that we can't get there from here.

We seem to be making the worst of all possible worlds for ourselves.
On the one hand, it will be even less stable than the 1870s–1910s, when the previous globocop was in decline; on the other, its weapons will be even deadlier than those of the 1940s–80s, when the United States and the Soviet Union threatened humanity with mutual assured destruction. Despite the steady decline in rates of violent death over the last forty years, and despite the unlikeliness of a new world war in the mid-2010s, the next forty years promise to be the most dangerous in history.

But if we step back from the details and look at the coming decades in the same way that we looked at the long-term history of violence in
Chapters 1
–
6
, rather different parts of the picture come into focus. In spite of everything, this broader perspective suggests, we really might get there from here—even if “there” is not where we expected.

Venus and Mars

For many years, the U.S. government regularly published a pamphlet called the Defense Planning Guidance, summarizing its official position on grand strategy. Most Guidances were rather bland documents, but in February 1992, just two months after the Soviet Union dissolved, the committee charged with drafting a new Guidance did something outrageous. It told the truth.

What it drafted was a how-to guide for globocops. While the United States could not “assum[e] responsibility for righting every wrong,” it conceded, “we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.” This meant accomplishing one big thing:

Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This … requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

Promptly leaked to the press, the draft set off a political firestorm. What it was talking about was “literally a Pax Americana,” complained the future vice president Joe Biden, which “won't work.” Chastened, the Department
of Defense toned down the final version, but whatever we call it, a Pax Americana is precisely what the United States has been pursuing for the last twenty-odd years (several of them with Joe Biden in the White House).

The lesson that politicians should have learned from the Pax Britannica was that an American version
would
work, at least for a few decades. Overall, the American experience since 1989 has been strikingly like Britain's in the late nineteenth century, and even the apparent exceptions are of the kind that only goes to prove the rule.

The most extraordinary of these apparent exceptions is surely western Europe, the first of the four potential problem spots that the 1992 planners worried about. The parallels between this region's experiences with the British and the American globocops are obvious enough. In the later nineteenth century, western European economies prospered in markets guaranteed by the British globocop, and a wealthy, powerful Germany became Britain's deadliest rival in the 1890s. In the later twentieth century, western Europe's economies once again flourished in markets guaranteed by the American globocop, and plenty of politicians—in Europe even more than in the United States—became alarmed that the reunited Germany would continue rerunning the historical script. (“People say, ‘It is a terrible thing that Germany is not working,'” one French official half joked, “but I say, ‘Really? When Germany is working, six months later it is usually marching down the Champs Elysées.'”)

But that did not happen. Instead, western Europe moved in a direction that at first sight seems to challenge not only the analogy between American and British global power but also virtually every argument in this book. Far from turning into a rival to the globocop, western Europe has almost entirely renounced force as a policy tool. A truly astonishing thing is happening. For the first time in history, huge numbers of people—500 million so far—are coming together to form a bigger, safer, richer society without being forced to do so (
Figure 7.3
).

It has been an epochal transformation, albeit a quiet one. I spent my first twenty-seven years living through it (assuming, for the sake of argument, that we count Britain as part of western Europe) without realizing that it was happening. Nothing, in fact, used to make me turn the TV off quite as quickly as yet another announcement from the bureaucrats in Brussels about what I was allowed to eat or drink and what size container it would come in.

But I—as well as the millions of others who shared my lack of interest in all things European—was very wrong. Dullness was the whole point of
the European Community (as it was called until it rebranded itself as the European Union in 1993). Old-fashioned Leviathans had used violence to create political unity and then used politics (and, when necessary, more violence) to create economic unity, but western Europe now turned history's most successful formula around. In committee meeting after committee meeting, its unsung heroes spun a web of rules and regulations that bound its members together in an economic unit and then began using economics to create a political unit. “The final goal,” the former head of the German Bundesbank explained in 1994, “is a political one … to reach any type of political unification in Europe, a federation of states, an association of states or even a stronger form of union.” In this agenda, “the economic union is [merely] an important vehicle to reach this target.”

This was simultaneously the dullest and most daring trick that statesmen had ever attempted, and for fifteen years after the signing of the crucial
treaty at Maastricht in 1992 it seemed to be working. Europe remained a mosaic of independent states, but from Ireland to Estonia most Europeans shared a single currency and central bank, accepted rulings from a European court and parliament, and crossed borders without passports. Until 2010, at least, the tedious path of consensus-building really did seem to be getting Europe there from here.