ON WARS

Copyright © 2023 by Michael Mann.

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 Contents

Preface

1. Military Power and War

2. Is War Universal?
3. Theories of the Causes of War
4. The Roman Republic
5. Ancient China
6. Imperial China
7. Medieval and Modern Japan
8. A Thousand Years of Europe
9. Seven Hundred Years of South and Central America
10. The Decline of War?
11. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield I: From Ancient Times to the
American Civil War
12. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield II: The World Wars
13. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield III: Communist Wars
14. Recent Wars in Muslim Countries
15. Possible Futures
CONCLUSION Patterns of War
Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Preface

IN 2013 I FINISHED the fourth and final volume of The Sources of Social
Power, as well as two papers that did not fit into that book. While working
on these papers, I realized that although I had always emphasized the role
that military power plays in the development of human society, I had never
really examined in any systematic way its main mechanism, war. And so for
the last eight years I have engaged in a wide-ranging exploration of wars
through human history—with a bit of prehistory added, too.
My fascination with war owes nothing to any personal experience of it.
Family lore tells me I was born in a hospital basement during the last World
War II German bombing raid on Manchester. If so, that was my last
experience of war. Conscription in Britain was abolished the year before I
would have been liable for it, and by the time I became an American citizen
I was too old to be drafted. I have never possessed or fired a gun. Some
sociologists study themselves—they write, for example, on their own class,
ethnic, or sexual identity—but anthropologists and other sociologists,
including myself, are fascinated by the task of trying to understand alien
ways of life. For me, one such alien way has been war.
I have to thank the Covid-19 pandemic for enabling me to work single-
mindedly if remotely during the last two years of this research project, with
the help not only of the magnificent UCLA Young Research Library, but
also of the internet resources provided by JSTOR for journal articles, Z-
Library for online access to most of the many books I sought, and
Wikipedia, useful for swift checking of dates and facts. But I must admit at
the start that my reading has been restricted to works in English or French.
I would like to thank my literary agent, Elise Capron of the Sandra
Dijkstra Agency, for her support and marketing skills. I am intellectually
indebted as always to John A. Hall, as well as to Randall Collins and Siniša
Malešević for their seminal works on violence, even if I have sometimes
disagreed with them. I thank my UCLA colleagues and graduate students of
the Sociology 237 seminars. I pay homage to the classical writers on war
from Sun Tzu through Polybius and Ibn Khaldun to von Clausewitz, Ardant
du Picq, and Raymond Aron. I must thank a horde of archaeologists,
anthropologists, and historians for their very many empirical studies, which I
have gratefully looted. I thank political scientists for clarifying the
theoretical issues at stake. And I thank two anonymous reviewers of my
manuscript for pertinent criticisms that I have tried to address.

Nicky Hart has been my constant companion for over forty years. Without
her love, support, intellectual stimulation, and reminders of the sunny side of
life, I would not have been able to complete this rather dark project. On
similar grounds I would like to thank my children, Louise, Gareth, and
Laura. May they—and the whole of humanity—be as fortunate as I have
been, in never having to fight or to suffer as civilians in wars.
 CHAPTER ONE

Military Power and War

WARS REVEAL HUMAN BEINGS behaving at their worst, killing and maiming
each other in very large numbers. It is easy to deplore this. Herodotus quoted
King Croesus of Lydia as saying in the sixth century BCE, “No one is stupid
enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war
fathers bury their sons.” In the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin said,
“There never was a good war or a bad peace.” Rebecca West in 1941 put it
more pungently when describing armed conflicts in Yugoslav history: “It is
sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of a
skunk.” But what determines whether war or peace is chosen? Are wars
driven by human nature, the nature of human society, or other forces? Are
wars rational? Do they do any good at all? My answer in the broadest terms
is that there is an element of rationality in wars but that this element gets
entangled to varying degrees within the emotions and ideologies of human
beings, especially their rulers, and within the social structures and cultures of
human societies. The combination often drives rulers in the direction of wars
that are rarely rational and that bring benefit to only a small proportion of
human beings. If humans and their rulers were predominantly rational
beings, there would be far fewer wars, an ideal worth at least aiming for.
I analyze many wars, hence the plural of my title. Most studies of war
have been conducted by historians and political scientists who are
international relations (IR) specialists. The latter have focused on wars
involving the major powers of Europe since 1816, which period provides
quantitative data sets of wars. Their preferred method is statistical, but it is
also Euro- and modernity-biased. In contrast, historians study wars in many
periods and regions. They also remind us that wars do not come as separate,
independent cases to be aggregated into statistical models. They come in
sequences, in which experience of the past deeply influences the living. Few
historians, however, dare to engage in comparative analysis across different
regions or periods of history. I dare do this by drawing on their detailed
analyses.
As a comparative and historical sociologist, I cover sequences of war
and peace over several regions and periods of history, chosen because they
offer well-documented cases containing varied war frequencies—namely,
Rome, imperial China, the Mongols, Japan, medieval and modern Europe,
pre-Columbian and Latin America, the world wars, and recent American and
Middle Eastern wars. Well-documented means ample written records exist,
but many societies have not left such records. I regret that I have neglected
historical South and Southeast Asian wars as well as classical Greece for
reasons of length, language, and personal exhaustion. I do not claim that
mine is a representative sample of wars. That is not possible to provide,
since the total number of wars remains unknown and many known ones are
only minimally recorded, as in the colonial wars touched on in chapters 8
and 10. I deal with sequences of wars, for wars rarely come singly, and the
past constrains the present. This is the tyranny of history. I present simple
statistics where they are available. I focus on interstate wars, but since these
are often linked to civil wars and extrastate wars (wars involving nonstate
contenders), I discuss them, too, where relevant and where records exist.
Military power is also used for domestic repression, which has been a
precondition for rulers’ ability to make any wars at all, but I will not discuss
such repression in much detail.
In the course of history, war has obviously changed enormously in
weapons, techniques, and organization. The lethality of weapons has grown
exponentially over the last few centuries, and the devastation of airpower
was added in the twentieth century and cyberwar in the twenty-first. This
required major changes in military organization and tactics. The organization
of state armies has become much more complex, and the nature of battle has
fundamentally changed. Body-on-body “ferocious” killing has partially
given way to “callous” killing from a distance. Soldiers no longer stand
upright in battle. They would be decimated if they did. Modern soldiers
disperse in small units over larger battlefields, seeking cover, living
underground—quite successfully, since their casualty rate has not increased,
despite far more lethal weapons. Military medicine has produced a major
decline in those dying from their wounds, accompanied by greater
consciousness of psychiatric ailments. Yet weapons, especially airpower,
have increased the civilian casualty rate, and it is now routine to define the
total population of a country as the enemy. In the modern period political
and religious ideologies justifying war have penetrated more deeply into
social structure. Finally, our evidence has greatly increased in a modern
surge in literacy, adding ordinary soldiers’ writings and social surveys to
chroniclers’ narratives in earlier periods.
In contrast, the causes of wars and the nature of war-and-peace
decisions have changed much less. The biggest variations have been among
different types of war. I distinguish wars of aggression, defense, and mutual
provocation or escalation. I also distinguish four main types of aggressive
war: (1) in-and-out raiding, (2) using military power to change or strengthen
regimes abroad to make them compliant, a form of indirect imperialism, (3)
conquest and direct rule over slivers of border territory, and (4) conquest and
direct rule of territorial empires. Obviously, a war of aggression leads also to
defense by those attacked, whereas many wars mix up elements of more than
one type. Also important has been the difference between symmetric and
asymmetric warfare, that is, whether combatant forces were near equals in
power or grossly unequal. Each of these types of war has had certain
common features through the ages, so that generalizations are possible. But
there is a historical contrast between raiding and imperial conquest, on the
one hand, and regime change and slivers of territory, on the other. The
former pair have almost disappeared from the earth in recent decades,
whereas the latter pair endure.
As a sociologist I hold to two methodological principles: on the one
hand, the need for analytical and conceptual rigor, which is necessarily
generalizing; on the other, the need to grasp empirical reality, which is
inescapably varied. There is always tension, I hope creative tension, between
the two. I start with the universal concepts and one near-universal
assumption framing my research. I assume that we humans seek to increase
our valued resources—material possessions, pleasures, knowledge, social
status, and whatever else we might value—or at least that enough of us do
this to give human society its dynamism, its history. And in order to
maintain or increase our resources, we need to exercise power, defined as the
ability to get others to do things that otherwise they would not do.
 There are two different faces of power. First, power enables some
humans to achieve their goals by dominating others. This is “power over”
others, called distributive power or domination, and it generates empires,
social stratification, social classes, and gender and racial domination. These
are all drivers of war. Second, however, power also enables humans to
cooperate with each other to achieve things that they could not achieve
separately. This is “power through” others, or collective power. Human
development would not be possible without collective power, people
cooperating to achieve their goals, while almost all known societies have
contained distributive power relations, that is, social stratification. Collective
and distributive power are closely entwined, especially in the minds of
rulers, who normally claim that their power over others is wielded to the
benefit of all, just as imperialists claim that they bring the benefits of
civilization to the conquered—as have Chinese, Roman, European, Soviet,
and now American rulers.
In the volumes of my Sources of Social Power, I distinguished four
sources of power: ideological, economic, military, and political. I have also
come to make three adjustments to this scheme. First, I distinguish political
power exercised within rulers’ domestic domains and “diplomatic,” peaceful
geopolitical power exercised abroad. Second, I pair ideologies with emotions
since both surpass empirical knowledge. Ideologies and emotions “fill in the
gaps” between pieces of scientifically and empirically ascertainable
knowledge. We do not have objective knowledge of the world, and so we act
with the help of generalized meaning systems (such as liberalism,
conservatism, nationalism, religion, or family values) and emotional
commitments. The two are entwined, since powerful ideologies lead to
strong emotions. Third, I have seen these four power sources as means to
achieve whatever goals people have. I still believe this, but now I explicitly
add that power can be seen as an end in itself, which I will explain more in a
moment.
Control over these power resources offers the principal ways in which
others can be induced to do things that they would not otherwise do.
Wielding ideological, economic, military, and political and geopolitical
power is the principal means to achieve desired goals. So to explain war, we
must understand why humans choose war rather than use economic
exchange, shared cooperative ideologies, or peaceful politics or geopolitics
to secure valued ends. In fact, more disputes are settled or simmer by these
means, without leading to war. Geopolitics contains two distinct elements:
the effect of the geographic, ecological environment on human action, as
stressed by late nineteenth-century writers; and the international relations
between states and communities, as stressed by today’s political scientists.
Perhaps the choice of war is not quite the right word. Rulers may feel
constrained by the warrior role they believe is required of them. War is
simply what Roman senators or Mongol khans or French kings or American
presidents do, habitually, when they feel slighted or sense opportunity.
Indeed, they do often feel they have no choice in particular situations but to
go to war.
The vast majority of people throughout history seem to have preferred
peace to war, so far as we can judge. They have felt that they could achieve
their desired goals better through economic exchange, shared ideologies, or
diplomacy than through the exercise of military power. So I am seeking to
explain the exceptions, to explain war.

The (IR)Rationality of War

Are wars rational? The basic issue is whether wars do achieve desired and
desirable goals. If so, we might call a war rational; if not, it might be
irrational. But we must distinguish between rationality of means and ends.
Rationality of means concerns efficient decision making, which is measured
and calculative, balancing goals against means, probably after some debate,
according to the best information knowable at the time, and where the means
of war seem to be adequate for reaching desired ends. Irrationality of means
occurs when the decision for war is made for hasty, uninformed, emotional,
or ideological reasons and when the means are predictably inadequate to
achieving the ends. Often the ends sought through war are not reached. But
this can happen for many reasons, not all of which were predictable at the
time of the decision to go to war. War proved a mistake, but this was not
evident beforehand—mistaken, but not irrational.
So I add the legal principle of the reasonable person or bystander.
Would such a person have judged that war would achieve its ends?
Obviously, rulers who commit to wars always think this is rational behavior.
Adolf Hitler thought so when invading Russia, declaring war on the United
States, and slaughtering Jews. But few others thought so, including many of
his generals. The judgment of rationality rests with contemporaries or later
scholars, including myself. There is room for disagreement, but a charge of
irrationality may be made where these observers conclude from the available
evidence that the desired ends could not have been reached, whatever the
later contingencies of the war. For example, this was my own view just
before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, as expressed in my book
Incoherent Empire.1 Making the generous assumption that the main goal of
the Bush administration was the replacement of Saddam Hussein’s autocracy
with a democratic state, U.S. forces never had significant Iraqi allies who
shared this desire, and they had not prepared at all for confronting sectarian
divides among Iraqis. As I predicted, the Americans had to strike a deal with
some sectarian groups to rule over others, and a disorderly ethnocracy, not
an orderly democracy, resulted. This was an irrational war fought for a
delusory goal. So, largely, was the Ukrainian invasion launched by President
Putin in 2022. But in most wars the folly is not as glaring as this. Whether
there is irrationality of means may be arguable.
Judging the rationality of ends is problematic, since ultimately it
involves a judgment about whether war produces “benefit,” and for whom.
Benefit is contestable. Hitler devised an extraordinarily efficient program to
kill Jews, six million of them killed in only four years, a rationality of means
perhaps unequaled in all of history. Hitler and his acolytes believed that this
genocide was also rational as an end, since they feared that the mere
existence of Jews threatened civilization itself. But virtually no one else has
believed this or would consider the end to be rational in the sense of bringing
any general benefit. To us, Hitler seems maniacal in his pursuit of this goal.
But this is an extreme case, and whether and to whom a goal brings
“benefit” is often arguable.
We are on somewhat safer ground with the narrower materialist view of
rationality as identified by Realist and Marxist theorists. They see wars as
mainly aimed at economic gain or geopolitical survival (or both), from
which the likely profit or secure survival derived from war may or may not
exceed its cost. There are four elements involved in this calculation:
weighing (a) the cost in money and (b) in lives against (c) the likelihood of
victory and (d) the rewards likely to ensue from victory. In my case studies I
try to assess the extent to which each of these elements is taken into account.
This kind of economic-military trade-off constitutes instrumental rationality,
as Max Weber defined it. Where the costs are predictably greater than the
profit, war would be materially irrational. Yet even this measurement is
difficult since economic profit, casualty rates, and the chances of victory do
not share the same metric, and there is no way of calculating how many
deaths suffered are worth how much profit made for what chances of victory.
If human life is considered sacred, perhaps no death is worth any amount of
profit—the pacifist position.
Yet there is an intermediary position, for proportionality might be
applied. As we shall see, soldiers in battle often try to apply this: they will
accept risking their lives provided they are not being used as cannon fodder
and if there is a good chance that victory is achievable. If they perceive this
is unlikely, they will try to subvert orders or mutiny or desert. Under
proportionality we might decide, for example, that the twenty-one worst
wars and atrocities in history in terms of deaths, which I list in table 10.1,
each of which resulted in the deaths of over three million people, could not
be considered rational, even if they brought profit for the aggressors. But
how many deaths would be worth it? There is no satisfactory answer to this.
Great conquerors may pay scant attention to the lives of an “enemy”
population, or indeed to their own troops’ lives. From their point of view, the
choice of war is rational, since it benefits them and their circle. But we may
feel that the benefit is not widespread enough to be justified. At a minimum,
we must carefully assess what benefit accrues to what proportion of the
people, and to judge how rational a war is accordingly. Though we shall find
that wars have varied considerably in these terms, in general we shall see
that most of them are irrational in terms of such means and ends.
Yet wars may be also aimed at desired but nonmaterial goals, such as
glory, honor, assuaging anger, exacting revenge, or pursuing an ideology.
Power may also be a valued end in itself. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “What
is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power
itself, in man. What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness. What is
happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war.”2
Those who command may get intrinsic enjoyment from dominating
others, regardless of what other benefits they might experience. They enjoy
the emotions they elicit from subordinates and conquered peoples, ranging
from adoration and admiration, through respect and envy, to hatred, fear, and
sheer terror. Chinggis (Genghis) Khan is reputed to have said, “Man’s
greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total
possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding,
use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and support, gazing upon and
kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the berries
of their breasts.”3
Political correctness prevents modern leaders from saying such things,
yet power remains an intoxication that might need no other justification. As
the philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron said, “The
satisfactions of amour-propre, victory or prestige are no less real than the so-
called material satisfactions, such as the gain of a province or a population.”4
These satisfactions are somewhat ineffable, not easily quantified. They may
also bring not benefit but disaster to the people as a whole. The pursuit of
status, prestige, and honor by “statesmen” for themselves and their state is an
important source of war, independent of what other rewards they might get
from it. Moreover, a sense of excitement and enjoyment in power may even
trickle down quite broadly among the people, as it probably did among the
Romans and Mongols and does among many Americans today, proud of
their country’s military power, which seems to boost their own egos.
When domination and glory are desired ends in themselves, this may fit
Max Weber’s second form of rationality, value rationality, which he defined
as “belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious,
or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success. . . . The
more the value to which action is oriented is elevated to the status of an
absolute value, the more ‘irrational’ in this [instrumental] sense the
corresponding action is. For the more unconditionally the actor devotes
himself to this value for its own sake, . . . the less he is influenced by
considerations of the consequences of his action.”5
His term value rationality may seem paradoxical, but it certainly fits
Hitler’s perversion of rationality. Many powerful groups may be driven by
values overriding everything else—values for hatreds, glory, honor, or
ideological transformation. Rulers pursuing such ends might calculate
precisely the means available for achieving them. But are the ends
“rational”? The benefits they bring are usually distributed very unequally;
small elites benefit most. They may indicate endless ambition, without a
resting place—the malady of infinite aspiration, in the sociologist Emile
Durkheim’s words. The main problem of an infinite aspiration to conquer is
the number of lives it destroys. War is a peculiar activity: it is designed to
kill a very large number of people, and this surely requires a very high level
of justification. Self-defense is generally considered such a justification, but
we will see that this is quite an elastic concept.
So I will tread carefully when dealing with the rationality of war, trying
to distinguish means from ends, errors from irrationality, costs from benefits,
the odds of victory, and social constraints. I try to assess who benefited and
who lost from the wars I discuss—for whom exactly was war rational in the
sense of beneficial? The answer is often almost no one.

Defining Military Power

Human societies involve conflict and cooperation among persons wielding
varying blends of ideological, economic, military, and political or
geopolitical power. These provide the key dynamic of human history toward
the development of more and more complex and powerful socie-ties.
Conflicts may be relatively peaceful—using mixtures of ideological,
economic, or political-diplomatic power—or they may be warlike, resorting
to military power. Military power may also achieve desired ends when
merely threatened, without war following. The Chinese military strategist
Sun Tzu wrote in the sixth century BCE, “The supreme art of war is to subdue
the enemy without fighting.”6 War is only one way of achieving ends, and
we must ask in what circumstances human groups turn to military power to
achieve their goals.
So the first of three additional themes in this book concerns the causes
of war—when, where, by whom, and why war rather than peace is chosen or
stumbled into. If we want to achieve Immanuel Kant’s ideal of perpetual
peace, we need to know what to avoid that otherwise might lead to war. I
devote eight chapters to examining the causes and rationality of wars
through human history.
My second additional theme concerns the culmination of war, in battles,
and its cost in terms of death or mutilation. I focus on exploring how soldiers
—normally men—are induced to accept such a risk. Why do they fight
despite the strong possibility that they will end up dead or physically or
psychologically mutilated? Few soldiers actually like battle, so how do they
cope with their dominant mental states in battle, which are fear and loathing?
Many have argued that soldiers have moral qualms that are important in
influencing their behavior in battle. I treat the management of fear, loathing,
and moral qualms in three more chapters. These focus mainly on wars from
the second half of the nineteenth century until today. Alas, this reduction of
focus is necessary because these have been the only wars in which most
soldiers have been literate and have thus left written records. I must
apologize to sailors for excluding their experiences, but this book is long
enough without them. Flyers do get some attention, though obviously only in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
My third additional theme concerns whether there has been a decline of
war, either throughout human history, or only in modern times, or indeed
merely since the end of World War II. In chapter 10 I dissect all these claims
skeptically. No long-run or short-run trends can be discerned in the
frequency of war. But this is not conventional military history. I neglect
tactics, weapons, battle formations, and the like, except when they influence
the answers to the questions mentioned above.
Military power is the social organization of lethal violence. It coerces
people to do things they would not otherwise do by the threat of death or
serious injury. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said, “War
is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”7 Military power
is physical, furious, unpredictable. Above all else, despite the positive lures
of army recruitment drives and despite armies’ role in alleviating natural
disasters, the main point of militaries is to kill people. Since a lethal threat is
terrifying, military power evokes distinctive psychological emotions and
physiological symptoms. The emotional intensity of approaches to war, and
of wars themselves, and of actual battle, is much higher than the relatively
pragmatic calm of economies and polities, while ideologies come both hot
and cold. Clausewitz added a high level of chance: “War is the realm of
uncertainty: three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are
wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. . . . War is the realm of
chance.”8 He said this was due to the “frictions” of battle, where nothing
goes as planned. The Duke of Wellington said war was “guessing what was
at the other side of the hill.” These generals suggest a random element in war
that obviously threatens our chances of reaching an overall theory of war.
These are the distinctive features of military power, separating it from
the other three power sources. This is not to deny an often close relationship
between political and military power, and I focus mostly on interstate wars.
But wars between communities lacking states, civil wars, and nonstate
guerilla forces will all play important roles, and so will contradictions
between military and political power revealed, for example, in both coups
and “coup-proofing” by rulers who deliberately weaken their armed forces to
protect themselves from their own generals. We cannot merge these two
forms of power.
Routinized coercion dominates within armed forces. Rank is all.
Military power provides the most rigid form of class structure found in
human societies. Those of higher rank must be obeyed, to a degree that is
unknown in ideological, economic, or political organizations. Soldiers have
formally signed away their free will. They cannot freely leave if they find
war not to their taste. They are under intense military discipline, which is
intended to stifle the urge to cower or flee. Their lives are dominated by
orders, however unpleasant or foolish officers might seem, however savage
the drilling and disciplining involved. If they do not obey, they will be
physically harmed, and sometimes even killed.
There are exceptions. Guerillas and other less formal militaries, like
tribal and some feudal forces, are freer in the sense that they may challenge
orders and even decide to walk away from combat if they are dissatisfied. In
modern armies there are also written codes of conduct that in principle limit
the power of higher ranks. You need to be very brave, however, to invoke
such codes against your officers. There are differences even among modern
state armies—for example, between the rigid discipline of eighteenth-
century Prussian forces and the more easygoing American armies of today.
Nonetheless, armies wield fundamentally coercive power within as well as
without, to create a military culture in which for lower ranks choice, rational
or otherwise, may be very restricted.
Yet armed forces have a dual organizational form, combining the
apparent opposites of hierarchy and comradeship, of intense discipline and
strong esprit de corps, especially in elite regiments. These combinations are
cultivated by commanders so that soldiers will not rationally respond to fear
with flight, as you or I might. The commanders may also provide alcohol or
drugs to dampen soldiers’ sense of danger. This is again distinctive to
organizations deploying lethal force. But military power wielded externally,
over enemy soldiers and civilians, is the most punitive, fearsome, and
arbitrary power of all.
Militaries depend on the other power sources: economic supplies and
the logistics to deploy them; ideological morale based on varying
combinations of solidarity, loyalty, patriotism, and belief that the war is just
and can be won; and political resources in the form of conscripted manpower
and revenue streams. Yet military power once mobilized has an ultimately
autonomous existence, for it alone can lay lives and territories to waste.
Mostly it plays an intermittent role. In peacetime, which is most of the time,
it may be confined to barracks, guard duties, parades, and exercises. It may
slumber as a distinct military caste living in its own communities on the
fringes of society. In many tribal or feudal societies and among guerillas,
“armies” barely existed at all outside wartime. Yet when war threatens,
military power comes onto center stage in explosive bursts, terrifying,
destructive, and unpredictable.
The four sources of power are ideal types, and most real organizations
combine elements of more than one of them. Some economic organizations
wield some lethal power, as in systems of slave labor; and in ideological
organizations, heresy may be met with death. There are lesser forms of
coercion—employees discharged may be blacklisted by other employers,
and someone who quits an ideological movement may suffer social
ostracism. If you live in a given political community, you are willy-nilly a
citizen-subject of that community, subject to its laws and punishments. Many
states inflict capital punishment and all forcibly fine or imprison or inflict
physical harm on lawbreakers. All forms of power organization wield some
coercion, many of them inflict physical punishment, and a few kill. But
armies are far more consistently and lethally coercive—within as well as
without, since casualties are suffered by all. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour
prime minister of Britain in the 1920s, remarked: “We hear war called
murder. It is not: it is suicide.” It is both.
There are also more benign aspects of military organization, manifested
in enthusiastic enlistment, warm comradeship, handsome uniforms, banners,
stirring brass bands, belief in a cause worth fighting for, and patriotism. But
in war these are secondary to inflicting death. The enthusiasm shown upon
enlistment rarely survives long. This book is not about the glories of military
history. War is hell, and militaries train soldiers for hell. Soldiers themselves
come to know this. Civilians often do not.
One further definition. Militarism combines the power predominance of
military elites in society, ideological exaltation of military virtues above
ideologies of peace, and extensive and aggressive military preparedness.
Militarism comes in degrees: some societies are highly militaristic, others
much less so—and so less likely to start wars.
 Few rules restrain military power. “Rules of war” are difficult to
enforce, even in the era of Geneva Conventions and the International
Criminal Court. So far war crimes trials have been conducted only against
the losers of wars. The major charge brought against Nazi leaders at
Nuremburg was launching aggressive war, and this was also prohibited in
principle in the United Nations Charter and in later international treaties. But
aggressive war has disappeared as a charge from war crimes trials, which
have focused on two other offenses, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Since U.S. wars today are mainly aggressive, no American politician could
accept that this charge be levied. Numerous norms have also spread
concerning “just” versus “unjust” practices of warfare, but there have been
many infringements, too. Norms have especially concerned the treatment of
fellow officers, of prisoners, and of civilians, especially old men, women,
and children, yet these are often breached. The relative paucity of rules or
norms is unlike economic or ideological power—and especially unlike
political power whose core is law. War is the least lawlike, least predictable
sphere of human action—which makes both rational decisions and causal
analyses more difficult.

Defining War
A war is a lethal conflict between two groups organized by rival states or
communities, or by rival communities within countries riven by civil war.
Although interstate and civil wars are often kept apart in analyses, in reality
about one-third of wars mix them together. But how big does armed conflict
have to be to count as war? Not duels, or brawls, or even a mere skirmish
between rival patrols. But where do we draw the line? Do we need to? Most
political scientists have followed the “Correlates of War” (CoW) research
project, which has produced statistics on wars since 1816. It has defined war
as an armed dispute that causes one thousand or more battle-related fatalities
inflicted within a twelve-month period. I will not stick rigidly to that, and
indeed lesser levels of fatalities have been recently added by political
scientists. A word of warning here: two different terms, casualties and
deaths (or fatalities), are used for losses. Casualties is the broader term,
meaning all soldiers removed from battle by death, wounds, capture, or
having gone missing. Unfortunately, some sources stating losses do not
make clear which is being referred to.
 Setting a required minimum number of deaths makes quantitative
analysis easier, and one thousand fatalities has the merit of including only
significant wars, but any threshold figure should merely be a rough
guideline. A conflict resulting in only five hundred battlefield deaths
between two small countries is surely as significant for them as are five
thousand deaths in combat between two big ones. Furthermore, many uses of
military power fall short of war as defined above yet involve the use or
threat of lethal force. So political scientists have introduced an intermediary
category between war and peace, “Militarized Interstate Disputes” (MIDs),
defined as conflicts in which the threat, display, or use of military force short
of war by one state is explicitly directed toward the government, official
representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state. These
range in intensity from mere threats to combat short of one thousand
casualties. Gary Goertz and his colleagues note that the absence of war does
not necessarily indicate peace. The Cold War produced no fighting between
American and Soviet forces, but one might not be inclined to call this
“peace.” So they enumerate five categories of growing conflict short of war.9
These are relevant to whether recent history has seen a decline of war, for
decline might take the form of a shift across these categories to lesser
violence rather than to full peace.
Statistical analysis of war frequency and casualties is possible only in
the modern period—though rough figures are more widely available. But
statistics have limitations. These count all wars as one, no matter how big (if
it is over one thousand casualties), yet the two world wars dwarf the
twentieth century. Explaining them is likely to be a far more significant
exercise than explaining large numbers of lesser conflicts. Separating them
as single cases also ignores the fact that wars come in sequences, each one
influencing the next. Severity can be measured through the number of deaths
or casualties, but the quality of estimates varies greatly. Civilian casualties
are not included in the CoW measure of war, and they are often impossible
to calculate. Quantification also downplays history and geography. The wars
of different epochs and ecologies probably differ. The most obvious
difference through time is the exponentially increasing lethality of weapons,
which require major adaptations. As Will Rogers remarked, “You can’t say
civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new
way.” Each place and period has idiosyncrasies, which makes generalization
challenging.
 Historical records are biased toward narrating war rather than peace.
War is exciting, peace boring. Can you “narrate” peace? It doesn’t change.
Great monuments like castles, triumphal stelae and arches, statues of
warriors, and paintings of battles survive, often considered great works of
art, whereas peaceful peasants and workers leave few traces. Since the
winners of wars write the records, they suppress the losers’ experiences and
extol the glory, not the shame, of war. Nowadays, however, victors’ accounts
are challenged. Revisionism is now necessary for the award of a history
PhD, and there is much pulling down of statues of warriors and slavers.
Alas, this is belated criticism. There are periods and regions for which
written records, let alone statistics, of war are not available, as in much of
precolonial Africa. Imperial powers kept tallies of their own dead but didn’t
count dead natives. Especially difficult are estimates of civilian deaths
caused by war but indirectly, through malnutrition and disease. We can
estimate, if to varying degrees in different periods and regions. But I now
turn to a widely accepted generalization: war is universal because it is
human nature.
 CHAPTER TWO

Is War Universal?

HOW WIDESPREAD IS WAR? Are we doomed to repeat, generation after

generation, Plato’s observation that “only the dead have seen the end of
war”? Perhaps war is hardwired into either human nature or human society.
All complex societies have had specialized groups of armed persons, and
almost all have raised armies. But have they all gone to war? There are two
main sets of findings on this question: whether war existed among very early
human societies, and variations in the incidence of war across space and
time. They both strongly suggest that war is not genetically programmed into
human nature.

The Earliest Human Societies

Much of the argument concerns the very earliest societies, which, since the
time of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many have believed lacked
war. Others have endorsed Ibn Khaldun’s fourteenth-century statement:
“Wars and different kinds of fighting have always occurred in the world
since God created it. It is something natural among human beings.”1 The
argument continues today.
Archaeologists are our first witnesses. They have found no remains
indicating organized warfare before discovery of a site in the Sudan along
the Nile River, dated to around 10,000 BCE. In that site twenty-four of fifty-
nine well-preserved skeletons were found in close proximity to what may
have been parts of weapons—suggestive of group combat, perhaps, but not
conclusive. Clearer was the discovery of twenty-seven skeletons at Nataruk
in Kenya, datable to 8000 BCE. Twelve of these were well-preserved, ten of
them showing evidence of a death inflicted by a spear, arrow, or club. The
bodies had not been given a proper burial, which suggests that this was not a
feud within a single community, but a small war between rival bands.2
Nataruk was then adjacent to Lake Turkana in a resource-rich environment,
so it could have been a struggle between groups over rights to irrigated land
or fishing. But there is no indication of who the victims were or whether
they were settled there.
In Australia there is evidence in cave paintings of duels between
individuals dating to 8000 BCE; there are paintings of group confrontations
datable to 4000 BCE. In Central Europe disorganized mass burials of persons
conjectured to have died from either battle or execution date from the period
5600–4900 BCE.3 In Spain rock art similarly suggests a growth in organized
violence from the sixth to the third millennium BCE, related to the
appearance of agriculture, more social complexity, and the emergence of war
leaders, identifiable by their burial goods, commanding groups of warriors.4
Archaeologists of the early Bronze Age, from around 3000 BCE in Europe,
have correlated injuries on skeletons with unearthed weapons of the time to
conclude that these were deaths in combat. For a little later period in the
Balkans, it is estimated that weapons and body armor represented about 5–
10 percent of total bronze remains.5 Yet in Central Asia there is no clear
evidence of war until 3000 BCE. In America the first evidence dates to 2200
BCE. In Japan right up to 800 BCE, only about 4 percent of skeletons reveal
evidence of a violent death, and there are no known cases of group deaths
from violence. As Hisashi Nakao and his colleagues observe, such gross
variations across human communities suggest that war is not built into our
nature.6
We cannot be certain that these were the first cases of warfare, for such
an argument would rest on an absence of earlier finds. Perhaps earlier
evidence of war may be found in the future. Yet at present it seems likely
that minimally organized warfare began sometime after 8000 BCE, much
later in some regions of the world, and it probably related to settled
farming.7 As William Eckhardt had earlier concluded in his review of the
literature, “War was a function of development rather than instinct.”8
Anthropologists have long disputed such issues. Lawrence Keeley
claimed that early hunter-gatherer societies were extremely warlike.9 But
Brian Ferguson went through Keeley’s early cases one by one, arguing that
they had been cherry-picked.10 He concluded that only a few communities
regularly practiced warfare. Azar Gat defended Keeley by assembling data
on two groups, Australian aborigines and peoples of the Pacific Northwest of
Canada and the United States. He says they offer “laboratories” in which
primitive peoples observed by Westerners were as yet “uncontaminated” by
the violence of Western imperialism.11 Contamination makes it difficult to
generalize from the experience of present-day hunter-gatherers to prehistoric
hunter-gatherers. Recently warlike groups, such as today’s Yanomami of
Brazil, appear to have developed much of their ferocity in response to
Western colonialism.12 But Gat claims that his two uncontaminated groups
were violent, probably more so than modern societies in that a higher
proportion of men died as a result of violence.
Gat focuses on hunter-gatherers in Australia, using anthropologists’
estimates of killing rates in different regions.13 The numbers killed in war
are given over periods varying from ten years to three generations, yet the
estimates of total male population are apparently one-point-in-time figures,
and they do not take account of additional comings of age of young men
each year. Recalculating their figures to do this would give violent death
rates among men of 5–10 percent. These figures are still quite high,
comparable to rates found in modern wars. Yet in a band of forty people that
contained twelve men of fighting age, if archaeologists dug up three whose
wounds indicated a violent death, the rate would be 25 percent—higher than
in modern armies but perhaps an artifact of small numbers.
Hunter-gatherer war bands normally numbered fewer than thirty men,
and war was occasional and brief. It had to be brief since virtually all healthy
adult males in the community participated in them, and if they were away on
campaign, there would be no meat or fish for their families. So before any
attack was launched, the men would go on a hunting expedition to provide
enough food for their families during their absence, but this had to be short.
Gat says that in a war involving all adult males, if an armed encounter went
badly, most of the adult male population might be killed. The highest death
rates were almost never found in set-piece battles, which were often
terminated at the first casualty. Instead, the most fatalities occurred in
surprise ambushes. The element of surprise could lead to a rout and
massacre, followed by the incorporation of most of the women and children
of the defeated into the victorious group. In terms of the proportion of a
population killed, these episodes have been surpassed in modern times only
by genocides in which the women and children are massacred, too. They
were quite rare events, however, not typical of normal aborigine skirmishing.
Richard G. Kimber concludes that “aborigines appear to have been no
different from other peoples on earth in that, despite a generally harmonious
situation, conflict did occur.”14 He also emphasizes the far more massacres
committed on aborigines by European settlers in Australia. Lloyd Warner
suggested that the death of young males allowed polygynous marriages to
continue.15 Peace would have created major conflict between sex-starved
young men and the clan leaders, who typically had more than one wife.
Polygyny was common among Australian aborigines, but uncommon among
most other hunter-gatherers.16 Carol Ember and Melvin Ember agree with
Gat in seeing Australian aborigines as rather warlike, as were the fishing
communities of northwest Canada, attributed to fixity of settlement around
natural harbors, which generated a healthy surplus.17 The Calusa of southern
Florida were a more extreme example of a warlike fishing community,
engaged in large-scale slaving raids, able to support three hundred full-time
warriors.18
Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg provide a broader global survey of
twenty-one simple hunter-gatherer societies.19 In twenty of them, the median
level of lethality during a period of one to three years was only three. Of
these incidents, 64 percent involved one killer, one victim—a murder or a
fight. Only in twelve events among these twenty bands was there a killing of
persons from a different band. So war between bands was rare, and homicide
was more common. None of these twenty bands was Australian. The twenty-
first band was exceptional. It contributed no less than 76 percent (thirty-eight
of fifty) of the total number of interband disputes, and this included seven
strings of related killings, whereas the other twenty bands had only two
strings of killings among all of them. The deviant group was the Tiwi of
northern Australia. So indigenous Australians were rather aggressive, but
elsewhere hunter-gatherers made war rarely or not at all. The reason may be
that they were clan societies which generate larger social units sharply
distinguished from other clans. Gat has refuted Rousseau’s claim that
primitive peoples were inherently pacific, but he has not shown that they
were very warlike. Warfare was rare.
Some early warfare was rarely deadly, according to anthropologists’
accounts of peoples in the interior of New Guinea who had had no contact
with white men. The men of two bands would meet in a clearing, sometimes
by earlier agreement, and stand in parallel lines facing each other, just inside
either archery or spear-throwing range. They would shout and swagger
defiance and then throw or shoot. When one or perhaps a few were hit, battle
would stop, the men would disperse, and any victim would be carried back
to his village. Neither side was capable of the coordination necessary to
conquer the other or seize its territory. Slaves were valueless in their
economy, and more territory was only of marginal value. These communities
had neither the motivation nor the ability to make war. Ritual combats were
ways of venting grievances and displaying one’s honor and bravery in a
relatively safe way.20 Aggressive behavior might flare up into violence, but
this was ritually managed to stop short of anything we might call war.
Such rituals might have been more successful than any achievements
made by the diplomats of history or by today’s international institutions of
conflict mediation sponsored by the United Nations and other agencies. War
was avoided over millennia, partly unintentionally, by maintaining a mixed
economy of horticulture and hunter-gathering from which war rarely
emerged, partly by deliberately avoiding the development of classes and
states, developing only what anthropologists call “rank” inequality of status
without inherited inequality of material possessions or political power.21 If
we could do without classes and states, there would probably be no more
war, an admittedly utopian prospect.
The likeliest conclusion is that pre-state communities contained
interpersonal violence but only rarely warfare.22 Christopher Coker argues
the opposite, but only by merging the two.23 Organized warfare may have
emerged first in fixed fishing and agricultural settlements producing
substantial surpluses and was enhanced when classes and states appeared.
Keith Otterbein says settled agriculture normalized organized warfare, but it
was helped by armed bands inherited from previous bands of hunters of
large game.24 War then escalated when peoples were trapped within fertile
ecologies like wetlands and river valleys, so they could no longer run away
from attackers without major sacrifice. Their lands were worth defending,
and outsiders thought they were worth attacking.
Early states were surrounded by mobile “barbarians,” hunting and
gathering, foraging, practicing slash-and-burn horticulture or pastoralism.
James Scott notes that for a very long time most of the world’s population
lived in such communities, and only a small minority lived under states: the
first warring Sumerian states came “only around 3,100 BCE, more than four
millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism” because mixed,
decentralized economies predominated.25 To explain the appearance of states
and wars, he emphasizes the growth of grain crops, which ripen all at the
same time and are highly visible, impossible to hide. Thus, they can be
taxed, seized, and stored. Armed thugs could do this by force and become an
idle ruling class living off others’ surplus, helped by armed retinues, city
walls, administrative records, and wars to acquire slaves—all serving to cage
the people under their rule. So began almost all the world civilizations. Other
anthropologists disagree, seeing granaries as evidence of collective sharing
of resources. David Graeber and David Wengrow have suggested that in
early city-states relatively egalitarian and somewhat “democratic” political
institutions—such as town councils, neighborhood ward associations, and
political assemblies that included many women—oscillated with institutions
embodying more class inequality, aristocracy, monarchy, and patriarchy.26
We cannot discern which made the more wars, though threats from outside
peoples often forced egalitarian groups to place themselves under the
protection of armed men. If these men could manage to hold on to power or
if outsider “marcher lords,” already featuring kings and aristocracies,
triumphed, then history’s dynastic empires appeared and the scale of warfare
increased.
So more than 95 percent of the 150,000 years of humans living on earth
had passed before the appearance of warring states. This means that warfare
is not genetically programmed into us. Biology is not destiny; we are
doomed to warfare not by our genes, but by societies. The 1986 Seville
Statement on Violence, signed by distinguished scholars in biology,
psychology, ethology, genetics, and other human sciences, declares that war
is not genetically based, that we have not inherited a tendency to make war
from our animal ancestors, and that there has been no natural bias toward
aggressive behavior. Nor do some racial groups’ genes dispose them to more
or less warlike behavior. Geneticists have shown that despite superficial
differences between human communities in the shape of the nose, the color
of the skin, and so on, human beings are remarkably similar in their DNA
sequences. Currently, about 85 percent of human genetic variability has been
found within racially defined groups, only about 15 percent between them.
Malešević provides a detailed critique of essentialist genetic and biological
explanations of violence and of explanations in terms of universal, stable,
and biologically uniform human emotions relevant to violence.27
 Can we derive answers from our nearest relatives? Gorillas are not
aggressive. In a Rwandan forest I sat within a meter of a group of gorillas
without any sense of danger. They ignored my presence although an
enormous silverback male brushed against my arm as he came ambling by
me. But humans share more genes with bonobos (apes) and chimps.
Bonobos are much less aggressive than chimps, but humans are more varied
than either. When relations between human groups deteriorate, they can
become much more violent and on a much larger scale than relations among
chimps. When human relations are good, they are very good, accompanied
by much greater payoff from neighborly relations than bonobos manage.
Humans do more than just mingle and have sex, like the peaceful bonobos.
They trade, share elaborate ceremonies, and generate the forms of
cooperation that led to their unique social development. “When it comes to
intergroup relations, we beat our close relatives on both the positive and
negative ends of the scale.”28 Coker notes that no fewer than seventy species
aggress violently against members of their species, but only the human
species makes organized warfare.29 Yet only humans also devise complex,
flexible, cooperative divisions of labor. Extreme variability of violence and
cooperation seems to be distinctive to our species.
Individuals vary in propensity for violence. We all know people who
are aggressive, others who are meek and mild. We will see that a few
soldiers like violence, for reasons of either sadism or heroism, but most
soldiers do not. In many areas of social behavior, personality differences
matter little. The growth of capitalism depends not on a few persons with
distinct personalities but on large numbers of entrepreneurs and workers
whose personal differences will tend to cancel each other out. But war-and-
peace decisions are made by small numbers of persons, sometimes by a
single monarch, dictator, prime minister, or president. Because of the
powerful social role they occupy, their personalities matter considerably to
outcomes of war and peace. Attila the Hun was likely to make war, whereas
Edward the Confessor preferred peace, and the history of white America is
from one mad king, George III, to another, Donald Trump. Such
idiosyncrasies limit general theory.
Yet whatever the human propensity for violence, cooperation has
played a larger part in social development. Those who fight die; those who
cooperate survive and prosper—a peaceful version of the survival of the
fittest. Like most behavioral characteristics, this one involves opposites—we
may have a propensity for violence, but we also have one for cooperation (as
we do for love and hate, introversion and extroversion, and so on). Gat
identifies cooperation, competition, and violent conflict as the three
fundamental forms of social interaction and says that humans choose among
them.30 He offers the paradox that war is both innate and optional, by which
he means that it is close to the behavioral surface, triggered with relative
ease. Steven Pinker’s bifurcation of human nature into inner “angels” and
“demons” is similar.31 For war-and-peace decisions I prefer the metaphor of
a balance. Human beings are perched in the center. If their behavior tilts in
one direction, we get war; if it tilts in the other direction, we get peace. But
the question is: What tilts them one way or the other?
Randall Collins in his brilliant book Violence tilts a little toward
peace.32 Using a host of empirical descriptions of violence drawn mostly
from modern brawls, he suggests that most humans do not like violence and
are not very good at it. Confrontations rarely lead to actual physical
violence. Fights that do break out tend to range bullies against the weak and
are not like those in the movies. They are clumsy, imprecise, and frenzied,
involving more flailing and slapping than solid punching. Bystanders rarely
get drawn in, as they often do in the movies. He adds that in war soldiers are
fearful to go “over the top,” and they have bowel problems at the prospect.
Violence is “hard,” he says, because “humans are hard-wired for
interactional entrainment and solidarity,” and this propensity “is stronger
than mobilized aggression.”33 Thus, most people stick at bluster and bluff.
To be violent, Collins says, most people have to overcome fear and tension,
and this happens either in ritualized encounters in which status concerns are
primary, as in duels, or in unusual situations when people are “sucked into”
what he calls a “tunnel of violence,” when normal perceptions are distorted,
pulse rates accelerate as cortisol and adrenaline flood the body, and there is
forward momentum down the tunnel produced by a quick-fire sequence of
events. One example is “forward panic,” found especially in micro-conflicts
in which bullies attack the weak without mercy, but found also in wars,
when one army falters and begins to flee, emboldening the other to rush
forward and engage in a killing frenzy. It is forward panic, he concludes, that
leads to most of the lethality of war.
Yet Collins hedges his bets with a principle of “social evolution”—the
growth of military power organizations. Armies have devised techniques for
keeping men fighting, even though they may be afraid—the entrapping
infantry phalanx, perpetual drilling, cultivating esprit de corps, and an
officer hierarchy backed by military police. At first tribal warfare consisted
of short skirmishes and involved much ritual defiance but considerably less
action. Thus, the capacity for violence has increased with greater, permanent
social organization. Violence is not primordial, and civilization does not
tame it; the opposite is nearer the truth, Collins says.34 Civilization makes
killing easier, more organized, more legitimate, and more efficient, adds
Malešević.35 Yet armies are highly efficient organizations only before they
encounter the enemy. Then all hell breaks loose. Battles are chaotic and
terrifying, the soldier sees that the enemy is trying to kill him, there is no
escape (as there is in street brawling), and his own survival becomes
unpredictable. Fear, anger, uncertainty seize the mind, and reason is
subordinated to emotion. As one side flees during an incident of forward
panic, the most murderous sentiments among the victors are suddenly
induced as fear and uncertainty are released. Anger swells at those
responsible for the fear and the deaths of comrades. Their charge forward,
accompanied by triumphant cries, reinforces emotional hatred. For Collins
serious violence needs both strong social controls and unusual situations.

Variations in the Frequency of War: Gender and Region

Militaries have been overwhelmingly masculine. When we glimpse the mass
armies of Rome, China, Japan, pre-Columbian America, Europe, and
elsewhere, we must visualize them as dense phalanxes of men, not a female
face in sight. Higher officers were older men, while rankers were youngish
males. Warrior norms, masculine and machismo, have amplified the gender
bias. The sense of honor so important in war has been masculine, “being a
man.” Irregular guerilla forces throughout history have contained women,
but fighting soldiers in regular armed forces have been men. The average
male is physically stronger and faster than the average female, so that males
on average made better soldiers in the battlefield body slashing, which lasted
for most of history. This is presumably why armies were male, and it may be
why patriarchy enshrining male dominance became the norm in human
societies. Men were armed, women were not. In earlier hunter-gatherer and
horticultural societies that lacked war, there was relative equality between
the sexes. Maybe Amazon warriors existed, though this has not been proved,
but women have mostly predominated among camp followers. In recent
times many women have had nonfighting roles, as medics, drivers, clerks,
cooks, and computer operators. So is war only part of male genetic makeup?
Women now, however, can equally fire guns and drive tanks, planes,
and drones, and more are becoming fighting soldiers. In World War I many
women served as noncombatants in all armies, and some died performing
their duties. But in 1917 the Kerensky Provisional Government in Russia,
desperate for soldiers, founded fifteen women’s fighting units. The first
Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, all volunteers, was sent to the front
and fought with greater enthusiasm than their war-weary male conscript
comrades. Since the men wanted the war ended, they hated these women,
who seemed to want to prolong it. A second Battalion of Death was
disbanded as the Kerensky government changed policy, but about five
hundred of these women went on their own initiative to the front. A female
light cavalry Cossack unit also went, and another unit was posted to defend
the provisional government headquarters in the Winter Palace. Months later
it was overwhelmed by mostly male Bolshevik soldiers. Veterans of such
units then fought on both sides in the Russian Civil War, though not in all-
female units. Russia led the world in female death dealing.
In the interwar period women fought in the Finnish, Spanish, and Irish
civil wars, as they probably had in earlier civil wars. In World War II
thousands of women fought in the Red Army and the Serb resistance. Slav
women still led in killing! In the Indian National Army allied with the
Japanese the Rani of Jansi was a regiment of women. Elsewhere, few fought.
British and German authorities in World War II authorized women to staff
antiaircraft batteries but not to pull the trigger, a task reserved for
masculinity.36 In the Vietnam War over one hundred thousand women fought
for the PLF (the Vietcong) and the NVA (the North Vietnamese Army),
especially as guerillas and in bringing supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
They took heavy casualties. From the 1970s about a dozen regular armies
have in principle accepted women into almost all roles, but in practice
women have rarely fought. Since modern killing rarely requires big muscles
(except for infantry carrying loads of up to forty-five kilos), it is only a
matter of time before women will become equal killers. In the U.S. and
British air forces there are already women drone killers. We are discovering
that supposedly masculine and machismo sentiments might not be necessary
features of militarism, though these were ever-present in the armies of the
past. Female participation in war atrocities will come, as it already has in
some civil wars. War is not programmed genetically into human beings or
only into men. But culturally and in numbers, it has obviously been male so
far.
The human nature of soldiers is largely (though not entirely) irrelevant.
What matters is that they obey orders. They are always initially terrified,
they would often prefer to flee than fight, but they do usually fight, and only
a few desert. They are not genetically programmed to do this; they fight
because they are socialized and drilled and disciplined, and because they are
trapped in their military formations, especially on the battlefield. Clearly,
however, there are personality differences. Some soldiers are braver or more
vicious than others.
Exaggerating the frequency and scale of war is widespread. Ibn
Khaldun noted that in his time chroniclers grossly exaggerated the size of
armies because sensationalism sold.37 There is a persistent internet myth
(whose source is unclear) that of the supposed 3,400 years of recorded
human history, only 268 have been entirely peaceful. This is bizarre. Who
could possibly know this? Yet even if it were true, it would only mean that
somewhere across the world one dispute turned into war every fifteen
months. The vast majority of human groups in any given year would be at
peace. Scholars have given estimates of wars in Europe over several
centuries varying between 1.1 and 1.4 wars per year. Again, that means that
somewhere in Europe slightly more than one war was ongoing, so that
almost all its very many states were at peace. Ditto with estimates for
historical China. Though complex societies containing states and social
classes have a propensity to make war, their years of warfare are far
outnumbered by their years of peace, and their conflicts are far more likely
to have been settled by diplomacy, or they remained as running sores
without wars.
For warfare since 1816, we can draw on statistical data that reveal large
differences between countries and regions. The CoW criterion of at least one
thousand battle deaths in a single year reveals sixty-six interstate wars
occurring since 1816. Of these sole or main warring states, 54 percent were
European.38 Yet this is an understatement. If we add the seventy-one CoW
colonial wars fought by the Europeans against stateless peoples, their
contribution rises to 68 percent. But this still undercounts colonial wars. In
the forty-three-year period from 1871 to 1914, the British, French, and
Dutch between them probably fought at least a hundred military
engagements against native forces—about 2.5 wars per year.39 Thus,
Europeans have probably perpetrated well over 80 percent of all wars since
1816, an astonishing disproportion, considering that Europeans contributed
only 15 percent of world population at the beginning and 11 percent at the
end of this period.
Europeans were from Mars. Evan Luard pushed back the statistics for
war in Europe over another four centuries to the year 1400, and Jack Levy
did it to 1494.40 They reveal that Europeans’ propensity for war remained
quite high over half a millennium. In the period 1400 to 1559, Luard finds an
average of 1.4 wars fought per year; from 1559 to 1648, the average was
1.25 per year; and from 1648 to 1789, he says it was only 0.29—but these
were mostly big wars between the great powers that had a consequent large
rise in casualties.41 Such averages conceal big differences between countries.
At the extreme, Sweden and Norway fought no wars at all after 1816, but in
earlier centuries Sweden had fought many wars, which indicates differences
between time periods as well as countries. In the post-1816 data sets, no
other continent or region has been anywhere near as warlike as Europe.
Latin America since 1833 has had only about twelve such interstate wars
(see chapter 9).
In the nineteenth century, wars among Africans probably increased—
and the scale of warfare certainly increased—as African leaders, influenced
by Western imperialism, conquered empires of their own. We know that
some of this, like that in the Zulu kingdom, was bloody, but numbers of
casualties are unknown. Nonetheless, African interstate wars have been
almost nonexistent since the colonial powers departed (though civil wars
have raged there). Before then, Europe had led in war making, followed at a
distance by Asia, then the Middle East, and Latin America and Africa
lagging behind. The African and Latin American postcolonial ratios of
interstate wars are three to five times less than the global average.42 My
tentative conclusion is that other continents and countries in modern times
came more from Venus than Mars—though not entirely, for few known
societies have been entirely free of war over long periods.
We know of both warlike and relatively peaceful cases in all periods of
history. In ancient Near Eastern history we can perhaps contrast warring
Sumerian city-states and then Sumerian dynasties with the more peaceful
Egyptian Old and Middle Kingdoms.43 There are two likely explanations.
First, the economic wealth of Egypt was protected from military predators
by deserts, and so states did not have to invest heavily in fortifications; on
the other hand, the wealth of the Sumerian cities was open to attack from
adjacent plains and hills, and so they built up substantial fortifications. But,
second, Egypt was mostly a single kingdom, again encouraged by the
ecology of the Nile Valley, whereas Sumer, though a single culture, was
divided into city-states that warred intermittently with each other.
Archaeologists no longer believe in a “Mayan Peace.” The Maya of
pre-Columbian Central America appear from their paintings, sculptures, and
texts (now deciphered) to have become highly war-prone.44 Weapons, a few
fortifications, and depictions of violence have been found on Minoan Crete,
but they are rare, and violence seems to have been more ritualized than
murderous.45 Graeber and Wengrow connect this to what they see as the
political dominance of women in Minoan society.46
The Indus Valley civilization may have been the most peaceful of all. A
century of excavations has unearthed two major and several minor cities
with sophisticated water and sewerage systems, standardized weights and
measures, literacy, but no evidence of palaces, temples, armies, wars, armor,
weapons (except those designed for hunting animals), or skeletons bearing
the marks of violent death. We have depictions of men and gods fighting
wild animals, but not fighting other humans or gods. The architecture of the
cities suggests a relatively egalitarian and highly cooperative society that
was engaged in much trade with Mesopotamia and India, but apparently not
in wars. In the decline and collapse of the civilization, there are no ash
deposits of burned buildings, nor do citadels reveal the kinds of damage we
associate with fighting. Flooding from sea and river seems a likelier cause of
collapse. It is possible that future excavations or a successful deciphering of
its script will reveal more violence, but at the moment this civilization stands
as the longest-lived exception to the ubiquity of war. Part of the explanation
might be ecology, for the lands around were relatively barren, supporting
few people and no significant rival state, and the few partially fortified
settlements found were by the seacoast, where pirates might come from afar.
This does not explain why there seem to have been also no civil wars. There
were a number of distinct cities, but no evidence of conflict between them.
There have been better-documented but shorter periods of more recent
peace. For 250 years, from 1637, Korea was a peaceful “hermit kingdom,”
avoiding relations with other countries apart from tribute embassies sent to
China and opening one port to Japanese merchants. For a further hundred-
plus years, Korea initiated no foreign wars, though it was attacked several
times. Japan was also self-isolating and peaceful for 250 years from the early
1600s. Switzerland has not declared war since 1531, although it suffered
brief civil wars, and some Napoleonic wars were fought by foreigners in
Swiss territory. Sweden has not experienced war since 1814. Thus, large
differences have existed between regions and periods.
After World War II came an abrupt European reversal. Since then
Western Europeans, like Africans and Latin Americans, have fought almost
no interstate wars, while the Middle East, Asia, and the United States have
taken over martial leadership. In fact, war participation by Western
Europeans elsewhere in this period has been almost nonexistent if we
exclude Britain and France. The other Europeans were now suddenly from
Venus. Before 1945 it might have been thought that war was structurally
programmed into European society, but the same generation that had made
the most cataclysmic war of all switched to peace—indeed, that is part of the
explanation. Thus, “European character” is neither inherently warlike nor
inherently peaceful. It has fluctuated according to social and geopolitical
context.
We find similar time differences in China. Here we have historical
records from the eighth century BCE. Between 710 and 221 BCE (the date of
the founding of the unified Qin Empire) there were wars in 75 percent of
these 489 years, at an average of about 1.6 wars each year. These figures are
comparable to those of martial-era Europe.47 The Chinese were also from
Mars. After 221 BCE, wars involving China decreased, though with big
variations between regions. There were also civil wars, where dynastic
succession was disputed. But as the Chinese Empire declined, Japan rose,
and since Russia also became expansionist in the Far East, warfare revived
significantly there. Since 1945 Japan has again been peaceful, while some
other East Asian countries have had wars. The United States has also had an
uneven record, its military aggression having peaked in the most recent
decades. But there has been no war with Canada since 1812.

Conclusion
Given such geographical and historical contrasts, the causes of war do not lie
in the evolution of an essential human character, as Coker has claimed.48
Indirectly, of course, human nature does matter, for that yields hot tempers
and aggressive ideological commitments, but these are variably distributed.
Instead, the causes of war lie in differing social roles, class and state
structures, and institutions and cultures that tilt the war-peace balance and
killing ratios one way or the other. I explore this in chapter 4 onward, using
historical narratives of six relatively well-documented cases. I have selected
one case where wars were always frequent—ancient Rome; two where they
began frequent but then became fewer—ancient China and medieval and
modern Europe; one that showed great fluctuations—late medieval to
modern Japan; one where interstate wars were at first plentiful and then
became rare—precolonial and postcolonial Latin America; and one making
the most recent and most global wars—the United States. Where possible I
discuss their colonial wars too. To these cases I add a brief description of
postcolonial Africa in which interstate wars have been rare but civil wars
common. I hope that this variety, combined with my global span, protect me
from possible charges of modernism, Eurocentrism, or cherry-picking my
cases to fit some particular theory. It also allows me to explain why some
times and places have been much more warlike than others. But first I
explore how others have viewed the causes of war.
 CHAPTER THREE

Theories of the Causes of War

THE CAUSES OF WAR are many. They concern the motives and the powers of
the rival protagonists—desired ends and available means—the nature of the
issues in dispute, escalating interactions, and the broader contexts,
ecological, geopolitical, and historical, that might escalate disputes into war.
All must figure in an explanation of war.
There have been many motives for making war. Economic motives
include seizing wealth, land, and labor, free or unfree, getting tribute,
dictating the terms of trade, and the mixed economic-sexual seizing of
women. Political motives are aimed at enhancing rulers’ domestic political
power, rewarding one’s clan and clients, and deflecting internal conflicts
onto foreign enemies. Geopolitical motives aim to enhance status in the
geopolitical system, aid threatened allies, co-ethnics, or coreligionists
abroad, preempt perceived threats by others, and avenge earlier insults or
defeats. Military motives include enjoying imposing terror, being confident
in victory, and self-defense. Ideological motives include aggressive
nationalism, forcing religious or political ideologies on others, militarism
internalized as a desirable code of conduct, and pursuing redress for a
perceived slight, revenge, honor, status, or glory through war. All these
motives are goal-oriented and assume some degree of means-ends rationality
and calculation.
The number and diversity of motives are striking, and they generally
come not singly but in combinations varying through the descent into war.
Descent adds interactions between rulers and their armed forces. As
Clausewitz observed, war “is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless
mass . . . but always the collision of two living forces”—and often more than
two.1 Motives alone do not tell us why war happens, since alternative means
are available to achieve most desired ends. For example, one can obtain
wealth through peaceful cooperation and economic exchange, or by threats
or trade embargoes short of war. Why is war sometimes chosen instead?
There is not agreement about this among scholars of war.

Political Power: Inside Societies and States

Who exactly makes war-and-peace decisions? We talk of Rome against
Carthage or the Chinese against the Mongols or the United States against
Iraq. These are unavoidable simplifications, but we should not assign
motives to states or nations. The decision makers are always specific human
beings, and they are almost always small coteries of rulers and their advisers.
Persons have motives and emotions, institutions do not. Elites often contain
rival war-and-peace factions—Werner Sombart’s Händler und Helden,
merchants and heroes. They dispute the merits of war versus peace, or war
versus trade, or offense versus defense. Their struggles will often decide
whether there is war or peace.
In complex societies containing a division of labor, the conduct of war
is usually assigned to a professional warrior caste. Warriors have their own
motives, which might be more or less warlike (since they are generally
aware of the horrors and limitations of war). Some generals might prefer not
war but a climate of fear, so that they are given large resources without
risking their lives. Political rulers may conversely fear their generals’ power
to mount coups or rebellions, and so they may deliberately weaken them,
reducing the likelihood of making aggressive war; this happened persistently
in imperial China (see chapter 6) and was also important in the recent
Middle East (see chapter 14).
Historians often emphasize popular pressures on war-and-peace
decisions, but I am skeptical. The masses are rarely involved in such
decision making since they lack interest—in both senses of the word—in
foreign policy. “Popular” pressures can turn out influential pressure groups
or mobilize crowds but only rarely the mass of the people. Some pressure
might well up from below, but most is organized by pressure groups with
special interests at stake, or are stoked by mass media for whom war fever
sells or by students who love to demonstrate. There are some warrior-
dominated societies, like the Mongols and the early Muslim Arabs, and also
a few ideological wars in which a mass movement pressurizes rulers. Yet
Hermann Goering, a leader of such a mass movement, dismissed this when
arguing with the U.S. jurist Gustave Gilbert in his Nuremberg prison cell in
1946 before his execution:

Goering: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why

would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when
the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one
piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in
Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in
Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the
country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter
to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist
dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people
have some say in the matter through their elected representatives,
and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Goering: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice,
the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any
country.2

Goering was right, although saying so did not exactly help his chances
of survival! Even in the United States the president and his advisers can
manipulate their way into wars. War is the sport of rulers. For the masses the
main curse is war, not who wins it. Yet institutionalized power relations
ensure that the masses follow their rulers into battle, even sometimes with
enthusiasm. They have no alternative sources of knowledge to what their
rulers tell them about the evils of the enemy, and they are usually ignorant
beforehand of how terrible war will prove to be—for wars are irregular
events. In advance, war seems like a masculine adventure story to young
men. Reality strikes for soldiers only in their first battle, while reality dawns
on civilian populations, male and female of all ages, only in long, costly
wars or when war is fought in their own fields and cities. Wars may be only
superficially popular—but that is enough to start them, and then they entrap
everyone. Soldiers can be trapped by military hierarchy, the battlefield, their
own values, or their sense of duty in “getting the job done.” Former
president Herbert Hoover declared in a 1944 speech: “Older men declare
war. But it is youth that must fight and die.” War is a conspiracy among old
rulers to kill the young. War has also normally been a male activity, although
women have generally regarded war as necessary and encouraged their men
to fight, shaming them if they don’t. Few women have been pacifists; rather,
they were not asked to fight.
The rarity of popular interest in foreign policy has attracted cynical
views of war as a political tool wielded by the upper class. Thomas More
gave sixteenth-century expression to this in his Utopia: “The common folk
do not go to war of their own accord, but are driven to it by the madness of
kings.”3 Marxists present a modern version: war is a ruling-class strategy to
deflect internal class conflicts onto an outside foe. Yet Levy presents
evidence suggesting this is rare, and Geoffrey Blainey says a government
weakened by domestic strife might want to promote a rally ’round the flag
sentiment by conjuring foreign threats but is unlikely to go so far as to
declare war.4 Instead, he finds in the period 1816–1939 that a nation
weakened by internal strife is more likely to be attacked by others. It is also
dangerous for rulers to arm their subjects. Victory in the 1914–18 war might
have boosted Habsburg and Romanov dynasty rule, as was intended by those
pressing for war. But defeat brought revolution by workers and peasants
bearing guns, as dissenters in both courts had warned. “War fever” does
dampen class tensions in the short term, and a quick victory legitimizes
rulers, but prolonged warfare does so only if successful (and even then not
always). Today, disputes among nuclear powers cannot rationally be
translated into war, but promoting fear of the other is useful to preserving
one’s rule. The current terrorist threat is typically exaggerated, but it places
society on a permanent threat alert, increasing state power and reducing civil
rights while not risking major war.
Marxists are right that the ruling class makes the decisions for war, and
other classes die as a result. They are also right to note that in precapitalist
modes of production with economic surpluses, these were usually extracted
from the direct producers by force in the form of unfree labor statuses, such
as serfdom, corvée labor, and slavery, all supervised by military power. This
was necessary for the rulers to live in luxury or to fight any wars at all. But
are wars a rational strategy by dominant classes to deflect class conflict? The
rulers would have to be confident that they would win the war quickly—
although we will see that overconfidence in victory is normal. It may be
more common for rulers to go to war to demonstrate their political strength
to rival elites. The deflection of conflict within ruling classes rather than
between them might have been more typical.
Political scientists used to argue that democracies do not go to war, but
this is not true. Institutionalized democracies do rarely suffer civil wars since
they have routinized electoral procedures for regime succession, whereas
monarchies and dictatorships are intermittently plagued by succession crises,
and democratizing societies in ethnically plural socie-ties are vulnerable to
civil war and ethnic cleansing, as I showed in my book The Dark Side of
Democracy.5 The “democratic peace” argument has been modified into the
claim that democracies do not go to war against other democracies. Levy
says, “The absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything
we have to an empirical law in international relations.”6 But this comes from
focusing on wars between major representative democracies, mostly
Western, in the period since 1816. This ignores the earlier war making
democracies of history such as some Greek city-states and some early
Sumerian city-states—highly imperfect democracies, yes, but so are our
own.7 Modern colonial wars involved many native peoples who had direct
democracies in which the whole community or all men decided on war or
peace, and anyone had the right not to fight. Such groups often fought
against each other. One curious contrary case was the Iroquois Nations’
League, which embodied a “Great Law” of peace lasting from 1450 to
1777.8 During this time the nations kept their own political autonomy and
decided their own policies. Yet the individual nations waged war against
outsiders, killing, torturing, and even sometimes eating them, but they never
warred against each other or collectively, as a league. Finally, whatever
constitutions say, in most modern democracies decisions for war are more
often made by the executive branch than by parliaments, let alone by the
people.
Yet political science has spawned a “triumphalist” democratic school
seeing democracies as not only more pacific but more successful in the wars
they do fight.9 Yet Alexander Downes says that Dan Reiter and Allan Stam
combine those attacked (called targets) with those joining a war later
(joiners), and that they exclude wars in which there is no victor.10 When
targets and joiners are separated, and draws are included (for they indicate
lack of success), democratic states, whether initiators, targets, or joiners, are
neither more likely to win nor more likely to lose wars. Other political
scientists maintain that democracies fight more effectively, having bigger
economies, stronger alliances, better decision making, more public support,
and better soldier morale. Michael Desch has roundly criticized this, finding
no significant relation between war capacity and regime type.11 He
concludes: “The good news is that contrary to some defeatists inside and
outside the U.S. government, democracy is not a liability for a state in
choosing and effectively waging war. The bad news, however, is that
democracy is not as large an asset as triumphalists maintain. In sum, regime
type hardly matters.”12 The twentieth-century armies of authoritarian
Germany, the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam enjoyed superior morale to
their democratic opponents. When we add Islamist fighters (see chapter 14),
ideological morale compensated for the technologically superior armies
confronting them.

Economic Goals, Military Means

Seeking material gain is an important cause of war, and military power
supplies the means. Calculating the relations between them dominates much
theory. Yet why choose war to get richer? War is costlier in money and lives,
it is riskier since it may result in defeat or a costly draw, and it makes
enemies. On the plus side, victory may yield immediate reward in the form
of tribute, but this may last only as long as you can enforce it. Conquest and
direct rule may give more secure possession of resources, especially of
geographically fixed resources like fertile soils, minerals, or harbors, but
their administration is costly. Slaves, normally acquired by war, permit more
intensive exploitation than free waged labor. Slavery, however, has costs in
its need for coercive supervision and its lack of labor flexibility (you don’t
lay off slaves when business is bad).
Sexual motives have usually figured in raiding. Raiders typically raped
women or carried them off as wives or concubines or slaves. The motives
were to satisfy sexual desire, to exercise dominance, or to increase the
victors’ rate of reproduction, thereby making their group stronger. Rape is
also easy for armed men to accomplish. In modern warfare rape remains
common; indeed, the highest total of known rapes in a single campaign was
perpetrated by Red Army soldiers in 1945, who raped an estimated 2 million
German women. Though today rape is still common, carrying women off is
much less so, except in nonstate armies. In earlier societies raiding rather
than full-scale war was often sufficient to carry off loot, slaves, and women
from territories that the raider could not stably control.
For much of history, victors reaped the spoils of war—land, loot,
slaves, women. Provided war was not too costly and they survived, rulers
and most soldiers could benefit and war might be rational for them in terms
of ends. This was Weber’s “booty capitalism”—risky but profitable. But the
general population back home might not benefit. European expansion into
the world was rational in terms of ends for many younger sons and settlers,
but not for most of the population. Probably only two European countries,
Holland and Britain, made a net long-term profit from their colonies.13
Perception of profit was what mattered, however, and overoptimism was
normal among war makers. The conquistadores, soldiers, merchants,
plantation owners, and settlers directly participating in colonial ventures
might make a large profit if they survived the battles and diseases. The risks
were great, but so were the potential profits, though the financiers staying at
home did best. Few Americans have derived material benefit from recent
wars. Many, perhaps most, defensive wars are rational in ends if successful,
though they rarely bring additional material resources.
Wealth can also be sought by military threats short of war, aimed not at
conquest but at tribute or coercing the terms of trade. The different types of
empire identified in volumes 3 and 4 of my Sources of Social Power
involved varying degrees of military coercion. Informal empire, for example,
threatens military power but uses it only in short bursts aimed not at
territorial conquest but at demanding homage and tribute or dictating the
terms of production or trade. “Tributary empires” receive tribute from rulers
who otherwise might remain in control of their domains. If they refuse, they
may be removed and replaced with more reliable clients. There is also the
reverse tributary case, where an empire pays tribute to its neighbors so that
they will not attack it. It was cheaper for China to pay off barbarians than
pay for military forces to fight them. The United States today can learn from
this (see chapter 14). While better-developed societies may make forays
against less well-developed ones by virtue of perceived military superiority,
they themselves may be tempting targets for less economically developed
but militarily skilled raiders, as Rome and China were for barbarian
neighbors: they offered a spectacle of such riches that if the barbarians could
raid and run away it might be rational to try it. The inhospitable terrain of
their homelands and their military mobility gave them motive and
opportunity.
Those seeking war for economic gain should be constrained by their
material means of making war—the cost in both money and lives of
militaries and their effectiveness relative to their rivals. Military power may
tempt states into aggression if they perceive easy pickings. Yet many wars
are fought between powers or alliances of powers that are evenly matched,
and these tend to produce longer, costlier wars. It is less clear why their
rulers should rationally choose war rather than other means of increasing
rewards. The opposite puzzling case is where lesser powers defy and fight
those that are much stronger. Why do they not do the apparently rational
thing and give in? On occasion, military tactics may offset inferior numbers.
Ever since Sun Tzu’s time, military writers have stressed that concentration
of forces against the enemy’s weakest point in battle matters most, not
overall inequality of forces. Yet since both sides are trying to do this, the
bigger battalions generally do win, though there are exceptions. Political
scientists have also tried to find good reasons for the weak to resist the
strong, though only for modern wars.14
Most wars are fought between neighbors over disputed border
territories, who claim this is rational in both economic and strategic terms.
Yet they usually add on moral assertions, bringing emotions into the dispute,
especially in “revisionism,” whereby one party claims the right to territory it
used to own but then lost—as do Russia and China today or the
extraordinary pitting of a claim based on one thousand years of Arab land
ownership in Palestine against a rival Jewish settler claim dating back to a
purported gift by Jehovah himself! Wherever territory is lost, there will be
revisionism. Economic interests tend to be quantifiable and capable of
compromise, as in splitting the difference in rival territorial claims. But
deaths cannot be objectively measured against profit, and if we add righteous
emotions, compromise becomes difficult. It is rare to find a war that does not
invoke notions of right and justice. Economic power relations do cause
disputes, while escalation to war should include calculating costs, benefits,
and relative military strengths; yet other motivations, emotions, and
situations are necessary to explain why the horrors of war are accepted so
often.
 Contexts 1: Ecology
I will place war-and-peace decisions amid the contexts of geography and
history. Geography was emphasized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century geopolitical theory, but recently geography has given way to politics.
Archaeologists suggest that war began when human groups settled fixed
natural environments that could support them and which they called their
own—as John Locke had argued. When peoples irrigated fertile river
valleys, they were trapped there by Mother Nature. If they left, it would be
to less fertile land. Their lands were worth defending, and less economically
privileged neighbors with military resources thought they were worth
attacking. The sight of wealthy cities with fertile fields and fat animals lured
pastoralists skilled at raiding. So cities built up their military defenses and
perhaps retaliated with punitive raids, and war intensified. Wars were made
likelier by ecological disjunctions between fertile river valleys, irrigated or
not, and savannas, mountains, and jungles around whose economies
generated distinctive military resources. This explanation is not founded
only on ecologies, but on how they generate different economic and military
resources for the human communities located at a specific site.
Moreover, a disjunction between the carrying capacity of the land and
population growth can threaten survival, to which warfare might be a
rational response or at least a gamble on one’s ability to seize land, or it
would be if starving people were good fighters. Darwinian sociologists
emphasize population pressure as a spur to social evolution, but most
archaeologists disagree.15 In ancient Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica,
growing state complexity and more war were correlated with population
decline, not increase.16 Warlike “Great Migrations” across Eurasia have
often been attributed to population pressure, but recent scholars have argued
that other pull-and-push factors mattered more. The pull was the lure of
richer lands and cities and the push was military pressure from other peoples
at their backs.17 Climatic changes also mattered. In the thirteenth century the
weather favored Mongol expansion as the normally cold, dry steppes of
Central Asia enjoyed their mildest, wettest period for a thousand years,
which caused an increase in grass, war horses, and Mongols.18 Mass
migration has often led to war, for settlers favor conquest. They want land
and its natural resources at the expense of natives, who might be exploited as
laborers or slaves, or expelled and in extremis exterminated. James Fearon
and David Laitin showed the importance for modern civil wars and their
guerillas of ecology.19 Civil wars have flourished primarily in rugged
terrains that allowed the weaker protagonist to hide and survive.
Ecology in interaction with social structures may encourage either war
or peace. Societies in pre-Columbian America lacked both the wheel and
draft animals (llamas were an exception of limited utility), and so faced
more daunting logistics of political and military power. The link between
ecology and types of military formations (infantry, cavalry, and the like) and
the influence of ecology on campaigns and battles have received much
attention from military writers throughout history. Mother Nature does not
lead us into war, for war is a human choice, yet choices are affected by
ecology’s effect on society.

Contexts 2: The Tyranny of History

Karl Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) begins: “Men make
their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it
under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already,
given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Marx was applying this striking image to revolutions but it is also
apposite to wars. International relations (IR) theories of war tend to lack
history. Sequences of wars are neglected in favor of comparison of
individual cases taken out of their historical contexts; such theories disregard
how the past may influence or constrain present decisions for war or peace.
Historians obviously do focus on causal flows through time, although they
rarely hazard long-term or comparative generalizations. My cases are not
single wars (except for the American Civil War) but sequences of war (and
peace) over long periods, the longest being an almost three-thousand-year
account of war in China. Past wars weigh on the brains of present decision
makers, but not only as nightmares. A major predictor of civil wars is earlier
civil wars in a specific locale.20 The same is true for interstate wars.
Sociologists call this “path dependence”: the present path depends on, or at
least is substantially constrained by, past paths. Though we cannot convert
path dependence into a law, it is a tendency in contexts where the past was
relatively successful. Past victories lead to increased ambition,
overconfidence, and ultimate hubris. Militarism becomes “baked in” to
cultures and institutions, so that war becomes seen as normal and even
virtuous, making it more likely.

Contexts 3: Geopolitics, Realism

From Thucydides through Machiavelli to contemporary political scientists,
geopolitics has been seen as the endless pursuit of power by rival states,
inevitably leading to wars between them. “Realism” has been the dominant
theory. States are the sole actors in an “anarchic” international space; there is
no arbiter above them wielding international law, in contrast to the rule of
law that routinely exists within states. Thus, states cannot be certain of other
states’ intentions, but they reason that the greater their own power, the less
likely they are to be attacked. So they all build up their power. This,
however, leads to “security dilemmas.” To ensure a state’s security, its
leaders must prepare for possible war, building up military power, perhaps
only for defense, but this alarms rivals into escalating their military
preparedness, too.21 Contagious feelings of insecurity make war more likely.
It might take only one aggressive community or state, for whatever reason,
to begin a process of escalation. Sometimes none of those caught up in
escalation might have originally wished for war. Realism can be “offensive”
or “defensive.” John Mearsheimer, an offense advocate, says states will
ceaselessly pursue more and more power, whereas Kenneth Waltz, on
defense, says balances of power make states content once they have acquired
enough power to survive and feel secure.
Insecurity also means that all protagonists claim to be fighting in self-
defense, which is generally considered legitimate. Many rulers whom we
might consider to be aggressors paradoxically claim that they are the
threatened ones, striking out in fear of other predatory states. German rulers
in 1914 declared that Britain was “strangling” them across the world, and
that Russian military modernization would soon threaten them on land.
Japanese rulers struck out in World War II using the same metaphor, the
main strangler being the United States. Such fears were not groundless,
although it was the German and Japanese responses that produced war. Since
Realists attribute readiness for war as necessary self-defense against the
uncertainty of geopolitics, they tend to absolve rulers of blame for provoking
acts of aggression. Yet rulers can always try diplomacy instead of war.
Humans seek collective as well as distributive power—cooperation, not
conflict—to achieve what they desire. And they may pursue their goals using
any of the four sources of power, not just military power.
It is true that most geopolitical relations are less rule-governed than
relations within states, except for civil wars, palace coups, and repressive
rulers who kill large numbers of their own people. But we should treat
“anarchy” as a variable, present in varying degrees. Wendt identifies three
degrees of anarchy in European history.22 The most warlike he calls
Hobbesian anarchy, where states share almost no norms and perceive other
states as enemies. He locates this in pre-1648 Europe. The medium level he
calls Lockeian anarchy, where European states perceived others as rivals but
accepted norms like the notion of “live and let live,” recognizing each
other’s right to exist. He says this typified the post-1648 Westphalian system
of Europe. The lowest level of anarchy he calls Kantian, where states
cooperate with each other, influenced by an “other-help” conception based
on “collective identity” and shared norms of conduct: war is displaced in
favor of cooperation, as in post-1945 Western Europe. I find the first two of
his periods problematic (see chapter 8), but real-world geopolitics does
contain varying degrees of anarchy. Contrast in this volume the highly
anarchic environment of sixteenth-century Japan (chapter 7) with the mild
case of postcolonial Latin America (chapter 9).
Realists note an alternative to anarchy. A single hegemonic state can
knock heads together to achieve geopolitical order and peace because it has
overwhelming military and usually also economic power in its region, as
well as leadership regarded as legitimate by other states. It combines what
Max Weber called domination and authority. The model cases are Britain in
the nineteenth century and the United States since 1945. Yet hegemons are
uncommon. If a state seems potentially hegemonic, others may form
“balancing” alliances against it. Yet there was no balancing against the
hegemony of Britain, the United States, the Roman Republic, or the Chinese
Qin dynasty, so there are specific preconditions of balancing alliances.
Rulers must be confident that their alliance can defeat the would-be
hegemon and that their allies will live up to their commitments, for if some
make a deal with the hegemonic power, the others are at greater risk.
Anarchy means allies cannot be fully trusted. Indeed, a balancing coalition
also requires normative solidarity among the allies, but norms are absent
from Realist theory. The allies must also fear the dominant power if they are
to combine against it. This has not been so since 1945 in Western Europe,
where the United States is seen as protecting those countries from worse
predators. The notion of anarchy is useful but variably so.
I am more skeptical about Realists’ other core thesis: that states are
self-interested, unitary actors rationally pursuing carefully calculated means
for pursuing their goals and seeking to maximize their prospects for survival
and growth. Thus, we should find that rulers choose war rather than more
peaceful forms of power when it can better achieve desired goals. There is,
however, implicit tension between Realism’s two theses of anarchy and
calculation. Anarchy breeds anxiety and fear of others, which rises as the
possibility of war looms, but these are emotional states conducive to
reckless, angry, or panicking behavior rather than calm calculation.
Decisions for war or peace are usually made in highly fraught environments
of growing tensions, domestic and foreign. Thus, not all Realists stress
calculative efficiency. Waltz argued that states often act in nonstrategic,
reckless ways, but he does not abandon rationality altogether; he says that
when states act recklessly, the system punishes them, whereas states that act
rationally are rewarded by the system. Here rationality of means lies not
with the individual state actor but with the hidden hand of the system.23
Mearsheimer expresses the commoner Realist view: “Great powers are
rational actors. They are aware of their external environment and they think
strategically about how to survive in it. In particular, they consider the
preferences of other states and how their own behavior is likely to affect the
behavior of those other states, and how the behavior of those other states is
likely to affect their own strategy for survival. Moreover, states pay attention
to the long term as well as the immediate consequences of their actions.”24
States are said to act “with relative efficiency.” Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
makes this into an “expected utility theory” of war: states go to war when the
expected benefits exceed the expected costs.25 Calculation leads to fairly
accurate predictions of when war will bring gain. A few historians concur;
Michael Howard says: “Men have fought during the last two hundred years
neither because they are aggressive nor because they are acquisitive animals,
but because they are reasoning ones. . . . Wars begin by conscious and
reasoned decisions based on the calculation, made by both parties, that they
can achieve more by going to war than by remaining at peace.”26
Fearon criticizes Realist theorists, saying, “War is costly and risky, so
rational states should have incentives to locate negotiated settlements that all
would prefer to the gamble of war.”27 I agree. Whatever the anarchical
threats, more is needed to push states over the brink into risky, costly war. So
he adds three factors that he believes can save the Realist model: states can
miscalculate because of imperfect or asymmetric information, whereby one
state has private information and incentives to misrepresent it; commitment
problems whereby mutually preferable bargains are unattainable because at
least one state would have an incentive to renege on a deal; and some issues
are indivisible, preventing a compromise.28 But Fearon’s actors remain
“genuinely rational, unitary states,” and he excludes the role of emotions,
ideologies, or power struggles within states, all of which we will see
perpetually permeate decision making. Human action is not in fact
dominated by instrumental rationality, pragmatic calculation, and
understandable mistakes. Margaret MacMillan notes that even if a struggle
seems material, defenders always try to protect what they hold dear, so that
emotions are always involved.29 Some Realists acknowledge factional power
struggles within a state. But they say that these rarely undermine rational
strategic thinking and so can be treated as “noise.” Mearsheimer says: “Unit-
level factors usually do not have much effect on foreign policy-making, and
when they do, they do so in ways that are consistent with balance-of-power
logic. Domestic political calculations are not likely to undermine sound
strategic thinking.”30 This is hard to believe, and we will see that it is not
true.
Some political scientists do introduce noninstrumental elements into
geopolitics. Richard Ned Lebow, analyzing twenty-six twentieth-century
wars, says wars emerge out of periods of dislocating political crises.31 He
identifies three types: crises arising from the ruler’s attempt to mobilize
domestic and foreign support for war; spinoff crises resulting from
unintended secondary confrontations with third parties if accommodation is
tried; and brinkmanship crises, the most common type, when a ruler tries to
force an adversary to back away from a commitment. Misperception,
especially of the resolve of the enemy, is a major cause of war when there is
brinkmanship: “As learning and steering capacity diminish, policy comes to
resemble a stone rolling downhill; it can neither be rerolled nor can its path
be altered.”32 And crises are not conducive to calm rational calculation. If
only political leaders did carefully assess the pros and cons of war! Realism,
like its competitor, liberalism, is in reality a normative theory that says to
rulers, “This is how you should behave if you are rational.” But, alas, they
often do not.
 Most political scientists focus on war between major European powers
since 1816, where the statistical data sets can be found. This leads to biases,
some of which I have already noted. Here are two more. These great powers
had virtually filled up the space of their geographical core, so that this really
was a multistate system. Today this has become a world multistate system
that offers almost no possibilities for expansion, except extraterrestrially. In
these space-filling multistate systems, sometimes states win wars, sometimes
they lose, and sometimes they fight inconclusively. But they do not die. It is
a board game of diplomacy in which all the players stay on the board. Both
Waltz and Wendt say that the death of states is rare.33 This might be true of
major modern states, but it is false of much of the rest of history. Most wars
discussed in this book resulted in an enormous number of states
disappearing. Successful states became bigger through imperial swallowing
up of the “vanished kingdoms” of history. The number of disappeared
societies greatly exceeds that of the survivors, on all continents. This
presents a conundrum for defensive Realism: Can states act “with relative
efficiency” to ensure their survival when the vast majority do not survive?
IR theorists say that some geopolitical configurations generate wars
more than others, but they cannot agree on which.34 Significant correlations
(on post-1816 statistical data) between geopolitical configurations and war
are rare. Multistate systems sometimes produce many interstate wars, as they
have historically in Europe, but not in postcolonial Latin America or Africa.
There is no agreement about whether “bipolar” (two great powers) or
“multipolar” (many powers) entities dominate a geopolitical system—or
whether an equal or an unequal distribution of power between states causes
more war.35 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman examined
different distributions of power and the number and internal cohesion of
alliances and found no significant correlations with wars.36 Nor did decision
makers act as if they were constrained by such variables. Some writers say
international trade brings peace, but others dispute this.37 A balance of
power between many states is sometimes associated with peace, but not
among the city-states of classical Greece or the warring states of ancient
China. Balances are fragile. As Kant nicely put it: “A lasting universal Peace
on the basis of the so-called Balance of Power in Europe is a mere chimera.
It is like the house described by Swift, which was built by an architect so
perfectly in accordance with all the laws of equilibrium, that when a sparrow
lighted upon it, it immediately fell.”38
 Power transition theory says that preponderance in power by a single
dominant state decreases the likelihood of war, a weak form of hegemony,
but if a dissatisfied challenger achieves power parity with the dominant state,
the probability of war increases. Rising powers sometimes do make war, but
many don’t. Germany spectacularly did so in the twentieth century, but the
simultaneous rise of the United States at the expense of British power was
peaceful. Here the normative solidarity of Britain and the United States was
important, but norms are neglected by Realism. As for the United States, its
rising power had led it into only minor participation in interstate wars until
1941, when the country had already risen and was actually attacked. Only
after 1945, when the United States was already hegemonic over most of the
world, did American foreign policy embody substantial militarism. We
might expect other rational rising powers to wait until they achieved
superiority before turning to military aggression, but neither Germany nor
Japan did wait. And adding other periods and regions, we see wars occurring
in far more varied circumstances than Realism suggests. Something is wrong
with the theory if it does not lead to empirically supported conclusions.
Stephen Van Evera analyzes thirty modern wars.39 He says Realists
have mistakenly attributed war to the “gross structures” of geopolitics, like
those just mentioned. In his wars, these explain almost nothing. Yet he
argues that more “fine-grained structures of power” do help explain war. He
identifies four: first-move advantages privileging attack over defense;
“windows of opportunity,” whereby striking now gives a state a temporary
edge; the relative ease of conquest; and cumulative resources whereby
aggression yields further resources that enable a state to continue aggressing.
Realism should focus on these, he concludes. Yet he actually shows not that
these four do lead to war, but that belief in them by rulers does. If rulers
believe there is a first-move advantage or a window of opportunity or easy
conquest or cumulative resources, then war is more likely. This is a useful
finding, but such beliefs are false as often as not, agrees Van Evera.
Finally comes entry into battle, an arena of emotions and chaos.
Generals strive hard to maintain their rationality here, to implement an initial
plan but also to adapt flexibly to changing events. Yet look at two famous
generals who doubted their rational ability to accomplish this. Here is
William Tecumseh Sherman on causes: “Wars do not usually result from just
causes but from pretexts. There probably never was a just cause why men
should slaughter each other by wholesale, but there are such things as
ambition, selfishness, folly, madness, in communities as in individuals,
which become blind and bloodthirsty, not to be appeased save by havoc, and
generally by the killing of somebody else than themselves.”40
And here is Clausewitz on battle: “So-called mathematical factors never
find a firm basis in military calculations. From the very start there is an
interplay of possibilities, probabilities, good luck and bad that weaves its
way throughout the length and breadth of the tapestry. In the whole range of
human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards. . . . War is the
realm of uncertainty: three quarters of the factors on which action in war is
based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.”41
This had also been expressed by Ibn Khaldun:

Victory and superiority in war come from luck and chance. . . .

There are external factors such as the number of soldiers, the
perfection and good quality of weapons, the number of brave men,
skillful arrangement of the line formation, the proper tactics, and
similar things. Then there are the hidden factors. These may be the
result of human trickery . . . occupying high points . . . hiding in
thickets or depressions [or] rocky terrain and similar things . . .
suddenly appearing when the enemy is in a precarious position. . . .
These hidden factors may also be celestial matters, which man has
no power to produce for himself. They affect people
psychologically, and thus generate fear in them. . . . An Arab
proverb says: “Many a trick is worth more than a tribe.” It is thus
clear that superiority in war is, as a rule, the result of hidden
causes, not of external ones. The occurrence of opportunities as the
result of hidden causes is what is meant by luck.42

If they are correct, could humans rationally choose war to achieve their
goals? In war as in Clausewitz’s gambling metaphor, most players are losers.

Liberalism, Constructivism, Emotions

A rival English or liberal school in IR theory sees geopolitics as dual,
involving both anarchical tendencies and benign international institutions
and culture. Kant had argued that “perpetual peace” might be attainable
under three conditions: representative government, a universal norm of
hospitality toward strangers and traders, and an international federation of
free states.43 He took comfort from the fact that in his time representative
government, international trade, and international law were spreading, but he
accepted that there was a long way to go. Hedley Bull similarly found hope
in representative democracy, the economic interdependence of global
capitalism, and an international “society of states” centered on the United
Nations, all sharing common norms and interests.44 Comparable institutions
restrained anarchy in the past, such as the medieval Church in Europe or
Confucian education in China. Liberals say that common norms emerge
because states share a fear of unrestricted violence and seek rules on the use
of force, the sanctity of agreements, and property rights. Statesmen do
pursue their own self-interest, but not at any cost, and the desire for peace is
based on its considerable virtues. Liberals stress “international orders,”
collective agreements between states made to preserve peace, like the Peace
of Westphalia in 1648, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and the United
Nations today (see chapters 8 and 15). Some liberals go further today, seeing
a “world society” composed of states, nonstate collective actors, and
individuals, all recognizing their mutual dependence and shared norms and
values—a pacific spin on globalization theory. Yet it is not clear that either
global capitalism or representative democracy leads necessarily to peace, or
indeed that war is even declining across the world.
A third school of IR theory, constructivism, rejects Realist materialism
and stresses social identities, seeing interests not as objectively grounded in
material forces but as resulting from ideas and culture constructed in social
interaction. Thus, constructivists do not assume rationality. Peter Katzenstein
emphasizes “the cultural-institutional context of policy on the one hand and
the constructed identity of states, governments, and other political actors on
the other.”45 Institutions embody norms, identities, and cultures. Norms give
actors their identity. Culture refers to both evaluative and cognitive standards
defining how actors operate and how they interrelate. I largely agree, though
I call this sociology, while noting that constructivism overplays cultural
creation. Social institutions were originally constructed and then adapted by
actors over long periods, some becoming deep structures, constraining actors
at later points in time—such as the state, the Catholic Church, or capitalism.
They are all composed of actors, but actors constrained by institutions that
have lasted much longer than themselves. Sociology also contains a
“cultural” approach to war, which is closer to constructivism, and it also
neglects constraining power institutions, including those relevant to war-
and-peace decisions.46
Constructivism also allows for emotions, neglected by Realists and
some liberals. Lebow in a data set of ninety-four wars between major powers
between 1648 and 2008 finds 107 dominant motives among the initiators of
wars.47 A concern for “standing” (status) or honor mostly motivated sixty-
two wars, and another eleven were motivated mostly by vengeful territorial
revisionism. Insecurity and fear, stressed by Realists, and material greed,
stressed by Marxists, Realists, and liberals alike, account for only nineteen
and eight cases, respectively. So sentiments of honor, status, and revenge
produced over 70 percent of offensive wars and a wish for material gain only
9 percent. His powers are all European except for the United States and
Japan since the 1890s and China since 1949. Nor does he discuss the most
common warfare over many earlier centuries: the swallowing up of minnows
by sharks. Would his findings apply to other contexts?

Overoptimism
War is especially puzzling: when weak fight strong powers rather than
negotiate or submit, and when states or alliances of roughly equal powers
fight each other, since their war will probably be prolonged and costly. We
might expect such rulers to rationally show more caution. At most only one
side can win, and often both sides lose more than they win. There would
surely have been no World War I if the statesmen had carefully calculated
the odds. Van Evera says false optimism by both sides preceded every major
war since 1740.48 He and Blainey note that rulers persistently exaggerate
their chances of victory, which has led to more wars than Realism would
warrant.49 Of course, all that is needed is for a single ruler to be rash enough
to start a war imprudently. This may have been the case with Vladimir Putin
in his invasion of Ukraine. Van Evera mainly attributes overconfidence to
chauvinist myths embedded in modern nationalism. This emphasizes the
nation’s virtues and commitments, is ignorant of other nations, and
minimizes their strength and virtues. But rulers were overconfident long
before nationalism appeared, trapped within the sentiments they have for
their own community, contrasted with their negative and inaccurate views of
foreigners—this would be the negative aspect of Durkheim’s stress on the
normative solidarity of societies. Blainey offers a “catch-up” Realist theory:
“War can only occur when two nations decide that they can gain more by
fighting than by negotiating.” But “wars usually begin when fighting nations
disagree on their relative strength,” and “wars usually end when the fighting
nations agree on their relative strengths.” Rulers might eventually calculate
accurately, but not before they get burned by war and mass deaths. He adds
that the initial overoptimism is due to “moods which cannot be grounded in
fact . . . by which nations evade reality”—hardly Realism.50 Quincy Wright
wrote: “International conflict is not in reality between states, but between
distorted images of states. It is probable that such distortions, stereotypes,
and caricatures are major factors in the situations of international conflict.
. . . The false images depend not on misinformation about the immediate
situation, but on prejudiced conceptions and attitudes rooted in distant
history, in the national culture, or in the minds of important persons in the
decision-making process.”51
Obviously human beings are not just calculating machines sometimes
prone to errors. We are emotional and ideological creatures, as we know in
our personal lives. Sometimes it is not clear that any calculation of odds is
being made in a headlong rush to war down what Collins describes as the
“tunnel of violence,” in which perceptions narrow as blinkers come down,
and a rush of adrenalin overwhelms caution—as also happens to soldiers in
battle.52

Ideological Power
It is sometimes argued that human groups distinguish between killing within
their own community and killing outsiders. Aware that the former raises
moral dilemmas, they apply an “internal ethic” to make fine distinctions
between murder, manslaughter, self-defense, and legitimate retribution. Such
distinctions are not applied to foreign enemies, to whom a weaker “external”
ethical ideology is applied. Yet this argument is undermined by the
frequency of civil wars in which worse atrocities occur, and wars have often
ensued in which combatants saw each other as sharing the same culture. The
Sumerian city-states warred with each other yet believed they all belonged to
a single ethnic group, the “blackheads.” Greek city-states fought each other
and yet shared Hellenistic culture. In Europe Christians fought Christians
and rulers were often kin-related. Human beings can make war whether or
not they consider the enemy as alien.
 But some wars seem especially ideological. John Owen identified four
modern waves of ideological warfare: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
European wars of religion; the wars of revolutionary and Napoleonic France;
twentieth-century wars among fascism, communism, and liberalism; and
Islamic wars from 1979 onward.53 These waves generated intense
ideological polarization diffused through what he calls transnational
ideological networks (TINs). I discuss such waves in chapters 8 and 14,
accepting the first three, but with skepticism about the fourth. But I add that
empires have legitimated conquest by claiming to be a “superior”
civilization, on the basis of ideologies of racism or religion that favor
eliminating or forcibly civilizing supposedly savage or degenerate peoples.
Jeremy Black combines ideologies and emotions into a concept of
“bellicosity”—how favorably rulers view war itself and how entranced they
are by military symbolism. He sees some communities as “warfare-
societies,” in which intense militarism ensures “that the relationships
between ends and means cannot be comprehensively calculated”—
rationality of means cannot operate.54 I add that militarists are more risk-
accepting of war. Black says bellicosity is hard to measure and does not
explain when bellicosity intensifies. He says rulers generally have clear
ideas of what they want, but these get inflected by bellicosity and other
ideological prejudices, so that the conceptions of alternatives required by
rational calculation of means are absent.
I distinguish in my work three types of ideological power: transcendent,
immanent, and institutionalized. Some wars—between religious sects, or
among socialism, fascism, and liberal capitalism—involve a clash of
transcendent ideologies all seeking to remake the world and impose their
beliefs on others. Such ideological wars make the enemy seem evil, which
increases casualties and atrocities. Second, immanent ideology reinforces the
solidarity and morale of a collectivity, including armies. Quite high morale is
present in most effective armies, but in chapter 13 I show that some
communist forces possessed an excess of both these first two types of
militarism, making them more formidable fighters, able to compensate for
technological inferiority with a more self-sacrificing morale. But most wars
are not so ideological, and transcendent and immanent ideologies do not last
long. They settle down into the third type of ideology, institutionalized
ideology. In the case of militarism, social actors have internalized the
inheritance of past experiences of victory, which bequeaths to further
generations baked-in militarist institutions and cultures. Historical practices
infuse the minds and institutions of the present. The weight of history is
conservative: people keep doing what seemed to work in the past—path
dependence. Conversely, if war proves repeatedly unsuccessful, bellicosity
should falter. In between the two there is likely to be a cultural lag period
when bellicosity endures when it should not, as it did recently in the United
States.
All three types of ideology constrain conceptions of self-interest.
Commitment to bellicose values such as honor and physical courage may
overcome normal human repugnance at killing others and normal fear of
being killed oneself. Militarism seduces through rituals, values, and norms—
heroic sagas, divine blessing of the banners, colorful parades, brass bands,
anthems, medals, and a culture that extols heroism, clothes battles with
moral worth, promises glory—even afterlife—to the slain, and confers honor
and status on its heroes. Together these stir our hearts, predisposing us to
war.
A sense of honor is important. Mark Cooney discusses it among
American inner-city gangs. Gang leaders respond violently to any
“disrespect.”55 If they do not respond, they lose respect and masculine honor
in the eyes of their own gang. Cooney emphasizes that the slightest behavior
perceived as disrespectful can be the trigger for violence, even homicide.
The responsibility attached to leaders traps them into violence. They fear
status loss within their own gang more than they fear the enemy gang. He
says that codes of honor were especially strong among the aristocracy of the
past. Their ideology valued the warrior more than the peacemaker, but now
honor has slipped down to lower-class gangs.
Yet in all ages his model also fits statesmen, the word revealing a claim
by leaders to personify the state. They identify their own career success,
personal honor, and status with the state’s. They seek, in varying degrees,
personal glory and grandeur for their state. Human emotions like ambition,
righteous anger, vengeance, humiliation, and desperation are applied to the
state. Lebow observes that powerful states are more likely to feel slighted,
even humiliated, than weak ones: “Anger is a luxury that can only be felt by
those in a position to seek revenge.”56 Weak states are used to being slighted
and learn to live with it. Perhaps the main reason the Bush administration
launched an invasion of Iraq in 2003 was fury over Saddam Hussein’s
decadelong defiance and disrespect of the United States. This is felt as both a
personal and geopolitical affront. Statesmen or stateswomen believe they
lose face personally if they do not respond with toughness to slurs and
threats, and they believe that their state will lose face in the system of states.
If both rulers in a dispute are imbued with prickly honor, neither will want to
be seen backing down, and it is difficult to find compromise solutions to
disputes, as we saw in the descent into World War I.

Conclusion
We have seen varied motives, disputes, and contexts as well as different
theories of war-and-peace decisions. It is easy to be skeptical about one-size-
fits-all theories like Realism. But can we go further in establishing the
relative weights of the many components of war-and-peace decisions? At the
macro level it is perhaps a struggle of the rather materialist duo of economic
and military power versus the potentially less rational duo of ideological-
emotional and political power. But this is muddied by wars resulting from
interactions between different factions and communities that bounce
unevenly, unpredictably toward war or peace. Wars never start accidentally,
says Evan Luard, but they often result from the unintended consequences of
interactions. Several causal chains may interact contingently, and their
conjunction may not have been planned by anyone. All this provoked
Raymond Aron into declaring that a general theory of war was impossible.
But I will have a shot at one.
 CHAPTER FOUR

The Roman Republic

ROME WAS AN EMPIRE long before it was ruled by emperors, and it was
almost always at war. Between 415 and 265 BCE, peace seems to have ruled
for only thirteen years, and for only fourteen between 327 and 116 BCE.1 The
first emperor, Augustus, claimed in 14 CE that the doors of the temple of
Janus, closed during peacetime, had before his reign closed only twice since
the founding of Rome. In his forty-five-year reign, he said, it had been
closed three times, suggesting that he was a man of peace. Such figures may
mislead. Rome became a very large empire, and its regions were not all at
war at the same time. In any one region wars were occasional, but there was
normally a war going on somewhere. Nonetheless, this is a formidably
enduring record of militarism that few states in history could match. Three
main explanations have been offered: war was self-defense; it was a
consequence of a geopolitical system in which Rome was no more
aggressive than others; and Rome was the aggressor because of its
militaristic social structure and culture. The third explanation becomes the
most appropriate, as militarism became thoroughly baked in to Roman
culture and structure, constraining daily actions in ways of which the actors
were largely unaware.

Three Explanations of Roman Militarism: (1) Self-Defense

A sense of insecurity certainly looms over later Roman accounts of the city’s
early years. They imply that Rome had to fight in self-defense or be
conquered by other Latin peoples or by tribes descending from the hills and
the north. Rome was sacked by Gallic tribes from the Po Valley in 390 BCE,
and later authors argued that the ethos remained kill or be killed. This may
have been true early on, and then occasionally later as large groups of
barbarians came raiding, but Roman authors generalized the argument to
cover the centuries. Almost all its wars were deemed defensive and “just.”
Not everyone agreed. Sallust quotes a letter he says was sent by Mithridates
VI, king of Pontus, describing the Romans: “They have possessed nothing
since the beginning of their existence except what they have stolen: their
home, their wives, their lands, their empire. Once vagabonds without
fatherland, without parents, created to be the scourge of the whole world, no
laws, human or divine, prevent them from seizing and destroying allies and
friends, those near them and those afar off, weak or powerful, and from
considering every government which does not serve them.”2
Tacitus quotes a long speech supposedly uttered by the Caledonian
chieftain Calgacus, including this description of Romans: “They have
plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger. . . . They are
driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor. . . . They
ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail
as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a
desert, they call that peace.”3
Sallust and Tacitus were criticizing Roman militarism but preferred to
express it through the mouths of enemies. Cicero was more measured: “Wars
were waged with the Celtiberi [Celts or Gauls] for actual existence, not for
rule; with the Latins, Sabines, Samnites, Carthaginians, and with Pyrrhus [a
Greek king] the struggle was for rule”—that is, wars for rule were wars of
choice, not of survival.4
War-and-peace proposals were put to a senate composed of rich
aristocrats by the two consuls, who had to be in agreement. There was then a
thorough debate, provided there was a quorum, at one point fixed at two
hundred senators. Total membership was upward of three hundred. New
senators were appointed by the consuls, not elected. Debate could last for a
whole day. Every senator present had in theory to speak in turn, and because
of the time constraint, filibustering was possible. The popular assemblies
generally ratified senate decisions, but a proposal could be vetoed by a
plebeian tribune. In this respect the republic exemplified Realism’s
rationality-of-means model, a rule-governed debating system with the merits
and demerits of war discussed at length, more than in my other case studies.
Debate mostly lacked high emotions because it was focused on the likely
gains in wealth and loot from a war, not on violent emotions, unless this was
the response to some killings of Romans. They also had enormous
confidence in their military means. If the gains were thought great, military
means would be provided, while likely Roman losses of life were rarely
calculated. Two factors did counsel restraint. First, if the legions were
already engaged in war elsewhere, the proposed war would probably be
deferred. Second, domestic politics might intervene. Senate rivalry meant
that some favored peace out of jealousy of the consul who would be
appointed to command the legions and grab the loot. There was careful but
limited calculation.
Once the decision was made, specialized priests (fetiales) carried the
senate’s terms to the potential enemy.5 If their terms were rejected, they
would cast a spear into enemy territory, or into a sacred piece of land in
Rome symbolizing enemy territory. Both were declarations of war. The ritual
invoked the support of the gods and so brought justice to the war. When
Latin sources seemed to imply a defensive war, they actually meant a just
war. Greek sources, like Polybius, emphasize imperial conquest, not self-
defense. Moreover, the terms they offered were nonnegotiable. The enemy
must accept them or be at war. So “defense” was actually a provocation to
war. The fetiales system decayed in the third century, but Roman
“diplomacy” continued to be tough. The senate sent ambassadors to offer
Roman terms. If those terms were not accepted, a state of war existed—no
bargaining.
Attempts at mediation by others were considered insulting. A
nonnegotiable stance was less common among the republic’s major rivals,
Carthage and the Hellenistic states.6 This was not Roman self-defense; it
was more a pretext based on leaders’ belief they were divinely privileged.7
“Defense” included going to the assistance of friendly polities or factions in
polities that sought Roman help. The goal was not only to help allies, but
also to dominate them afterward. Roman domination was thus extended.
Cicero quotes the Roman general Gaius Laelius: “Our people in defending
the allies have now gained control of all lands.”8 This “offensive defense”
was the dominant Roman policy in campaigns and conquests fought against
many peoples: the Marsi, Samnites, Etruscans, Umbrians, Gauls of north
Italy, Sabines, Vulsinienses, Lucani, Tarentini, Brutii, Picentes, Sallentines,
and the Greeks in Italy. It was highly successful, as the Romans conquered
the whole of Italy by 275 BCE. Almost all these peoples eventually
disappeared from history through defeat in war. Some wars went through
several stages of offense and defense. The wars against the Greek king
Pyrrhus of Epirus began when the senate broke a treaty after the Roman fleet
menaced the last democratic Greek city-state in Italy, Tarentum. The
Tarentine democrats responded fiercely, fearing defeat and oppression,
calling on Pyrrhus to help them. He invaded Italy in 280 BCE, recruited
Samnite and Lucanian allies, and fought several very costly battles against
Rome—hence the expression “Pyrrhic victory.” This was a more defensive
phase for Rome. But Roman ability to keep on raising legions forced
Pyrrhus out of Italy. The Tarentines surrendered in 272 BCE, and Rome
completed the conquest of Italy. The way was open to Greece and Sicily.
Most leaders claim their wars are waged in self-defense, usually
divinely blessed, and their own people normally believe them. If Romans
sincerely believed this, it made a difference in their behavior. But as an
explanation for Rome’s continuing to go to war, defense was limited mostly
to its early years and to lesser phases of its wars of expansion.

Three Explanations of Roman Militarism: (2) The Geopolitical

System
The second explanation is Realism’s version of self-defense, blaming war on
an anarchic multistate system. War is said to have resulted primarily from
the insecurities of the geopolitical system, not from the nature of particular
states, rulers, or peoples. No central authority existed to which rival states
could turn for a diplomatic settlement, and the only way to punish an
aggressor was by fighting—a Hobbesian “war of all against all”—the
inevitable logic being that the strong defeated the weak. Some ancient
authors agreed. Demosthenes said it would be better if all states behaved
morally, but they don’t: “All men have their rights conceded to them in
proportion to the power at their disposal.”9 Thucydides quotes the Athenian
response to pleas for mercy from the city-state of Melos: “Right is in
question only between equals in power, while the strong do what they can
and the weak suffer what they must.”10
Arthur Eckstein is the main modern exponent of Realism on Rome.11
He rejects, as most Realists do, “unit-level” analysis, which emphasizes the
internal structure and culture of states and communities. The threat from the
external geopolitical environment was what mattered, yielding a perpetual
Roman sense of insecurity and violent response. After struggles with Latin
and Etruscan states, the Gauls of the Po Valley, the Volsci, and the Samnites,
came the Greek city-states in southern Italy, sometimes backed by the
Hellenistic monarchies, and then the states of Greater Greece, the
Carthaginian Empire, the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, and
the tribes of Europe and the Balkans. Rome was militaristic, he agrees, but
this was normal among ancient states and tribes around the Mediterranean,
trapped in the same “cruel logic.” Rome was merely the most successful.
Nicola Terrenato casts doubt on this.12 He says that in the sixth to the
fourth centuries BCE, Rome, like many Italian communities, consisted of an
urban center and an agricultural hinterland dominated by aristocratic clans.
The center was gradually becoming statelike, but before the fourth century
goals were primarily those of dominant clans, not the city, and Rome’s
“army” comprised the retinues of aristocrats, fighting for private clan goals,
and raids, especially for cattle, were the main type of warfare. Communities
lacked clear boundaries and did not occupy the whole space of even that
zone of Italy. Yet through exchange with neighbors they came to share some
common culture. Most Roman wars with known locations were fought not
against other lowland urban centers, but against the tribes of the north and
the Apennine Hills, especially the Samnites. Against the Gallic tribes, most
war was self-defense in response to raiding, but the Romans repeatedly
initiated wars against the Samnites because they blocked Roman ambitions
to conquer a realm stretching from coast to coast.
Yet the incorporation of neighboring lowland urban centers into Rome,
says Terrenato, was less through warfare than through negotiations, not
between states, since this was not yet a multistate system. Neighboring clans,
especially those with kin connections in Rome, would negotiate alliances
with Rome, often to repress class conflict within their own communities.
Rome attracted neighboring aristocracies because it defended their rights
against the lower classes and granted them Roman citizenship. This pressure
for regime change made it “at worst the lesser evil and at best a golden
opportunity” for some elites, who aided Rome’s absorption of their own
community.13 This involved faction fighting with clans opposing absorption.
He sees “a grand bargain between elites across the peninsula that would be
the main catalyst of its political unification.”14 They cared “little for the
destiny of any specific state and much about that of their own lineage, they
weaved in and out of the various political systems, jumped on passing
bandwagons, and jockeyed for position, all the while trying to stay on the
winning side.”15
This is persuasive for the two centuries following the establishment of
the republic in 509 BCE. Since many prominent Roman families had non-
Roman origins, wars may have been less common than later Romans
believed.16 They were perhaps reading back into earlier history the world of
an Italy filled with states they themselves inhabited, and they were
neglecting class conflicts within and class solidarities between communities.
Terrenato concludes, “The situation in central and southern Italy after the
conquest is essentially compatible with a model that regards wide-ranging
elite interaction and negotiation as the primary factors that drove the
transition.”17 There were wars, but some polities disappeared because their
elites sought a change of regime. By 264 BCE, Rome had made more than
150 treaties with polities across Italy, bilateral but asymmetric, embodying a
Mafia-type Roman protection racket. After 338 BCE, allied Latin city-states
were forbidden to maintain official relations with one another to prevent
alliances among them. Rome’s tributaries had to contribute military levies
and fund their military operations. Roman citizens paid a direct tax
earmarked for the military, while allies supported their own levies.18 The
most urbanized rival peoples, Etruscans and Greeks, were divided in
fractious city-states.
So in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE Rome expanded across central
and southern Italy, a mini-empire becoming more statelike, as were other
Mediterranean polities, such as Phoenician colonies (e.g., Carthage),
Syracuse, Marseille, and Tarquinia. Terrenato emphasizes “the limited range
of options that remained open for those states that were not expanding. For
them, small-scale neutrality and independence must have been increasingly
unrealistic. . . . It became clear to the elites involved that their only viable
choice was to lend their support to whoever offered the better terms. . . .
These states began negotiating the terms of their incorporation, especially in
central Italy, where they were tightly clustered together.”19
Terrenato and Scheidel emphasize a shift in early Roman history from
diplomacy to Mafioso threats, to regime change, and finally to conquest. It
was from then on, with the emergence of real states, that Eckstein’s Realism
might be applicable, and this was an insecure environment.20 As William
Harris and Mary Beard note, however, almost all Rome’s wars were then
fought outside its own or its allies’ territories, which suggests offensive
expansion.21 One advantage of offensive war is that it lays waste to enemy
territory rather than one’s own. Harris says that the Romans initiated more
offensive wars than the Samnites or the Etruscans once Rome was clearly
established.
Eckstein offers some sketchy data on Greek states. He says Athens was
at war in two-thirds of the years from 497 to 338 BCE, and other states
engaged in war in over 90 percent of years over short periods. At least one of
the Hellenistic monarchies was at war for 97 percent of years over a 163-
year period. Yet since there were between four and nine monarchies at any
one time, the average for any single one of them would be a war in under
half the years—still a high rate, however. Three Hellenistic rulers, Attalus I,
Philip V, and Antiochus III went to war every year, but over only a twenty-
five-year period.22 Victor Alonso challenges the view that Greek city-states
were at war almost all the time.23 The focus on Athenian-Spartan rivalry
obscures the fact that many states stayed out of war for long periods. Argos
and Corcyra abstained from war for most of the fifth century, as did Megara,
the Achaean Confederacy, and the Common Peace movement in the fourth
century. Regions such as Aetolia, Epirus, and Crete adhered to neutrality and
non-alignment, as did many of the Greek colonies abroad. Alonso
emphasizes the role of diplomacy in mediating Greek conflicts. Though
Greeks believed that war was frequently inevitable, they sought to limit its
scope and delay its outcome while pursuing diplomacy. Once war had
started, they accepted truces, capitulations, and protection of heralds.
Rivals sometimes launched offensives against Rome, but less often,
whereas the frequency and duration of Roman wars is unparalleled. Polybius
said the Romans were more ferocious than Hellenistic states in dealing with
defeated enemies. We shall see that the Carthaginians were not as warlike as
the Romans. Eckstein’s geopolitical argument has some limited explanatory
power, varying and declining through time, but we must add the third theory
of Roman wars.

Three Explanations of Roman Militarism: (3) Roman Aggression

This explanation accepts the notion that the geopolitical environment was
unstable, but it argues that Rome, propelled by domestic militarism, became
the main aggressor. Among classical writers Polybius and Cicero came close
to this, and Harris is the main modern scholar.24 Harris does not see a
conscious long-term policy of imperialism, for expansion came piecemeal
and opportunistically (which is not unusual in empire building). But success
breeds success and there was a consistent thrust of aggression: Rome kept
doing it. Dexter Hoyos agrees, as does Erich Gruen, regarding Roman policy
in Italy and the west, but not Rome’s relations with the Hellenistic world.25
Gruen portrays Rome as being long indifferent to the Greeks, unwilling to
enter into treaties with them, cautious about entering a region where multiple
developed states competed. At this stage there was little thought of
annexation in the east. He concludes, “Hellas ultimately fell under Roman
authority not because the Romans exported their structures to the East, but
because Greeks persistently drew the westerner into their own structure—
until it was theirs no longer.”26
Yet during the second half of the third century BCE Greece was a
sideshow. Rome was fully committed in its wars against Carthage. As we
will see, this immediately became a major Roman imperial venture into the
eastern Mediterranean (followed by a phase of desperate defense in Italy).
But in 201 BCE as soon as the Second Punic War ended in decisive Roman
victory, the legions began intervening in Greece. Gruen says Rome
“blundered” into the Second Macedonian War, 200–196 BCE, yet the senate
revealed it was determined to go to war, as it was in the Seleucid War in
192–88 BCE against Antiochus.27 This major commitment of forces included
withdrawing legions from Spain and Gaul, and it produced the first Roman
incursion into Asia. The senate was also determined to fight the Third
Macedonian War (171–68 BCE) against Perseus. After victory the senate
divided Macedonia into four client republics and permanently stationed
legions in Greece. In the Fourth Macedonian War, in 150–48 BCE, these
legions quickly defeated an attempt to reunite the Macedonian kingdom.
Finally, the Achaean League of Greek city-states launched a desperate
rebellion against Rome but was quickly defeated in 146 BCE, which
culminated in the Roman sacking of Corinth—in the same year the city of
Carthage was obliterated. This looks like determined aggression.
Gruen makes some concessions. He says several times that Rome
would not tolerate threats to the Adriatic. He agrees that the Punic Wars
provoked more Roman imperialism, and he agrees with Harris that when the
senate did decide to fight, it fought until victory was fully achieved, whether
or not it saw vital interests at stake, and even if the enemy wanted to come to
terms, as Perseus did. Gruen concludes that Rome’s ultimate “willingness to
assume imperial responsibility . . . [was] the effect of numerous individual
decisions in ad hoc situations, not a grand design to control the East.”28 Yet I
have narrated a cumulative imperialism whose level of aggression steadily
increased once imperial control of the Carthaginian territories was
completed. Carthage is the missing player in Gruen’s account.
There were different stages of Roman aggression. First came the
punitive raid, not just to carry off goods and slaves, but also to punish
peoples and rulers who would not submit. Roman diplomacy was built on
fear, instilled through punitive campaigns. This did not at first involve
territorial conquest, only pillaging and destroying to demonstrate that Rome
could make uncooperative neighbors suffer. The troops were encouraged to
loot but the goal was also to secure cooperative client rulers through regime
change or stiffening. Thus, directly ruled Roman territories were ringed by
client monarchies, republics, and tribes. But Rome rarely rested satisfied
with indirect imperialism. Second, seeking more direct control, Romans
invaded to conquer, either installing Roman consuls or stationing advisers
and perhaps legions there to supervise the ruler. This brought more
systematic plunder and slavery, vital to supply labor for mining and
agriculture, the core Roman economic sectors. The third stage was to
suppress rebellions, widespread after conquest. The key was swift response
to stifle revolt before it spread. Local troops were flung into action. If they
failed, a larger army was mustered to crush rebels and install more direct
rule. All three types were fought mostly on land. Roman naval power was
weak until it took on Carthage. The main function of Roman navies was to
patrol coastlines and suppress piracy.
The decision makers for war were in theory drawn from the citizens
who served in the legions and paid the taxes, perhaps one-quarter of male
inhabitants, and no females. No one else counted. But the decisions occurred
within the senate and the popular assemblies. The senate was dominant, and
it was dominated in turn by wealthy aristocrats. The popular assemblies also
had powers, but they had class-weighted voting systems favoring lesser
aristocrats, and the moderately prosperous census classes provided the heavy
and medium-heavy infantry. This was a representative system, but weighted
by class—and most of the leaders, the consuls in the senate and the tribunes
in the assemblies, were aristocrats. The people of Rome could demonstrate,
riot, and strike (collectively marching out of Rome), and they always had
sympathizers in the popular assemblies, especially on domestic issues like
debt and taxes. The assemblies rarely contested senate decisions for war,
though they voiced discontent about long-running wars. A few aristocratic
senators were disproportionately responsible for Rome’s wars.
Evidence of aggression comes from the absence of Roman diplomacy,
unlike elsewhere in the ancient Middle East. Amanda Podany details many
diplomatic treaties, oaths, and gift exchanges made, and for a time adhered
to, between the cities and empires of the Bronze Age in the Middle East
region—Ebla, Mari, Mittani, Hittites, Kassites, Egypt, and more.29
Resolving conflict through mediation and arbitration also featured in Greek
and Hellenistic international relations.30 These procedures seem to have
been unknown to the Romans. Romans let Greeks resolve their own
differences but themselves rarely participated. Sheila Ager says, “The formal
structure of the fetial formula undeniably implies that judgement of some
sort has already taken place before Rome even embarks on war. In some
sense, Rome has already been to ‘arbitration,’ for a judgement has been
rendered that the enemy is the guilty party. For a mere human to offer his
third party diplomatic skills when Rome has already received heaven’s
judgement on the matter would therefore be at the least superfluous, and . . .
might be construed as presumptuous and offensive.”31
There were a few unjust wars, Romans acknowledged—when Rome
was defeated! This proved the gods had not been consulted, for they would
have declared defeats to be unjust.
Romans indignantly rejected attempts at mediation. Attempts to
negotiate by Greek and Carthaginian ambassadors indicated “the posture of
one great power to another, not of a submissive inferior to an acknowledged
superior,” and were unacceptable.32 Ager adds that the most a third party
could do in a dispute between Rome and a Greek state was to plead mercy
for the Greeks. In the later empire, Rome met states of equal powers in the
east, the Parthians and Persians, and then had to negotiate treaties. Before
then, when dealing with groups who were not enemies, Rome did
occasionally conclude nonaggression pacts or recognize each party’s distinct
spheres of influence, but these were temporary. Hostages were taken but
only by the Roman rulers who never offered their own hostages. War
sometimes deliberately provoked other states, and Roman dominance
expanded through defending and then absorbing allies, but both were
claimed as self-defense.33
 Polybius tells us that those defeated by Rome and who then capitulate:
“surrender all territory and the cities in it, together with all men and women
in all such territory or cities, likewise rivers, harbours, temples, and tombs,
so that the Romans should become actual lords of all these, and those who
surrender should remain lords of nothing whatever.”34
Although the norm was that defeated enemies should be treated
mercifully, “the Roman response to the entreaties of the defeated could not
be calculated, any more than the responses of soldiers or muggers or rapists
to the pleas of their victims. . . . That, for the Romans, demonstrated the
fulness of their power.”35 They paid less attention to acquiring direct control
of territories than to instilling fear into their inhabitants. All dissent would be
countered with “terror and awe that they hoped to produce in the enemy; and
the moral and status issues, such as the need to repress superbia, avenge
injuriae, and maintain the honor or decus of the empire. It was on these
things that, as they believed, their security depended; it was for these that
they fought.”36 The Roman treatment of allies was constitutionally the same
as of defeated enemies—their land would be formally confiscated by the
Roman state. Some was kept to found colonies for Romans, although most
was given back to those perceived as reliable allies. Treaties offered degrees
of citizenship to the allies, but Rome alone would dictate matters of war and
peace. Trusted allies could rule themselves—but they must provide troops to
assist Rome.37 So the rulers of Rome fought mostly aggressive wars.

Economic Motives
Once the republic was securely established by the early third century BCE,
two main motives, greed and glory, drove Romans into war. They came
bundled together with political ambition.38 Economic motives meant looting
removable wealth, receiving tribute, seizing farmland, and acquiring slaves.
By the first century BCE there were over a million war-acquired slaves in
Italy, about one-fifth of the population.39 Territorial control usually came
later to ensure security of control. Rome did not develop more sophisticated
policies of economic acquisition because it almost never conceived of a
realm of economic power relations separate from other power realms. There
was no mercantilism, and military defense of trade simply meant combating
pirates, not dictating the terms of trade. Conquest and expropriation, or
subordination and tribute taking, not trade on unequal conditions, dominated
economic acquisition.
War making depended on funding from those paying the property taxes.
Yet with expansion, the upper classes, members of which became governors
or officials of conquered states and siphoned off most of the spoils, kept the
state’s treasury adequate for normal expenses, but not for more. The upper
classes did not want a successful general or a popular demagogue using
public wealth to finance either tyranny or public welfare. This began a three-
way struggle between the senatorial elite, the generals, and more popular
forces. The Roman people suffered a loss in power when the property tax
was abolished in 167 BCE. Since they no longer funded wars, their voice was
marginalized.40 The taxes, indemnities, and loot expected from a war were
carefully assessed beforehand, as Realists would expect, but for the elite’s
private gain. Of course, they often had limited information, and mistakes
were made, as in an invasion of the Arabian desert, wrongly assumed to
contain fabulous wealth.41
By the time the republic was prosperously established, loot was
considered too base to figure in dignified senate speeches. Obsession with
booty was a persistent criticism levied against rivals, for they all sought it.
Claims to act morally were important in Roman upper-class discourse, but
acquiring booty was more important in reality.42 If civilians tried to stop the
looting of their homes or the raping of their wives or daughters, they would
be shown no mercy, especially if the legionaries had suffered casualties in
the campaign. Defeated enemy soldiers and civilians in their many
thousands provided most of the slaves of Rome, and they were sometimes
the greatest source of profit from war. Generals profited most but donated
some captives to their soldiers. Slave traders following the armies then
bought them from the soldiers. Rape generally went unpunished, though it
was prosecuted in peacetime and bore the risk of execution (though not if the
victim was a slave or prostitute). Ransoming wealthy prisoners was
common. Ordinary soldiers might calculate on profit coming from victory—
provided they lived—and they received a basic level of pay. Accepting the
risk of death seemed normal to citizens at the moment of enlistment, whether
conscripts or volunteers. Once enlisted, they had lost the ability to control
their lives and were at the mercy of decisions made by the senate and the
generals. The booty of war was their compensation for their exploitation by
the state and the upper class.
 The land and part of the booty went to the state, but most booty was
claimed by the soldiers in quantities according to rank.43 In the third and
second centuries BCE, the distribution of the spoils became more unequal and
in response, the “Social Wars” exploded, a rebellion by Rome’s allies,
outraged they were not receiving their fair share and impoverished by the
neglect of their farms during their long military service. Discontent with
Roman rule and the distribution of spoils had precipitated defections of allies
to Hannibal in the Second Punic War. Elites acquiring offices in conquered
provinces, especially governors, diverted revenues into their own pockets.
This was constantly railed against but was normal practice. Once a territory
was conquered, the publicani, the public contractors, also arrived seeking
profits from army and administration.
A second material motive was for land seized from the defeated, leased
to the rich or given to Latins or Roman colonists, or granted outside any
formal structure. This began soon after the foundation of the republic,
although we have details only from much later. Veteran colonies were
designed to stiffen the loyalty of newly conquered territories, producing
population transfers of many thousands moving from old to new Roman
territories, increasing Romanization and war support among veterans and
ambitious civilians.44
There were some longer-term economic benefits. Booty did inject much
capital into the economy, while slavery increased agricultural yields and
wine exports, but this was entirely at the expense of those looted and
enslaved. Yet Philip Kay detects an “economic revolution” during the mid to
late republic.45 What I termed in volume 1 of The Sources of Social Power
the “legionary economy” yielded some more general benefits from better
communications infrastructures constructed by the legions, the economic
demand coming from the army and the state, and the provision of relative
order. An unintended consequence of levying taxes on the conquered
peoples was that they had to convert their agricultural surpluses into cash,
which encouraged commercialization.46 Living standards and population
rose, though not enormously.47 On the other hand, the many rebellions
brought exemplary repression as tribes and cities were annihilated to deter
others from rebelling.48 But if you behaved yourself, life improved a little.
For the Romans, militarism was institutionalized into everyday economic
life. Their material greed probably provided the most widely shared motive
for imperialism among the different social classes and legionary ranks. It
was a conscious choice for acquisition through conquest, but increased trade
was also a consequence. There is, however, the counterfactual possibility
that economic growth might have been alternatively stimulated by peace.

Ideological Motives: Grandeur and Glory

Like all empires, Romans justified conquests ideologically: their version was
that their rule brought peace and the rule of law to less civilized peoples, and
so was blessed by the gods. Rome was a state of laws, imposing its order on
the conquered through war.49 Peace was valued, but mainly as propaganda.
Although atrocities such as Caesar’s near-genocide in Gaul were denounced,
there was almost no pacifism. Nor was there transcendent religion justifying
or denouncing war. Romans were religious in the sense that they regularly
performed rituals to deities in whom they believed, but there were multiple
gods and you could choose your own. As was common in the ancient world,
Roman leaders consulted the auguries (usually the behavior and entrails of
birds) before making decisions. A bad omen might delay battle for a day or
two but not stop it altogether. After a defeat, however, it was often said that
the omens had been bad. Suetonius quotes Caesar as saying, “The omens
will be as favorable as I wish them to be.”50 Roman wars were not usually
driven forward by transcendent ideologies, religious or secular, or indeed by
high emotions, for emotions were cooled down by the rituals involved in
debate and quasi diplomacy, except where rebellions had killed many
Roman citizens.
War had become the means to achieve all things material and ideal:
wealth, fame, and glory for the leaders, grandeur for the state. Status,
influence, political power, refusal to show weakness, and domination for its
own sake were shared by senators, generals, and to a lesser extent their
soldiers.51 Tacitus remarked, “The lust for power, for dominating others,
inflames the heart more than any other passion.”52 Prestige and glory for the
rulers, once institutionalized, becomes grandeur for the state, involving more
militarism than material goals, which are restrained by calculations of profit
and loss. Greedy generals will make war only if they see profit. But fame,
prestige, glory, and grandeur in a militarized society are valued for their own
sake, almost whatever the profit or loss. Susan Mattern says honor, revenge,
and aristocratic competition were the main forces driving foreign policy.53
Gruen agrees that economic motives were far less important than status in
explaining Roman wars in the Hellenistic world.54 He sees the Third
Macedonian War, for example, as caused by senators’ fear of losing face,
showing “that Rome was not a helpless, pitiful giant,” a rather odd way of
expressing it!55 Walter Scheidel explains endless war thus: “Unless we
believe in decades of inadvertent mission creep, the aristocratic quest for
glory coupled with a pragmatic desire to keep Italian mobilization structures
fully operational is the most economical explanation for this outcome.” He
adds that in 157 BCE, after sixty-eight consecutive years of warfare, when
Rome had run out of targets, the senate immediately launched a new
campaign in the Balkans to ensure that the people would not be softened by
a lengthy peace.56
Ambition for glory among the elites was hereditary. Roman
commanders, said Sallust, “as they called to mind their forefathers’
achievements, such a flame was kindled in the breasts of those eminent
persons, as could not be extinguished till their own merit had equaled the
fame and glory of their ancestors.”57 The ideology was not transcendental. It
had no goals higher than bringing order and profit through Roman rule. But
it was immanent, strengthening the solidarity of the lineage and the republic.
Militarism was institutionalized into politics and ideology. Serving in
the field became the main way to public office. Polybius says young men
had to serve with distinction during ten campaigns before they could stand
for public office. Distinction meant showing valor and leadership skills in
battle, which Sallust adds made the young keen to make their bravery
conspicuous. Promotion through the hierarchy of public offices (from which
ascending levels of profit flowed) depended on valor and victory, right up to
senate level. Ordinary soldiers could also receive honors and promotions. A
medal for bravery or promotion to centurion gave prestige, and its receipt
was proudly carved onto tombstones. Some in all classes had war-making
incentives. This was not the ageism of modern warfare, whereby old
civilians send out young soldiers to die. Rome’s aging leaders had already
experienced battle themselves. Even the self-declared near-pacifist Cicero,
who rose as an intellectual, lawyer, and politician, had done military service
(and hated it). When he conquered mountain tribes while proconsul in
Cilicia, he demanded a Triumph. He did not get it, but he did get the spoils
of office. The highest public officials were the two consuls, drawn from
senatorial ranks. One would be delegated ever since the founding of the
republic in the mid-fifth century BCE to command the legions in the field
together with a professional general. Their term of office lasted only a year,
so if they wanted glory and wealth, they had to get on with war quickly.
Generals used the riches won from wars to strengthen their political
power in Rome.58 Rome entered wars even when lucrative pickings were
unlikely. Caesar’s two invasions of Britain were motivated more by his
desire to best his rivals and dominate the senate. Cicero observed, “There is
not a bit of silver in that island and no hope of booty except from slaves.”59
Later, Claudius, the third emperor, conquered Britain mainly because victory
would overcome his political difficulties. The desire to achieve domination,
honor, and reputation came to triumph over money, say Gruen and
Mattern.60 Michael Taylor finds that from 200 to 157 BCE, military expenses
were about 75 percent of all state expenses, and that few wars were
profitable for the state, since the taxes and loot received from them was less
than the military expenses.61 But war was profitable for the generals
extracting loot.
Only about one-quarter of consuls did not engage in war.62 The other
three-quarters hoped to get the highest accolade, the Triumph, when a
victorious general marched with his soldiers through Rome, displaying the
riches he had looted, providing circus spectacles, showering delicacies and
trinkets on the people, while enemies were marched in chains before being
enslaved or killed. The victor basked in the adulation of the city. The main
restraint on the number of Triumphs was other senators’ resentment of their
rivals’ successes. One-quarter of consuls did get a Triumph. Writers of the
Late Republican period such as Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus disapproved,
seeing Triumphs as a corrupt degeneration of the simpler, austere ceremonies
of earlier times. The fame sought by Roman generals grew through time, a
sign of the institutionalization of militarism. Architecture increasingly
reflected military glory, as can be seen in surviving triumphal arches and
columns and in statues erected to the goddess Victory. Monumental public
building meant much was spent on displays of power and glory, just as
medieval Europe’s cathedrals demonstrated the Church’s glory. Taylor says
such monuments represented another 10 percent of total state expenses.
Again there were mixed motives of self-glorification and intimidating the
world and the populace with the grandeur of Rome.63 But all these forms of
greed and glory depended on Rome’s having the military might to win wars
at an acceptable level of cost. Triumphs required victories.
 The Roman Art of War
Citizenship and class jointly structured the way Rome fought wars. There
were four legal criteria of class identity: ancestry, patrician or plebeian; six
census ranks based on wealth and political privilege, in which the senatorial
and equestrian ranks were classified above the ordinary citizens; honors
granted so that a self-made man’s family could become “noble” plebeians;
and citizenship rights ranking freeborn Romans above the partial citizenship
given the allies. All these statuses came with rights under law. All male
citizens had to fight. They had originally provided their own weapons,
armor, and horses, according to the resources specified by the six census
ranks. Census taking was established in Rome from the fifth century BCE,
and we have numerous census totals recorded from 234 BCE onward. Its
purpose was to count manpower available for the legions—all free males
above the age of seventeen, not women, children, or slaves—and to allocate
it by class. There was a parallel in the same years in Warring States China,
but these two cases were, I think, unparalleled mobilizations of military
power in the ancient world. The censor was always an official of the highest
standing, whose decisions could not be overruled. The census became an
overall population count only later, during the empire.
Roman citizen-soldiers had democratic rights, including electing some
of their officers. But there was a tension between the inclusive nature of
citizenship and class inequalities (as in democracies today). The result then
was class struggle and army mutinies, recorded from the fifth century BCE
onward. When pay was not forthcoming or when soldiers felt deprived of
loot, or badly led, or forced into too many battles, they might resist. We
don’t know how frequent mutinies were, but they were a refusal to accept
disliked conditions of service, not a refusal to fight. But their sacrifices had
to be proportional to the chances of victory and rewards, and this indicated
soldiers’ determination to defend legal privileges.
So these rulers and the citizens were devoted to making war, and they
were efficient at it. The republic, once institutionalized, could rapidly extract
taxes for war and raise and logistically maintain legions in the field. It
probably mobilized a larger proportion of the total population than any other
state before modern times, and modern states have much larger state and
local bureaucracies. Rome had a very small bureaucracy: only about 150
civil servants in Rome, and perhaps 150 senatorial and equestrian
administrators, plus small staffs of public slaves in the provinces. Such a tiny
bureaucracy could not effectively govern an empire of around 50–70 million
people spread over 100,000–200,000 square kilometers deploying legions
totaling between 200,000 and 300,000 disciplined, logistically supported
soldiers. But this state was really run by its militaristic class structure,
defined by nobility, wealth, and military service, whose combination of
collective solidarity and hierarchy of rank conferred considerable
infrastructural power. The republic centered on the senatorial and equestrian
classes, which shared a common culture and were politically organized in
the senate and shared the popular assemblies with heavy infantry and
medium-heavy infantry middling classes. All participated in a career
structure that tied together army command and political office, providing the
spoils of war and political office. The military-political class structure
provided the core of the state, not the few “bureaucrats,” who were often
slaves. As Scheidel says, “The Roman state that arose from these
arrangements was one narrowly focused on warfare and little else.”64 This
war-addicted republic had an economy largely “off the books,” making war
for greed and glory. So despite what I wrote in my 1984 article on despotic
and infrastructural power, the Roman Republic actually had extensive
infrastructural power and a despotic power confined to controlling the poor,
the conquered, and the enslaved.
The fighting qualities of the Roman soldier are often exaggerated. As
happens in all armies, on occasion the soldiers got frightened, ran, or
deserted. There were defeats, those against Hannibal and Mithridates, king
of Pontus, being the best-known. Jessica Clark counts forty-three defeats in
the second century BCE alone, but she adds that the senate did not always
count them as such and always saw them as setbacks on the road to eventual
victory.65 In 53 BCE at Carrhae in modern Turkey, defeat came at the hands
of a Parthian army dominated by horse archers. The Roman commander
Crassus had scorned advice to attack the Parthians through Armenia and
instead marched his troops straight across the desert, engaging in battle
without resting his men, in open terrain suited to horse archers. Roman
weakness in cavalry meant the archers could not be dispersed. Firing from
outside the range of Roman spears during a whole day, they caused
substantial infantry losses, although the line stood firm. Now Crassus made
the error of sending forward part of his force, breaking up the legions’
cohesion. The Parthian heavy cavalry charged and the lines began to
disintegrate. The legionaries, their officers, and Crassus were slaughtered.
After Carrhae, vengeance was required. To accept defeat was unthinkable.
Caesar was preparing an expedition to avenge Crassus when he was
assassinated. Mark Anthony did launch a Parthian expedition but was
defeated in 37 BCE, having ill-prepared his troops for mountain combat. The
senate kept on authorizing attacks on Parthia, and some victories were
achieved, but the troops were never able to finish the enemy off. Rome had
been more intrinsically bellicose than successful, yet declaring that final
victory is inevitable means you carry on aggressing. Roman armies kept
coming back from defeats. They had been successful while Roman rulers
could tolerate only victory. Belatedly, Parthian persistence taught Romans
Realism.
There had been two main military virtues of Roman citizenship
(Eckstein and Harris agree). First, it was geared to warfare. It generated
comradely bonds among citizen-soldiers, while its legally and militarily
entrenched class privileges strengthened legitimate hierarchy. Intense
comradeship and unquestioning obedience to hierarchy are the main
requisites of an effective army. The citizen body became larger than rival
states’, expanding to include all classes of free men. Taylor says that the
Romans could muster a peak deployment of 175,000 soldiers in 190 BCE
(other estimates are higher). By comparison, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic
kingdoms spent much less of their wealth on the military and so could
mobilize only about 80,000, and though the Macedonian kingdom was more
militarized, it was also smaller and poorer and mobilized only 45,000. Taylor
notes that Carthage could on occasion mobilize more men than Rome, but
they were drawn mainly from tributary states, which had weaknesses.66
Citizens were lightly taxed, for their main duty was onerous military
service, which evolved into a duration of six to fourteen years (according to
need) for the assidui, citizens with the property qualification. The draft went
smoothly and there were no troop shortages, not even when virtually all
assidui were called up in the Second Punic War. But then came some
reluctance, and in 107 BCE Marius abandoned the property qualification,
recruiting poor, paid soldiers who would expect a grant of property at the
end of their service. A further change was instituted by Emperor Augustus,
who established a volunteer, professional, and paid army with a service
obligation of sixteen years. These reforms broke the tight links between
citizenship and the army that had provided the republic’s coup-proofing.
 Legionaries expected a share of the loot, and many could expect land
when they finished their service. To satisfy them required victories, a self-
reinforcing system. Soldiers who survived could achieve more prosperity
and respect from family and neighbors. So Roman soldiers and veterans
were an important pressure group for war. They fought well both because
rewards depended on victory and because of the brutal class-based
discipline, intensive drilling, and citizen esprit de corps of the legions. The
legion was superior because of the dual nature of Roman citizenship, which
yielded class solidarity at the top and hierarchy down below.
The second advantage of Roman citizenship was its flexibility toward
allies. Although Romans viewed peace as something imposed by them on a
defeated enemy, repression was limited by a desire to enhance their military
manpower, and this was achieved, uniquely in the ancient Mediterranean
world, by gradual extensions of citizenship.67 Eckstein saw the crucial
Roman advantage as its “divorce of citizen status from ethnicity or
geographical location,” which allowed the creation of a citizen body
dwarfing other ancient states, coming close to being a “unified nation-
state.”68 After allies and former enemies had subordinated themselves to
Rome, they were given a degree of citizenship consonant with their past
behavior, present attitudes, and strategic location. A few were granted full
citizenship, others had citizen status without the right to vote, others had
lesser rights. Those who had fought against Rome might be killed or
enslaved and have their property expropriated. This has the look of a highly
rational war-making strategy.
It is not entirely clear why Rome adopted this uniquely expansive
citizen strategy. The foundation myth was that when Romulus defeated the
Sabines, he promised citizenship to Sabine war captives held in Rome. We
saw that some early non-Roman elites negotiated their way into Roman
citizenship. This happened, for example, in Veii, the nearest Etruscan city. In
396 BCE the Romans took the city. Archaeologists have detected continuity
of settlement, and Rome apparently allowed it to operate as before, but under
its authority. In 390 Veiians were among four new citizen tribes created after
the Gauls sacked Rome, expanding the pool of military recruits.69 Highly
attuned to battlefield advantage, Rome viewed winning wars as more
important than preserving the exclusivity and purity of citizenship, in
contrast to the Greeks. In Greek city-states like Athens, all freeborn males
were citizens, but slaves, foreign residents, and allies could not become
citizens. Though the Carthaginians were probably not so restrictive, they had
a merchant empire lacking extensive landmasses with large populations.
Only when defeated in the First Punic War did they acquire tributary states
in Iberia and North Africa in order to field more troops. The reason that the
Romans were the most successful warriors was that their social structure,
their political rights, and their culture were all subordinated to military
efficiency—a truly militaristic society.
By the late republic, citizenship was held by Italians, colonies of
Romans established elsewhere, Romans or their descendants living
elsewhere, some city populations throughout the empire, and client allied
rulers. Women were not citizens since they did not provide military service,
though they had legal rights. The grant of citizenship if one proved one’s
loyalty was a major factor keeping allies loyal—the one area of genuine
Roman diplomacy. The allies did not pay taxes, nor did the Romans usually
take tribute from them. Instead, allies delivered annual military service.
Since this symbolized their subordination, it was important to use allied
auxiliaries regularly, another incentive to make war often.70 The advantages
for the allies were that they had a right to loot, while Rome brought peace
between them.
Each Roman legion was flanked by allied auxiliaries often
outnumbering the legionaries. Without them, Rome would have been weak
in cavalry and javelins. That they fought together on the battlefield required
close coordination of drilling and tactics, which solidified the relations
between Rome and its allies. Most ancient empires fell because rivals took
advantage of revolts in conquered provinces. Hannibal tried in Italy to draw
away Rome’s allies, offering them alliance with Carthage. Some wavered,
but they knew he could not give them rights equal to those of Roman
citizenship, and they knew that Rome would keep on fighting whatever the
odds. Being on the winning side was all-important to them as minor powers.
Thus, Rome rarely sued for peace or searched for compromise, even when in
dire straits. Three Samnite Wars, three Punic Wars, four Macedonian Wars:
by digging deep for victory, Rome kept its allies loyal.71 The allies initially
kept their own languages and culture, but from the first century BCE the allies
became Romans in culture, language, taxes, censuses, oaths, baths,
architecture, and law.72 Assimilation was not forced on them, for they
desired Roman favor and civilization.
 The two military virtues—breadth of citizenship and its extension to
allies—brought Rome larger manpower reserves than its rivals. Beard and
Eckstein agree, but they claim that Rome’s opponents were just as
militaristic, focusing as they did on ferocity of culture and praise for
warriors. More critical for militarism is the need that other institutions be
subordinated to military efficiency. In the nineteenth century Prussia became
more militaristic than Austria-Hungary, not primarily for reasons of culture
but because it had a military machine dominating the state. Rome’s power
structures were subordinated to military efficiency. Greek states valued a
citizenship restricted by class and ethnicity for political reasons. In Carthage
militarism was subordinated to trade. That is why Rome was unusually
aggressive and fought and won so many wars.
Each refusal to accept defeat, whatever the cost, brought final victory.
Roman militarism was not unique, but it was more relentlessly pursued,
more enduring, and more institutionally embedded. War was a reasonable
bet for achieving booty and glory. The confidence of legionaries in their
superiority made the odds seem more favorable. In periods of defeat, the risk
was much greater. Then brutal discipline and intense drilling had to kick in
to nullify fear and motivate the struggle for ultimate victory. Roman legions
suffered defeats, but they won the wars. For an example, I turn to the third-
century BCE Punic Wars, fought against Carthage.

The Punic Wars

The surviving sources on the Punic Wars were all written later than the
events described and they are pro-Roman—Polybius the least so. We can
combine archaeological evidence, synthesized by Nathan Pilkington, with
the largely text-based accounts of Richard Miles and Dexter Hoyos.73 But
because the Roman senate ordered the destruction of Carthage’s records after
final victory, we know little of its version of events.
Eckstein again sees the Punic Wars and concurrent wars against Greek
states through the lens of Realism. He says that the eastern Mediterranean
world had been formerly “balanced” between three great Hellenistic powers,
the Seleucid, Ptolemaic, and Antigonid successor dynasties to the empire of
Alexander the Great. But through internal conflict in the Ptolemaic state,
from 207 to 188 BCE the eastern Mediterranean suffered a “power-transition
crisis,” as the balance ended and anarchy increased. Wars to establish
hegemony broke out. Rome, says Eckstein, was pulled into this partly by
fear of unrest or of a new hegemon, partly by commitments to its allies, and
partly by its long-established traditions of imperial expansion. Carthage was
similarly pulled in, he says. Rome’s triumphs in the Greek and Punic wars
signaled the rise of a new hegemon.74 This makes some sense, but to
understand the Punic Wars we must also examine the different sources of
social power within Rome and Carthage.
The city-state of Carthage, on the North African coast in what is now
Tunisia, was an offshoot of Tyre, a Phoenician city in Lebanon. The Latin
word punicus meant Phoenician. Carthage became a self-governing city-
state penetrating its hinterland, but for centuries it remained a minor colony.
It originally had kings, perhaps elected, but then acquired a constitution with
an aristocratic senate and a more popular assembly. Around 340 BCE
Aristotle said admiringly that it combined monarchical, oligarchic, and
democratic elements and deflected internal conflict abroad by sending
groups of citizens to found other Carthaginian states. There was a shared
ruling-class culture and shared military-service obligations for citizens of
Carthage and its African hinterland. The main differences from Rome were
that merchant and aristocratic families could act more autonomously, and
military offices were rigorously kept apart from civilian and religious
offices; in Rome militarism also dominated the state and religion. Two
annually elected “suffets,” resembling Roman consuls, exercised judicial and
executive power but not military power. Generals were appointed separately,
often picked by the officers, and were then ratified by the city authorities.
Militarism was not as central to the state and society as in Rome.
Carthage was said by Justin to have invaded Sicily in 550 BCE and again
around 525. Herodotus adds an invasion in 490 BCE, defeated at the Battle of
Himera. Many scholars have followed them in dating Carthaginian
imperialism this early. Hoyos gives a detailed account from Greek sources of
the campaign leading to Himera, and Terrenato mentions several wars in
Sicily between Carthage and Syracuse through the fifth century.75 Yet the
battle at Himera probably involved men from other Phoenician colonies,
argues Pilkington, adding that there is no archaeological evidence for any
Carthaginian military venture abroad until an opportunistic invasion of
Sicily in 409 BCE, when Syracuse had been weakened by its long war with
Athens.76 Carthaginian forces razed several Greek cities on the island and
established at least two settlements, while leaving alone indigenous Sicilian
towns. Before this, Carthage had established sufficient control over its
African hinterland to support the city and armed forces. Carthaginian rule
brought more prosperity to fertile Tunisian land that had been previously
underexploited. Rule over the indigenous peoples was not very onerous,
enabling the fusion of these Africans into a Carthaginian identity. They
became the mainstay of its army, alongside other mercenaries, while citizens
dominated its navy. But the port of Carthage remained small and lacked dry-
dock facilities until the mid-fourth century BCE. There were merchant ships
but no fleet capable of carrying a large invasion force. Perhaps the fleet of
490 BCE came from several Phoenician cities.
Unlike Rome, Carthage then became a major trading state, at first
through trade with Athens and other Greek city-states, especially by
exporting grain from its own hinterland. Small Phoenician colonies in
Sardinia and southern Gaul were also subordinated, sometimes forcibly,
though they retained their own political institutions, which indicates indirect
Carthaginian rule. C. R. Whittaker and Miles emphasize the nonimperial
nature of Carthaginian power even in the third century BCE, and it was for
long more a federation than an empire.77 Rome was the only true empire in
the western Mediterranean world. Carthage controlled key ports and had
widespread political connections but no imperial system of conquests or
annexations. After 350 BCE Carthage maintained large fleets in a big new
port facility, dominated more North African territory, and founded colonies
in Sicily, Sardinia, and Iberia. This involved troops, although not much war
was involved. Miles says Carthage’s foreign policy “stands in stark contrast
to the power politics” of Rome’s plunder and subjugation policies. “There is
little evidence of territorial conquest, administrative control, collection of
taxes, commercial monopolies or the appropriation of foreign policy.”
Carthage created a “middle ground on which Phoenician, Greek and
indigenous populations interacted and cooperated.”78 Perhaps this is a little
too glowing, as Harris argues, for Carthage did wage war, had some
militarism in its culture and institutions, restricted citizenship tightly, and
dealt harshly with discontent.79 But Hoyos says Carthage waged far fewer
wars than Rome and the effect was to produce generals who were
“amateurs” in comparison with the Roman generals (Hannibal excluded).80
Whittaker went through the attributes of empire—territorial conquest,
colonial governance, tribute, and unequal trade.81 In the fifth and fourth
centuries BCE he found only reciprocal agreements with other cities and
peoples for port of trade rights favoring Carthaginian ships, since their naval
power protected shipping. Military power did not dominate Carthaginian
economic, political, and ideological institutions. Much expansion was by
private merchant houses with their own small fleets. Think of several British
East India Companies, not the British Empire.
This was only a coastal empire, focused on port cities, and the
hinterlands needed to supply them. After the invasion of Sicily, troops were
stationed there, but there is no sign of political institutions. The population
subject to Carthaginian rule in Sicily and Sardinia remained small and
largely self-governing. Carthage avoided conflict in Greece and with Rome
and played no role in the Italian mainland. Polybius says Rome and Carthage
concluded three treaties recognizing each other’s spheres of influence, and
trade between them produced a Carthaginian merchant district in Rome.82 In
the third treaty, signed in 279 BCE, Rome and Carthage pledged to aid each
other in case of a threat from the Greek king Pyrrhus. Since Rome still
lacked much of a navy, a Carthaginian fleet would, if required, transport
Roman troops across the seas. The treaty was not activated, but it implied a
loose alliance. Pyrrhus then entered Sicily, forced Syracuse to submit, and
attacked the Carthaginians, pushing them to the west of the island. They
were saved by his maltreatment of other Greek settlements in Sicily, which
joined with Carthaginian forces to drive Pyrrhus off the island in 276,
leaving a balance of power between Syracuse and the Carthaginians, and
other Greek and indigenous settlements alongside them. Carthage was still
not revealing imperial ambitions and Rome lacked equal sea power. War
between them was not inevitable.
Then came a window of opportunity. The Mamertines, “Sons of Mars,”
a band of Italian mercenaries, had seized Messene, the closest port to
mainland Italy, and held it for twenty years. They had slaughtered the
inhabitants, for which they were universally condemned as war criminals,
and had then run the city as a base for piracy on land and sea. Syracuse
finally sent a force that defeated them. The remaining Mamertines, retreating
into the citadel, appealed in 264 BCE to both Carthage and Rome for help.
The Carthaginians had a fleet nearby and sent some troops into the city, but
then they moved out. We don’t know why. There was some debate among
the Roman senators about the morality of aiding the Mamertines, especially
when they themselves had just put to death renegade Roman soldiers, allies
of the Mamertines, who had similarly murdered the citizens of Rhegium in
Italy. The senate—unusually—failed to reach a decision and passed it on to
the popular assembly. Polybius gives a detailed account of the decision. He
says the Romans feared Carthaginian power:

Carthaginian aggrandisement was not confined to Libya but had

embraced many districts in Iberia as well. . . . Carthage was,
besides, mistress of all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian
seas: they were beginning, therefore, to be exceedingly anxious
lest, if the Carthaginians became masters of Sicily also, they
should find them very dangerous and formidable neighbours,
surrounding them as they would on every side, and occupying a
position which commanded all the coasts of Italy. . . . Should they
avail themselves of the voluntary offer of Messene and become
masters of it, they were certain before long to crush Syracuse also,
since they were already lords of nearly the whole of the rest of
Sicily. . . . They felt it was absolutely necessary not to . . . allow
the Carthaginians to secure what would be like a bridge to enable
them to cross into Italy. The people, however, had suffered much
from the previous wars, and wanted some means of repairing the
losses which they had sustained in every department. Besides these
national advantages to be gained by the war, the military
commanders suggested that individually they would get manifest
and important benefits from it. They accordingly voted in favour
of giving the aid.83

The appeal to greed undercuts the claim that this was really self-defense, for
the “manifest and important benefits” accruing to Roman citizens meant
plunder and tribute, “justified” by the threat of future strangulation. In reality
Carthage was not a threat. Polybius’s sources were written near the end of
the Punic Wars by historians reading back their present into the past.
Carthaginian ships had long patrolled the straits, protecting trade from
pirates without showing signs of territorial ambitions in mainland Italy, and
Carthage was in defensive mode in Sicily, deploying few troops there. If
Carthage had been seen as the main threat in Sicily, the obvious strategy
would have been to ally with Syracuse against Carthage, but this was the
opposite of what Roman forces did.
In 264 BCE a Roman invasion force crossed the straits and took Mes-
sene, beginning the first Roman war fought outside Italy. Roman and
Carthaginian forces initially avoided each other, and the Romans instead
went southeast to attack Syracuse, forcing it to submit to Roman rule. Only
then did they turn westward toward Carthaginian settlements, having
realized the relative weakness of the Carthaginian presence. It was
opportunism aimed at direct territorial control. Carthaginian forces followed
the cautious strategy they had pursued against Sicilian Greeks. Defending a
few fortified towns, their outnumbered troops hoped to sap the Roman will
to continue fighting so that a negotiated settlement could be reached. A
treaty delineating separate spheres of interest was possible. Rome could have
continued as a northern Mediterranean power, Carthage as a southern, and
Carthaginian strategy on the island aimed at preserving the status quo. But
Roman goals had expanded into conquering the whole island. Carthaginian
leaders felt they could not accept this because as a maritime power trading
across the Mediterranean, Carthage needed some control of the straits. Since
Roman leaders must have realized this, they knew they were starting a major
war with a power whose navy dominated the seas. I suspect a war party in
the senate had a longer-term ambition. Polybius’s ambivalence might
indicate a similar suspicion.
War began, its first phase taking place in Sicily. The Carthaginians
poured in reinforcements, and bloody, inconclusive warfare ensued, both in
Sicily and in North Africa. Carthage was at first dominant at sea. Rome had
the advantage of its expanding citizenship and a much larger population
from which it could draw troops for land fighting. Pilkington says Carthage
could draw on a maximum of about 200,000 men of fighting age from its
African territories and colonies elsewhere.84 Apart from its African
hinterland, the Carthaginians had not acquired landmasses with large
populations. Thus, it had only about one-half of Rome’s potential soldiers.
Carthage had to make up numbers with levies from tributaries and
mercenaries, perhaps costly and of lesser loyalty. Carthage had to twice
divert resources to suppress rebellions among North African troops. The
Romans also detached some of Carthage’s tributaries in Iberia and Numidia.
Rome had the edge on land.
At first Carthage was a naval power and Rome was not. Yet the
Romans again demonstrated an ability to subordinate the economy to war
and exploit the resources of Greek city-states that it now dominated in the
western Mediterranean. Private finance was mobilized to build fleets whose
design was based on a recovered Carthaginian vessel, using Greek
craftsmen, while adding improvements such as raised, strengthened prows
for ramming and boarding (though these proved vulnerable in storms). Battle
performance improved, and in 256 BCE a Roman fleet of over three hundred
ships defeated the main Carthaginian fleet, also over three hundred vessels,
off Cape Ecnomus in the south of Sicily. There was further fighting for a few
years, but Carthaginian soldiers in Sicily, their supply lines cut, surrendered.
Later that year a Roman army invaded Africa. The ultimate weakness of a
commercial empire now revealed itself. Carthage struggled to find more
troops; Rome continued to raise them.
Polybius says the First Punic War was “the greatest war in history in its
length, intensity, and scale of operations.”85 But the Carthaginians now sued
for peace. The senate exacted heavy terms: a war indemnity paid over ten
years and the loss of Sicily and other islands. Polybius concludes rather
euphemistically: “It was not by mere chance or without knowing what they
were doing that the Romans struck their bold stroke for universal supremacy
and dominion, and justified their boldness by its success. No: it was the
natural result of discipline gained in the stern school of difficulty and
danger.”86
Romans then took advantage of Carthaginian preoccupation with a
Numidian revolt to seize Sardinia and Corsica, hitherto Carthaginian. The
senate then demanded a further indemnity from Carthage. These
unprovoked, treaty-breaking acts made further warfare inevitable, as
Polybius notes.87 So far this had been all Roman aggression.
But this had provoked an aggressive Carthaginian response. Its rulers
now sought direct control over further African territories, and they looked to
Spain to build up resources to counter further Roman aggression and to pay
the indemnities. They already had trading depots along the coast, and they
now moved inland through campaigns against indigenous peoples, planting a
more direct imperial rule over them, aided by marriage alliances with local
elites and new settler cities.88 This was now territorial imperialism, a
defensive response to Roman expansion, though offensive against the
inhabitants of Africa and Spain.
The Treaty of Ebro in 226 BCE allowed Carthage to expand in Spain
south of the Ebro River while Rome took the north. This was breached by
Rome when it supported the city-state of Saguntum, south of the river. The
Saguntines had attacked a nearby city-state allied to Carthage, believing they
had Roman protection. Carthage’s commander in Spain, Hannibal, moved
quickly to defeat Saguntum in 219 BCE. He would spare the population,
provided they were “willing to depart from Saguntum, unarmed, each with
two garments.” He needed to pay his army and bribe the wavering
assemblies in Carthage with the spoils of the city. They were more cost-
conscious than Romans, and Hannibal, unlike Roman commanders, had to
contend with an assembly peace faction. The citizens of Saguntum declined
his offer and tried to destroy the city, so Hannibal ordered a bloodbath. The
senate declared that this was a casus belli and that Carthage had breached the
Ebro treaty. Roman ambassadors were then sent to demand Hannibal be
handed over and taken to Rome as a war criminal—a typically unacceptable
Roman demand, made so that Rome could claim that refusal made this a
“just” war. Polybius blames both sides, as do most modern historians.
Nathan Rosenstein says that neither Carthage nor Rome wanted war, but
neither would back down, whereas Harris blames the Roman senate for
using the Saguntines to provoke Hannibal into war.89 The provocation seems
to have been mutual, however.
The Second Punic War lasted seventeen years, until 201 BCE. Hannibal,
well aware of Rome’s greater potential reserves, struck quickly at the Roman
heartland.90 He took his soldiers and his elephants in Spain over the Alps
into Italy. He had support from several Celtic tribes and tried to bring
Rome’s Italian allies over to his side, releasing all their captured prisoners
and promising to restore the freedoms of those who allied with him. At the
height of his power in Italy, perhaps 40 percent of Italian cities had promised
him their allegiance, though most were more cautious in their actions,
anxious not to provoke Roman rage. After Hannibal’s great victory at
Cannae in 216 BCE, in which Livy asserts 50,000 Romans were killed, Livy
says Hannibal told his prisoners that “he was not carrying on a war of
extermination with the Romans, but was contending for honour and empire.
That his ancestors had yielded to the Roman valour; and that he was
endeavouring that others might be obliged to yield, in their turn, to his good
fortune and valour together. Accordingly, he allowed the captives the liberty
of ransoming themselves.”91
At this moment Hannibal did not march straight on Rome but offered
negotiations, a decision sometimes considered his biggest mistake, since
Rome never negotiated. Livy quotes one of his generals urging an immediate
march on Rome.92 Hannibal replied, “I commend your zeal, but I need time
to weigh the plan which you propose,” to which the general responded,
“Assuredly, no one man has been blessed with all God’s gifts. You,
Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it.” Yet
Hannibal had probably calculated that taking Rome would involve a long
siege that threatened supply difficulties while his forces remained static,
vulnerable to attack. He wanted not the destruction of Rome but recognition
of the equal stature and independence of Carthage. Cannae is also well over
three hundred kilometers from Rome.
Hannibal’s alliance with King Philip V of Macedon in 215 BCE put
pressure on Rome, which faced a possible two-front war. Hannibal marched
around Italy for fifteen years, ravaging Roman territory. The Romans
resorted to stalling “Fabian” tactics, made famous by the general Fabius
Maximus. Hannibal was hurt by the defeat of his brother Hasdrubal, who
had brought reinforcements into Italy. When Rome sent legions to detach
Carthaginian allies in Spain and Numidia, Hannibal was in trouble, unable to
get reinforcements or defend his Italian allies. Again, Roman allies and
mobilization policies made the crucial difference.93 Hannibal also faced a
faction in Carthage that opposed sending him reinforcements. The
commercial instincts of Carthaginian leaders prompted them to send more
resources to Iberian campaigns than to Hannibal in Italy. With the economic
resources of Spain, members of this faction believed they might reestablish a
balance of power with Rome. Hannibal was eventually recalled to Carthage
and lost a final battle with the Romans at Zama in Africa in 202 BCE. His
government then sued for peace and exiled him. Carthage, unlike Rome, had
not subordinated all its sources of power to war making. Commercial and
military calculations remained distinct. Faced with Rome, wavering between
them would destroy them.
The Roman senate kept raising new legions. There were no rebellions,
no peace factions within the senate, just class solidarity and competition
between senators for command against Hannibal, and the fame and spoils
that would bring. Over 70 percent of Roman citizens aged seventeen to thirty
were drafted to fight, which in modern times, Rosenstein notes, has been
equaled only by the Confederate states in the American Civil War. The
disasters in Italy, says Livy, did not induce the Romans “to breathe a word
about peace.”94 The final peace treaty of 202 BCE stripped Carthage of most
of its territories, most of its fleet, and the right to make war without Roman
permission, as well as the payment of a huge annual indemnity over a fifty-
year period. When Carthage offered to pay this off in a single installment,
Rome refused—it was a long-term means of demonstrating Carthage’s
subordination, a status ploy.95
During this war the Romans had avoided a two-front war with Philip V,
king of Macedon, only by conceding a treaty favorable to Philip. This was
remedied in 200 BCE when they invaded his kingdom. The senate responded
to a call for help from the Greek states of Pergamum and Rhodes, which
were feeling threatened by a projected alliance between the kingdom of
Macedon and the Seleucids, another Hellenistic monarchy in southwestern
Asia. These smaller powers feared they would be overcome, and the senators
seized the opportunity to use their enlarged armies to achieve conquests in
Greece also.
The Romans had won the Punic Wars. Carthage had been defeated, but
a war party led by Cato declared repeatedly that “Carthage must be
destroyed.” The city still had rich pickings, and greedy Romans were keen to
take them. Hoyos says no Roman could have believed that Carthage was still
a threat.96 Rosenstein laments, “The Republic’s declaration of war on
Carthage in 149 stands as a permanent stain on its honour.”97 Polybius and
Appian say the senate made a secret decision to attack Carthage, while
encouraging a Numidian prince to attack it first. When Carthage resisted, the
senate claimed this was in breach of the treaty requiring Carthage to first
seek its permission for war. Claiming a just war, a Roman army arrived in
Africa in 149 BCE and besieged Carthage. The city offered to surrender, but
the Roman generals demanded they hand over all weapons, abandon the city,
and found a new city at least sixteen kilometers from the sea—an offer they
could not accept. After a three-year siege the city was stormed and looted.98
Perhaps 150,000 Carthaginians were killed and 50,000 survivors, mainly
women, were sold into slavery. Archaeological excavations confirm that the
whole city was burned and razed to the ground, not a soul remaining—
emotional revenge for past humiliations, out of all proportion to them. The
loot did pump wealth into the Roman economy, and taking North Africa into
public ownership, the state redistributed it to Romans. In the same year
Corinth was destroyed by Roman forces, the pretext being that Roman
ambassadors, again offering unacceptable peace terms, had been insulted.
Some citizens were slaughtered, the rest enslaved, and the city declared
extinct. Yet archaeology reveals a lesser scale of destruction than at
Carthage.
 The Roman senate showed that it would achieve domination free of any
rival. The Punic Wars had revealed an imperialism and resistance to
negotiations unmatched by the Carthaginians. The end of Carthage was more
than just payback for its earlier victories. Along with Corinth’s extinction, it
was a dire warning to any people who might contemplate resisting Rome.
Eckstein helps us identify a dangerous geopolitical environment, but Harris
gives us the reason war triumphed over diplomacy in handling it—an
opportunistic but cumulative Roman militarism baked in to its social
structure. Carthaginian power structures could not match such single-
mindedness.

Endgame of the Republic: Civil Wars

Roman militarism reached its apogee in overthrowing the very republic that
had institutionalized it. Roman conquests had increased inequality, and
peasant soldiers had fought to their own detriment. While away on military
service, aristocrats had bought their lands with the spoils of war and
cultivated them with slaves the soldiers had conquered. The new slave-based
villa agriculture generated higher yields and economic growth—at the
expense of soldiers and slaves alike. Rising expectations of war profit
heightened corruption by governors and generals, intensifying electoral
bribery for high office. The state had acquired extensive public lands, which
the wealthy of Rome could lease to create estates worked by slaves. Many
peasant farms could not compete, and farmers were forced off their lands
into a poverty-stricken existence in Rome, whose population rose greatly.
Their rising discontent was paralleled by that of slaves, who across different
regions mounted large-scale revolts in 136–30, 105, and 72–70 BCE (the last
famously led by Spartacus).
These conflicts led to more violent Roman politics. During 133–21 BCE,
the two Gracchi brothers exploited their power as tribunes of the assemblies
to seek radical reforms, backed by a large influx of people voting in the
assemblies. The twin political institutions of the republic, senate and
assemblies, were now at odds. The Gracchi sought to redistribute lands that
the rich had acquired to veterans and landless citizens, and to offer more
rights to the allies—the social democrats of the ancient world, fiercely
opposed by most senators, who represented the rich. The unequal
distribution of the spoils of war generated an enduring polarization of
Roman politics between reform-minded populares and conservative
optimates. But the Gracchi brothers were assassinated by optimates before
their reforms bore fruit. These murders may have been the first political
bloodshed in the city of Rome for three centuries, and they reduced the
political power of the popular classes.
The senate aborted the reforms but unrest remained. Discontent among
allies grew: manpower shortages meant their military service obligations
were mounting. They were doing most of the fighting. This provoked in 91–
87 BCE the Social Wars of the allied Italian peoples, who demanded full
citizenship, equal share in pay and spoils, residence and contract rights, and
marriage with Romans. Rome was pressured into granting most of their
demands. But this did not end unequal imperialism. The upper classes
continued to amass large fortunes, while more legionaries were dispossessed
or indebted. The elite destroyed the republic. They “lacked willingness to
abide by the norms under which they had grown up” (a parallel for today).99
The embedding of Roman armies in the senate, the popular assemblies,
and the citizen population as a whole had produced an outcome similar to
modern civilian control of the military. Coup-proofing strategies had not
been required. But now the social bonds had been broken and wars had
increased the power and autonomy of generals, which encroached on the
power of the senate. During the 80s BCE, two rival generals, Marius and
Sulla, managed in turn to restore order by force and intimidate the senate
into appointing them as consuls. They had recruited armies more loyal to
themselves than to the state by extending military service to the lower
classes, offering them bounties and land upon discharge, and granting more
citizen rights to allies. The ensuing civil wars of the period involved much
plundering in order to pay the troops and ensure their loyalty to their
generals.
Marius was an arriviste populist and used his popular backing to break
the rules of Roman politics, including standing for reelection to the
consulship on multiple occasions—and winning. Sulla, an aristocrat, was
backed by optimate senators. In 88 BCE their rivalry escalated into civil war
when Sulla violated a constitutional taboo by marching his army into Rome
and forcing Marius and his followers to flee the city. After the death of
Marius in 86 BCE, Sulla seized control, styling himself “Dictator to Restore
the Republic,” killing and seizing the property of opponents and distributing
it to his own supporters. The institutions representing the dominant classes
of Rome had lost their power. Now a general spoke for them.
That began the death throes of the republic, but it did not solve
factionalism. Disorder followed the death of Sulla. In 59 BCE two generals,
Pompey and Julius Caesar, joined forces with Crassus, a man of enormous
wealth acquired through buying up property confiscated by Sulla. They
seized power in Rome and established a triumvirate. Caesar styled himself
protector of the Marian legacy and courted popular support with reforms
opposed by most of the senate. He was granted an extraordinary ten-year
command in Gaul to get him away from Rome, but his string of victories
there enabled him to build up a formidable army and wealth. The Gauls, he
said, were emotional, impulsive, credulous, fickle, quick to anger, politically
unpredictable, and constantly intriguing. They were therefore a threat,
needing a firm Roman hand. They certainly got it. Plutarch says his
campaign killed a million Gauls and enslaved another million.100 Think of
the horrors such numbers must have involved. His goal was political power
in Rome. He needed money from slaves and military prestige to ensure this
and to outdo Pompey.
Crassus died at Carrhae, leaving Pompey and Caesar as twin dictators.
They both had armies, and Pompey also had a senate majority.101 The
inevitable civil war began when Caesar took his army into Italy in 49 BCE,
crossing the River Rubicon. Pompey was defeated and murdered, and the
senators opposing Caesar were mopped up. But when Caesar adopted the
title Dictator in Perpetuo, a conspiracy of sixty senators assassinated him.
Caesar’s followers won the ensuing civil war, and in 43 BCE came the
triumvirate of Mark Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian, ruling different regions.
This produced more civil wars, ending with the victory of Octavian,
Caesar’s great nephew, adopted son, and heir, in 31 BCE. At first Octavian
preserved the shell of the senate and assemblies. In 27 BCE a tame senate
granted him the titles of Augustus and “First Citizen of the State.” He ruled
as de facto emperor until 14 CE, followed by many emperors. The republic
was finished by its own militarism.

Postscript: The Roman Empire

Under Augustus, Rome became formally an empire. The term Pax Romana
was coined, referring only to the internal peace of the empire, not its foreign
relations, which differs from modern usages of similar terms—Pax
Britannica and Pax Americana. Since Augustus was determined to keep
military power pointing outward, foreign wars continued. Glory remained
the principal motive for war among the emperors.102 Conquests all around
the Mediterranean followed. The emperors said they made war in order to
bring peace to the conquered peoples.103 The emperors in theory controlled
the army, but its practical autonomy threatened them. The development of
praetorian guards was an attempt at coup-proofing, but then their loyalty
might be problematic. Civil wars were rare, but coups common. There were
seventy emperors in total, and only twenty seem to have died of natural
causes. Between twenty-seven and thirty-five were assassinated or died in
prison, nine died in battle, and five committed suicide.
Militarism slackened as a professional army detached war from
citizenship, so that culture and institutions became divorced from military
power, as resources became stretched over a vast empire, and as frontiers
adjoined regions with little wealth or fierce resistance so that war became
not worth the cost. In the east against Persia a more defensive strategy
brought treaties and hostage exchanges.104 But the western empire became
vulnerable to militarism. Civil wars broke out between rival emperors whose
soldiers were loyal to their generals, who became provincial warlords. No
one intended to destroy the western empire. Collapse came as an unintended
consequence of their struggles. The barbarians mattered as they became a
larger proportion of Roman armies.105 But for almost a millennium, Rome
was perhaps the most successful example of militarism the world has ever
seen. After its fall, no European state had equivalent military power for over
a thousand years. The only equal was the Chinese Empire. Their secret was
not a powerful bureaucratic state, but the embedding of dominant classes in
political institutions.

Roman Conclusions
Seven reasons explain why the Roman Republic made war so continuously.
One more explains why this did not last forever.

1. Early Roman growth was due to mixed defensive war, Mafia-

style protection rackets, and negotiated upper-class alliances in an
Italy not yet filled by states, which offered opportunities to expand
over other peoples. Then going to the defense of an ally and
gaining dominance over both enemy and allied regimes was a
mixed offensive-defensive strategy that allowed Rome not to fight
on its own territory. Insecurity receded as Rome enforced more
regime changes and conquered more territories and peoples.
2. Offensive warfare needs success to become repetitive. Rome
was militarily effective because militarily defined classes were
entrenched in the senate, the popular assemblies, and the legions.
Politically, the senate dominated, debating the likely gains, though
not usually the costs, of proposed wars. But calculations—
rationality of means—were dominated by optimism about Roman
military power. This proved not to be misplaced since Romans dug
deeper and sacrificed more for war than did their enemies. Legally
guaranteed rights were held by citizens in return for lengthy
service in legions that thus possessed cohesion resulting from
citizen solidarity. The privileges varying by social class
strengthened legitimate army hierarchy and enabled the intensive
drilling, discipline, logistics, and flexible maneuvering of large
legionary armies by a very small state. Thus, domestic political
power relations produced effective legions, helping lead to success
in aggressive wars.
3. Romans granted varying degrees of citizens’ rights to allies,
thereby reinforcing their loyalty and more than doubling the size
of Roman armies. Battlefield success was enhanced by prioritizing
military power over exclusive citizenship, unlike Rome’s Greek
and Carthaginian rivals. This involved “society” in its two senses,
one modern, meaning a collective body of citizens, the other
relating to the original Latin root word socius, a confederation of
allies.
4. Allies’ allegiance required Roman victories. Client peoples fear
above all the defeat of their protector. If they sense weakness, they
may change sides. But Rome kept on winning. Roman rulers
scorned diplomacy, which meant that they could not counter
possible grand alliances among their rivals by means of
negotiations. They issued demands and refused compromise, while
defeats merely made them dig deeper into manpower reserves than
their enemies could. That gave allies confidence in Rome’s
ultimate victory. This wavered only temporarily under Rome’s
greatest challenge, Hannibal’s invasion of Italy.
5. This combination of causes meant that Roman militarism
became baked in to its economy, ideology, and politics more than
in other states around the Mediterranean. Scheidel agrees: “The
four sources of social power—ideological, economic, military, and
political—were unusually tightly bundled together: members of
the same narrow elite acted as political leaders, military
commanders, and priests, and controlled the largest private
fortunes.”106 Roman success was not due simply to a better
military, disconnected from society. All sources of power were
sacrificed to war making. This eventually brought success even
after reverses in battle, which generated territory, wealth, and
slaves for Romans; it intensified a bellicose culture transmitted
across generations; and it subordinated economic, ideological, and
political institutions to military needs. This was no longer war by
careful, pragmatic calculation of cost, as in Realist theory. It was
war whatever the cost. Repeated wars were due primarily to
domestic power structures.
6. Benefit accrued mainly but not only to the upper classes. The
dual pursuit of greed and status through glory, the two being
closely entwined, also brought political office, becoming the main
motives of politician-generals and soldiers alike, justifying the risk
of death. Romans saw conquest, not trade (coerced or not), as the
major mode of economic acquisition. Carthage mixed the two and
was militarily weaker for it.
7. Rulers carry on doing what works, and Roman militarism and
imperialism intensified with success. Ambition grew from
achieving mere dominance over neighbors to conquest and
territorial empire. By the time of the Punic Wars, Rome was the
major aggressor around the Mediterranean. Any people that defied
Rome would be destroyed—Carthago delenda est, and Corinth
too. Such ferocious retribution involved an unusual phase of
emotional amplification of imperialism. An autonomous ideology,
however, was not a characteristic of Roman imperialism. Rather,
militarism was built into everyday life experience, especially into
the economy and the political career structure, seemingly natural
 and taken for granted. The proximate cause of wars of aggression
was victory in earlier wars. Path dependence helps explain why
Romans kept on making war. We will see that this was merely one
of the most extreme forms of conquest imperialism, commonly
found in historic warfare.
8. But war making eventually weakened the republic, intensifying
inequality and discontent, opening fissures between the senate and
popular assemblies, overturning the coup-proofing links between
citizenship and the army, and allowing generals to build
autonomous power bases. Military power was deployed in Italy
and in Rome itself in civil wars whose winners became dictators,
destroying the republican polity. Militarism had become suicidal
for the republic.

The Roman upper classes were the main beneficiaries of war, followed
by legionaries who survived intact, merchants trading with the legions and in
conquered provinces, and foreign upper classes who switched allegiance
when they perceived Rome would win. The allies took heavy losses but
benefited if they got Roman citizenship. Defeated peoples suffered
massacres, rapes, pillage, and slavery. The Romans destroyed hundreds of
“vanished kingdoms.” The region benefited a little from Roman economic
growth, but whether more peaceful development might have occurred across
the Mediterranean had Rome shared power with Greeks and Carthaginians is
unknowable. Less tangible was the Roman contribution to civilization—law,
literary works, mosaics, sculptures, aqueducts, baths, straight roads—but
achieved with great loss of life. Overall, these wars probably benefited few
of the peoples around the Mediterranean. Rationality of ends was mostly
confined to Roman elites and their dependents.
 CHAPTER FIVE

Ancient China

BETWEEN 710 AND 221 BCE, 866 wars are mentioned in the Chinese annals,
but many were probably minor skirmishes (MIDs). Over the period 656–221
BCE, there were 256 wars involving “great powers”—one every 1.7 years. In
the last phase of the Warring States period, 356–221 BCE, there was a war
every 1.4 years. Most of these encounters probably met the CoW standard of
one thousand battle deaths in a year, although exaggerations are common in
the records, and we can rarely be sure about army size or casualty rates. The
number of polities was reduced from over seventy in 771 BCE to about
twenty in the mid-fifth century BCE. The Warring States period then saw this
reduced to just one, the empire of Qin.1
So there were many “vanished kingdoms,” and the likelihood of any
single polity being at war grew through time. Dingxin Zhao says that fifteen
of the twenty wars whose casualties surpassed 20,000 occurred at the end of
the Warring States period.2 Yet such statistics only indicate that, on average,
somewhere in China a war was occurring between at least two states. In any
single year until near the endgame, most states were not at war.
Nevertheless, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu in the sixth century BCE, begins,
“Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Way to
survival or extinction.” The questions for this chapter are: Why so many
wars, why so many state extinctions, and were wars rational in terms of
either means or ends?
Before 771 BCE the Western Zhou Chinese monarchy had expanded
through quasi-colonial conquest of mostly stateless agriculturalists and
hunter-gatherers. As in early Roman Italy, there was not yet a multistate
system. The Zhou launched wars because they could win them, for they had
greater economic and military power than their neighbors. They did not seize
great wealth. Slaves and military conscripts were the main prize, and Zhou
settlers might develop more intensive agriculture in conquered areas. Many
peripheral peoples bowed to reality by submitting to threats without going to
war. Their elites’ daughters might be married off to Zhou aristocrats as a
symbol of their absorption into the Zhou realm. Rule was feudal, though
different from European feudalism. As their realms extended, rulers shifted
from being mere heads of clans and lineages and stabilized their conquered
realms by “enfeoffing” kin and allies in small walled towns and military
colonies, in which these became lesser replicas of the king, while their own
hereditary “ministers” became lesser replicas of themselves—the typical
devolution of power we find where feudal regimes are unable to directly
control large territories. The eldest son of the principal wife or concubine
inherited lordship, though younger sons received lesser hereditary office at
court or served as soldiers and might be enfeoffed in more peripheral towns.3
Younger sons agitated for more conquest.
Armies were formed of lineage levies whose core was aristocratic
charioteers. A clan chief might have a few full-time soldiers, but most were
conscripted peasants. As in other feudal regimes, as Marx said, armed force
was necessary to extract surplus from the direct producers so that the upper
classes could live well and not fight wars at all. Yet exploitation had its
limits. The core class problem in near-subsistence agrarian societies was that
taking too much of the surplus or too many of the peasants as soldiers or
slaves harmed the productivity of farms on which rulers depended to fight
their wars. They could not squeeze too hard. Taxes were moderate and
armies small and confined to a campaigning season when farm labor was
less important. But peasants were also taken as corvée labor, given the great
height and depth of city walls found by archaeologists. Warfare remained
key for aristocrats, their culture bellicose. Mark Lewis says, “Defense of
one’s honor was the primary spur to battle,” but as Zhao adds, there were
also economic, political, and geopolitical motives. Lacking much evidence,
we cannot disentangle them.4 Then the kings’ power weakened in a typically
feudal way as power shifted downward through this hierarchy of lineages.
They lacked the infrastructures to control their vassals or stop their feuding.
They began to suffer defeats by incoming peoples.
 The Spring and Autumn Period, 771–476 BCE
In 771 BCE came disaster. The Zhou, racked by a disputed succession, saw
their capital sacked by men they called uncivilized—barbarians. The
survivors fled eastward, where the Zhou lords set up their own polities as
“dukes” over which the king retained only a symbolic kingship. Ritual
deference was shown to him, and no one else could claim the title of king.
The indigenous people of the new domains either were conquered and
enserfed or submitted to ducal power to keep their freedom. Since these
states were founded by military power and continued to extract the surplus
by force, militarism continued. China was divided into many independent
lordships—one chronicler says there were 148, but there were at least 70,
most of them tiny; a few acted as overlords to their smaller neighbors.
States were at first rudimentary, and ministers and officials were
dependent on personal relationships between dukes and their vassals. The
duke could assign offices to his vassals but had little power over them once
they were installed. An effective vassal enjoying high office might acquire
enough retainers to challenge the duke, and so might cliques of discontented
vassals excluded from office. Dukes were male, although dowager queen
mothers might govern as regents on behalf of a boy successor, a practice
surviving right through to Cixi, the final dowager of the Chinese Empire,
who died in 1908 just before the fall of the last dynasty.
Civil wars were caused by a duke’s failings, especially in war, by the
absence of a direct male heir, by the accession of a boy or apparent
weakling, or by the rise of a discontented lineage group. Palace coups were
more common, when discontented kin killed a duke and seized his throne.
Zhao finds that about half the dukes of three major states were assassinated
—an extraordinary proportion, which might seem to render irrational the
pursuit of political power, except that there was no escape—even kin who
sought only a quiet life were killed in coups, as were the kin of those staging
unsuccessful coups. The domestic fears of insecure dukes fueled foreign
wars, for to secure domination at home required soldiers acquired in war,
and victories abroad brought loot for retainers and loyal soldiers, who could
then be deployed domestically. Thus, war was the way to acquire resources
for extracting the surplus from those who actually produced it. This Marxian
circular process reinforced the lure of war.
Geopolitics was fairly anarchic, yet so was domestic politics, which
often led to civil war between rival lineages. Chinese thinkers believed war
was inevitable because of either human nature or the nature of society. The
primary value was political order, as is usual in disorderly socie-ties. War
imposing order was therefore righteous but generally brief. These were
highly class-divided societies in which the masses shared little of the culture
of their rulers. Peasants saw little of the state. Taxes, military service, and
corvée labor were extracted by local vassals.
There was a shared culture among elites in the core zones. One
enduring diplomatic form was the hegemon—a duke coming to exercise
some authority over other rulers through arbitration of disputes and
convening of assemblies to issue agreements. An edict of 657 BCE
proclaimed, “Let there be no damming of irrigation water, no withholding
sales of grain, no changes of heirs apparent, no promoting of concubines to
replace wives, and no involvement of women in state affairs.” Another
declared: “Let not office be hereditary, nor let officers simultaneously hold
more than one office, and in the selection of officers let the object be to get
the proper men, and let not a ruler take onto himself to put to death a great
officer. . . . Make no crooked embankments, and impose no restriction on the
sale of grain, and let no boundary markers [be] set without announcement.”
These were probably good intentions rather than actual practice, although
Cho-yun Hsu says this was an “interstate community,” adding a liberal tinge
to Realist geopolitics.5 Yet hegemony was not heritable, struggles over the
next hegemon were common, and all five of the hegemons were from
different ducal houses. These hegemons do not fit political scientists’ usage
of the term since they had nothing like the powers exercised by the British
and American empires—or of later emperors of China. They were uneasily
perched as first among equals in an arena that still had “empty” spaces for
expansion.
There were short-term peace agreements and even attempts at enduring
ones. In 579 BCE the rulers of Qi, Qin, Jin, and Chu convened a conference at
which they agreed to pursue peace and limit army size. Alas, this was only
rhetoric. In 546 Hsiang Shu, a Sung diplomat, lobbied Chinese courts to
negotiate a treaty to end all wars. Wanting to seem to be on the side of
virtue, fourteen major rulers drew up an agreement. A dispute then erupted
over who should sign first. Some then refused to sign, and the signers
ignored it anyway. Hsiang Shu presented a signed copy to his chief minister,
who responded that war was an inevitable tool of statecraft. To seek to
abandon it was folly. He tore up the treaty in front of him.6 In 541 BCE a
peace conference received the news that Lu forces had just invaded the small
state of Ju. There was a proposal that the conference punish the delegate
from Lu. But the chief minister of Jin responded: “Territory is defined by
battle. It belongs to one state at one time, to another state at another time.
Where is the constancy? . . . Supporting large states at the expense of the
small ones is the way a leading state has acquired its leading status. What
else is useful? Which state has not lost some land? Which presiding power
can pass judgement?”7 It was not far from Hobbesian anarchy. War was
normal, baked in to culture and institutions.
Yet one secular tendency appeared amid the confusion: the swallowing
up by dominant rulers of lesser ones through war, mafia-like protection
rackets, and a few marriage alliances. Eventually there were only twenty,
including seven much bigger than the others. The ensuing Warring States
period saw space-filling geopolitics in which “great powers” alternately
fought and negotiated with each other, rising and declining amid two
centuries of balancing alliances and instability. These unstable balances of
power defeated all attempts by individual dukes to maintain dominance
temporarily achieved.8 All the while, smaller domains were vanishing.
The aristocrats saw war and militarism as normal. Victory brought both
glory and material gains, in the form of more territories and peoples, which
could be converted into a bigger military for further wars. But dukes also
fought wars if they felt slighted, to defend their honor or right a wrong or
recapture territory lost by defeat in a past war, or when they felt threatened at
home and sought to demonstrate strength through war. An army raised could
be turned to domestic repression. As in Rome, there were many motives for
war, but we lack the knowledge to rank them in importance. When war was
so baked in to social life, it was not so much “chosen” in preference to the
other sources of power; it was the normal way in which conflicts were
settled. It is difficult to discern how much careful calculation of means was
involved in war decisions, but calculations had to include the likely
responses of other states that might be supposed allies or enemies.
Diplomatic luck and skills were important.
Warrior motives deriving from religious or secular ideologies were
absent, which was not the case in Europe. For repeat victors, conquest was
self-sustaining—though there were always more losers than winners, as the
declining number of states confirms, which would not seem to indicate much
accurate calculation by most of them. Aristocratic culture glorified lineage,
patriarchy, blood, war, oaths, and covenants of fealty. Codes of honor in
battle were shared, making warfare not too costly for the aristocrats, as was
true in medieval Europe. Some rulers fought in person, though it was more
common to use kin as generals. Conquest was justified as spreading order
and civilization to the uncivilized.
Once horses were domesticated, aristocrats’ chariots dominated
warfare. Their weapons were of bronze, which only the wealthy could
afford. Armies were around 5,000 to 25,000 men in the Spring and Autumn
period, campaigns lasted a few weeks, and most battles were decided in a
day. Though the bigger states often clashed with each other, until the Late
Warring States period the ecology of China enabled states to partially deflect
their conflicts onto mutual expansion through conquest of, and rule over, less
well-developed peoples on the peripheries. Only the central zone was filled
with states. The incentive to make aggressive war increased for Zhou states
adjacent to the periphery.9
Up to the mid-sixth century, an archipelago of city-states expanded
control over stateless and tribal peoples, the “country dwellers,” while major
states annexed minnows. “Early hegemonic rivals typically attacked the
lesser states that were sandwiched between them and largely avoided direct
confrontations.”10 Victories dominate surviving annals, for the annals of
defeated rulers usually vanish. The conquerors of the country people
founded walled towns fed from their hinterland, the “well fields,” which
were distributed among friendly indigenous people, military veterans, and
other settlers. The towns were inhabited by the “people of the state [or
city].” Around them the “people of the field” or “country people” might owe
labor service or payment in kind to the cities, but not initially military
service, in order to keep them disarmed. City fortifications became stronger
and included lateral barriers to the free flow of people within the city, which
suggests authoritarian control.11 It was a form of Gumplowicz’s “super-
stratification,” a class structure imposed by the victors of war over the
vanquished.12 The peoples farther away lived in so-called empty spaces
outside the control of states, which were inhabited by “those who will not
come to court,” less “civilized,” lacking “duty” or “moral instruction.” The
notion of a state as a bounded territory arose in the fifth century BCE. Before
then, the walled towns formed a network of nodes, each sustained by a rural
periphery of uncertain boundaries. The non-Zhou peoples, like the
“uncivilized” Rong and Di, were gradually absorbed. They began as farmers,
shepherds, and mountaineers, but by 400 BCE they had disappeared as
separate peoples from the records. Military service, corvée labor,
intermarriage, and cultural assimilation had generated a single people calling
themselves the Hua Xie, the Chinese.13
Dukes made war to acquire wealth and peoples, to increase their
population and specifically their army size, but also to acquire status and
glory, just as Roman aristocrats did. Again, these motives were closely
interwoven. Polities were identified by the name of the ruling dynasty, a
ducal house, not a state. Offensive war was incentivized, for it might bring
loot or conscripts, and it spared one’s own agricultural base from
devastation. Sun Tzu in his Art of War advised the Wu king, “When you
plunder a countryside, let the spoil be divided amongst your men; when you
capture new territory, cut it up into allotments for the benefit of the
soldiery.”14 His recommended distribution was very unequal: “If he is a
noble he will receive 10,000 mou of land; if he is a farmer, artisan, or
merchant he will be permitted to seek service at court; if he is a slave or
bound to menial service he will be freed.” But most settlers benefited, as did
younger sons with meager inheritances. They were risking their lives but
were militarily dominant and lived behind defensive walls. The expected
utility of war was high—the only avenue of advancement.15 War was
rational in terms of ends achieved by the surviving winners—obviously not
for the losers.
Concentration of power in the ruler and his court grew with the
extension of state control into the hinterland, as military power translated
into political power.16 Army service was originally owed only by the
nobility and the people of the state, but it was then extended to the country
dwellers in return for granting them fuller property rights to the land, so that
military power became baked in to the economy of China. As the size of
states increased, armies grew to up to 50,000 men, mainly peasant infantry
armed with newly available iron weapons, cheaper and stronger than bronze
weapons. The exploitation of iron brought about what is often described as a
military revolution, though its diffusion from Anatolia across Eurasia took
seven hundred years. But the aristocratic chariot disappeared. Larger armies
required more drilling, and manuals describe complex battle formations.
Armies required more logistical support, so states acquired new functions,
such as censuses to determine conscription and taxation. Taxes were usually
only up to 10 percent of income, but in a subsistence economy that could be
severe. County administration replaced lineage patronage, which indicates
more political centralization, as do fewer civil wars and palace coups.
Leading ministers were less aristocratic than dependents of the monarch.
More intense warfare required greater agricultural productivity, assisted by
irrigation projects. Trade increased. These were small steps toward resolving
the feudal military paradox: costlier warfare might lower the agricultural
surpluses needed to finance it. War was initially bad news for the conquered,
many of whom were enslaved, but it might eventually bring economic and
other civilizational benefits—provided the conquered did not rebel, for then
they would be slaughtered.

The Warring States Period, 475–221 BCE

The states now began to form permanent administrations and had frontiers
dotted with walls and forts. Wars became costlier in money and lives, for
fewer easy preys remained. The space-filling core grew, though expansion
brought new peripheries. Army size by the end of the Warring States period
ranged up to several hundred thousand men, much bigger than forces in
Rome or Europe before Napoleon. Soldiers were drilled to be capable of
shifting formation rapidly, as they were in European armies only from the
sixteenth century CE.17 Casualties rose, as little mercy was shown to the
defeated. The dead and prisoners alike would be beheaded and the heads
presented to the generals, who rewarded soldiers according to the number.
There are accounts of “taking sixty thousand heads.” After the battle of
Changping in 260 BCE, the Qin victors claimed to have inflicted 450,000
casualties on the defeated Zhao. Such figures may be inflated, but drilling
and killing had skyrocketed.18 The risk of death or mutilation for soldiers
rose, but most were conscripts who lacked free will. They were fed and
minimally paid, and they might as veterans be awarded a small farm on
conquered land, the silver lining for the survivors.
Because of the growing lethality of war, sophisticated literature on war
strategy and tactics arose, like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, advising generals
how to win without fighting and how to practice ambushes, feints, and
deceptions of one’s own strength, to strike where the enemy is weak and
never where he is strong—tactics intended to avoid murderous frontal
pitched battles. They were widely read among elites. Their stratagems might
mean that states weaker in material resources could defeat the bigger
battalions. The end product was more losers than winners, which suggests
much miscalculation. The distinction is often made between a “Chinese
way” of war and a “Western way,” expressed in a contrast between Sun Tzu
and Clausewitz, particularly the latter’s emphasis on annihilating the enemy
through frontal assault. The contrast is real enough between them, but today
both are required reading at West Point and the Chinese Military Academy.
Nonetheless, periods of negotiated peace lasted much longer than wars,
and so there was tension between a preference for institutions guaranteeing
peace versus opportunities to intervene in dynastic succession crises and in
peripheries. Peace was rendered fragile as rulers used peacetime to introduce
military reforms, which led their rivals also to improve their militaries—the
Realist security dilemma. By the mid-fourth century BCE, all seven surviving
major states had implemented reforms suggested by “legalist” theorists to
gear the economy and the state more tightly to war needs. A mass of
peasants owing military service replaced lineage-organized militaries.19
Militarism now affected the people more intensely.
The surviving large states had institutionalized militarism, internalizing
“glory” as an end, making them confident of success in the next war. Indeed,
they were overconfident, for when they lost—and all but one eventually did
—they might disappear as autonomous states. So from 419 BCE, with a
bigger jump after 317 BCE, wars resumed, costlier and fiercer, producing
greater chances of death for soldiers and greater debts for states. Defeat
might destroy quite major states.20 During the fourth century BCE, rulers
began to style themselves as kings, and deference to the Zhou monarch
collapsed. By then professional soldiers rather than the dukes went into
battle. Dukes could play with the lives of others.
This phase was probably more ruthless than it was in medieval Europe,
where Christendom and kinship networks meant that a petty prince
conquered by a major kingdom might be treated mildly. He might pay an
indemnity and swear loyalty to the new king. Though this also sometimes
happened in China, in other cases the defeated aristocracies and soldiers
were put to death or enslaved en masse. One cause of the decline of the
aristocracy in the late Warring States period was the killing of so many of its
families.21 Multistate alliances grew, seeking peace through deterrence but
periodically activated for war.
During the Warring States period peripatetic intellectuals sold expert
advice to rulers.22 The sayings of some survive, philosophers like Confucius
and Mencius, legalists like Shang Yang and Han Fei, and military writers
such as Sun Tzu and Sun Bin. Despite their many differences, most reacted
to the Warring States period by arguing that China was destined to be one
realm under a single state: “all under heaven,” ruled by the “Son of Heaven.”
They believed in Realist style that only a hegemonic power could enforce
peace over all China.23 This view drew on the Zhou ideological legacy of
universal kingship, now with the cosmic resonance of returning the natural
world to its proper course. None of these intellectuals defended the
autonomy of individual states. They hoped that one day one ruler would
come, and realistically, he could come only through war.24 This belief
encouraged several thrusts by individual states for hegemony across the
central China region. Yet all failed, until Qin.
Confucius (born 551 BCE) said little about war, but he taught that
creating the moral person and the good society involved five virtues:
benevolence, charity, and humanity; honesty, uprightness, and the ability to
tell right from wrong; knowledge; faithfulness and integrity; and propriety,
ceremony, ritual, and worship. He emphasized filial piety and strict ritual
adherence to one’s given social role, a conservative program aimed at
protecting society from uncertainty and disorder, the greatest threat to good
government and social harmony. Action by both the individual and the
government should aim at morality, not profit or utility. Yet only an elite of
morally and intellectually superior men could refine their innate moral
goodness or overcome innate badness and decide policy. Since states could
not create such a man, this elite must have some autonomous power from the
ruler. This idea later bore fruit in a Confucian bureaucracy.
Confucius said that a ruler is morally obliged to maintain peace, by
force if necessary, while for the people war is a justified last resort to remove
inhumane kings. But when asked to give a ruler advice about the conduct of
war, he refused. When questioned on the purpose of government, he replied,
“Give the people enough to eat, and enough soldiers to defend them, and
they will have confidence in you.” But which of the two should be given up
first? Confucius replied, “Give up the soldiers.” Yet rulers could ensure
victory in war through just and humane policies that would win popular
support.
Mencius (active in the fourth century BCE) denounced war: “In wars to
win land, the dead fill the fields; in wars to seize cities, the dead fill their
streets. This is what we mean by teaching the earth how to eat human flesh.”
The ruler had been installed by heaven solely for the benefit of his people,
and human nature tends toward and desires goodness. The truly good ruler
would be looked up to even by the people of neighboring states, who will
“turn to him like water flowing downwards with a tremendous force.” To
wage an expedition for the improvement of people’s lives was acceptable,
but he added: “In the Spring and Autumn Annals, there are no just wars.
They merely show that some wars are not so bad as others.” Mo Tzu (ca.
480–ca. 390 BCE) condemned aggressive war on both utilitarian and moral
grounds. Aggressive war did not pay, except for a few winners, and their
peoples rarely benefited, since war required high taxes. He criticized the
moral double standard of violence being illegitimate within a state but
legitimate in interstate relations; aggressive war was morally the same as
murder. He favored defensive war, however, giving expert advice to rulers
on defensive fortifications, and his supporters formed a militia to help small
states resist big ones. Alas, they were on the wrong side of history, as armies
became bigger and bigger, and sharks swallowed up the minnows.25
Few Confucians were pacifists. They gave two legitimate reasons for
making war. First, China was the universal state, of greater moral authority
than any rival. So if a foreign ruler refused to perform rituals of submission,
war against him would be just. Second, wars were just if they helped reunite
“all under heaven,” restoring the unity of China. Xunzi (born ca. 300 BCE)
remarked, “Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by conscious [or
intentional] activity.” He saw the military stratagems of Sun Tzu as working
only against a state in which ruler-subject relations had broken down. “For a
tyrant to try to overthrow a good ruler by force would be like throwing eggs
at a rock or stirring boiling water with your finger.” Virtuous rulers would
win wars over despots since their soldiers and people would be more
committed. Virtuous rulers would not fight against other virtuous rulers—an
ancient variant of democratic peace theory. Sun Tzu said the moral ruler
benefits from a “moral law” that “causes the people to be in complete accord
with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives,
undismayed by any danger.” An immoral ruler at odds with his people will
fail regardless of his skill in the art of war. Sun Tzu added, “If one is not
fully cognizant of the evils of waging war, he cannot be fully cognizant
either of how to turn it to best account.”26 There is a parallel here with
Waltz’s version of Realism in which those states that act wrongly will be
punished by the system. If only that were true.
 Legalist theorists subordinated morality to politics. The early Zhou
period was seen as having been a time of plenty and peace—“the people
were few whereas goods were plenty; hence people did not compete,” said
Han Fei, blaming population growth for ruining that idyll. Scarcity produced
greed, conflicting interests, and war. Legalists saw the state as the only
source of order and morality, so all should be subordinated to it. Since no
one can say who deserves the title of “superior man,” the ruler could not rely
on a ministerial elite. Ministers were concerned only with their own
interests, and a ruler must be absolute and create an order in which only
those who benefit society through agriculture and war should be rewarded
and promoted. Those who fail should be punished. The meritocratic yoking
together of agriculture and war under an authoritarian ruler would yield a
successful and orderly state. Reward and punishment should be the twin
“handles” of policy, said Han Fei. The ruler must subordinate his ministers
to strict bureaucratic controls. Yet the Han Feizi text is full of references to
weak and incompetent rulers as well as great rulers who annexed many
states but whose successors then lost all. “The intrinsic contradiction
between an institutionally infallible and humanly erring sovereign is the
major source of tension in the Han Feizi,” says Yuri Pines.27 Yet Han Fei
seems to imply the resolution of the tension: the incompetent ruler will fall,
and the most competent one will eventually produce “all under heaven.” But
even military strategists such as Sun Tzu and Sun Bin claimed to abhor war.
The latter’s Art of Warfare declares: “Abhorrence of war is the highest
military principle. A distaste for war is the most basic principle of the True
King. Between heaven and earth there is nothing more valuable than man.
[Thus,] you must go to war only if there is no alternative.”28
Chinese theorists often speculated on the causes of war. One example is
in Wuzi’s Art of War, written around the turn of the fourth century BCE.

There are five matters which give rise to military operations. First,
the struggle for fame; second, the struggle for advantage; third, the
accumulation of animosity; fourth, internal disorder; and fifth,
famine. . . . There are also five categories of war. First, righteous
war; second, aggressive war; third, enraged war; fourth, wanton
war; and fifth, insurgent war. Wars to suppress violence and quell
disorder are righteous. Those which depend on force are
aggressive. When troops are raised because rulers are actuated by
 anger, this is enraged war. Those in which all propriety is
discarded because of greed are wanton wars. Those who, when the
state is in disorder and the people exhausted, stir up trouble and
agitate the multitude, cause insurgent wars.”

And he offers solutions: “There is a suitable method for dealing with each: a
righteous war must be forestalled by proper government; an aggressive war
by humbling one’s self; an enraged war by reason; a wanton war by
deception and treachery; and an insurgent war by authority.”29
War was considered righteous when dedicated to order or the
restoration of order. But if order already existed, there could be no righteous
war.
The major states seem more pragmatic than the intellectuals. They
alternated wars and peace conferences, making and switching alliances—all
rather Realist. Yet Sun Tzu stated, “Peace proposals unaccompanied by a
sworn covenant indicate a plot,” which implies that sworn covenants might
be relied on.30 But why did wars continue when casualties increased and
their expected utility declined? The risk of death and debt might outweigh
possible gains. Part of the answer is that rulers were not at risk themselves
since they hired generals who were professional soldiers, mostly younger
sons enjoying upward mobility through soldiering. Defeated rulers of states
whose soldiers had fought with honor and then surrendered might be
enfeoffed by the victor, given title to their lands but in the victor’s realm.
There was a Realist calculation: attack when the rival seems weak or when a
minor or a woman succeeds, or when he or she is already engaged in a war
on another front. But there was also overoptimism about the chances of
victory, as their final comeuppance revealed.
Rulers also had to face new threats from the periphery. “Uncivilized”
nomads and seminomads of the north and west became more formidable
enemies once horses and camels were dressed with saddles and stirrups. This
development produced horse archers with durable composite bows and iron-
tipped arrows. The twin military “revolutions” of iron and cavalry are
emphasized in Peter Turchin and his colleagues’ analysis of the diffusion of
military technology across the globe in early historical times, though the
diffusion of iron was slow because of the complex smelting techniques
required.31 It did not reach the Americas or Australasia. It is not known
whether tools or weapons, if either, came first. Cavalry’s striking range was
greater than “barbarian” peoples’ capacity to institutionalize political rule, so
their initial threat was raiding. Chinese frontier states then realized they must
field horse archers, and they built great walls for defense and to fence off
newly conquered territory from barbarians seeking their lands back. Chinese
pressure also tended to consolidate the barbarians into larger military
federations that mimicked the Chinese in seizing grazing lands for cavalry
horses and iron deposits for weapons and tools.32 The Chinese adapted in
turn, taming wastelands and thereby enabling new settlements and more
soldiers. Thus, frontier states gained a military advantage, as they had bigger
populations and armies than the states of the old core.
In the sixth century BCE, China was dominated by four states, Qi, Jin,
Qin, and Chu, all located on the peripheries, ruled by “marcher lords” who
could combine agricultural infantry and pastoral cavalry. I showed in volume
1 of The Sources of Social Power that marcher lords became a major feature
of early empires, and Turchin and his colleagues have confirmed this as a
general feature of early historical warfare.33 In China these four peripheral
states were joined in the fifth century by two states along the southern
periphery with mixed Zhou-barbarian populations or barbarians who had
adopted Zhou culture and institutions.34 The Warring States period saw the
sharks protecting, dominating, and then swallowing up minnow states in a
kind of “offensive defense”—expansion through defending allies—which
we have seen was also the Roman strategy. A Jin minister observed: “If we
had not taken over the smaller states, where would be the gain? Ever since
the reign of Wu Gong and Xiang Gong, Jin annexed many states. Who
bothered to investigate?”35 Surviving, unmutilated soldiers benefited from
victory, while the losers died or suffered. Most peasants probably didn’t care
who ruled them.
There was also path dependence. War had worked in the past for these
states, baking in the institutions and culture of militarism. States carry on
down the path that has brought them success. Many states for whom war had
not brought success had vanished. For successful states, the pursuit of power
and glory became intrinsically desirable, bringing respect, high social status,
and profit. Victors left a legacy of literature and monuments glorifying war.
Bellicosity dominates the historical record because the winners wrote it. The
meek inherit neither the earth nor its history.
Lewis says: “The chief activity of these states was combat. . . . They
were states organized for warfare.”36 Militarism had several sources: the
need to extract a surplus from the peasants, an ecology enabling outward
expansion, the increasing integration and bureaucratization of state, army,
and economy, and Legalist ideology urging the moral imperative of
commitment, obedience, and sacrifice for one’s state.37 Zhao detects four
main regional war zones, each seeing one state located on its periphery
dominating the smaller states of the central core. Three of these states were
also located in more defensible ecologies, having better borders and fewer
neighbors than their rivals. Between 403 and 350 BCE they had also
implemented the military and economic state-strengthening reforms urged
by legalists.
But why was the final outcome of these wars different from that in
Europe? Unlike Europe, all the Chinese states were eventually conquered by
one of their number. There were far, far more losers than winners. They
should have heeded Sun Tzu:

He who knows the enemy and himself

Will never in a hundred battles be at risk;
He who does not know the enemy but knows himself
Will sometimes win and sometimes lose;
He who knows neither the enemy nor himself
Will be at risk in every battle.38

Few rulers could meet such a high standard.

European attempts at continental hegemony failed, unlike Chinese
endeavors. This is generally explained by “balancing theory”: a state’s
aiming at hegemony was countered by a balancing alliance of the other
states. The Habsburgs, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler were all frustrated.
Indeed, this had happened to several would-be hegemons in China before
Qin. Balancing theory sometimes worked. But Hitler was not in fact
thwarted by a balancing alliance within Europe, either in the 1930s, when
Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and minor powers failed to agree to an
alliance, or during World War II, when Western Europe was rescued from
afar by the United States and the Soviet Union. During the Cold War the
United States again rescued Europe, this time from the Soviet Union. Europe
wasn’t very different from China. Victoria Tin-Bor Hui notes the failure of
fifteenth-century Italian city-states to balance against France and the
Habsburgs and the failure of the Hellenistic empires to balance against
Rome, which picked them off, one by one, as we saw in the last chapter.39
The Qin conquest of China was just another example of such balancing
failure. We will see another failure in Japan. Balancing failure seems more
common than success.
Zhao adds two reasons for political-military dominance.40 First, China
lacked religious institutions capable of restraining the state comparable to
those of Christianity in Europe and Islam in Muslim countries. Chinese elites
did not believe in transcendental divinity, or in an afterlife. Ancestral cults
legitimized first the Zhou royal line and then the aristocratic order. Neither
the Confucian nor legalist tradition advanced transcendent ideologies, for
both emphasized order and obedience to the state. Daoism preached
quietism. Later, Buddhism was more controlled by rulers than Christianity
was in Europe. None of these theories promoted individual rights. Second,
economic actors lacked autonomy. China had no independent merchant
associations, guilds, or autonomous cities, as Europe did. Cities were ruled
by state officials. Economic acquisition through conquest rather than trade
was prioritized. Rulers knew they should promote economic well-being to
get a revenue base to finance large armies. They interfered with existing
markets and promoted economic infrastructures, production, and trade. The
economy was somewhat statist (insofar as a near-subsistence peasant
economy could be) and did not offer a counterweight to the militaristic state.
The absence of autonomous economic and ideological power institutions is
important in explaining Chinese state militarism.
In the fourth century BCE balancing began to fail. In 221 BCE the state of
Qin finally conquered the others and founded the first empire over China.
Qin dynasty rule proved short-lived, but the successor Han dynasty lasted
four hundred years and institutionalized a single imperial state across the
core of China. This expanded through many dynasties into the twentieth
century CE. The sequence of feudal expansion, collapse, reconstitution, and
then consolidation into fewer states is reminiscent of both Europe and late
medieval Japan. In the end China, like Japan but unlike Europe, was unified
into a single state.
Why did Qin and not another state achieve hegemony? Ecology
mattered: Qin was at the extreme north and west of the Warring States. It
may have had the advantage of a marcher lord position at the cusp of the
pastoral-agricultural divide, like almost all the later conquerors of China, for
the effectiveness of the pastoralist horse archer was now becoming evident.
Moreover, it did not face rival states on two of its four sides. On the other
two sides a single mountain pass conferred a strong defensive position. To
the north and east it could expand against lesser foes, acquiring their
populations to increase the size of armies. Qin was outside the main line of
fire of most wars.41 Its rulers waited for most of their rivals to weaken each
other before they attacked. Qin’s final assault had a good chance of victory,
but an even better chance of avoiding defeat, because of its good defensive
position.
Qin’s geopolitical strategy was also important. Hui emphasizes the
“clever,” “devious,” and “Machiavellian” stratagems of Qin rulers, “dividing
and ruling” among opponents, waiting for them to weaken each other in
warfare. The chroniclers stress the varying diplomatic talents and
personalities of kings and dukes, the varying military talents of their
generals, and their advisers’ complex scheming. Yet it strains credulity that
Qin rulers should have enjoyed a monopoly of intelligent strategy lasting
over the 135 years of Qin’s ascent, and they did fight more wars than their
rivals. Yet since their territorial gains were piecemeal and opportunist, they
did not unduly alarm rivals. In this period its fifty-two expansionist wars
encountered only eight allied balancing responses. In 266 BCE the
appointment of Fan Sui as a senior minister ushered in a policy shift. He
urged “irrevocable expansionism,” arguing that the way to dominance was to
wage war against one’s neighbor in alliance with more distant powers that
could force the neighbor into a two-front war. This could expand the state,
and “each inch or foot gained was the king’s foot or inch.”42
Rulers were well-versed in geopolitical alternatives. Balancing against
a would-be hegemon was called vertical strategy, whereas horizontal
strategy favored conciliating the leading power and sharing in its rise.
Horizontal strategy assumed from past experience that no state could remain
ascendant for long, so it was not risky to side with a more powerful ruler.
That was soon proved wrong, but Qin had not seemed an existential threat
until too late. Qin had led an alliance defeating the last previous attempt at
hegemony, by the Qi king who was about to assume the Zhou title of Son of
Heaven. So Qin forged an alliance with five others, defeating Qi. Now there
was only one other ruler of comparable strength to Qin, the Zhao ruler, as
well as five weaker others. Zhao might have organized a balancing coalition,
but states not directly threatened by Qin preferred to stay neutral. Zhao was
trying to swallow up another state when Qin attacked it, so Zhao had to fight
on two fronts, Qin on only one. After fluctuating fortunes lasting three years,
Qin triumphed. The last remaining states might have allied with each other.
But once Zhao was defeated, they wavered between vertical and horizontal
options.43 For some, coming to terms at that point seemed the better fate.
Terms were granted confirming the local powers of rulers if they accepted
Qin sovereignty.
Broader domestic reforms also underlay Qin victory. Hui contrasts the
“self-strengthening” character of Qin reforms with the “self-weakening”
reforms of European states. The Europeans operated in a monetary economy
permitting loans, sale of public offices, tax farming, and hiring mercenaries.
She sees these as “easy” but “self-weakening” means of waging war, since
they weakened the rulers’ control over powerful civil society groups. The
most successful European states from the seventeenth century onward did
not weaken themselves in this way. Holland and Britain developed state-
enhancing tax and financial institutions and achieved hegemony through
global empires, though not in Europe itself.
The legalist reform movements of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE
sought to forge new relations between the warring states and their
populations, parallel to Rome and resembling the European states of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet this was not participatory citizenship.
It was a form of authoritarianism sidelining the aristocracy and extracting
military service from peasants in return for easing serfdom and granting
leasehold tenures and eventually property rights. This might be seen as a
lessening of coercive extraction of the surplus, but it was significantly called
“lodging the army among the people,” which baked the coercion of
militarism in to everyday life. Meritocratic military reform also meant
soldiers could rise through the ranks. Generals came increasingly from
unknown families.
Under Shang Yang, chancellor of Qin, the reforms went deepest and the
populace was mobilized for mass sacrifices. He declared, “The means by
which a ruler encourages his people are offices and rank; the means by
which a state arises are agriculture and war.” The goal was to create a single
class, “men of service in farming and warfare.” If agriculture is the sole
source of energy, and warfare its only outlet, the people will risk death to
serve the state. The state produces energy and manpower for battle. The
effective ruler makes the people “forget their lives for the sake of their
superiors” so they “delight in war” and “act like hungry wolves on seeing
meat.” For Shang the most useful outlet of energy is war. There must
“always be another war to fight, another enemy to defeat.” Surpluses must
be consumed by war, for settling into enjoyment of the surplus would lead to
self-interested squabbling and idleness. Lewis observes that this “sucks in
more and more resources to be consumed in wars that no longer serve any
purpose save to keep the machine running.”44 This is war for its own sake.
The Qin ruler Shi Huang was a megalomaniac who claimed heavenly
powers and declared that his dynasty would reach to the end of time and the
limits of space. He had nourished this ideal secretly. Now, to transcend his
humanity and become immortal, he ascended Mount Tai to communicate
with the highest god. He inscribed his triumphs in verse on the peaks of
mountains throughout his realm. Six have survived. They declare blessings
had been bestowed on all within the four seas, “wherever sun and moon
shine,” “wherever human tracks reach,” even extending to the beasts and the
plants. The range of his power and beneficence was universal.45 The path to
that end had been repetitive, baked-in warfare.

Conclusion
Ancient Chinese polities inherited a feudal mode of warfare. Inequalities
between polities encouraged the strong to conquer or demand fealty from the
weak, and wars of conquest could be fought against weaker peripheral
peoples. Sharks swallowed minnows, but they were more cautious about
other sharks. Coups, rebellions, and civil wars between lineages threatened
rulers, giving them political motives to raise armies, demonstrate strength in
foreign wars, and use their armies to crush revolt and extract the surplus
from the peasants. Honor, revenge, humiliation, and the like intermittently
added more emotional, less material motives, though the annals rarely delve
into character except when scandals were involved. Inheritance norms gave
incentives for younger sons, as they did in Europe, but here lineage rivalries
were also important. War gave ambitious young men opportunities for
upward mobility after the age of chariot warfare. Conflict between major
polities was often “deflected” onto weaker ones, making it less deadly for
major polities.
This resulted in the path-dependent growth of militaristic institutions
and cultures baked in to state power, in to warrior ideologies and ambitions
for greed and glory across the generations—as in the Roman Republic.
Neither religions nor cities and merchants could counterbalance warriors.
Although Confucians were generally more pacific than legalists, both
advocated that order-enforcing states fight “just” wars. Ideological power
did not undercut state power, as the Church in Europe sometimes did. Major
states then turned against each other, fighting costlier wars. Victorious states
carried on fighting, eventually overconfidently, and all but one plunged to
defeat. Rationality of both means and ends weakened. “Mistakes” were not
occasional but systemic, because a mishmash of motives and opportunities
intervened: greed, demonstrating political power at home, pursuing honor
and righteousness, anger, and revenge. The result was either overconfidence
in victory or a more resigned view that war was the only way for human
beings to settle disputes and for China to become reunited—which
Confucian and legalist theorists endorsed. All four power sources are
necessary to explain the patterns of war in China.
There came a fourth century BCE “arms race” to integrate economic and
military power as legalist reforms brought the masses into war in return for
economic concessions. There was a little support for liberal theory in the
many treaties and intermittent recognition of a hegemon, but Qin unified
China through conquest. In the Changping campaign Qin’s harnessing of
economic to military power gave it more staying power than Zhao, but
campaign contingencies were decisive in the end. Realism has dominated IR
theory of war in the post-1816 context of struggles between fairly equal
major powers, all of which survived. Ancient China was a different context,
more typical in the history of a world where the strong swallow the weak,
and the weak cannot retreat into guerilla warfare. It had finally brought only
one winner out of the seventy-plus who had begun in post-Zhou China. The
fundamental contradiction in ancient Chinese warfare was that, on the one
hand, rulers practiced much military and diplomatic calculation, aided by
much military, economic, and political expertise, yet the result was the
defeat and disappearance of all but one ruler. Realism sets a much higher
standard of calculation of means and ends than was realistically possible
here.

Who benefited? The dukes and vassals of victorious states might benefit
during their lifetimes, if they were not cut down by coups or wars. Settlers
moving into conquered lands might benefit, while rulers and peoples who
submitted without fighting did not lose much. Limited economic privileges
came in return for more military service, as more lives were risked in ever-
larger armies that suffered greater casualties. Chinese cultural civilization
was largely for the upper classes. Qin unification was seen as likely to bring
order to China, but it is finally impossible to say whether the millions of
casualties and the devastation produced by hundreds of wars were justified
by the much later creation of a somewhat more peaceful and very long-
lasting realm. One can conjecture an alternative path of development,
through a more peaceful multistate Chinese civilization, but this seems a
long way from the reality of ancient China. But although rulers thought they
were pursuing rational purposes through wars, most lost their realms and
lives. Peace and diplomacy might have produced better outcomes, but both
geopolitics and domestic power relations blocked this path to development.
 CHAPTER SIX

Imperial China

FOR MOST OF ITS over two-thousand-year history, the Chinese Empire was
the leading edge of human civilization. It made war quite frequently. Tonio
Andrade says that from 800 to 1450 the rates of war of China and Europe
were similar.1 Then, between 1450 and 1550, warfare decreased somewhat
in China while increasing in Europe, but convergence resumed between
1550 and 1700. From the 1750s a “great military divergence” grew, when
Chinese warfare was at its lowest level ever. Overall Chinese figures,
however, conceal large differences between macroregions. The east and
southeast saw relatively few wars, and a distinctive form of tributary
diplomacy emerged instead. In the north and west relations between China
and its neighbors were far more warlike. Realist theories cannot explain this
difference. In fact, as we shall see, it was due primarily to different ecologies
generating different internal social structures and external relations. In the
north and west an empire populated mainly by agriculturalists and city
dwellers abutted savannas and steppes populated by pastoralists. This
produced different configurations of power and far more conflict between
them. But through time and wars the steppe dwellers and the farmers merged
into a single, larger empire. Abstract theories of war cannot deal with such
variation in space and time.

The Imperial Chinese State

The first Qin emperor, Shi Huang, crushed resistance and greatly expanded
his realm through war, while burning the books of those who had opposed
war. He standardized the written language, penal code, calendar, weights and
measures, and cart axle rod lengths. He built roads, canals, and monuments
with mass corvée labor. Today we marvel at his mausoleum near Xian, built
by perhaps 700,000 workers, with 7,600 full-size, lifelike, beautifully
sculpted terra-cotta soldiers and their horses (more are apparently not yet
unearthed). After failing to reach immortal health through imbibing the
potions of magicians and sages, he seems to have believed that this army
would protect him in the afterlife. He is the first of the great conquerors of
history I shall discuss, driven onward by his sense of destiny, subordinating
all to universal domination, including megalomaniacal exploitation of labor.
His regime became steadily harsher, more militaristic, and less popular. He
buried many Confucians alive. Massive infrastructure projects and further
conquests brought benefit to only a few. After his death, his dynasty
collapsed amid insurrections; it was replaced by the milder western Han
dynasty (206 BCE–8 CE), which rejected severe legalism in favor of the
moralistic tones of Confucianism.
The imperial state began to acquire its long-lasting forms. The royal
court was divided into an inner and an outer part, separating the personal
household of the emperor from the central administration of government.
The inner court was confined to members of the imperial family and their
concubines, eunuchs, and staffs. Membership in the outer court was at the
discretion of the emperor, yet its agencies had some autonomy because they
were strongly rooted in the provincial gentry class. The Han and then the
Tang increased the central bureaucracy to 153,000 officials, ten times larger
than the Roman Empire’s bureaucracy that ruled a slightly smaller
population.2 By modern standards this is still tiny. In 2019 in the United
Kingdom, which had a similar population, there were 5.4 million public
employees. Modern states pursue many functions unknown to early states.
The Han introduced examinations for entry into the bureaucracy. Under
the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) these became systematic, testing candidates’
Confucian knowledge and literacy. The northern Song (960–1127) extended
the system to almost all officials, and this lasted right up to 1905, though of
less importance during the two ex-barbarian dynasties, the Yuan and the
Qing. Since almost all literate males came from gentry families or from the
children of dependents educated by these families, a national gentry-
bureaucrat class with a common Confucian culture emerged, which
dominated the outer court while also anchored in local class power. In an
attempt to increase bureaucratic powers, officials could not serve in their
own region. Yet this was undercut by officials’, often powers of patronage,
which led to corruption contrary to Confucian norms. Confucians also
educated most emperors and their families. This created a rooted and quite
cohesive agrarian state, comparable to the Roman senate and assemblies in
their representing the dominant classes of Roman society. Republican Rome
had a representative system, and China did not, but both had strong
connections between provinces and central government, which reinforced
cohesion among the upper classes and mobilized large, well-organized
armies. Sizable ancient empires needed comparable links between the central
state and provincial class power. Otherwise, they would devolve into
feudalism—and some did. But not China.
Zhao sees a balance of forces between emperors, Confucian scholars,
and bureaucratic officials in a “Confucian-Legalist State.”3 Legalism
provided the law and punishment, Confucianism the morality. This
“amalgam of political and ideological power” allowed emperors to
“strengthen state authority and . . . penetrate the society.” Military power, he
says, was required less. Political elites curbed the generals’ power and kept
economic power holders localized.4 Confucianism permeated higher
education and the bureaucracy. Allied to strong gentry identity, its advocacy
of low taxes and laissez-faire economics limited the emperor’s ability to
make war. This dual state tamed all challengers, including bandits, rebels,
barbarian conquerors, Buddhism, Daoism, and commercialization. True,
heredity or competence might fail and a dynasty collapse amid civil war, but
when its victor founded a new dynasty, essentially the same state was
reconstituted. The merger of central state and the gentry class was too useful
to rulers. Rafe de Crespigny adds that the ideology of a Zhou-Han-Sui-Tang
line of descent legitimized a single state, while it also had an economic
core.5 The central plain, crisscrossed by rivers and canals, offered a solid
base to rulers, fertile and revenue yielding.
Nonetheless, civil wars and wars between states within China lasted for
almost five hundred of a two-thousand-year history. For a quarter of its life,
the universal empire was aspirational. When Chinese dynasties were solidly
entrenched, they still had to contend with rival rulers around their borders.6
Sometimes imperial family life became a bloodbath. Despite a norm of
inheritance by the eldest son, when emperors had multiple wives and
concubines, it was often unclear which son might inherit, and a kinsman or
ambitious general might claim the throne. In such civil wars there was only
one winner but often several losers. Only half the emperors died in their beds
or abdicated by choice; the other half died through assassination, by forced
suicide, or in an uprising—and the entire royal family might then be killed
off. The second Qin emperor murdered all his siblings as he ascended the
throne. Thirty-one Tang dynasty family members had been styled heirs
apparent, but only nineteen of them reached the throne, twelve being
murdered. Yet, after succession crises, an established emperor might count
on fairly stable rule. Ex-barbarian dynasties were more precarious, as their
rules of succession were fuzzier and aristocratic rivals all commanded
troops.
Chinese ideologies lacked a transcendent divinity. Order was valued
above any ultimate notion of truth. The emperor was the Son of Heaven, but
if he did not keep order, he was perceived as having lost the mandate of
heaven and could be overthrown. Occasionally, rebellions generated mass
millenarian religious movements, such as the Huang Lao, the Yellow
Turban, the Five Pecks of Grain (which demanded minimal taxes), the
Taiping, and the Muslim rebellions. Underlying them was protest against
exploitation. This was also occasionally so in medieval and early modern
Europe. But only the last two Chinese cases, both in the nineteenth century,
had an avowedly religious goal—to establish a Christian or Muslim state.
Religious ideology was also unimportant to the nomads and seminomads
attacking China, though farther west in central Asia some were fired up by
Islam.7

War-and-Peace Decisions
Traditionally, Chinese foreign policies were seen as Confucian- dominated,
favoring peace.8 This is now regarded as exaggerated. But there are several
competing theories, mostly varieties of Realism. Yuan-Kang Wang offers a
structural Realism like that of Eckstein on Rome.9 Focusing on the Song
(960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties, he stresses geopolitical
anarchy and lack of trust in other states. “Confucian pacifism” had little role,
he says, for foreign policy was geared to calculating the material capabilities
of China relative to its rivals. Rulers chose offensive war when strong, and
defense, compromise, and harmony when weak. What mattered was the
relative balance of “troops, horses, grain production, government budget,
fiscal balances, and domestic rebellions.”10 Although Song and Ming
officials passed through the Confucian exam system, this had little effect on
whether they launched wars. Wang does not explain why some dynasties
were more warlike than others. He omits the Yuan and Qing dynasties from
his Realist analysis on the grounds that, as ex-barbarians, they were not
Confucian. But this omits the most aggressive regimes of all.
Zhenping Wang offers a toned-down Realism.11 In barbarian-Tang
relations rulers attempted to calculate balances of power resources;
sometimes they tried to understand the social dynamics of rival kingdoms,
and sometimes they decided that they must use soft, not hard power. They
had to assess allies and enemies, opportunists lying and dissembling. Thus,
alternative decisions might be equally plausible and errors likely. Local
officials in frontier provinces had different priorities from those of the
central authorities, and outcomes were often decided by the balance of
power between factions. De Crespigny says modernists favored military
expansion and state intervention in the economy to secure more revenue for
wars, while reformists favored localism, less government, low taxes, and no
costly wars.12 During the early Han and Tang dynasties, Zhenping Wang
distinguishes doves, hawks, and centrists.13 Factions were often “ins” versus
“outs,” however, possessing or excluded from the spoils of office. War-and-
peace decisions were often the by-product of domestic struggles. The
temperaments of rulers also mattered. Strong emotions surged, such as desire
for vengeance if feeling deceived. Finally, the fortunes of battle were
uncertain. This is a more realistic Realism. Rulers try to be rational, but
often they fail.
Alistair Johnston offers an ideological version of Realism. He says
legalism, not Confucianism, dominated Ming policy. It had a “parabellum”
model: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Security threats must be met by
force, the people must obey their rulers, foreigners are rapacious and
threatening, and violence must be the response to them. One attacks when
strong, but defends or seeks accommodation when weak. The Confucian
model was an ideal, but most practice was parabellum—not because of
geopolitical anarchy but the martial culture internalized by officials. Yet he
exaggerates the role of legalism, less important in officials’ education than
Confucianism, and he mischaracterizes Confucians as pacifists.14 As we saw
in chapter 5, Confucians offered mixed messages on war and peace.
 Peter Lorge doubts whether any moral philosophy was heeded by
rulers.15 The texts offered ideals that Confucian-trained officials endorsed in
principle but considered marginal to practical politics. Military power
remained the way to hold China together. The military absorbed above 70
percent of state revenue, all dynasties were created in war, all declined
through military decay, and all fell to rebellious generals claiming the
throne. He concludes: “Chinese empires were not created by the cultivation
of virtue, a fundamental cultural orientation to political order, or ideological
pleas for ethnic unity; they were created by decades of war and political
strife. Organized violence was applied toward political goals intelligently
and ruthlessly, with the targets of that violence almost exclusively the power
elite, the men and women who held significant political, military, cultural or
economic power.”16
This is effectively a military Realism, but applied to domestic struggles
as well as external wars. Lorge believes our sources are biased by literati
who downplayed militarism. Jonathan Skaff agrees, for the Tang literati elite
(618–907) presented “an incongruent image of a society with a value system
seemingly opposed to frontier aggression that nonetheless implements a
strategy of military expansion.”17 Beautiful poetry concealed violence. Yet
the frontiers required doses of both military action and diplomacy, hard and
soft power.
A military and political offshoot of this approach would help explain
why the founders of dynasties and their immediate successors generally
launched more offensive wars than later successors. They had already
demonstrated martial skills when seizing the throne, they had troops needing
employment, and their victories gave them the political power to levy taxes
and conscription for war. But gradually the Confucian gentry-bureaucrat
class pressured successor emperors toward conservative, low-tax, and low-
conscription policies, and away from war.

Tributary Diplomacy in East and Southeast Asia

This region saw relatively few wars. China became the dominant partner in a
tributary system comprising China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam; distant
polities participated more loosely. David Kang says that between 1368 and
1841 only two major wars occurred between these core states, though two
Chinese civil wars also spilled across frontiers.18 In this period the borders
between the four states were relatively uncontested. But we should add a few
more wars: a Ming occupation of Vietnam between 1406 and 1427; the Ming
defeat of a Japanese invasion of Korea in the 1590s; two Manchu Qing
invasions of Korea in the 1630s against a Korean king who supported the
rival Ming dynasty; a brief 1662 Qing invasion of Myanmar to capture a
Ming pretender to the Chinese throne; Qing incursions into Myanmar in the
1760s; and a brief Qing incursion into Vietnam in 1788.
There were also naval engagements against pirates, as well as Admiral
Zheng He’s famed five voyages around South Asia to Africa in the early
fifteenth century, which intimidated coastal peoples into paying tribute to the
emperor. His fleets were large, carrying about 27,000 persons, half of them
soldiers, about the same overall numbers as in the Spanish Armada 150
years later. They were deployed in three brief wars, one against pirates, one
to defend a Sumatran tributary ruler against rebels, and one of retaliation
against a Sri Lankan kingdom that had opposed his presence during an
earlier voyage. But the admiral died in 1433 during his fifth expedition, and
the voyages were abruptly ended by the imperial court after a struggle
between the eunuchs who had backed him and Confucian officials concerned
with the cost. The “Treasure Fleets” had come back with little treasure. The
Yongle emperor had spent lavishly, leaving large debts. The voyages had
been for glory as much as economic profit. His successor, Xuande, stopped
them, more on grounds of economy than of military weakness. He also
feared that far-flung trade would give merchants too much power. The
reduced Chinese fleet could still achieve victories in naval engagements
against pirates, the Portuguese in 1512, and the Dutch in the 1620s.
Thus, China in this region fought only about a dozen land wars, in
addition to smaller naval engagements, which lasted in total about forty
years over a six-hundred-year period, a very small proportion. Two-thirds of
the land wars were undertaken by ex-barbarian dynasties, and two were the
spillover of Ming versus Qing civil wars. So this was broadly a defensive,
diplomatic imperialism, mostly at peace, especially under Han Chinese
dynasties. Kang notes that between 1368 and 1841, under twenty interstate
wars were dwarfed by wars elsewhere with northern and western barbarians
(252 cases), by defense against pirates (60 cases), and by conflicts among
other states and unruly border tribes with occasional Chinese intervention
(number unspecified). In this region state and interstate institutions favored
diplomacy far more than war.
 Was this due to China’s weakness, its inability to overcome its rivals, as
Realists suggest? Feng Zhang’s population and GDP estimates suggest not.19
China had ten times the resources of any single rival and over twice the
resources of all the regional rivals combined. Kang says China had “the
military and technological capability to wage war on a massive scale,”
potentially defeating all rivals.20 That meant those rivals could not threaten
China, which we will see was not the case in the north and west. Moreover,
the main foreign actors involved were established states with agrarian
economies similar to China’s: known, predictable actors. Underlying this
was the fact that China did not have expansionist goals in this region and
was very rarely provoked into military action by others. Here was a satiated
power. Of course, there were lesser economic and political factors involved.
Bigger wars required higher taxes, flouting Confucian (and Daoist) laissez-
faire economics, and were opposed by much of the gentry-bureaucrat class.
The court’s fear of its generals also reduced military budgets as a coup-
proofing strategy. Overall, however, foreign states in this region were not
powerful enough to threaten China, so why bother? I examine first the
exceptions, when it did bother.
There were four Sui dynasty attempts between 598 and 614 CE to
subjugate the main Korean kingdom. Their failure led to the fall of the
dynasty. There were two Tang invasions between 645 and 668 in support of
the Korean Silla kingdom, the second one being largely successful, although
Silla kept its independence. David Graff says these were the only wars
against foreign states during the period 300–900 CE.21 After another three
hundred years came the period of Mongol expansion and establishment of
the Yuan dynasty in China itself. Between 1231 and 1257 came eight
invasions of Korea, with varying outcomes, and then two failed invasions of
Japan in 1274 and 1281 by Kublai Khan. Hurricanes destroyed his fleets as
they arrived at Japanese shores. Like many mighty warriors, he found nature
mightier still. These invasions were a part of the almost continuous wars of
aggression the Mongols waged to extend domination over much of Asia.
They were neither Han Chinese nor Confucian.
After three hundred more years came a successful 1592 Han Chinese
intervention in Korea by a Ming dynasty army of 50,000, equipped with
heavy cannon and flanked by substantial naval forces. This was to aid
Korean forces against an invasion by a Japanese 160,000-strong army
launched by Hideyoshi, who had just reunified Japan by force and believed
his battle-hardened army could beat anyone. He also needed to find
employment for it. Chinese intervention was an activation of the tributary
system, but it was also self-defense, since Hideyoshi had sworn to move
straight through Korea and conquer China, installing himself as regent. After
heavy losses in his first campaign, Hideyoshi tried again in 1597 with an
army of 150,000. In response the Ming raised their forces to almost 100,000.
The China-Korea alliance won again, the Ming cannon destroying the
Japanese arquebus-equipped infantry (this was a war of guns), while the
Chinese and Korean navies controlled the seas. Total Japanese casualties
were reported as 80,000, the Ming as 38,000, the Koreans as 200,000 militia
plus several hundred thousand civilians.22 The war devastated Korea and
involved atrocities against civilians and captive soldiers. No one gained
except Tokugawa Ieyasu in Japan, and he gained by not fighting. Defeat
weakened his Japanese rivals, enabling him to found the Tokugawa dynasty
(see chapter 7).
This war revealed the formidable military power of the Ming, but there
was no attempt to take over Korea. Ji-Young Lee says the court considered
annexation but preferred “coercive diplomacy through tribute practices to
extract Korean compliance.”23 Japan itself was protected by its seas and was
now isolationist. It did not return to Korea until the 1890s and to China until
the 1930s. China never again contemplated an invasion of Japan. The bias of
China in this region was toward peaceful tribute, while Japan remained
insular.
Chinese dominance over Vietnam had lasted a thousand years. Kang
and his colleagues have a data set of wars and lesser disputes from 1365 to
1789.24 This reveals a broadly tributary system as Vietnamese rulers ritually
recognized their lesser status—with one major exception. In 1400 Ho rebels
massacred the ruling Tran clan and seized the Vietnamese throne. The Tran
heir (or perhaps a pretender) fled to the Chinese court and asked for help.
After a long pause, during which the Chinese investigated what had
happened, the Ming Emperor Yongle agreed. He was experienced in wars
against northern barbarians and was known for aggressive policies. He sent
the Tran prince back to Vietnam with armed Chinese guards. Once over the
border, the small force was ambushed and all were killed. Yongle saw this as
an outrageous violation of tributary relations mandated by heaven.
Confucian principles demanded revenge, bolstered by righteous outrage at
the killing of the Chinese.
 An invasion force of 200,000 entered Vietnam in 1406. The lure of loot
was important among the soldiers, but the court’s motives were honor and
revenge. Yongle ordered that after the war was won and a Tran installed on
the throne, the army would leave—just regime change. But though victory
came swiftly, the army stayed for twenty years. Heaven’s mandate turned
into naked imperialism and mass looting.25 This provoked fierce Vietnamese
resistance. It was a question of survival for Vietnamese elites, not so crucial
and then not so profitable for the Chinese after most of the loot had been
taken. After several rebellions, in 1427 an overextended Chinese army of
occupation was defeated. There had been debates at court between factions
urging leaving or staying. Now they left. Profit had been submerged by the
costs of repeated wars for a not very desirable target. Beijing later
recognized the son of the victorious rebel as the legitimate ruler and regular
tribute missions resumed, borders were settled, and peace endured.
Vietnamese elites had no ambition to attack China, and they could now turn
southward to destroy their long-term rival, the Champa kingdom. The
Vietnamese accepted a largely notional tributary status and peace endured.
The Pacific island of Taiwan, not hitherto Chinese, was occupied in
1662 by Ming forces seeking a secure base after their defeat in China by the
Qing. In 1683 the Qing invaded, defeated the Ming remnants, and annexed
the island—a Chinese civil war spilling out abroad. They stayed there to
prevent the Portuguese from using it as a naval base. But China never tried
to annex the Ryukyu island archipelago kingdom (which was wealthy
through trade), the Philippines, Borneo, or other lands occupied by militarily
weaker peoples. The Moluccas had supplied spices for centuries and were
formally tributary states, but they were left alone. Tributary trade was
preferred to conquest as the mode of economic acquisition.
Between 1370 and 1500, 288 tribute missions came from seven lesser
Asian states to the Ming court—more than two per year. The system was
termed “all under heaven” or “harmonious world.” The emperor’s duty was
to maintain cosmic harmony through the performance of ancient religious
rites cultivating popular obedience and moral virtue.26 He also had to impose
rites of homage and tribute on other peoples. Foreign rulers should “observe
the subordinate integrity of loyalty, obedience, and trust-worthiness for
serving China,” while China should show “moral excellence, humaneness,
and grace for loving smaller and inferior” peoples.27 China could
legitimately launch punitive expeditions against a state defying the
Confucian diplomatic system, and the threat rarely led to war. This was not
the Confucian triumph of pacifism described by John Fairbank, nor was it
governed by Realist principles, as Yuan-Kang Wang suggests.28 His model
applies better in other regions of the empire, as we will see. The elaborate
rituals also served to dampen emotions, though doubtless those performing
them might have felt humiliations that they had to try to repress.
But in any case lesser states often benefited from ritual submission.
They did not have to worry about war with China and could deploy their
forces elsewhere. The legitimacy of foreign rulers was bolstered by an
investiture ceremony performed by the emperor. The Chinese court derived
domestic prestige and legitimacy from the repeated presence of foreign
ambassadors doing homage at the feet of the emperor, strengthening factions
favoring diplomacy over those favoring war. Once a state did homage, it
could participate more in the world’s biggest trading network. Tribute trade
was only a small part of all trade, but it played a key role. Typically,
ambassadors would do homage at court while merchants did business in
ports. If you did not pay tribute, this opportunity was not available.29
For the Chinese the main reward was peace, for China usually gave
more valuable gifts to foreign states than it received. Exchange of hostages
and marriages of Chinese princesses to foreign rulers furthered relations.30
“Kowtowing” to the emperor, forehead on the ground, was the most
expressive ritual. In the mission of British Ambassador Macartney to China
in 1792–94, he bowed but refused to kowtow, and his mission was a failure.
Emperor Qianlong wrote to King George III: “Our Celestial Empire
possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its
borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside
barbarians in exchange for our own produce.”
The system was a formal hierarchy with China at the top, yet it
permitted much informal equality.31 Subordinate states were free to choose
their own domestic policies. In this region after the Yuan dynasty, China
sought direct imperial rule abroad only once in Vietnam (described above)
and once in Myanmar. The Chinese never sought to export Confucianism,
though some neighbors did embrace it.
Tributary diplomacy was built to avoid war. Chinese rulers mediated
conflicts between other powers, while never submitting to mediation
themselves. They said they were bringing civilization to Asia, and neighbors
sometimes appeared to accept this. But despite the submissive rituals, these
neighbors rarely viewed the system in Confucian terms, except Korea, a
Confucian country. In dual-language agreements, the duties of foreign rulers
appear more stringent in the Chinese text than in the other language—mutual
complicity to evade clarity for peace and honor. Lee says the contrast
between Korean acceptance and Japanese rejection of Chinese hegemony
was due not only to the sea, but also to Korea’s being Confucian.32 In
contrast, Japanese political legitimacy rested on traditional reverence for the
Japanese emperor and for Japan as “the country of the gods,” with no
reference to China.
IR specialists see hegemony as the principal means of countering
geopolitical anarchy. A state possessing it enjoys preponderant military and
economic power over all others and leadership that includes some consent
and legitimacy—dominance and authority. China had both. Realist
hegemonic theory focuses on domination, as does Yuan-Kang Wang,
whereas other IR theories emphasize authority. Liberal theory stresses
acceptance of some constitutionalism and a rule of law that constrains the
hegemon as well as the lesser states. Power is embedded amid a system of
rules and institutions that restrains its exercise, and the states bind
themselves to consent and agreed-on rules and institutions.33 For
Gramscians hegemony is broader, “based on a coherent conjunction or fit
between a configuration of material power, the prevalent collective image of
world order (including certain norms) and a set of institutions which
administer the order with a certain semblance of universality.” Thus, it is
seen “as the necessary order of nature,” spanning economic production and
class exploitation as well.34 Both Gramscians and constructivists stress the
diffusion of legitimacy among the population as a whole.
All these conceptions bear the marks of modernity and do not quite fit
imperial China. The model cases are American power over much of the
world since 1945 and British nineteenth-century liberal imperialism. In
military power the United States has been far more dominant than China
was, and Britain ruled the waves. Both spread liberal capitalism globally,
and their economic power included possession of the world’s reserve
currencies. In contrast, China did not try to influence the economies of other
states. Nor did hegemony extend downward to the peoples, who were of no
concern to the court. Tribute involved relations between rulers, extending
downward only as far as aristocracies and major merchants. Chinese
hegemony was narrower, more conservative, and less ambitious than modern
examples: it was oriented to peace. The relationship with Korea was the
most spectacular success. It saw over two hundred years of peace and virtual
political independence in exchange for occasional trips to perform rituals of
submission at the Chinese court. This was hegemony for peace.
Yet peace also brought stability and economic development. Its
diplomatic rituals fit liberal better than Realist theory. The answer here to
“who benefited?” was almost everyone. The Chinese Empire was largely
satisfied in this region. The potential gains from further expansion seemed
minimal and its costs unacceptable, as Kublai Khan’s failed Japanese and
Vietnamese forays had revealed. All the power sources reinforced the same
geopolitical logic, and ideological power relations provided the rituals by
which this could be achieved honorably. But this could not be replicated in
other regions.

The North: Barbarians and Civilization

In China, empire emanated almost exclusively from the northern
frontier. Over the course of 3,600 years, all but one of a dozen
unification events originated in the north. Seven of them were
rooted in the northwest, especially the Wei River valley: Western
Zhou (twelfth century BCE), Qin and Han (third century BCE), Sui
(sixth century CE), Tang (seventh century CE), Yuan (thirteenth
century CE), and the communist takeover out of Shaanxi (twentieth
century CE). The Manchu Qing came from the northeast
(seventeenth century CE), and the Shang (sixteenth [?] century
BCE), Western Jin (third century CE), and Northern Song (tenth
century CE) from the north-central area. Two further unifications
merely of northern China—Northern Wei (fourth century CE) and
Jin (twelfth century CE)—originated from the northwest and
northeast, respectively. The Ming regime (fourteenth century CE),
centered on the Yangzi basin, was the sole outlier.35

Northern China exemplified the Eurasian economic divide between

predominantly nomadic pastoralists to the north and predominantly settled
agriculturalists to their south. On the agriculturalists’ Middle Eastern
southern flank lay pastoral Arabs. Pastoralists had horses or camels, but the
agriculturalists had the wealth and then the iron to equip chariots and
infantry. Then, with the advent of stirrups and saddles, mounted archers
required only horses and the recursive bow with iron-tipped arrows to
become highly effective soldiers. Pastoral aristocracies began their
expansion. Ibn Khaldun said the military difference was that the pastoralists
developed the technique of swift attack and withdrawal, whereas the
agriculturalists advanced steadily in closed, massed infantry formations,
retreating if necessary inside fortifications organized by bureaucratic
states.36 The Chinese called the pastoralists “uncivilized,” normally
translated as “barbarian.” Larger nomadic and seminomadic confederations
often had a political center, yet that center was mobile. The khans moved
around their domains, the better to control them.37 Note that the horse and
iron were unknown in the Americas before the Spanish arrived, and so
American wars lacked this contrast and the dynamic that flowed from it.
Marcher lords who learned to combine the two military forms could
become conquerors, emerging from the fringes of Chinese civilization in
more mixed pastoral-agricultural surrounds, learning the military skills of
both sides—early practitioners of “combined arms warfare.” Nowhere was
this clearer than in north China. That list of conquerors given by Scheidel,
quoted above, contained only two barbarian dynasties, the Yuan and the
Manchu, but almost all the dynasties were to some degree descended from
barbarians who had become ex-barbarians.
War was much more frequent here than in the southeast, and the region
absorbed the vast bulk of Chinese military expenditure. The Chinese had to
deal with the consequence of their own success. Agrarian productivity and
wealthy cities attracted the cupidity of their pastoral neighbors who could
trade, raid, or exact tribute payments for not raiding. Most of the time they
chose trade, tribute, and diplomacy, but their striking speed and range led to
raiding by small war bands owing loyalty to their leader, taking back loot,
women, and slaves at low cost but some risk, especially when it brought
large-scale Chinese retribution. From childhood, nomadic pastoralists were
skilled horsemen, and in hunting they became skilled archers—natural horse
archers experienced in skirmishing between clans and tribes. Di Cosmo says
the image of the “natural warrior” can be taken too far, and nomads and
seminomads were not fighting most of the time, yet the contrast with China
is valid.38 They did not really “choose” war; it was part of their way of life.
Chinese armies consisted of massed peasant infantry, many armed with
crossbows, as well as mercenary cavalry drawn from barbarian peoples. But
agriculture does not teach military skills, and Chinese society was normally
more peaceful. The peasant had to be trained to fight, which required
permanent conscripted forces and taxes, and states. Criminals were often
recruited as soldiers. Though the Chinese population was much greater, the
barbarians could raise tribal hosts of up to one-quarter of a total population,
and the cost to their khans was minimal.39 War was costlier for Chinese
states, and they usually had low taxes.
Different ecologies made for inequality between the two economies, yet
their relatively equal military power enabled acquisition by force. Chinese
armies often defeated tribal confederations in fixed battles, but the nomads
then might retreat into endless steppes where the Chinese had not the
logistical ability to follow because they were dependent on provisioning by
supply trains, whereas the nomads could live off pastureland. Since cavalry
horses had become the crucial weapon, Chinese armies needed more horses
than their own ecology could provide. They traded many products with the
barbarians, but the main Chinese demand was for horses (camels were
second). They could trade with some barbarians to acquire horses to defeat
other barbarians; they could get horses by seizing and ruling pastureland; or
they could use barbarian soldiers to attack other barbarians. Chinese forays
into the steppes often relied on recruits from the very peoples they were
combating. But horse archers might need ten mounts, and their price was
high and the quality of those offered for sale was often quite low.40 Since
trade was insufficient for Chinese military needs, it was not clearly
preferable to go to war. Such dilemmas maintained the rough equality of
military power between the two sides and kept their relations simmering for
two millennia.
When China fell into disorder, the pastoralists were less threatened, and
tribal confederations might then weaken. Chinese aggression consistently
enhanced the power of khans leading tribal federations. Barbarian
factionalism was endemic—anarchy within as well as between. It also
allowed lesser chieftains to flout treaties negotiated by their leaders. Before
the tenth century, cycles of raiding that invited punitive retaliation
predominated. Barbarians did not initially seek the conquest of agrarian
China, but growing military power enabled some of them to move from the
steppes into terrains mixing pastoralism and agriculture—and to capture iron
mines and foundries to make weapons, for Chinese states often banned
weapons exports. Thus began conquests by multitribal barbarian armies. But
victorious khans grew keen to acquire the institutions and culture of
“civilization,” which the khans blended into their own practices. Many had
served as officials or soldiers in China (like the barbarians attacking the
Roman Empire). The most successful khans founded permanent
administrations, extracted taxes from sedentary populations, acquired
literacy, and claimed the title of emperor.41 They were “ex-barbarians.”
There seem to be no examples of states emerging spontaneously within
pastoral societies. They all came from interaction with sedentary states.
Around imperial borders, raiding and retaliation were frequent, wars
and conquest occasional. Scheidel estimates over five hundred nomad
incursions over the two thousand years from 220 BCE and almost four
hundred in the opposite direction by China.42 According to an eleventh-
century calculation, between 599 and 755 CE, Turks in Mongolia accounted
for 55 percent of the 205 recorded attacks on Sui and Tang China, or 0.72
per year. But pastoral nomadism “was characterized by permanent
instability. It was based on dynamic balance between three variables: the
availability of natural resources, such as vegetation and water; the number of
livestock; and the size of the population. All of these were constantly
oscillating. . . . The situation was further complicated because these
oscillations were not synchronic, as each of the variables was determined by
many factors, temporary and permanent, regular and irregular. Thus, even
annual productivity of pastures varied significantly because it was connected
to microclimatic and ecological conditions.”43
Chinese warfare was often reactive, sometimes defensive, sometimes
punitive expeditions to deter further raids, sometimes conquest and
incorporation of enemy territories. Conquest was seen by the Chinese as an
exasperated final step to eradicate raids. They sometimes erected defensive
walls around recently conquered territories—like the Great Wall. This was a
reaction against barbarian pressure, but it was also defense of lands acquired
through conquest. But borders were not very stable. Sometimes sections of
the Great Wall were inside Chinese territory, sometimes not. But geopolitics
was not entirely anarchic, for it had a rough cyclical logic.
Dealing with the seminomadic Xiongnu was unfinished business from
Qin unification. The western Han dynasty launched wars against them in the
north and in Central Asia, aimed at cutting the links between these regions.
The wars eventually succeeded, though the cost in lives and money was
tremendous.44 Incursions deep into Xiongnu territory led their khans into
adapting agriculture, permanent states, literacy, even siege engines and
navies. Some styled themselves as rival “empires” to China. The Chinese
court might trade, appease, or marry Chinese princesses to barbarian princes.
It might divide and rule, defend, aggress, found military colonies, or resettle
difficult populations. None would work indefinitely, and this meant shifting
flexibly between diplomacy and war. Sometimes the Chinese made shrewd
choices, sometimes disastrous ones—usually because of overconfidence or
emotions overriding pragmatism.
On both sides war-and-peace decisions involved debate. In China the
inner court (the emperor, eunuch officials, and dependents) tended to be
more warlike than the Confucian gentry-official stratum of the outer court,
who sought to keep taxes down, yet under the Tang dynasty eunuch factions
warred with each other. Chinese rulers found decisions difficult given nomad
volatility. They divided over whether to believe a khan’s promises, or
whether he could control tribes under his nominal command. Tribal leaders
had to engage in diplomatic negotiations or minor wars with tribal rivals,
and only the skilled or lucky ones rose to the top. How long they or their
successors could stay there remained uncertain.45 Emotions of anger, hubris,
fear, and vengeance inflected rationality, while preserving honor was
important for all.
Ethnic stereotypes sometimes intensified hostility. The Chinese told
tribal rulers that their “cultural inferiority” meant they should submit. A
Song high official called the Khitans “insects, reptiles, snakes, and lizards,”
adding, “How could we receive them with courtesy and deference?” Ming
officials said the Mongols had “the faces of humans but the hearts of wild
beasts”; they were “dogs and sheep whose insatiable appetites and wild
natures made them unenculturable.” Han China was the head of a person,
barbarians the feet. When they refused to submit, it was like a person
hanging upside down. Racism made calculative decisions more difficult.46
When the Chinese had to negotiate because of weakness, however, they
usually showed pragmatism in hiding their racism.47 Barbarians regarded the
Chinese as herds of sheep to be pushed around at will.48
Confucianism was alien to the barbarians, and tribute was simply given
to the stronger. When China was strong, it exacted tribute from barbarians;
when weak, it paid tribute (in all but name). Tribute encouraged trade, which
within limits was mutually useful. But tribute was also sometimes paid by
China even when strong, since bribes for peace were much cheaper than war.
The Xiongnu and later Turkic groups swore fealty to the emperor in return
for cash. Ying-shih Yu calculates that between 50 and 100 CE the value of
goods received by barbarians from the Chinese was equal to 7 percent of
imperial revenue, or 30 percent of the imperial payroll.49 Song and Ming
paid lesser indemnities.50 Critics at court insisted that this dishonored China,
and the payments consolidated the power of tribal rulers.51 When the
Chinese demanded tributary submission, barbarians and ex-barbarians
balanced a loss of honor against the gains it brought. Some pragmatically
submitted, others proudly refused.

Testing Realism: The Song and the Barbarians, 960–1279 CE

Song dynasty wars were usually fought against ex-barbarian peoples who
had adopted Chinese practices. Can their wars be explained by structural
Realist theory, as Yuan-Kang Wang argues?52 He says the northern Song
state was weak, especially compared to the first century of the Ming dynasty
(1368–1449). Thus, he says, the Song fought mainly defensive wars or
sought accommodation with the barbarians, whereas the stronger Ming
fought largely offensive wars.
The Tang dynasty had fought aggressive wars against barbarians up to
about 760 CE, but it paid a price for territorial expansion. The gap between
the central officials and those in frontier districts grew into political
incoherence.53 Military governors far from the capital acquired autonomy,
which resulted in rebellions. The biggest was launched by general An
Lushan, who commanded over 100,000 troops along the northern frontier.
He rebelled in 763, and it took fourteen years and millions of deaths for
Tang forces to finish off his forces (see table 10.1). Meanwhile, the Tang lost
most of their western lands as neighbors seized on Chinese disunity to grab
territory. A reduced tax base and smaller armies weakened the dynasty. A
partial revival occurred in the early ninth century, but then an uprising was
suppressed by a general who killed the entire royal family and declared
himself Emperor Taizu of the Later Liang dynasty. After his death, his
domains disintegrated as warlords founded their own states in the period of
the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.
One warlord took control of the central plain in 960, styling himself the
first of the Song dynasty. He remained threatened by the ex-barbarian Khitan
Liao, ruling formerly Tang lands on both sides of the Great Wall. The Khitan
ruled over a mainly Han Chinese agricultural population and blocked Song
access to horses. The Khitan north was ruled according to tribal principles,
while its south had a Han Chinese administration.54 Geopolitics was not
entirely anarchic. Most rulers preferred peace to war, and embassies,
audiences, and gift exchanges proliferated. When war broke out, “The basic
rule,” says Edmund Worthy, was “cease aggression before annihilating an
actor.”55 Rather, the goal of war was to compel allegiance and homage,
expressed in honorific titles conferred on subordinated rulers.56 These were
ways of defusing conflict while mutually preserving honor and status.
Yuan-Kang Wang says that the Song mounted aggressive war when
strong, and defended or accommodated to the enemy when weak—and the
latter situation predominated.57 Some Song advisers did urge this.58 But
most Song endorsed the Confucian orthodoxy that a war was just if a foreign
ruler refused to pay homage to the Son of Heaven or if the goal of war was
to retake formerly Chinese domains. Previously Han lands in the north were
ruled by the Khitan Liao, the Tangut Xi Xia, and later the Jurchen Jin, all ex-
barbarian empires. In the south lay ten small Han Chinese states. The Song
intended eventually to reunify all China, but they knew this was beyond their
powers at the time. They focused on reclaiming the southern states and, in
the north, the state of the northern Han and the region known as the Sixteen
Prefectures, which was fertile and strategic but had been lost by the Tang
dynasty to the Liao. The Song felt entitled to these “lost territories.”
Taizu, the first Song emperor, calculated carefully. Seeing that he
lacked the power to retake the Prefectures, he attacked the small Chinese
states to the south, mopping them up one by one. Lorge says there was no
advance plan.59 The court was divided, and Taizu was tentative. Yet he was a
proven general and politician, flexible and opportunistic. He had first
focused on stopping northern Han raids, but victory eluded him since the
Liao supported the northern Han. When it became clear that the southern
Han rulers could not unite against him, he went instead for the weakest of
them, and conquest of the others followed. Strengthened by the resources of
these regions, he then turned northward, carefully built up his forces, but
then unexpectedly died. Taizu fits the Realist model, an unusually talented
ruler and general who was in command of his court. Not so his successors.
His younger brother, Taizong, succeeded Taizu. He knew that many at court
thought Taizu’s son should have been made emperor. Taizong was weak,
unpopular, and incompetent. He chose to attack the northern Han, says
Lorge, mainly because he thought victory would firm up his domestic
political position. He would show that he really was the Son of Heaven.
Personally leading the Song forces, he destroyed the northern Han state in
979 and achieved a victory over Liao forces in a narrow pass unsuited to
Liao cavalry strength.
The court knew, however, that victory had really come from Taizu’s
careful military buildup, so Taizong felt he had to win his own war. “His
clear political motivations for invading overrode his military judgment,”
observes Lorge.60 Emboldened by his recent victory, and despite the
misgivings of his generals, Taizong ordered an invasion of the Prefectures.
But his troops were tired and unpaid, and supplies were sparse. They were
routed in badly chosen flat terrain that benefited the Liao horse archers.
Taizong then turned inward to secure his political position by alternative
means, murdering all royal rivals, removing most generals, and expanding
the Confucian bureaucracy. Yet he still craved legitimacy and pressed for a
new offensive. In 986 an opportunity seemed to come with the accession to
the Liao throne of an eleven-year-old. His mother, the dowager empress,
became regent, which Taizong thought signaled weakness. So he ordered an
invasion. The swiftness with which his forces advanced threw off the
prepared campaign plan and led to confusion among his generals. The Liao
launched a crushing counterattack ably led by the dowager empress herself.
Taizong had not known she was an experienced general. Lorge says Song
and Liao military strengths were fairly equal, and the main reason the Liao
generally won was better leadership, more consensus at court, and a more
consistent policy of border defense.
Taizong died in 997 and was succeeded by his third son, Emperor
Zhenzong. Neither he nor any subsequent Song emperor commanded armies
in the field. Yet he had not abandoned recovery of the Prefectures. In the
year 1000 Song armies launched an offensive against their other northern
neighbor, the Xi Xia, believing that victory there could lead to a Prefecture
offensive. Again, they were overconfident. The Xi Xia cavalry repulsed
them, and a stalemate resulted. Song policy in the north had been
unrealistically aggressive. A series of inconclusive wars followed, and the
Song constructed a network of canals, which Lorge calls “The Great Ditch
of China,” intended to foster economic development but also to strengthen
defenses against marauding cavalry.61 In 1004 came a major Liao attack that
captured much Song territory before the Liao’s inability to storm Song cities
forced a halt. This series of wars gave the Liao gains but was costly in lives
and damage to the countryside. Even so, the Liao had succeeded in
stabilizing the frontier and retaining the Prefectures.
It seemed like a stalemate, and both sides agreed to end the war in the
Chanyuan Covenant of 1005, a treaty ensuring 120 years of peace. It allowed
both parties to take back small amounts of territory. The Song made large
annual payments of silver and silk to the Liao and removed assertions of
civilizational superiority from their public discourse. The Liao did better
since the Prefectures remained in their hands. But the payments were not
crippling, only 1–2 percent of the cost of the last war. Paying for peace was a
sensible way of using the greater resources of China.62 This reflected less a
Chinese weakness than it did a preference for a cheaper policy than war, one
that appealed to the tax-averse gentry class. Most at court recognized that
bribes and walls were better than wars.
Peace brought mutual benefit. The Liao used the payments to build a
new capital and buy needed Song goods. Unequal trade then enabled the
Song to recover 60 percent of the value of the payments.63 Peace also
enabled the Song to focus on reforms that touched off a remarkable period of
technological innovation, population growth, economic development, and
cultural flowering. The Song almost achieved a breakthrough into an
industrial revolution—seven centuries before Europe managed it. The Song
capital, Kaifeng, grew to over a million people. Reforms of education and
administration enhanced state infrastructural powers and enabled the literate
gentry-bureaucrat class to share an imperial identity that, notes de Weerdt,
survived all subsequent dynastic upheavals in China.64 Thus, the Song
boosted the chances that future upheavals would end up restoring the
Chinese imperial state.
Its domestic achievements eased succession problems, and peace made
possible reforms cementing civilian control of the military, through the
removal of generals from foreign policy decisions.65 A supreme military
council was headed by a chancellor who had no actual control over the army.
The army was divided among three marshals, each reporting separately to
the emperor, so he (and his advisers) provided the only unity of command.
Generals were limited to a single-term posting, and the emperors protected
themselves with large bodyguard armies stationed in and around the capital.
All this was coup-proofing, to prevent generals from accumulating enough
power to threaten the emperor. Just to be on the safe side, the emperor had
some generals executed. The constant change in generals weakened the
army, yet the measures worked in increasing political cohesion. There were
eight more emperors during the 167 years of the northern Song and only
three brief failed attempts at usurpation. During the 252 years of the
successor southern Song dynasty, there were only two short-lived periods of
rival claimants. Combined, the two Song dynasties were the longest-lived
dynasty of China. Whatever the Song failures in interstate wars, they had
success in domestic growth, stability, coup-proofing, and avoiding civil war.
A war party emerged, however, urging war against the supposedly less
powerful Xi Xia tribes. Yet in 1040 the Xi Xia inflicted two more battlefield
defeats on the Song. The Liao now debated whether to join in the war and
finally eliminate the Song, who would have to fight on two fronts. The Liao
emperor contented himself with increasing Song tribute payments, preferring
subsidized peace and balance to the cost and risk of war. Wang says balance-
of-power logic suggests that Song and Xi Xia should have allied together
against Liao, but Song Confucians saw the Xi Xia as rebel vassals and
refused to recognize their legitimacy. “In this case,” Wang concedes,
“cultural variable supplements structural realism by explaining behaviors
contrary to structural logic.”66
But the Prefectures retained their allure. The accession of Emperor
Shenzong in 1067 brought another revisionist. He began with a campaign
against the Xi Xia, as a prelude to moving into the Prefectures. His 1081
campaign was not decisive, so he ordered an attack again the next year. The
Song army was routed. Losses in the two campaigns were reported as
600,000. Shenzong died in 1085. His successor was a boy, and the dowager
empress abandoned the offensive and ceded territory to the Xi Xia. When
the boy came of age, he ordered war against the Xi Xia. The 1097 offensive
was a success, recovering territory until stopped by Liao threats of
intervention. Most of the newly captured territory was soon returned to the
Xi Xia.
The region was then transformed by the rise of another northern ex-
barbarian dynasty, the Jin, originally a Jurchen people. In alliance with the
Song, they destroyed the Liao in 1125. Again the Song chose the wrong ally,
for they should have formed a balancing alliance with the Liao to contain the
more powerful Jin. In the event of their victory, the Jin had promised the
Song the Prefectures. Yet while Jin forces had won their battles, Song forces
were twice defeated by the Liao—overconfidence again. The Song military
weakness revealed, the Jin granted them only six lesser Prefectures in return
for large Song subsidies. Two years later, the northern Song were finally
finished off by Jin armies.
Since their early offensives against the southern states and the northern
Han, the Song had repeatedly gone on the offensive but lost, through desire
to show strength subverted by rash overconfidence. They did then move to
defense out of weakness, as Realism suggests, but it was largely self-
induced, owing to their failed offensives and coup-proofing to weaken their
generals. After a last offensive failed, the Song retreated southward to form a
southern Song dynasty, still economically strong and technologically
creative. In the military sphere they developed the first effective gunpowder
weapons and a navy able to suppress coastal piracy.67
The Jin rulers to the north embraced Confucian institutions and culture
but faced rising Mongol power to their north.68 The southern Song launched
two campaigns northward, in 1206–8 and 1234, in attempts to reconquer the
lost provinces. The first one was against the Jin, who the Song believed were
in a state of collapse. Not so—the Song armies came fleeing home. But
obsessed with finishing off the old Jin enemy, Song rulers failed to see the
greater threat of the Mongols. A Jin-Song alliance would have been Realist
balancing, but instead the Song launched an invasion of Jin in alliance with
Mongol forces. This finished off the Jin. In 1234 the Song launched a
campaign to win back Honan, then occupied by Mongols. Officials advised
against this war, citing army weakness and logistical difficulties of
campaigning in devastated Honan, but an impulsive, revisionist emperor,
egged on by hand-picked advisers, overruled them. The army was destroyed.
The Song continued to irritate the Mongols with revisionist claims yet held
on stubbornly for forty more years. The Mongol forces overthrew them in
1279.69
So the Song offer only limited support for Wang’s structural Realism.
The initial problem comes from seeing the Song as weak. The Song did not
believe they were weak; in fact, they were resolved to show strength, and I
have chronicled seven offensive wars by them. The founder of the dynasty,
Taizu, behaved like a Realist, assessing the odds, carefully preparing his
forces, and achieving successes. Yet his successors launched six offensive
campaigns, lost four, and achieved only one victory; one was a draw. They
were more effective in defense and in peace, which permitted economic and
political development—indeed, they almost broke through into industrialism
—the “Song Miracle.” Technological advancements included improvements
in agriculture, creation of movable type, development of various weapons
from gunpowder, invention of the mechanical clock, devising of compass
navigation, improved shipbuilding and a permanent fleet, issuance of paper
money by the government, and porcelain production. All this produced a
population explosion and improved living standards. The Song did not dig as
deeply into the economy for military resources as some other dynasties,
which was probably a mistake, given their environment, their defeat, and the
subsequent economic stagnation of China. But it was partly a choice, a coup-
proofing strategy to weaken the generals—a contradiction between political
and military power. Peace, not war, brought benefit for most Chinese.
The northern and southern Song did strengthen military defenses,
deterring enemy attacks and stalling invasions, giving the dynasties long life
during a period of increased barbarian pressure. Wang views this as a sign of
weakness, but it was a recognition of military realities given ecological
conditions. Campaigns typically pitched infantry-dominated Song armies
against horse archers. So Song forces were better in terrains that were rough,
forested, or crisscrossed by rivers or canals. The ex-barbarians were better
on open plains but weak in siegecraft. The Song carried supply trains, the
ex-barbarians preferred to live off the land, but different ecologies shifted
logistical possibilities. In this zone of varied landscapes, when one ruler
aggressed, he or she usually moved out of favorable terrain into terrain
favoring the enemy. This slowed down offense or brought defeat. The more
the Song advanced northward, the greater the terrain aided cavalry; the more
the ex-barbarians advanced southward, the more their cavalry got bogged
down by canals and cities. Defensive warfare triumphed on both sides and
was responsible for the longevity of Song rule. So reliance on defense was
due partially to coup-proofing, which produced military weakness, and
partially to different forms of military power aided or hindered by the
terrain.
There were also two Song strategic failures. Their Achilles’ heel
remained a yearning to rebuild the imperial unity of China, specifically to
restore the Sixteen Prefectures, reinforced by Confucianism, which was not
pacifist on this issue. Ambitious, overconfident emperors and advisers
embarked on offensive campaigns against the ex-barbarians, emboldened by
the perceived righteousness of their claims. Second, in the decisive
campaigns, when the northern Song attacked the Jin and the southern Song
allied with the Mongols, they made the strategic mistake of rejecting
balancing alliances with the enemy of their most powerful enemy.
Sometimes Realism works, but with the Song it mostly does not. The
Chinese and ex-barbarians alike were ruled by despotic monarchs with
varying preferences, abilities, and characters. Being despots, they had the
power to choose their advisers and execute critics, subordinating careful
calculation of foreign realities to a desire to show strength at home. Debates
over war and peace, however, were often secondary to domestic issues.
“Reform” factions tended toward revisionism, “anti- reform” factions were
conservatives who favored the status quo, low taxes, and defense or cash
payments to the enemy. If the Song military underperformed, that was due
mostly to a combination of overconfidence and coup-proofing. War-and-
peace decisions and campaign performance might be the indirect outcome of
domestic political struggles.70 Campaigns were usually carefully planned,
but the plans rarely survived contact with the enemy or the terrain. Peace
also had its own virtues, for it led to economic development and greater
political stability.
Coup-proofing, deliberately weakening their militaries to safeguard
their political power, was commonly also practiced in the Han, Sui, Tang,
and Ming dynasties.71 “A proven general by his very nature was a political
hazard.” China was too big to be stably ruled by a single monarchical state.
Succession crises were inevitable, and rival generals could challenge the
state. The most a ruler could do was enforce obedience on localities too
small to challenge him and to divide the military into units too small to allow
generals regional power bases.72 This might mean a less effective military,
but it also lessened the chances of civil wars—much like the coup-proofing
by authoritarian rulers in the postwar Middle East and North Africa (see
chapter 14).

The First Khan Emperors: The Yuan Dynasty

The Mongols overthrew the Song and seized the imperial throne. For several
centuries “barbarians” had been acquiring Chinese characteristics, but now
steppe and field came under a single yoke. Through repeated wars Chinggis
(Genghis) became the Khan of Khans of the Mongols in 1206. Major khans
had long believed that their rule in the steppes was sanctioned by heaven.
Then they had extended this blessing to sedentary realms as well. From the
tenth century their victories had led them deeper into China. The Khitan
Liao and the Jurchen had accepted the Song emperor as an equal. Not so
Chinggis, who claimed a heavenly mandate to conquer the whole of China
as both Son of Heaven and Khan of Khans. He claimed he was predestined
to rule the whole known world, hence his choice of title. “Chinggis Khan”
means “Oceanic Khan,” implicitly ruler of all lands between the Pacific and
the Atlantic. He did not “choose” war; it was his destiny. All must pay
homage. “Insults against the Mongol nation and the imperial family were as
pitilessly avenged as personal slights. . . . When an Onggirat prince
voluntarily submitted to Genghis Khan, the latter decided to reward him with
one of his daughters in marriage. The daughter did not appeal to the prince:
‘Your daughter looks like a frog and a tortoise. How can I accept her?’
commented the Onggirat . . . an impudent answer for which he paid with his
life.”73
Chinggis rose ruthlessly to the top. He himself fought in battle, though
not particularly bravely. But his campaigns were carefully prepared with the
help of a council of generals, and Chinggis was an effective commander,
trusted by his officers, who were therefore loyal to him. Despite his anger, he
was rarely rash or impulsive, and his diplomatic skills, especially his ability
to exploit differences among his enemies, was exceptional. He lost some
battles but, like the Romans, he and his men kept on fighting, to found
through conquest the biggest land empire the world has ever seen. During
his reign, fewer than one million Mongols with an army of just over 100,000
ruled half of Asia.
How could so few rule so many? Precariously. Like many of the
empires of history, but unlike Rome or Han China, this empire was not one
of direct rule. Chinggis ruled over barbarians more indirectly, through
subordinate khans and other rulers, extracting tribute and troops from them.
These could come to resemble regular taxes, however, and Chinggis also
used the existing imperial bureaucracy to rule over his Chinese subjects,
especially the taxation system. He moved masses of skilled persons,
including soldiers, away from their home areas; this was the Mongol policy
of ruling through strangers in order to compensate for their small numbers
and avoid local resistance.74 On top of that were various devices designed to
increase his powers of surveillance—moving his capital and court around the
empire and devising a postal system with staging posts that provided an
efficient means of communication between the court and country and
enabled troop movement and long-distance trade. These were not paved
roads, however, unlike Rome’s or the Incas’.
These techniques increased the emperors’ control of their territories, yet
military power directed from the center was always the principal tool. The
core of Chinggis’s army was long-service loyalists on whom he could rely,
drawn like himself from relatively lowly origins, who had become an
aristocracy enriched with the spoils of war. This was a meritocracy, for
neither heredity nor ethnicity counted for much. Aristocratic status was
achieved through performance in war. Chinggis led a small but quite
cohesive state as long as he lived because of his reputation, yet constant
offensive warfare was necessary to keep the spoils flowing. Otherwise,
Mongols would fragment into their component peoples and clans,
squabbling and skirmishing. Chinggis was enabled but also trapped in
almost perpetual conquest by the ambition of an aristocratic elite whom he
needed to keep on rewarding, and the members of that elite similarly needed
to reward their dependents. The same lure of tribute, which trapped rulers
into perpetual war to reward their followers, has been noted among the
Aztec rulers of Meso-America.75 There, too, offensive warfare was baked in
to the culture and institutions of Aztec society (not so much the tyranny of
history, but the tyranny of their own histories!).
The illiterate Chinggis issued written laws, focused heavily on the
military. One declares, “Every man, except in rare cases, must join the
army.” If he could not afford a horse and weapons, “every man who does not
go to war must work for the empire without reward for a certain time” as a
laborer in military logistics. Every Yuan household with young men had to
supply at least one to the army. Their main material reward was loot,
including slaves, for another law stated that Mongol households were
forbidden to have Mongols as slaves or servants. Looting had rules: “It is
forbidden, under death penalty, to pillage the enemy before the general
commanding gives permission, but after that permission is given, the soldier
must have the same opportunity as the officer and must be allowed to keep
what he has carried off if he has paid his share to the receiver for the
emperor.” Han Chinese regimes with conscription required that one in seven
to fifteen households (according to dynasty and period) provide a soldier.
Chinese households could also pay a substitution fee so that a waged soldier
could be hired instead. Yuan society was much more mobilized for war than
the Han.76
 At first Mongol military strength rested on horse archers, who
combined the mobility of light cavalry with the lethality of the recurved
composite bow. Chinggis, however, was quick to adopt the skills of his
enemies. He developed a more hierarchical, permanent, and centralized army
command structure, and he recruited Chinese infantry, siege engineers,
ships, and sailors. Though Mongol conquests involved mass atrocities
against those who resisted (detailed in chapter 10), quick submission brought
benign consequences, including religious toleration (absent in Europe),
multicultural creativity, and increased long-distance trade helped by the
postal system stretching across Eurasia. Mongol civilization left many
positive legacies for Eurasia even after its empires collapsed. Whether these
benefits were worth the death of around 10 million people is another matter.
Much depended on the ruler, and succession was often disputed.
Shortly after the death of Chinggis, civil wars split up the empire into four
khanates, although the sense that this was a single imperial civilization
endured.77 Chinggis’s grandson Kublai Khan inherited the Chinese khanate,
and he overthrew the southern Song in 1271, claimed the Chinese throne,
and founded the Yuan dynasty. He took the titles of both emperor of China
and Khan of Khans, which also trapped him in wars to exact homage to
maintain his grandeur, distribute loot to his followers, and exact tribute and
taxes for himself and his clan. This entwining of ideological and material
incentives resulted in almost continual war, for not all neighboring rulers
would yield. Homage was primarily a problem of honor and autonomy, for it
did not carry very burdensome obligations. The first sedentary people
joining the Mongol camp, the Uyghurs, set the precedent: their khan paid
homage to the Mongol khan in person, sent relatives as hostages, paid light
taxes, sent military recruits, and participated in the Mongol postal system.
This allowed him to carry on ruling his lands, in the khan’s name.
Kublai Khan had great early success. The cost almost bankrupted the
state, but economic was subordinated to military power. Calculative
military-economic trade-offs were rare since he just kept aggressing, fearing
the supposed “humiliation” and tribal grumbling if a ruler defied him.
Pursuing honor and grandeur, he was pushed on by earlier success and
materialistic followers. Sometimes those refusing submission expressed
defiant insults, sometimes they murdered his envoys.78 If so, Yuan wars
were brutal: resisting city populations were massacred to persuade others to
surrender. But if they swore loyalty, they kept their positions and provided
the khan with troops.79
Yuan ambition clashed eventually with Mother Earth. In Japan, Java,
Annam, and Champa (in Vietnam), the Yuan withdrew after repeated
reverses revealed that Mongol troops were unsuited to either jungle or open-
sea naval warfare. Tropical diseases devastated these steppe dwellers. This
affected Kublai deeply, and he declined to his death. The dynasty fell less
than seventy-five years later. Disputed successions were the bane of
barbarian states, since there were no clear rules of inheritance, all prominent
Mongols commanded troops, and Han Chinese rulers might interfere. Civil
wars weakened the dynasty, and it fell to the Ming Chinese dynasty.
The first two Ming emperors destroyed the last Yuan resistance. Their
successors had very varying capacities. The third emperor, the bellicose
Yongle, expanded the empire back to the old Tang borders through five
strenuous campaigns in Mongolia. The Xuande emperor strengthened the
empire’s administration. But he was followed by the hapless Zhengtong
emperor, who in 1449 personally commanded his forces at the Battle of
Tumu Fortress. His army of half a million was destroyed by a Mongol force
of supposedly only 20,000, and he was imprisoned. Thereafter,
administrative power usually lay with the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats,
rather than with the emperors.80
Wang shows that the Ming in the period 1368–1449 initiated most of
the wars with the barbarians.81 Then war became rarer. In the period 1450–
1540 wars were closer to police actions.82 Ming policies of accommodation
revealed a desire for peace based mainly on what Zhang calls “expressive
rationality”: they wanted peace with honor, as a moral value that elicited
deference.83 The Mongols were more instrumental. When feeling strong,
they attacked; when accommodating, they performed deference to benefit
materially from tributary payments, but they were not interested in acquiring
Ming culture.
Wang says that from 1449 up to its fall in the 1640s, a weak Ming state
sought peace. It was certainly corrupt, but if it were weak, it would not have
survived so long.84 Until the 1550s this was peace through strength. Then
came a faltering, but a revival arose in the 1590s, when the Wanli emperor
won multiple wars. The Ming decline came suddenly, in the 1640s, when its
policy was neither defensive nor accommodating. Disastrous offensives
posed a bigger problem; these were caused by court factionalism and an
irresolute emperor, Chongzhen, seeking to exude strength.85 Beset by
contrary advice, he repeatedly dithered before finally heeding the advice of
civilian officials ignorant of warfare; he ignored the views of seasoned
generals whose power frightened him, and he had the best of them executed.
Coup-proofing continued to weaken military power. In a monarchical system
the ruler’s capacity, bellicosity, and choice of advisers all matter. The fall of
two great Han Chinese dynasties, the Song and the Ming, goes against
Realism. They were undone by overconfident aggression aimed at
manifesting strength internationally and domestically, rather like the
Habsburg and Romanov monarchies in 1914, striking out precipitously.
Han Chinese wars were sometimes defensive, sometimes they launched
punitive expeditions to deter further raids, sometimes they sought to conquer
and incorporate enemy territories in order to provide extra depth to defense.
This third option was obviously imperialistic, but the Han saw it as an
exasperated final step in eradicating barbarian raids. Some aggressive wars
aimed to reunify Han China through the recovery of lost territories. All were
justified by Confucian precepts, on the grounds that they would bring peace.
But the barbarians and especially the ex-barbarians really were a threat. This
was a clash of “civilizations,” as occurred repeatedly across northern
Eurasia, intensified by a security dilemma as both Han China and its
enemies enhanced their militaries in fear of the other, but where on both
sides, especially among barbarian leaders, there was also a security dilemma
within. To refrain from war might invite rivals to challenge their rule. Thus,
wars were much more frequent in the north than in the south and southeast,
where neither a clash of civilizations nor international and domestic security
dilemmas ruled.

More Khan Emperors: The Qing Dynasty

Conflict between settled agriculturalists and pastoralists also permeated
Inner and Central Asia. The Mongols, Tibetans, and Uyghurs there were
physically and culturally non-Han. Han dynasties sometimes attacked them
but rarely stayed for long. Ming armies had campaigned there after 1368,
gaining nominal overlordship in Yunnan, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, but
Ming influence then waned. In the northeast the Qing Manchu dynasty
(formerly Jurchens) overthrew the Ming and seized the Chinese throne in
1644. They viewed other Mongol-descended tribes not as “aliens,” difficult
to integrate culturally into the empire, as the Han had, but as ethnic relatives
who could be integrated if they swore homage to the Qing ruler as lord of all
the Mongols. Under three emperors, Kiangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, the
Qing secured control over Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia, taking the Chinese
Empire to its largest size since Chinggis.
Kiangxi launched several attacks eastward. He commanded his armies
personally and mobilized different supply trains for several armies operating
together in wars of encirclement. Peter Perdue emphasizes his ambitious
goals, his scorning defense, his overruling the more cautious strategies of his
main advisers, whether Han or Manchu, convinced that only personal victory
in battle could justify his claim to be the Son of Heaven.86 The Yongzheng
emperor was more cautious and economical with Qing resources, but when
provoked into aggression he rashly outran his supply lines and suffered a
major defeat.
The greatest Qing conqueror was Qianlong. To achieve and uphold the
integrity of the greater empire represented for him the ultimate political goal.
It showed that the Manchu claim to power was part of the zhengtong, or
“true line of rule,” and that the Qing “occupied a legitimate place in the
historic transmission of Heaven’s mandate,” says Mark Elliott.87 They
differed from Han Chinese predecessors in that martial achievement
dominated their rituals, artworks, and monuments. Yet they were also
calculative in their military and political methods. A dual state structure
separated the Han bureaucratic administration of China proper from the Qing
banner system created for the Manchu homeland and the Inner Asian
frontier. Manchu soldiers, called bannermen, dominated the inner court, and
eunuchs were replaced by bond servants. Military decisions were made by a
secretive Grand Council of Manchu aristocrats, who spoke a language that
the Han Chinese could not understand. The armed forces were divided into
an elite force of Manchu bannermen and a Green Standard militia composed
mainly of Han Chinese. Despite Zhao’s notion that the barbarians were
incorporated into the Confucian-legalist state, they respected Han ways only
when it assisted their rule, just as Buddhism was used in Buddhist areas.88
Yet although Confucian bureaucracy was subordinated to the Manchu ruling
class, it was essential to their stability, for it enabled control of their domains
in a way much closer to direct territorial imperialism than their ex-barbarian
predecessors had managed.
 Qing wars were driven, like the Yuan wars, by the need to compel
homage toward a ruler who was both the emperor of China and the Khan of
Khans. The Qing normally preferred trade through “tea-horse frontier
markets” as opposed to war, provided the steppe peoples formally submitted.
Honor was the usual sticking point. While careful to sign treaties with a
Russian Empire also expanding into Central Asia, Qianlong launched his
armies against “mere barbarian chiefs” who had “humiliated” and
“wounded” the vanity of a universal sovereign.89 Against the Zunghars, the
last adversary, in a daunting logistical environment of savannas and
mountains, it “was the first time that a logistic system had been created that
allowed a Chinese empire to fight a sustained war far into the steppe and
bring the enormous material wealth of China to bear in a devastating way.”90
Perdue says it was possible only because of the commercialization of the
eighteenth-century Chinese economy.91 The Qing armies penetrated deep
into the Zunghar heartland, where Manchu bannerman cavalry pinned down
the enemy and the Han Chinese Green Standard forces’ cannon and muskets
finished them off. The Qing did not attack only when they were strong.
Their militarism could create whatever military strength was needed,
whatever the cost—as had Rome’s.
In the campaign of 1761, an army of 100,000 killed almost all Zunghar
males, and women and children became bonded labor for Chinese families.
The number of Zunghar dead or missing totaled half a million. A later
Chinese estimate was that a smallpox epidemic contributed 40 percent of
these deaths and the genocide of males about 30 percent, whereas about 20
percent escaped abroad. Normally, if a steppe people surrendered, its
aristocrats and soldiers were incorporated into the victor’s clan, while others
became slaves or bondservants. Women, children, and older men were rarely
killed. This genocide was exceptional, and due to Qianlong himself. He
urged: “Show no mercy at all to these rebels. Only the old and weak should
be saved. Our previous military campaigns were too lenient. If we act as
before, our troops will withdraw, and further trouble will occur. If a rebel is
captured and his followers wish to surrender, he must personally come to the
garrison, prostrate himself before the commander, and request surrender. If
he only sends someone to request submission, it is undoubtedly a trick. . . .
Massacre these crafty Zunghars.”92
Some historians regard Qianlong’s reign as a Chinese Age of
Enlightenment because he was a great patron of the arts (and a mediocre
poet). There was nothing enlightened about his campaigns, although they did
expand Qing territory by over 1.5 million square kilometers. The Zunghar
khanate was renamed Xinjiang province, as it is known today.93 What
today’s Chinese rulers are doing there is but a pale shadow of their
predecessor’s deeds.
This did not end Qianlong’s ambition. Wars were also fought against
the Jinchuan Tibetans in 1747–49 and 1771–76. These campaigns were
unexpectedly difficult, for the Jinchuan had adapted their warfare to
mountain terrain. The first war achieved little. The second cost 62 million
taels (a weight of silver), compared to 23 million in the Zunghar wars, and
50,000 Manchu died. Eighty percent of expenses went to logistics to supply
the armies with food, uniforms, tents, handguns, gunpowder, and, above all,
the horses, oxen, and carts to carry them over long distances. The campaign
mobilized 200,000 soldiers and 400,000 civilian laborers: “The Qing
dynasty was able to effectually mobilize the whole government structure and
a large part of the population in order to fulfill its ambitious imperial
projects in spite of a narrow financial base and a thin bureaucratic
network.”94 This was total war, involving infrastructural power superior to
anything Western states had yet mustered.
These wars were motivated more by vengeance, glory, and grandeur
than by a cost-benefit calculus of profit. The conquered regions were always
a drain on the treasury. For Qianlong conquest of the new territories was a
glorious enterprise, worthy of the ages, adding luster to his rule. He boasted
of his campaigns in his “Record of the Ten Perfects,” stating: “The ten
instances of military merit include the two pacifications of the Dzungars
[Zunghars], the quelling of the Muslim tribes, the two annihilations of the
Jinchuan, the restoring of peace to Taiwan, and the subjugations of Burma
and Vietnam; adding the recent twin capitulations of the Gurkhas makes ten
in all. Why is there any need to [add] . . . trivial rebellions in the inner
provinces?”
Expansion was spurred on by anger at insults, such as a usurper to a
local throne failing to seek his blessing. He responded with outrage: “The
majestic Great Qing holds unified sway over center and periphery alike, and
now this renegade tribal usurper dares to see himself as our equal?!”
Qianlong extracted whatever resources were needed. He felt he must keep
his Manchu soldiers fighting, for he wanted to be able to continually reward
them and did not want them to soften into Chinese ways. Elliott comments,
“The second half of Qianlong’s reign was a veritable orgy of martial revelry.
Some of his dynastic chest-pounding took poetic form. Qianlong composed
more than 1,500 pieces on themes of war and battle relating to his ten
campaigns.” Giant triumphant stelae dotted the landscape.95
As usual among the Mongols, subsequent rule was not cruel if a people
did not rebel, as the Qing drew together agriculturalists and pastoralists. The
conquered peoples’ ethnic cultures, descent myths, and lineage histories
were all officially recognized.96 Whereas the Ministry of Rites dealt with
tributary foreign states in the east, the Court of Colonial Affairs dealt with
the Inner and Central Asian peoples.97 The Colonial Court made Inner Asian
peoples Qing subjects without making them Han Chinese, and local chiefs
became officials of the Qing Empire. Tibetans ruled Tibetans, Uyghurs ruled
Uyghurs, and Mongols ruled Mongols, each allocated to administrative
districts, banners, and “tribes,” subject to fixed taxes, conscription, and
rituals—somewhere between direct and indirect imperialism.98
Along the Burma-Myanmar borderlands in the south, frontiers were
unclear, straddled by warlords, some of whom owed fealty to China, some to
Burma, others to no one. Conflict and banditry were endemic. The Ming
dynasty fought small defensive frontier operations there, while Qing arrival
brought border incursions in pursuit of Ming rebels. After a century of
relative calm, Qianlong responded with his military forces to requests for
help from his vassals in the Shan border states. His economic motives were
not as important as the grandeur that he believed arose from defending
vassals, teaching upstarts lessons, and securing battle glory. Borderland
provinces rarely paid their way, subsidies went from center to periphery, and
there was no state mercantilism, which was not the case with Western
imperialism. Borderlands were expected to pay for some of their defense, so
that taxes on the local economy, such as salt extraction and agriculture, were
important but did not dominate policy.99
The Manchu knew little of Burma’s jungle terrain or of its rulers’
resolve. Three wars were fought between 1765 and 1769, each deploying
larger forces that contained increasing numbers of elite bannermen. These
were defeats due to ignorance of the terrain, tropical diseases, and
overextended supply lines cut by guerillas—the same problems suffered here
by the Yuan. Manchu casualties in all three totaled 70,000. Eventually a
peace treaty was signed that was favorable to Burma. Qianlong perversely
boasted he had acquired a new tributary state, adding these campaigns to his
list of “Ten Perfects.” But in a private letter he confessed bitterly: “Myanmar
has awful conditions. Human beings cannot compete with Nature. It is very
pitiful to see that our crack soldiers and elite generals died of deadly diseases
for nothing. So [I am] determined never to have a war again [there].”100
In southwest Yunnan, whose peoples owed the Qing nominal
allegiance, the Qing aimed at political centralization, imposing “civilization”
on “barbarians,” “soothing,” “pacifying,” and “instructing” “bandits” who
threatened China’s unity.101 Qianlong also wisely accommodated local
religions, ruling through the Dalai Lama and “Yellow Hat” Buddhists,
investing himself with Buddhist titles while delegating powers to Buddhist
or Dao institutions.102 He achieved a small increase in political control.
In Qianlong’s old age, the Chinese Empire became a satisfied hegemon.
Small Manchu numbers and the power of the Confucian education system
ensured that some were sinicized. But long-lasting peace saw armies decay
and leaders skimming off taxes. The combination sparked rebellions and
fragmented warlord rule. After 1600 European military power had begun
growing, as it refined guns originally invented in China. Qing dynasty forces
were still able to launch a successful combined land and naval assault in the
Sino-Russian Border War of 1652–89, however, driving the Russians out of
this disputed northern territory. But an “Age of Parity” after 1700 swung
military power from China to Europe. Andrade sees “mild” Chinese military
stagnation in 1450–1550 becoming “significant” in 1760–1839, when China
had fewer wars than in any prior period.103 By the nineteenth century the
Europeans were far stronger. The Qing had fought less well-developed
enemies, expanding techniques for fighting tribes in savannas and mountains
—not relevant for fighting Europeans. Then they made barely any wars at
all. Like the Japanese, they had become sitting ducks. Unlike the Japanese,
they were not spared the time to respond. The virtues of peace came at a
cost.

Conclusion
The Chinese Empire was created and expanded through conquest, like the
other imperial civilizations of history. But distinctive here was its longevity,
its vitality, and its relative stability. Over two millennia this was the most
technologically inventive, educated, and culturally creative civilization on
earth, one that almost broke through to an industrial society six to seven
hundred years before Europe did. The combination of centralized monarchy
and an empire-wide gentry-bureaucrat class stabilized state power, providing
social order and a dominant class–state alliance that could survive and
reemerge after periods of instability caused by external and civil wars. The
Confucian dynamic of the empire leaned more toward peace than war, but
the empire’s size coupled with the normal problems of hereditary monarchy
—court intrigues and disputed successions—produced intermittent
bloodbaths and civil wars before stability reemerged. Rulers wanted to show
strength, if necessary through war, to bolster their domestic positions and to
reveal themselves as the true Sons of Heaven, but most of the early rulers of
dynasties were more warlike than their successors. They already had capable
armies and needed to find them employment. Yet in the long run the gentry-
bureaucrats pressured emperors against raising taxes, and this made wars
more difficult. Peace was preferred by most, and peace generated most of the
flourishing of this remarkable civilization.
As the state stabilized, however, there emerged large regional
differences. In East and Southeast Asia peace resulted largely from Chinese
tributary diplomacy. Han Chinese rulers could have chosen further
imperialism, but they settled for rituals of homage paid by foreign rulers.
This increased trade and was cheaper than war. This was not an anarchic
region, for Chinese rulers did not fear their weaker neighbors, and vice
versa, for diplomacy lessened Chinese threats to them, increased their
domestic legitimacy, and enabled them to focus on problems elsewhere. This
was hegemony for peace, minimalist compared to modern hegemonies but
effective in preserving relative peace over long periods. There was no
parallel region in the Roman domains. Rome kept on fighting offensive wars
across all its frontiers—as did the two non-Han Mongol and Manchu
dynasties of China.
The frontiers of the north and west differed, seeing at first perpetual
conflicts between steppe and field dwellers. Han farmers and urban dwellers
waged war against nomadic and seminomadic peoples whose horse archers
enabled low-cost raiding. Chinese insecurity led to wars with a larger
defensive component than Roman wars, although what was originally self-
defense sometimes escalated into imperial conquest and rule—by either side.
The diplomacy of the east and southeast did not work here. The barbarians
could be bought off, but even trade was permeated by militarism, since the
scarcest commodity for China was warhorses and for the barbarians iron
weapons, each found in the other’s territories. War decisions across this
Eurasian fault line balanced economic goals and military means as Realists
suggest, but amid an ecology unusually conducive to war.
Most Chinese wars were reactive to barbarian pressure, whereas war,
tribute, and trade were all viable means of economic acquisition. Given such
dilemmas, the motives and abilities of emperors and khans made a big
difference. Confucianism provided mixed messages, a pacific bias undercut
by demands for homage and territorial revisionism. Choices were inflected
slightly by racism and substantially by emotions like pride, humiliation,
hatred, and, above all, honor. Sun Tzu and Sun Bin both regretted that war
was so common. Sun Bin said that “a distaste for war is the kingly military
instrument,” and “you must go to war only when there is no other
alternative.”104 The notion of geopolitical “anarchy” made some sense in the
north and west, but it was enhanced by the ecological-sociological context,
and barbarian society itself contained anarchic tendencies. Moreover,
successful rulers waged wars without much calculation, digging deeper into
resources to achieve victory at whatever the cost. They made reality more
than conformed to it.
Domestic politics greatly influenced war decisions. Strong rulers made
wars, but so too did weak ones striving to prove their fitness. Factionalism
often pitted a more warlike inner court against the low-tax, Confucian
gentry-bureaucratic class of the outer court. Barbarian confederations
appeared, conquered, split, and disappeared. The fault line between the two
was increasingly muddied by Chinese dividing and ruling, and by barbarians
shifting from mere raiding to territorial conquest—and acquiring Chinese
civilization. Two ex-barbarian dynasties conquered the entire empire, and
the second one, the Manchu Qing, destroyed the remaining barbarians,
abolished the agricultural-pastoral gulf, and instituted a single multiethnic
China, satisfied, conservative, relatively peaceful, with a gradually decaying
military. China was then hegemonic all around its borders for just over a
century, before being assaulted by foreign imperialists, though a twentieth-
century counteroffensive has come from Chinese nationalists and then more
strongly from communists.
Realist explanations of Chinese wars are based on anarchic geopolitics
and military-economic calculation. Sometimes this model works—but
sometimes not. It downplays important causes of war from ecologies, class
and ethnicity, domestic politics, ideologies, emotions, the blessings of peace,
and variable human competences and desires. The main ex- barbarian
fallibilities were political factionalism and overconfidence in war; the main
Han fallibility was a contradiction between wars necessary to strengthen
their political power and the need to preserve their political power by coup-
proofing, which weakened the military. The main macro-determinant of war
was the level of objective threat to China, stronger in the north and west than
in the south and southeast. But all four sources of social power, in addition
to the ecological environment, help explain imperial China’s war-and-peace
decisions.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Medieval and Modern Japan

THE FREQUENCY AND INTENSITY of war fluctuated greatly through Japanese

history. The civil wars of the sixteenth century and the interstate wars of the
twentieth century are well-documented and together frame a long period of
peace. In the sixteenth century there were many “vanishing kingdoms”;
more than seventy political lordships, or daimyo, were reduced, mainly
through war, to just one ruling the whole of Japan. In the twentieth century
the intensification of Japanese imperialism in Asia culminated in the Great
Pacific War and the downfall of Japan.

Medieval Warfare
As we saw in chapter 2, war arrived late within Japan. The two-hundred-
kilometer sea crossing between Japan and the Asian mainland deterred
interstate war until the nineteenth century. Yet civil wars racked Japan, and
in medieval times there were also wars of “deflection,” whereby weaker
indigenous peoples were conquered. During the Heian period (794–1192 CE)
a war defined by the CoW standard of one thousand battlefield deaths
occurred about once every ten years and rarely lasted longer than a season.
There were more small-scale clashes (MIDs) between clan families, warrior
bands, and peripheral peoples. The next centuries saw power
decentralization. The divine emperor and the imperial aristocratic court
represented ideological power, but they yielded military power to a shogun
and his allies. The army “moved from a conscripted, publicly trained
military force to one composed of privately trained, privately equipped
professional mercenaries.”1 These professionals became known as samurai,
at first mounted bowmen, then also armed with spears and swords,
commanding part-time peasant infantry.
Although the samurai were of lower social status than the imperial
aristocracy, they became the main bearers of military power. From the
Genpei War (1180–85) onward they dominated the aristocracy. Law and
order, day-to-day governance, and tax collection were in practice delegated
to local lords, the daimyo. Yet the land formally belonged to the imperial and
shogun authorities, which had in theory assigned it to each clan. Once
peripheral territories were occupied, the ecology of conflict on these
confined islands became unlike that in China. Only rarely could war now be
deflected on to less powerful peoples, and so wars between the clan alliances
of the major daimyo lords were largely zero-sum wars.
The Kamakura dynasty (1192–1603 CE) saw intense civil wars, but
there were also two attempted Yuan Chinese invasions of Japan at the end of
the thirteenth century. The invaders were already having difficulty storming
entrenched Japanese coastal positions before their fleets were devastated by
storms. They retreated, leaving trapped Yuan forces to be massacred. China
and Japan then left each other alone until the 1590s. Armed struggle was
confined within the archipelago but grew. Armies expanded from a hundred
or so to fifty thousand in the 1550s, and prolonged warfare prevented
economic growth. The daimyo had not solved the problem of how to feed a
growing population while provisioning a military without harming the
peasantry. They found it difficult to finance armies and keep peasants
productive.2
Civil wars mobilized armies composed of the daimyo’s kin, vassal
samurai, and retainer foot soldiers. The vassals swore fealty to the lord and
paid him taxes extorted by credible threat of force from the peasants
beneath, recognizably feudal elements. Vassal loyalty was often calculative,
and shifts of allegiance resulted from bribes or loss of confidence in a
daimyo’s military capacities. The famed samurai honor code did not much
constrain behavior. Warriors rendered service and expected proper reward.
“Fourteenth-century warfare transcended all contemporary boundaries and
subverted political, intellectual, and social norms.”3 Karl Friday debunks
literary traditions of speeches before battle, agreements to fix time and place
of battle, dueling between champions, and respectful treatment of prisoners
of war and civilians.4 Instead, he says, warfare was more ferocious than in
medieval Europe because of distinctive features of Japanese feudalism. Land
was formally owned by the state, but the possessing clan had the right to
control and draw taxes from it. Politically, a clan’s influence at the imperial
and shogunate centers protected its rights. Yet if it wiped out an enemy clan,
it could claim possession of its lands, which the central authorities then
ratified. Prisoners were decapitated, their heads displayed in victory parades.
Stephen Morillo thinks this explains why ritual suicide was prevalent among
losing samurai, while unknown in Europe.5
Ideological power could not regulate wars. In contrast to the monolithic
dominion of the Church in Europe, religious authority was divided between
numerous schools and sects. None was powerful enough to impose ethics on
warriors—indeed, armies of Buddhist monks joined in.6 As imperial and
shogun power declined, the state could not restrain war. As in China and
Europe, this decline meant autonomy for local lords and ensuing small wars.
Lowborn warriors were promised land and loot, lowborn monks were
mobilized for revolutionary war, and the samurai dominated the aristocrats.
Wars were described as “the lower ranking overthrow the higher ranking.”
This was material conflict over control of land and its population and taxes,
but it also invoked issues of status and honor.7

The Warring States Period and the Triumph of the Triumvirs

In the Sengoku (Warring States) period (1467–1590, though exact dates are
debated) civil wars intensified, involving perhaps 250 small, independent
daimyo domains mobilizing limited forces in countless skirmishes. Before
the development of firearms, the leading daimyo were often in the thick of
the action. If they were killed, their forces usually submitted. In the sixteenth
century more powerful daimyo were able to impose more control over the
fighting men and material resources of their domains. They began to
swallow up lesser lords. Mary Berry says the main precipitants of war were
loose rules of dynastic succession and vassalage in a society where central
power was still declining.8 A strong lord could choose his successor without
a contest; otherwise, succession could be disputed between sons or nephews,
each supported by vassals. Outside daimyo might also intervene. A century
of often savage warfare was triggered by succession crises in four major
military households. Unlike those in Europe, some issues in medieval
Japanese society, says Berry, “stood outside the universe of statute,
precedent, contract, and executive right—outside, that is, the universe of
conventional expectation and duress that make the rule of law intelligible.
By their very nature, succession decisions resisted the workings of law . . .
for no review of evidence, no consultation of statutes, no invocation of past
practice, no exploration of the natural order could settle them
unequivocally.”9
Only warfare could settle disputes not confined to material issues. It
involved

feelings of pride and anger that spawned mortal grudges in a

society preoccupied with honor. . . . Jurists sometimes condoned
the grudge; chroniclers and diarists made it a narrative frame to
interpret conflict; and warlords and soldiers did battle in its
service. Sanctioned or not, the grudge satisfactorily organized
ideas and actions that required no translation into other terms—of
law or religion, of ideology or economics.
Elite families turned recklessly to violence to avenge insult,
enhance prestige, secure their stakes in land, and sate the appetites
of opportunistic retainers. None intended to remake the world or
even to fight very long; all were after marginal gains that would
eventually cost most of them everything. . . . Violence was a
perfectly normal extension of political fights. . . . The final years
of the Warring States brought an unparalleled escalation in
violence, the ravaging of cities and monasteries, and a geometrical
increase in casualties as muskets and mass conscription made the
gentleman’s war obsolete. Hundreds of thousands of troops,
representing a majority of able adult males, were brought to arms
. . . fired by losses, by the seeming need to avenge mounting
numbers of dead and legitimate the purposes of their leaders. . . .
Something that started as an elite contest over prestige ended by
obliterating an old world and forging a new one none of the
players could have forecast.”10

This vivid account suggests that calculation of material goals and military
means was highly inflected by grudges, vengeance, and savagery, all of
which ended in mutual self-destruction, for wars destroyed most of the
daimyo. Only for a few winners was there rationality of ends. All rulers
attempted rational calculation of means, but most did not succeed. War was
not at all rational for civilians, especially peasant farmers, whose homes and
crops were looted and burned, inducing famine and disease. William Farris
adds laconically, “Violence, pillage, arson, kidnapping, and forced
conscription are not conducive to demographic, agricultural, or commercial
expansion.”11 Winnowing of states, as in China and Europe, was at the
expense of lesser daimyo and major ones made overconfident by past
victories.12 After 1550 wars were fought by daimyo seeking regional, then
national, hegemony. Hundreds were eliminated, down to only the triumvirs,
and then only one, who ruled all Japan—a process that resembled (though
more rapidly) the development of China.
John Bender calculates the numbers of the vanished among seventy-
eight daimyo on whom he found data in the period 1467–1600. Of these, 60
percent were eliminated by force.13 The remaining 40 percent survived by
submitting to the winners under threat of war, able to keep some or all of
their estates. Survival rates were higher in more isolated and poorer regions.
Lack of economic resources prevented the losers from assembling armies
and did not arouse cupidity in others. The lowest survival rates were in the
richest region around the capital, Kyoto. In this region of small daimyo, all
were vulnerable. Bender says that sixteen of the seventeen daimyo around
Kyoto were eliminated by war.
Eastern Honshu, quite near Kyoto, was the ideal launching pad for
attacks on the capital. The clan of Oda Nobunaga, the first of the triumvirs,
came from here. After successful campaigns against rival daimyo in his own
region, Nobunaga seized the capital in 1568 with an army of 60,000. He
eliminated or accepted homage from the local daimyo and installed an ally
as shogun. The shogun and the court were largely symbolic figures, but they
brought legitimacy to his rule, and so they had enough power to jockey for
advantage with him. Nobunaga then used the wealth of the Kyoto region to
finance more wars, bringing thirty of Japan’s sixty-six provinces under his
sway, and he pressured the shogun into “voluntary” exile, becoming shogun
himself.14
A successful daimyo needed an economic power base, given mostly by
fertile soil and trade. Poor daimyo were unlikely to dominate. But where
economic growth occurred without military improvement, this merely
aroused the cupidity of neighbors. The competitive pressures of war
stimulated some into economic reforms designed to increase military power.
Since daimyo needed fortifications, weapons, uniforms, and supplies, some
encouraged traders and artisans into their service, and a few even took
measures to encourage peasant productivity, sponsoring irrigation and other
projects.15 Berry emphasizes the introduction of cadastral surveys of the
land, which enabled clearer, more equitable conscription and tax obligations
that were geared to land productivity.16 Defeat loomed for those who did not
reform, as was the case in China in the late Warring States. Cadastral
reforms also required political skills in handling the different interests of the
various classes involved.
The elimination of daimyo came mainly from defeat in battle or
capitulation to threats. During the sixteenth century, armies got much bigger,
their organization more complex, their drilling more intense. Paid
professional soldiers replaced conscripts. Firearms had been imported from
China in the twelfth century but saw little use. But when Portuguese firearms
were imported in 1543, they quickly went into mass production. The guns
forced the daimyo back, to command from the rear. Siege warfare involved
sophisticated engineering. Most campaigns aimed at devastating enemy
territory, living off the land while destroying the enemy’s subsistence; but
killing the enemy clan was more important than seizing territory. The coup
de grâce was the storming of the enemy’s fortress. The defeated daimyo
would be abandoned by his vassals, which made retreat into guerilla warfare
impossible, except as bandits.
Nobunaga achieved his many victories aided by an elite core of skilled,
upwardly mobile captains, mostly from his own province, who had flocked
to him early because of his military reputation and who were well rewarded
for victory. His armies then increased through victories. If a daimyo defected
to him before battle, he could lead his troops alongside Nobunaga’s, and he
might receive new estates after victories. If he capitulated early in a
campaign, he and his troops might be absorbed into Nobunaga’s vassal
bands, but under the command of the core captains, and he might lose some
estates. A fully defeated daimyo would die, and his estates were given to
Nobunaga’s vassals and allies.
Although the resource base and army size mattered, in some battles
smaller forces triumphed. At Okehazama in 1560 an invading Imagawa
force of 25,000 to 40,000 was defeated by Nobunaga’s 2,000–3,000 in a
surprise attack on forces sheltering from driving rain, unprepared for battle.
Nobunaga possessed military skills in abundance, while the Imagawa
demonstrated folly, failing to post scouts and pickets in enemy territory.
Their daimyo was killed, and many of his vassals changed sides, foiling the
succession of his heir. After 230 years dominating their region, they
vanished. Comparable fates awaited most clans.
Yet most battles were fought by armies of fairly equal strength. Thus,
advance intelligence, tactical skill, fatigue, the terrain, and the weather could
all tilt the balance one way or the other. At Nagashino in 1575, Nobunaga
quietly moved his forces into close range of the enemy, into a position
flanked by a river on one side and mountains on the other. This meant the
enemy could not effectively use his superiority in cavalry on the flanks. If he
joined battle (which he should not have done), he had to charge headlong
into Nobunaga’s firearmed infantry. They did, and they were decimated.
Skill triumphed over folly. Nobunaga did suffer reverses, but he had such
self-confidence and relentless drive, backed up by the loyalty of his captains,
that he triumphed. In war, leadership skills matter.
There was much diplomatic maneuvering around promises and threats.
If threatened, a daimyo might be weakened by a factional dispute over the
best course of action, and the enemy might bribe or threaten one faction.
Military leadership involved knowing when to retreat, compromise, or fight.
Fighting on one’s own, without allies, was unwise, for it invited enemy
alliances smelling victory and spoils. Isolating one’s rival was all-important.
If one attacked him, one should first secure promises from others of alliance
or neutrality. There was much changing of sides by subordinate daimyo,
even during battle. Alliances involved treaties, hostage exchanging, and
intermarriage, but alliances lasted only as long as they brought gains.
Loyalty was not to be relied on. Some daimyo were better than others at
such scheming—none better than the triumvirs. Nobunaga and his captains
managed to overcome several larger hostile leagues of daimyo and warrior
monks. The tactic was to pick on one of them and prevent others from
arriving to offer help. This was fertile ground for rational calculation, yet
most daimyo ultimately failed.
The sources portray Nobunaga not as an exemplar of calm calculation,
but as ruthless, intemperate, impetuous, and unpredictable, preferring
terrorizing over negotiations. Emotions often dominated his actions. He
reacted to a difficult year in 1571 by killing the entire population of a temple
fortress. “Nobunaga dispelled years of accumulated rancour,” noted a
chronicler. He distributed the temple domains to his soldiers and hoisted
enemy heads on pikes, saying, “You cannot imagine my happiness that I
have slain them all, for I hated them deeply.” The next year he destroyed a
confederation of religious sects, slaughtering 40,000 people, making no
distinction between enemy soldiers and civilians, men and women. He had
declared beforehand, “The confederates make all kinds of entreaties, but as I
want to exterminate them root and branch this time, I shall not forgive their
crimes.” He said he “gave orders to slaughter men and women alike.” “This
kind of bloodthirsty language occurs frequently in reports from campaigns,”
observes Jeroen Lamers.17 All three triumvirs were driven more by skill
inflected with strong emotions. Geopolitics was fairly anarchic, perhaps
more so than in any other case in this book. Underreported peripheral areas
where most daimyo survived probably saw fewer wars, but elsewhere there
were few normative constraints. Fear and ambition led to aggression, for it
was better to fight on other peoples’ lands than on one’s own. It was difficult
to calculate the odds of victory, since economic, military, political, and
geopolitical strategies all figured. But, as is true of most of my cases,
fighting was seen less as a choice and more as what a leader did. If
aggressing, one chose only when to attack. If defending, honor compelled
resistance. More ideological warfare was fought by warrior monks.
Power was pursued through militarism baked in to culture and
institutions by the normalcy of war. Path dependence meant that daimyo who
gained territories and people sought more victories, which eventually led to
their own defeat and the disappearance of their domain. The vanished
kingdoms far outnumbered the victors. This was rationality of ends for only
a few. Although the primary goal was acquisition of land and people,
domination for its own sake was also evident. Violence was the great
intoxication of rulers, as Berry has already confirmed. All this resembles war
in other cases. Scheming culminated in wars in which recklessness might
help, for unpredictability was a useful asset in anarchic geopolitics.
In 1571 Nobunaga, his lieutenant Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and the
Tokugawa clan, the triumvirs, began an ambitious joint strategy to dominate
Japan. Under Nobunaga terror tactics dominated, but they provoked hostile
reactions that might have derailed further ambitions. But contingent events
intervened. Nobunaga and his heir died suddenly in 1583 in a surprise coup
launched by a dissatisfied general. Hideyoshi avenged his death, becoming
head of the Oda clan and shogun. He had begun life as a simple farmer, then
become a soldier. He rose rapidly through the ranks, possessing a
combination of charm, charisma, and acuity in political and military
strategies and tactics that had induced Nobunaga to place great trust in him.
“Arrogance, ambition, and daring—not prudence—led Hideyoshi to
leadership.”18 His policies were less tyrannical than Nobunaga’s, for he
sought to conciliate neutrals and those who defected from his enemies,
allowing them some autonomy under a “federal” style of rule, confirming
their rights over their own vassals, often offering them lands in return for
ruling in his name. One letter from him read, “Because of your assistance to
me, I bestow upon you all rights to Shisō in the province of Harima. This
area shall be your domain in full.” He also pursued at least twenty acts of
attainder for treason, however, confiscating daimyo estates, and achieving
many partial confiscations and transfers of land. Only a daimyo who
remained faithful had no need to fear punishment.19 There was continuity in
religious policy, however: the “religious policies of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi,
and Ieyasu were all predicated on the primacy of secular authority”; “in
early-modern Japan there would be no independent, religious sphere
operating outside of state control.”20
But Hideyoshi self-destructed in the 1590s, dying near the end of his
two failed invasions of Korea (see chapter 6). With bad timing, he had
recently killed his nephew, the heir-apparent, for his own son was only a
child. He was quickly deposed by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who seized the
shogunate and showed no mercy to defeated clans. Hideyoshi could be either
cruel or conciliatory, according to his perception of the needs of the moment.
He himself claimed to value patience: “The strong manly ones in life are
those who understand the meaning of the word patience. Patience means
restraining one’s inclinations. There are seven emotions: joy, anger, anxiety,
adoration, grief, fear, and hate, and if a man does not give way to these he
can be called patient. I am not as strong as I might be, but I have long known
and practiced patience.” A model Realist!
Japan was finally unified through violence and two contingent deaths,
and the Tokugawa dynasty was declared in Edo (Tokyo) in 1603. The
triumvirs unified Japan, where so many warlords had failed, first because of
the ruthless aggression of Nobunaga, then because of a timely switch from
terror to milder politics under Hideyoshi, and finally because of Ieyasu’s
patience when he stayed out of the invasion of Korea, which sapped the
strength of his main rivals. The sequence seems important—and contingent.
The reforms of Hideyoshi and Ieyasu focused on reducing violence.
They did not establish national taxation, regulate banking or commerce,
establish a national police force, organize public works or engineering
projects, or have education or welfare policies. Revenue came from the
shogun’s own domains, vast from his having seized defeated lords’ lands.
Daimyo rights to tax their own domains were confirmed. The unifiers
banned Christianity, regulated temples, shrines, and monasteries, and
restricted foreign trade—all of which they believed had brought conflicting
ideologies into Japan. They repressed pirates, and Dutch traders were
confined to a few port enclaves. There was minimal contact with the outside
world. Local rule remained with the daimyo, but pacification belonged to the
shogun. The daimyo’s right to war in pursuit of his interests was abolished.
The shogun assumed the right to transfer and redistribute daimyo
landholding, removing dissident daimyos to peripheral areas and positioning
reliable allies around them. Daimyo castles were destroyed by decree.
Samurai were denied tenure rights in land and forced to live by their lords’
castles, severed from both villagers and their own subvassals. Commoners
were banned from bearing arms, while migration, political mobilization, and
unregistered travel were also prohibited. Supreme judicial authority was
vested in the shogun’s court.21 The traditional rights and privileges of classes
and status groups were confirmed providing they refrained from violence—
daimyo, samurai, monks, priests, merchants, artisans, and peasants. Daimyo
increased control over their domains, retaining control over local levies and
administering local justice, commerce, agrarian affairs, and religion.22
Samurai and radical clerics were the biggest losers, as the samurai were
subordinated to their lords, and the monks were defeated.
These unification policies were popular because there was a reaction
against the Sengoku period, whose last battles had seen armies of over
100,000. Ieyasu collected 35,000 enemy heads after the final battle of
Sekigahara in 1600. Many battles were decided by daimyo changing sides
just before or during the battle, which resulted in the massacre of abandoned
daimyo. Use of arms had pervaded villages, cities, and monasteries, aiding
sectarian religious warfare, peasant rebellions, banditry, and myriad violent
quarrels over property lines, water and forest rights, debts, commercial
privileges, inheritances, taxes, runaways, and wives. The unifiers feared
violence might engulf them too, so they focused on policies against violence,
popular among most classes, who were desperate for peace and aware that
Japan had once been united.23
 The contributors to John Ferejohn and Frances Rosenbluth’s volume
stress war weariness and yearnings for unification, especially among
peasants oppressed by taxes and military service.24 Farris adds class
relations.25 On the one hand, the daimyo were caught in a race to integrate
military and economic power in forms analogous to legalist reforms in
China. They encouraged commerce in order to tax it, lessened the tax burden
on peasants, and banned armies living off the land, which also safeguarded
peasant livelihoods. There was demographic and economic growth after
1550 as improved irrigation, cultivation, and trade raised production above
subsistence. They had made steps toward resolving the paradox of efficiently
provisioning the military without unduly damaging the economy. Second,
peasants for their part pressured their daimyo by using “weapons of the
weak”—“striking, absconding, hiding, bribing, negotiating, and in the last
resort fighting.”26
Demilitarizing reforms contributed to success. In the 1587 “Sword
Hunt” ordered by Hideyoshi, troops entered villages and temples and
confiscated swords, spears, and guns. Peasants, townsmen, and priests were
forbidden to bear arms. The Separation Edict of 1591 decreed that armies
would consist only of professionals. Conversely, the samurai were denied the
right to farm. Farmers and soldiers were now kept apart.27 The reforms were
aimed at curbing lawlessness in the countryside; they enabled peasants,
artisans, and merchants to focus on being productive, and under Hideyoshi
cadastral surveys were greatly improved.28 The triumvirs had created a
military organization that brought less harm to peasants and townspeople
and integrated economic and military power.

Tokugawa Peace, 1603–1868

Unification produced a spectacular reversal of history: almost no wars over
250 years. The only ones occurred at the beginning of that span, when
Ieyasu was still fighting to establish his rule. There were three thousand
local incidents of violent peasant protest, mainly over taxes, mostly at the
beginning and the end of the Tokugawa period, and they were quickly
suppressed. Barrington Moore says Japanese peasants in this period played a
passive role in historical change, unlike their Chinese or Russian
counterparts.29
 From peace, not war, came growth in commerce and cities and a
relatively advanced agrarian society containing protocapitalist tendencies.
The military decayed as soldiers were scattered in small units across the
country. Non-samurai forces were disbanded, and the samurai wore but
rarely unsheathed their swords.30 There was almost no military training, and
soldiers exercised only police functions. Those accorded the highest social
rank were samurai wielding swords, then bowmen and pikemen, and the
lowest were those bearing guns. Military prestige was thus inversely related
to the ability to kill. Toy soldiers ruled. The system preserved “the façade of
a military government. But it was not a machine fit to fight a war. . . . The
strength of the Edo government lay not in its capacity to fight but in its
capacity to prevent a fight from starting.”31 A precondition was the absence
of foreign threat. When in the 1850s foreign navies confronted Japan with
serious intent, its military could not resist.

Meiji and Taisho Informal Imperialism, 1868–1904

The Tokugawa peace ended in the violence preceding and accompanying the
Meiji Restoration of the 1860s. Subsequently interstate wars became more
frequent than in any other period of Japanese history, occurring on average
once every 2.5 years. This was a second remarkable transformation. Our
evidence suddenly improves, and we can see clearly the influence of
domestic politics on decisions of war and peace.
After 1854 Japan was forced by American and British naval powers
into signing “unequal” trade treaties, opening up trading ports to foreign
ships and merchant houses. They were unequal in two senses. First, they
gave rights of extraterritoriality to foreigners residing in these entrepôts, who
were subject not to Japanese law but to the laws of their home countries.
They could not be indicted by Japanese courts even for murder. Second, the
treaties specified Japanese tariff levels for imported and exported goods,
whereas the colonial powers were free to fix their own tariffs. These
inequalities were deeply resented, as they had been in China, but
enforcement was by foreign warships, against whom resistance was fruitless.
Some realized that foreign pressure would only mount. Westerners were
encroaching on Chinese sovereignty, carving out territorial enclaves outside
Chinese jurisdiction. Japan might be the next victim. Hence the reform
movement of 1866–68, which deposed the shogun, put down consequent
rebellions, and inaugurated the reforms known as the Meiji Restoration,
adapting a mixture of Western models of modernization under the rubric
“strong military equals strong nation.” Militarism was at first self-defense.
Japan benefited from its island ecology, and the Western imperialists
were focused on China. For three decades Japanese elites were left alone to
reform, an essential breathing space that China and India had lacked. Japan
already had a commercial economy, and the reforms accelerated economic
growth. Yet the country was hindered by a lack of natural resources and
export markets, as well as overpopulation. This pushed toward coveting the
resources of Korea, Manchuria, and northeastern China and sending
Japanese settlers to all of them. This made Japanese imperialism more likely,
although the main motive remained self- defense. Military reforms modeled
on French and British examples coupled with the communications revolution
enabled the Japanese to join the overseas imperial powers.
Japanese elites expected to expand outward as Western nations had. Up
until the 1890s, the dominant Japanese policy was informal imperialism—
opening up markets, if necessary with threats, to give Japan the same
unequal rights that the Western powers enjoyed. Britain, France, and the
Netherlands had substantial Asian colonies. Russia was moving into north
China and Korea, building railroads connected to its far eastern provinces.
The United States, France, Germany, and Britain were moving beyond
Chinese treaty ports into “spheres of influence” in the interior, building
railroads, mines, and factories, and leasing lands complete with
extraterritorial rights. Many Asians believed this was a step toward
partitioning coastal China into colonies. In this world, commented one
Japanese statesman, “the strong ate the meat of the weak.” This geopolitics
was not anarchic, since the imperial predators collaborated with each other
—the strong in league against the weak. A resource-poor country like Japan
might be later forced into similar submission. Japan wanted to join the
imperial age, and China was the obvious target, for as the Japanese resident
minister there remarked, “When there is a fire in the jeweller’s shop, the
neighbours cannot be expected to refrain from helping themselves.”32
China’s tributary states could be picked off. Korea was weak; Taiwan was
almost stateless.
The first escalation came in 1876 as gunboat diplomacy forced an
unequal treaty on Korea, which ended Korea’s status as a Chinese tributary,
opened three ports to Japanese trade, and granted extraterritorial rights to
Japanese in Korea. The second move came in 1894, when the Korean
monarchy failed to cope with a rebellion. China sent in an army to restore
order, so Japan invaded, too. Japan easily won its short war, for its officers
were better trained and acted cohesively, unlike the squabbling Chinese
generals—a reflection of broader structural differences between the two sets
of elites. The Chinese mobilized 600,000 men, the Japanese 300,000; but
about 35,000 Chinese were killed or wounded, and Japan lost only half that.
Japan showed restraint elsewhere so as not to alienate Westerners. Britain
was willing to use Japan to “balance” against Russia, and it largely repealed
its unequal treaties with Japan that same year. Other powers followed by
1899. Japan now had a freer hand in Korea without colonizing it, and Japan
received an indemnity from China, joined its unequal treaties, and annexed
Taiwan.
These were the fruits of a cheap victory. Japan was moving from fear of
other imperialisms to seizing its own. As the world filled up with empires, it
was best to take advantage of the window of opportunity before it was too
late, and that involved participation in global capitalism. Japan paid for its
wars by borrowing on the London market, and its Chinese indemnity was
invested there. British financiers were investing in Japanese imperialism.33
Self-defense had been the original motive, but capitalist greed and national
status came to replace that motive in what was becoming a normal imperial
state.
But there are different forms of imperialism. In explaining which form
triumphed, we must delve into the sources of power within Japan, where
Realism cannot take us. Japanese historians distinguish “liberals” from
“nationalists” or “militarists” in debates over foreign policy. Almost no one
was liberal in the Western sense of favoring only open markets—nor was the
West itself. In Japan those favoring informal empire confronted those
favoring colonies or protectorates. Should expansion in Korea and
Manchuria be achieved by negotiating concessions or by conquest; should
Japan pause at the Great Wall or go beyond it? The foreign service favored
the first set of options, and the army the second. They battled for influence in
the Diet (parliament) until that mattered no more and at the emperor’s court.
Within the cabinet the posts of war and navy ministers could be held only by
a general and an admiral on the active list. They had direct access to the
emperor without having to go through the prime minister, while the army or
the navy could prevent the formation of any cabinet by refusing to fill these
positions.34 At that point, this power made little difference to Japanese
policy, which was still cautious.
The Japanese government first tried indirect rule in Korea, through the
Korean monarchy and local elites. Yet they could not find reliable Korean
clients, and conflict with Russia was growing. In 1898 Japan had been
forced by the other powers to cede to Russia the Kwantung Peninsula in
Manchuria, taken from China in 1895. Japan and Russia now had competing
railroad-building projects in Manchuria. Britain remained more concerned
about Russia, and it signed a naval treaty with Japan in 1902. Since the
United States and France took their lead in the region from Britain, Japan
would not face interference from them. Japan was now the strongest foreign
power in Korea, but its rulers were frustrated at Russian meddling in a
country claimed as “the keystone of national defense.”35 Japanese
expansionism had obvious economic and strategic motives.

Escalating Imperialism, 1905–1936

The military saw that once Russia finished its projected railroads and ports
in its far east, the balance of power would shift toward it. So Japan’s second
escalation was a preemptive strike in 1905 on Russian forces in Siberia and
Manchuria, taking advantage of a window of geopolitical opportunity. This
was intended to ease national security fears by replacing Russian with
Japanese domination there. No one else intervened.36 The West did not
expect a decisive outcome, but Japan triumphed. The main Russian fleet
sailed thousands of kilometers from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan. At
Tsushima it sailed overconfidently too close to Japanese coastal batteries and
underestimated Japanese naval skills, suffering “an annihilation with
scarcely a parallel in the history of modern sea-warfare.”37 The Russian
army did better in Siberia and Manchuria, though Japan gradually prevailed
in a war in which machine guns and barbed wire apparently made defense
superior to offense; Japanese generals were prepared to take extremely high
losses in their assaults on Russian positions. Both powers mobilized over a
million men, and they put over half a million men into battle. Japan probably
lost about 80,000 dead, Russia about 70,000. About 20,000 civilians also
died. This was a terrible war.
Japanese soldiers’ diaries and letters reveal conscripts who found battle
gut-wrenching and longed for their villages and loved ones. They fought
determinedly so that the war would end and they could return home to
restore the family farm. Discipline was fierce, and the ideal of “fighting to
the last man” was pressed, but Japan had signed the Geneva Conventions,
and soldiers obeyed orders to treat prisoners well. Military service made
many realize that they were “Japanese,” rather than having only a local
identity.38 But this was not ideological war. For the Japanese leaders it was
calmly rational, although the experience for the soldiers in battle was not
remotely that. But beset by the 1905 revolution, the Russian government
wanted the war ended and made concessions that gave Japan unchallenged,
indirect rule in Korea and the Kwantung Peninsula. The rest of Chinese
Manchuria would be run by deals between the Japanese military and local
warlords. It was the first victory inflicted by non-Europeans over a major
European power, and many oppressed peoples celebrated. This war had been
preemptive, but so had been Prussia’s nineteenth-century wars and the U.S.
war against Spain of 1898. In Japan it was proof war might work if carefully
chosen.
There remained no serious threat to Japanese national security. The
powers all had implicitly agreed-on imperial spheres of influence—Russia in
Siberia and northern Manchuria, Japan in southern Manchuria, Korea, and
Taiwan, the United States in the Philippines, France in Indochina, Britain in
the Yangtze Valley, south China, and South Asia, Germany in the Shantung
Peninsula and scattered Pacific Islands. They collaborated in China, together
fighting off Chinese resistance. Might this be an acceptable balance of
power? Could Japan settle for what it had, plus a gradual expansion of
informal imperialism and increasing participation in international markets?
After 1905 Japan’s rulers doubted the wisdom of using force to expand the
Japanese sphere of influence. A less risky alternative was to guarantee the
neutrality of the region through international agreements giving market
access to all foreigners. This would avoid Russia’s seeking revenge and
lessen military expenditures.
A third escalation came in 1910. Japan increased troop strength in
Korea and quietly annexed it. This step was unprovoked but easy, and the
main Japanese political parties supported it. Liberals had hoped to achieve
regime change through client Korean reformers, but these had failed to
overcome local monarchists and nationalists. The Japanese claimed to have
been sucked from regime change to direct rule to establish order. The
170,000 Japanese settlers in Korea also demanded protection. For Japan’s
peasant-farmers, the lure of settler colonies was strong, and so imperialism
acquired a social base. The Western powers protested, but Japan ignored
them. Annexation was meant to decrease Japanese insecurities, but it
alarmed the other powers. In response, the Japanese High Command
demanded and got higher military budgets. A security dilemma was
ratcheting Japanese militarism upward.39 So far, a Realist explanation of its
modern wars works quite well.
Japan added on a typical imperial mission, however: Koreans were
“uncivilized” and “backward,” living in “filth, squalor, and indolence,” their
politics dominated by “passivity, corruption, and toadyism.” There was
enough shared ethnic heritage and cultural affinity to make their “uplift”
possible. Japanese colonialism was not yet as racist as European and
American.40 Japan could transport a large army across the sea to repress
resistance, and settlers then followed, given conqueror’s privileges,
purchasing farms at knockdown prices and dominating profitable sectors.
The main colonial actors “were not powerful metropolitan business interests
but restless, ambitious, frugal elements from the middle and lower strata of
Japanese society.” Although trade with Korea was not enormous, the
Japanese handling it made big profits.41 Settlers and some business interests
encouraged imperialism.
The Korean economy flourished under the Japanese. Manufacturing
rose from 6 percent of GDP in 1911 to an astonishing 28 percent in 1940—
far outstripping China or India or anywhere else in Asia apart from Japan
itself. Annual GDP growth rate between 1911 and 1939 was around 4
percent, as it was in Taiwan and Japan itself in the same period, double
Western rates of growth.42 Some of this must have filtered down to the local
population since average Korean life expectancy is said to have risen from
twenty-six to forty-two years over the life of the colony. The Taiwanese
became taller, also a sign of improving health. Japanese rulers saw that
colonial empire worked. In 1912 the government claimed that “countries . . .
turn toward Japan as the sunflower toward the sun.”43 The cultivation of
geopolitical status had become an important motive; human societies tend to
keep on repeating practices that work—as Japanese colonies clearly did.
Resources gained through war had been cumulative.
World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution then dislocated Asian
geopolitics. Germany was removed by defeat, Russia was weakened, and
France and Britain needed time to recover. The Japanese government had
wisely chosen the Allied side in the war and was rewarded with the small
German colonies of Shantung, Tsingtao, and the Micronesian islands.
Shantung was a possible jumping-off place for expansion in Manchuria or
north China. In 1915 the Japanese government made “Twenty-one
Demands” on China, which to Chinese nationalists and other powers
presaged more Japanese expansion. By the 1920s Japan had a colonial
empire in Taiwan and Korea; an informal empire in Manchuria and parts of
north China; and substantially free trade with the rest of Asia, the British
Empire, and the United States. Its expansion had involved threats and short
wars in an unbroken run of success. There was consensus in Japan that it
must defend its “line of sovereignty”—Japan plus its colonies—while
protecting a broader but unclear “line of interest.” Expansion might extend
participation in international markets, by expanding its “line of interest” in
Manchuria, north China, and Fukien (the Chinese province opposite
Taiwan), or by extending the “line of sovereignty”—colonies.
The 1920s favored liberal informal empire. World War I saw the
triumph of the liberal powers, followed by the League of Nations, and the
Washington Naval Treaties of 1922.44 The Naval Treaties limited the size of
navies, thereby ending British dominance in Asia and allowing Japan to play
the United States against Britain. The United States was at this point Japan’s
largest trading partner and supplier of foreign capital, and most Japanese
politicians favored a policy of market expansion in addition to informal
empire in China, not more colonies. Shidehara Kijuro, the dominant foreign
minister of the 1920s, favored cooperation with other powers. Expansion
would be at the expense of China, but he hoped for Chinese consent in an
Asian revival led by Japan. Growing Chinese nationalism made this
delusory. Japan was expanding too late in world-historical time. This was
still the age of empires, but the more advanced colonies were being
confronted by nationalism—as the British were finding in India.
The nationalist government in China sought to cancel its unequal
treaties. Shidehara, supported by Japanese consular officials and most big
businesses, said he would bend to British and American pressure to
renegotiate them, provided China pay its debts to Japan. Other Japanese
politicians, supported by Japanese business interests in China, resisted
renegotiation, while conservatives feared a republican virus spreading from
China to Japan.45 But liberal politicians had popular support to reduce the
military budget since this meant lower taxes. And the more Japan
industrialized, the more dependent it became on the international market.
Economists counseled conformity to its rules, and since Japan depended
most on the markets of the British Empire and the United States, it would be
unwise to alienate them.
So economic debate shifted toward classical economics, open markets,
the gold standard, and deflationary policies. Japan was not on the gold
standard in the 1920s, and liberals urged its reinstatement, which was
opposed by those favoring a statist path of development. Empire, arms, and
authoritarianism were advocated by “German” conservatives, whereas
liberal admirers of Anglo-Saxon civilization favored parliamentary politics
and informal empire. The “Germans” were drawn more from oligarchs, the
army officer corps, and state bureaucrats, the “Anglo-Saxons” were more
influential among the political parties and the civilian middle class.
The middling levels of the officer corps were the most extreme, and
those in the Kwantung Field Army in Manchuria became imbued with self-
confidence and ambition from its military victories. They saw Japan leading
pan-Asian resistance to the West, through “total war,” advocated by
Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, a military theorist who saw history as
cycles of short, sharp, decisive battlefield encounters followed by “wars by
annihilation or exhaustion” fought by whole peoples to the death. Japan’s
previous wars had been short and decisive, requiring attacking élan and high
morale. But the modern industrial state was making such war obsolete. A
period of wars of annihilation would now follow, leading to a final encounter
between the United States and Japan, the leader of Asia. Ishiwara’s vision of
a final war matured through the late 1920s to the early 1930s. He wrote:
“The last war in human history is approaching. . . . ‘Titanic world conflict,
unprecedented in human history’ . . . the gateway to a golden age of human
culture, a synthesis of East and West, the last and highest stage of human
civilization.”46 In readiness for this final triumph, Japan had to expand in
Manchuria and China to build a self-sufficient industrial base on the Asian
mainland, preferably with Chinese cooperation. Japan could be a great
power, “harmoniously joining Japan’s financial power and China’s natural
resources, Japan’s industrial abilities and China’s labor power.”47 Ishiwara
proposed that the Japanese run high-tech Manchurian industry, the Chinese
run small business, and Koreans do the farming!48 Economic policy, he
explained, should be aimed at long-term military buildup, not at yielding
profit for bankers or corporations. Acquire resource-rich colonies, build a
“military-industrial complex,” and strengthen military influence in Tokyo,
preferably without alienating other powers. War might come, but, as
Tomosaburo Kato, the navy minister, said, “unless we have the money, we
cannot make war.”49
Those favoring colonies or protectorates argued that Japan could
expand into the vacuum left by China’s decline. This was their
neighborhood, and the other powers were far away, except for Russia, which
was weakened by revolution. Corrupt Chinese warlords should be gobbled
up before Chinese nationalists did so—another supposed window of
opportunity. An expanding Japanese sphere of influence in northeast China
would give breathing room and long-term resources. Japan had to grow in
Manchuria, or it would be forced out. Such arguments dominated army
planning circles.50
There were domestic pressures, too. Victories had given aggression a
popular base. The ex-servicemen’s association had 3 million members, and
“patriotic societies” recruited broadly. Conservative oligarchs and
bureaucrats favored social imperialism as a way of hanging on to power. The
Soviets were consolidating in the north, while leftists were active in coastal
China. Conservatives and the army played up the threat of Bolshevism.51
Settler and business interests in China promised riches for everyone, and
demands to subsidize settlers were fueled by the media.52 This coalition
proclaimed the “defence of the Asian race” against the West.53 Media
exaggerations of the welcome given to Japanese settlers in Korea and
Taiwan contrasted strongly with the U.S. Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924,
which banned all Japanese immigration. The Japanese were shocked by the
“yellow peril” scare.54 Japan had failed to get an antiracist clause added to
the League of Nations charter, since the other great powers either had racist
empires or were internally racist, as was the United States. Western
“liberalism” was hypocritical, the Japanese correctly argued.
The choice between these options was decided not by rational
calculation of Japan’s “national interests,” but by the changing balance of
political power between left and right within Japan. Leftists and liberals
made headway in the 1920s. A cheap food policy depressed prices for
peasant farmers, fueling rural riots. Workers agitated for greater rights,
forming labor unions boosted by the Bolshevik Revolution and by popular
demands to reduce the military budget. Political parties began to dominate
the lower house of parliament during the 1920s. Universal male suffrage was
introduced in 1925, and civil citizenship rights were increased.55 Big
business mostly supported liberalism until the mid-1930s, since it depended
on Anglo-American trade. Most of these developments seemed to favor
liberal geopolitics.
Yet there were conservative countertendencies. The franchise
overrepresented rural areas whose politics was dominated by landed
notables. The Meiji reforms had included little land reform, and tenants were
enmeshed in conservative state-run co-ops.56 Many rural households
depended on military wages or were tempted by the lure of settler colonies.
The Peace Preservation Law permitted the police to repress socialist and
communist parties and unions and to interfere in elections on “public order”
grounds. The legal code did not tolerate “outsiders” (i.e., national unions) in
trade disputes, and workers had to agitate shop floor by shop floor, which
weakened their ability to maintain the membership gains and strike levels of
the early 1920s.57 Japan developed a dual economy with a widening gulf
between agricultural and manufacturing wages, making worker-peasant
collaboration difficult. Much of the middle class, at that time enfranchised,
abandoned its brief alliance with workers, fearful of Bolshevism.
Conservative and liberal parties, controlled by the upper class and supported
by the middle class, contended for power; leftists, workers, and peasants
were largely excluded. All this was set amid the emperor system of the Meiji
constitution, which was biased toward ideological harmony, obedience, and
patriarchy. The Japanese state became more cohesive and more militarist.
Finally, the extraneous Great Depression tilted Japanese politics
rightward. With exquisitely bad timing, the liberal Minseito Party
government began deflating the economy to return Japan to the gold
standard, just as the Depression hit. This slashed demand and investment,
worsened recession, and produced a run on the yen. The 1931 British
withdrawal from the gold standard was seen as the fall of the international
liberal order. Japanese bankers began selling yen for dollars, confirming
nationalist accusations of treason. The government raised interest rates and
abandoned reforms, including votes for women and concessions to unions
and tenant farmers. Liberalism was halted. The government fell in
December, the normal fate of governments of both right and left engulfed by
the Depression. Without it, Japan might have avoided aggressive militarism.
 Militarism Rampant, 1936–1945
The government shifted to the right, and by 1936, 62 percent of strikes were
settled by the “sabre mediation,” notes Sheldon Garon. This deterred worker
dissent, and, faced with such violence, the unions split and were later
absorbed into the “patriotic societies.”58 Liberals shifted rightward. By the
late 1930s the economy was dominated by a military-industrial complex that
struck corporatist compromises with the government.59 The subordination of
both labor and capital to militarism boded ill for the peace of Asia.
Street demonstrations were in the 1930s dominated by violent
ultranationalists led by young officers and former colonial settlers who
received covert support from inside the High Command. Minseito Prime
Minister Osachi Hamaguchi was assassinated in November 1930 and died of
his wounds nine months later. The former finance minister Junnosuke Inoue
was also killed, and other politicians and zaibatsu (corporation) chiefs
followed. Assassins, if brought to trial, were given light sentences because of
the “purity” and “sincerity” of their motives. The leftist Social Masses Party
garnered 9 percent of the vote in the 1937 elections, but to avoid
assassination its leaders embraced “popular imperialism.”60 In public almost
everyone favored imperialism.
The economic policies of the new conservative government proved
effective. Korekiyo Takahashi, the finance minister, took Japan off gold,
lowered interest rates, introduced deficit financing, and boosted
countercyclical government spending, an “intuitive Keynesianism” (of the
right, not the left) that revived industry. Japan exported its way out of
depression.61 This boosted conservatism, and more government spending
went to the military. In 1935 Takahashi pushed through a reduced military
budget, which earned him an assassin’s bullet.62 Military spending rose
under a government dominated by rightist bureaucrats. They introduced
more controls on industry, ending market allocation by the price mechanism
in iron, steel, and chemicals—state-dominated capitalism for military
purposes. These developments produced a quicker economic recovery than
liberal capitalist economies managed. As in Nazi Germany, the economic
success of an authoritarian regime made a “military Keynesianism”
popular.63 Exclusively “war parties” are rare in modern politics. Parties
usually focus more on domestic goals than war posturing, but success or
failure in them will lead to questions of war and peace. The economic good
fortunes of conservatives, and the bad fortunes of liberals, contingently
boosted the lure of war in the 1930s. Such linkages in earlier history must
have often tilted the balance between war and peace.
Market-oriented expansion presupposed low-tariff international trade
for Japan, which depended on importing equipment from the United States,
raw materials from the British Empire, and oil from the United States and
the Dutch East Indies. In return, Japan exported textile goods. But the
Depression, followed by global protectionism, hit this hard. Japanese fears
grew of an “ABCD encirclement” by America, Britain, China, and the
Dutch. Exports to Manchuria and north China rose rapidly, boosting
arguments for direct imperialism there. The “resource imperialism” of
Taiwan and Korea might be extended in Manchuria and north China, which
were seen as lifelines for Japan to avoid “strangulation” by the liberal
empires. Minerals could be better secured by occupying the territories they
lay in than by uncertain markets.64 So for both domestic and foreign reasons,
the shift toward liberalism and informal imperialism in the 1920s was
reversed in the 1930s, as the state bureaucracy was militarized.
The Army Ministry and the Foreign Office had been fighting a turf war
over Manchuria since 1906. From 1926 Chiang Kai-shek was reviving
Kuomintang fortunes in China, egged on by nationalists to restore Chinese
authority over former Qing territories in Manchuria and north China.
Japanese settlers and businessmen there felt threatened and asked for more
protection. The foreign service resisted and was denounced as sympathizing
more with the Chinese than with its own citizens. Provocations by Japanese
and Chinese nationalists destabilized both governments.65
With hindsight, the escalation of Japanese military imperialism through
the 1930s might seem inexorable, but it was not. There were long-term
factors, but a more contingent role was played by Japanese soldiers taking
foreign policy into their own hands, ignoring policies formulated in Tokyo.
In 1928 Japanese soldiers killed the Chinese warlord ruling Manchuria. The
General Staff refused to condemn this, but in the liberal period this was seen
as a mistake and led to the demise of the conservative government that had
failed to stop it. More important were the incidents of 1931, 1935, and 1937,
constituting a fourth wave of escalation that coincided with rightward shift
in Japan. The Kwantung Field Army had attracted ambitious young officers
seeking action. In September 1931 they faked a sabotage of the main
railroad line and persuaded the army (against the wishes of the government
and their own commander) to attack the larger armies of the local Chinese
warlords. They won the ensuing battles and overran Manchuria. Ishiwara
was the senior staff officer involved, though senior military and court figures
were complicit. Ishiwara saw the Manchurian invasion as a short, decisive
war building up resources for a later “total war.” He judged correctly that
other powers would not intervene. The Soviet Union was in the middle of a
Five Year Plan, and the West was preoccupied with the Depression.66
The Manchurian invasion angered some in Tokyo, including Emperor
Hirohito. The liberal Minseito government ministers opposed it, but they had
to acquiesce because the action had been successful. A series of failures to
stand up to the armed forces followed.67 The last government staffed by
party politicians fell in May 1932. Informal empire in China had involved
negotiating deals with local Chinese warlords and capitalists.68 Some
cooperation in Japanese-occupied areas of Manchuria and China occurred,
but most Chinese businessmen feared alienating Chinese nationalist
sentiment.69 Lacking reliable allies, the Japanese attempted more direct
colonial rule, setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo in a further incident,
claiming they had liberated the “Manchus” from China.
Manchukuo alienated the Western imperial powers, the League of
Nations, and world opinion. But as Ishiwara predicted, they offered only
words. Japan quit the League, and the fuss subsided. But there were
unintended consequences. Japan had left the community of states sponsoring
the “rules of war,” and a backlash came from China. Japanese rhetoric to the
contrary, most inhabitants of Manchuria considered themselves Chinese, and
they were considered as such by other Chinese—the legacy of the Qing
Empire. Whatever “anti-Manchu” sentiments might have lingered in Chinese
republicanism were swamped by anti-Japanese sentiments.70 Boycotts of
Japanese goods by the Chinese finished off Shidehara’s moderate diplomacy.
Manchukuo’s new government was a partnership of Japanese military
officers and capitalists. Borrowing from German World War I and Soviet
models, they pioneered a mixed public-private economy with five-year
plans. Manufacturing production rose fivefold and GDP rose by 4 percent
per year between 1924 and 1941—the normal rate across Japan’s early
empire.71 With order restored and the economy vibrant, Japan moved toward
less direct rule through Manchurian elites. Manchukuo was described as a
“brother country,” a “branch house” of the Japanese family. Back in Japan
the public read sanitized accounts of colonial progress. One million Japanese
settlers entering Manchukuo in the 1930s reinforced imperialism and
provided symbols of upward mobility for Japanese peasants. “Manchurian
colonization was a social movement before it became a state initiative,” says
Louise Young.72 But reality differed from the propaganda. Settlers had to be
pressed into part-time soldiering to defend occupied areas from “bandits”
(dispossessed peasants). This proved a long way from the “paradise”
proclaimed by the Japanese media. Settlers who failed and returned to Japan
turned their discontent against those opposed to pouring more resources into
the colonies.
After the initial media war frenzy subsided, Manchukuo’s contribution
to the Japanese economy seemed less than promised. Support for informal
empire began to revive in the home ministry and Foreign Office, and army
budgets were attacked in the Diet during 1933–35.73 But when the militarists
realized that Manchukuo could not alone provide an autarkic economy, they
schemed for north China as well. The solution to the problem of inadequate
colonies was seen as more colonies. A purge of “dangerous thought,”
initially launched against communists, then engulfed socialists, liberals, and
internationalists. In 1936 an old rule was reinstated that only serving officers
could be military ministers, which gave the High Command a veto within
the cabinet and more access to the emperor. The destruction of the Foreign
Office was secured. Its diplomats had been walking a tightrope between
instructions from Tokyo, the need to work with local Chinese, and
conformity to the norms of the treaty ports. As Tokyo shifted rightward, in
1937–38 the diplomatic corps was disbanded, its roles handed to a military-
dominated authority.74
The military was now in control of a cohesive state seeking further
colonies. The navy favored southern advance across the Pacific, recognizing
that this carried a risk of war with Britain and the United States. The
admirals supported a holding operation in the north to contain the Soviets
and Chinese. Most army officers focused on expansion in north China but
were divided. “Total war” advocates like Ishiwara sought a “national defense
state” to build up Asian resources to challenge the West. This involved
dominating China. A second “control” faction sought a deal with the Soviets
while strengthening Manchurian defenses. This view was prevalent among
General Staff officers who believed Japan could not take on another great
power as well as China. A third, “imperial way” policy urged war against the
Soviets. It downplayed the contribution of material factors such as
production capacity or army size. Such “economistic” calculations were
despised. “Decisive battles” would be won by offensive élan. The military
knew it would be inferior in numbers and perhaps technology. But Japanese
seishin, “spiritual mobilization,” could triumph over material difficulties. A
study group analyzing defeats by Soviet forces in 1939–40 concluded that
the Japanese were only about 80 percent as effective in technology and
organization as Soviet troops, and “the only method of making up for the
missing 20% is to draw upon spiritual strength.”75 This paralleled the Nazi
worship of the national spirit. So did the harsh discipline and ferocious
fighting spirit that treated enemy soldiers and civilians brutally. But whereas
the Wehrmacht cultivated rather egalitarian comradeship between officers
and men, Japanese differences of rank were profound. But blitzkrieg, the
sudden, overwhelming offensive, would win the day, as it was claimed it had
in 1894, 1905, and 1931, and as it had for the Nazis between 1936 and 1940.
These debates were not resolved, and policy documents typically combined
references to all three strategies while remaining vague about resources
needed. But all factions wanted war and territorial expansion in Asia, as well
as more military control of the state.76
Once again, soldiers on the ground decided the issue. In 1935 Japanese
army units, acting without orders from above, created two new puppet
regimes in north China and one in Mongolia. This put an end to the
negotiations between Japan and the Chinese nationalists. A fifth escalation
then began after an incident in 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing.
Though fighting between Chinese and Japanese units stationed there may
have begun accidentally, the General Staff sent in Japanese army and naval
units to escalate it, supported after the fact by Prime Minister Prince
Fumimaro Konoe and the emperor.77
These military escalations precipitated a full-scale war with China that
then evolved into the Pacific War, which lasted until Japan’s total defeat in
1945. The war seemed promising in 1937. The Chinese nationalist
government lacked the infrastructural power to rule all the country, and it
had to retreat. Konoe and army staff officers hoped one swift blow would
knock China out of the war. Konoe said he would deal with Chiang Kai-shek
only on the battlefield and at the surrender table. He saw Chiang’s regime as
the obstacle to Chinese acquiescence in a Japanese-led Asian revival,
liberating Asia from Anglo-American capitalism and Soviet communism.
The Japanese did not yet rate Chinese communists as significant opponents.
 Ishiwara and total war advocates opposed this war, recognizing the
mobilizing power of Chinese nationalism. Ishiwara warned it would “be
what Spain was for Napoleon, an endless bog.”78 He saw China as eating up
resources needed for Japan’s future, and the war did drain the Japanese
economy and manpower. So he was removed from the General Staff. But he
did not have a solution either. Like others, he had hoped for Chinese
acquiescence in a Japanese leadership of Asia, but he had been misled by
Chiang’s appearing to seek a deal—but in reality only until he had finished
off the communists. Though Chiang and the Japanese both wanted to
extirpate communism from Asia, there could be no agreement between them.
Most Chinese now saw the main imperial enemy not as the West but as
Japan. The United States increased its loans to China.79
In Japan the sources of social power had been fused under military
dominance. The remaining political choice was between military rule and a
quasi-fascist corporatist state, but neither could quite triumph. The Japanese
system had relied on the common interests, culture, and modernizing intent
of oligarchs, bureaucrats, capitalists, and the educated upper middle class to
generate policies of development. But the state had been taken over by a
military favoring the anti-parliamentary corporatism sweeping other states of
the period, claiming more technocratic expertise and concern for the national
interest than disputatious parties had.80 A few of these were fascists. In other
countries fascism was a mass movement mobilizing from below. Japanese
fascist groups lacked mass support and did not coalesce into a single
movement; Hirohito declared that he would not accept in cabinet or court
posts “any person holding fascistic ideas.”81
After early Japanese victories in China, the army got bogged down.
Chinese forces avoided big battles and cut the supply lines of an
overextended enemy. The war proved costlier and more difficult than
anticipated. Japanese forces were overconfident victims of their own
ideology of racial superiority, and this led them into atrocities alienating
many Chinese who might otherwise have joined them. Atrocities had been
absent in Japan’s previous wars, but ideology-infused emotions were
beginning to cloud material interest and rational strategy.
In Southeast Asia Japan had pursued a market-oriented strategy in the
early and mid-1930s to secure oil from Java and Sumatra, as well as some
informal empire in Vietnam. With a neutrality pact signed with the Soviets in
1939, the navy’s strategy of expanding southward was embraced. When
Hitler overran France and the Netherlands, their colonial possessions in
Vietnam and the East Indies seemed to beckon. “Seize this golden
opportunity! Don’t let anything stand in the way,” urged Army Minister Hata
Shunroku in June 1940.82 It seemed another window of opportunity. Since
leaders did not expect Britain to last long against Hitler, its Asian colonies
might also be acquired. An alliance with Germany and a strike southward
was pushed by much of the navy, though not by its head, Admiral Isoroku
Yamamoto, who knew Japan could not defeat the United States. But the
army was coming around to the notion that defense in the north and offense
in the south would be the best strategy.
Japan still depended on foreign imports, especially oil. Though its
“resource imperialism” in Manchuria, north China, Korea, and Taiwan
provided 20 percent of mainland Japanese GDP, the temptation to strike out
for the oil of the Dutch East Indies grew. In 1938 the United States began
shipping military supplies and credits to nationalist China, and the British
planned a railroad from Burma to ship supplies to the nationalists. This
contributed to a stalemate in the China War and increased Japanese hostility
to the Anglophone powers.
In August 1940 Japan founded the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity
Sphere for developing Asia peacefully. Yet the next month it joined the Axis
alliance and invaded Vietnam—oddly, an attack on the territory of a
supposed ally, the French Vichy regime. The main intent was to cut off
supplies to the Chinese nationalists. Again, local officers on the ground
exceeded their orders and were successful. The sticking point remained
China. Since 1932 the Stimson Doctrine had declared American hostility to
Japan’s invasion of China and Manchukuo. Yet Japan received 80 percent of
its oil from the United States. The problem, one U.S. diplomat complained to
Roosevelt, was that “we have large emotional interests in China, small
economic interests, and no vital interests.”83 Yet the United States continued
to demand that Japan return to the pre-1931 status quo, which almost all
Japanese leaders saw as abandoning Manchukuo and 170,000 Japanese
settlers. It would be disastrous for Japan’s economy and politically for any
government that accepted these terms.84
The U.S. administration was alarmed by Japanese aggression in China,
its alliance with Hitler, its occupation of Vietnam, and the obvious threat to
British and Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia. It had prepared possible
war plans against Japan ever since 1906, and these were later to provide the
blueprint for its Pacific War strategy.85 But lacking the military power to
implement them, it had first fought an indirect proxy war by subsidizing
China’s resistance to Japan. Now it turned to flexing its economic power
resources more directly. Its response to a possible Japanese southward
advance was not to come to terms, as the Japanese had hoped. In May 1941
Roosevelt embargoed almost all exports to Japan from the United States or
the British Empire. Oil was crucial. Japanese companies had already secured
approval for licenses for gasoline from the United States for another nine
months and crude oil for thirty-two months, but freezing Japanese assets in
the United States would prevent Japan from paying for or getting it.
Roosevelt approved this perhaps without realizing the consequences, though
Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson did. Roosevelt’s position remains
unclear, though he had appointed the hawkish Acheson to escalate pressure
on Japan. The official story is that Roosevelt discovered only in September
that Japan had received no oil since July.86
The effect of the embargoes was the opposite of that intended. Liberals
could not understand militarists for whom the embargoes were “an assault
on the nation’s very existence.”87 The embargoes precipitated a desperate
fling. Japanese planners estimated that the navy could last without oil
supplies for between six months and two years. They also saw that the
United States was expanding its Pacific fleet. Since Japan could not win a
long war, a short but devastating offense against American and British power
was needed. When Admiral Yamamoto failed to persuade the emperor to
avoid war, in May 1941 he proposed attacking Pearl Harbor as the best
strategy. This was tested in war games in September and adopted as policy in
mid-October, the fifth and final escalation.
Civilian leaders were not informed by the High Command, and so they
did not know of the plan to attack Pearl Harbor. Prime Minister Konoe was
authorized to negotiate but not to make concessions. If he could not
negotiate a peace, Japan would attack. Both sides toyed with the possibility
of compromise in late 1941, but it foundered mainly on China. The issue of
Manchukuo might have been detached from the rest of China, allowing
Japan to remain there while quitting China. Alternatively, a withdrawal from
China might occur in stages over some years. On the Japanese side,
however, the army was absolutely opposed to any withdrawal, and its
influence on the government and the emperor was increasing.88 It was
curious (from a Realist point of view) that the higher priority than war
against each other seemed to be, for Japan, the war against China and, for
the United States, the war against Hitler. So why did Japan continue to
antagonize the United States by its southward moves? And why did not
Roosevelt compromise over China and build up his commitments to the
struggle against Hitler? This would also give the United States time to build
up its military resources so that it could later deter Japan from aggression.89
But the confrontation was really between Japanese militarism and rising
American consciousness of its own imperial potential. Neither allowed
backing off. There were mutual misunderstandings. Japan and the United
States embodied different forms of imperialism and different visions of
threat: where the United States feared “brutal totalitarianism,” the Japanese
saw “liberal strangulation” by global economic tentacles. Both were only
exaggerating the reality the other posed.
The initial success of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa in Russia pushed
Japanese rulers over the edge. Japan had to seize this window of opportunity.
But why had Japanese militarism passed beyond the bounds of reason? Only
inordinate slices of luck could have brought a good war for Japan, as some
Japanese leaders knew. Irrationality is difficult to explain. It is usually the
residual in our explanations. But here it brought on war across the Pacific. In
October Konoe, having failed to negotiate a compromise, was replaced by
General Hideki Tojo, an army hard-liner. On November 25, 1941, White
House officials concluded that war was inevitable. Secretary of War Henry
Stimson recorded in his diary, “The question was how could we maneuver
them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much
danger to ourselves.”90 Secretary of State Cordell Hull insisted Japanese
forces be withdrawn from all of China, including Manchuria, as a
precondition for normalizing relations. This was unacceptable. On December
1 the emperor approved the Pearl Harbor attack. On the seventh it began, a
surprise attack, simultaneously with attacks on Australian, British, and
Dutch forces in Malaya, Sarawak, Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, the
Philippines, and Thailand. Japan would conquer an empire or go down
fighting. Tojo managed both.
Few in the United States had expected such a reaction. This was one
example among many of diplomacy where both sides refuse to back down
while expecting that their own pressure will force the other to do so. Instead,
the opposite happens: each ratcheting up of pressure hardens the response of
the other. The U.S. ability to read Japanese diplomatic codes warned them an
attack was coming, but no one knew where or when. Some expected
landings in the Philippines, not an attack on U.S. territory. Pearl Harbor and
its fleet were seen as the springboard toward Japan, not a vulnerable asset.
The attack destroyed all the battleships in the harbor. For Roosevelt it was “a
day of infamy.” American leaders could not believe that Japan, a country
with about 5 percent of U.S. heavy industrial capacity, would attack its
sovereign territory.91 Indeed, it is not easy to understand this when Japan
was already fighting in China. But American economic warfare and its hard
line on China had strengthened Tokyo militarists and brought the navy to
agree to secure oil by force.92 Tojo saw that the embargoes would strangle
Japan and the United States would only grow stronger. The chances of
success in war were not great, he conceded. But America would reduce
Japan to “a third-class nation after two or three years if we just sit tight.”
Peace under American domination or war against the odds but with honor—
that was the choice.93
The Japanese could have backed down, and American leaders reasoned
that they would. But it would have been rather like Britain backing down in
1940. Japan had a militarist regime with a half-fascist ideology, to which any
backing down would have been dishonor, “a colossal loss of prestige,” an
insult to the memory of all who had died in China, and long-term
subordination to the United States, says Ian Kershaw.94 It had also enjoyed a
string of triumphs in war that was being continued in Hitler’s sequence of
military successes. So it pulverized the American fleet, seized British,
Dutch, and American colonial possessions, and established a defensive
perimeter across the Pacific to secure the oil of Borneo and Sumatra. Japan
could then negotiate to secure access to all these markets from a position of
strength, helped by Germany’s irresistible force in Europe. Japanese leaders
were hopeful of victory in a short offensive war, pessimistic about a longer
war. Yet they believed the United States would sue for peace after the first
devastating blows, and then they could compromise. Admiral Tomioka
Sadatoshi later conceded “such optimistic predictions . . . were not really
based on reliable calculations.” Overconfidence also resulted from the
militarists’ despising “soft” liberal democracies. Caged by their own society,
they exaggerated Japanese seishin and took American mouthing of
Wilsonian liberalism at face value. Had they appreciated the reality of
American imperialism, they would have realized that the United States had
never been averse to using its military in “wars of choice.” Yamamoto was
right on both counts: the attack on Pearl Harbor was the best strategy, but it
still wouldn’t work.
A conspiracy school says Roosevelt wanted the Japanese to attack, so
that he could get American global domination after the war—a theory that is
plausible but lacking evidence, and it would require a visionary strategy of
which few politicians are capable. But the destruction of a quarter of the
American Pacific fleet in its home port, and the occupation of a dozen
countries across an American sphere of interest, caused national outrage.
The Senate voted unanimously for war, and the House had one dissenter, the
pacifist Jeannette Rankin, who declared to boos and hisses, “As a woman, I
can’t go to war and I refuse to send anyone else.” U.S. officials rejected
compromise not only because it would demean its reputation, but also
because it had no need to. Japan could not hurt the U.S. mainland—and that
made the Pearl Harbor attack stupid. Americans could fight a war with no
danger to the homeland. The Japanese could not. So Japanese rulers got a
conflagration across the Pacific and their own destruction, while Americans
got an economic boom and a global empire. Early Japanese successes
contributed to eventual defeat, for by the spring of 1942 its imperial forces
were overextended, scattered over thousands of kilometers from Burma to
the southwest Pacific. This headlong advance was a strategy infused with
seishin. Many Japanese officers thought it was folly. The better strategy, they
argued (an argument endorsed by some later historians), was to stop short of
this and either merely take over the European empires or establish an
imperial perimeter that would be defensible for a few years, by which time
both sides might want peace.95 Indeed, they might even be allies against
Soviet communism. But these officers were overruled by the leadership.
Appropriately, the last great battle of the war involved the Kwantung
Field Army, the cause of so much trouble. The Red Army, joining the war in
the east, overpowered it, killing 80,000 Japanese. Pacific War casualties had
been appalling. The Chinese suffered most: 3.75 million nationalist and
communist troops were killed or went missing, and 15–20 million civilians
died, mostly from war-induced famine and disease, though Japanese
atrocities accounted for several million. Indian and Burmese civilian losses
amounted to several million from famine and disease. Around 800,000
Japanese civilians died, mainly in callous U.S. bombing raids, about 140,000
died at Hiroshima, and 88,000 perished in the fire-bombing of Tokyo—a
maneuver chosen because Japanese homes were built of wood. As Major
General Curtis LeMay, in charge of the bombing, said, the population was
“scorched and boiled and baked to death.”96 There were far more civilian
than military deaths in the Pacific War.
Just over 2 million Japanese troops, about 160,000 Americans, and
120,000 British Commonwealth troops were killed in the Pacific War
including 20–30 percent death rates among allied POWs. Japanese atrocities
included massacres, surgical dissections of unsedated humans, reprisals on
whole villages and cities, deliberate starvation, and forced labor unto death.
The most notorious examples were the Nanjing massacre of 1937 of perhaps
200,000 Chinese civilians; the “Three Alls Policy” instructing Japanese
forces to “Kill All, Burn All, and Loot All” in China, approved by Hirohito
himself; bacteriological and chemical warfare experiments conducted on
Chinese civilians who were invariably killed; the use of biological and
chemical weapons beginning in China in 1939; and the “comfort stations,”
where Chinese and Korean women were forced to serve in brothels as
prostitutes for the soldiers.
These atrocities occurred because Japan had withdrawn from the rules
of war, though there were no rules against bombing civilians. In no previous
wars had Japan practiced such atrocities, but in the army a culture of
brutality, fanaticism, and racism had built up, including the beliefs that the
Chinese were subhuman and surrender was treason. Assassinations in the
1930s had made the killing of civilians normal. Army logistics became
murderous. Living off the land meant extorting subject peoples’ produce,
causing starvation, disease, and death. The ideals of the Greater East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere were destroyed by wartime occupations. The never-
surrender cult spun off into the belief that POWs did not deserve to live.
Japanese army discipline was sadistic and involved terrible beatings. When
trapped on Pacific islands, with no possibility of retreat, Japanese soldiers
chose death. On ten islands the average death rate was an astonishing 97
percent. In Okinawa it was “only” 92 percent. These are death rates
unparalleled in any other war discussed in this book. American death rates
were under 5 percent but rose to 11 percent in the battle for Okinawa.97 In
1945, when the Tokyo leaders knew defeat was imminent and inevitable,
they still refused to surrender until the United States dropped what the
Japanese believed were only the first two of many atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki—in reality the Americans had only these two.98
 The mayhem of the Asia-Pacific War was a far cry from the calm
calculation of Realism or the beneficence of liberalism. Its combination of
folly and evil is difficult to comprehend. Even if the big battles had gone
better for Japan, it is difficult to see a different outcome. The Battle of
Midway in June 1942 is often seen as decisive, narrowly going against Japan
—ten accurate bombs out of thousands dropped on the Japanese fleet made
the difference. But the Americans had many thousands of bombs to drop.
Even if Japan had won this battle and seized Australia, the United States
would have regrouped, built more carriers and planes, dropped more bombs,
and pushed them back again. Between 1941 and 1945 the Japanese produced
70,000 planes, no mean feat, but at the cost of civilian suffering. The United
States produced 300,000 while its civilians prospered. Ford’s Willow Run
assembly lines produced a B-24 bomber every sixty-three minutes. And the
United States got the atom bomb. It had acquired the economic and military
power and the ideological will to become the world’s greatest power. From
that point on it would act accordingly, while still mouthing the ideology of a
Wilsonian charitable association.

Conclusion
We have seen great variations in war in Japan. Its distance from the Asian
mainland made foreign wars difficult for many centuries, but civil wars
increased, resulting in the sixteenth century in over a hundred vanished
kingdoms. Warring rulers thought they were making rational choices, but
they were almost all mistaken. Only the triumvirs and their vassals survived,
and then only one of them. They were the most capable military-political
rulers, helped by luck. The drive toward unification proved popular. It came
first from the most ruthless general, then from one who combined impulsive
generalship with astute diplomacy. He and the third triumvir developed
reforms aimed at peace and insulation from the world. Japan then entered
modernity after 240 years of peace in reaction to foreign imperialism. There
was long-term logic in the rise of modern Japanese militarism. Like the early
Roman Republic, the Meiji Restoration began as self-defense, but repeated
victories in war combined with fear of class struggle at home developed a
militaristic culture baked in to political, economic, and ideological
institutions. The short-term consequence of the Restoration was remarkable
economic development aided by a militarism that was ultimately to
undermine it. Foreign wars came thick and fast. Abundant documentation
enables a nuanced view of war and peace since the Meiji Restoration. Had I
equally rich data on earlier societies, I might have found comparable
factional struggles, contingencies, and ambiguities of outcome. The annalists
had told patterned evolutionary tales. Abundance of data leads to a less
coherent narrative.
The Japanese military was suited to direct imperialism in the
neighborhood until it began overreaching in China. There was support for
“social imperialism,” one of the few cases where popular pressures in wars
were substantial, though conservative oligarchs manipulated peasant support
for imperialism. Peasants provided soldiers and most colonial settlers,
boosting popular imperialism. The organized working class weakened under
repressive labor laws, and conservatives and bureaucrats intimidated middle-
class liberals into accepting authoritarian government. Junior army officers
were violent at home and abroad. The Meiji Constitution mattered, as
factions struggled over access to the emperor, which was vital for approving
policy. Victories abroad increased the prestige of the armed forces in Tokyo
and at court.
But the rise of the Japanese empire was not predetermined. There were
five Rubicons that might not have been crossed: against China in 1895, in
Korea in 1910, in Manchuria in 1931, in China in 1937, and at Pearl Harbor
in 1941. The Great Depression that began in 1929 added an external shock,
which aided the drift rightward. Earlier aggressions had been cautious; and
the 1931 aggression in Manchuria was launched independently by mid-level
military officers, which reflected changes in the balance of power within
Japan that freed the military from civilian control. The 1930s baked-in
militarism led to the next aggression, the full-scale invasion of China, which
was again precipitated by soldiers constraining facts on the ground. By this
point the Japanese military was more than a rational instrument calibrated to
security fears at home and profit abroad. It was the dominant power actor,
with its own definition of national interest and honor and with its own
savage martial values. The final aggression at Pearl Harbor was suicidal. The
deadliest war in human history was governed on the Axis side more by
militarist ideology and emotions than by calm economic-military
calculation. Belief in the superiority of offense over defense and seizing
windows of opportunity became baked in to military strategy and prevented
realistic assessment of the odds of victory. Realism was now irrelevant to
any explanation of Japanese militarism.
This perverted the Meiji Restoration, a “strong military” dominating a
“wealthy country.” This had long-term structural causes, but equally
important were fluctuating balances of power abroad and at home, the
accidents of war, and military provocations. Had power struggles in Tokyo
had a different outcome, a different “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity
Sphere” might have appeared, centered on a Japanese indirect and informal
empire dominating East and Southeast Asia, but with an increasing role for a
reviving China. But within Japan itself had arisen a logic of intensifying
militarism, until the moment in 1941 when Japan catastrophically
overreached.
After atomic bombs and unconditional surrender came another abrupt
shift. Under American direction, Japan abandoned war and embraced
democracy, albeit one where elections produced one-party rule for four
decades. Japanese ideologies shifted substantially in the absence of
militarism and a much-reduced emperor worship, developing a capitalism
with only limited state coordination of enterprises. Although some virulent
nationalism remains and prevents the apologies and reparations that postwar
Germany has offered, most Japanese seem content to be citizens of a
peaceful economic giant. Japan has increased its military spending every
year for the last nine years while keeping it just below the 1 percent of GDP
agreed to in 1945. (In 2023 it is projected to slightly exceed 1 percent for the
first time.) But the size of that GDP made this rather pacific power the
world’s ninth-highest military spender in 2019. More Chinese aggressive
moves may determine much more.
The history of Japan reveals the importance of domestic power
struggles in decisions of war and peace. It also shows that those who
continue to live by the sword will eventually die by it, undone by
overconfidence. Conversely, it also shows the pacific effect that devastating
victory around 1600 and devastating defeat in 1945 both brought.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

A Thousand Years of Europe

EUROPE PROVIDES THE MOST richly documented history of warfare. From the
tenth century until 1945, Europe may have had more interstate wars than any
other region of the world, although this impression could result from more
available data. These seem to raise four questions.

1. Why was war so important in Europe?

2. What was the role of war in the “vanishing kingdoms” of
Europe?
3. What were the causes of war in different phases of European
history?
4. How rational were decisions to make war rather than peace?

The Importance of Origins

As in China and Rome, origins were crucial. Europe experienced incoming
waves of barbarians before and after the fifth-century collapse of the
Western Roman Empire. They were not distinct ethnic groups, despite the
labels “Visigoths,” “Huns,” “Saxons,” and so on that are always pinned on
them, but loose groupings of tribes and warriors collecting thousands of
followers as they moved; these polities were “forged on the march.”1 If
raiding was successful, it turned into conquest. By war or threat of war, they
forced homage on elites and unfree labor on peasants. Desiring
“civilization,” they Christianized and intermarried with the post-Roman
population.
 The first successor states in Western Europe were large ex-barbarian
kingdoms built on Roman foundations. Under pressure from outside and
from their fissiparous succession practices, they fragmented, their taxation
powers weakened, and living standards fell.2 Goths, Franks, Burgundians,
and others had come as conquerors but then had to defend against
newcomers. War making was bred into post-Roman Europe. The Franks
came the closest to reestablishing political unity within Europe, but the
division of their realm into three parts undercut this. The ecology of Europe,
with its forests, its stone castles and its lack of pastoral plains, protected it
(except for Hungary) from barbarian horsemen, but in the seventh century
the Muslims invaded and founded enduring states. In Spain they destroyed
the Visigoth kingdoms and drove the Christian lords into the north. Later,
Muslims conquered the Balkans, from where they kept up the pressure until
the seventeenth century. So the defense of Christendom added to continental
militarism.
Across Christian Europe fragmentation and defense against raiders led
in the tenth and eleventh centuries to the devolution of states to local castles
and bands of armored knights, who commanded retinues of peasant infantry
and archers, amid a rather Hobbesian anarchy. Brigandage abounded. In
reaction, peace movements, known as the Truce or the Peace of God, were
led by clerics asking that lords not kill clerics, women, children, the elderly,
and sometimes anyone unarmed. Numerous lords did so pledge, and had
they acted on their words, this would have been a formidable peace
movement. The solution to Hobbesian anarchy eventually came through the
creation of larger states operating a Mafia-like feudalism. In the meantime,
kingship was subordinate to lordship. “States” had very few functions and
lacked taxation powers. To make war, kings with extensive personal estates
could finance mercenaries, but most relied, especially for cavalry, on the
retinues of their vassals. These men held their estates in return for providing
the king with these retinues. Thus, kings had an incentive to make war in
order to acquire new lands, which they could distribute as rewards to
existing and new vassals, who in return would provide more soldiers. This
circular process made war more likely, though it was waged by soldiers
owing loyalty more to the lords than to the king. So highly decentralized
military power dominated Europe.3
Peasants placed themselves under the protection of a lord. If they did
not, they would probably suffer the violence of that or another lord. Some
cities survived in leagues of city-states armed with militias and mercenaries.
Elsewhere, the castle, the domain, vassalage, the knightly retinue, the servile
conditions imposed on the peasants were the institutions of what is generally
called feudalism. War and unfree status were the price the people paid for
order. Thus, Jeremy Black says, “War appeared natural, necessary and
inevitable, part of the divine order, the scourge of divine wrath and the
counterpart of violence in the elements, as well as the correct, honourable
and right way to adjudicate disputes.”4
Militarism and the Church jointly infused culture. Transnational
chivalric ideals coupled heroic prowess in violence with honor, piety,
consciousness of the duties of rank, courtoisie toward ladies, and protection
of the poor. This was only for those with noble blood, that is, of aristocratic
descent and possessing a supposed nobility of spirit.5 Courtly literature
narrated the chivalrous behavior of the knights of King Arthur, the heroes of
Valhalla, the paladins of Charlemagne—although recent warriors figured
too, such as Otto the Great, Richard the Lionheart, Bertrand du Guesclin,
and El Cid. The culture was more religious than that of medieval China or
Japan. Chivalric ideology was not transcendent, since all could distinguish
between romantic myths and the reality of war, but it played an immanent
role, strengthening ruling-class solidarity. War was also infused by aesthetic
elements, at least among the upper classes. Knights were beautifully
caparisoned, their comportment dignified and gentlemanly. Clerics often
criticized the actual behavior of knights, and the literature was normative:
knights should do these things, but often they did not, a contradiction
embodied by Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur, who wrote
his masterpiece during prison terms for violence, extortion, and rape. Malory
depicts Galahad as the only knight who can attain the Holy Grail since he is
pure, completely without sin, unlike Gawain, Lancelot, and Perceval, who
fail to achieve this unattainable model of perfection, despite conduct that is
chivalrous. Pure virtue was not for this world.
There were three supposed sources of order: the Church, princes, and
knights. The clergy believed they embodied religion, learning, and peace.
The prince claimed a divine duty to establish order and justice, defend the
realm, and conquer enemies. But this also required knight enforcers who
were “fiercely proud of their independence, exulting in their right to violence
and in their skill at exercising it.”6 Such institutionalized ideology gave
young men, especially younger sons and bastards, incentive to join in
aggressive ventures, driven by greed for land, wealth, and serfs, and by the
quest for honor and glory. As in Rome, successful militarism in each
generation baked it in for the next one. In any case, rulers lived off surplus
extorted by force by their retinues from the peasantry.

Medieval Warfare
By the late eleventh century, the former lands of the Frankish Empire
contained polities of varying types, around which lay a periphery of weaker
polities, tribes, and self-governing communities. Many were defined as terra
nullius, nobody’s land, ripe for the claiming. Rulers of the core could
conquer, enserf, and colonize their peripheries, offering land and booty to
accompanying knights, farmers, artisans, and traders, circumstances
resembling the early history of China, except that here priests were also
winning wealth and souls, providing some normative solidarity through
Western Christendom. Younger sons and bastards lacking inheritance were
overrepresented. The promise of land with serfs in a newly settled area that
lacked rigid status differences was a strong material inducement.
After Rome’s collapse, the four sources of social power became
uncoupled. Political power lay with princes, but there was not much of it.
They lost much military power to their vassals. Ideological power was
monopolized by the Church, and economic power was decentralized, shared
among feudal lords and townsfolk. By 1000, Western Europe was what I
termed in volume 1 of The Sources of Social Power “a multiple acephalous
federation” composed of these complex interactive networks.
Over the next three and a half centuries, says Robert Bartlett, the core
swallowed up the periphery, the sharks swallowed the minnows, feudal
states with noncontiguous domains either consolidated them into one
territorial domain or were swallowed up, and the victors developed more
central administrations.7 The Norman conquest of England is an obvious
example. After victory, Normans were installed in lordships across the
country, reinforced by the judicial and military power of the Norman king.
Turchin detects several bands of core states stretching across Europe, each
swallowing its periphery.8 Western Europe was not yet composed simply of
major states, as it would later be. For the warriors of the core, war was
profitable and rational, but it did not usually need much calculation, for the
odds were stacked in their favor. Rulers were also glad to get rid of wellborn,
armed young men without inheritance prospects causing trouble at home:
war abroad to achieve peace at home was a low-risk deflection strategy.
Armed men could be dispatched to conquer new lands, just as accompanying
traders could acquire new markets and priests new souls, while farmers and
artisans sought upward mobility impossible back home. Iberians were an
exception since the Muslim enemy was their equal, especially when it was
reinforced from North Africa. The Church provided legitimacy that war was
moral. There was a risk of death, but the odds were favorable against less
well-organized foes, and consolations were offered in the afterlife. Yet the
primary motive for expansion was economic but feudal: wellborn men
lacking inheritance sought land and its peasants, from whom they could
extract rent and labor. Honor derived from achieving this. In this quasi-
colonial expansion, some settler groups became autonomous, founding new
states on the periphery, as Visigoths and Franks did in Spain, as Normans did
in many places, and as knightly orders did on Europe’s eastern borders.
Crusaders pillaged Constantinople and colonized the Holy Land, but after
ruling and squabbling there for almost a hundred years, they foundered
against Islamic rulers who enjoyed the logistical advantages of proximity.
The Holy Roman Empire was distinctive, a federation of mainly
Germanic but also some Italian rulers who elected their emperor. A Diet of
rulers was intermittently called to address crises, and standing tribunals
heard legal disputes between members. The empire uniquely saw a persistent
three-way power struggle among the emperor, the individual rulers, and the
popes, whose powers were threatened by the emperor’s Italian domains. This
three-way struggle produced much switching of sides and balancing to
prevent any one of them from becoming dominant—highly calculative
sequences of wars that resulted in a much higher survival rate of small states.
Though shaken by religious wars in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, this federation of many states survived until the nineteenth-century
absorption by Prussia of Germany, and by Piedmont of Italy. But elsewhere
in Europe, state swallowing had been a more cumulative process through the
centuries.
Monarchs were anointed by God but benefited from earthly fear of the
disorder that followed the perennial weakness of monarchy: disputed
successions. Since ruling families intermarried across Europe, claimants
might include foreign princes, and civil wars were internationalized. When
Henry I of England died without a male heir, several rivals claimed the
throne. His nephew Stephen of Blois quickly crossed the Channel and seized
the throne, reigning as king 1135–54. But a civil war, “when Christ and all
his saints slept,” lasted through most of his reign, fought against the Empress
Matilda, who as the daughter of Henry I had a more direct claim to the
throne but was a woman (in the highly patriarchal society of Europe). The
war finally ended in compromise. Stephen recognized Matilda’s son as his
successor, Henry II, the first Angevin monarch, a strong, even tyrannical
ruler. The barons muttered but did not rebel, fearing more civil war. But the
third Angevin, John, went too far, importing mercenaries to help him
dominate his barons. The barons forced him to sign the Magna Carta in
1215. There were now upper-class constitutional restraints on English
monarchs.
Western Europe was a single ideological community—Christendom,
whose infrastructures penetrated every town, every village. War was more
normatively regulated than in feudal periods of Chinese and Japanese
history, and monarchs were normally secure in their beds, there being few
palace bloodbaths. The Church legitimized monarchs, discouraging
insurrections. Dissidents attacked the monarch’s “evil counsellors,” not the
monarch, while peasant rebels naively believed that the monarch would
listen to their grievances. The papacy also legitimized the power of prince-
bishoprics and monastic orders. European monarchs were restrained both by
the transnational power of the Church and by the contractual element in lord-
vassal relations. Royal armies were composed of the largely autonomous
retinues of vassals, and princes could not be confident that if they declared
war, lords would turn out to fight. Many princes and vassals held
noncontiguous lands acquired through marriages and inheritances.
Sovereignty was often ambiguous, and in conflicts vassals might choose
sides. Some did so for pragmatism—bribery or calculations as to who would
win—others for dynastic connections. Before the sixteenth century there
were virtually no ideological wars within Christendom, and even in crusades
against Muslims, religious zeal was often subordinated to greed. Within
Christendom wars were not usually fought to the death of many aristocrats.
Defeat led more often to ransoms and homage.
The period 1400 to almost 1600 was dominated by dynastic wars
between rival princely families.9 Every child born to every prince anywhere
in Europe might change the balance of power, and every marriage was a
diplomatic triumph or disaster, observes Howard.10 Gains were twofold:
acquiring new territory and its resources and taxes, and inducing rulers to do
homage. Twice English negotiators in peace talks with the French said they
would agree to let the French king control disputed lands if he would do
homage for these lands to the English king. Twice the French refused the
deal—in this case honor outranked material acquisition. Matters of honor
were the most frequently stated casus belli. Disputed succession caused or
was the pretext for most wars, as was the case in most monarchical systems
of rule (as in China and Japan). If a prince or a baron died without a direct
male heir, or if a woman, a boy, or a seeming weakling inherited, this gave
opportunity to kin-related lords, often living abroad, to enlarge estates,
prestige, and power. Monarchical succession issues led to both civil and
interstate wars, a cause of war rare in modern republics and constitutional
monarchies. Such wars were risky ventures, but succession crises were
opportunities for huge gains of lands and serfs that might not occur again
during a lord’s lifetime—a true window of opportunity, as Realists say,
though the opportunity was high-risk—and lords were trained to accept the
risks of war. In any case, claimants might first try litigation and bribery
through arbitration by a higher authority, such as the papacy. War was only
the continuation of litigation by violent means.
An example of litigation was the success of Philip the Good (not good
in the modern sense, since he had at least eighteen mistresses). This Duke of
Burgundy paid homage to the French king yet became his near-equal in
power through acquisition of territories by wars, purchases, marriage
alliances, and victory in a disputed succession in the 1420s against his
cousin Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault. Her disadvantage was that as a
woman without an heir, she could not herself rule her estates in Flanders, nor
could she find a powerful enough man to become her husband and
“protector.” She had married and then separated from the Duke of Brabant,
considered too weak and too close a relative, so this marriage had needed a
papal dispensation. This had still not been granted when she married the
powerful Duke of Gloucester, brother of Henry V of England. This forced
her to change tack and petition the pope to annul her previous marriage.
Pressured by Philip and her rivals in Flanders, the pope refused, which
annulled her marriage to Gloucester. War was avoided, since without the
English she could not muster enough military support. Instead, a peace
agreement was imposed, stating that Philip’s claim was strong enough to
grant him administration of her estates while she lived, and inherit them
when she died. Poor Jacqueline, ground down by patriarchal norms of
succession.
Through the late Middle Ages the major monarchies of western and
northern Europe became more statelike. Then came a “state-swallowing”
phase whereby bigger states swallowed up the smaller. Norman Davies has
studied thirty vanished kingdoms in Europe.11 His cases are too diverse and
sprawl over many centuries, from Visigoth Toulouse to the Soviet Union, but
he distinguishes five ways in which they disappeared: implosion (only the
USSR), conquest (ten to twelve of his cases), dynastic merger (three to four
cases), liquidation, which is difficult to separate from conquest (three cases),
and “infant mortality,” a very short-lived state unable to establish roots (one
case). Conquest and liquidation dominated. War was the main cause of state
mortality.
He identifies no fewer than twelve successive Burgundian realms,
vanishing and resurrected with differing territories between 410 and 1477.
Burgundies were either destroyed in battle, partitioned by more powerful
neighbors, or subordinated to the kingdom of France or the German Empire
by marriage alliances or threats of war. There was often a tipping point when
vassals would desert the duchy and declare allegiance to someone else. Yet
some Burgundian domains continued to exist as part of other realms or as
small independent rump states. Resurrection occurred through the temporary
weakness of the neighbors or shrewd or fortunate marriages and vassals
switching allegiances. The greatest Duke of Burgundy was the last one,
Charles le Téméraire, usually translated as “the Bold,” but “the Reckless”
would be the correct translation. He began expansion by using the wealth of
his core domains to buy up territories, but then he switched to wars to
consolidate his dispersed domains into a single territorial state. But he
became reckless, alienating all his neighbors at once. He lost a series of
battles against them and was killed in battle in 1477, leaving only his
daughter as heir. The king of France and the emperor offered their sons in
marriage; the emperor won and swallowed up Burgundy. Burgundy
continues to be famous today despite having no administrative status within
France because of the swallowing of its fine wines. In earlier centuries,
swallowing had usually been more violent.
The United Kingdom has involved a sequence of stages not yet
finished. The Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England in
the eleventh century and then, as Anglo-Norman feudal lords, they
conquered much of Wales and Ireland, eliminating some chiefdoms and
persuading others that only English rule could guarantee their protection.
The English built strong castles to entrench their rule, but it took until the
reign of Henry VIII to establish English-language administration and law
over Wales. More fractious resistance in Ireland led to civil wars. Then the
sixteenth-century schism of Christendom (discussed below) spread to the
British Isles. In the 1640s on the Irish battlefields of the Civil War, the
Catholics and Royalists were destroyed by Cromwell, which led to a
“Protestant Ascendancy” over the largely Catholic Irish in the following
century. But since Catholicism was deeply implanted in the Irish population,
many Irish lords were offering only token allegiance to the Protestant
Ascendancy. The island continued to simmer.
The independent Scottish kingdom, assisted by French and Spanish
monarchs, survived repeated wars with England but became divided by its
own sixteenth-century religious schism. Yet when Elizabeth I of En-gland
died childless, the Scottish Protestant King James VI was her most direct
successor. English political leaders had anticipated this, and, fearful of a
disputed succession, had already negotiated his succession as James I, the
first of the Stuart dynasty. Fighting in Ulster (Northern Ireland) culminated
in the “Flight of the (Catholic) Earls” abroad. English domination of Ireland
and Scotland strengthened with the crushing of three Catholic Jacobite
uprisings, in Ireland in 1689 and in Scotland in 1715 and 1745. The appeal
of the Jacobites was limited by their Catholic leanings, while the Scottish
clan lords, like feudal lords, could choose their allegiance. Many chose the
likely winners, the English, like my mother’s clan, the Campbells.
The “Plantation of Ulster” established settlements of English and
Scottish Protestants, which forced Catholics off their lands. An Irish uprising
with French assistance was crushed in 1798, followed in 1800 by the Acts of
Union, which created a single United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Its empire came to rule a quarter of the world, with considerable input from
Scots. The Irish potato famine further lessened the popularity of British rule
in Catholic Ireland. After a period of peaceful Anglo-Irish struggle over
home rule within the Westminster Parliament, another Irish rising, in 1916,
was repressed, but subsequent guerilla warfare forced the British
government to grant Irish independence, except for majority Protestant
Ulster in the north, which remained in the retitled state, the Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This state remains today, but rival
national sentiments, divisions over union with Europe, and the folly of
English leaders—all more peaceful causes—have generated a Disunited
Kingdom, including the looming possibility of Scottish independence. War,
dynastic accidents, and the choices of vassals had predominated earlier,
before they were trumped by religious divisions.
In Europe, as elsewhere, the winners of the wars wrote history, whereas
the losers were usually absorbed into the winners’ culture. Europeans’
collective memory of war in history was glorious and profitable, and their
institutionalized culture was bellicose, so they kept waging war—selectively
recorded path dependence. In the east, the winners were the Romanov,
Habsburg, and Ottoman monarchs. In the north, Danish and Swedish
expansion brought them successive regional dominance. Peoples were
swallowed up by the Spanish, French, and English empires, as Catalans,
Provençals, and the Welsh could attest. The swallowers were states, not the
earlier bands of lords.

Phase One: The Hundred Years’ War

There were three main phases of war in Europe. The first feudal phase is
exemplified by the Hundred Years’ War, fought between English and French
rulers. France was divided into many baronial domains and cities that
pledged allegiance to either or both kings, since the English dynasties had
originated in France and still had many French domains. During the reign of
the incompetent Edward II, England lost most of its possessions in France.
His son Edward III determined to strengthen his position at home by fighting
successful wars. He first fought a successful war against the Scots. Then
when Charles IV of France died in 1328 without a direct male heir, both
Edward and Philip, Count of Valois, claimed the throne. Philip had the
advantage of being in Paris and had himself crowned king there, as Philip
VI. Relations worsened and war was declared in 1337. Edward invaded in
1340, focusing first on securing the loyalty of Low Country lords. Both sides
claimed a legal dynastic claim to the Crown and expected that lords in
France would help them. The loyalty of their soldiers was dynastic, to their
lord or prince, not their country. Much of the population was indifferent
about which dynasty ruled them. When the church bells rang for victories,
the crowds cheered, but when the taxes to pay for war were raised or when
their sons were taken for soldiers, they preferred peace. But the people had
negligible power in war-and-peace decisions. Parliaments representing the
upper classes had just a little.
Campaigns were intermittent over a century. In the Crécy campaign of
1346 Edward had about 15,000 professional soldiers, the French had a more
mixed force of mercenaries and vassals, perhaps 40,000 strong. At Poitiers
in 1356 around 6,000 English confronted about 11,000 French. As a result of
these battles, Edward was able to recover the domains in France that his
father had lost in return for renouncing his claim to the French Crown. At
Agincourt in 1415, 6,000 to 9,000 English under Henry V confronted 12,000
to 30,000 French. All three battles produced asymmetric casualties. The
English won all three, thanks partly to their Welsh longbow archers, who
could fire more rapidly than French crossbowmen, but also partly to well-
chosen defensive positions. The English suffered fewer than 1,000 killed at
Agincourt, and probably only a few hundred at Crécy and Poitiers. The
French lost several thousand each time. At Agincourt 1,600 French knights
and perhaps 8,000 infantry and archers lost their lives. At the final battle of
the war at Castillon in 1453, both armies were under 10,000, and the
casualties were again asymmetric, but this time they favored the French, as
they had also at the preceding small battles of Orléans, Patay, and Formigny.
In all seven battles most casualties came from the killing of troops beginning
to flee, in what Randall Collins has called “forward panic.”
Yet battles were expensive and monarchs had limited resources. In
theory war would bring land and serfs, and so more taxes for the monarch,
but that depended on victory. In the meantime, one might borrow from
bankers. Debts to them were often defaulted, but this lowered the chance of
borrowing again. Vassals might rally around their king’s call to arms, but if
war dragged on, opposition at court and parliaments appeared, and
sometimes popular discontent. Struggles between war and peace factions
began, crosscut by struggles between “ins” and “outs” at court. For the
English Lords Appellant, exclusion from power was primary, and their
favoring war was secondary, in their attack on Richard II’s “false
counsellors.” In contrast, the French Marmouset faction was more focused
on the war, consistently advising Charles V to refuse battle and let the
English exhaust themselves in marches and skirmishes. The consequence
was cyclical warfare. A campaign would be ended by financial stress. A
period of peace would ensue, during which resources were built up again.
Then might come another campaign.
 Most campaigns consisted not of large battles but of sieges, ambushes,
and chevauchées, mounted raids, by small forces. The largest was the
campaign leading up to Crécy, in which the whole English army spread out
while marching across the French countryside, stealing whatever they could
carry, burning what they could not, raping and killing all who objected,
devastating a swathe of territory forty-three kilometers wide over a length of
a thousand kilometers. Such atrocities contrasted starkly with chivalric
ideals. The English wanted to join battle, the French wanted to avoid it. But
the chevauchée, which Edward had seen Scots raiders practice in the north
of England, was designed to show that the French king could not protect his
subjects and so did not deserve to rule. Eventually, this forced him into battle
on ground that Edward had chosen. Edward won, as did the defense in
almost all the pitched battles of the Hundred Years’ War.12
Chevauchées were useful when fighting abroad. The French king could
with some difficulty finance his army by taxation and through his vassals.
The English, like all medieval armies fighting abroad, had to live off the
land. As always, those suffering most were local civilians. The infrequency
of campaigns also led to bands of discharged mercenaries ravaging areas of
France, with names such as Smashing Bars and Arm of Iron, extorting,
raping, and murdering. Between 1356 and 1364 over 450 localities were
forced to pay ransoms to them. There were two main motives, greed for
wealth and sex, and the desire to inflict such terror on the inhabitants that
they and their supposed protectors would submit. In this war both the
English and French complained about the taxes required, but the French also
suffered whole regions of pillage, rape, famine, and consequent disease.
Neither people benefited from the war. It was not rational in terms of their
ends. Indeed, few benefited other than finally the French king and his
clients. Their state got control of the territory we know as France.
Wars were interspersed with treaties, typically stipulating that one side
should control a disputed region in exchange for an indemnity paid to the
other. States were cash-strapped, barons and cities enjoyed autonomy, and
defections occurred as vassals tried to judge which side would win.
Succession crises, civil wars, peasant revolts, campaigns against the Scots
and Flemish, and the Black Death intermittently disrupted the balance of
power. Joan of Arc gave a brief ideological boost to the French armies. The
fortunes of war swung around, but the French had the advantage of fighting
on home turf while the defection of the Duke of Burgundy from the English
cause in 1435 led to the final victories of the French Crown. Six hundred
years to the day after the victory at Agincourt, English nationalism was
rekindled with exhibitions and commemorative services in churches around
the country. No one dared tell them that the French had won the war.
This war lasted so long that it saw two military revolutions. It began as
a war of feudal levies led by mounted knights and then shifted toward
infantry-archer commoners, in effect professional soldiers, signing on
repeatedly for campaigns. War became deadlier as fewer gentlemanly rules
prevailed. Since infantry and archers were cheaper than knights, they could
be recruited and expended in larger numbers. The expense of war brought a
little more power to the tax-authorizing parliaments and estate assemblies.
Finally, the war saw the start of a second revolution, when cannons operated
by specialists were introduced, which proved decisive for the first time at
Castillon. As cannon gun barrels got longer and powder improved, there was
more state investment in weaponry and a greater ability to knock down the
castles of the barons, and major states became consolidated.13 The war
started with princes fighting in battle. By its end they had retreated to the
rear or remained in their courts.
Decisions for war and peace were made by the prince, usually in
consultation with his principal barons. When taxes had to be raised,
assemblies representing the upper classes might be consulted, though these
were often manipulated by bribery and threats. The prestige and political
skills of the prince or his principal counselors were important. Howard says
European decisions for war reveal “a superabundance of analytical
rationality” since humans are “reasoning” creatures.14 He offers no evidence
for this claim. Luard lists 229 wars during the period 1400–1559 and says he
never found any serious attempt to calculate in advance the chances of
victory.15 The combatants had clear goals, but they were careless about how
they achieved them, for to fight was honorable if in a just cause, whatever
the outcome. Righteousness outweighed prudence. War was what you
declared when your honor had been affronted or when you saw an
opportunity to claim long-nurtured rights. Either might bring economic
rewards. The prince hoped he could raise the necessary monies and men, and
then “in hope and in faith” he sent his forces into battle with however many
turned up. Luard probably exaggerated, but the means of war were not often
carefully calculated. Overoptimism was widespread, as we shall see in most
of my cases.
 War was in theory the way to wealth, but at the same time it was a
source of honor and glory, requiring courage. As in the case of Rome, it is
difficult to separate greed and glory. John Lynn comments that honor
pervaded war, interpersonal disputes, and tournaments alike: “Honor is best
interpreted as reputation, and for the knight this meant appearing as an
example of the warrior virtues. Aristocratic men of medieval and early
modern Europe valued their honor so highly that they gambled their lives to
maintain it even in what would seem to modern eyes as frivolous matters.
Men could fight for no other reason than to avoid any suspicion of
cowardice. In fact, a sense of masculine honor led to the common, almost
casual nature of violence.”16 So emotions were less idiosyncratic and
personal, more the product of monarchical and aristocratic culture.
Calculation was difficult since it was unclear how many men a prince
could turn out. If 5,000, he went with them; if 10,000, he could be more
ambitious. The cost of mercenaries could be calculated, but hiring them
might involve powers of taxation that only some rulers had. Rulers took care
to assemble specialists—miners, carpenters, blacksmiths, cooks, and so on.
Once total numbers were known, the logistics of assembling and
transporting them to the campaigning zone (which for the English involved
hiring ships and their crews), supplying them, and provisioning and stabling
thousands of horses were all carefully planned. Getting the soldiers into the
campaign and toward battle was the zone of calculation, the phase of
domination by the quartermasters, as was the case in all the wars I have
chronicled.
Once in battle, calculation became difficult again. The absence of much
drilling meant that orders were not easily changed and tactics could not be
flexible. Outcomes were attributed by chroniclers to commanders’ tactical
mistakes, ill-disciplined knightly jostling for a chance at glory, or interacting
with unexpected battlefield ecology. This was a war of movement in which
commanders had difficulty controlling their lieutenants and were often
unsure of the enemy’s position or the local ecology. Battles turned on failing
to spot sharpened stakes concealed in ditches, or cavalry getting bogged
down in mud or marsh, or enemy forces hidden by a wood or a hill emerging
suddenly to attack flanks or rear. Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt, Baugé, Patay,
and Castillon were all examples of these contingencies. Defense was usually
better than attack if undertaken in well-chosen positions. The combination of
honor, overconfidence, impetuosity, lack of drilling, difficulties of
maneuvering troops in battle, frequent mistakes, variable élan, and
unexpected terrains limits rational choice theory’s credibility as an
explanation of the conduct of medieval war.
Warfare was not all Hobbesian anarchy, however. It was partially
regulated through kin networks and shared Christian norms, even if these
were not always respected. Anyone could aggress but only if he had legal
cause.17 There were norms of conduct in war. In 1513 the Scottish king
James IV gave the English a month’s notice of his invasion of northern
England, in accordance with his understanding of the rules of war. We see
this as irrational, for it gave the northern English lords time to assemble their
forces, at a time when Henry VIII and his army were away fighting in
France. Gentlemanly behavior proved James’s undoing. At Flodden in
Northumberland he was killed and his army routed, supposedly with 10,000
dead.
Norms concerned campaigns, battles, ransoms, prisoners and civilians,
truces, and the division of spoils. These all appeared in Henry V’s 1415
Agincourt campaign. Henry, like Edward III before him, had decided on war
for basically political reasons. His father, Henry IV, had uneasily weathered
numerous rebellions, and he determined to secure a reputation for strength
with victories abroad. The English landed unopposed in France despite the
invasion’s being well advertised, for the French king Charles VI could not
finance a large force to sit idly by waiting for the English to show
themselves somewhere along the coast. The first action was the siege of the
port city of Harfleur, necessary for resupplies from England. Eventually the
city surrendered and opened its gates to the English, but the terms of
surrender included the proviso that if the French army arrived to lift the
siege in two weeks, the surrender would be rescinded. Henry agreed—such
agreements were common in sieges. The city gates stayed open, and Henry
could have marched in. But he waited, honoring the agreement. The French
did not come, and so he took the city and then marched north.
In the weeks following, a larger French army shadowed Henry’s
soldiers as they advanced northeastward, ignoring opportunities to ambush
the straggling English columns. The two armies were in implicit agreement
to wait until they both showed readiness by drawing up in battle formation,
which the English did near Agincourt and the French accepted. The
legitimacy of one’s cause was demonstrated by proper military comportment
—for this was a struggle over who was the rightful king of France, divinely
anointed. That involved agreeing implicitly to the rules of war.18 The
English won the battle and captured many prisoners. Before the campaign
had begun, English ransom norms had been announced. Henry declared he
would take a third of the receipts. Captains were entitled to a share of the
ransoms gained by their own troops, and prisoners of high rank would be
handed over to the Crown in return for compensation being paid to the
captor. Aristocratic honor meant that knights should choose ransoming over
killing each other. Nor should they kill prisoners.
Yet at Agincourt, on Henry’s direct command, the English massacred
their prisoners after the first French attack failed. This was in keeping with
his ruthless character (Shakespeare’s portrayal of him is Tudor propaganda),
but the English claimed this action was the result of their seeing a second
attack being prepared. Outnumbered, they did not want to spare soldiers for
guard duty, or risk losing control of the prisoners. The French did marshal
their troops for a second attack, then hesitated and fled. Contemporary
chroniclers seem not to have condemned Henry. There were norms and
agreed-on exceptions. Both sides spared for ransom the wellborn and
wealthy. At least 320 French were ransomed at Agincourt, with the
wealthiest removed to England. When the French king John II was captured
at Poitiers, his ransom equaled the English king’s taxes for three years. That
the French paid it, rather than choose another king (as the Chinese probably
would have done), indicated the legitimacy of monarchy. Defeated
aristocrats were rarely deprived of their estates except in civil wars. Some
did get killed, but not many, so when the major states had swallowed the
minnows and turned to fighting each other, it was still not very dangerous
for the lords.
It was different for expendable foot soldiers and the poorest knights—
or nonnoble women, who were often raped. War for the lower ranks was
risky but an acceptable alternative to dire poverty. By the time of Agincourt,
the army was waged, although only for the duration of the campaign. Most
then reenlisted for the next one. It was a summer job, the campaigning
season when armies could live off the countryside. The wage for an archer
was sixpence per day, a living wage, even if only half as much as the lowest
men-at-arms. Above that, payment varied by aristocratic rank. Loot offered
more profit. The Duke of Gloucester opposed a peace treaty with France,
declaring “the poor knights, squires and archers of England, who are idle and
sustain their estate by war, are inclined to war.”19 Looting was not
dishonorable and was a motive for launching wars into others’ lands.
European armies were minimally drilled—unlike Chinese armies since
about 400 BCE. Crossbows and artillery could not manage repetitive volleys
of fire; the first line would fire and retreat to reload behind the second line,
who would step forward and fire, and so on. In the seventeenth century most
European armies finally did adopt volley fire and were highly drilled. They
then overtook the Chinese in cannon technology. Before the seventeenth
century, had they ever met, Chinese armies would have destroyed the
Europeans, and not only because they had much bigger numbers.20 European
logistical organization was minimal. The soldiers lived off the countryside or
from their pay, buying food from merchants who followed the armies.
Supplying large armies was difficult.
Civilians were rarely in principle considered the enemy. Peasants were
looted and maltreated because that was the lot of peasants, but merchants of
countries at war traded with each other, and passports were issued to travel
to the enemy’s country. Massacres were inflicted on heretics and on stormed
resisting towns, as was traditional. Wars were settled by treaties, which were
sometimes kept, sometimes not. When the En-glish commander in France,
the renowned John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, was captured at Patay, his
release required that he never wear armor in battle again. His honor
compelled him to comply. At Castillon, then in his sixties, he charged at
French cannons. His horse was hit by a cannonball, and he fell to the ground,
where he was finished off by a foot soldier with an axe to his bare head.21
This was a continent of war and gentlemen’s agreements.

Phase Two: Religious Warfare

Violence was ratcheted upward in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries by two changes, one in ideological power, the other in economic-
ecological power. Christendom had been the guarantor of order in Europe,
although perennially riven by the contradiction between Christ’s message of
salvation for all and the worldly power, wealth, and corruption of the Church
itself. Heresies had appeared throughout medieval times and been savagely
repressed. Now perceptions of Church corruption grew. Luther’s nailing of
his Ninety-five Theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517 was
then the catalyst for schism, since it became linked to broader underlying
forces. Simplifying complexity for the sake of brevity, there was an elective
affinity, as Max Weber argued, between Protestantism and emerging
merchant capitalism, but there was also a geopolitical affinity between
Protestantism and the princes of northwestern Europe.22 These were
Protestantism’s two main constituencies of support.
For over 150 years after Luther’s defiance, Europe saw major conflict
between the Catholic Church and Protestant sects, all possessing rival
transcendent ideologies claiming divinely inspired truth and seeking to
impose it on others. Religious toleration was rare in Europe (unlike the
Mongol Empires). Jews survived, but at risk of pogroms. Yet most states
came to contain both Protestants and Catholics. In states whose rulers
adhered to Catholicism, thousands of Protestant heretics were killed after
torture on the rack or public burning at the stake. Burning could produce up
to an hour of screaming, depending on the quality of the wood, as the victim
died in front of a baying crowd. Protestant rulers also burned Catholics, and
both burned single women denounced as witches. ISIS executions today pale
by comparison. Decapitation was then the swiftest and kindest form of
execution, reserved for aristocrats or those to whom the king granted
leniency.
Doctrinal conformity mattered. Whether you lived or died might
depend on whether you would affirm that in the Eucharist the body of Christ
was actually present or merely symbolized, or whether only the priest or the
whole congregation could fully participate in the ceremony, or whether the
Eucharist should be celebrated at all. Though the people were largely
ignorant of such abstruse doctrines, they might be attached to traditional
rituals or a Marian cult or, on the Protestant side, to simplicity of worship or
hatred of clerical corruption. A Protestant intelligentsia consisting of what
Owen calls a transnational ideological network (TIN) published pamphlets
and translated the Bible into national vernaculars that were smuggled
abroad.23 This was a version of the “two-step” theory of communication,
passed in this case from the literate to the illiterate. The literate, defined as
those who could sign their names in parish registers, were overwhelmingly
male. Male literacy rates in En-gland and Germany doubled in the first half
of the sixteenth century, to the range of 16–20 percent. By 1650 this had
increased to 33 percent, and by 1700 to over 50 percent. That rise was a
precondition for the spread of Protestantism across Europe, but the
Protestant religion also asserted that the people should be able to read the
word of God, the Bible. Most literate men could read short pamphlets of the
intelligentsia, and communication to the masses was through sermons
delivered in churches, chapels, and public squares to literate and illiterate
alike. Though Owen suggests Catholics had their own TIN, their networks
were mainly through the Church and the holy orders, and Catholic countries
had much lower literacy rates.
Protestantism and Catholicism could mobilize mass movements. War
became inevitable when Catholic and Protestant rulers sought to forcibly
convert dissidents. This provoked neighbors to intervene to protect their
coreligionists, which led to regime-change wars. So began the first of four
waves of ideological warfare that Owen identifies over the last five hundred
years. He focuses on forcible regime change. In the period 1520 to 1678 he
finds seventy-nine states targeted by such interventions, of which thirty-one
cases had been preceded by civil war or strife in the target country. Luard
lists all eighty-nine wars waged between 1559 and 1648.24 Half were fought
over religion, half were more secular. Luard again finds little calculation
beforehand of the odds of victory: “Over-optimism distorted judgements:
faith in the national destiny, or in God’s benevolence, or in the righteousness
of the cause brought persistence in the wars which in the end brought ruin to
the country.”25
Sixteenth-century flare-ups culminated in the Thirty Years’ War of
1618 to 1648. Rulers did not take to the field except for King Gustavus
Adolphus of Sweden, and the generals remained out of range of the guns.
Armies mixed conscripts and mercenaries, typically over 100,000 men,
though only up to 30,000 could be mobilized for a single battle. Though the
main direct motives were religious hatreds, it was the nature of the war that
produced most casualties. Infantry and most cavalry were armed with
muskets, backed by artillery batteries. Since soldiers still stood upright in
battle, casualties mounted. But civilian casualties were worse. Armies lived
off the land, pillaging vast swathes of territory to survive. As the war
dragged on and new armies entered, the land could not provision all soldiers
and civilians, and so civilians died. Famines and plagues as well as the
sacking of villages and cities caused massive civilian deaths. Germany was
the main theater of war. Twenty percent of its total population may have
died, a figure that reached 60 percent in war zone provinces. Total casualties
were around 8 million. Notorious episodes were worsened by religious
hatred, such as the massacres committed by a Catholic army at Magdeburg
in 1631 and by Cromwell’s Protestants at Drogheda in 1649. In earlier
periods sporadic outbreaks of heresy had brought occasional horrors, but this
period saw persistent savagery, part religious, part survival, part motivated
by greed.
The second cause of the war was a geopolitical shift within the
continent. Almost all Europe became involved. The war included
geopolitical balancing against another perceived attempt at hegemony by the
Holy Roman Emperor, whose Habsburg dynasty at that point also ruled
Catholic Spain, much of Italy, and the Spanish Netherlands. Scheidel argues
that any attempt at hegemony was doomed to fail, but that is not how the
other states saw it.26 The Habsburgs seemed to particularly threaten German
princes of the federal empire. Resistance began in Bohemia and then spread
to Protestant princes of north and western Germany, who were then aided by
the major Protestant states of Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and England.
These states had been empowered by two economic-ecological shifts.
Agricultural technology could now turn over the heavier, rain-watered soils
of the northwest, while open-seas navigation generated trade from the
Atlantic and Baltic that rivaled that from the Mediterranean. Protestant rulers
and noble clients also profited by the seizure of monastic estates.
Geopolitical power was shifting from the Mediterranean to the northwest of
Europe for ecological-economic reasons. This proved a lasting European
trend.
The beliefs and dynastic problems of rulers also mattered. In England,
Henry VIII’s marriages and reproductive problems left him unable to
produce a male successor. This forced him toward Protestantism, since the
pope would not annul his serial marriages. Henry was a wavering Protestant,
commanding the burning of fervent Catholics and Protestants alike. The
short-lived rule of his one son, the boy Edward VI, briefly burned Catholics.
His successor, Mary, burned Protestants, but Elizabeth finished off all but
secret Catholics. These were all commitments to a value rationality that
today would be considered unreasonable.
Geopolitical balancing crossed religious lines in only two cases. First,
Protestant Hungary allied with the Muslim Ottoman Empire to counter
Catholic Austrian and Polish attacks. Subsequently, Habsburg armies fought
for the Catholic cause, while Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and English forces
mixed geopolitical and religious reasons for intervening on the Protestant
side. The geopolitical goal of English rulers was to prevent an alliance
between the two major Catholic powers, the Habsburg Empire and France.
When this policy worked, the English need to join the wars lessened. Since
the Habsburg Empire was challenged by its Protestant princes, it built up
large armies. And since that menaced French rulers too, the alliance dreaded
by Protestants never materialized, and Catholic France prioritized
geopolitics over religion, once its internal Huguenot (Protestant) problem
was settled by compromise. To counter the power of the emperor, the French
king helped finance the Protestant armies, and then in the 1630s French
armies fought alongside them. This coalition turned the tide, and Habsburg
hegemony was thwarted. French rulers obviously did calculate the odds of
alternative options. Other rulers were not without calculation, but they allied
with coreligionists.
Thus, the war had several causes: mutually hostile religious ideologies,
a shift in economic exploitation of different ecologies, geopolitical shifts,
and the domestic politics of rulers. The war was worsened by military and
ecological factors, but now Europe remained a multistate system. Rome
could not return, says Scheidel.27
Three treaties, signed in 1648 by 109 European state delegations, sealed
what was essentially a Protestant-French victory. The treaties, known as the
Peace of Westphalia, established a precedent for ending wars through a
diplomatic congress. In theory there was now peaceful coexistence among
sovereign states, backed by a balance of power and a norm against
interference in each other’s domestic affairs. These principles became the
norms of modern international law, although they have often been flouted in
practice. The treaties confirmed the Latin tag Cuius regio, eius religio,
“whose realm, his religion”—each ruler could choose the religion of his (or
her) lands, firming up monarchical power and boosting the more statist
Lutheran and Anglican versions of Protestantism. Europe remained
Christian, but that no longer signified a single faith. Most of the treaties’
clauses confirmed the sovereignty of Germany’s many tiny states. The
settlement caused mass migration of minorities to states controlled by their
coreligionists, which increased the homogeneity of states, thereby making it
easier to raise proto-national armies and reducing dependence on foreign
mercenaries. Many extol the “Westphalian System” as a newborn
geopolitical system, but this is exaggerated. Nor was it a shift from a
Hobbesian to a Kantian form of anarchy, as Wendt argues.28 It was a return
to limited warfare, if between larger armies. Indeed, the consolidation of
states and their finances into war machines continued through the centuries
before and after 1648.
Kalevi Holsti and Evan Luard show that between 1648 and 1789, the
number of wars declined a little.29 Most wars were between the major
powers, typically lasted several years, and were inconclusive. The main
issues were disputed borders, followed by control of maritime trade and
strategic naval ports; dynastic issues had fallen to third place. No wars were
now fought over religion. Wars became more capital-intensive, so states
became more revenue-conscious and centralized. Mercantilism saw the
wealth of the world as finite, and more wars were conducted for economic
goals. Rulers believed that acquiring more territory would provide more
soldiers and taxes, while navigation would secure more wealth through
expansion into the world. Sovereigns and their advisers initiated action, the
people being irrelevant, except that the more prosperous classes represented
in the English Parliament and Dutch merchant elites played an important
role, helping establish a “blue-water” naval-centered policy, focusing less on
European commitments. This was to favor the island British in their global
struggle against France, since France was split into “two Frances,” one
facing the continent, urging army expansion, the other facing the Atlantic,
favoring naval expansion. French rulers never quite managed both at once.
In reaction to the wars of religion, war became more regulated. The
effects on civilians lessened. Army size increased as armies developed their
own depots and supply chains, no longer living off the land. Aristocratic
honor and rules of war restrained savagery. Cities were not sacked, nor their
inhabitants slaughtered. There were debates among intellectuals about the
causes and conduct of wars and numerous treaties ending wars, and
international agreements over ransoming prisoners were applied to common
soldiers as well to as aristocrats. Emeric de Vattel, an early theorist of
international law, claimed that “the Nations of Europe almost always carry
on war with great forbearance and generosity.” Eighteenth-century wars
were usually fought for clear and limited goals and ended with negotiated
treaties. Wars were planned; they rarely occurred as a result of
misunderstandings, confusions, or accidents. This period did resemble
Realist rational calculation of means. Yet war did not do much good for the
people.
Wars were just if committed by a legitimate ruler for a legitimate cause
that could not be achieved through institutional legal recourse. Hugo Grotius
declared, “Where the power of law ceases, there war begins.”30 Yet war was
still considered normal, and rulers’ geopolitical ambitions remained:
Swedish and French monarchs attempted regional hegemony, and major
rulers conspired to partition the minor out of existence. For “Louis XIV and
his court war was, in his early years at least, little more than a seasonal
variation on hunting,” notes Howard.31 Louis himself said, “I shall not
attempt to justify myself. Ambition and glory are always pardonable in a
prince.”32 Material considerations were not primary among noble officers.
They raised their own regiments, and the expense normally outweighed
spoils received. Noblemen and monarchs pursued la gloire to demonstrate
their honor and status. Montaigne wrote, “The proper, sole, and essential life
[for] one of the nobility of France is the life of a soldier.” Courage was
prized, but it had to be visibly demonstrated, and so the casualty rate among
officers was high.33
The soldiers were drawn from the lower classes by the pay. Officers
considered them men without honor, without aspirations for social status or
commitment to the cause, the dregs of society. They had arrived there
through conscription or poverty and rarely showed initiative in battle. Only
coercion could make them face the enemy. So intensive drilling and harsh
discipline ruled European armies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
ending the yelling that had whipped up the spirits of soldiers in earlier
battles. Soldiers had to hear officers’ orders. Disciplined, repetitive,
rhythmic collective movement reinforced regimental cohesion through
“muscular bonding,” which helped soldiers confront death as a collective
physical unit.34 Many preferred to desert.
Rulers of the major powers tried to calculate the odds of victory but,
given the rough equality of power among them, mistakes were normal. Little
could be predicted of the behavior of allies, consent to war taxes over long
periods, or the commitment of soldiers. Mediation was not used to prevent
wars, but if wars dragged on inconclusively, it became a way to end them.35
This was limited rationality.

Phase Three: The Colonial and Bourgeois Revolutionary Eras

After 1500 came overseas imperialism. Conflicts between the first two
imperialists, Spain and Portugal, were settled by papal intervention (see the
next chapter). Later, naval wars were fought between Spain, France,
Holland, and Britain, partly over trading rights and monopolies, partly over
colonies. Though Europe was now full of great powers and their clients,
their wars could be deflected onto weaker colonial peoples, reducing their
zero-sum nature. Success in war in Europe entwined with naval technology
to generate transoceanic empires. The European powers had world-historical
good luck since the major Asian empires were stagnating or declining, while
those in the Americas and Africa had not yet risen far.
Repeated wars within Europe had nurtured armed forces able to pour
intensive firepower on an enemy. Improvements to guns and drills enabled
naval batteries to deliver coordinated, continuous fire, while the integration
of infantry, cavalry, and artillery became superior to that of non-European
forces. New weapons and formations were backed up by reorganized state
finances relying more on private capital. Those who lent money to the state
could secure low-risk profit. Yet the degree of military superiority varied
greatly. It was quickly achieved along coastal Africa and in the Americas
(see the next chapter). But superiority came slowly and unevenly in Asia,
where the Europeans encountered gunpowder empires and kingdoms
mobilizing large, quite well-drilled armies whose rulers were quick to adapt
to Western ways of war. European navies, sometimes of states, sometimes of
private enterprises, and sometimes privateers—pirates—dominated the
seacoasts, pressuring local rulers to become their clients. Some rulers were
only too pleased with client status. For example, in India the last century of
the Mughal Empire saw much military violence and political chaos, as
succession disputes raged and Persian and Maratha warlords and bandits
joined in. This chaos made the much stabler political rule and fiscal
reliability of the British East India Company seem attractive to many
Indians, especially those involved in production and trade. Indeed, says
Dalrymple, its ability to get access to unlimited reserves of credit ultimately
“enabled the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern
world into the field” and to defeat even relatively well-organized Indian
states. European forces provided their military core, but they could not have
conquered such large empires without the greater numbers provided by their
levies of native soldiers.36
Kaveh Yazdani analyzes the fall of the Indian states of Mysore and
Gujarat.37 Mysore’s rulers recognized the danger the British posed and
embarked on rapid military modernization helped by European mercenary
officers and étatist industrialization. Yet they were under continuous British
pressure and had too little time. They won the first war against the East India
Company and drew the second war, but they were defeated in the third,
losing their independence in 1810. The British undermined Mysore
industries a decade later. Gujarat was in some ways the opposite case, a
strong merchant oligarchy but a weak state, and so it was easier to militarily
dominate. The Europeans tended to escalate from regime change to
territorial conquest, pressured, they claimed, by unreliable, corrupt local
rulers, but fundamentally because they could, except at the far edge of their
logistical reach, when confronted by two major, if stagnant, powers—China
and Japan.
Did wars inspire economic development in Europe, increasing the
rationality of war? We can first consider the development of European
science and technology with the aid of Leonid Grinin and Andrey
Korotayev’s list of inventions.38 They do not discuss whether innovations
coincided with periods of peace or war, but the nature of the innovations can
tell us something. From 1100 to 1450 came clocks, spectacles,
mechanization of water wheels, and horse-powered drilling machines, while
free labor and autonomous capitalism enabled rational profit-seeking first
exemplified in Italian luxury manufactures, accountancy methods, and
Renaissance artistic and scientific achievements. None was related to or
caused by war. From 1450 to 1660 the pace accelerated, through open-sea
navigation, artillery improvements, more coordinated armed forces,
windmills, water power, and commercialized agriculture, all resting on a
new mechanical view of nature—a mixture of economic and military
drivers. The seventeenth century saw constitutional political regimes, mass
literacy, the rationalization of state finances and banks, large mechanized
shipyards, global trading companies, and naval dominance—responses to
pressures from all four sources of power, but including substantial military
elements. But from about 1760 the Industrial Revolution centered on
economic developments of machinery, factories, fossil fuel technology,
steam power, chemical processes, and revolutionized transport—all of
mainly economic inspiration. Grinin and Korotayev and many others stress
competition among European states as inspiring innovation: first Italy,
Spain, and Portugal dominated, then Holland and England, then Britain
alone. Yet much of the diffusion of technologies was peaceful and
transnational. Scientific ideas and technological practices spread
transnationally across the continent, as did the inventors and skilled artisans
themselves. War had no place in this aspect of the diffusion. Competition
among states and capitalists brought much creativity, but war brought
creativity largely to war-related economic sectors.
Were there positive, unintended spin-offs from military development?
As Charles Tilly and I have argued, the cost of warfare in taxes and
indebtedness led to political concessions of more representative government,
which proved beneficial to the voicing of domestic policy grievances. That
was the first silver lining of the dark clouds of war, traded off for the second
silver lining, reforms to state finances that enabled new relations with
finance capitalism using institutionalized debt to more reliably fund wars
(the main breakthroughs were Dutch and British). There were also lesser
economic boosts. Gunnery improvements imparted metallurgical and
chemical knowledge useful for other metal products, military uniforms
boosted textiles, and naval developments were simultaneously boosting war
and trade. Yet the first stimulus to the European economic breakthrough—
the European Miracle—came from greater commercialization of agriculture,
which was largely unrelated to the military or war. This boosted population,
workers’ wages and farmers’ profits, and consumer demand for metal,
textile, and pottery goods—the three major early industries. Domestic trade
based on market principles continued to grow substantially. International
trade grew, organized more on mercantilist principles, which sought to
establish monopolies by force. This did bear the imprint of war and
produced winners, like British capitalists, and losers, like Indian textile
producers. European global expansion always produced losers as well as
winners. Take the plantations and factories of sugar production, models for
the factories of the Industrial Revolution—but staffed by slaves. Imperialism
itself, although highly profitable for a few, killed, enslaved, and exploited far
more. The possibility that major investment in military sectors of the
economy “crowded out” private investment in more productive sectors is
often suggested but difficult to prove. But it did not add much benefit for the
mass of the people of the imperial nations until the end of the nineteenth
century. Nor did wars between the major European powers bring benefit for
the people. Though there were economic spin-offs from war, they were not
the central cause of the economic breakthrough to industrialization. War was
rarely rational in terms of ends for most people during this extraordinary
period of growth.
 Harnessing militarism to science and capitalist finance and industry did
deliver clear military superiority from the end of the eighteenth through the
nineteenth centuries, producing increasingly one-sided colonial battlefields.
Yet stable postconquest rule proved more difficult than in many earlier
empires of history. In temperate zones colonial settlers could replace native
peoples’ rights to land, and in a pre-nationalist era they could persuade some
native elites to desert their former ruler and collaborate if they perceived the
Europeans would win. Ideology as a driver of war shifted from religion to
race. Racist beliefs were not new among imperialists—as we saw in China.
But European imperialism involved transoceanic travel and contact with
peoples who looked very different from Europeans. The combination of
supposedly inferior civilization and different physiognomies evoked the
systemic model of racial superiority that still flourishes today. This
weakened the empires politically and ideologically, preventing the
assimilation of natives that the Roman and Chinese empires had achieved.
Racism was the ideological wild card that shortened the life of European
empires. There were also many rival European empires, an additional
weakness because their existence was conducive to war between them.
Wars between Europeans now included colonial theaters. The
Habsburgs and Romanovs struck landward to the east, while Portuguese,
Spanish, Dutch, French, and British rulers all went overseas. Prussia
deviated, a major power through swallowing neighbors in Europe (plus later
some colonies). But there were enough colonies to go round. Even a war’s
losers might get lesser gains. The colonial deflection of war helped the
powers delay the endgame of China and Japan, war to the death and only
one surviving state. Instead, there was balancing, led by Britain and Russia,
against the centrally located states, successively the Habsburgs, France, and
Germany, all seeking continental hegemony. Balancing was made easier by
the geography of the two fringe powers. Britain with its island protection
had developed a formidable navy and industrial capitalism, while Russia had
its enormous landmass, population size, and winter. Neither could be easily
invaded, neither rivaled the other in Europe (though they did in central
Asia), and, if allied, they could deter a central power from fighting a two-
front war. Unlike the last ancient Chinese states, they were not tempted into
a deal with the French. Napoleon could not overcome their alliance, nor did
Hitler later (though he chose to confront the United States as well).
 France lost most of its eighteenth-century wars; its debts and weak
taxation destroyed state finances and undid the monarchy. The revolution
added a new wave of ideological wars between absolute monarchy,
constitutional monarchy, and republics.39 Absolute monarchies ruled in
Russia, Austria, and Prussia, constitutional monarchies controlled Great
Britain and Holland, and republics in the Americas had overthrown
monarchy but were controlled by a slave-owning upper class under
constitutions designed to protect them from monarchy or the mob. But in
France the propertied classes lost control, which deepened ideological
struggle.
Between 1770 and 1850, Owen identifies sixty-two attempts at regime
change in Europe. Twenty-eight were preceded by civil war or lesser strife in
the target country and thirty-six, a majority, were French interventions.
Interventions shot up in the 1790s and remained high in the 1800s before
declining after 1815, although they were briefly boosted by the 1848
revolutions. Europe was again stunned by ideological warfare. The shock
was not confined to the carnage of war, though this amounted to between 2.5
million and 3.5 million military deaths, and civilian deaths anywhere
between 750,000 and 3 million. There was also shock at the revolutionary
and nationalist ideologies unleashed by the French armies. The French
revolutionaries had developed a republic of universal suffrage, executed
their king and all the aristocrats they could catch, raised banners of class
struggle, and organized a levée en masse, military mobilization arousing
citizen nationalism.
Napoleon Bonaparte tamed this revolution, restored slavery to the
colonies, and politically restructured France. His attempted conquest of
Europe continued realpolitik struggle between the great powers, but it was
carried to new heights by nationalist ideology. As the manifestation of one of
the great conquerors of history, Napoleon’s personality mattered. Harold
Parker identified six main motivational elements: his desire to be master of
all situations; the noble officer ethic of glory, dazzling fame, and honor;
enthusiasm for historical persons personifying masterly qualities; his own
brilliant victories and achievements seen as part of this lineage; the
opportunity to match past renown in the eyes of his own and future
audiences; and a compelling belief in his own destiny. He had declared, “I
am of the race that founds empires,” and he had encouraged the vision of
himself as “the new Charlemagne,” flaunting replicas of the sword and
crown of Charlemagne, and conquering Germany and Italy as Charlemagne
had done.40 He consecrated his life to glory, to domination in itself. His ends
were less instrumental than value-laden. In contrast, in mobilizing means he
was highly rational, capable of mastering complex and dynamic political and
military situations—though he could not master England, and he invaded
Russia against the advice of his counselors. His boundless goals and his
extraordinary military record, his Russian folly and Wellington’s comment
on Waterloo as “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” did not
mean that the fall of his hegemony was inevitable, but it lasted only about
ten years. The multistate system was restored.
The scale of warfare had skyrocketed. In 1812 Napoleon mobilized
600,000 troops for his Russian campaign, and two years later the German
states and Russia combined to mobilize a million. Napoleon conquered
continental Europe, raising commoners to kings; he was welcomed by
liberals abroad until disillusion set in over French domination. The
overturning of the Bourbons in Spain had collateral effects in Latin America,
where revolutions arose against Spanish rule, as we will see in the next
chapter. European crowned heads trembled in fear of the guillotine. Thus,
the 1815 Congress of Vienna aimed at repressing radicalism so that
monarchy could rest safe. The participants’ calculations were weighted by
fear more of domestic class struggle than of interstate warfare. Since war
might bring revolution, peace was better. France was stripped only of
Napoleon’s conquests and otherwise restored so as to bolster the power of
the restored monarchy. Authoritarian monarchies developed top-down
versions of mass mobilization armies. A second fright from the 1848
revolutions led to monarchies introducing limited degrees of representative
government under top-down controls. For the second time, transcendent
ideologies led by a would-be hegemon had been countered. Europe was
experiencing a cyclical sequence of wars.
In the 1780s Germany still contained over three hundred states, their
existence largely protected by the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire. But
Napoleon crushed the empire and abolished the ecclesiastical and many of
the secular states and the imperial free cities. Most were absorbed into a
French-dominated confederation, but the Congress of Vienna abolished this
and decreed that Germany in 1815 consist only of thirty-eight states and four
free cities, in addition to the great powers of Prussia and Austria. Then
Prussia’s victories over Denmark and Austria in the 1860s enabled it to
swallow up dozens more states, more often through military intimidation
than actual battle. This culminated in the final act, the defeat of France in
1870, when Bavaria and Württemberg “voluntarily” joined the Prussian
federation, having seen what happened to the Hanoverian and Saxon rulers
who had resisted. By then most German elites agreed that unification was
necessary since small states could no longer protect them. In Germany war
had been the main destroyer of the vanished kingdoms. Italy too was unified
by the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont and Garibaldi’s republican forces
through a series of small wars against Austria and the other states, though
the final capitulation of the Papal States was through intimidated
negotiation. States had continued to vanish violently.
Between 1816 and 1992, Tanisha Fazal finds that 66 of the existing 207
states “died,” in the sense of losing control of foreign policy to another ruler.
Only 11 died after 1945. Of the dead, 40 percent had been buffer states, and
50 of the 66 deaths (76 percent) occurred through military violence. About
half of these were later resurrected, such as the countries conquered by
German forces in World War II. But 35 (70 percent) of the permanently
disappeared states died violently, predominantly German, Italian, and Indian.
She attacks IR models like “balancing” and does not find that rival major
powers sought to preserve buffer states between them, since these were the
most likely to die. Instead, a major neighboring ruler would preempt another
neighbor to acquire a buffer state they both desired, even when this meant
the two would become direct neighbors with no buffer between them. Major
rulers were just greedy, and war was still the primary cause of vanishing
kingdoms.41
The number of wars in Europe between 1815 and 1914 declined as a
response to the revolutionary period, though only by 13 percent.42 Wars
were also shorter. The Crimean War of 1853–56 was the deadliest because it
involved several powers. Several Russian-Ottoman skirmishes occurred, and
then Crimea saw intervention by Britain and France for balancing reasons, to
prop up the Ottoman Empire and prevent Russian control of the Black Sea.
The war produced over 500,000 military deaths, two-thirds of them from
disease. Russian and Ottoman civilian deaths are unknown. None of the
other five European interstate wars of the century killed many civilians. The
Austro-Prussian War lasted only seven weeks but killed over 100,000
soldiers, mostly Austrian; the two Schleswig Wars of 1848–51 and 1864,
pitting Prussia against Denmark (and its allies), killed under 3,000 soldiers;
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 killed about 180,000 soldiers (three-
quarters of them French); the 1878 Austrian seizure of Bosnia-Herzegovina
from the Ottomans cost just over 3,000 Austrian soldiers’ lives, two-thirds
from disease, while Ottoman deaths are unknown; and the Balkan Wars of
1912–13 killed about 140,000. These were quite short wars with decisive
victors. Except for the Balkan Wars, they were not very ideological and are
largely explicable in Realist terms. Yet during the nineteenth century civil
wars grew in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and in Spain.
Holsti classifies wars by their most dominant issue. He says wars of national
liberation against empires were in this era the most frequent, dominant in 37
percent of wars. Territorial issues declined from 25 to 14 percent, while
commercial and navigational issues declined from 14 to 4 percent.43 British-
regulated free trade combined with pragmatic use of tariffs by other states
had largely replaced protectionist wars.
Further afield, Europeans were perpetually at war, yet rarely against
each other. There was a big if uncountable rise in the number of colonial
wars fought against the natives of other continents. Owen does not mention
that all his three ideological rivals, authoritarian monarchies, constitutional
monarchies, and republics, embarked on identical wars of conquest, all
installing repressive authoritarian rule over native peoples. He excludes
regime changes in the colonies, saying, “I limit targets to sovereign states
because such cases are most relevant to IR theory.”44 This is conforming to
an academic discipline rather than explaining the nature of war. He also
excludes most early interventions by the British in India and the Dutch in
Southeast Asia since these were by private companies. At its height in 1803
the British East India Company had an army of 260,000—twice the size of
the British army at the time. It fought numerous wars, including big ones
against the Gurkhas, Gujarat, and Mysore, imposing regime change on
them.45 Owen does not include regime change imposed by Europeans in the
Americas or by Japanese. The excluded cases were ideological wars since
the colonial powers claimed they would elevate the savage and decadent
races by imposing civilization and the true word of God on them. Thus,
Owen misses the longest-lived wave of ideological regime change,
colonialism.
There proved to be not much economic profit in most colonies, but the
aggressors did not want to be left out of the race—just in case. The struggle
was also for imperial status, a “place in the sun.” Deflecting war onto the
native peoples avoided major conflict with other imperial powers. The
“Scramble for Africa” might have threatened this, but in 1885 fourteen
powers—eleven European states, and Russia, the Ottomans, and the United
States—signed the Treaty of Berlin, which allowed the signatories to claim
an African territory if they could effectively patrol its borders. This set off a
race by powers focused on their own expansion rather than disputing anyone
else’s. Despite a few MID incidents, almost all Africa was claimed without
inter-imperial wars. At the very end of the nineteenth century, two non-
European powers joined in: Japan attacked imperial dependencies of China,
and the United States joined the attacks on China and destroyed the
remaining Spanish Empire. Imperialism was globally triumphant, at
enormous human cost, by 1910. Then it fell apart.

The Two World Wars

This period culminated in the suicide of imperialism in the two deadliest and
least rational or profitable wars in history. As Table 10.1 reveals, World War
II had the highest absolute fatality rate and the highest annual rate of
fatalities, as well as the greatest genocidal component, of any war in history.
World War I had the second-highest annual level of fatalities in history.
There was little rationality on display in either of them. I discuss soldiers’
experience of them in chapter 12, but here I deal briefly with causes.46
In the decades before 1914, Europe seems to have had a stable
geopolitical order centered on two great power alliances: the central powers,
Germany and Austria-Hungary, ranged against the Triple Entente of Britain,
France, and Russia. A balance of power between them seemed to have
secured peace in Europe. The two Balkan Wars of 1912–13 enlarged Serbian
ambition, to the alarm of Austria-Hungary. But the major powers were
sharing the spoils of Africa and Asia, the Anglo-German naval race ended in
1912, and mass armies might deter war. But the great powers and their
clients were filling the entire space of Europe so that any war between them
would be disastrous.
In July 1914 the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated
in Sarajevo by a cell of Serb nationalists, who bungled the operation but
almost by accident managed to kill him. Trouble between Austria-Hungary
and Serbia was predictable, likely to lead to a Third Balkan War. But the
assassination crisis escalated during the next thirty-seven days to the Great
War, which engulfed almost the whole of the continent plus colonies
elsewhere. The two alliances held up, but in war not peace, as Russia,
France, and then Britain joined the Serb side, and Germany joined with
Austria-Hungary. This has been viewed by Realists as a failure of balancing
alliances amid power transitions, an inability to cope with the
destabilizations posed by Serbia’s rise in the Balkans, Russia’s rising
military power, the decline of the Habsburgs, and the transformation of
Prussia into a globally ambitious Germany. German rulers have been usually
blamed most for the escalation, especially by encouraging Austria-Hungary
to fight. Yet the tyranny of history meant that war remained the default mode
of diplomacy for all the powers. If negotiations broke down, war was still
normal. The cult of the offensive sweeping high commands brought further
danger. Thus, once the crisis in Serbia hit and war loomed, the trigger-happy
mobilizations of Russia, Austria, and Germany reinforced one another too
quickly for the diplomats to open effective channels of negotiation—and
Britain’s ultimatum to Germany to deter any invasion of Belgium came too
late.
Almost all rulers believed the war would be won quickly by swift
offense. None had made plans for the massive industrial and military
mobilization that proved necessary. Nor had they made a plan B for a
negotiated peace: unconditional surrender or nothing, which yielded decision
making to the generals.47 Of course, the war showed how wrong they were,
for in the battles of 1914–18 defense triumphed over attack on the Western
Front, producing calamitous casualties, though there was very little
movement of fronts (see chapter 12). These might be considered
understandable mistakes, except that the example of the carnage of the U.S.
Civil War was before them. Those who pressed for war believed with
arrogant condescension that this had been due to Americans being amateurs
at war (see chapter 11).
In volume 2 of The Sources of Social Power I offered a half-serious
“cock-up/foul-up” theory of how European states entered this war,
emphasizing miscalculations on all sides.48 This now seems the orthodox
view, argued in different ways by Christopher Clark and Thomas Otte.49
Clark lays much of the blame for the war on the Russian hasty military
mobilization. But he emphasizes mainly the microprocesses of diplomacy by
all powers. He concludes that the actors were “watchful but unseeing,
haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to
bring into the world.” They were sleepwalkers, fallible, unimaginative,
miscalculating and misjudging situations. But additionally these were not
unitary states. Decision making in all of them was fragmented among
different agencies, ministries, and embassies. The powers of the monarchs
were uncertain, their courts were riven by intrigue, deception was common,
and leaders gave differing official and unofficial information to the press. All
this made assessments of other states’ reactions to changing events difficult.
Should the Kaiser’s statements be regarded as German policy, or those of the
chancellor, or those of leading German ambassadors or generals, since they
all differed? Some decision makers did warn of the likelihood and dire
consequences of war but were outmuscled in the political intrigue.
Otte’s blow-by-blow account of the onset of war is similar. He
concludes:

Abstract concepts, such as the “balance of power” or the “alliance

system” did not cause Europe’s descent into war. Nor did states in
the abstract propel the Powers along the path towards war. . . .
Individuals acting in response to external and internal stimuli, and
to perceived opportunities and threats, were central to the
developments in July 1914. Their hawkish or dovish views on the
perceived realities of international politics, and how they
manoeuvred in the space given to them within the existing political
arrangements in their respective countries, hold the key to
understanding how and why Europe descended into world war.”50

His cast list is 160 men (no women) spread across Europe—monarchs,
presidents, prime and foreign ministers, diplomats, generals, some of their
staffs, as well as one cell of Serbian terrorists. This amounted to quite a lot
of people, but drawn from a very narrow social stratum. Otte lays much of
the blame on their failings, portraying them as men of limited vision and
abilities, inadequate to the task confronting them. Some were ditherers,
others reckless. Like Clark, Otte suggests that decision making was
haphazard. As we have seen so often in the run-up to wars, whose policy
won out month by month in a fast-developing crisis depended more on
political power within each capital than on calculative realpolitik. Gross
errors proliferated.
Austria-Hungary lacked coherent decision making, and discussion
between the two capitals, Vienna and Budapest, was slow. A war party in
Vienna triumphed with a Balkanpolitik vision focused on punishing Serbia
for the assassination and its claim to a Greater Serbia. By war the honor and
status of the monarchy could be saved and nationalist insurgents repressed,
and little attention was paid to the wider consequences. This was aggravated
in Berlin by factional divisions. Prowar generals like Helmuth von Moltke
and Erich von Falkenhayn had privileged access to the monarch, hated
France, and thought war would stop the rise of both the capitalist class and
socialism in Germany. The Kaiser was ruled by a desire to assert German
and his own personal honor and prestige. The result was that a few German
leaders foolishly gave Austria carte blanche in Serbia, promising German
support whatever Austrian actions might be. Yet Austrian aggression against
Serbia would probably bring in Russia. But since others in Berlin feared
Russia’s growing military strength, they reasoned that Russia should be
confronted before its current military modernization was complete—a
window of opportunity. There were varied German motivations, domestic
and foreign. These were also apparent later, during the war, when the
proponents of unrestricted submarine warfare won out, thus bringing a
reluctant President Woodrow Wilson into the war.
Otte also blames Austria, whose court war party was hell-bent on
punishing Serbia, to preserve the prestige, even the survival, of the Habsburg
dynasty. The assassination of the archduke was a tragic blow, for he had
been a moderate in Vienna, and his death fatally weakened the peace party
whose reforms had been lowering the ethnic tensions of the empire. Now
hard-liners, especially generals, led the way to war.51 Otte sees their actions
as the first great provocation. In St. Petersburg a more defensive mentality
contended with those arguing that aiding the Serbs could maintain the
prestige of the Romanovs—and perhaps avoid revolution. Some sought
control of the Black Sea and the Bosphorus. There was a disconnect between
politicians and generals, and a foolish belief that military mobilization could
be kept secret. Otte sees the Russian mobilization as a second provocation.
French diplomacy was obsessed with bolstering Russian commitment to the
Franco-Russian alliance, which might deter a German attack. In London the
pacifist wing of a divided Liberal cabinet threatened resignation if the
government uttered military threats. Their resignation would have brought
down the Liberals and forced an election that they would probably lose. This
domestic political fear prevented Foreign Secretary Edward Grey from
issuing deterrent threats to Germany.
 Were these all just “mistakes”? Cumulatively, they surely confound
Realist theory. The balance of power had seemed rational during peacetime,
when it was not needed, but the rapid downward spiral to war was too much
for it. A combination of fear and feckless brinkmanship among decision
makers in the capitals resembled declining Chinese dynasties launching
aggressive war. No statesman would back down, for reasons of great power
status and personal honor. This meant less careful calculation of alternative
policies or of the odds of victory. All the rulers were caged within their own
states and nations, exaggerating national resolve and unity, minimizing the
enemy’s, particularly one with a different political system. They believed
threatening war would deter the enemy from going to war. So they tried
brinkmanship to gain leverage. That strategy was irrational because they all
followed it and so no one backed down.52
The dominant view of the development of war-making capacity through
history sees greater and greater complexity, made manageable by
bureaucratic state control.53 True, the armed forces had rigid command
structures (blurred a little by rivalry between the services), yet this was not
so of rulers’ decision making. The states contained numerous institutions.
Army High Commands were coherent bureaucratic organizations, but some
had autonomy from monarchs and politicians, particularly over mobilization
policy. The German chancellor seemed not to know that the High
Command’s “defensive” mobilization plan involved seizing railheads in
Belgium, which would probably force France and Britain to declare war (and
it did). Russian rulers were ignorant of their High Command’s mobilization
plans. Some countries had contending courts and parliaments, courtiers and
politicians, while in others parliaments and cabinets contained bickering
parties. Foreign services had their own networks. Five great powers and
several minor powers with very varied constitutions had little understanding
of each other. The 160 persons Otte identified were scattered across
institutions, all trying to shape foreign policy—only half the number of
Roman senators who made decisions for war, but these had met in a single
chamber to collectively and openly debate policy. The Chinese imperial
court had two principal loci of decision making, the inner and outer courts,
often factionalized, but with decision making far more concentrated than in
Europe in 1914. Absolute monarchs, dukes, daimyo, and dictators across
Eurasia had small councils of state, perhaps containing contending views,
but able in a single room to argue directly with each other. The First World
War resulted from multiple interacting causes, structural, personal, and
emotional. It was not accidental, for the escalations were willed or
structurally induced, but it was a series of feckless reactions to fear,
benefiting no one and destroying all three monarchies that had started it—
the triumph of irrationality of ends, perhaps the most extreme of all my
cases.
The slide to World War II differed. Decision making was more
coherent, for this was naked aggression encountering survival defense. But
this was primarily an ideological war. German revisionist demands for the
restoration of lost territories were important, a consequence of the first war
and a necessary cause of the rise of Nazism. But Hitler and the Nazis added
to it a transcendent ideological vision of a Thousand-Year Reich stretching
right across Europe, and then the world. The period 1910 to 2003, says
Owen, contained the third wave of ideological wars.54 World War I does not
really fit his model since ideologies barely figured, though nationalism was
whipped up by the war. But between 1917 and 2003 Owen lists seventy-one
cases of wars imposing regime change. The United States fought twenty-five
of them, the USSR nineteen, and Germany six. He largely omits Japan, yet
Japan forcibly changed regimes in seven countries. From 1918 to after 1945
almost all wars were substantially ideological. From the Allied intervention
against the Bolsheviks to the Soviet invasions of Poland and Iran in the
1920s, to the Japanese invasions of China and Manchuria, the Spanish Civil
War, and Italian intervention in the Horn of Africa in the 1930s, to World
War II, motives for wars were couched within transcendent ideologies. State
socialism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and capitalist democracy all led
rulers to impose their rival forms of world order. Then the Cold War
narrowed down the conflict to state socialism versus capitalist democracy.
In the run-up to World War II, ideological power played an important
role in preventing the traditional balancing alliance among Britain, France,
and Russia, which might deter Nazi Germany. There were obstacles in
Eastern Europe, notably the opposition of Poland to Soviet troops passing
through its territory in case of war, and the capitalist powers were not
confident of the ability of the Red Army, so soon after its disastrous purges
in 1937. Yet for them antisocialism proved a more alluring ideology than
antifascism, and this overwhelmed the rational geopolitics of balancing.
Britain and France did little to secure Soviet support for a collective
deterrence of Hitler, which led Stalin—fearing their lack of determination to
fight—into his Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler.55 But then Stalin
obstinately clung to his belief that Hitler would not open a two-front war by
invading the Soviet Union, despite the mountain of intelligence reports of a
German military buildup on the frontier. For Hitler, the second front made
sense now, before the Red Army was restored to its former level of
efficiency and before the United States might join the war. But Stalin
“remained in complete denial,” says Kershaw. Even as the invasion began,
he believed that it was launched by German officers without authorization
from Hitler. If he spoke to Hitler, all would be sorted out, he said. Kershaw
calls this “the most extraordinary miscalculation of all time”—though there
is a lot of competition for that honor.56 Yet Stalin was a murderous dictator,
with whom no one dared argue—sensibly so, for he shot eight of his
generals after the front collapsed. The balancing coalition did come later, at
least between Britain and the Soviets (for France had submitted), helped by
the United States. Hitler had finally knocked geopolitical sense into Stalin.
In 1943 Stalin tried again to interest Hitler in a joint pact, but Hitler’s
genocidal plans prevented this.
Hitler’s state comprised a vast array of institutions, divided between
state bureaucracies, the Nazi Party, and the Nazi paramilitaries, all spawning
rival satrapies. Yet Hitler’s charismatic dominance and the “leadership
principle” meant that in practice they sought to “work toward the Führer,”
trying to anticipate what he would have wanted them to do, which was
always the most “radical” option.57 This produced a cohesive environment
backing up Hitler’s prejudices and decisions. Mussolini and Japanese
military leaders provided weaker versions of this. The means pursued were
irrational, however, dominated by fascist ideology: war was virtuous and its
new martial breed of men could overcome the odds. Nazism also came to
apply its ruthless militarism to exterminating “lower” races—Jews, Slavs,
gypsies, and others. Mussolini went along with this and wanted imperial
prestige from colonies in Africa more than any economic benefit they would
bring. Japan provided a half-fascist, half-racist version of conquest
imperialism. The Axis powers valued martial values more than did the
liberals or state socialists, and this led their leaders to underestimate the
enemy’s bellicosity if attacked. Hitler thought liberal Britain and France
would not declare war if he invaded Poland, since they had tolerated his
other aggressions. He was right that French forces could be beaten, but that
victory was due to the brilliant tactics of his generals. It might have gone
otherwise. After the fall of France, he expected Britain to come to terms—
indeed, some British revisionist historians have argued that its leaders should
have done this in order to preserve the empire. Yet British geopolitical
understandings focused on the need to defend imperial honor, and this
inevitably took British leaders into the war. In the vital cabinet meeting in
1940, before Churchill had acquired significant authority as prime minister,
even appeasers like Lord Halifax came around to the view that they had to
fight.58 Preserving honor was predominant in both the autocracies and the
democracies. Of course, as Kershaw notes, this was confrontation between
two political extremes, not typical of other modern wars. The four
autocracies he discusses conferred far more power on a single leader than
did the two democracies, the United Kingdom and the United States. But one
should not generalize that autocracies are more likely to go to war than
democracies.
Hitler expected the “rotten Bolshevik” regime of Stalin to collapse once
he invaded Russia, and then he could finish off Britain. Of course, neither
happened. That the obdurate resistance of Soviet and British forces turned
into victory required the entry of the United States into the war. Although the
Roosevelt administration was already assisting the British before its formal
entry into the war, this was on a small scale and was geared to American
economic interests in gaining entry to the markets of the British Empire and
exhausting British gold reserves. The American declaration of war in Europe
came on December 11, 1941, after Hitler’s declaration of war on the United
States earlier that day and four days after the Japanese attack on U.S.
territory at Pearl Harbor on December 7. As we have seen, overoptimistic
ideology deluded Japanese decision makers into believing that the United
States might have the stomach only for a brief struggle after Pearl Harbor.
Here I deal with Hitler’s reasoning.
Some historians have seen Hitler’s decision to declare war on the
United States as utterly irrational. Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman
say it was a calculated gamble.59 Kershaw offers a more nuanced view.
These authors agree that Hitler felt that war with the United States was
inevitable at some point in the future and that he thought it was better to start
it preemptively, specifically by unleashing all restrictions on U-boat
commanders when sighting American ships. (His unleashing order came two
days before his declaration of war.) His decision must be seen in the context
of his ideology, however. As Kershaw asserts, Hitler had consistently
declared that he sought world conquest. Hitler also believed that Jewish
capitalism was his main global enemy, dominating U.S. governments. So
“inevitability” came not from purely geopolitical calculations, but from his
ideological commitment to world conquest and the elimination of a
nonexistent Jewish world conspiracy. Nor was victory over the United States
achievable. Hitler could not hurt the continental United States, apart from his
U-boats offshore. But even their threat was eliminated over the next two
years. His declaration of war also only made it more likely that Roosevelt
would fight in Europe as well as across the Pacific. As tensions had mounted
with Japan, Roosevelt was already transferring naval units from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, and the Pearl Harbor attack might have led the United States
to neglect Europe, giving Hitler time to finish off Britain and Russia, and
tolerating a minor level of American aid to them in the meantime. Hitler’s
declaration also removed all opposition in Congress, which had up till then
resisted Roosevelt’s attempts to join the war in Europe. Kershaw adds that
Hitler’s temperament and dictatorial status also influenced him. He made the
decision “swiftly, and without consultation”; he was “headstrong,” “rushing
into Japan’s arms,” “ecstatic about Pearl Harbor.” Joachim von Ribbentrop,
echoing Hitler, said, “A great power doesn’t let itself have war declared on
it, it declares war itself.” Hitler was impressed by Japanese “audacity”; that
was his kind of move. His colleagues privately criticized his “dilettantism”
and “his limited knowledge of foreign countries.” They said of the
declaration, “We couldn’t be more surprised,” and it was “politically a
mistake.” Kershaw concludes that from Hitler’s point of view, his decision
was “rational” but not “sensible.”60 But we don’t have to adopt Hitler’s
definition of rationality. That would also have us describing the Holocaust as
rational, from his point of view. His declaration of war had strong
ideological, impulsive, irrational, false, and even suicidal currents. His
misperceptions were due to a caging ideology: trapped within the worldview
of his own Reich, he could not have an accurate perception of the outside
enemy.
World War II was an ideological war like the wars of religion. The
aggressors were irrational, and there was at first a desperate defensive
rationality shown by the Allies, especially by the Soviet people. Those who
were communists or Jews could expect to be murdered after a Nazi victory,
while all Slavs could expect to be enslaved. No wonder they fought like hell.
Another ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union
then inherited the earth. This was not anarchic geopolitics, for only two
major powers were clashing through competing ideologies involving
conflicting ways of structuring the world.
Finally, we can ask whether these wars produced much benefit. World
War I killed about 20 million people and World War II 75 million. World
War II did quash fascism, a major benefit. MacMillan also identifies
substantial spin-off benefits from these wars, arguing like Arthur Marwick
before her that mass-mobilization warfare, demanding mass sacrifices by the
citizens, brought rewards to them afterward.61 But that neglects the great
variety of aftermaths, and it misreads the nature of military power. I noted
that military power combines strict hierarchy with intense comradeship.
These writers focus only on the comradeship. But mass-mobilization warfare
brings both hierarchy and comradeship to the mass of the people.
Consequences varied according to whether armed forces were victorious or
defeated. One army collapsed during the first war, the Russian. What
collapsed was hierarchy, the ability of officers to coordinate action or
discipline their soldiers. Indeed, many junior officers joined together in
comradeship with their soldiers to achieve a socialist revolution—which
promised much, always praised comradeship, but delivered more pain than
benefit. The other defeated powers saw attempts at revolution, but these
failed because military and political hierarchies mostly remained in place.
There was a boost to center-left regimes after the war, and they began to
deliver reforms but they were overwhelmed by a fascist revival conjoining
hierarchy and comradeship. Army veterans were the core of all fascist
movements, which also had large paramilitaries.62 Fascists too brought much
more pain than benefit.
Things were better for the victorious countries in the first war. There
was less pain and large promises were made, but again the hierarchies
remained in place. MacMillan argues that World War I produced a surge in
women’s suffrage. In the United States, minor participation in the war did
contribute a little to the push in a long sequence of victories for women in a
growing number of states, as they secured equal rights amendments, though
not at the federal level. Yet in Britain suffrage had been promised by the
Asquith government before the war and was delayed by the war. Women
property owners got the vote in 1920, other women followed in 1929. But
Frenchwomen did not get the vote until after World War II, Russian women
got a delusory vote, while improvements for women in Germany and Italy
were undermined by fascism, a more powerful legacy of the first war. Nor
were there many new welfare programs among the combatant countries. The
promise of “homes fit for heroes” after the war was kept only for a few. In
Britain Labour Party participation in the wartime government did lead to a
surge in its vote, which continued through the 1920s. But it achieved little
and was badly broken by the Great Depression. It became a major party
again in the election of 1935. Everywhere, promises of political rights to
colonized peoples made in 1914 were broken. Indeed, the victorious powers
got new colonies formerly ruled by the Germans and Ottomans, renamed
“Mandated Territories of the League of Nations.” To the victors go the
spoils.
MacMillan is on firmer ground with World War II, after which some
peoples saw full employment, some redistribution of wealth, and some
welfare reforms. Yet these gains were less likely in the combatant countries
than in the neutral or occupied Scandinavian countries.63 Of the combatants,
Britain benefited because of Labour’s shrewd participation in the wartime
government. Churchill’s Tories ran the war, and Labour managed the home
front—and used their ministries to plot reforms after the war. Labour’s
massive victory in the 1945 election and its subsequent reforms ensured the
British welfare state. So this achievement was due to political power
relations as well as to the war. Most Americans did benefit economically
from the wartime boom, but they gained least in welfare benefits afterward
(except for veterans). The Soviet Union never recovered its growth rates of
the interwar period. Colonized peoples did gain since they had enjoyed a
wartime license to kill white people, and they saw that the whites had been
weakened by the war. Successful independence movements, starting with
India, grew into an unstoppable global wave.64 Wars often have unintended
silver linings for some, but these rarely figured in the original calculations
for war; the Indian nationalists were an exception, for they had joined the
British war effort on condition of getting independence afterward.
MacMillan also cites technological innovations, relying on a few
stimulated by war, ignoring those that were not, such as vaccines, antibiotics,
X-rays, movies, and television. Even some that she does emphasize, such as
medical triage, computers, and jet engines, would have probably been
developed without the war, if at a slightly slower pace. But who knows what
alternative technologies might have flourished in peacetime? And do these
rather scattered benefits and inventions justify almost 100 million dead
human beings? The benefits of war, even those originally unintended, have
been much exaggerated.

Conclusion
1. Europe’s early origins paralleled those of Republican Rome and
ancient China. In all three cases the need for self-defense in a
decidedly anarchic multipolar context produced a militarized
ruling class exercising a Mafia-like protection racket that forced
the lower classes to provide taxes and soldiers. But states did not
fill in the whole space of the region. Endemic small-scale wars of
conquest of stateless and tribal peoples by the core states were
inevitable.
2. So war was normal, and bellicose ideologies were rooted in the
cumulative effects of past historical victories. Continued success
by the major states of Europe baked in the institutions and culture
of militarism, which, as in Rome and China, added to motives of
material gain values such as honor, status, glory, and power in
itself. There were major personality differences among rulers—as
in the contrast between Edward II and Edward III—but their
emotions derived more from the general culture of honor.
3. Christendom provided limited regulation of war in medieval and
early modern Europe. Aristocrats shared a transnational culture
and were highly intermarried. Church institutions were as
powerful as any state until the sixteenth century. For aristocrats
and other wellborn men, war was normatively regulated; it yielded
a lower chance of death, which in any case would be rewarded in
heaven. War seemed rational to them. But it was not for most of
the people, especially if war was fought over their land.
4. The core powers expanded through conquest of lesser peoples
and states, first on the western European periphery, then across the
world and in central Europe. Sharks swallowed minnows,
“deflecting” wars between each other from zero-sum to positive-
sum for rulers. The dominant classes of major states gained
through these phases of colonial expansion. Younger sons and
bastards were especially keen on war. Expansion across other
continents came with good fortune at the moment when their most
powerful states were stagnant or in decline and Europe was filling
up with states. Rivalry between the major states fueled revolutions
in military organization and technology, which provided the ability
to control seacoasts and settler colonies and to secure compliant
native regimes. This culminated in an alliance between militarized
states, technology, and industrial capitalism that from the late
eighteenth century was able to conquer most of the world.
5. The breakthrough culminating in the Industrial Revolution—the
“European Miracle”—owed little to interstate wars. In any case,
neither brought much immediate benefit to the European
population as a whole, though it did in the long run—but much
less for the conquered colonial peoples.
6. A sense of civilizational entitlement to eliminate, enslave, and
exploit colonial peoples was buttressed by a belief that the
European population possessed the one true word of God, and by
racial theories of superiority based on visible physiognomy. This
was the most enduring ideological justification of warfare found
among Europeans. But racism weakened empires unwilling to
acculturate native peoples, unlike both the Roman and Chinese
empires.
7. From the sixteenth century came three waves of transcendent
ideological warfare: wars of religion, revolutionary and nationalist
wars, and twentieth-century struggles, which originated in Europe
but then spread to the world, among fascism, state socialism, and
capitalist democracy. The third wave continued after 1945 (see
chapters 13 and 14). These wars were particularly vicious, for
transcendent ideologies claimed the right to impose certain values
on an enemy denounced as evil or savage, though the savagery
was mostly the aggressor’s own. These produced short-lived
reactions in treaties and institutions to restrain wars, which led for
a time to cautious interstate wars embodying more pragmatic,
delayed-reaction rational Realism—though not in the colonies.
Such waves and reactions remind us of how varied are the causes
of war, even within a single civilization. But interwave geopolitics
was like a game of chess where only the pawns can be taken off
the board, white pawns in Europe, black pawns elsewhere.
8. Wars against the pawns were rational in terms of ends for the
dominant classes and settlers of the major powers, although in
such lopsided wars calculations of means were often unnecessary.
Luard concludes his survey of wars through six hundred years of
European history by flatly rejecting rationality of means: “It does
not appear that there has been, in most periods, any serious attempt
made to balance possible gains against likely costs, or even
accurately to assess the likelihood of victory. Governments that
resort to war are not usually in a mood for calculations of this
kind. They are often filled with passion, indignation, vengefulness
or greed; inspired by patriotic estimates of the quality of native
fighting men, weapons, and strategies; and so inflated with over-
optimistic conceptions of the prospects of success.”65 This would
seem to be exaggerated, though truer of western than central
Europe, where I noted the calculative nature of the three-way
struggles waged over the Holy Roman Empire.
9. As in Republican Rome, ancient China, and medieval Japan,
defeat in war multiplied vanished kingdoms, though this was much
more belated in central than western Europe. If survival is the
basic goal of rulers, as Realists say, almost all failed. Maybe their
most important goal was the survival not of their state but of
themselves. Yet they could have lived if they had freely paid
homage to the strong. Weaker states acted rationally when they
submitted to threats from the powerful, or when they voluntarily
accepted subordination and absorption, perhaps through marriages.
Yet those choosing war overconfidently acted irrationally, and
Luard and van Evera say they were in the majority. Delusions also
drove states with fairly equal powers to war against each other. In
the three ideological waves, European rulers were driven by
ideology as well as geopolitical calculation, though between these
waves more caution and negotiation occurred. Yet in general
militarism was so baked in to culture and institutions that war
became what rulers did when they felt insulted, wronged, entitled,
or self-righteous in seizing the opportunities provided by
succession crises. Most wars were not fought after careful rational
calculation of means in relation to ends. Balancing alliances was
rarely effective in the long run, as stronger powers repeatedly
 swallowed weaker ones. Yet some successful balancing occurred
between the greatest powers.

In most of Europe before 1945, war was not primarily a rational

instrument of policy, except where sharks could easily swallow minnows—
which was both morally dubious and not requiring careful calculation of the
odds. Overall, the most striking feature of European wars was their varied
sequencing through time—from limited but impulsive dynastic wars to wars
within more calculative great power systems, to ideological wars, to global
colonial wars, to two of the most devastating and least rational wars in
human history. Through all these wars, few people benefited.
 CHAPTER NINE

Seven Hundred Years of South and Central America

Precolonial Empires: Aztecs

Postcolonial Latin America has had a low rate of interstate wars and good
data sources. Yet the period of colonization had been extremely bloody. In
the sixteenth century the Portuguese and Spanish sailed to the New World
and heard credible stories of cities of fabulous wealth. Spanish
conquistadores, driven by greed and relative poverty (being mostly from
poor regions of Spain), and militarily confident through the successful
Spanish war record in Europe, embarked on conquest—the first major
attempt at overseas empire by a European power. The goals were material—
gold, silver, and land and labor—though legitimized by Catholic
Christianity. There was a risk of death, but the potential gains were great.
Priests saving souls, if necessary by forced conversions, came later.
They conquered numerous indigenous communities. I focus on the
Aztecs in Mexico and the Inca, whose core lay in Peru. Earlier civilizations
had existed in these regions—the Olmec, the classic Maya, Teotihuacan,
Toltecs, and Zapotecs in Central America and the Chavín, Moche, Huari,
and Tiwanaku in the Andes. These had left impressive monumental
buildings, especially temples, and indications of states, dominant classes,
occupational specialization, trading and artisanal networks, religions with
theatrical public ceremonies, and agriculture yielding surpluses for quite
dense populations. But Central America was neither a single core region nor
a single dynastic tradition, and states repeatedly rose and fell.
The Aztecs were descendants of the Chichimeca peoples, who entered
central Mexico from the north from about 1150 CE, and the Inca inhabited
the Cuzco Basin from the eleventh century. From the fourteenth century, our
information on both begins to improve, hence the seven hundred years of
this chapter title. The Aztec elite were literate, and illustrated books were
produced by professional scribes and included maps, histories, censuses,
financial accounts, calendars, ritual almanacs, and cosmological
descriptions. Almost all were destroyed after the conquest as “books of the
Devil” by order of the Catholic Church. Some survived, however,
supplemented by codices written soon after the conquest either by native
Nahuatl speakers or by Spaniards who had interviewed Aztecs.1
Around 1325 the city of Tenochtitlán was founded as the capital of the
peoples known as the Nahua or Aztec. They had a long history of serving as
mercenaries in other states’ wars and were at this time turning their
militarism toward their own conquests. A century later, in 1428–30, came
the formation of the Aztec Triple Alliance between the city-states of
Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, neighbors in the Basin of Mexico. The
Triple Alliance remained the core of what is generally called the Aztec
empire, ruled by nine kings of Tenochtitlán dynasties during the ninety years
up to the arrival of the Spanish in 1519. This young empire had emerged in a
region of small city-states with a typical radius of about ten kilometers; some
were probably republics with representative institutions (perhaps dominated
by oligarchies), but most were monarchies, the ruler elected by four leading
nobles who chose as kings men who were close kin of the previous ruler,
who were proven warriors but not too old for campaigning, and who had
daughters who could be married to other rulers to cement alliances. Marriage
alliances and tribute were sometimes chosen in preference to war. Few
successions seem to have been disputed. In this respect, the political system
worked. Nobility was achieved by prowess in war. The cities warred
sporadically with their neighbors, sometimes for conquest, but more often to
elicit homage from tributary cities—a predominantly indirect form of
empire. Alliances between cities to deter more aggressive groups were also
common. The Basin of Mexico was unusually fertile, supporting a dense
population; its great lakes also permitted quicker communication by water
than by land and made possible both a larger heartland of empire and a
larger army than the Triple Alliance’s rivals’.2 Numerical superiority was
always their main military weapon.
Led by the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán, the Alliance defeated many city-
states, replacing their rulers, raping their women, capturing their men, and
distributing estates and their workers to their own nobles and warriors. This
achieved their two main aims, to seize lands and labor and to worship the
gods by sacrificing captives. But with polities lying farther away, they relied
more on exacting tribute and corvée labor from cities that could otherwise
rule themselves. The Triple Alliance fielded a formidable army, its core
noble units well drilled, and all young men received military training. But
there was no standing army, and warriors had to be mobilized for each
campaign. All the Aztec kings engaged in aggressive war, and all but two
apparently expanded the empire. Ross Hassig states, “Politically peace did
not mean amiable coexistence, but subordination. In essence, for the Aztecs,
everyone was either a subordinate or a target. Peace was achieved by
hierarchy.”3 Though they suffered defeats, on balance the Triple Alliance
triumphed through the size of the forces they could field. War was rational
for them and highly calculative, but not for the defeated. It was zero-sum. In
the province of Morelos, although war and tribute exactions had a positive
effect on textile production (of uniforms), and perhaps on agricultural
productivity, they lowered general living standards. Inequality widened,
given the generosity of tribute given by rulers to their warrior nobles.4
According to the norms of the region, rulers needed a casus belli to
justify mobilizing their army. They could always find one—maltreatment of
their ambassadors or merchants (often used as spies), refusal of an imperial
request, balking at paying agreed-on tribute, maltreatment of an Aztec bride
—or, indeed, any perceived slight or insult. The Aztec ruler would then
mobilize, summon his allies, each of whom would march separately to an
agreed-on spot on the enemy’s border, and they would join together in battle,
each contingent fighting separately under its own lord, all of whom were
issuing commands in their own varied languages. The army, though very
large, could not have been very well coordinated.
The Aztecs spared those who quickly surrendered, contenting
themselves with tribute.5 They exacted it from over four hundred cities as
both regular payments and as extras destined for special needs, such as war
or monument building. Some of these cities would in turn exact tribute from
other cities. Rulers had to swear allegiance, pay tribute and corvée labor, and
provide levies for Aztec wars in their vicinity. The clients could retain their
political autonomy if loyal. If not, they would be massacred and replaced by
men chosen from among the defeated ruler’s kin, who would be married to
an Aztec princess to strengthen their loyalty. This economized on military
resources, and garrisons were stationed only in insecure areas and at the
locals’ expense. In a continent lacking the wheel and draft animals, logistical
difficulties blocked more direct rule. But the Aztecs were skilled at what
they could do.
There was almost no attempt to acculturate subjugated peoples. They
did not become “Aztecs” but retained their existing identities, gods,
languages, and military levies. Exacting regular tribute and levies reinforced
and routinized subordination, encouraging Aztec rulers to keep on going to
war. This was of course resented by client rulers. They grumbled and were
intermittently rebellious, but usually they complied, as the Aztecs remained
strong and won their wars. Rival city-states always existed just outside the
borders of empire. To dominate the central valley required making wars
elsewhere. They knew they had to extract material rewards for their
followers and clients. Polygynous marriages ensured that royal families and
their demands got bigger, and the dangers of royal factionalism grew.6 Only
victories would cement the ruler’s reputation and his followers’ loyalty.
Since men would follow a successful leader, conquerors were trapped by
their own success, compelled to continue conquests by a mixture of
Durkheim’s notion of the “malady of infinite aspiration,” the need to keep on
rewarding followers and kin rivals, and fear that the ambitious militarism
they had cultivated might produce threatening kin rivals should their
conquests end.
Power was legitimated through intense and aesthetic religious rituals.
The core of solidarity in each city was provided by religious ceremonies in
which all social classes repeatedly performed rituals. War itself was
ritualized. Aztec warriors in battle dressed and were armed according to their
noble rank, which was determined by how many prisoners they had taken in
previous battles. The Spanish soldiers had never before seen enemies doing
ritual dances as they advanced into battle, decked out in bright colors,
covered with paint, jewelry, feathers, elaborate headdresses and hair styles,
some resembling jaguars, eagles, or other creatures with religious
significance. The warriors focused not only on killing enemy soldiers but
also on wounding and capturing them, for captives were sacrificed to the
gods, which provided spectacular ceremonial and political proof of Aztec
dominance and conferred fame and visible symbols of achievement on the
captor. In attack the aim was to seize a city’s marketplace and destroy and
burn its main temple. The defenders lost heart as their god fell to a more
powerful deity. The main symbol of conquest was a burning temple
—“victory in symbol and defeat in fact.”7
The Spanish were appalled by the savagery of one Aztec war ritual.
Aztecs had inherited from other peoples a belief that the sun god needed to
drink human blood to survive. If he died, darkness would envelop the earth
and all life would end. The only reliable source of quantities of blood were
prisoners of war. So prisoners were delivered to the gods by having their
beating hearts ripped out, their blood spilling out over the temple steps in the
presence of the people. A new ruler had to deliver larger numbers to show he
was approved by the gods. This gruesome militarism was baked in to Aztec
culture and institutions. Cases date from at least 1199 until the ceremonies
seen by the Spanish in 1519. Camilla Townsend says that Nahuatl memoirs
reveal ceremonies conducted in an atmosphere of reverence, not savagery,
yet this indicates just how baked in savagery was.8 Of course, the Spanish
were also appalling toward native peoples who resisted them.9 These were
rival ghastly forms of rationality.
The Aztecs also fought a more limited and regulated form of war called
“flower war.”10 When conflict occurred with a city-state alliance considered
by the Aztecs to be of relatively equal power, like the Tlaxcala, the two sides
might agree to send out an equal number of warriors drawn from their elite
noble units to an agreed-on battlefield. These warriors would engage in
combat but seek to wound and capture an opponent, not to kill him—rather
like Roman gladiators, except that some of the captives were later sacrificed
to the sun god. It was a way of establishing relative dominance without
much actual killing. It was also an opportunity to train men and to deploy
one’s main force elsewhere, without risking attack from this enemy. One
flower war supposedly lasted eight years, but these wars could escalate into
an intermediate form of combat that involved commoners who could be
captured and sacrificed, as would happen to captives of all ranks in full-scale
wars.
In 1519–21 the Aztecs met their match. When confronted by the
conquistadores, they proved inferior in tactics and weaponry. Their open
infantry formation, permitting each soldier space to fight independently,
could be broken up by the close-order Spanish tercio formation, which
mixed together pikes, swords, crossbows, and muskets, supported by
artillery and cavalry. By that time cavalry was a declining force in European
warfare, but Spanish horses proved intimidating in open terrain in a
continent without horses. Cavalry turned Aztec retreat into carnage.
Firearms and crossbows were superior to the arrow and dart projectiles of
the Aztecs, and Spanish steel armor and weapons were superior to Aztec
thick cloth armor and wooden weapons tipped with obsidian.11 But this was
not enough to secure victory. The Aztecs adapted, focusing on ambushes in
rocky or forested terrain unsuitable for horses, developing longer spears, and
ducking and weaving when they saw that bullets came in straight lines. The
Spanish were but few, massively outnumbered. They could break up enemy
attacks and inflict heavy casualties but not press home conquest. They could
add greater unity and clarity of purpose. When the Spanish arrived, the
indigenous peoples argued about what to make of them, but they thought
they were too few to effect conquest. In contrast, the Spanish knew exactly
what their purpose was: to seize gold, silver, and land.
Yet the major Aztec weakness was political: lack of control over allies
and neutrals.12 Ironically, Moctezuma was embarking on an attempt to
control captured cities through governors and garrisons when the Spanish
arrived.13 The Aztec system worked well as long as the Triple Alliance
remained more powerful than any local rival. But once the Spanish revealed
military superiorities, discontented clients and rivals saw their opportunity to
overthrow their oppressive overlords. This was especially true of the
Tlaxcala, long rivals of the Aztecs and still independent but impoverished.
Like some other city-states, they had more representative political
institutions, and we know that the issue of whether to fight or ally with the
Spaniards was hotly debated in them.14 The clincher was probably when
Hernán Cortés promised them an equal share of the booty. Their native
allies, including Tlaxcala’s army of 20,000, gave the Spanish equal numbers
in battle and the means to effect conquest. But the Tlaxcala had made a pact
with the devil.
Moctezuma, the Aztec leader, was first puzzled by the Spanish; he then
seemed to realize his own political weakness, which might explain his not
fighting in 1519. His spies told him that more Spanish ships were arriving at
the coast, and it was now clear that his forces would suffer massive
casualties even if they managed to achieve victory. He suspected this would
destroy his reputation as a war leader, and he and perhaps the empire would
be overthrown.15 Without a show of defiance from their absolute ruler, other
Aztecs lacked the legitimacy to command prolonged resistance. Moctezuma
was reduced to offering the Spanish massive tribute if they would only
leave, underestimating their ambition and avarice. Military superiority and
defection of elites from native rulers became repeated features of European
conquests. Lacking the bonds of nationalism, local elites would assess the
strength of the Europeans compared to their local rulers and side with
whoever they thought would win. If some rulers sided with the Europeans,
victory would result.
There were also, however, contingencies evident during 1519–21. The
Spanish were almost destroyed as they tried to escape from Tenochtitlán on
La Noche Triste, June 30, 1520, when Cortés lost over six hundred Spaniards
and several thousand of his local allies. Then in September 1520 smallpox
struck the indigenous peoples who lacked the immunity possessed by
surviving adult Spaniards, which added to the locals’ sense of the
invincibility of the Spaniards.16 Epidemics of smallpox, measles, and
influenza, in addition to consequent famines, finished off Aztec morale and
resistance the next year. Among the victims of smallpox was Moctezuma’s
successor, Cuitláhuac, who had shown some fight. The native population
continued to decline, from perhaps 10 to 15 million in 1519 to just 1 million
a century later. So if not Cortés, then another Spaniard, and if not a Spaniard,
then an Englishman or a Frenchman. From now on, the Europeans were on a
murderous roll.
The Spanish conquest of the Maya was much slower, lasting over two
centuries, because of the fragmentation of Mayan polities in this period and
their ability to retreat into terrains to which the Spanish tercio and horses
were unsuited. Native allies were found, but European diseases again proved
the most lethal weapon, since the Maya had no immunity either.

Precolonial Empires: Inca

In South America we know less of the Inca since they had no written
language, but oral traditions, sagas, and early Spanish sources provide much
information. My principal sources have been María Rostworowski de Diez
Canseco, Terence D’Altroy, Gordon McEwan, and Fernando Cervantes.17
The Inca originated as a tiny kingdom in the twelfth-century Cuzco Basin,
defending themselves against the neighboring Chanca, then turning to
raiding and finally subordinating them. Then they expanded. Each ruler, the
Sapa Inca, was expected to expand the empire and demonstrate success in
war as evidence of his fitness to rule—a common motivation among
monarchs. But a more personal motivation for war resulted from the custom
of split inheritance in royal succession. A new Sapa Inca was elected by
those with most royal blood on both maternal and paternal lines, but he
inherited only the office, titles, and control of the army. His predecessor,
although deceased, retained all the wealth acquired during his reign, now
controlled and managed by his clan. So the new Sapa Inca was motivated
and able to make war.18
From about 1438 the Sapa Inca were defeating other peoples in battle,
notably the coastal kingdom of Chimor. Like the Aztecs farther north, they
were the most warlike people in their vicinity, yet they more often
intimidated opponents with a show of force that persuaded them to pay
homage without fighting. Inca generals usually gave opponents the choice of
homage or death, and sagas describe peoples succumbing without pitched
battle. Rostworowski says that in the early stages of expansion, Inca rulers
strengthened ties with allies and conquered populations through generous
gift giving—luxury and prestige items and women, cemented by generous
banquets.19 Rulers defeated in battle were executed, but their children might
be educated in Inca culture and then returned home as client rulers. Rulers
who paid homage remained in place. Rebellion was treated severely,
sometimes by extermination or deportation and seizure of lands and
property, accompanied by much raping. One man later remembered, “When
they resisted for a few days, the Incas put all of them, large and small, to the
knife, and when this was seen and understood by the rest of the people, they
submitted out of fear.”20 Some captives were thrown into dungeons with
wild animals, and any survivors were enslaved. At least six Inca rulers
conquered new territories, the principal conqueror being Túpac Inca
Yupanqui. Opponents generally had smaller armies, were less well-prepared
for battle, and were apparently unable to form balancing alliances among
themselves—another case of a core mopping up its periphery.
Elaborate religious ceremonies were held before battle. The army was
predominantly subject peoples, each serving under its own lord, following
orders in its distinct language, although a small elite force, at first of pure-
blood Inca, was developed. Armies can have been only loosely organized,
and the main tactic seems to have been to overawe the enemy with the sheer
size of a force, like the Aztecs. Scholars estimate them at between 35,000
and 140,000, sometimes comprising several armies in the field at once.21
Most generals were of royal Inca blood, which made rulers wary they might
challenge their own power. They did coup-proofing by executing overly
successful generals and adding supposedly more loyal ethnic groups to the
elite force. Wars of succession involved rival half brothers intermittently
claiming the throne.22
The Inca had a somewhat indirect empire, yet there was a formal
administrative hierarchy, consisting of the Sapa Inca; his council, composed
of royal family members and a high priest at the summit; then the governors
of the “four quarters” of the empire, each divided into provinces, and then
into a decimal structure of local offices. This state could collect taxes,
organize corvée labor, and conduct censuses, but it is unclear how uniform it
was, since most administration was in the hands of regional and local nobles.
But they did have a major communications advantage: a magnificent road
system covering the long spine of their empire.23 They were built by local
corvée labor, which alongside military service was the main form of
taxation. Two main roads ran north to south along an empire stretching over
five current Latin American countries, one down the coast, the other along
the Andean highlands. The roads stretched over a total length of about
40,000 kilometers (today’s French autoroute system covers only 12,000
kilometers). Roads were from one to four meters wide, often lined with low
walls. Some stretches were just tracks, but others were paved, and there were
many bridges, causeways, and stepped sections in hilly terrains. In the
absence of wheeled vehicles, steps were fine even for load-carrying llamas
and alpacas. In the empire’s core regions, stone terracing and hydraulic
works increased agricultural productivity. The quality of the surviving roads,
terraces, and buildings around Cuzco, constructed without cement or iron
tools, remains extraordinary even today.
The roads partially compensated for the dispersed political structure,
allowing swift movement of tribute payments, troops, and information. A
twenty-four-hour system of relay runners, each running 1.4 kilometers, could
deliver an oral message or a quipu (colored ropes knotted together in ways
that revealed information) at a rate of 240 kilometers a day. There were
lodging stations every 30 kilometers, as well as food stores for the troops so
that they did not have to live off the land (and so despoil it), and a network
of small fortresses. In some regions relatively few Inca-style stone buildings
have been found, suggesting an indirect empire there.24 Yet there was a
move toward a little more direct rule as military policy shifted toward
pacification, resettling restive peoples, replacing them with compliant
peoples, and fortifying frontier hot spots with garrisons.25 Tamara Bray
suggests the Inca used the roads “to subvert pre-existing relations of
exchange,” an attempt to steer local economies into the imperial model to
prevent local alliances among other peoples, while encouraging dependency
on the Inca state.26 The Inca fought fewer wars than the Aztecs, the
Mongols, or the Romans once their empire was established. D’Altroy says
that in the final decades of the empire, threats came largely from
insurrections, not invasions, as is suggested by the commitment of small
forces to the perimeter and large ones to internal garrisons and armies of
pacification.27
The Spanish invaders enjoyed similar superiority in weapons as they
had in Mexico, even as their numbers were smaller. They had two great
strokes of luck, however. First, Spanish epidemics arrived before the Spanish
did (having spread from Mexico and Central America), in 1528 killing off
the Inca ruler, his designated heir, and many others. It was not clear which of
two sons, the half brothers Atahualpa and Huáscar, should succeed. It was
agreed that one would take the north, the other the south. Both then built up
regionally based forces, and a civil war broke out, which ended in
Atahualpa’s victory in 1532, at the very moment when the Spanish under
Pizarro arrived—the second stroke of good luck. The two regionally
entrenched Inca factions still existed. Again, there was a difference between
the Spanish, driven by relentless avarice focused on the seizure of gold,
silver, and land, and the divisions and uncertainties of the Inca. Both Inca
factions tried to enlist Pizarro’s support, but he double-crossed them both.
Borrowing from Cortés’s tactics, he invited Atahualpa and his elite guard to
a feast in the Inca’s honor in the main square of Cajamarca. Suddenly, armed
Spanish soldiers emerged into the square and massacred the unarmed Inca.
Atahualpa was imprisoned and later murdered. Pizarro then kept his
successor hostage and killed the remaining leaders of both parties and finally
the last Sapa Inca. He had overthrown an Inca Empire with greater
administrative resources than the Aztecs without having fought a single
serious battle.28
Battles did come later, in 1536, when Spanish atrocities against native
populations provoked uprisings. But when the last two Sapa Inca were
killed, no alternative leader possessed the religiously sanctified prestige to
coordinate a major resistance movement. Rostworowski says the generous
gift giving of the Inca came back to bite them, for “as the state grew, so did
the number of lords who had to be satisfied.”29 New conquests generated
revenues but also demands from new clients expecting gifts. So Inca rulers
had to increase land and labor taxes. Yet this alienated those who were
already allies, and many rebelled, making the disastrous decision to ally with
Pizarro. Spanish-borne epidemics then finished off the resistance. Those
who fought on retreated to the jungles and mountains, but the end was now
inevitable.30 The Inca were destroyed in intermittent wars over a forty-year
period, their empire looted of its gold and silver, which was melted into
ingots for the conquistadores and the Holy Roman Emperor.
The Iberian conquest of Central and South American empires was
nearly inevitable, given their relative youth and political weakness. Spanish
weaponry and solidarity compared to the fissiparous tendencies of Aztec and
Inca alliances, the relentless avarice of waves of colonists against the
uncertain responses of the locals, and Europe’s stealth weapon, the epidemic,
added to the power inequality. The extraordinary monumental buildings,
mainly religious, of pre-Columbian America tend to disguise their relative
political and military weakness.
Few benefited from the conquest. Perhaps half the conquistadores
survived and got booty or land, whereas half died or left disappointed. Their
leaders became immensely rich, and the king of Spain, entitled to one-fifth
of all the spoils, did best of all. Since they created no wealth, destroyed
much, and killed hundreds of thousands, their gains were achieved entirely
at the expense of the indigenous peoples. Today, the conquistadores might be
charged as war criminals by international courts, but the papacy, greedy for
souls, thought otherwise. Popes organized treaties between the two Crowns
of Spain and Portugal to settle their territorial disputes, giving Brazil to
Portugal while Spain received the rest. This spared Latin America the inter-
imperial wars that scarred North America and Asia. The two sets of Catholic
colonists could exterminate the remaining indigenous peoples in peace,
although there was increasing criticism of their brutality within the Church
and in Spain that reached even up to the Holy Roman Emperor himself. As
elsewhere, moral qualms were felt afterward, too late.

Postcolonialism
“God is in heaven, the king is far away, and I give the orders here,” said the
colonists. As in North America, they grew discontented with their monarch,
encouraged by new liberal republican ideology. The Spanish Empire
collapsed when Napoleon invaded Spain and deposed the Bourbon king. In
the ensuing power vacuum in the Americas, Creole settlers (those born
there) tried to seize the royal administrations from the ruling peninsulares
(born in Spain), which led to a flurry of civil wars. In 1815 the Bourbons
were restored to the Spanish throne and Ferdinand VII declared himself an
absolute monarch. This drove most colonists toward demanding
independence, although some royalists held out until 1833. Ten Spanish
successor states were recognized as sovereign by the Church and by the two
relevant great powers, Great Britain and the United States. Two of these
states, Gran Colombia and the Central American Federation, soon broke up
into several smaller ones. In contrast, Portuguese Brazil stayed whole. The
Portuguese king had fled from Napoleon and now ruled in Brazil as emperor.
Excluding tiny British, French, and Dutch colonies, there were fifteen
sovereign states in Latin America. They are my subject matter.

Explanations of War in Postcolonial Latin America

All these countries except for Costa Rica and Panama possess armies, but
their main activity has not been to make interstate war. As Stanislav
Andreski noted: “Militarism has become introverted in the Latin American
republics: with few opportunities to fight for their countries, soldiers
remained preoccupied with internal politics and the search for personal and
collective advantage. Instead of inter-state wars there was military violence
within states, in domestic politics.”31 He argued that militaries were too
large for police functions and too small for interstate wars. Robert Holden
says the region contained much violence: “killing, maiming, and other acts
of destruction committed by rival caudillos, guerilla ‘liberators,’ death
squads, and state agents such as the armed forces and police.”32 Latin
Americans are not more pacific humans, but they have rarely launched
interstate wars. Correlates of War data since 1830 reveal only a few, mostly
in the nineteenth century, though these data exclude most of the wars waged
against indigenous peoples.33 By the mid-1880s the power of the indigenous
peoples had been destroyed, although the Caste Wars of Yucatán lingered on
into the twentieth century. Subsequent violence has been mostly provided by
civil wars between political factions, regions, and classes—and, recently,
drug-related gang wars.
 Comparing the region with other regions in the world between 1816
and 2007, CoW statistics provided by Douglas Lemke, Charles Gochman
and Zeev Maoz, and Tassio Franchi and his colleagues reveal the rate of
interstate warfare in Latin America to be three to five times less than in
Europe, and rather less than in Asia.34 David Mares says that after World
War II, Latin America was only “in the middle of the pack” for wars, since
its three wars put it above Africa’s two, Northeast Asia’s one, and North
America’s zero.35 But it is absurd to say that the United States has had no
wars, and Mares also separates Northeast from Southeast Asia, saying they
do not share similar security concerns. Not so. The Korean and Vietnam
wars were both confrontations between communist and capitalist
authoritarian regimes, both involving the United States, the Soviet Union,
China, South Korea, and France. They should be joined into a single
regional case. Correcting for these omissions leaves only postcolonial Africa
below Latin America in interstate wars—and Africa has had many more
civil wars. Most Latin American wars have also been waged by small armies
over short periods and at low cost, financed more by debt than by taxes,
having less effect on society. World Bank data for 2020 put Latin American
defense spending at 1.2% of GDP, half that of the global average of 2.4%.
Military spending has been on modernization, not a search for superiority
over one’s neighbors.36
Latin America has barely participated in wars outside the continent. In
World War II Brazilian soldiers did fight in Italy, suffering almost one
thousand casualties. When German U-boats sank Mexican ships in 1942,
President Manuel Ávila Camacho declared war, seeing this as the solution to
internal social divisions, but his attempt at conscription was met by social
unrest, and Mexico sent no soldiers. In 1944 it sent one air force squadron to
the Pacific theater. The pilots were low-cost national heroes, for the United
States supplied the planes and only five pilots died in action.37 Finally,
Colombia sent 5,100 soldiers to the Korean War, and 163 died there. For all
these reasons Latin American history is often described as a “Long Peace.”38
Mares prefers to call it a zone of “Violent Peace,” observing that a
simple dichotomy between war and peace neglects intermediate MIDs
ranging from mere bluster to use of force in smaller combats. Using CoW
data, Gochman and Maoz suggest that from 1816 to 1976 in the whole of the
Americas, including North America, there were 183 MIDs. But this figure
was much lower than Europe’s total of over 500.39 In the period 2002–10,
only Western Europe had fewer MIDs. Western Europe had zero, Latin
America fifteen, Central Europe thirty-five, and the Middle East, South Asia,
the Far East, and Africa all had forty or more.40 There were no Latin
American countries among the top-ten initiators of MIDs during the two
periods where we have data, 1816–1976 and 1993–2010.41 So I would not
agree with Mares unless he was also including civil and gang wars.
One-third of MIDs in the region have been border disputes and have
rarely been settled by one armed encounter.42 Until the 1980s, all Latin
American countries had unresolved minor border disputes, and these
sometimes triggered MIDs but rarely war.43 Most have now been settled.
Recent examples are a dispute between Nicaragua and Colombia over two
small islands, settled in 2012 by the International Court of Justice; a dispute
between Peru and Chile over maritime boundaries, settled by the ICJ in
2014; a dispute between Bolivia and Chile, settled by the ICJ in 2018; and a
dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua over the Isla Calero region,
settled by the ICJ in 2018. There has also been a dispute between Colombia
and Venezuela over Colombian guerillas operating from over the Venezuelan
border. Only the disagreement between Britain and Argentina over the
Falklands (Malvinas) brought war—a small, undeclared one—and has not
been settled. Jorge Dominguez and David Mares tersely summarize this:
“Territorial, boundary, and other disputes endure. Interstate conflict over
boundaries is relatively frequent. Disputes sometimes escalate to military
conflict because states recurrently employ low levels of force to shape
aspects of bilateral relations. Such escalation rarely reaches full-scale war.
Interstate war is infrequent.”44 So there are two main questions: Why were
there so few wars in Latin America, and why have there been Militarized
Interstate Disputes eventually resolved through diplomacy?

Previous Explanation
The most influential explanation of why there have been relatively few wars
is Miguel Centeno’s.45 He emphasizes the weakness of Latin American
compared to European states. He departs from the Tilly-Mann theory of the
development of the state in Europe. In the famous words of Tilly, “War
makes states and states make war.”46 Centeno says this barely happened in
Latin America. Since its states fought few wars, they remained too feeble to
fight more of them. They found it difficult to increase taxes for war, and they
leaked resources through corruption. “Simply put, Latin American states did
not have the organizational or ideological capacity to go to war with each
other.”47 Moreover, the dominant landowning class favored a weak state
unable to interfere with its power and wealth. He acknowledges two
exceptions: Chile and Paraguay have possessed coherent states and
militaries. So he stresses states’ domestic politics, not their geopolitical
relations, as IR theorists do.
He also perceives a lack of militarist ideology. After counting street
names, statues, memorials, and coinages, he says that, compared to North
America or Europe, their iconography “is much more focused on cultural
and scientific figures, pays less attention to political symbols, and lacks the
mythology of a people at arms uniting through sacrifice.”48 He adds class,
ethnic, and religious restraints, too. Racial-ethnic diversity within each
country generated a weak national identity that discouraged popular
mobilization for war. Between the peninsulares and Creoles at the top and
later white immigrants, and between those immigrants and ex-slaves, slaves,
and indigenous peoples, lay enormous gulfs that involved notions of
“civilization” as well as ethnicity and class. The elites had much more in
common with each other than they did with their populace. They had
Spanish or Portuguese blood, they were Catholic, and residents of all but one
state spoke Spanish. Of course, shared Catholicism had not prevented states
in medieval Europe from going to war.
His explanation is largely true. But does war require a strong state? One
need only consider oneself superior to the rival. Why should a weak state
with a ragtag, underequipped, undersupplied, incompetently led army not
attack another state it believed to be even feebler? Since most states are
overconfident about making war, a sense of relative weakness is rare. A
weak fiscal base did hinder lengthy war making. Any state can finance a
brief war, but if the tax base cannot be increased, then rulers must borrow to
continue a war, and debt can only mount up to when creditors doubt whether
they will be repaid. Then the war maker must negotiate. European militarism
had the advantage of going through a feudal stage of warfare, which called
on vassals who were largely self-financing. Then, when rulers perceived the
military superiority of mercenaries over vassals, they developed some state
capacity and more productive taxes, and there were plenty of mercenaries for
hire. There were neither vassals nor roving mercenaries in America. There
could be Latin American wars, but short ones.
Sebastián Mazzuca focuses on state capacity. He says the major states
of Europe were “born strong,” whereas weakness was a “birth defect” of
Latin American states. Yet the last chapter showed that European states had
also shared this birth defect, but some became much stronger, owing to a
militarism that swallowed up smaller states. In contrast, Latin Americans did
not swallow each other up. Mazzuca says that whereas European
development was “war-led,” Latin American was “trade-led.” Although
warrior rulers in Europe were able to eliminate peripheral patrimonial power
brokers, seen as rivals for the control of land and people, in trade-led Latin
America, to battle against peripheral power brokers might bring on civil war,
which would torpedo investment, production, and export-led growth.
Instead, rulers appeased the peripheries through promises of future shares in
economic expansion. There were three kinds of patrimonial factions, he
says, port interests, rival parties, and regional caudillos, all favoring fiscally
starved, “patronage machine” states, unable to fight wars for long. The
weakening of states was reinforced by a period of transnational free trade led
by external powers far more powerful than any in Latin America. So for him
the low rate of war was due to a distinctive balance of domestic class and
regional forces in an era of free trade, an argument made mostly in terms of
economic and political power relations.49
Geopolitical explanations are added by IR specialists. First, they say
interstate wars remained rare because Latin Americans were relatively
insulated from the wider international system and did not get embroiled in
wars not of their own choosing, unlike states elsewhere. Second, some argue
that interstate war became rare thanks to the deliberate creation of balances
of power in South America in the late nineteenth century. Robert Burr gives
as an example Chile, which, after defeating Peru and Bolivia in the War of
Confederation in 1841, sought to maintain a balance of power in its region
by an understanding with Argentina while also improving relations with
Brazil as insurance against a future conflict with Argentina.50 Chile also
strengthened relations with Ecuador, which was strategically located at the
rear of its traditional enemy, Peru. Chile even tried friendship with
Colombia. The other states made their own diplomatic moves—all insuring
themselves with defensive alliances against the possibility of war against
rivals. We will indeed see balancing against rulers seeking regional
hegemony. The question remains: Why did these often fail elsewhere and
lead to war, especially in Europe, but peace mostly endured in Latin
America? Third, IR theorists argue that international regional institutions
emerged in the nineteenth century and blossomed in the twentieth, fostering
peace and international mediation when wars broke out. Holsti says that
during the period 1820–1970, eight South American states used such
procedures to settle their disputes no fewer than 151 times.51 We have
glimpsed the importance of the ICJ in settling recent disputes. Europe was
also multistate, but its wars rarely ended with mediation or arbitration by
outsiders. But why did this happen more in Latin America?
Mares offers a modified Realist rational-choice explanation: force is
used when its costs are less than or equal to the costs acceptable to the
leader’s principal constituencies of support.52 The cost of using force is the
sum of the political-military strategy, the strategic balance, and the force
employed. The costs that the leader’s constituencies will accept are reduced
if the leader lacks accountability to them. Politicians consider employing
force only to meet the interests of their core constituencies. This stress on
domestic politics is uncommon among Realists. He argues that in the
twentieth century weaker states tended to precipitate wars and MIDs, usually
in response to domestic pressure. Mares also rejects several other IR
explanations.53 Neither power equality nor a preponderance of power
reduces the chances for war or serious crises. The balance of military power
was not a major factor in Latin America. U.S. hegemony or democracy or
authoritarianism cannot explain interstate war or peace here. They have
sometimes fueled war, sometimes restrained it, while democracies have
sometimes fought each other.54 Douglas Gibler says democracy is not the
underlying cause of peace. Rather, peace results from the stabilization of
borders, which also consolidates democracy.55
Many of these explanations make sense, but I will insert them into the
history and ecology of Latin America. First, the “tyranny of history” here
was that these children of two empires had inherited the entire space of the
subcontinent. This was already a multistate system. It was not like Europe,
where one or several core states could expand outward at the expense of
other peoples, in the process strengthening their states and armed forces. In a
formal sense the successor states filled up the whole of Latin America. There
was no terra nullius between them. Expansion here was possible within each
state’s boundaries, however, over jungle or mountainous or desert terrain
where the settlers had not penetrated, or over indigenous settled peoples who
after the initial conquest phase were displaced by the settlers. Second, these
states had mostly inherited the boundaries of either the Portuguese Empire or
a former Spanish viceroyalty, or audiencia (a law court jurisdiction), or caja
(a treasury district). Regina Grafe and Maria Irigoin stress the cajas, noting,
“The break-up of the empire occurred along the lines of territories where the
regional treasuries were located.”56 Thus, most of the successor states
already had functioning if rudimentary administrative, judicial, or fiscal
systems over their territories, though sometimes these had fuzzy borders.
Even new republics like Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia, which had not
been distinct viceroyalties, had been distinct cajas or audiencias. Mazucca
rejects such continuity by focusing only on the level of the viceroyalties.57
Only Central America, which fragmented into small republics, had not been
a viceroyalty, caja, or audiencia.58 The others were literally “successor
states” with administrative continuity and legitimacy, while the boundaries
between the Brazilian and the Spanish empires had been set by papal
mediation centuries earlier.
Thus, states accepted in principle the legal doctrine of uti possidetis,
Latin for “as you possess”—new states should retain the same borders as
preceding ones. All rulers benefited from this, since it confirmed their
sovereignty over mountainous, jungle, or savanna areas in which they had no
real presence. The political ecology of the region was one of center and
periphery within each state rather than between them, and so expansion
required lesser states, taxes, and armies. David Carter and H. E. Goemans
find across the world that borders inherited from previous administrations
are less often disputed.59 From 1955 uti possidetis became a globally
accepted norm.60 It could not entirely prevent border disputes here. Though
Spanish viceroyalties had been split up during the Wars of Independence,
there were occasional attempts to re-create them whole, citing a rival uti
possidetis, though these were successfully resisted by others. In sparsely
settled regions without apparent wealth, like the Amazon basin and the
Atacama Desert on the Pacific Coast, precise boundaries had seemed
unnecessary before independence, and lines drawn vaguely on a map by the
Spanish or Portuguese Crown were easily disputable. Moreover, settlers in
border zones tended to arrive from whichever country had the most
accessible routes there, so that in some remote areas a claim to settlement
might rival the old imperial maps. So there were border disputes.
 Many studies show that territorial disputes are more difficult to resolve,
more likely to be repeated, and more prone to incur fatalities than other types
of issues. Control over territory is the heart of political power, and claims
bring an emotional, even sacred, element of sovereignty. In Latin America
the sovereignty of each state in its core areas was recognized, and so the
elimination of states through wars of conquest never happened, nor was it
aimed at—which was so different from Europe and China. This was why
wars were limited and why even the most decisive war defeat, suffered by
Paraguay, did not result in its elimination.
The social ecology of settlement also meant that few population centers
lay close to the disputed borders, and so deeply entrenched rival settler
communities were rare. Ecology also had military consequences. If a region
did become disputed, the rival countries would try to establish a military
presence there—a fort or a few huts with barbed wire and a flagpole. Each
rival would send out patrols to probe the other’s installations. Sometimes
these patrols would collide, shooting and perhaps causing a casualty or two.
Such an MID incident might be exaggerated back in the capital, perhaps
escalating further, occasionally to war. On the other hand, ecology and
demography made the military logistics of most cross-border incursions
difficult and costly. Early “imperial” projects for a Gran Colombia and for a
single Central American Republic were defeated more by obdurate ecology
than force of arms. Wars involved small forces operating over large,
underpopulated areas—armies were like fleas crawling over elephants, says
Robert Scheina.61 A peace settlement might confer territories on one party,
but ruling there was difficult. A peace treaty might be unraveled by new
population movements, discoveries of economic resources, or the
construction of new frontier posts. This made major wars less likely but
disputes involving MIDs more likely. Social ecology is important in
explaining the Latin American puzzle.
New settlements by the borders were few because there was ample land
for settlers well inside borders. In medieval Europe and early Spring and
Autumn China, a small military expedition and war abroad could be
immediately followed by “planting” settlers among less well-developed
peoples living there. But here settlers could find new estates or trading
opportunities within the country, either on virgin or on Indian land. When in
the nineteenth century the republics’ small forces got modern rifles and the
Indians did not, wars of domestic expansion yielded easy pickings for
settlers. Interior areas could be pacified without great cost, and states
attempting the conquest of indigenous peoples were generally given a free
hand by their neighbors. External meddling was rare, and arming Indians
was undesirable since it might threaten all whites.62 It was different for
political disputes among whites, which attracted much neighborly
interference since this was much cheaper than war. It might lead to MIDs if
not war.
Minnow states were not swallowed up. Though Brazil’s size dwarfed
the former Spanish republics, much of it was thinly populated jungle and
mountain. Argentina had a large population and great potential resources,
but it was riven by interprovincial conflicts. Chile was more well-developed,
although it was initially quite small, and both it and even smaller Paraguay
developed the most cohesive states and militaries. Mexico was a giant, but
Britain and the United States would not permit it to swallow up the minnow
states to its south. For reasons of trade, these two great powers had an
interest in maintaining relative peace.

The Cases of War Post-1833

With these general explanations in mind, I turn to the interstate wars fought
after 1833. I exclude defensive wars waged against American, Spanish, and
French invasions, but I do include the Falklands War. The total number is
fifteen, although four do not meet the CoW standard of one thousand battle
deaths. For lack of evidence, I do not include wars fought by colonists
against indigenous peoples, nor do I include most civil wars, although some
affected interstate wars, as we shall see. Interstate wars were all fought
between neighbors. I begin with the two main regions that were most
strategic or resource-rich. In the Río de la Plata system, large populations
lived not far from disputed borderlands, some containing valuable resources
or straddling major communications routes. The sparsely settled central
Pacific Coast had some strategic importance for international trade and was
found in the mid-nineteenth century to contain valuable mineral resources.
There seemed to be opportunity for economic profit through conquest of
border territory in these two regions, and the biggest wars occurred there.

The Platine War, 1851–1852

This six-month conflict was fought between the Argentine Confederation
and Brazil, which was supported by two dissident Argentine provinces. The
war had both geopolitical and economic causes. It was part of a long-running
struggle between Argentina and Brazil for influence over Uruguay and
Paraguay. It was also a struggle for control of the Río de la Plata system,
which fed into the Atlantic Ocean, with its valuable trade routes. Brazil had
lost some territories in early postcolonial encounters, and revisionism
flourished among Brazilian elites. Uruguay had been created by British
mediation as a buffer state to help ease their conflicts, but Uruguay had
needed a joint Anglo-French naval blockade of Buenos Aires during 1845–
50 to protect it from the aggressive Argentine president Juan Manuel de
Rosas. This was the only substantial British military intervention in Latin
America until 1982. Rosas was backing the Uruguayan Blanco party, while
Brazil’s Emperor Pedro II backed the rival Colorados—rival attempts at
regime change or strengthening. Rosas had strengthened the Argentine
Confederation’s central state against the peripheries, becoming an
authoritarian ruler and building up a cult of personality. It was believed he
sought dominance over most of the former Spanish viceroyalty of the Río de
la Plata. This might ultimately mean claiming control over Uruguay,
Paraguay, and even bits of Bolivia and Brazil. Brazil was provoked by
Argentine expansion amid rival interpretations of uti possidetis, for borders
were not entirely clear here.
After debates in the Brazilian cabinet and parliament, the government
decided to send its small professional army, backed by its more powerful
navy, into battle. In early 1851 it helped finance two Argentine breakaway
provinces and the opposition Colorado Party in Uruguay, and it signed
defensive alliances with Paraguay and Bolivia. Provoked, Rosas struck out.
Claiming self-defense, he declared war on Brazil. He had actually provoked
the formation of the alliance against him. Valuable riverine territory of
uncertain ownership fueled conflict, but it was fired up by a high-risk
president with ambitious goals.
A Brazilian force invaded Uruguay. After a series of short skirmishes,
there was a decisive battle with Argentine forces at Caseros between armies
of about 26,000 men on each side. Losses of about 2,000 dead or wounded
were afterward declared, two-thirds of them Argentines. Brazil secured
victory and marched its army through Buenos Aires in triumph, which
humiliation was hardly likely to secure peace in the future. Victory had
confirmed the independence of Paraguay and Uruguay, prevented a planned
Argentine invasion of Brazil, and weakened the Argentine Confederation.
Brazil then enjoyed more internal stability and economic growth. But
Uruguay’s civil strife continued, inviting foreign interference short of war.
Paying small subsidies to a friendly faction there was much cheaper than
war. Argentina also became more united in the early 1860s, followed by a
consequent growth of revisionism. Paraguay also grew stronger along the
river system, sometimes harassing Brazilian shipping. This might not seem a
stable balance of power, but peace lasted for twelve years.

War of the Triple Alliance, 1864–1870

This was by far the longest and bloodiest war occurring in Latin America. It
pitted an alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against Paraguay. The
Río de la Plata system continued to cause armed conflict; it was
underpopulated and inadequately mapped but a key strategic and economic
resource. Tension rose in the early 1860s, again precipitated by civil strife in
Uruguay. In 1863 Argentina aided a small invading army of Uruguayan
dissidents trying to install the opposition Colorado Party in power, while
Paraguay supported the Blanco Party government—a regime-change
skirmish. Paraguay protested the invasion, and Argentina implausibly denied
all knowledge. The next year Brazil joined in the invasion, partly to protect
Brazilian trade along the rivers. The Blanco regime fell. Paraguay threatened
war, but Brazil ignored this. A secret treaty between the allies claimed that
“the peace, safety, and well-being of their respective nations is impossible
while the present Government of Paraguay exists.” News of their deal leaked
out, fueling Paraguayan fury.
Thomas Whigham identifies four principal causes of the war. First,
disputed thinly populated but strategically important borders had long been
causing MIDs. Second, the political ambitions and nationalisms of
Bartolomé Mitre of Argentina and Dom Pedro II of Brazil clashed; both
claimed territories and sought more central state powers against peripheral
political factions demanding regional autonomy. Third, Uruguay’s
government remained unstable, presenting a security dilemma in which
escalation was not in armaments but in foreign meddling. Fourth, like Chris
Leuchars and Peter Henderson, Whigham lays most of the blame on
Paraguay’s president Francisco Solano López.63
 Paraguay was ethnically quite homogeneous, and its isolationist
policies had cultivated a strong sense of nationhood, the main exception to
Centeno’s argument that ethnic diversity weakened Latin American states
and Mazzuca’s argument that peripheral factions weakened them. The
indigenous population was largely Guarani-speaking, which the regime
recognized as a second national language; it also treated the Guarani culture
sympathetically. In this sense Paraguay was enlightened. It also had a
powerful presidency. President Carlos Antonio López (1841–62) had
sponsored statist development centered on protectionism, infrastructure
projects, and conscription. He saber-rattled against Argentina and Brazil but
avoided war. But in 1862 he transferred the presidency to his more
aggressive son, Francisco Solano López.
In December 1864 Solano López declared war and invaded the Mato
Grosso region of Brazil. In March 1865, when Argentina refused his request
to march through its territory in order to reach Uruguay, he invaded
Argentina as well. The first year of the war went well for Paraguay. The
armies of Brazil and Argentina were small and poorly organized. Uruguay
had no professional army. In contrast, Paraguay was more militarized,
employing near-universal conscription. Whigham estimates that Solano
López could count on conscript armies totaling one-third of the Paraguayan
male population. He was modernizing them with British assistance, and he
had built a chain of forts along the river system. Paraguay punched well
above its weight in numbers. Yet it decisively lost the war, as was
predictable if the war lasted long, given the disparity in resources between
the two sides. He thought this was a window of opportunity, but it soon
closed. The alliance’s population of 11 million dwarfed the 300,000 to
400,000 Paraguayans. Although Solano López could keep on drafting new
recruits without recourse to debt, finally conscripting prepubescent boys, this
eventually harmed the productivity of the labor force. In a war of attrition
Brazil could draft more, at no great loss to the economy. Brazilian casualties
as a proportion of national population were not high because of the
enormous size of its population. Argentina’s were not high because its
commitment to the war was low. But estimates of Paraguayan casualties,
though much disputed, are somewhere between 15 and 45 percent of its total
prewar population. Bear Braumoeller gives a death rate of 70 percent of the
adult male population, which is at the high end of the possible. In
proportional terms, this would make it the deadliest war in the world in the
entire period since 1816, more deadly than either world war.64
Fazal sees Paraguay as “a fairly standard instance of a buffer state”
having near-death inflicted on it.65 But Paraguay was no victim buffer state.
Its fate was self-inflicted through its ruler’s irrational level of aggression. An
overconfident president ordered his army and navy, initially superior, to
attack all the surrounding powers at once. Solano López overestimated
Paraguay’s military power and underestimated Brazil’s, once mobilized. He
might have won a short war, but not a long one, although he could keep on
fighting because of large-scale conscription. He had reason to fear the
Brazilian and Argentinian rulers, but the traditional Paraguayan diplomacy
of playing one against the other could have continued. His aggressive
impulses got the better of him. He mistakenly thought Argentina would
remain neutral in a war between Paraguay and Brazil even if Paraguayan
soldiers marched into Argentine territory, which brought unacceptable
dishonor to its rulers. He also denied any autonomy to his senior officers in
the field and executed many of his own soldiers. He was utterly reckless in
fighting to the bitter end rather than shifting to negotiations after repeated
defeats made clear the writing on the wall.
Brazil did most of the alliance’s fighting. Yet the war was unpopular in
Brazil, and its army was composed largely of ex-slaves, some bought by the
government from their owners, others promised land after the war.
Paraguayan conscripts showed tenacity, but defeat was already certain when
Solano López was tracked down and killed.66 Nationalistic theories claiming
the hand of Britain was everywhere have been discredited. The foreign
powers favored peace (for trade) and stood aside, apart from giving loans to
whoever seemed likely to repay them.67 They were not interested in direct
intervention, even in mere gunboat diplomacy.
Paraguay’s national output was halved, and the country had to cede
one-third of its territory and all its claims in disputed areas. That it was not
wiped off the map was due to the victors not trusting each other—a very
Realist sentiment. This was the closest the continent came to the elimination
of a state, common in European, Chinese, and Japanese history. But
Paraguay was reduced to a buffer state, alongside Uruguay. There was one
sweetener. Paraguay was given the desolate Chaco Boreal region by the
arbitrator, U.S. president Rutherford Hayes. Argentina and Brazil became
indebted by the war, but merchants and planters had benefited, as had
Buenos Aires centralizers against those favoring provincial autonomy. In
Brazil victory enabled the first stirrings of nationalism to emerge, and it
strengthened the Brazilian military, which prepared the way for its coup
deposing the emperor in 1889, when a republic was established. A war of
this magnitude is bound to effect major changes among the participants.
Concludes Leslie Bethell:

Solano López’s reckless actions brought about the very thing that
most threatened the security, even the existence, of his country: a
union of his two powerful neighbours. . . . Neither Brazil nor
Argentina had a quarrel with Paraguay sufficient to justify going to
war. Neither wished nor planned for war with Paraguay. There was
no popular demand or support for war; indeed, the war proved to
be generally unpopular in both countries, especially Argentina. At
the same time little effort was made to avoid war. The need to
defend themselves against Paraguayan aggression . . . offered both
Brazil and Argentina not only an opportunity to settle their
differences with Paraguay over territory and river navigation but
also to punish and weaken, perhaps destroy, a troublesome,
emerging (expansionist?) power in their region.68

Some wars, including this one, involve a human folly that confounds
rationality. Why did Solano López aggress, and why did he continue fighting
long after defeat was inevitable? I note a similarity between cases where
leaders make overaggressive moves and then keep on fighting when defeat
seems inevitable, as in Japan and Germany in the 1940s. Leaders imprisoned
themselves inside an ideology and political institutions that induced the
belief that their soldiers would be superior in martial spirit to those of the
enemy. So the leaders cannot calculate the balance of potential goal
achievement versus the economic costs and military fortunes of war. They
go recklessly to their doom, as their behavior becomes erratic,
psychologically disturbed, and pathologically destructive to self and the
dwindling loyalists around them. Solano López’s mental descent amid the
desperate degeneration of his remaining few troops accompanied by a mob
of refugees is vividly and horrifically depicted in Whigham’s last chapters.69
The participants learned a lesson from this terrible war: even the
communications system of the Río de la Plata was not worth fighting for
again. Tensions were in future followed by rhetoric, and sometimes MIDs,
but then defused by negotiations and eventually settlement.

The War of Confederation, 1836–1839

Parts of the central Pacific coast had unclear colonial boundaries. The
Spanish Crown had not bothered to clarify administrative boundaries in such
barren and sparsely inhabited deserts. But for the successor republics,
boundary issues emerged. Separatism in the south of Peru, northern Bolivia,
and Chile made neighborly interference for regime change possible.
Disputes here were initially about control of coastal maritime trade and the
tariffs that this brought. But the so-called tariff wars between Chile and Peru
did not flare up into fighting.
The Bolivian regime seized a time of civil war in Peru to intervene and
unite the two countries, claiming the legitimacy that they had both been in
the same Spanish viceroyalty. This confederation was potentially the most
powerful state on the Pacific coast, threatening the interests of Chile and
Argentina. Again, a regional hegemony threatened. Diego Portales, the
dominant figure in the Chilean government, declared: “The Confederation
must disappear forever from the American stage. We must dominate forever
in the Pacific.”70 So he threatened military action, and, as intended, this
produced negotiations, mediated by Mexico. Agreement on trade and tariffs
emerged, but Portales’s demand that the confederation be dissolved was
unacceptable to Bolivia. Agreement was then thwarted by a military revolt in
Chile in which Portales was murdered. Though the rebels were defeated,
many believed Peru had financed them. A Chilean war party strengthened.
Interstate war in Latin America again involved attempted regime change in a
neighbor’s domestic politics. This was the pretext for Chile to declare war.
The Bolivian-Peruvian Confederation had been recognized by Britain,
France, and the United States, but they were ignored. Argentina and Ecuador
initially remained neutral. But when the confederation interfered in
Argentine internal politics, Argentina declared war as well. The
confederation defeated the small Argentine army sent against it, but after
fluctuating fortunes, Chilean forces were victorious at the Battle of Yungay
in 1839, and the confederation was dissolved. There were about 8,000 total
casualties in this war; the final decisive battle, between forces each about
6,000 strong, contributed almost 3,000 casualties, mostly Bolivian and
Peruvian.
This was not massive warfare, and it did not attract much popular
support, although when confederation forces supposedly committed
atrocities in Chile, Chileans rallied ’round the flag. But the people were
mostly absent from Chilean politics, excluded by an oligarchy that
controlled elections.71 From the 1830s expanding foreign trade was blending
Chilean merchants and mine and land owners into a ruling class that agreed
on the interests of the country and themselves. Family connections
strengthened elite cohesion in a small country, which, given greater resolve
and commitment of resources, was an advantage in war. Chile was the
second exceptional case noted by Centeno and Mazzuca, where at least at
the level of dominant classes there was some sense of “national”
homogeneity. This was the only war in Latin America in which a state—a
new, fragile confederation—was dismantled by war.

The War of the Pacific, 1879–1883

The second world war was bigger, causing nearly 12,000 military deaths.
Geopolitics was here dominated by economic interests.72 In 1842 valuable
deposits of guano fertilizer were found along the border area disputed by
Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. MID disputes dragged on for some time without
escalating to war, but the rivalry became more intense with the discovery in
the early 1860s of nitrate deposits, and then of silver. But in 1864–66 a
Spanish fleet bombarded coastal towns in Peru, Chile, and Bolivia. The
Spanish fortuitously produced an alliance among the three. In two small
naval battles two hundred to four hundred sailors were killed before the
Spanish withdrew. Bolivia and Chile signed a treaty in 1866, each
renouncing some of its territorial and mining claims. They agreed to split the
proceeds from guano deposits and taxes on mineral resources.
Chile developed the more effective government and capitalist economy,
centered on a mining-industrial complex. Its revenue enabled development
programs and military expenses. In response to mining pressure, the Chilean
government sought to reinterpret the treaty to justify territorial expansion. In
1873 Peru and Bolivia formed a countering alliance, but a Chile-Bolivia
treaty appeared to settle their differences. MID incidents arose and then
dissipated. But in 1878 Bolivian authorities tried to extract more taxes from
foreign mining companies, while Peru’s impoverished government
nationalized Chilean-owned mines. These provocations caused Chilean
hawks to demand war to protect mining interests, and mutual
miscalculations made war probable. Bolivia’s dictator thought Chile was
focused on possible Argentine aggression and so would not fight, while
Peru’s president decided to honor his country’s not-so-secret military
alliance with Bolivia, blundering into war ill-prepared. Army sizes grew to
about 25,000 on each side, but those mobilized into battle were much fewer.
They had modern weapons but obsolete tactics of mass infantry assaults, and
they lacked logistical support. The Chileans had better-trained officers and
NCOs, but their victory resulted mostly from superior civil infrastructures
and political instability in Peru and Bolivia.73
The peace treaty of 1883 was dictated by Chile, and it allowed Chile to
annex one Bolivian and three Peruvian provinces—and their nitrate deposits.
Nine of the fourteen articles in the treaty referred to either guano or nitrates.
Chile’s acquisition of the deposits became the central source of income for
the state, strengthening its armed forces and its political oligarchy—just as
defeat weakened the Peruvian and Bolivian states. Chile was now the
dominant Pacific power. Since the other powers were beset by internal
disorder, they mounted no threat, and Chilean leaders relaxed into
cultivating its balance-of-power system.74
The peace treaty stipulated that Chile organize a plebiscite after ten
years in two of the provinces taken. Chile failed to do this, but subsequent
MID episodes brought in mediation by the United States in 1929, which
awarded one province to Peru, the other to Chile, and fixed all land border
disputes. Maritime boundaries were not settled, and there were two further
MID incidents followed by negotiations. In the Santiago Declaration of
1952, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru agreed to a maritime boundary limit of 320
kilometers offshore, but only in 2014 did the ICJ finalize a maritime
settlement. Another group of Latin Americans learned through experience of
unproductive wars that disputes are better settled through negotiation.

Ecuadoran-Colombian War (War of the Cauca), 1863

Both Ecuador and Colombia had been part of the Spanish viceroyalty of
New Granada and the early successor Gran Colombia state. Border disputes
thrived on vague Spanish maps in sparsely populated areas. In 1861 the
conservative Gabriel García Moreno became an activist president of
Ecuador, seeking to lessen class, regional, and language disputes by
conferring more power on the Catholic Church. This alienated liberals, who
saw the Church as an obstacle to liberty and progress. Similar conflicts had
riven Colombia, and after a civil war there, the liberal Tomás Cipriano de
Mosquera became president and immediately declared he would restore
Gran Colombia and annex Venezuela and Ecuador. Venezuela’s well-armed
president ignored this, but weaker Ecuador was threatened as Mosquera
urged Ecuadoran liberals to overthrow García Moreno and join the Gran
Colombia project. When nothing happened, Mosquera ordered his army to
the frontier. García Moreno responded by ordering his army to invade
Colombia. This sequence of provocative actions by two aggressive
presidents revealed systematic miscalculation of one another’s likely
response. The war was swiftly ended at the Battle of Cuaspad when about
4,000 Colombians routed 6,000 Ecuadoran invaders, killing or wounding
about 1,500 of them. Colombian losses are unknown.
Colombian forces then invaded Ecuador, but international pressure
brought an armistice welcomed by the two tired sides. International
negotiations led to an agreement to return to the prewar status quo. Meddling
in each other’s internal conflicts—regime change—had been the major
cause. This was the last war between the countries. Border disputes also
involving Peru eventually resulted in a treaty of 1922 that deprived Ecuador
of access to the Amazon. Ecuador was a resentful loser but, being weak,
could not resist. A historian lamented that Ecuador was like Christ at
Calvary, crucified between two thieves.75 From 1950 Colombia was
embroiled in civil wars and had no interest in external conflict.

Central American Wars, 1876, 1885, 1906–1907

These brief, connected episodes were provoked by attempts to reestablish
the early Central American Federation, which were countered by balancing
alliances among the other states. Once again, factional disputes within a
country sparked military action for regime change. In 1876 Guatemala
invaded Honduras in support of liberal rebels there, seeking to overthrow a
conservative regime. El Salvador joined with the Hondurans to prevent
Guatemalan hegemony. The war lasted a month. Guatemala triumphed. A
new liberal regime was installed in Honduras, but there was not Guatemalan
hegemony. Armies numbered 2,500 or less, while total losses were 4,000
killed or dead from disease. In 1885 Guatemala made another attempt at
federation, Honduras acting as an ally. Their forces invaded El Salvador,
which was aided by Costa Rica and Nicaragua. After a war of little more
than two weeks, the Guatemalans were defeated and Central America
remained divided. Army sizes were well under 10,000, and there were about
1,000 casualties, mostly Guatemalan.
A third, two-month war occurred in 1906 between Guatemala and El
Salvador, aided by Honduras, each trying to install its clients, liberals or
conservatives, in power in the enemy country. The largest army size was
7,000, and there was a total of 1,000 deaths. The war was inconclusive and
ended with Mexican and American mediation. The next year war flared
again as Nicaraguan forces attacked Honduras and El Salvador in yet
another attempt to re-create a federation. Army sizes were about 4,500 and
total casualties after two months of inconclusive fighting were about 1,000.
A U.S.-sponsored peace conference agreed to submit claims to binding
arbitration by a judge from each country, although this proved a failure.
None of these short, small wars succeeded in changing the balance of power,
but, although dictators kept on meddling in the internal politics of neighbors,
they did not again go to war—until the 1969 Soccer War, which had quite
different causes. Here rulers learned through failure that war did not pay.

The Chaco War, 1932–1935

This much bigger war was fought between Bolivia and Paraguay over
borderlands in the Gran Chaco region, arid and thinly populated, but thought
to be potentially oil-rich. Braumoeller says this was the second deadliest war
of the modern era in terms of the proportion of national populations killed
(higher than either world war).76 The Paraguay River running through Chaco
provided access to the Atlantic Ocean, important to Bolivia, which was
landlocked, having lost its Pacific coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific.
Since Paraguay had lost half its territory in the War of the Triple Alliance,
both were self-righteous revisionist powers disputing access to the Atlantic.
Their rulers were under economic pressure from foreign debts and stalled
modernization, and under political pressure from nationalist newspapers and
student demonstrators. So the war was partly diversionary as presidents
sought to shift attention from their domestic failures. Their fears were of
rival elites, not of class struggle. Because Bolivian literacy was just over 10
percent, and under 5 percent of its people were enfranchised, politics did not
involve the masses. Miners pressed for workers’ rights, but they were
sectorally confined.77
Paraguay claimed its right by virtue of occupying the Chaco since the
Spanish left, but this consisted only of a few government outposts dwarfed
by large estates that a cash-strapped government had sold to Argentinian,
British, and American investors. Its main economic motive was to continue
receiving this income. Most of the Guarani people of the region identified
with Paraguay. The glorification of Paraguay’s mestizo identity, personified
in the notion of the patriotic Guarani-speaking peasant soldier, enabled
scientists, missionaries, and anthropologists to write about the indigenous
populations without racial slurs, a situation unique in Latin America.78
Bolivia claimed uti possidetis, arguing that in Spanish times the Gran Chaco
had been part of its audiencia. Since Paraguay’s defeat in the War of the
Triple Alliance, Bolivia had been the more active in the Chaco region,
provoking MIDs between them. Foreign powers attempted mediation, but
agreements proved contentious back home, and none was implemented. As
diplomacy failed, military preparations began.
Both had small military outposts along the frontiers, and 1927 saw a
collision between rival patrols. A Paraguayan lieutenant was killed and his
men taken prisoner by Bolivian soldiers. Rhetoric escalated in the two
capitals, then subsided, as the liberal government in Paraguay resisted
pressure for retaliation. A bigger MID clash occurred in 1928, when a
Paraguayan battalion seized a Bolivian post. Two successive Bolivian
presidents decided that war would divert national attention from internal
disputes with a hostile congress, radical students, and a weak economy.
Believing that Bolivia’s greater resources, larger population, and German-
trained army would bring swift victory, Bolivia’s President Daniel
Salamanca ordered the army to take three more Paraguayan outposts.79 In
1929 the Pan-American Union brokered a settlement. The two sides signed a
peace accord, withdrew their forces, and exchanged prisoners. The border
dispute was not settled, but war was avoided, since neither side felt ready to
wage it. Instead, they engaged in an arms-importing race.
In 1931 Paraguayan surveyors found a freshwater lake in the parched
Chaco region. Irrigation agriculture might be possible. The Paraguayans
constructed a fort to consolidate their presence, which the Bolivians seized
in June 1932, provoking a counterattack that drove the Bolivians away.
There was pressure in Bolivia for retaliation, and a force of 10,000 men
seized the biggest town in the Chaco. This produced a Paraguayan army
response, and from May 1933 the Bolivians were forced to retreat. This
humiliation brought down President Salamanca in a military coup in 1934.
By that time, Paraguay’s soldiers held far more ground than their country
had claimed. Paraguay’s soldiers, though outnumbered, again proved more
cohesive and better led, possessing the logistical advantage of rivers and rail
lines leading into the remote region. It seemed to be winning the war. Yet it
had also incurred heavy losses, faced supply difficulties as it advanced, and
exhausted its loans from Argentina. Both sides sought peace and agreed to a
cease-fire in 1935. The peace settlement of 1938, assisted by Argentina and
the United States, awarded Paraguay three-quarters of the Chaco Boreal and
left Bolivia with the swampy northwest, not the desired river port.
Diplomatic and strategic blunders and political infighting had left Bolivia
with far less land than it had had before the war. In mediated settlements
victors usually made some gains and negotiators sometimes favored claims
based on occupation rather than ancient maps.
Paraguay lost almost 40,000 men and Bolivia almost 60,000, although
mostly from disease. Bolivia mobilized about 10 percent of its population
during the war, Paraguay about 16 percent. The loss rates, Bolivia 3 percent
and Paraguay 4 percent of total population, were slightly higher than
European losses in World War I; the recruitment rate was similar to that in
the U.S. Civil War (about 10 percent). This had been a devastating war for
both countries. Bolivian mobilization was a remarkable if disastrous
achievement in a thinly populated country with a supposedly weak state.80
At first, recruitment had been easy, especially in cities where a rally ’round
the flag sentiment briefly raged, but it got more difficult the longer war
lasted and the defeats piled up. Conscription required enforcement,
desertions grew, and officers had to put rifles in deserters’ hands and push
them back into the lines, for if they had shot them, their regiments would
have been denuded. Eventually, in 2012, commercially viable oil was found
in the area awarded to Paraguay, and natural gas was discovered in Bolivia’s.
It had proved a pointless war. It lived on in Bolivian resentment and
occasional MID incidents, but it was not repeated.
 The Leticia War, 1932–1933
This eight-month conflict was fought between Colombia and Peru over
disputed border territory in the Amazon rainforest. It began with Peruvian
occupation of the small river port of Leticia, connected by the Amazon to the
Atlantic, 4,000 kilometers away. The attack was by armed Peruvian soldiers
and civilians, perhaps without authority from above. A reluctant Colombian
government was forced by urban popular pressure to prepare to retake the
port. Similarly, the Peruvian government was pressured to defend it. When
Colombian forces eventually reached this remote area, 1,100 kilometers
from Bogotá, they retook the port. The forces involved were each about
1,000 strong. The number of persons killed is not known, but it is unlikely to
have been more than two hundred deaths on each side, partly to jungle
diseases, a motive for them to end the war alongside mounting debt. With
the assistance of League of Nations mediation, Leticia was restored to
Colombia, but the two governments divided the rest of the disputed zone.
This conflict had casualties well short of the CoW minimum, and it is not
normally included in lists of Latin American wars.

Ecuador-Peru Wars
From the 1830s to the 1990s a large but sparsely populated Amazonian
border zone between Ecuador and Peru saw repeated skirmishes.81 In 1857
Ecuador attempted to repay its debt to Britain by issuing bonds for this
disputed territory. Peru objected, and military skirmishes followed, which
went in Peru’s favor. The Treaty of Mapasingue in 1860 included
considerable Ecuadoran concessions. The treaty was ratified by neither
government, however, and the next decade saw thirty-four MIDs between
them, all short of war. This was the longest-lived territorial sore in the
Americas, arising from border ambiguities in forests and mountains. Peru
claimed the border was along the ridge of the Cordillera del Cóndor
mountain range. Ecuador insisted that its territory extended eastward over
the top of the sierras to the Cenepa River, which feeds through the Marañón
river to the Amazon and thence to the Atlantic, the access to which Ecuador
claimed a sovereign right. Thus, this remote region has strategic
significance, especially for Ecuador. Three brief conflicts ensued in the
twentieth century, interspersing small MIDs or wars with diplomatic
wrangling and mediation.82
The War of ’41, or the Zarumilla War, began when a large Peruvian
force invaded Ecuador, seeing a window of opportunity, a political crisis that
brought the main Ecuadoran army into the capital. The Peruvians
overwhelmed the much smaller Ecuadoran forces opposing them. About five
hundred soldiers died, including only one hundred Peruvians. An armistice
was soon signed, followed by the Rio Protocol, brokered by the United
States, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. They threatened Ecuador with ending
the talks if it did not sign, which would leave Ecuador to face menacing
Peruvian forces. Ecuador had to give up two-thirds of the disputed territory,
comprising 220,000 square kilometers, thereby losing any outlet to the
Amazon River. So Ecuadoran governments became bitterly revisionist.
David Mares and David Palmer say that in all the Ecuador-Peru
confrontations, politicians on both sides were pushed by “public opinion”
into aggressive stances.83 The urban classes were more ignorant of the
horrors of war than were the politicians, and few of them fought in these
mostly peasant armies. Only the financial cost of war might harm them, if it
lasted long.
Seventy-eight kilometers of the border remained unclear, however. The
actual course of the Cenepa River differed from that shown on the maps.
Seizing on this, Ecuador rejected the protocol, which brought further
diplomatic wrangling. After 1969 relations between them improved. Both
joined the Andean Pact, and they signed economic pacts with each other.
Peruvian leaders, democratic and authoritarian, hoped this would settle the
dispute. But Ecuadoran political movements, seething with injustice, did not
let go of the issue, and military outposts were erected in the disputed area in
1977. The Peruvians responded with threats but not much action, and the
two sides backed off without war. But Peru’s mild reaction emboldened the
Ecuadoran government into repeating its infiltration. There were two more
flare-ups into violence.
The Paquisha War of 1981 was triggered by Ecuadoran forces
establishing three military outposts on the Cenepa River. It lasted only a
week, and there were fewer than two hundred deaths. The Peruvians won
because of greater military power. Yet in the 1980s Peru experienced
economic crisis and near-bankruptcy, political turmoil, a border dispute with
Chile in the south, and a civil war against Shining Path guerillas. So
Ecuadoran leaders opportunistically upped their territorial claims and
prepared for war. This provoked Peruvian forces to strengthen border
defenses. Undaunted, in 1995 Ecuadorans constructed stronger forts inside
contested territory. Both regimes were egged on by nationalism among the
literate classes demanding to preserve or recapture sacred homeland.
Ecuadoran governments, whichever political faction was in control, would
not let go of the issue because of a sense of injustice. Mares and Palmer
observe, “The external threat posed by Peruvian claims to territory in the
Amazon . . . [was] the glue that held the nation together.”84 They mean the
middle-class nation.
This led to the monthlong Cenepa War, for which 40,000 soldiers were
mobilized, of whom 500–1,000 were killed.85 The Peruvian air force
bombed and strafed. Nine of its planes and helicopters were downed.
Ecuadoran forces performed better, the fighting was inconclusive, and both
governments tired of the financial costs. Revisionism in Ecuador was
assuaged by pride in the army’s achievements, which gave the government
space to negotiate a compromise. International pressures brought back four
international mediators who ruled that the border was the line of the
Cordillera, as Peru claimed. There were sweeteners: Ecuador was
guaranteed shipping access to the Amazon and the Atlantic, received $3
billion in development aid from international financial institutions, and was
granted perpetual ownership of one square kilometer of land in the disputed
territory to build a memorial to its fallen!
This settlement has endured partly because it allowed economic
development of both border regions and increased trade between them. The
countries finally learned that negotiation is preferable to military aggression.
Mares and Palmer say that “we should not believe that Latin America has
reached a state in which the use of force as an instrument of statecraft has
been rendered illegitimate or null.”86 I am more optimistic, perceiving that
each region of Latin America in turn has learned that interstate war does not
pay.

The Soccer War, 1969

This war of 1969 was fought between Honduras and El Salvador. The
violence began in riots during a football World Cup qualifying match
between them, but the roots of conflict lay mainly in mass immigration.
Around 300,000 Salvadoran immigrants had streamed into Honduras
seeking a better economic life. William Durham and Thomas Anderson
show that this resulted from growing inequality of landholding in El
Salvador because of the government’s encouragement of export-oriented
agriculture, which favored larger landowners and squeezed peasants, many
of whom were forced by debts off the land.87 They migrated to Honduras,
believing they could get land there. Some succeeded. But Honduras also had
growing inequalities of land that were squeezing out its small farmers. The
two pressures of immigration and landlessness, both a consequence of class
struggle between capitalist landlords, who controlled the state, and peasant
owners and tenants was diverted into struggle between the two national
communities. This was one of the few wars analyzable in Marxist terms as
the diversion by state elites of class struggle—and the resulting nationalism
was popular, mobilizing much of the population.
This war occurred during the Cold War, as fear of communism fanned
the flames. Large landowners and American agribusiness pressured the
Honduran government into a land reform that expropriated Salvadoran
immigrants who owned or tenanted their land, forcing 130,000 out of the
country. This infuriated El Salvador’s leaders, terrified by returning angry
peasants whom they saw as potential communists. The nationalism that
flared up was manipulated by Salvadoran leaders and gave popular backing
to an invasion of Honduras. The Salvadoran army advanced and quickly
neared the Honduran capital. The Organization of American States and the
United States then pressured the Salvadorans to halt, as they may have
anticipated, and the OAS negotiated a truce. After contentious negotiations,
the immigration dispute was settled in 1980. In the four-day air-and-land war
El Salvador suffered an estimated 900 dead, mostly civilians, while
Honduras is estimated to have lost 250 soldiers and 2,000 civilians—
significant numbers in tiny countries. The war strengthened the powers of
both countries’ militaries and made the border dispute more difficult to
solve. Several peace deals later, there has been no further violence.

Falklands (Malvinas) and the Beagle Channel, 1982–1983

The Falklands (Malvinas) War began when Argentine forces invaded these
British-owned islands, desolate and of little economic value, long claimed by
both sides, long occupied only by British settlers—there were 1,820 settlers
and their 400,000 sheep in 1982. War was started to bolster the sagging
popularity of the Argentine military regime, while the British response was
dictated by a mixture of the sagging popularity of Margaret Thatcher and her
strong Churchillian sense of national honor. Losing the war destroyed the
Argentine regime; winning bolstered Thatcher. The total casualties (dead
plus wounded) of about nine hundred did not meet the CoW project’s
requirements of one thousand deaths, but it was clearly a war.
Yet it was part of broader conflicts in this desolate region. Border
disputes between Chilean and Argentine rulers had mounted in Patagonia in
the later nineteenth century as Argentina had expanded southward,
conquering indigenous peoples backed by Chile. Uti possidetis offered no
solution since the Spanish had not settled this far south, but a treaty of 1881
had set the border at the line of the highest mountains dividing the Atlantic
and Pacific watersheds. Yet in Patagonia, drainage basins confusingly
crossed the Andes. Should the Andean peaks constitute the border, as the
Argentines claimed, or should the drainage basins, as the Chileans claimed?
There were some naval MIDs, but both feared that any war might be costly.
War had been avoided when the parties agreed in 1902 to binding British
mediation, which solved the crisis by dividing the lakes along the disputed
line into two equal parts, Chilean and Argentine. In celebration the two
countries shared the expense of a giant statue of Christ the Redeemer,
erected under the shadow of the highest mountain, marking the restoration of
friendship.88
There was one remaining issue. Chile possessed four small islands at
the southern edge of Tierra del Fuego in the Beagle Channel, which connects
the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Possession had implications for navigation
through the channel, and steamships had greatly increased traffic. From 1904
Argentine governments had claimed the four islands. The dispute had
festered on through MID incidents, attempts at direct negotiations, and
supposedly “binding” international tribunals, all of which awarded the
islands to Chile. In 1978 a plan by the Argentine military government to
invade the islands had been aborted because of divisions within the military.
It was perhaps surprising that the generals then made the decision to fight
not there against the weaker enemy, but against the British, a major military
power traditionally friendly to Argentina. This choice was made because in
the intervening four years the military regime had become unpopular and the
war was a desperate attempt at survival.89 Political goals triumphed, backed,
as so often, by an overoptimistic military calculation of odds.
The Argentine war plan of 1982 was to invade the disputed Beagle
Islands after success in the Falklands. President Leopoldo Galtieri declared
that Chileans “have to know . . . what we are doing now, because they will
be the next in turn.” Indeed, he deployed his better troops on the Chilean
border, while lesser units had to deal with the highly professional British
forces. He made the not unreasonable decision that the 13,000-kilometer
distance between Britain and the islands made any retaliation logistically
impossible, while the fait accompli of a bloodless invasion of the islands
would persuade the British to negotiate. He believed that international public
opinion, and the United States, would regard this as a war of resistance
against colonialism. Mares regards this as a “rational policy decision” and
blames the British and American governments for not taking the Argentines
seriously and failing to credibly signal deterrence.90 The problem in Britain
was that war could not be threatened before the invasion, since almost no
one in Britain even knew of the existence of the islands or of British
sovereignty over them. But once the invasion happened, the government
could count on a rally ’round the flag.
Galtieri had misjudged. He had brought forward the date of the invasion
because the British government was growing suspicious of the Argentine
military buildup, but this gave the British time to retaliate before winter set
in. President Reagan had warned Galtieri that Thatcher was determined to
fight. She also had political goals, being unpopular at home before the war.
Had Galtieri possessed any understanding of the enemy, he would have
realized two things about British conservatism. First, it views sovereignty as
sacred, not to be renounced in the face of foreign aggression. In 2020 British
conservatives supposedly “reclaimed British sovereignty” from the
European Union. Second, conservatism was still in the grip of imperial
nostalgia. Britannia could still rule the waves—indeed it could against a
third-rate military power. Moreover, the weakness of the colonial analogy
was that the entire population of the islands declared themselves to be
British. International opinion did not turn against Britain, nor did the U.S.
government. Being convinced of the justice of the Argentine case and the
dominance of anticolonial sentiments around the world, Galtieri had
assumed that the Americans would side with him. But once the British fleet
reached the South Atlantic (with refueling and communications help from
the United States), Argentina’s defeat was predictable. Once landed on the
Falklands, the British infantry’s superiority was marked.
Galtieri’s consequent fall resulted in a democratic government anxious
to solve the Beagle dispute. It set up a referendum in 1984 in which 82.6
percent of Argentines voted to implement a papal peace proposal. Argentina
and Chile signed the agreement, which awarded the islands to Chile but
maritime rights to Argentina, the obvious solution. There has been no
challenge to this. Indeed, that 82.6 percent shows how far these Latin
Americans have moved away from war and even from MIDs. The Falklands
are another matter. The rival claims endure there.

Latin American Conclusions

I have analyzed fifteen interstate conflicts since the 1830s, but my total
includes four that did not reach the CoW minimum of one thousand deaths.
Even including them means there was a war somewhere in Latin America
for one in five years—and only a little more frequently, one in four years, in
the period 1834 to 1899. This has not been a warlike region of the world,
except for its massacres of indigenous peoples. Three countries never went
to war with another Latin American state: Venezuela, Mexico, and Panama.
After the War of the Triple Alliance, Brazil solved all its border disputes
through diplomacy. Among the thirteen countries experiencing war, there
were no serial repeaters—unlike Republican Rome, Greek city-states, early
Chinese states, Mongol peoples, medieval and modern European states,
Japan from the 1890s to 1945, and the United States more recently.
Argentina and Peru fought three wars, five countries had two wars, and five
only one. No single “front” had more than two wars. The notion that “states
made wars and wars made states” involves an iterative sequence: wars must
be made repeatedly if war is to be baked in to the culture and institutions of a
country. In Latin America wars were few and generally short, for
governments lacked an expandable tax base. The two most serious wars
were so damaging that they deterred these governments from making war
again. Governments dealt with erratic domestic pressures for war or peace;
they protested their grievances; they made threats that quite often led to
MIDs, but they generally avoided war. Since 1982 there have been no
interstate wars, and that last one involved Britain, an outside power.
 All the wars were between neighbors, but there was virtually no raiding
over borders in the continent. Nor were there successful imperial conquests,
though a few attempts at regional hegemony failed. There were three main
substantive causes, each present in six cases. First, some wars attempted
Realist geopolitical balancing: an alliance of neighbors to counter what they
perceived as one state’s drive for regional hegemony—as in the Platine War,
the War of the Confederation, the War of the Triple Alliance, the Peru-
Bolivian War, the Ecuadoran-Colombian War, and the Central American
Wars. These aimed at restoring former Spanish viceroyalties. Yet none was
successful—balancing worked. No state was swallowed up by the victor in
war, as happened in other continents, although some lost territory. Balancing
was made easier by the conservatism of uti possidetis, by ecological and
fiscal limits on would-be hegemons, and by the common culture of rulers.
Balancing was largely a rational response, but as a consequence rulers
learned to love peace.
Second, six wars involved rival claims to sparsely settled border
regions—the Platine War, the War of the Triple Alliance, the War of the
Pacific, the Chaco War, the Leticia War, and the Ecuador-Peru Wars—
sparked mostly by a disjunction between uti possidetis and newer patterns of
settlement on the ground, and exacerbated by fuzzy historic maps. Both
sides considered their claims to these slivers of territory morally justified,
and disputes were exacerbated if major economic or strategic resources lay
there. Nitrates and oil were the main economic interests activated in border
wars; strategic interests principally meant access to the Río de la Plata and
Amazon River systems and to the oceans, which also brought economic
opportunities. So economic power interests predominated in this group of
wars. But territorial gains were mostly limited. Little was at stake in most
border disputes to justify big sacrifices, and conflict was much more limited
than in Roman, European, or early Chinese experience, where states were
often fighting for their survival. This was an unintended benefit of European
imperialism—it roughly stabilized the borders of the successor countries,
with the exception of what we might call the “Horn” of Latin America, the
former British colonies of Guyana and Belize, whose borders with their
neighbors, Venezuela and Guatemala, remain disputed and whose case is
currently before the ICJ in 2022. Of course, no benefit had resulted for the
indigenous peoples anywhere in Latin America.
 Third, six wars were precipitated by interfering in neighbors’ internal
politics for regime change or regime preservation—the Platine War, the War
of the Triple Alliance, the War of Confederation, the Ecuadoran-Colombian
War, the Central American Wars, and, in a rather different way, the Soccer
War. This involved a distinctive security dilemma. If state B did not interfere
in the factional disputes of its neighbor A, then rival state C might do so,
increasing its power in the region. So state B sometimes did intervene first,
causing state C to do so as well. This was intended as a cheap way of
increasing regional influence, although in these cases it escalated into war.
This group of wars had a large unintentional component. But security
dilemmas involving arms races were rare because states had low tax bases
and so were cost-conscious. Interventions were boosted by the ideological
similarity of internal disputes across Latin America, between republicans
and monarchists, peninsulares and Creoles, regional autonomists and central
statists, liberals and conservatives, and finally capitalists and socialists.
Shared ideologies led to alliance with neighboring like-minded groups, and
so domestic political power relations helped drive wars.
The Soccer War was distinctive, the only case in which class struggle
was diverted by a government into interstate war, as Marxists suggest. Other
forms of conflict diversion were more common, however, and these
motivated the Argentine and Thatcher regimes in the Falklands War, two
Bolivian presidents during the Chaco War, and the Mexican president in
World War II. All sought to gain popularity through a successful war, but it
worked only for Thatcher. This was a second way in which domestic
political power relations drove wars.
These causes of war overlapped. Some wars can be partially explained
by rational choice theory of calculations of the chances of strategic or
economic gains balanced against likely military and fiscal costs and the
chances of victory. There was calculative brinkmanship, establishing frontier
posts, financing foreign factions, taxing foreign businesses, and general
saber rattling to bolster a domestic image of strength, but then drawing back
by accepting a truce or mediation. Such gambits often did not play out as
calculated, however, since the rival’s moves were not easy to predict. And as
usual in my cases, overconfidence was rife, the product of rulers trapped
inside nationally compartmentalized societies, unable to fully comprehend
the opponent’s motivations, options, and strengths. Six times the initiator of
war clearly lost, and only two initiators won. In five cases there was mutual
provocations into war, and five wars ended in a costly stalemate, rational for
neither side. This is not a rational balance sheet in favor of war.
Rulers mattered. They varied in aggressiveness, and there were four
cases in which aggression was rather irrational and military judgment was
distorted by reckless ambition, righteousness, and domestic political needs—
the cases of Argentine president Rosas in the Platine War, of all three of the
principal leaders in the War of the Triple Alliance, but especially Paraguayan
president Solano López, in the Ecuadoran-Colombian War by Colombian
president Cipriano de Mosquera, and in the Falklands War by Argentine
president Galtieri. Moreover, all the regimes that initiated war were
overthrown either during or immediately after the war.91 That was a salutary
lesson. There was in the long run a learning process: movement from war to
MID rituals posturing strength and resolve to satisfy domestic pressures or
leadership pride and sense of honor—but also to avoid war, for almost all
states had experienced bad wars. Indeed, Latin American history does
reassure liberal theory that in the right circumstances human beings can
calculate that war is bad and to be avoided—an example of delayed-reaction
Realism, the belated realization that war does not pay.
The mass of the population rarely concerned themselves with foreign
policy, and nationalism did not penetrate deeply. As Centeno observes,
dominant classes in different countries shared more culture with each other
than they did with their own popular classes. Two cases deviated somewhat.
Paraguay was more homogeneous, even “proto-nationalist,” whereas Chile
had a more cohesive capitalist ruling class, and so both punched in war
above their weight of numbers. Otherwise, nationalism was sometimes
mobilized among the urban middle classes, especially students, particularly
when an incident like a lethal attack on a border post might be claimed as a
national humiliation requiring vengeance. Strong revisionist emotions could
push the rulers of countries that had lost a previous war into rash aggression,
as they did Paraguayan and Bolivian rulers. They saw themselves as
embodying the nation, so that their emotions and ideologies were both
personal and national. Galtieri and Thatcher both embodied this during the
Falklands War. Sometimes mass media amplified such sentiments.
Henderson argues that border disputes strengthened nationalism throughout
the world.92 Not here. Nationalism in Latin America has mostly been of the
harmless variety—World Cup not war fever.
 I have again emphasized distinctive social and political ecology, but
here as causes of the low incidence of wars. Expansion by stronger states
over weaker neighbors elsewhere in the world brought many wars of
deflection, increasing the apparent rationality of war, as we saw in ancient
China and medieval Europe. But in Latin America the deflection of war was
mostly within states and against indigenous peoples. Most Latin American
states were less concerned with expanding borders than with gaining
effective control of their own territories. There were sparsely populated
regions with little political authority, but unlike early Europe and China, they
lay within states wrested from indigenous peoples. A second ecological
effect made interstate wars logistically difficult. Wars required mobilizing
and deploying forces over long distances in border areas, often in deserts,
jungles, or swamps, far from the capital, barely habitable and disease-ridden.
The potential gains were rarely worth the cost. MIDs were far cheaper and
let off steam, a mixture of rationality and emotionality. Such difficult
logistics also meant that regional guerilla insurrections—which I have not
discussed—became easier to sustain and more difficult to crush, increasing
the number and duration of civil wars in parts of Latin America.
Unlike their counterparts in Europe, the officers and men had had little
experience of war and so did not fight very competently—a good thing
perhaps. Yet this was not in itself much of a deterrent to war since to win one
had to be only a little less incompetent than the enemy. Wars happened when
state elites perceived that the enemy state was even weaker than they were,
but as in my other case studies, they were often wrong. One difficulty in
predicting relative strengths was the combination of very inexperienced
soldiers and the foreign British, German, or French officers brought in to
advise them. Rulers tended to place unwarranted faith in these men’s ability
to transform soldiers’ behavior, for in battle the soldiers tended to revert to
old ways—as we see today in Afghanistan and Iraq in armies trained by
Americans.
Another deterrent was the fact that their low tax base was insufficient to
finance long wars or big armies. As Mazzuca argues, rulers could rarely
overcome the fiscal resistance of peripheral power brokers exploiting an
economy of free trade. War involved debt, crippling after a quite short
period. As Centeno contends, debt was probably the main state weakness
that made for few wars, and it was the main reason that the wars were short,
that after a year or two the combatant states were willing to accept
mediation, and that there were no repeating war-mongering states. Thus, the
institutions and culture of militarism never really got going. Militarism
pervaded the officer caste, not the whole society, and conceptions of military
honor and virtue were too weak to sustain warfare in the absence of profit.
The rank-and-file soldiers fought for pay, and most civilians stood aside.
Losing a war was a disaster, but the winners rarely found that wars paid for
themselves. Only the War of the Pacific brought immediate profit for Chile,
although the Río de la Plata wars brought long-term trading benefits for the
victors. Otherwise, victory was a costly investment in limited territorial
gains of dubious worth and uncertain future payoff. Defeats resonated more
than victories in popular emotions. Pressure from urban classes could push
rulers into saber rattling to show their strength, but few wanted a crisis to
escalate into war.
There was little armed intervention by external powers—an Anglo-
French naval blockade, minor British gunboat diplomacy to protect its
colonies Guyana and Belize, a failed Spanish naval attack, a failed French
attack on Mexico, a successful British invasion of the Falklands, and more
significant Mexican-American wars. With this last exception, more salient
for the external powers was the maintenance of free trade, and for this they
had much support among Latin American power brokers who wanted to
keep central states weak and starved of funds. Thus, free trade was in this
case an indirect cause of relative peace.
Most nineteenth-century wars ended by agreement between the
belligerents, but all the twentieth-century wars were mediated or arbitrated
by other states or outside organizations. This indicates gradual lessening of
conflict, which allowed the parties to recognize the liberal virtues of
diplomacy. Clear-cut military victories and significant territorial gains
became less likely. Some aggression was launched on the assumption that
outside negotiators would soon call a halt, and a swift invasion might change
facts on the ground to influence the diplomats. Some argue that the global
prevalence of mediated and arbitrated ends of wars and MIDs leads to
geopolitical instability by preserving weak states and revisionist
aggression.93 This has not been so in Latin America. Interstate wars have
yielded to MIDs, which have also become smaller and milder. Mares and
Palmer reveal that the years 2005–9 saw ten MIDs in the region, but eight of
them involved only threats or shows of force.94 Two produced shooting and
a few deaths, but not war. The usefulness of the category of MID is clear in
Latin America.
The Cold War saw a major change in the late 1940s as U.S.
administrations went wholesale for regime change or strengthening through
violent repressions of leftists. In 1948, at the end of a civil war, the Costa
Rican army was abolished. Since then the country has had no military at all,
just police forces. Honduran rulers then debated whether to follow this
pacific example. Unfortunately, this was bad timing. The United States was
entering Latin America more forcefully, offering military training and better
weaponry to combat the supposed threat of communism. Though the real
communist threat was negligible, the United States sponsored suppressing all
other leftists, too, sometimes out of ideological ignorance, sometimes to
protect the interests of American business.95 Latin American militaries loved
this, for it gave them better status, training, and weapons. Conservatives also
welcomed it for reasons of perceived class interest. In 1947 the United States
had given more bite to the Monroe Doctrine with the Rio Treaty. This laid
down “hemispheric defense” doctrine over Latin America. The treaty
obliged its nations to help against any aggressive actions by one state against
another. Yet this was diverted into anticommunism in the U.S. Mutual
Security Programs of 1949 and 1951. So Honduras did not follow the
example of Costa Rico. Along with most other states, it remilitarized. The
threat was civil wars, left against right, not interstate wars.96 Although
Marxian arguments had relatively little explanatory power in interstate wars
in Latin America, they are essential in analyzing such civil wars.
In the post–Cold War period, U.S. hegemony is weakening in Latin
America. The United States failed to overthrow leftist President Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela, and it vacillated when the conservative opposition
appealed for help against his leftist successor. Americans’ demand for drugs
has also undermined Latin American police powers. This happened first in
Colombia, where struggles between leftist guerillas and paramilitaries hired
by landlords and backed by rightist governments also became drug wars.
These spread to other countries, notably Mexico, where over 100,000 people
have been killed since 2006, about 70 percent of deaths inflicted by illegally
imported U.S. guns. In 2018 the Mexican total of just over 33,000 drug war–
related deaths was the second-highest civil war death rate in the world,
greater than either Afghanistan or Iraq, exceeded only by Syria. By 2022
there had been a total of 360,000 drug-related killings in Mexico since 2006.
The region’s cities also have the highest homicide rates in the world.
Privatized wars have replaced civil wars as the main form of Latin American
violence. Weak government has protected Latin America from interstate
wars, but in some contexts it has intensified civil strife.
But this period has also seen a healthier countertrend: two common
market pacts, MERCOSUR and the Andean Community, are moves toward
greater regional economic integration. In 1998 all the countries (except
Venezuela) signed a framework agreement toward integrating the two
customs zones in a single South American Free Trade Area, with thirteen
member states. This represents a further step away from war as a means of
economic acquisition. Yoram Haftel analyzes Regional Integration
Arrangements (RIAs) across the world, including MERCOSUR and the
Andean Community.97 He showed that a broad scope of RIA economic
activity and regular meetings of high-level officials helped the peaceful
resolution of disputes by reducing uncertainty regarding states’ interests,
motivations, and resolve. They are effective instruments of interstate
bargaining in times of conflict, one more factor in explaining why Latin
American war is almost obsolete and why even MIDs are much less
frequent. I expect such trends to continue—mafias, not massed armies, will
predominate in the near future. Latin America represents an example to the
rest of the world. Perhaps Kant’s perpetual peace is out of reach, but letting
off steam with MIDs that lead to diplomacy represents an achievable goal
for the world.

An African Addendum
Although wars in postcolonial Africa are not part of my remit, I briefly note
similarities between its wars and those of Latin America. For postcolonial
Africa we have data for only fifty to seventy years, compared to two hundred
years for Latin America. Both experienced anticolonial wars of
independence, followed by few interstate wars. Also shared has been the
unintended border benefit of posthumous imperialism. The boundaries of the
European colonies were accepted by the newly independent states, so there
were few border disputes. Ruling regimes had a shared interest in
maintaining peaceful borders, while they dealt with the greater problems of
imposing rule inside their borders. The colonial powers had generally
pacified a zone around a capital, normally a port, and along communications
routes to valuable mining and settler zones, but their authority elsewhere was
feeble. The postcolonial states inherited this unevenness and have struggled
to expand their zones of control. About half of them have seen civil wars,
usually between center and peripheries, which is a higher proportion than in
any other region of the world. States have prioritized domestic rather than
international order. The Organization of African Unity (OAU), established in
1963, pledged to respect state sovereignty and to avoid intervention in each
other’s internal affairs. Its Cairo Declaration of 1964 accepted the principle
of uti possidetis, going further than Latin America. As we see in the next
chapter, however, the African Union has been recently intervening in wars
against non–state actors.
On border issues, the Horn of Africa has been the main exception, again
for colonial-era reasons, since territory had been shuffled between the
Abyssinian-Ethiopian Empire and the British, French, and Italian empires.
Rival borders could be claimed by the Horn’s emerging states, Ethiopia,
Eritrea, Somaliland, Somalia, and Djibouti, especially where ethnic differed
from political borders, as in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. The Cold War
aggravated these conflicts since the United States and the USSR backed
different sides, while the growth of nonstate Islamic terrorism has more
recently introduced further armed struggles. The total fatalities in the five or
six wars of the region have been at least 100,000 so far. They were the only
interstate wars in the continent in which disputed borders were the principal
casus belli. Unusually for Africa, these states were also repeat war makers,
and the disputes are not over, as the war of 2021 that pitted Ethiopia and
Eritrea against Tigray revealed. In 2022 a repeat war seems likely.
The Congo War, most severe during 1996 to 2003, but still simmering,
has been by far the deadliest in Africa. This was initially a series of civil
wars of regional resistance against Congo’s central regimes. Yet they have
been exacerbated by intervention by neighboring states supporting local
clients who would let them share in Congolese mineral wealth—the main
violation of the OAU pledge of nonintervention. Conflict between Hutu and
Tutsi groups in the country were also exacerbated by armed Hutu militias
fleeing from Rwanda after defeat following the genocide there, pursued by
vengeful Tutsi government forces. Nine African countries and many more
armed groups have contributed to between 2.5 and 5.4 million deaths,
mainly through disease and starvation among civilians.
 There have been only six to twelve wars in postcolonial Africa,
depending on how you count, half in the Horn of Africa, and the worst in the
Congo. Over half of these cases also contained substantial civil war
elements. Of the fifty-three African countries, at least nineteen have
experienced one or more civil wars, often accompanied by quite high
civilian casualties, while another eleven have experienced more minor
insurgencies. That leaves twenty-three broadly pacific states, though some of
these have experienced coups d’état. Like Latin America, Africa has
experienced civil wars, but more and deadlier ones. The elimination of
states, common in Eurasia, is unknown. If war between states did threaten,
the ecology usually made for difficult military logistics. Governments were
even weaker in African than Latin American countries, making civil wars
likelier. We cannot attribute the low rate of interstate warfare in these two
regions to unusually pacific populations. Rather, they specialized in other
forms of violence.
 CHAPTER TEN

The Decline of War?

Western Views after the Enlightenment

Has there been either a long-term increase or a long-term decrease in wars in
history up to today? My answer is broadly neither. Instead, variation has
characterized each epoch. Almost every literate source before the late
eighteenth century saw war as an inevitable and sometimes desirable feature
of the human condition. In contrast, most European writers since the
Enlightenment have claimed that war was declining or was about to decline.
Kant started this, saying absolute monarchs made war whereas republics and
constitutional monarchies might make peace. Provided the latter expanded at
the expense of the former, peace might spread. This began a “republican”
theory of peace based on the spread of representative government and the
rule of law. He added tongue-in-cheek that universal hospitality to foreigners
and a federation of free states would also be necessary for peace, and he
admitted that occasional wars might be necessary so that the virtues of peace
would not be forgotten.1
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars interrupted such hopes.
Yet nineteenth-century Europe seemed quite peaceful. Europeans fought
colonial wars in other continents, but most social theorists ignored these and
advanced optimistic dichotomies distinguishing historical from modern
societies—throughout history, warfare and militarism had dominated
societies; now peace owing to capitalism or industrialism and free trade
would rule. War had brought profit in the past, but it was now superseded by
the superior profits of trade. Such arguments were made by Montesquieu,
Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Auguste Comte, Henri de Saint-Simon, Karl
Marx, and Herbert Spencer. Writers like Joseph Schumpeter and Thorstein
Veblen, at the turn of the twentieth century, aware of the rise of militarism in
Germany and Japan, treated this as the last vestige of feudalism. Four main
reasons for optimism were generally advanced: republicanism, free trade,
socialism, and industrial society.2 These arguments are still heard today.
Some British liberals were conscious of their country’s colonial wars
but embraced “liberal imperialism.” Led by John Stuart Mill, who worked
for the East India Company for thirty-five years, they defended colonial wars
as bringing civilization to the benighted races (including the Irish, said Mill).
Like virtually all imperialists, they said war was necessary to bring peace.
French writers endorsed an imperial civilizing vision advocating rather more
assimilation of native peoples. Late nineteenth-century Americans said it
was the duty of the Anglo-Saxon race to bring civilization and peace to other
races. The sociologist Lester Ward, borrowing from Spencer, said war had
been responsible for human progress.3 Through violence hominids had
gained dominance over animals, and through war technologically advanced
races had gained dominance over the less civilized and had a duty to spread
civilization among them. Yet he said war would eventually decline as race
differences were overcome by assimilation and miscegenation.4 William
Sumner said war came from a “competition for life” between “in-groups”
and “out-groups.”5 But he was a pessimist: not only had war always existed,
but it always would. “It is evident that men love war,” he concluded ruefully
during the 1898 U.S. war with Spain, which he stridently opposed.
Much Germanic theory reflected the fact that Germans were winning
wars and had not yet achieved empire but wanted one, while Austrians had
an empire and were fighting to keep it. For both, war remained necessary,
even virtuous. General Helmuth von Moltke the Elder declared, “Everlasting
peace is a dream, and not even a pleasant one; and war is a necessary part of
God’s arrangement of the world.” Clausewitz was more measured, writing:
“The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war
more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords
in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a
sharp sword and hack off our arms.”6 That remains the dominant
justification for being militarily prepared for war—just in case, as President
Putin has recently reminded us.
Ludwig Gumplowicz said modernity would not bring peace since
conflicts between dominators and dominated were endemic to human
society.7 Heinrich von Treitschke, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Werner
Sombart, and Max Scheler saw no end of wars. Treitschke approved of
warfare; he attacked liberal theories of peace, which he associated with the
hypocritical British. The “slaughter” of enemies was part of the “sublimity”
of war, he declaimed.8
Weber was a liberal imperialist. Although disliking militarism, he saw
imperialism and war as necessary to modernity and to German development.
As World War I erupted, he embraced it. His support for the war, expressed
in August 1914, was ideological. “Responsibility before the bar of history”
meant that Germany had to resist a division of the world between “Russian
officials” and “the conventions of Anglo-Saxon society,” with perhaps a
dash of “Latin reason” thrown in. “We have to be a world power, and in
order to have a say in the future of the world we had to risk the war.”9 Once
Germany achieved its rightful place in the sun, this would bring more
civilization to the world and wars would decline—as the British liberal
imperialists had argued and as their American counterparts do today. Weber
was not alone. Thomas Mann wrote, “Germany is warlike out of morality.”
German enthusiasm, however, was a temporary rally ’round the flag
phenomenon. A year later Weber had shifted to call for a diplomatic end to
the war, and by 1922 Mann was defending the Weimar Republic against
militarism.
Scheler saw war as inevitable and desirable. The “genius” of war
represented the dynamic principle of history, while peace was the static
principle. War exposes the banal rationality and materialism of modern
culture. It gives people a higher plane of existence, conferring an existential
sense of security inside the national community. Like Weber, he saw war as
a battle of cultures. Whereas France and especially England embodied
pragmatic, empiricist philosophy, Germany embodied the true philosophy of
metaphysical idealism. War awakens a nation to the need to preserve its own
culture and is justified when its culture is attacked. England was seeking to
impose its mercantile, utilitarian philosophy on Europe.10 Like Weber,
however, Scheler shifted as the horrors of this war became revealed. Simmel
saw war and peace “so interwoven that in every peaceful situation the
conditions for future conflict, and in every struggle the conditions for future
peace, are developing. If we follow the stages of social development
backward under these categories, we can find no stopping-place.” He called
for armed struggle against materialistic Anglo-American “Mammonism.”11
Sombart saw World War I as ranging the German “hero” against the British
“merchant.” Merchants were morally inferior, greedy for profit, money, and
physical comfort. Heroes were superior in historical significance, motivated
by ideals of the great deed and of sacrifice for a noble calling. Since Entente
rhetoric claimed this was a war of liberty and democracy against
authoritarian aggression, the war was seen as a struggle for civilization on
both sides.
So most prominent Germanic intellectuals of this period did not believe
war was declining, some approved of it, and others were horrified by its
excesses. Though many people today would endorse Clausewitz’s view that
war is sometimes necessary—and military defense is always necessary—
almost no one today celebrates war as intrinsically virtuous. That is
undoubtedly progress. Marxists have offered a more optimistic theory.
Rudolf Hilferding and Vladimir Lenin perceived a close relation among
capitalism, imperialism, and war and believed that overthrowing capitalism
would bring peace. Most theorists in Britain and France were in between:
they deplored war but conceived of their own wars as purely defensive.
World War I made Russians, Americans, British, and French hope this
had been the war to end all wars. The Soviets used military metaphors for
their domestic policies—shock troops, work brigades, and the like—but after
the failed invasion of Poland in 1920, they believed that a socialist society
would bring peace. After the war most British and French writers opposed
war but preferred to think about other things. Leonard Hobhouse, the first
professor of sociology in Britain, had predicted that the future belonged to
higher ethical and peaceful standards, and he had been shattered by the Great
War. His response was to turn away from sociology to philosophy.
Americans experienced revulsion against World War I, which they saw as
essentially European. American sociology also preferred to think of
activities other than war.
Germany and Italy had experienced unfavorable wars generating
conflicting strands of theory. One militarist strand evolved into fascism,
which celebrated war, sometimes in mystical terms, always seeing it as
crucial to human progress. Socialists in Germany and Italy deplored war and
hoped to abolish it, but they nonetheless felt they needed to form defensive
paramilitaries. The Italian social scientist Vilfredo Pareto argued that rights
would always derive from might, whereas his countryman Gaetano Mosca
said that those who held the lance and the musket would always rule over
those who handled the spade or the shuttle. In France, the critic and
philosopher Roger Caillois adapted Durkheim’s sociology of religion into
romantic nationalism whose celebrations had replaced religious festivals in
dragging people out of their mundane lives and giving them a sense of the
sacred.12 He saw war as revealing the inadequacies of modernity, expressed
in yearnings for national spirituality.
World War II then saw the victory of a Marxian-liberal alliance
combining optimism with moral revulsion against war. It was better not to
think about war in Britain, America, France, and Germany alike.
Functionalism and modernization theory dominated social theory and
ignored war. Political scientists, handmaidens to power in Washington,
differed. Most supported American liberal imperialism and offered Realist
theories of war as a rational instrument of power. Western Marxists
emphasized class “struggle,” but the metaphor did not mean actual killing.
“Third-world” Marxism did turn toward revolutionary violence, exemplified
by China’s Mao Zedong and the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The war had
produced the excellent studies of American soldiers to which I refer in
chapter 12, but their legacy in America was to reduce the sociology of war to
studies of the military profession. With some exceptions—Stanislav
Andreski in England, Raymond Aron in France, Hannah Arendt and C.
Wright Mills in the United States—the social sciences outside political
science neglected war during the Cold War, and this seemed justified by a
decline in interstate wars. Today almost no one in the Global North glorifies
war. Nor do many believe that human nature or human society inevitably
generates war (or peace).

The Return of Liberal Optimism

The twenty-first century has seen a revival of interest in war in the field of
sociology.13 Yet these scholars’ suitably nuanced views have been swamped
by a revival of liberal optimism expressed by John Mueller, Azar Gat,
Steven Pinker, and Joshua Goldstein.14 Their books have been well received
in a Washington satisfied with the notion of a Pax Americana. Goldstein
focuses on the post-1945 period. Mueller sees the decline of war as long-
term and still continuing. World War II might seem to create a problem for
him, but he shrugs this off, saying that one man, Adolf Hitler, was
responsible for it. Mueller emphasizes cultural shifts occurring during the
twentieth century that made war “rationally unthinkable” as ever more
countries were “dropping out” of the war system. He dismisses the rise of
Islamic terrorism as criminal activity responded to by “police action,” rather
than constituting “war.”15 Gat sees war in nineteenth-century utilitarian
terms: war is now inferior to trade in securing scarce resources. He also
points to attributes of Western society that strengthen the attractions of peace
—mature democracy, the growth of metropolitan life, the sexual revolution
and feminism, and nuclear deterrence. All differ from nineteenth-century
scholars in identifying a long-term decline of war. Dichotomous views of
war in history before and after the nineteenth century no longer exist.
Pinker draws on modern studies of human nature, offering a metaphor
of “angels” and “demons” struggling within us, capable of steering us either
to peace or to war. He also draws on Norbert Elias, who, in The Process of
Civilisation, argues that a civilizing process involving self-restraint and
impulse management had intensified over past centuries in Europe.
Europeans had inhibited their impulses, anticipated the consequences of their
actions, and empathized more with others. A culture of honor, embodying
the ideal of revenge, had given way to a culture of dignity, embodying
control of one’s emotions. The book was originally published in German in
1939—bad timing! Pinker seems not to know that Elias came to revise his
view. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, and then as a wartime British
intelligence officer interviewing hard-line Nazis, Elias thought a
“decivilizing process” had begun in the twentieth century, when nuclear war
was a distinct possibility.16 He died in 1990, at the end of the Cold War, too
soon to regain optimism.
Liberal theories have been heard before. The contribution of recent
writers has been to add empirical data. Gat and Pinker give knowledgeable
narratives of violence and warfare through the ages. Goldstein offers data on
post-1945 trends in wars and civil wars. Pinker presents a six-phase
periodization of decline through the ages. Since he presents the fullest
historical statistical data on the frequency of wars and the number of
casualties they inflict, which are the simplest measures of whether war has
declined, I focus on his data.

Pinker on Early History and the Mongols

Pinker begins with prehistoric warfare that I discussed in chapter 2. In it, he
says, war deaths averaged 15 percent and amounted to “up to” 60 percent of
the total population, whereas in modern nation-states war deaths have been 5
percent or less. His 15 percent average figure is too high. His maximum of
60 percent is much lower than the maximum in modern cases of genocide—
over 95 percent of the natives in North America and Australia, while in the
twentieth century the Nazis disposed of about 70 percent of Jews, the
Ottoman Turks and Kurds about 70 percent of Armenians, and the Hutus
about 60 percent of Tutsis. So war was not more intense in prehistoric times.
Pinker also exaggerates the worst early historical cases. He puts the
total death toll of the An Lushan civil war in eighth-century China at 36
million. This is derived from comparing Chinese censuses before and after
the war. Sinologists accept that this was a devastating war, but they add that
it also devastated the Tang census administration, which led to severe
undercounting of the postwar population. They regard 13 million as a more
reasonable total for deaths due to the war, which is bad enough.17 Pinker
also accepts as truth the boasts of rulers of ancient empires like the
Assyrians that they had wiped out entire populations in their millions. But
these were boasts with the strategic purpose of cowing future opposition.
Faced with a city refusing to surrender, the Assyrians might massacre the
inhabitants after taking the city, but this was to encourage other cities to
submit. Given such a terrible demonstration of Assyrian power, they usually
did so. The Assyrians wanted to rule over other peoples, not exterminate
them.
Gat adds brief data on Greece and Rome. On Greece he focuses on the
Peloponnesian War and derives very high totals of Greek war losses from the
military historian Victor Hanson, who follows Thucydides.18 He concludes
that a staggering one-third of the whole Athenian population (not just
citizens) died in this war. Yet the classicist Stewart Flory shows that all
Hanson’s estimates are much too high and observes that Greek historians,
especially Thucydides, wrote for literary effect, not statistical accuracy.19
Regarding Rome, Gat focuses on Roman losses in the first three years of the
Second Punic War. He follows Peter Brunt’s 1971 estimate of Roman
legionary losses in those years as 50,000, which he says was 25 percent of
the adult male citizenry.20 Actually, it was the proportion of those citizens
called assidui, liable for military service. The Roman response was to lower
the property requirement for military service, which immediately enabled
them to raise more legions. Brunt also inadvertently doubles the likely
proportion of Roman citizens slain by assuming that all the soldiers were
drawn from its citizen body. Yet the auxilia, foreign allies who were not
fully Roman citizens, formed at least half of the Roman armies, sometimes
more, as I showed in chapter 4. These wars had high death tolls, but
probably not higher than the worst wars of most historical periods. What
does support Pinker’s argument here is the sheer frequency of wars in
ancient Rome, also evidenced in chapter 4, although this was not typical of
the whole ancient world.
The Mongols are crucial for Pinker. He claims they were far deadlier
than any other human group. He estimates that in their conquests they killed
40 million persons in total. Indeed, estimates of between 30 and 60 million
dominate web entries on the Mongols, though these give no evidence and are
in fact an internet myth. Scholars of the Mongols—Jack Weatherford, David
Morgan, and Peter Frankopan—declare such figures to be preposterous.21
The real total is unknowable, but much lower, they say. Pinker relies heavily
on two massacres in the cities of Merv and Baghdad, which fiercely resisted
the Mongols but were finally stormed. At Merv he says that the total killed
after surrender was 1.3 million, but this is six times more than its probable
population at that time. Pinker’s estimate of Baghdad’s fatalities is 800,000.
Again, this is higher than its total population, which was somewhere
between 200,000 and 500,000. Even if we conjecture that refugees from the
surrounding countryside flooded into the cities, swelling their populations,
there would not have been room in the cities for such numbers. The Baghdad
caliph’s defiance did the inhabitants no good, particularly his reply to
Chinggis’s order to knock down his walls: “When you remove all your
horses’ hooves, we shall destroy our fortifications.”22 Michal Biran
concludes that though Baghdad did suffer a terrible massacre, the number of
deaths was less than previously supposed.23 Many escaped death by bribes
or through negotiations. One scholar comments that 80,000 (removing a
zero) is a much likelier estimate of the casualties in Baghdad.24 True, higher
figures for the two cities were given by contemporary sources, but just as
these greatly exaggerated the size of Mongol armies, so they exaggerated
their slaughter.25 The Mongols themselves inflated numbers to terrify others
into submission. In a letter to Louis XI of France, Khan Hulagu boasted he
had killed over 2 million in Baghdad, an utterly incredible figure. The worst
massacres occurred where cities that had surrendered then rebelled again,
where the khan’s envoys or kin had been killed, or in regions of persistent
guerilla resistance, which is consistent with the policy of vengeful
calculation I described in chapter 6. This was motivated by great anger yet
also calculation, for a massacre might persuade the next city or region to
surrender.26 Compare President Harry Truman’s dropping of atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to persuade Japan to surrender. Both were
justified by the perpetrators as saving further lives among their own troops.
We find the Mongols worse because their killing was ferocious body
hacking, whereas Truman’s was long-distance callous killing, to which we
have grown accustomed. Both policies did induce surrender—a ghastly
rational calculation.
The Persian chronicler Joveyni described the varied policies used in the
conquest of the cities of Bukhara by Chinggis (Genghis) Khan in 1219,
which had been provoked by the defiance there of Sultan Muhammad. The
sultan’s armies were much larger than the Mongols’, but fear of his own
generals had led him to disperse his armies, a disastrous case of coup-
proofing that weakened his war-fighting ability. The cities and their armies
were overpowered one by one. Chinggis first reached the city of Zarnuq and
sent an emissary to offer the usual alternatives to the city: surrender or death.
The citizens of Zarnuq sensibly chose the former and were spared, losing
only some sons to Mongol conscription. The next city was Nur. Its gates
were shut while divided counsels reigned in the city. The decision was
eventually to surrender. Chinggis accepted this but with one condition. All
the citizens were led out of the city; none was killed, but the empty city was
looted by his soldiers. Then in Bukhara, the defiant sultan sent out an army
to resist. It was overwhelmed. The citizens opened the gates, but the sultan’s
soldiers in the citadel, fearing the worst, continued fighting. They were
slaughtered, as were many citizens, in the general mayhem. The rest were
driven out into the fields. Chinggis gave a speech to them, declaring: “O
people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones
among you have committed those sins. If you ask me what proof I have for
these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God.” So the city’s
notables were all killed, while the young men were conscripted into the
Mongol army. The rest of the population were spared. Joveyni mentioned
twelve cities taken after fighting by Chinggis in 1220–1221. In one city “all
were killed,” three cities were “destroyed” (casualties not stated), in one the
people were driven out and the city looted, and in the other seven there was
only limited killing.27 Ratchnevsky’s account uses many sources and differs
in details, but not in the overall policy.28
Useful anger endured. In 1273 Kublai Khan began his final assault on
Song dynasty rule over China by besieging twin cities. Fancheng bravely
endured a long siege, which caused massive Mongol casualties, but it was
eventually stormed. The population was put to the sword. Ten thousand
bodies were supposedly stacked in view of the nearby city of Xiangyang. Its
defenders were terror-stricken, and the commander, Lu Wenhuan, promptly
surrendered. Not only was the city spared, but Lu and his troops were
incorporated into the Mongol army, Lu becoming a prominent Mongol
general. In 1276 the end of the Song dynasty came as its capital, Hangzhou,
perhaps the biggest city in the world at that time, capitulated without a siege
after negotiations. The city was spared killing or looting.29
Mongol practice after resistance was to divide the population. Elites
who had resisted were almost always killed, but artisans and merchants were
spared, alongside farmers, for the Mongols wanted to rule a rich land, not a
depopulated desert. Nor were women and children usually killed—they
might be enslaved, while young males were conscripted into their armies.
Much of the remaining male urban population might then be killed.30
Chinggis was reputed to be skilled at winning over allies and was certainly
an active diplomat.31 Empire builders need war and diplomacy. Indeed, the
Mongols were not always seen as oppressors, since they offered a higher
level of civilization and order to many regions, as well as religious
toleration, and they often poured resources into cities after they had occupied
them.32 Some cities and regions were devastated, but most appear not to
have suffered at all. Resistance or submission was the key.33
Thus, we should reduce the total deaths inflicted by the Mongols by
more than half from the internet myth figure. Though most scholars
conclude that it is impossible to estimate the total number of the Mongols’
victims, one gives a detailed estimate that takes into account known regional
variations and yields a probable death total of about 11.5 million, less than
one-third of Pinker’s 40 million.34 A figure of 11.5 million is bad enough, of
course—worse in total than the atrocities of any other group of that period. I
doubt that this was a price worth paying by humanity for the undoubted
benefits of Mongol rule. Yet Mongol killings were not out of proportion to
other terrible historical cases, including those in the twentieth century.
 Pinker’s Worst List
Pinker relies most on a list of the twenty-one cases in history with the
highest absolute death tolls in war.35 These death tolls include civilian as
well as battle deaths, in addition to state-induced famines. Table 10.1 shows
his list, which he arranges in column 1 in order of the absolute number of
deaths: World War II had the most, and the French Wars of Religion had the
least. All figures in the table are in millions of deaths. A word of caution:
modern figures are more likely to be accurate, whereas in ancient sources
inflation of deaths is likelier. Lacking alternative sources, however, we have
to go with these.
 His cases are drawn from all ages of human history, though columns 1–
3 show that seven of them occurred during the first half of the twentieth
century, including the two deadliest of all, World War II and the killings and
famine deaths during Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China. My amendments
of the death toll from An Lushan and the Mongols (discussed above) are
given in parentheses in the table. The “Absolute deaths” column reveals no
overall decline in fatalities, and Pinker accepts that. But he prefers to use not
the absolute but the “relative” death rate—deaths as a proportion of the total
world population at the time, standardized by the twentieth-century
population total. Thus, the absolute and relative death rates for the twentieth-
century cases are identical, while absolute deaths in the earlier cases are all
increased by multiplying them by the twentieth-century global population,
divided by estimated global population at that time. Columns 4 and 5 present
his results.
This changes the picture since most wars with the highest relative death
rates were in the distant past, when global population was far lower. With
this adjustment, the deadliest wars in Pinker’s list are no longer World War II
and Maoism but the An Lushan rebellion in eighth-century China and the
Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century, although if my downward
revision of the Mongol-induced losses is accepted, the Middle Eastern slave
trade rises up to the second spot. Indeed, all of the top eight cases are now
from earlier centuries, in line with Pinker’s theory. This switch from absolute
to relative deaths makes sense, yet the decrease in the relative death rates in
the twentieth century was due not to growing pacifism but to an explosion in
global population and a large increase in workers in war industries who are
not counted as combatants. This does suggest not a decline in warfare but a
transformation in the nature of war—as I argue later. Braumoeller adds that
controlling only for the population of those countries at war would be a
better measure of relative rates, though this is not a perfect measure since
countries with larger populations tend to have smaller armies relative to
population size and so they kill fewer enemies relative to that size.36
Should we not also take into account the duration of each case? World
War II inflicted fewer deaths as a proportion of the global population at that
time than had the Mongol conquests, the Atlantic slave trade, or the
annihilation of Native Americans and Australian aborigines. Yet World War
II lasted only eight years (including the Japan-China war), whereas the
Mongol conquests lasted one hundred years, and the slaughter of the Atlantic
slave trade and of the Native Americans took centuries. Pinker says the slave
trade lasted twelve centuries in the Middle East and five centuries in the
West. The Middle Eastern slave trade lasted so long that in annual terms its
death rate plummets to the bottom of the table. True, there is something
horrible about an atrocity that endured for centuries versus one that was far
briefer but killed more people, but the latter may be a better measure of how
much a society is involved in killing. So I have calculated average annual
killing rates based on Pinker’s relative figures. On this measure World War
II goes back up to the top of the list with a much higher annual relative rate
of killing than any other case. The runner-up would be An Lushan if we
accepted Pinker’s inflated estimate of fatalities. If we use the revised figure
of 13 million, this drops it back to eighth position. Similarly, the Mongols
drop down to sixteenth on my corrected figures. World War I is then the
runner-up, after World War II (even though the count does not include the
50+ million Spanish flu casualties diffused to the world by troop movements
at the war’s end). These revised figures cast doubt on any general decline of
war in the period up to 1945. You can take your pick of which measure to
prefer, but the combination would suggest no overall decline in casualties
induced by war.
Pinker is also inconsistent. While he combines long-lived but sporadic
bouts of killings into a single case, like the Mongol conquests or the two
slave trades, he separates six cases in the first half of the twentieth century:
the two world wars, the Russian and Chinese civil wars, and the Stalinist and
Maoist famines. Yet these all occurred within a fifty-year period, they were
all connected, and each one led directly or indirectly to the next. These
might make them a single case, or rather a single sequence of cases. So the
first half of the twentieth century would contain easily the bloodiest “event”
in human history, in both absolute and relative terms, without even taking
annual rates into consideration. These data refute any notion that warfare
declined through human history. They might also suggest that none of these
mass killing bouts of from 3 to 55 million fatalities could be regarded as
rational or justified, whatever the positive contributions made by the
perpetrators to their civilizations.

Have Wars Increased?

Do such figures actually support the opposite view, that wars have been
rising through the centuries? Eckhardt saw an “increase in war deaths and
deaths per war during the last five centuries. Not only has the total violence
of war increased over these centuries, but the average war has also increased
in violence.”37 Malešević says war deaths have been continually growing
over no fewer than one thousand years.38 He explains this in terms of the
growth of the infrastructural power of state bureaucracies, backed up by the
resources of modern capitalism and of science. States have become military
precision killing machines, he says. Yet we need to remember Pinker’s
distinction between absolute and relative fatality levels. Overall, armies have
been bigger and casualties higher in modern times than earlier in the
millennium, as Malešević and Eckhardt say, but primarily because world
population has grown so enormously—from perhaps 450 million in 1300 to
1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020. When the death-rate figures are
adjusted by Pinker’s relative method, the growth in army size and war deaths
disappears, except as we saw for the first half of the twentieth century. When
subtler measures are introduced, the pattern becomes more complex, as we
will see.

Modern and Premodern Wars

Eckhardt and Malešević return us to a dichotomous premodern-modern
theory of war, concerning not the frequency of war but the growing
organizational efficiency of warfare. They base this on European history
during the last five hundred years (for Eckhardt) and one thousand years (for
Malešević). One thousand years covers the transition from feudal agrarian to
capitalist industrial and postindustrial societies, from small polities with
feeble infrastructural powers, mobilizing tiny armies, to the states with the
greatest infrastructural powers in history, capable of mobilizing armies of
millions. Eckhardt covers the “modernization” period of this millennium.
Obviously, their stark contrasts are correct for Europe during these periods.
Malešević very briefly discusses two earlier exceptions, Rome and China,
with their large, well-drilled armed forces, despite their tiny state
bureaucracies. Yet he stresses the “weakness” of China—a bizarre judgment
given the Chinese history I chronicled in chapter 6. Even in the nineteenth
century, when the lack of naval forces had made China vulnerable to foreign
navies, in land warfare against Russia the Qing were still fighting successful
campaigns. Malešević says that the Roman exception was due to the
unusually well-developed bureaucratic and professional structure of the
legions themselves: not the state but the legions had considerable centralized
infrastructural power.
Yet infrastructural power does not merely flow from the central state. It
is a two-way relationship between the state and civil society. In this book I
reveal several types of such relations. In chapter 13 we will see mass
mobilizing communist parties that have thoroughly penetrated the armed
forces of the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam, reinforced by communist
rituals and ideology. This enabled them to inflict defeat on higher-tech
armies. In chapter 4 I showed that Roman citizenship was the main source of
infrastructural power, conferring rights on citizen-soldiers, while the
hierarchy of citizen census classes translated directly into army ranks. The
state and its legions actually were the senatorial, equestrian, and heavy and
medium infantry census classes. They shared a common ideology, they were
politically dominant through the senate and popular assemblies, and they
were economically organized by careers that tied together army command
and political office. That class structure provided the state’s core, not the few
“civil servants” (who were often slaves) or the legions themselves. In
chapter 6 I found a different form of this two-way relationship in imperial
China. Han Chinese armies up to a million strong were the product not of a
centralized bureaucracy (again tiny by modern standards), but of a close
relationship between a centralized monarchy and a Confucian gentry-
bureaucrat class whose powers stretched from the localities into the “outer
courtyard” of the palace. Rome and China had polities that structurally
“represented” dominant classes, enabling them to levy the taxes and
conscription necessary to support large standing armies and to inflict mass
slaughter on the enemy—Caesar killing nearly a million Gauls, the Chinese
emperor Yongle mobilizing over 200,000 men to destroy several Mongol
peoples, the Manchu emperor Qianlong killing several hundred thousand
Zunghars and mobilizing 200,000 soldiers in the field, as well as 400,000
logistical support staff (the Chinese armies bearing firearms). These are
glaring exceptions to the premodernity-modernity dichotomy of warfare.
I have also noted some intermediate examples of large, drilled,
organized, and effective historical armies, as mobilized by the Aztecs, the
Inca, the Mongols, and the early Chinese and later Japanese warring states
periods. They had quite weak states, but close relations between the ruler
and dominant classes, which enabled their forces to begin conquests; and a
ruler’s feeling forced to continue distributing tribute and spoils to his
soldiers also increased the likelihood of further aggression. The Chinese also
had a deal with their peasantry, offering economic reforms in return for
military service. The Inca developed their extraordinary paved road system,
providing more central control as well as trade. The power of that great
engine of destruction, the Mongol army, rested on the two-way relationship
between the horsemen of its pastoral economy and the tribal political
federations—generating forces that were not large but extremely lethal. The
Mongols had their weaknesses, especially their small numbers and the
factional disputes of tribal leaders, but I noted their techniques for increasing
their infrastructural power, like their postal and staging system, their use of
Chinese taxes, and an army-centered set of laws. Yet only when they
appropriated the entire Chinese administration system, as did the Yuan and
Manchu dynasties, were they able to sustain massive armies for long
campaigns (Qianlong’s being the prime example). Otherwise, wars had to be
shorter while disputed successions still brought them down.
Earlier organization of warfare in Europe and Asia thus deviated from
the dichotomous model. Two were the equal of the modern West, others
were not so well developed but were well beyond the primitive. The West
does not provide the only model for an infrastructurally powerful society
effective at large-scale, bloody warfare. Of course, many societies in history
did have less well-organized armed forces, and these were much smaller. But
history is not a divide between modern and premodern states and armies.

Nineteenth-Century Peace? Europe and Its Colonies

Has there been a medium-term trend toward fewer or less intensive wars?
Lars-Erik Cederman and his colleagues show that in the years 1770–1810
the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars produced a jump in army
size and battle fatalities.39 Reworking Levy’s data on wars between 1475
and 1975, they say the emergence of nationalism at the end of the eighteenth
century enabled a large increase in states’ ability to inculcate loyalty within
mass armies, generating deep tensions between the principles of territorial
and popular sovereignty that have driven patterns of interstate warfare ever
since. They rule out alternative explanations of increasing war intensity, such
as increasing population and changes in weapons technology. Thus, they say,
we can trace the roots of the twentieth-century world wars back to 1789.
They have no actual data on nationalism, however, and the motivation on the
French side was revolutionary rather than nationalist, although this did
develop into the notion of the nation in arms. For France’s monarchical
enemies, the motivation throughout was counterrevolutionary, which
involved rejecting the nationalism espoused by those who at first saw the
French armies as their liberators. The settlement of 1815 was clearly
counterrevolutionary.
Counterrevolutionary fears did then reduce war in Europe. Pinker sees
the period 1815–1914 as a “Long Peace.” Blainey agrees: “Historians’
explanations of peace in modern times are centered on the nineteenth
century. Two long periods in that century were remarkably peaceful. One ran
from the Battle of Waterloo to the short wars of 1848. . . . The other . . . ran
from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to . . . 1914.”40 Gat uses
CoW data to identify two subperiods of peace, in 1815–54 and 1871–1914.41
The interim period of 1854–71 was bloody, containing the Crimean War,
three Prussian wars with Austria, Denmark, and France, the Indian Mutiny,
the American Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion in China, and the disastrous
Paraguayan War. But the before-and-after periods are key to Gat’s assertion
of a long-term decline of war. Braumoeller, using CoW data, notes the
hiccup in the middle but concludes that “the trend in the data is very
consistent with the mainstream historical record, which portrays the
nineteenth century as a remarkably peaceful one.”42
Yet all these authors are wrong. The nineteenth century did not contain
one long or two shorter periods of peace. Gat counted only “wars between
the great powers,” the major states of Europe, because these were “the most
crucial and most destructive inter-state wars.” This also limited Levy’s data
on earlier periods, which showed that the number of large interstate wars had
declined steadily in every decade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
century. Their Eurocentrism excludes the most common form of war fought
by early modern Europeans—colonial wars fought against natives of other
continents. The nineteenth century culminated this process, for the British,
French, and Dutch empires now expanded over virtually the whole world,
while the American, Belgian, German, and Japanese empires began their
relatively brief ascents—all killing very large numbers of indigenous
peoples. These studies have two further biases. First, they include only wars
in which over one thousand soldiers were killed in battle in a year, and this
understates colonial warfare, which usually consists of sequences of much
smaller campaigns. Recent CoW data have been extended to cover MIDs as
well, but only for conflicts between states, not for “extrastate” conflicts like
most colonial struggles. I have every sympathy for the CoW researchers. It is
hard enough to get reliable data on soldiers in the battles of major wars. It
would be impossible to get comparable statistics on civilian deaths or on
smaller colonial wars and skirmishes. Nonetheless, no analysis based on
CoW data alone, however statistically sophisticated, can make claims about
the totality of war in the nineteenth century.
CoW data on the period 1816–1997 do include some colonial wars.
They reveal 79 interstate wars, 214 civil wars, and 108 colonial wars. Of the
53 million combat deaths these produced over the whole period, interstate
wars contributed 32 million, thanks mainly to the two world wars. Without
them, civil wars produced more deaths, 18 million, mostly in the period after
1945, and colonial wars contributed almost 3 million, mostly in the period
1870–99. The 1890s saw the most wars in one decade until the 1970s outdid
them. Controlled for the size of the population, battle deaths had three big
peaks, in the 1860s, the 1910s (World War I), and the 1940s (World War II).
With these three exceptions, there was a basically flat rate of deaths as a
proportion of population, which Meredith Sarkees and her colleagues say
suggests “something discouraging about the constancy of warfare in human
affairs.”43 They acknowledge that the first quarter century after 1816 was
quite peaceful, but there was no further nineteenth-century decline in
warfare. They ask rhetorically, “Was this supposedly, civilized, peaceful
century just a time when Europeans stopped fighting each other to conquer
and slaughter militarily weaker Asians and Africans?” Their answer is yes,
and they are right.
The second bias is that CoW figures are of deaths in battle, excluding
the many civilian deaths in colonial wars. Many of these wars killed more
civilians than soldiers. In Europe the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had killed
about 8 million people, of which battle deaths represented “only” several
hundred thousand. Most colonial wars were also lopsided. Yet estimating
deaths is difficult since many resulted from starvation and disease resulting
from the colonists’ mistreatment of natives—troops burning crops and
villages and imposing slave labor conditions with brutal punishment and
inadequate nutrition. Those were war-generated deaths. But much death also
resulted from mere contact with Europeans through diseases to which the
natives had no immunity. Such diseases might have spread anyway without
war, as a result of peaceful trading or freer labor relations, although the
herding of natives together in slave ships, mines, plantations, and armies
worsened the spread of diseases. Separating out deaths consequent on war
from mere contact deaths cannot be exact. We cannot put precise numbers on
fatalities resulting from colonization. Most colonizing campaigns also
consisted of many small encounters, none individually reaching a thousand
deaths; native casualties often went uncounted since they were of little
interest to the colonial authorities. So I will quickly review the relatively
well-evidenced colonial cases. Deaths are usually estimates of whole
campaigns involving small encounters rarely recorded individually. I stress
that such estimates are less reliable than CoW data and can indicate only
rough orders of magnitude.
In the United States the Native American population in 1500 was
somewhere between 4 and 9 million. Only about 600,000 were left in 1800,
and only 237,000 appeared in the census of 1900, a population loss above 95
percent since 1500 and 60 percent since 1800. In the Indian Wars lasting
through the nineteenth century, Native American losses in battle were
around 60,000 inflicted by soldiers and settler militias, though in massacres
like that at Sand Creek (described in the next chapter), soldiers killed entire
populations, not just braves. Many deaths also resulted from the famine and
diseases caused by forced deportations onto barren lands. Native North
Americans are absent from CoW data. In South America the greatest early
casualties had been inflicted by the Spanish and Portuguese, but we lack
evidence on numbers. There were massacres through most of the nineteenth
century. The last big ones are known. In Cuba’s “Great War” of 1868–78,
about 240,000 died. CoW counted only 50,000 battle deaths. In Argentina’s
“Conquest of the Desert” in Patagonia in the 1870s to 1884, over 30,000
died, but this does not appear in CoW data.
In Africa killing rates of indigenous soldiers escalated through the
nineteenth century as the Europeans acquired more lethal guns. Since natives
learned not to attempt pitched battles, warfare became hit-and-run guerilla
campaigns in terrain posing logistical and climatic challenges, and troop
ratios to area and population size were low. Intermittent campaigns were
more common than pitched battles during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.44 Yet in western Kenya alone between 1894 and 1914 the British
fought twenty-two battles, one per year.45 Soldiers and administrators would
arrive in the colonies already fearful of supposedly “savage” natives, holding
nervous fingers on the trigger. Their fears were exacerbated by unpredictable
violence amid hostile environments. To them, this legitimized massacres,
punitive campaigns that destroyed villages, and killing of inhabitants who
might be sustaining the rebels. There was, says Bouda Etemad, a “conquest-
resistance-repression cycle.”46
 The protracted French conquest of Algeria (1829–47) killed between
300,000 and 825,000 Algerians in many small-scale antiguerilla campaigns
and punitive attacks on villages. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting Algeria, said
he had a “distressing notion that at this moment we are waging war far more
barbarously than the Arabs themselves.”47 French armies did not respect the
difference between soldiers and civilians. CoW data include only two
campaigns that total 23,000 Algerian deaths. Worse in relative numbers was
the German army’s genocide of the Herrero and Nama peoples in today’s
Namibia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Herrero were reduced
from 60,000–80,000 to only 16,000 in eight years (only 2,000 of the
survivors being men), and the Nama loss rate was 50 percent of a total
population of 20,000.48 CoW data total only 11,000 battle deaths among the
two peoples. In present-day Tanzania in the Maji-Maji War of 1905–7, the
official German report presented to the Reichstag stated that 75,000 Africans
died. Other estimates double that, others go up to 250,000 to 300,000—a
huge number for such a small region. Some tribes lost over 90 percent of
their members.49 CoW native battle deaths there total only 5,400. In the
Belgian Congo during 1885–1908, perhaps 10 million died, mainly through
diseases brought about by dire forced labor conditions and repression. CoW
native battle deaths in the Congo are only 13,000.
Russian colonial expansion into Asia continued through the nineteenth
century. Although not as bloody as earlier campaigns in Siberia, expansion
into Central Asia produced Turkmen losses of around 20,000 spread over
many smaller campaigns. CoW data include three wars against Kokand and
Bukhara with total battle deaths of 7,300. The peoples of the Caucasus
suffered many more fatalities from the 1860s to century’s end. The Russian
census of 1897 recorded only 150,000 Circassians left in their homeland,
one-tenth of their original number, mainly reduced by deportations ruthlessly
enforced by the Russian army. The Russian government acknowledged that
the wars and deportations caused 300,000 deaths. Circassian survivors
claimed over 3 million.50 Circassians do not figure in CoW data.
In India between 1850 and 1914, millions were killed in famines caused
by coercive colonial policies. This case figures in Pinker’s list of the worst
death tolls in conflicts in human history. In Java in 1825–30, the Dutch
conquest included devastation of the countryside and over 200,000 deaths.51
CoW data on battle deaths in this case are the same, the only instance of
agreement we will find. In the Bali invasion of 1849, about 10,000 died.
This does not appear in the CoW list of wars. In Aceh wars between 1873
and 1914, about 100,000 indigenous people died in battle, through disease,
and in terrible conditions in labor camps. CoW data total 22,200 native battle
deaths. There were another thirty-one Dutch smaller military expeditions in
this period, says Henk Wesseling. The Tahitian population collapsed by 90
percent between 1770, when white men arrived, and the 1840s. This does
not appear in CoW data. The Kanaks of New Caledonia lost 70 percent of
their original population of about 70,000, mainly in the nineteenth century,
when French settlers seized their land and imposed forced labor on them. A
rebellion in 1878 killed 1,000, and many more were deported abroad. They
do not appear in the CoW list. In New Zealand the Maoris were driven from
their lands, exterminated when they resisted, and contracted diseases. Their
numbers fell from 150,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century to
42,000 in 1896.52 The Maoris appear only in CoW data for the war of 1863–
66 against the British; 2,000 battle deaths were recorded.
Australian aborigine and Torres Straits peoples do not appear in CoW
data. Yet after the first contact in 1788 there were many small massacres
committed by settlers and armed police, often in explicit “hunting
expeditions.” The University of Newcastle, New South Wales, is mapping all
such cases. It defines a massacre as the killing of at least six undefended
people, since if the typical indigenous group was about twenty strong, the
loss of six, 30 percent of the population, was likely to threaten the group’s
survival. The project has so far uncovered almost five hundred massacres.
Most were committed in the second half of the nineteenth century, but they
began as the nineteenth century dawned and continued into the 1930s.
Wikipedia’s “List of massacres of indigenous Australians” details over
ninety of Newcastle’s cases. They involve casualty rates of between six and
several hundred. None entails over one thousand. R. G. Kimber concludes,
“The numbers shot were undoubtedly so great as to cause total or near-total
local group extinctions . . . so poorly recorded that accurate pre-contact
populations in the region can never be known.”53 The indigenous population
of Tasmania, numbering 20,000, was completely exterminated. Raymond
Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen have gone through the records of
Queensland. They estimate 65,000 to 67,000 indigenous Queenslanders shot
by police and settlers, an overall death rate of 22–26 percent.54 In 1887 the
ethnographer Edward Curr estimated that “fifteen to twenty-five per cent fall
from the rifle.” If the rate in Queensland was typical of other states and
territories, then total killings across Australia must have been about 200,000,
about the same as the battle deaths in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-
Prussian Wars combined.
This is not systematic coverage of colonial wars. Wesseling estimates
that the British, French, and Dutch fought about one hundred campaigns
against native peoples in the period 1870 to 1914, and I have mentioned only
some of these.55 Paul Bairoch estimates that between 1750 and 1913 the
lives of 300,000 European and 100,000 native colonial soldiers were lost in
African and Asian territories, mostly due to disease.56 He says the total
native lives lost in battle was somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000.
He adds, however, that the total deaths resulting from the wars and
subsequent forced migrations and famines might have reached 25 million.
Etemad estimates civilian losses at 50–60 million, mostly from diseases
spread by the destructiveness of war.57 Because of the mixed causes of
death, the total killed directly by wars is unknown, but by any count there
were both many more deaths in battle than recorded in CoW data, and a
hugely larger number of civilian deaths induced by war.
So we cannot deduce a Long Peace or two Short Peaces in the world in
the nineteenth century. Within Europe that may have been so, but it was
Europeans who were inflicting almost all the massacres and genocides
elsewhere. Combining all the deaths caused by the wars of Europeans might
exceed the death toll inflicted by any single civilization in any previous
hundred-year period. The rise of Enlightenment civilization in the West did
not bring peace. And then came the two world wars. The paradox of the first
half of the twentieth century was that it saw both the most devastating wars
in human history and the greatest growth in world peace movements—
though of course the former dwarfed the latter. But there was no overall
decline in warfare through history, or in the nineteenth century, or obviously
in the first half of the twentieth century.

Global War Trends since 1945

Most writers have been optimistic about peace in this period, compared
especially with the first half of the twentieth century. This comparison is
irrefutable. They are encouraged by the postwar settlement, the end of
colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization. In 1945 the Axis powers were
forced into unconditional surrender and occupied. Top Axis leaders were
charged with war crimes and convicted, except for the Japanese emperor,
whom U.S. leaders believed would be a symbol of stability for the country.
A blind eye was generally turned to lower-level administrators, and to
capitalist and political collaborators. Japanese and German military spending
was at the time kept at very low levels. Parliamentary democracy in West
Germany and Japan, and state socialism in Eastern Europe, were devised as
shields against fascist revival. Welfare states compromised class conflicts.
The United States gave substantial economic aid to Japan and Germany and
other Europeans. The Japanese Empire was abolished, and the war had
greatly weakened the European empires. Anticolonial movements finished
them off in the 1950s and 1960s. All encouraging news.
The main war threat became hostility between democratic capitalism
and state socialism, and both sides soon were brandishing nuclear weapons.
With a few scares along the way, mutual deterrence ruled. Raymond Aron
expressed the Cold War paradox as “peace impossible, war improbable”;
although the Soviet Union and the West had incompatible visions of the
world, they were unlikely to risk nuclear war.58 The Cold War also added
new security arrangements. In the Far East, the American military presence
turned from the pacification of Japan to its protection from state socialism.
NATO also transformed the United States into the protector of Western
Europe against any Soviet offensive. The Warsaw Pact had a parallel goal in
Eastern Europe. Mutual economic cooperation in Europe strengthened into
the Common Market and then the European Union, its initial purpose to
keep Germany in and the Soviet Union out. These institutions did secure
stability, peace, and massive economic development in Europe and (after
wars) in East Asia. The continent of Europe, the most warlike continent for a
millennium, was now a zone of peace.
When the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and 1991, this owed
less to American military power than to the breadth of it alliances and its
economic and technological superiority. But that was soon forgotten, as the
United States turned more to military interventions to secure its interests
abroad. This was to prove much less successful—because war is rarely a
rational instrument of policy.
Liberal optimists note correctly that the period has seen a declining
number of interstate wars. They have suggested that a relative peace,
enduring for over seventy years, might be headed at last toward Kant’s
vision of perpetual peace. Optimism is understandable within recent Western
Europe, from which war was virtually abolished after 1945, but only by
excluding the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine from that zone. The full-scale
Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 blasted apart such European
complacency (see chapter 15). It is also odd that the four optimistic liberals
are three American citizens (Mueller, Goldstein, and Pinker), and one Israeli
(Gat, an army major), given that their countries are among the few states still
waging war. Mueller’s optimism concerned forty years after 1945 in the
advanced countries, adding that the negative memory of the “two great
exceptions,” the world wars, acted as a deterrent to further major wars.59 Gat
calls this the Long Peace.60 He is optimistic about the future but sensibly
refrains from predicting perpetual peace by listing some ways that humans
might descend again into war. Goldstein says the decline in interstate wars is
deep-rooted, derived from eight causes unlikely to be reversed: the end of
the Cold War; U.S. dominance; a global economy; the spread of human
rights; the spread of democracy; increased participation of women in
politics; the proliferation of NGOs; and growing conflict resolution,
including UN peacekeeping operations, which he says have made the biggest
contribution to the recent decline.61 Two of these eight, the global economy
and democracy, are repeating nineteenth-century theories, but most of the
rest are more recent growths in international and transnational institutions.
Goldstein believes that international diplomacy spearheaded by the UN and
the United States is gradually bringing peace to the world. He sees U.S.
forces as being like UN blue helmets (peacekeepers), putting themselves “in
harm’s way to maintain peace, to establish conditions for political and
economic progress, to be diplomats and educators rather than just
‘grunts.’ ”62 Washington optimists see this as achievable policy, as do
soldiers struggling bravely to implement it. While appreciative of their
efforts, I am skeptical about their success, and sometimes about the goals of
their rulers.

Data on Post-1945 Wars

For this recent period there is no longer a problem of unrecorded small
campaigns, although data on civilian deaths remain problematic. The main
data sources up to 2015 are usefully summarized on the web by Max
Roser.63 The number of interstate and extrastate (mostly colonial) wars
declined greatly. Colonial wars dropped almost to a vanishing point as wars
of liberation converted colonies into independent states. We might suppose
that this would lead to more interstate wars, since the number of UN member
states increased from 51 in 1945 to 193 in 2020, but the reverse has
happened—fewer interstate wars, a very positive sign. Indeed, kingdoms did
not vanish, and some were resurrected. Thus, Joel Migdal posed the opposite
question: “Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?” despite their frequent
inability to deliver the goods.64 Fazal identifies just nine vanished kingdoms
since 1945, only one resulting from war.65 The others were cases like the
German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The
exception was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and even that proved
temporary. Fazal attributes the end of state mortality to the global
strengthening of a norm against conquest, which the exception proved, for
Saddam was countered by an invasion under United Nations auspices
restoring Kuwait’s independence. The United States has often invaded states,
but absorption was never the aim—regime change or strengthening was the
goal. Except for the United States and Russia, there have been few wars
between states with grossly unequal powers, traditionally the main killers of
kingdoms. The most positive aspect of the post-1945 period was that one of
my four types of war, wars of conquest followed by direct imperial rule,
seemed obsolete—at least until Vladimir Putin aimed at that in his Ukraine
invasion of 2022. And this also revealed a weakness of nuclear deterrence,
which is powerless to stop a major conventional war if the aggressor chooses
to threaten the nuclear option.
Nonetheless, there have been a few big wars. The modern war with the
highest death rate of soldiers as a proportion of national population was
Paraguay’s 1860s war. Number two, however, was in the 1950s: Paraguay
(again) versus Bolivia in the Chaco War (both wars were discussed in
chapter 9). Number three was the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–88, in which Iran
lost about a million casualties, and Iraq up to a half of that, in a war of
trenches and barbed-wire, like World War I. Numbers four and five were the
two world wars, although if we include civilian casualties, the wars in the
Eastern Congo in 1988–2008 would figure. Additionally, the wars in Korea
and Vietnam killed a million or more in battle, and several million if we
include civilians. The ongoing war in Ukraine might join this group of big
wars. There were also many small wars, especially during the Cold War. The
overall number of battle deaths, both in absolute numbers and especially as a
proportion of world population, however, declined between 1945 and 2013
but then began fluctuating quite sharply. There were in 2020 more wars but
fewer casualties than in recent years, but casualties must have risen sharply
in 2022 because of the wars in the Horn of Africa and Ukraine. CoW data on
the initiation of MIDs show that during the Cold War they reached the
highest level in over two centuries, but they then declined with the collapse
of the Soviet Union. This was the only decrease in two centuries of increases
in MIDs, and they rose again in the period 2012–20.66 Overall, says
Braumoeller of CoW data, the post-1945 period has been neither more nor
less deadly than the previous 130 years after 1816. But, he warns, “Given
how deadly the first half of the 20th century turned out to be, that conclusion
is nothing short of horrifying”—referring obliquely to what might happen
next. His second overall conclusion is that the two centuries since 1816 have
not seen either a consistent rise or decline of war. There have been short-
term rises and declines as well as short periods of no variation.67
Other studies have lowered the bar for war. Monty Marshall defines war
as armed conflict producing five hundred or more deaths, including an
annual death rate of at least one hundred.68 He also measures “war
magnitude” on the basis of a combination of casualties, geographical scope,
intensity, and displacement of civilians. There were large fluctuations in
magnitude without any overall trend between 1946 and 1985. Then came a
sharp decline until 1995, when it leveled off before declining again in 2010.
The first known year with no interstate wars was 2015. His data end there.
They imply not a seventy-year Long Peace but a thirty-five-year Short
Peace, since 1985—and more wars have started since 2015. Yet even a
seventy-year period of peace would not be unusual in world history, says
Aaron Clauset.69 Focusing on battle deaths from 1823 to 2003, he concludes
that both the recent period of relative peace and the half century of great
violence that preceded it are not statistically uncommon patterns in time-
series data. The postwar pattern of peace would need to endure for over one
hundred more years to become a statistically significant trend. Steven Beard
controls for the large rise in world population over the period, and this
reduces the proportion killed, but again only from the mid-1980s—which is
consistent with a Short, not a Long, Peace.70 It is too soon to conclude that
this represents a long-term decline of war, unless one can plausibly project
forward decline in the underlying causes of war.
Civil wars show different trends. If we use the CoW cutoff point of one
thousand battle deaths, we find that they rose in the 1930s and grew until the
1990s, when they were the large majority of wars. There was then a slight
decline from the early 1990s until 2008. Marshall finds that civil wars
increased until 1992–93 and then sharply declined, before rising again from
about 2009. The last few years have seen a rise in civil wars, from only four
in 2012 to twelve in 2016, to ten in 2019—and I count eight in 2020 and
twelve also in 2021.71 Wars involving non–state actors (extrastate wars),
such as ISIS, have recently dominated. Paul Hensel gives data for every two-
decade period from 1816 to 2000. Excepting the two periods of the world
wars, civil wars plus extrastate wars were always more frequent than
interstate wars. But wars relocated. In the nineteenth century, most interstate
and civil wars were in Europe, and there were far fewer in the Middle East
and Asia. Since most independent states in the nineteenth century were in
Europe, this is not surprising. But since 1945 the large majority have been in
Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. Europe has seen only two interstate wars
since 1950.72 Wars now seem confined to the developing world, though I
show later that this partially misleads. The world is now full of states whose
spatial configuration is largely guaranteed by international law and
institutions. The internal space within more recent and divided or weaker
states is now contested.
The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Uppsala Conflict Data
Program (UCDP) have data that use only twenty-five battle deaths as
defining war. These increased from 1955 to 1994, almost entirely because of
civil wars, followed by a decline until 2003, although this level was higher
than almost every year from 1950 to 1975. Between 2003 and 2018 trends
fluctuated. The total number of fatalities reached its peak of over 100,000 in
2014, and then declined to 53,000 in 2018, but that is still higher than any
other year since 1991.73 Mark Harrison and Nikolaus Wolf go even lower,
counting MIDs with fewer than twenty-five deaths, and even counting some
amounting to no more than saber rattling.74 In contrast to actual wars, these
have been increasing, and they now far outnumber actual wars. Indeed, saber
rattling has increased in recent years among the greatest powers, Russia,
China, the United States, and NATO (which I discuss in chapter 15). Goertz
and his colleagues suggest that movement toward milder MIDs is the core of
increasing peace in the world.75 Perhaps rulers are warier of war but bluster
and bluff more—a modern equivalent of early tribal societies hurling abuse
and brandishing spears and bows, but cautious about actually fighting. That
would not be quite perpetual peace, but it might be promising. As we saw in
chapter 9, this pattern has increasingly characterized Latin America. On the
other hand, blustering has also spread to the great powers, capable of the
greatest damage to the world.
These figures reveal more fluctuations than long-term trends, with two
main exceptions: a trend toward smaller wars and MIDs, which offers
support to liberal theorists; and a trend toward more civil wars, which offers
no such hope for the Global South. At a global level there has been no
overall decline or increase in war since 1945, although there was a decline
between about 1985 and 2014, ended by a recent flurry of wars, mostly in
Muslim countries (which I analyze in chapter 14).
Braumoeller explains the post-1816 results geopolitically, in terms of
“International Orders”—such as the Concert of Europe after the Congress of
Vienna, the Bismarckian period in Germany, and the American-dominated
world order after the Cold War.76 These, he says, brought relative peace,
whereas contested orders, such as those seen in the Napoleonic period,
around the two world wars, and in the Cold War, generated more wars. This
geopolitical explanation neglects economic and political power relations and
the transnational waves of ideological power I noted in chapter 8. The
Napoleonic Wars involved the transnational spread of revolution, which
made war deadlier and longer-lasting. The Concert of Europe of 1815 was
counterrevolutionary as well as geopolitical. It withstood a smaller
revolutionary wave in 1848. It was then shaken in Europe by Italian
aspirations for nationhood, and by the rise of Prussia, owing to its militaristic
society and state. Bismarck’s main later goal was domestic, to use a period
of peace in Europe to consolidate the transformation of Prussia into
Germany. He hosted the 1884 Berlin Conference on Africa, which did
ensure peace between the great powers, but it encouraged them to partition
Africa and Asia by force. World War I did break up this order, though this
again requires consideration of domestic sources of social power as well as
diplomatic factors (as outlined in chapter 8). The war ended with a wave of
revolutions, followed by seventy years of bitter struggle among rulers
seeking to impose on the world their own transnational ideologies—state
socialist, fascist, or capitalist-democratic—as in World War II, Korea, and
Vietnam, as well as countless small wars pitting class against class and
leftists against rightists. The Iran-Iraq war and the more recent wars in the
Middle East have involved both religious ideology and American
imperialism (see chapter 14). The main patterns of recent wars have been
due to domestic power relations and transnational ideologies as well as to
geopolitics.

Civilian versus Military Fatalities

Civilian casualties were high in many historical cases, caused by “exemplary
repression” of peoples who resisted as well as by armies “living off the land”
of their enemies. In chapter 8 I discussed the seventeenth-century Thirty
Years’ War and its massive civilian casualties. How many Russian civilians
died as a result of Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 is unknown, but the number
must be large. In general, though, civilian casualties increased during the
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, first in interstate wars, then in
civil wars. Air forces bomb civilian areas, and most civil wars are
“asymmetric,” pitting the heavy weapons of state armies and air forces
against guerillas wielding light weapons but hiding among the people
(sometimes using them as human shields) or fighting in regions with
difficult ecologies. Bombing them has increased civilian casualties. Marshall
says the proportion of civilian fatalities has steadily increased since 1954,
preponderating from about 1990.77
Ratios of military to civilian casualties in recent wars have also varied.
In the 2003 war in Iraq, official Iraqi estimates put deaths at up to 460,000,
whereas unofficial estimates are higher still. Official estimates undercount
because of difficulties in conducting surveys in wartime conditions, morgue
officials saying they receive more bodies than the authorities record, and
Muslim families often burying their dead immediately, without notifying the
authorities. The most plausible range of fatalities in Iraq seems 500,000–
600,000, civilians contributing 80 percent of them—a ratio of four civilian to
one military death. Yet which deaths do we count? Studies finding civilian-
military death ratios of less than one or even one to one, as in Bosnia in the
1990s, are of direct combat deaths only.78 According to the Watson Institute,
as of January 2015 about 92,000 people had been killed in the Afghan War,
of which only just over 26,000 were civilians. This yields a civilian-to-
combatant ratio of only 0.4:1, but this is a count of those killed directly by
enemy action. Crawford adds deaths through indirect causes related to the
war, such as famine and disease outbreaks.79 These add another 360,000
Afghans, pushing up the ratio enormously to about 8:1.
 African civilian casualties through civil wars have been much worse.
Most of these ten civil wars occurred in poor states with few records, so
fatality figures cannot be exact. Guesses have to be made of prewar
mortality rates and these compared with the postwar rates. In the deadliest
case, in the Eastern Congo between 1988 and 2008, two very different
estimates have been given by international organizations, one of 5.4 million
killed, the other just under half that figure. The higher figure seems biased
by an underestimate of prewar mortality rates.80 So I have preferred 2.5
million, following Bethany Lacina and Nils Gleditsch, who estimate that
over 90 percent of them were civilians, as also in the conflicts in Sudan and
Ethiopia.81 Civilian casualties in Mozambique, Somalia, and Ethiopia-
Eritrea were probably in excess of 75 percent, a ratio of 3–4:1, and this may
also be so of the 2021 war in Tigray province of Ethiopia. Being a civilian in
a civil war zone is dangerous across large swathes of Africa. A few small
wars have more military than civilian casualties—for example, the 1982
Falklands War and Nagorno-Karabagh in 2020—but the reverse is far more
common, provided we count civil as well as interstate wars and include war-
induced famines and disease.
 Wars also force refugee flight. Statistics have been collected by the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) since 1965. The
number displaced by persecution or conflict and fleeing abroad reached 19
million in 1989. It then declined to 9 million in 2005, in the period of hope.
But then came a decade of increases, culminating in the highest-ever figures,
29.5 million in 2018, 34 million in 2020, and 35 million in 2021. By the end
of June 2022, 6.5 million Ukrainians had fled their country in only four
months of war. An additional 8 million were internally displaced. Combined,
these figures add up to one-third of the Ukrainian population, an incredible
proportion. The total number of refugees in the world, if we add those
fleeing within their own countries, is much higher. The highest numbers,
82.4 million in 2020 and 94.7 million in 2021, were again the last ones. The
biggest numbers were from Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and
Myanmar.82 Of course, instead of remaining in fear of death in a war zone,
refugees flee to camps offering basic subsistence, thanks to the UNHCR,
other international agencies, and neighboring governments. This offers a
little support to Goldstein’s optimism regarding international organizations.
But when refugees more numerous than the population of the United
Kingdom or France are forcibly displaced, this can offer only a tiny smidgen
of hope.
Goldstein says UN peacekeeping troops encourage peace. In January
2020 there were 110,000 blue helmets stationed in fourteen countries, the
second-largest military intervention force in the world after the United
States, which had about 165,000 troops stationed abroad. UN troops are
brought in only when both sides to a conflict wish to be separated, so they
have no effect on wars until the endgame. Within this limitation, the UN
brings some successes, some failures. About half its brokered peace
settlements endure longer than twelve years, but half break down sooner.
Unfortunately, peace achieved through negotiated settlement does not last as
long as peace achieved by the victory of one side.83 Border disputes settled
by the International Court of Justice have been increasing, as we saw in
Latin America. A world without border disputes might be halfway to a world
without wars. But we are not there yet, for there are well over one hundred
current border disputes. Though most are now fairly dormant, some are not.
In 2020–22 border disputes continued in Ukraine before exploding into
Russian imperial conquest, and they flared up again between China and
India, China and other Pacific nations, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Tajikistan
and Kyrgyzstan, and Ethiopia, Tigray, and Eritrea. We have seen various
indications of a recent uptick in the number and intensity of wars. We must
be cautious about projecting this into the future, but the signs are ominous in
some places, especially around Russia’s borders and in Taiwan.

Pacific Tendencies in Western Societies

Yet internally the West has become fairly pacific, as Pinker, Gat, Mueller,
Goldstein, and MacMillan all observe. Take homicide rates. The average in
forty local studies in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England was twenty-
four murders per 100,000.84 Today in England and Wales it is less than one,
in the United States it is five, and the global average is just under seven. Yet
fifty cities in the world have homicide rates of over thirty per 100,000,
higher than in medieval England. Most are in Latin America, three are in
South Africa, but four are U.S. cities (led by Detroit and New Orleans). No
European city comes anywhere near this level of violence. Pinker says that
U.S. violence is a problem only in southern states and among African
Americans. Northern white homicide rates are only double those of modern
European countries, he says, not ten times as high. Of course, we could
reduce the rates of all the world’s cities by excluding the groups committing
the most homicides.
Police homicides are also relevant. In the United Kingdom between
2010 and 2019, on average 2.4 persons per year were killed by policemen.
Few U.K. police carry guns, but in Germany and France most do. In 2018
French police forces killed twenty-six persons and German police forces
nine. In most of the French cases, the victims were unarmed, but the police
had feared they were terrorists.85 American official figures of police killings
are unreliable, but the Washington Post published a survey of all known
cases in 2015 that revealed a shocking total of just under 1,000 killings that
year.86 The annual toll was slightly reduced in a 2021 study, which estimated
30,800 deaths from police violence between 1980 and 2018, an average of
820 per annum.87 These figures are about double officially recorded rates.
Around 80 percent of victims are claimed in police reports to have been
armed, though we might be skeptical about this claim, and we don’t know
whether victims were brandishing a gun when shot dead. In any case,
shooting a suspect repeatedly in the back when he or she is fleeing because
of reasonable fear of the police is an extremely violent act.
The rise of extremist militias in the United States is also worrying,
especially their persistent presence on the fringes of the Republican Party
and in the Trump movement, seemingly encouraged by the former president.
There are also persistent mass school shootings. Despite all this, the
prospects of significant gun control are politically very dim. This is
exclusively a domestic problem, for gun toters, even those dressed in quasi
uniforms, seem uninterested in foreign wars. The potential for civil war is
more threatening, should the deterioration of the U.S. political system
continue. America North and South does not support liberal theories of a
decline in interpersonal violence, but Europe, Japan, some of East Asia, and
Australasia do.
Like Helmut Thome, I stress the role of the state in the decline of
violence.88 Infrastructural power is the capacity of states to actually
penetrate civil society and logistically implement its decisions through the
realm. Most premodern rulers lacked the infrastructural power to
institutionalize procedures for maintaining order. Nor could they disarm the
population (though we saw that Tokugawa Japan managed it). Rulers relied
on repression, including killing. In contrast, modern rulers have
infrastructural power whose institutions routinely preserve order without
inflicting lethal violence—except in some authoritarian regimes. In most
countries the population has been disarmed—the United States is the
exception. In the West most people live peaceful lives. The West does have
extremely violent video games, and Hollywood movies are obsessed with
guns and violence. There is debate about whether this is simply cathartic
fantasyland or a direct expression of a repressed desire to kill. But without
conscription, real war has been removed from the everyday experience of
young men in the most developed parts of the world. To traditional sports
like male boxing and wrestling have been added cage fighting and female
fighting. Violence in the ring is real enough, though rarely lethal, and the
audience merely shouts. Violence in political and racial demonstrations has
increased in recent years. Yet overall, there has been a decline in militarism
in the principal institutions of society.
Chapter 1 defined militarism as combining the dominance of military
elites in society, the ideological exaltation of military virtues above those of
peace, and extensive and aggressive military preparedness. In earlier periods
I have found cases of militaristic societies in which we can find all three.
This is not so in today’s liberal democracies. Nonetheless, military spending
in both liberal and illiberal countries has been growing, the United States,
Europe, India, China, and Russia taking the lead. World military spending
grew every year since the year 2000, except for a slight dip between 2010
and 2014. These figures were adjusted to control for inflation. In 2021 it
topped $2 trillion for the first time. Doubtless the 2022 figures will be even
higher. The United States alone accounts for 38 percent of the world’s
expenditures. Yet military spending does not dominate the major economies.
Their dollar figures never top 4.1 percent of GDP. Only two of the Arab Gulf
state figures are higher than this.89 Military elites do not dominate even
American society, and while its gun culture, violent videos and movies, and
the elevation of soldiers into “heroes” are expressions of cultural militarism,
this is not institutionally dominant. European countries’ cultures are more
pacific. But the United States possesses the third element of militarism in
spades. Never has a single country had such military overpreparedness, its
bases spread over the globe, prepared for and launching military
interventions across the world. This combination makes for an uneven and
narrow form of militarism, a “regime militarism” rather than the societal
militarism of Rome and ex-barbarian dynasties of Asia. And it has required
new ways of making war.

From Ferocious to Callous Killing

Following Randall Collins, I distinguish “ferocious” from “callous” ways of
killing and note a partial shift in the modern period from the former to the
latter, from body hacking to killing from a distance.90 Ferocity is today
found mainly in civil wars in poorer countries, from machete hacking in
Rwanda to decapitating prisoners in the Middle East, to bayonet stabbing
and raping of Rohingya in Myanmar. Civil wars are often called “low
intensity,” but even paramilitary bands can terrorize large populations, while
the states fighting them are often just as ferocious. There is less long-range
killing in civil wars and virtually none by insurgent groups lacking airplanes,
tanks, and artillery. But all sides commit atrocities.
Wars in the Global South have been called “new wars” involving
asymmetry between states and rebels, military privatization, states losing the
monopoly of the means of violence, drugs or precious metals sold to finance
arms buying, and seizing resources from unarmed aid agencies. All these are
said to be reinforced by economic globalization, and all weaken state
sovereignty, offering further opportunities for rebels to intensify violence.91
Of course, some of these were often present in earlier wars, too, while the
link of “new wars” to economic globalization is dubious.92 Yet asymmetry is
real: government forces armed with tanks, airplanes, artillery, intensive
professional training and discipline battle against insurgents armed with
Kalashnikovs, handheld rocket launchers, improvised explosive devices, off-
road pickup trucks, suicide belts, guerilla cells, and morale conferred by
populist ideologies. Asymmetry had first allowed Westerners to conquer
most of the world. But in the post-1945 period, “weapons of the weak” have
allowed poorer political movements to fight back and sometimes outlast
much more heavily armed and richer opponents. Thus, in a study on
conflicts between strong and weak states measured by their material
resources, during the nineteenth century the strong ones won over 80 percent
of the wars, but after 1945, the weaker actors have won over 51 percent.93
This came in two waves, first in anti-colonial liberation struggles, second in
post-colonial struggles against the Soviet Union and the United States and
allies, in which religious ideologies have sometimes loomed large.
Ivan Arreguín-Toft says the colonial powers often tried “barbarism” to
repress enemies they considered “less civilized”—for example, massacres
and torture by the French in Algeria and by the British in Kenya.94 Today
some Western special forces do fight ferociously, and torture is not
unknown, but in general “they” fight ferocious warfare, while “we” do more
callous warfare, an aspect of asymmetric warfare. Swords and spears
enabled hacking at the body of another. This requires ferocity, which was
valued as a social trait. Tournaments, jousting, archery, and quarterstaff
combat trained medieval men for physical combat. Calmness and technical
ability have supplanted ferocity as the most important military skill. The
deadliest weapons are now wielded by people who never see the enemy they
kill, which creates indifference to distant death. This especially characterized
World War II, in which the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, deliberately
targeting civilians, was not seen by the Allies as atrocities. We see our
enemies’ atrocities, not ours. Our attitude was epitomized in 1945 by the
mundane words of William Sterling Parsons, the commander of the Enola
Gay immediately after he had dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima:
“Results clear cut successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than any
test. Conditions normal in airplane following delivery.”95 There is no
emotion expressed in this log entry, only satisfaction with performance.
Parsons’s navigator, Ted van Kirk, claimed to have “come off the mission,
had a bite and a few beers, and hit the sack, and had not lost a night’s sleep
over the bomb in 40 years.”96 Today’s drones even take the travel out of
bombing.
As Pinker, Mueller, Goldstein, and Gat observe, Westerners shudder at
torture, rape, and hacking of body parts. We shudder at body-on-body
ferocity—but not at our own long-range killings. We try not to see them. We
prefer not to go into an abattoir and see the mangling of animals. We prefer
not to see torture, and we may turn a blind eye if our side does it. We do not
have to see any of these sights. But we still eat meat, and we still make war
with missiles and drones; America may still covertly torture perceived
enemies, and some of its allies certainly do. We are horrified at the
decapitation of civilians inflicted by the Islamic State, but not at the callous
killing of civilians by our air forces. Among drone “pilots,” the enemy is
seen only through satellite images on computer screens. Drone personnel
follow carefully scripted procedures concerning the adequacy of their
information. Only if satisfied with this do they release their drones’
weapons. They show no passion, and ideology is not driving their decision
other than the belief that those labeled as terrorists can be legitimately killed.
ISIS deliberately targets individuals and groups, civilians as well as
combatants, and is proud to show videos of prisoners being decapitated. The
United States and its allies do not deliberately target civilians, but accurate
bombing depends on intelligence gathering on the ground, and its quality
varies. Bombing cannot be always aimed at the right target. Rockets and
bombs dropped by planes and drones inevitably kill civilians: they are
mistaken for terrorists, they are in proximity to terrorists, or they are part of
a wedding party or a hospital or a school that intelligence erroneously sees
as an assembly of terrorists. The U.S. military admits to killing very few
civilians because to admit to more might alienate Americans, a healthy sign
of Americans finding the excesses of war unacceptable. But it is no comfort
to those civilians caught up in the crosshairs of U.S. or Russian targeting,
and it leads to serious undercounting of the civilian victims of recent wars.

Civil Wars Internationalized

So is this now a polarized world, a civilized, pacific North (the United States
and Russia serving as partial outliers) and an uncivilized, warlike South?
This is deceptive, for two reasons. First, the profit motives of northern arms
companies and governments have led to massive arms transfers from the rich
countries to the regimes and rebels of poorer countries. Businessmen and
“good union jobs” (as U.S. liberals like to say) are causing death in far-off
countries. The total dollar value of arms transfers is unknown since much
shady arms dealing exists, but SIPRI estimates it as over $40 billion at the
height of the Cold War in the early 1980s. Then it fell to just over $30 billion
in 2002–6. Then it rose again to about $35 billion in the period 2007–16,
before falling to just over $30 billion in 2021. It must have risen again in
2022. But all these figures are very substantial. The biggest exporter in
recent years has been the United States, at 35–39 percent of the world’s total,
followed by the combined European Union countries at 26 percent (France
and Germany led the way), and Russia at 21 percent.97 Numerous additional
countries, such as Britain, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Israel have
important arms industries, and manufacturers usually negotiate major arms
sales in collaboration with their government. These deals are important to
their economies, and so no government wishes to reduce arms sales. Most
countries with military expenditure of 5 percent or more of GNP are poor.
They are arming against both domestic and foreign enemies, yet they also
view a modern military as conferring geopolitical status, just as do the major
powers. They all want to flex military muscles in public. Addiction to
militarism by southern warlords is fueled by northern arms lords in a
symbiotic relationship.
Second, the northern powers do fight, but mostly through proxies.
“Civil war” needs qualifying, for most of these wars are also
internationalized. The year 2018 saw fourteen conflicts (six wars and eight
MIDs) internationalized, where local war was intensified by foreign
intervention, especially by the United States. These conflicts provided over
half of all battle-related casualties that year. Internationalized conflicts last
longer, and political solutions are harder to find. Foreign interventions
usually involve regime strengthening, supporting the government side in a
conflict, although this was not true of the United States in its wars against
Muslim states, and Russia supports regime change separatists in Ukraine.98
During the Cold War, NATO troops were not sent into war zones. The first
intervention came in 1992 in Bosnia. They have since intervened in Kosovo,
Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya, and the seas off Somalia and Yemen. After a
period in which African countries had a policy of mutual noninterference,
the African Union agreed to a multinational intervention force in 2002. Its
gestation was lengthy, but from about 2013 it became a reality.
 Recent foreign states’ interventions were or are in eastern Congo (by
nine other African countries), Mali (by France, Chad, and contingents from
many African Union countries, with U.S. logistical support), Somalia (by the
United States, NATO, and various African Union countries), Colombia (by
the United States), Afghanistan and northern Pakistan (by the United States
and thirty-eight other NATO and partner countries), Libya (by seventeen
NATO members, including the United States, Britain, France, the United
Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Turkey), Syria (by
the United States, much of NATO, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and
Hezbollah), Yemen (by the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, several Gulf states, Iran, and Hezbollah), and eastern Ukraine (by
Russia, with the United States and NATO providing massive arms supplies
to Ukraine). In 2020 Turkey was heavily involved in the fighting in
Nagorno-Karabagh, and in 2021 Horn of Africa countries were involved in
the struggle between Tigray rebels and the Ethiopian government. UN and
NATO forces are active in numerous countries, but few of them are involved
in ground fighting, although they do provide logistical and training aid. This
is internationalization of local disputes.
Syria has been by far the deadliest civil war raging over the last few
years, and the United States, Russia, and NATO countries have been fighting
there, either directly or through proxies, as are Iranian soldiers, Saudi pilots,
and Hezbollah militias. Without the foreigners, the death toll and the refugee
flow would be much lower. Libya also remains the site of a confused war
between numerous militias, all of whom receive foreign assistance. Access
to Libya’s oil is an important motive for the foreigners. The war then
simplified into one main conflict, between a government in Tripoli, backed
by the UN, Turkey, Qatar, and Italy, and a rebel general based in Benghazi,
backed by Russia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, and France. Russia sent
unmarked planes and mercenaries working for the Wagner Group, a private
Russian organization (with close Kremlin links), and the Turkish
government has introduced ground troops, mostly allied Syrian militias,
while U.S. planes and drones bomb jihadists wherever they can find them.
According to UN officials, Libyan deaths since 2014 in what is called the
Second Civil War have risen to 9,000; another 20,000 have been wounded.
Turkey assisted the attack in 2020 by Azerbaijan on disputed territory held
by Armenia, while Russia supplied Armenia with antidrone defenses that did
not work. The death toll here was over 6,000. Across the world, foreign
intervention is also common against non–state actors, especially armed
religious groups like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab,
and the Lord’s Resistance Army, and these movements operate across
borders.
The U.S. government sends military advisory teams to many countries
and bombs a few; NATO assists. Because the action is far away, the North
seems pacific. But the United States, followed by France and the United
Kingdom, followed by other NATO members, is not pacific. Their foreign
entanglements are distant, and their citizens are rarely conscripted and rarely
risk death. American leaders have kept the body bags few through risk
transfer militarism. Often peoples do not know where their soldiers are
engaged. How many Americans knew that U.S. soldiers were in Niger, until
suddenly in October 2017, when four of them were found killed? How many
French knew of Operation Barkhane, in which 5,600 French troops have
been quartered across five West African countries to counter Islamist
insurgents across the Sahel region since 2014 (as well as to protect France’s
uranium mines)? The total number of French killed is so far about fifty; over
600 jihadists have been killed or captured; and the annual cost is one billion
euros. In 2021 President Emmanuel Macron announced plans for
withdrawing the French troops. Although U.K. military interventions in the
Middle East have become controversial, less publicity is given to small
African interventions, to U.K. bases in Kenya and Sierra Leone, and to its
Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, leased to the United States for its
Middle Eastern and Afghan bombing ventures. These military adventures are
discrete and far away.

Conclusion
I have questioned rival theories of diminishing or increasing wars through
history. I found variation across the world and through time.99 Intergroup
conflict was uncommon in early human communities, but it grew as hunter-
gatherers settled into fixed communities and grew again as states and
empires emerged. Thereafter war remained ubiquitous but erratic. The
Roman Republic was continuously at war. In China I found that war varied
greatly by region. In Japan it varied greatly through time. Post-Roman
Europe was highly war-prone, but at first wars were small-scale and
somewhat rule-governed. Smaller kingdoms were swallowed up by major
powers with more formidable militaries, which were later diverted into
religious and revolutionary wars. These powers conquered much of the
world, annihilating or exploiting its peoples. Neither the Enlightenment nor
industrial capitalism brought peace to the nineteenth century, as is
commonly believed, for Europeans were exporting war to their colonies.
Finally, they precipitated world wars that destroyed their own military
power. The nineteenth century was not peaceful, nor was the first half of the
twentieth century.
Wars changed after 1945. There were fewer big wars but more small
ones and MIDs, mostly beginning as civil wars. The total number of wars
and their casualties fluctuated, but through all of the twentieth century
civilian fatalities grew. At the beginning of the twenty-first century liberal
theorists perceived a trend away from war, but this has subsequently
wavered. The two main axes of the recent wave of wars in the Muslim world
—conservatives-secularists against jihadists and Sunni versus Shi’a—are
worsening currently (see chapter 14). In contrast, wars in Western Europe
and Latin America have almost disappeared. Warfare is gone from the
relations between the rich countries, just as Mueller argues. Whatever the
level of economic conflict among the United States, Japan, and E.U.
countries, it is unlikely they would wage war against each other. If the north
of the world were hermetically sealed, optimistic liberal theory would have
much traction, although the United States lags, with guns galore, a massive
state arsenal, and callous militarism. Yet one type of war, territorial conquest
imperialism, seems dead.
Many poor countries remain beset by wars, especially civil wars,
however, which show little sign of decline. Rich countries still contribute
unhelpfully to these with arms sales, proxy wars, and bombing. That these
are deployed far away obscures the militarism and seems to give liberal
optimism more support than it deserves. Rich countries have exported
militarism far from the attention span and the well-being of their citizens.
Terrorism in their backyards, partly caused by their own aggression, should
have given them pause, but instead it escalated an emotional “war on terror.”
Irrationality rules. Gat is wrong to assert that in the post-Enlightenment era,
“war has become incomprehensible to the point of absurdity.”100 Much of
the world knows of its absurdity only too well—and we are partly
responsible.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield I

From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

SO FAR I HAVE discussed wars at the level of rulers’ decision making,

without the presence of ordinary soldiers who had no role in such decisions.
We have seen rulers backing farther and farther away from the battlefield as
the range of lethal weapons broadened, enabling them to play war games at
the expense of other peoples’ lives. They no longer see—and so far you the
reader have not seen—mutilated corpses, torn flesh, or gushing blood. I must
remedy this neglect and focus on those who have been the greatest sufferers
from war, the soldiers, both officers and men. But there is one great
methodological obstacle. On earlier wars we lack evidence from soldiers
themselves, and this changed only with the advent of mass literacy in the
nineteenth century. So after a brief introduction, I offer a short section on the
limited amount we do know of soldiers in battle before mass literacy, and
then I will discuss soldiers’ experience of battle during the American Civil
War, the first war in which most soldiers were literate and wrote letters,
diaries, and memoirs about their experiences. Then, in the next two chapters,
I discuss soldiers in battle in more recent wars.
The dominant image of soldiers in modern culture is of courage and
triumph, heroes over cowards, good guys over bad guys. In war movies the
heroes with whom we identify almost never die. Supporting actors are
expendable, but they usually die cleanly, with good grace. These are “good
deaths.” Today American soldiers are routinely called heroes by politicians,
but soldiers themselves are uncomfortable with hero versus coward
dichotomy. They often declare that only those who have experienced battle
can understand its reality, and they know that their own deeds fall short of
heroic. General Sherman spoke for most during the American Civil War: “I
am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have
neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry
aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
Of course, soldiers’ experiences in battle have varied. A few seem to
actually like battle because they are sadists or because they crave danger and
are exhilarated by surges of adrenaline coursing through their bodies. They
may hate and fear battle, as I think you or I would. They may fight because
they are paid to fight and it is their job, because they believe in the cause,
because they want the status of a warrior, because they have obedience
drilled into them, or out of loyalty to comrades. Soldiers normally embody
complex mixtures of such motives and emotions. The battlefield is
emotional struggle par excellence. Obviously, the prospect of being killed or
maimed is not something that anyone could relish. Fear of this is the
dominant emotion on battlefields. Yet fear can be coped with, even utilized
to kill others. A loathing for battle may derive from revulsion at the specter
of mangled, bloodied bodies, from moral repugnance at killing or maiming
others, or from fear of being killed or maimed oneself. Skulking (keeping
one’s head down and pretending to fight), nonfiring, mutiny, and desertion
are all expressions of repugnance. Yet reactions are affected by the
perception of risk: What level of risk of death or maiming do soldiers
perceive and accept? Is the degree of risk controllable by them? I explore
these issues over the next three chapters.
It is unlikely the same answers apply across all forms of arms, all
historical periods, all geographical regions, and all phases of campaigns. I
will not discuss the very earliest “battles” of prehistoric humans, which (as
we saw in chapter 2) are conjectured to have contained more ritual shouting
than bodily combat. Later, when warfare became more organized, we can
distinguish a very long stretch of time during which infantry and cavalry
combat consisted of direct body-on-body slashing and clubbing—what
Collins calls ferocious warfare. This was followed by a comparatively short
period from the eighteenth century onward in which most killing has been at
a distance, often by unseen enemies. This is emotionless, callous warfare,
since the killer is not present at the death, and so he can kill dispassionately.
In World War II over 95 percent of British military casualties were inflicted
from a distance, and 85 percent of fatalities came from aerial bombing,
artillery shells, mortars and grenades, antitank shells, and bullets.1 Of
course, archers inflicted bodily damage from a distance throughout history,
as did sling and javelin throwers over a few meters away. An interim period
lay between the two eras, in which arquebus and musket were fired over
short distances against an enemy seen but only rarely confronted bodily.
Naval warfare does not fit so neatly into such a periodization, and airplanes
did not appear until the twentieth century. Also modern infantries, though
firing over distances, do not usually do so coldly. They are themselves
simultaneously threatened from a distance. This involves a distinctive terror
caused by the seeming randomness of death.
The first phase in a campaign is recruitment. In modern wars we know
that the prospect of death seems abstract and distant to new recruits. Recruits
think more often of the guaranteed pay, food, and clothing, inducements
laced with some degree of pride and status (especially, they think, in the eyes
of women) in fighting for one’s country, and a desire for adventure
influenced by the manly heroism depicted in stories. The notion of adventure
includes fighting but not one’s own death. None of this prepares them for the
terror of battle.
So after recruitment must follow a second phase of drilling and
disciplining intended to prepare the soldier to cope with battle by converting
him into an automaton, subordinating himself without question to officers’
commands, sublimating his sense of self into a collective identity with
comrades or a regiment, felt most directly through the “muscular bonding”
that I noted in chapter 8 was a consequence of drilling. Subordination and
coercion are the heart of military power; the simplest answer to the question
“Why do men fight?” is that once recruited, they are coerced to do so,
sometimes rather brutally. The Duke of Wellington marveled at the power of
drilling in 1813 when describing his own soldiers: “The very scum of the
earth. People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling—all stuff
—no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children—
some for minor offences—many more for drink; but you can hardly
conceive such a set brought together, and it really is wonderful that we
should have made them the fine fellows they are.”2
Finally, the soldier enters into the third phase, battle—skirmishes,
ambushes, guerilla attacks, and set-piece battles, all generating different
kinds of fear.
 The Long History of Ferocious Warfare
From early history until well into the nineteenth century, restricted literacy
means our evidence does not come from rank-and-file soldiers. The armies
of Greece, Rome, Byzantium, imperial China, Islamic kingdoms, ancient
Israel, and the Incan and Aztec empires have left records that suggest that
warrior ideals dominated armies, but we lack the view of the soldiers
themselves.3 The Roman Republic is our best-sourced early case. There we
rarely read of resistance to the draft. Its legions were usually successful,
which helped commitment, as we saw in chapter 4. The Roman military
writer Vegetius said, “Few men are born brave, many become so through
training and force of discipline,” and extensive drilling enabled Roman
armies to show battle-winning maneuverability. Repeated success gave them
confidence, partly overcoming their fear of death. Their discipline must have
also intimidated the enemy. They were not perfectly tuned warriors,
however. Sometimes, as in all armies, amid the confusion of battle they
would panic and run, while harsh campaign conditions, brutal discipline, and
fear led to much desertion.4 There were many defeats—but usually on the
road to ultimate victory. Aislinn Melchior poses the question whether
Roman soldiers suffered from something like posttraumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). Of course, she lacks the evidence to answer, but she identifies the
three main triggers of PTSD today as witnessing horrific events, being in
mortal danger, and killing at close quarters. The legionaries routinely
experienced all three. Yet Romans were also habituated to the sight of death.
Half their children died very young, criminals were executed in public,
sometimes torn apart by wild animals in arenas for sport, and disobedient
soldiers might be flogged or stoned to death, sometimes by their comrades.
Such inurement might make them stoic, less likely to suffer from
psychological maladies, Melchior suggests.5 But no psychological problems
would have been recognized by the Roman authorities.
There were material incentives for armies. They were paid. They could
ransom rich prisoners, plunder from the dead and wounded, and plunder and
rape in cities they had stormed. Soldiers would carry in their pockets
whatever coins or jewels they needed to finance themselves during a
campaign because this was the least likely place to get robbed. But after
death or when wounded, helpless on the ground, they were easy pickings.
From Rome to Gettysburg, soldiers stripped the bodies of fallen foes and in
Ukraine they still do so. Rome and China expropriated farms from the
defeated and gave them to veterans. In Europe when looting and ransoming
died out, “prize money,” pensions, or public employment could be allocated
to veterans. These were common in China, too. Soldiers also fought for
social status. Roman soldiers were given dona, medals for bravery, prized
badges of honor: they are boasted of on tombstones. Roman auxiliaries were
granted some of the privileges of citizenship. Upper-class warriors might
receive land or offices or better marriage prospects. War was an avenue of
upward social mobility for younger sons, and the risk of death came only
occasionally. The dominant experience was boredom, since nothing
happened most of the time. That is why battles are so suddenly shocking and
disorienting.
The culture of most historic societies viewed interpersonal violence as
normal. It demonstrated manhood, which men wish to demonstrate, or
cowardice, which they wish to avoid. War was the intensification of
brawling, as war today is not. Soldiers had disincentives in the form of
flogging or execution if they ran away. Yet peasants obeyed their lords in
war as in peacetime; their villages had to fulfill quotas of conscripts; and
even in modern societies orders are obeyed because the lower classes are
used to obeying.
After recruitment, the second phase was drill and discipline—though
not, of course, for guerillas whose looser style of warfare has been an
intermittent presence through human history. At the other extreme, Roman
soldiers underwent intensive drilling in rhythmic movement, always taught
to remain tight with the men on either side of them for mutual protection.
Theirs was muscular-bonded ferocity. They described the Gauls and the
Germans as fighting in a mass, but each man fighting as an individual, with
more spontaneous ferocity than Romans. Alcohol and other drugs were
handed out in many armies and navies to still fear and instill confidence.
And so they went into battle, usually fought over a small area for not
more than a day. Infantry advanced wielding sling, spear, javelin, axe, or
sword, cavalry on horseback. Both may have had bad feelings in stomach or
bowels, but it was only within range of enemy archers, against whom they
were unable yet to defend themselves, did fear of death dominate. Untrained
men (and women) would have mostly turned and fled at this point, but in the
rhythm of battle, this was when disciplined soldiers quickened their pace,
physically trapped within their military formation, shouting, grimly
hunching shoulders, advancing under the partial protection of shields. Those
advancing were full of hatred and tension, wanting very much to kill the
source of their fear.
When soldiers reached the enemy, the motivation of “kill or be killed”
took over for those in the opposed front lines. If a soldier hesitated for a
moment, the enemy probably would not, and so death or maiming would
come. There is no time for complex emotions—just get your blow in first!
Thrust into, don’t slash across, the Roman drill sergeants urged. Archers
fired from a distance, sling and javelin throwers from close by, but all
needed protection. Mounted archers were fearsome, for they could wheel out
of range after firing. But most infantry were not engaging the enemy at any
one point in time. John Keegan imagined the battle of Agincourt in 1415.
Most soldiers were lined up in ranks behind the men in the front line. In an
advance they would just be pushing those in front forward, in defense they
would be stationary, engaging the enemy only if the front rank began to
sustain casualties or became exhausted and faltered. Then the next rank had
to move forward and strike.6
In this type of fighting, dominant through history, battle was an
aggregate of individual or small group combats, men welded together by
being physically trapped as a mass, not only by the enemy in front, but also
by their comrades behind and on each side. They were trapped into fighting
by the coercion of army organization and the ecological environment of the
battlefield. The trap was tightest in the Greek phalanx, somewhat less so in
the Roman legion, and much less so among barbarians and in medieval
battles. Cavalrymen were free until they charged. Then they too became
trapped by their momentum toward hand-to-hand fighting. If they faced a
solid line of enemy, their horses might refuse to charge into it, and
cavalrymen often then dismounted to fight like infantrymen. Their advantage
in mobility was used mainly to arrive quickly at the chosen point of attack or
to assault open or dispersed enemy formations.
Only as victory or defeat seemed to loom did some freedom of
movement come to the surviving infantry. If soldiers saw their comrades
being felled and felt themselves being pushed back, or especially when they
were pushed sideways by an unexpected flanking movement, fear mounted
and might overcome training and discipline. Fear paralyzed military action,
as many soldiers became incapable of fighting with or shooting at the
enemy. Colonel Charles Ardant du Picq in the 1860s recommended how to
combat fear: “Man has a horror of death. . . . Discipline is for the purpose of
dominating that horror by a still greater horror, that of punishment or
disgrace.” But he added, “Self-esteem is unquestionably one of the most
powerful motives which moves our men. They do not wish to pass for
cowards in the eyes of their comrades.” He noted that it was paradoxically
those in the rear ranks, the least threatened, who panicked first under this
pressure simply because they could turn and run, whereas the front lines
were trapped front and back by the enemy and their comrades.7 If flight
became contagious, the army degenerated from being a coherent body of
men to a “crowd,” “a human assembly animated,” says Keegan, “not by
discipline but by mood, by the play of inconstant and potentially infectious
emotion, which, if it spreads, is fatal to an army’s subordination.”8
These were the common features of well-organized enemies throughout
history. Yet all battles had peculiarities. At Agincourt the English army was
mainly archers, protected by concealed sharpened stakes dug into the
ground. The French had not reconnoitered these, and the charging French
cavalrymen were surprised, their horses terrified, many of them throwing off
their riders. The English archers and men-at-arms then rushed forward with
knives and axes to capture (for ransom) or kill and strip the wounded or
unhorsed knights and men-at-arms pinned down by their armor or horses.
French archers and reserve cavalry at Agincourt, witnessing the collapse of
this first charge, had a choice. They hesitated and then fled. The English
victors surged forward in what Collins calls a “forward panic.”9 The French
had lost their order and, engulfed by panic, were easy targets. The pursuing
English had neither fear of the enemy nor loathing of battle to hold them
back. A rush of adrenaline induced a killing spree as, released from their
own fears, they struck or shot arrows at the backs of the fleeing enemy. By
far the greatest volume of killing occurred in flight, as we look from Muye,
China, in 1046 BCE to Cannae, Italy, in 216 BCE, to Agincourt, France, in
1415 CE.
In battles fear may have been ever-present, but it was managed by the
need for violent self-defense and the physical constraint of the battlefield,
until the prospect of defeat induced demoralization. Repugnance at killing in
battle was unlikely. Slaughter of old men, women, children, and prisoners
did evoke disapproval, but it happened. In siege warfare moral qualms were
usually suppressed if city leaders had refused an offer to negotiate or
surrender. This made the city population vulnerable to massacre after the city
was stormed, according to the norms of warfare. The larger the casualties
suffered by the besiegers, the angrier and more pitiless they were when they
stormed into the city. Their commanders knew that loot and rape were
rewards their soldiers expected, and they turned a blind eye to atrocities. The
Jewish historian Josephus describes Roman soldiers sacking Jerusalem in 73
CE:

When they went in numbers into the lanes of the city, with their
swords drawn, they slew those whom they overtook, without
mercy, and set fire to the houses whither the Jews were fled, and
burnt every soul in them, and laid waste a great many of the rest;
and when they were come to the houses to plunder them, they
found in them entire families of dead men, and the upper rooms
full of dead corpses, that is of such as died by the famine; they
then stood in a horror at this sight, and went out without touching
anything. But although they had this commiseration for such as
were destroyed in that manner, yet had they not the same for those
that were still alive, but they ran through every one whom they
met with, and obstructed the very lanes with their dead bodies, and
made the whole city run down with blood, to such a degree indeed
that the fire of many of the houses was quenched with these men’s
blood.10

The sacking of cities brought death and horror to civilians as well as

soldiers.
Not much more than this can be deduced without testimony from the
soldiers. But we can probably assume that moral qualms were rare, while
fear was uneven, exploding in routs.

The Early Modern Period in Europe

Clausewitz in On War dealt with wars in continental Europe from about
1740 to 1830, focusing on the transition from what he called ancien régime
warfare conducted by kings and military aristocracies to the revolutionary
warfare introduced by the French and Napoleon. As a long-serving Prussian
soldier, from cadet to general, he had personal experience of wars in this
period. The transition began with the levée en masse of 1792, when the
revolutionaries raised a mass volunteer force to defend France against
invading aristocratic forces. Their defense succeeded, and it introduced the
notion of “the nation in arms,” which led to Napoleon’s enormous citizen
armies, which he deployed in much looser formations, able to act on their
own initiative, as ideological fervor supplanted much drilling. This forced
other regimes to respond with their own quasi-citizen forces, while Spanish
peasants reacted with guerilla nationalism. As Clausewitz noted, the
tendency was toward whole nations and entire states mobilizing for war.
Patriotic more than aristocratic honor now drove war forward.
Nineteenth-century technological development made weapons much
more lethal. Organized combat centered on lines and columns of soldiers,
overseen by junior officers leading them onward. Drilling was reinforced by
a deployment trapping them on the battlefield. The famous squares deployed
by Wellington at Waterloo consisted of a hollow square or rectangle, each
side composed of two or more ranks of infantry. The colors and officers
were positioned in the center, alongside reserves who could reinforce any
weakening side of the square. The wounded could retreat inside the square
without disorganizing the ranks. An enemy attack on the square then trapped
the soldiers into fighting rather than running away. It was very effective
against cavalry and infantry, but its density made it vulnerable to cannon
fire.
Rulers no longer fought. The last English and Prussian kings to
command on the battlefield did so in the mid-eighteenth century, but they
stayed out of range of enemy guns, as did the two Napoleons, the only
nineteenth-century heads of state in the field. Modern heads of state have
been desk killers, ordering the deaths of far-off soldiers, including their own.
Junior officers and NCOs have been in the thick of the action, setting an
example. Wavering would be conspicuous and invite demotion and the
charge of cowardice. Many have feared that label more than death.
In this period most soldiers were firing muskets. Bayonet charges
brought some hand-to-hand fighting, though this inflicted far fewer deaths
than guns. The biggest killers were artillery batteries, whose barrages could
last for hours. Tolstoy, who had personally experienced battle, gives us a
terrifying portrait in War and Peace of an artillery barrage at the battle of
Borodino suffered by a Russian infantry regiment waiting for orders to move
that never come. The soldiers are stationary in a field, under French cannon
fire, and death comes from the air, intermittently, randomly, and suddenly.
The regiment loses over one-third of its men, killed or wounded, without
being able to fire a shot back. Enforced passivity under fire induces not only
terror at the randomness of death but also a petrified sense of loss of
personal control. The regimental commander, Prince Andrei, with whom we
have identified through the novel so far, sets an example by remaining
standing. He sees a shell drop with little noise two paces away. “Lie down!”
cries his adjutant, throwing himself flat on the ground. Andrei hesitates.
“Can this be death?” he thinks. “I cannot, I do not wish to die. I love life—I
love this grass, this earth, this air . . . ” His thoughts are interrupted by the
explosion, a whistle of splinters as from a breaking window frame, and a
suffocating smell of powder. It flings him into the air and he lands in a pool
of his own blood.11
This is fiction of course, although a brilliant, imaginative
reconstruction. Andrei’s wounds prove fatal, and we lose our hero. But what
was he or his men to do? They were too well trained or cowed by coercion to
flee, but they were also trapped within the battlefield, unable to fight back.
Where could they safely flee? They were in the middle of a very large army.
Cossacks patrolled the rear, killing deserters. Bodies continued to fall, fear
persisted, but they did not run. They lay silently on the ground, pretending to
ignore the carnage around them. What could be more terrifying than this
unpredictable threat to life? Desertion usually occurred between battles,
when men could slip off or lag behind unnoticed. Marshal Thomas-Robert
Bugeaud suggested that for every French Napoleonic army of 100,000 men,
there were 25,000 skulkers trailing in the rear, dropping away.12 He
exaggerated for effect.

The American Civil War

The first war of the industrial age produced more casualties than all
America’s other wars combined. But 90 percent of Union soldiers and 80
percent of Confederates were literate, and many of them wrote letters,
diaries, and memoirs. Since there was then no military censorship, we have a
mountain of written evidence from the soldiers, mined by Gerald Linderman,
Earl Hess, James McPherson, Chandra Manning, Michael Adams, and
Jonathan Steplyk.13 For the first time we get good information on the battle
experience of soldiers, and this is why I have included this single war in a
book about sequences of wars.
 This was a society experiencing immigration and territorial expansion
amid differences between two regional ways of life. The North and Midwest
hosted industrial capitalism, mining, and commercial farming, all using free
wage labor. The South, whose population was also expanding westward, was
dominated by agrarian plantations cultivating tobacco, cotton, sugar, indigo,
and rice, using mainly slave labor. The cotton gin had made slavery very
profitable, and a rich plantation-based slave-owning upper class dominated
the South. Even though fewer than one-third of southern white households
possessed slaves, almost all whites depended on the slaveholders for wages,
produce, and credit. The legitimacy of slavery was barely disputed, which
was not so in the North, where slaves were rare.
The two zones had complementary, not rival, economies. Labor was the
only economic issue at stake: slavery versus free labor, but as expressed also
in terms of ideological and political power. Southerners saw their civilization
as different from that of the North, and South and North interpreted in
opposed ways their two sacred scripts, the Bible and the Constitution. But
war was precipitated by politics in the new western states. The question was
not merely whether each would allow slavery. The issue also affected the
balance of power in the House and especially in the Senate. If new states
embraced free labor, a Senate majority might in the future interfere with, and
even abolish, slavery in the South. Since there was more migration westward
from the North than from the South, Southerners felt the pressure of growing
abolitionism. As a minority in much of the South, many whites feared
emancipation might bring race war and their own annihilation.
It was difficult to solve this clash of politicized ideologies. Most
Southerners regarded expansion on northern terms as an existential threat;
most Northerners would yield nothing in preserving the Union. Attempts at
compromise faltered, and the alternative for the South was secession, which
was easy enough to declare. In November 1860 the Republican candidate
Abraham Lincoln, known to favor abolition, won the presidency without
even being on the ballot in ten southern states. This degree of polarization
between North and South, the North being politically dominant, seemed
ominous for the South, and it was the touchstone for South Carolinian
radicals to declare secession the next month. Yet neither Lincoln nor the
Republican Party had proposed abolition, half the Republican Party opposed
drastic action, and the Democrats, if they could resolve their factional
disputes, still had enough power in the Senate to obstruct any such attempt.
Nothing much would have happened quickly. Was secession necessary at
this point? Was it not better for the South to wait for emancipation proposals
to be put on the table so that it could claim to be the victim of northern
aggression, instead of being the aggressor?
The United States was only in patches a militaristic society. Westward
expansion had required a small army used mercilessly against Native
Americans and Mexicans. Its units were stationed in small forts around the
country. One was Fort Sumter, commanding Charleston Harbor in South
Carolina. It was a tiny Union garrison in secessionist surrounds, and South
Carolina’s governor demanded its capitulation. Neither side would yield, yet
neither wanted to fire the first shot and be blamed for a war that might
follow. Eventually the governor gave the order to fire, and an artillery duel
ensued. Its supplies running low, the garrison surrendered. The only loss of
life had been accidental, but the damage had been done. Six more states
seceded. Four others came later. Neither side doubted that war would come
or that it would win it. It was expected to be short, especially by Southerners
who dominated the army’s officer corps and were convinced of their
superior martial spirit. Overconfidence ruled. Large volunteer armies were
quickly mobilized, composed overwhelmingly of men who had never fought
before: lambs to the slaughter.
Why did the soldiers fight? Initially, they were volunteers, and Hess
and McPherson, analyzing their letters and memoirs, say that most endorsed
the declared casus belli of their side. McPherson finds two main motives for
enlistment: a sense of adventure and a patriotic ideology. This included
commitment to duty and honor as part of the rite of passage to manhood. He
says that duty backed by conscience was more important among the Union
troops, whereas honor backed by public reputation dominated among
Confederates. Both sides believed they upheld the ideals of the American
Revolution. Confederates fought for independence from tyrannical,
centralized government; Unionists fought for the liberties of the
Constitution. Few Confederates mentioned the defense of slavery (only one-
third of Confederate soldiers’ families had any slaves), but during the war
more Union soldiers came to extend the concept of freedom to the abolition
of slavery. This was a war between transcendent ideologies deriving from
the key American contradiction, a country of white male democracy and
mass slavery.
 This contradiction had been visible for decades as each new territory
and state was added to the Union. Rarely would soldiers be so well-informed
but so ideologically polarized. Linderman, whose sample was mainly
officers, observes: “Manliness, godliness, duty, honor, and knightliness
constituted in varying degrees the values that Union and Confederate
volunteers were determined to express through their actions on the
battlefield. But each, as an impulse to war, remained subordinate to
courage,” which was “heroic action undertaken without fear,” virtuous,
favored by a just God, so that “the brave would live and the cowardly would
die.”14 Religion conferred legitimacy on both sides. Some thought that a
“good death” would be rewarded with eternal life. One man wrote that death
was just “the destruction of a gross, material body. . . . A soldier’s death is
not a fate to be avoided, but rather almost to be gloried in.” Another saw
“something solemn, mysterious, sublime at the thought of entering into
eternity.”15 Linderman agrees that deep conviction characterized the
volunteers of 1861–62, but then the war brought disillusionment. Courage
was then often described as “futile.” Manning emphasizes slavery: “The
problem, as soldiers on both sides saw it, was that . . . the opposing side
threatened self-government. It threatened liberty and equality. It threatened
the virtue necessary to sustain a republic. It threatened the proper balance
between God, government, society, the family, and the individual. And no
matter which side of the divide a Civil War soldier stood on, he knew that
the heart of the threat, and the reason that the war came, was the other side’s
stance on slavery. From first to last, slavery defined the soldiers’ war among
both Union and Confederate troops.” “Shared belief in the dangers of
abolition powerfully united Confederate soldiers and motivated them to
fight, even when they shared little else.”16
Economic motives, she says, were subordinated to the need to maintain
southern ideologies of race and sex that upheld the privileges of white men
and their obligations toward their families. The racially leveling Republicans
would destroy slavery, thereby threatening their families’ safety. Even as
their discontents with the Confederate government mounted and defeat
loomed, they fought on, believing defeat might lead to a race war. Manning
says Union soldiers championed the end of slavery a year ahead of the
Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, before most civilians or
politicians. They had been stirred by welcoming slaves in Confederate areas
and by black comrades fighting bravely. Almost 80 percent of them voted
for Lincoln in the 1864 election. Being antislavery did not mean that white
Union soldiers favored racial equality. But common soldiers believed in the
casus belli proclaimed by their rulers. Thus, the soldiers, though
inexperienced and poorly trained, had high morale and fought determinedly.
Yet two influential soldier-scholars have claimed that many or even
most American soldiers have not been able to fire their weapons because of
moral qualms. I discuss U.S. Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall’s widely
cited study of American World War II infantry soldiers in the next chapter.17
But U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, much influenced by Marshall,
focuses on this war.18 He says most Civil War soldiers could not bring
themselves to fire at the enemy out of moral qualms over killing. This is
surprising given the ideological fervor we have just glimpsed. The first proof
he offers is that war casualties were relatively few despite infantry firing at
quite short range at each other. But this had been normal in musket battles
for two centuries. Muskets were not very accurate, and few of these soldiers
had been properly trained in firing them, and that typically resulted in firing
too high. Grossman suggests this was because of repugnance at killing, but
he produces no direct evidence of this. Instead, he relies on a curious piece
of indirect evidence: a brief description of abandoned muskets found on the
field of Gettysburg after the battle of July 1863, as described by a Major
Laidley of the Union Ordnance Department. I quote Major Laidley in full:

The examination of the muskets, picked up on the battlefield of

Gettysburg, reveals a fact that few would be prepared to admit,
and speaks in terms which should not pass unheeded, as to the
inherent defects of the muzzle-loading system. Of the twenty-
seven thousand five hundred and seventy-four muskets collected
after the battle, it was found that twenty-four thousand were
loaded: twelve thousand contained each two loads, and six
thousand (over twenty per cent) were charged with from three to
ten loads each. One musket had in it twenty-three loads, each
charge being put down in regular order. Oftentimes the cartridge
was loaded without being first broken, and in many instances it
was inserted, the ball down first. What an exhibit of useless guns
does this present!—useless for that day’s work, and from causes
peculiar to the system of loading.19
 Grossman says the soldiers’ overloaded muskets reveal nonfiring
because they found killing repugnant: man is not a natural killer, he says.
Malešević agrees: “Killing is, in fact, terribly difficult, messy, guilt-ridden,
and for most people, an abhorrent activity,” although he hedges his bets,
observing that some soldiers become “paralyzed by fear” alongside a
“conscious inability to kill other human beings.”20 But Laidley does not
mention repugnance or moral qualms. He says nonfiring demonstrates the
failings of muzzle-loading muskets compounded by drilling deficiencies of
soldiers—“causes peculiar to the system of loading,” says Laidley. The main
cause of nonfiring was soldiers’ failure to properly load the trio of powder,
bullet, and wadding. Gordon Rottman adds percussion cap problems.21 The
drill manual for the smoothbore musket listed seventeen distinct physical
movements for each round fired, quite complicated for nonprofessional
soldiers. Given the noise, the dense smoke coming from the black powder
used, and the chaos of the battle, as well as soldiers’ tension and fear, these
men might have omitted any step. The fear and tension of battle bring rushes
of adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone. The heart rate accelerates. All
this brings distortion of vision and shaking of the hands. Soldiers fire wildly
and find it difficult to reload. Emotions have physiological consequences. If
a soldier botched his first or second shot, he might discard the weapon and
pick up another from a fallen comrade. If he did not notice, he might load a
third. If and when he did notice, he might still be deterred from cleaning the
charges out of the barrel, for this procedure required a corkscrew-shaped
bullet extractor attached to his ramrod. This operation was time-consuming,
and the soldier in battle felt disarmed and helpless while thus engaged.
Adams says that “at least 18,000 men, in a highly distracted mental state,
loaded and over-loaded their weapons, oblivious of never having fired
them.”22 Probably some were pretending to fire, as Grossman suggests, but
there is no evidence the cause was moral qualms. Anyway, why would they
not fire deliberately high rather than not fire at all, which would catch the
attention of their comrades?
Paddy Griffith thinks the muskets had been discarded as faulty, often
because of bad handling.23 They amounted to 9 percent of all muskets used
at Gettysburg, normal for misfiring muskets in Civil War battles. The
soldiers had never been trained in live firing, to economize on ammunition
and to avoid alarming nearby regiments by creating the apparent sounds of
battle. When battle started, smoke enveloped the men, who could not clearly
see the enemy.24 Soldiers recounted in letters and diaries shooting blindly in
the general direction of the enemy, hence the low casualty rate and the high
ratio of shots fired to casualties. Since they could not see if their shots hit
anyone, they could not correct their aim. High ratios of shots to casualties
had also characterized the Napoleonic Wars.25 Later, deadlier weapons
paradoxically increased the ratio of shots to kills.
The soldiers were told to fire only when well under a hundred meters
from the enemy. Some officers preferred thirty meters. On average soldiers
began firing at 116 meters, as they came under artillery fire.26 If they obeyed
orders, many would die without having fired. It is intolerable to soldiers to
be inactive when under fire. They fire in order to relieve this and so the
enemy does, too. Griffith says that as firing drills broke down, lines became
ragged, and soldiers were out of control, blazing away into the fog, usually
too high, until their ammunition was exhausted.27 Experienced forces, like
Wellington’s British squares at Waterloo, might wait for the order to fire, but
some rawer Belgian and German regiments had not, nor did most Civil War
soldiers. The commanders had never marshaled large armies and so did it
badly. They ignored the “mixed order” possibilities of column and line
attack of the Napoleonic Wars in favor of simpler long lines. This made
shock action impossible and lateral coordination difficult, as officers
struggled to keep their sprawling battle lines from disintegrating if they
attempted maneuvers. They believed attack was superior to defense, but the
reverse proved true. These two errors brought carnage.28 Neither side was
well-drilled or well-coordinated, but Union forces were twice as numerous
and better supplied—so they won.
In 1868 Colonel Ardant du Picq distributed a questionnaire to French
officers, asking about the conduct of their soldiers in recent battles. He was
killed in the Franco-Prussian War, before he could write a report of his
survey. A book collecting his manuscripts was published posthumously in
1880 and is now a classic of military theory. The appendix presenting his
questionnaire survey is widely cited by scholars but contains only seven
cases. Presumably other responses have been lost. Two officers complained
of wild overfiring in the air, and two complained of skulkers in the rear, but
none complained of nonfiring.29 All soldiers experienced fear, said Ardant
du Picq. The army that mastered it longer would win, while the one for
whom normal fear turned into terror would lose. As a regiment advanced
and came under fire, the choices, he said, were not dictated by instrumental
reason. Instead, there were two highly adrenalized reactions, “charge” or
“flee.” One of the seven officers who responded to his survey describes a
single chasseur rescuing his regiment by shouting, “Charge,” and rushing
madly forward. His charge was contagious to his comrades. He also
comments: “Modern weapons have a terrible effect and are almost
unbearable by the nervous system. Who can say that he has not been
frightened in battle? Discipline in battle becomes the more necessary as the
ranks become more open, and the material cohesion of the ranks not giving
confidence, it must spring from a knowledge of comrades, and a trust in
officers, who must always be present and seen. What man to-day advances
with the confidence that rigid discipline and pride in himself gave the
Roman soldier?”30 He says overfiring had occurred ever since muskets and
rifles had first appeared; it was produced by the soldier’s anxiety to relieve
his fear by firing when under artillery fire or before the enemy infantry fired
at him. He cites Cromwell’s famous order—“Put your trust in God and aim
at their shoe laces!”—to avoid firing too high.31
So at Gettysburg incompetence and fear were more important in
producing mischarged muskets than moral qualms. Almost all soldiers
fought roughly as they were ordered to. The fighting was often severe, there
were no mass flights or desertions during the battle, and the final retreat of
the Confederate Army was orderly. Even when final Confederate defeat
loomed in the war, there was little surrendering until Lee signed the articles
of surrender.
The Union and Confederate armies recruited 3 million soldiers, as well
as many black slave laborers for Confederate forces. Between 620,000 and
750,000 died, more Southerners than Northerners. In the three days at
Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee lost 28,000 men, 40 percent of his force, whereas
Union forces lost 23,000, or 25 percent. The disproportion was the result of
Confederates’ attacking entrenched Union positions on the crest of low hills.
Casualties were as high among the upper ranks, closely accompanying their
troops. Lee lost one-third of his generals in the bat-tle. The ratio of shots
fired to casualties was about 180:1 in the Union Army. Confederate figures
were probably just as high. Attrition rates in battle as well as desertions in
camp and on the march forced the addition of raw, untrained troops, and in
early 1863 the militaries introduced conscripts and “bounty jumpers” (paid
substitutes for conscripted men), who were less ideologically committed.
The soldiers were recruited by the in-dividual states. The monuments
encircling the battlefield of Gettysburg all commemorate the exploits of state
regiments, Union or Confederate, and generals had to tolerate autonomous
action from them. Ardant du Picq commented patronizingly on these
amateurs: “The Americans have shown us what happens in modern battle to
large armies without cohe-sion. With them the lack of discipline and
organization has had the inevitable result. Battle has been between hidden
skirmishers, at long distance, and has lasted for days, until some faulty
movement, perhaps a moral exhaustion, has caused one or the other of the
opposing forces to give way.”32
Griffith shares his low view.33 Hastily recruited volunteers and
conscripts lacked military experience. The stereotype was that Confederate
recruits were farm boys and Union recruits bank clerks. Only a few from the
western frontier were likely to have fired a gun. The recruits were drilled for
a month and then thrown into battle.
How did they respond? McPherson discusses Marshall and moral
qualms.34 The Sixth Commandment, handed down by God to Moses,
bothered many, he says. Hess concurs and says soldiers tried to avoid hand-
to-hand encounters and aimed fire at groups, not individuals.35 Neither
suggests that this translated into nonfiring, which was not mentioned in any
letters or diaries. McPherson says overfiring was a much bigger problem. It
was common for soldiers to say they found killing obnoxious the first time.
They might hesitate a moment, but then they shot. There was less of a
problem the second time, and none the third time. In face-to-face encounters
there might be a momentary pause, but then they fired. At very close
quarters they stabbed fast with their bayonets, since to pause might be fatal.
Soldiers fired because they found reasons to ignore the commandment, most
commonly self-defense. This drove out feelings of immorality. One
Confederate said that when he saw the pale face of the Union soldier he had
just killed, “I felt strange but cannot say that I am sorry any. When I know he
would have killed me if he could.” Another commented that despite the
scriptures, “My nerve seemed to be as steady as if I was shooting at a beast.”
A few confessed enjoying it: “I never thought I would like to shoot at a
man,” wrote one Union soldier, “but I do like to shoot a secesh”
(secessionist). A Confederate artilleryman wrote, “I feel a perfect delight
when I see my shell crash among them.” A new recruit wrote, “I am heart &
soul in the war & its success,” and so would be “duty bound” to kill if “such
a Cup is however presented to me.” McPherson says both sides believed
God wanted them to kill a godless enemy. A Union soldier wrote that in one
battle he must have fired two hundred rounds: “I was up and firing almost
incessantly until the enemy was repulsed. . . . Thank God, that in his strength
we drove back the enemy. . . . To God our blessed Father in Heaven be all
the glory.” Sharpshooters who aimed at inactive soldiers, however, were
disliked in both armies.36
Naturally, men writing diaries and memoirs rarely admit to skulking.
One man admitted to having lain low in a wood through a battle, while a few
refused promotion into more dangerous posts. Far more complained of other
cowards. One man wrote that on battle day “the usual number of cowards
got sick and asked to be excused.” Another names nine cowards in his
regiment. A Union private watched his colonel rubbing gunpowder on his
face to appear combat blackened: “Instantly he was transformed from a
trembling coward who lurked behind a tree into an exhausted brave taking a
well-earned repose.” No one suggested that skulkers might have moral
objections to the war—they acted from fear.37 But the term skulking was
used broadly. Some described rear soldiers thus, partly from envy, as have
frontline soldiers in most wars. This would not be fair to the staff of
quartermasters, hospitals, prisons, recruitment offices, or those supporting
the General Staff and all the other necessary functions in the rear. These men
may have breathed a sigh of relief when allocated to the rear, but their
courage or cowardice was not tested. Volunteers also despised conscripts,
especially bounty jumpers, and probably exaggerated their cowardice.
Skulkers disappeared just before battle, lagged behind, lay low, persistently
helped fallen comrades on the ground, faked sickness, and so on. They may
have totaled 10 percent of the army, but that is just a guess.
The sense of adventure, a major reason for enlisting, rarely survived the
first shock of battle, which was more frightening than they had imagined.
Hess gives vivid soldier accounts of random death; bodies torn apart by
shells; blood, brains, and other body parts spattered over them; streams and
pools of blood; the horrors of the hospital; the burying of mutilated bodies;
the Minié ball’s grating sound when it hit bone, and the heavy thud when it
hit flesh. How did they manage to keep on fighting? Hess stresses that a
large majority of Union soldiers were working-class men (poor farmers,
laborers, and skilled workers) who came to view war as just another job to
be done. Often during battle, a soldier became so involved with the tools and
tasks of his trade—loading a musket, carrying out maneuvers—that he had
no time to think about the horrors. Moreover, after surviving his first battle,
the soldier believed that his chances of survival were good. And “it was a
source of wonderment to many men that so much lead could be expended to
kill so comparatively few soldiers.”38
McPherson adds more elevated reasons. Their sense of the cause,
honor, and duty endured, he says, enabling killing with little sense of
immorality, and motivated half of them to reenlist once their three-year term
was up. Linderman is more skeptical about reenlistment, seeing the offer of
thirty days’ leave back home during the campaigning season as an important
sweetener—thirty days of heaven before three years of hell.39 Yet soldiers’
ideological commitment waned, becoming weary cynicism and disillusion.
Many felt they had been duped. Hess divides fifty-eight Union soldiers’
postwar memoirs into four fairly equal groups. The first stressed ideology
and remained committed to preserving the Union. The second he calls “lost
soldiers,” who “could find no self-assurances of any kind about the war,”
disillusioned and embittered. The third group consisted of “pragmatists,”
who rejected the cause but viewed the war as a personal process of self-
discovery, and the fourth group were “silent witnesses,” who “recalled
comradeship, camp life, and other common experiences, but repressed
memories of battle.”40 This is a very mixed picture.
New recruits were enthusiastic but low in skills. The survivors
improved to peak efficiency in their third or fourth battle. Then enthusiasm
and energy began to fade. Such cycles were typical in modern wars. A
woman watching new Union recruits marching to war said they displayed
“boyish enthusiasm,” in contrast to the more experienced, who marched “in
a grim silence that was most oppressive.”41 Experienced soldiers knew the
dangers, kept their heads down, and did the minimum.42 Hess says that the
relentless pressure of war ensured that almost all would occasionally shirk
combat duties without being labeled a coward.43 Everyone needed a rest.
One man said 10 percent of Union soldiers were always brave, matched by
10 percent “arrant cowards,” while 80 percent lay between, functioning
“within the safe margins of acceptability.” Since morale was similar on both
sides, it did not much affect the outcome of the war. But the constant
jumping from calm to chaos brought rapid mood changes. Hess notes that
many soldiers distinguished between moral courage, the conscious desire to
do one’s duty and preserve one’s honor despite the dangers, and physical
courage, usually the product of adrenaline and the emotional and
physiological stimulation of combat.44 Battle remained gut-wrenching and
gut-spilling. Adams presents a horrific litany of actual deaths:

Corporal James Quick stumble[s] back as a bullet enters behind his

left jaw and exits through the nose. He is just twenty-two. Next to
him, Lieutenant William Taylor has been hit in the neck by a bullet
that missed the arteries but severed his windpipe. He clasps his
hands to his neck, trying to stanch the flow of blood and air hissing
through the wound. Private Keils runs past, “breathing at his throat
and the blood spattering” from a neck wound. . . . We avoid
Private George Walker because his right arm is off, severing the
artery, and blood “on certain movements of the arm, gushed out
higher than his head.” Blood spurts, too, from a Federal officer
shot behind the bridge of the nose; he wanders about, continuing to
blink even though both eyes are gone, “opening and closing the
sightless sockets, the blood leaping out in spouts.45

These were not what defenders of wars call “good deaths,” but they were
probably typical of battles through the ages. McPherson quotes a Virginia
private: “I have seen enough of the glory of war. . . . I am sick of seeing dead
men and men’s limbs torn from their bodies.” A sergeant from Minnesota
wrote: “I don’t know any individual soldier who is at all anxious to be led, or
driven, for that matter to another battle.” They were volunteers, but their
actions were no longer voluntary.
McPherson says that in the heat and fear of battle, many soldiers’
bodies pumped out a “super-adrenalized fury” that provided a “combat
narcosis” that “acts almost like a hallucinogenic drug,” generating an
excitement so strong that it overwhelmed thought of morality, fear, or
cowardice. We know now that a rush from the adrenal glands generates
sudden energy and strength, a racing pulse or pounding heart, and increased
respiration. This may induce soldiers to flight, which in the entrapment of
battle was difficult, or to fury, which led men to charge forward yelling. The
diarists say this meant “behaving like wild men.” “Our men became insane,
howled and rushed forward.” An Indiana sergeant wrote to his fiancée, “A
man can & will become so infuriated by the din & dangers of a bloody fight,
that if he ever did have a tender heart, it will [be] turned to stone & his evry
desire [be] for blood.” The “rebel yell” became feared by Union soldiers.
Adrenaline came only in short bursts. But for technical jobs such as artillery
teams, the mind was occupied with the sequence of loading, firing,
repositioning, reloading, and refiring, a process that relegated fear to the
back burners. “My mind was wholly absorbed,” one wrote.46
Fury was fueled by the desire to avenge the deaths of comrades, and so
atrocities resulted. A Union soldier wrote: “We captured about a hundred
prisoners and killed about thirty of them. It was fun for us to see them Skip
out.” Confederates shot black Union soldiers they captured, in addition to
their white officers. Rapes were common. Union generals advancing in
Confederate territory pursued scorched-earth tactics. Sherman declared: “To
secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi I would slay millions.
On that point I am not only insane, but mad.”47 War is “the most dangerous
of all excitements” said Lee, and he remarked, “It is well that war is so
terrible—otherwise we would grow too fond of it.” But once combat or
charging forward ended, the men collapsed in exhaustion, and fear returned.
An incident during the Civil War, though not a part of it, however, puts
Civil War atrocities in perspective. On November 29, 1864, hundreds of
Arapaho and Cheyenne Native Americans were massacred at Sand Creek,
Colorado, by Union cavalry led by a Colonel John Chivington, who
declared: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! . . . I have come to
kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under
God’s heaven to kill Indians. . . . Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make
lice.” The soldiers’ attack degenerated into frenzy. They took scalps and
other grisly trophies from the dead bodies, adorning themselves with scalps,
human fetuses, and male and female genitalia. Two-thirds of the dead were
women and children. Civil War battles never sank so low. Yet two cavalry
officers at Sand Creek were horrified. Captain Silas Soule wrote to his
mother: “I was present at a Massacre of three hundred Indians mostly
women and children. . . . It was a horrable scene and I would not let my
Company fire.” Lieutenant Joseph Cramer also ordered his men not to shoot.
In the Civil War soldiers could not treat white men this cruelly.48
After Gettysburg more permanent combat exhaustion set in. Soldiers
were weakened, says McPherson, from “the marching, loss of sleep, poor
food or no food, bad water, lack of shelter, and exposure to extremes of heat,
and cold, dust and mud, and the torments of insects.” Contaminated water
presented them with the dilemma of choosing death through thirst or disease.
“Malnutrition and diarrhea gravely impaired the efficiency of armies,
causing depression, lethargy, night blindness, muscular debility, neuralgia,
and susceptibility to major diseases. Finally, emaciated men could not march
or fight and died.”49 A Virginia captain confessed to his wife: “This has
broken me down completely. . . . [I am] in a state of exhaustion. . . . I never
saw the Brigade so completely broken down and unfitted for service.”
Occasionally a unit would not fight. A Massachusetts captain reported, “We,
our brigade, have made fourteen charges upon our enemy’s breastworks,
although at last no amount of urging, no heroic examples, no threats, or
anything else, could get the line to stir one peg.”50 This was neither
reluctance to kill nor cowardice, since the soldiers knew that further charges
would be pointless, and they were exhausted. Ideology was now irrelevant—
they would have gladly gone home. Freer peoples, like Native Americans,
would have gone home if their battles were only half as threatening as this.
Some soldiers also had political discontents. They objected to
conscription, seeing this as a “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight,” and
Confederates took a dim view of Lee’s decision to take the war north into
Union territory. Most Confederate soldiers thought they had signed up to
defend their own state. Mark Weitz says soldiers on both sides saw
enlistment as contractual.51 If they perceived the government as not living
up to its side of the contract, they deemed their departure justified.
Unswerving ideological commitment was over. The Gettysburg defeat
brought a crisis for the Confederacy, which had to grant amnesty to deserters
to replenish the army’s depleted ranks. Short-term leaves were also
authorized by regimental officers if they deemed it necessary to prevent
longer-term departure.
McPherson rejects the argument that nineteenth-century Americans
were more violent or accepted death more easily than Americans today. He
also downplays training, discipline, and leadership in motivating soldiers to
fight, declaring, “Civil War volunteer regiments were notoriously deficient
in the first, weak in the second, and initially shaky in the third.” “American
white males were the most individualistic, democratic people on the face of
the earth in 1861. They did not take kindly to authority, discipline,
obedience.”52 I view such American cultural tropes skeptically, and the army
responded by intensifying coercion. Cowards were occasionally shot, but
more often they were court-martialed and shamed. A Union private wrote,
“There are few cowards here and those that are, are drummed Before the
Regt on dress Parade.” A Confederate general threatened “to blow the brains
out of the first man who left ranks.” A Confederate private wrote that his
brigade had to watch a captured deserter, “a wretched creature,” getting
thirty-nine lashes on his bare back, a punishment that they knew was
normally reserved for slaves.53
Yet the most common coercion came from comrades. As the first battle
approached, so did fear, but it included fear of failing to be worthy of
manhood, a coward in full view of one’s comrades. It was followed by a
sense of relief and even joy when a soldier felt he had surmounted his fears
and shot boldly at the enemy. Fear of battle was undercut by fear of being
labeled a coward by one’s comrades and officers. Hess says Union soldiers
thought of the “line . . . all in touch, elbow to elbow.” “Men fight in masses,”
a Union officer explained. “To be brave they must be inspired by the feeling
of fellowship. Shoulder must touch shoulder.” Hess concludes, “If it were
possible to pinpoint one factor as most important in enabling the soldier to
endure battle, it would be the security of comradeship.”54 McPherson quotes
a Union colonel writing of Shiloh: “Those who had stood shoulder to
shoulder during the two terrible days of that bloody battle were hooped with
steel, with bands stronger than steel.”55 Bonded by shared danger, they were
“a band of brothers” whose mutual dependence enabled them to maintain
self-respect and function as a fighting unit. If one man became petrified with
fear, he endangered the survival of all and drew contempt and ostracism, and
he lost self-respect as a man.
Peer-group coercion was more effective than coercion by officers,
though soldiers stressed that officers who led from the front challenged their
men forward. But the reputation of a coward would follow the soldier and
his family even in peacetime, given the recruitment of units from single
localities. “Death before dishonor” was a constant refrain in letters. An Ohio
soldier wrote that he shook like a leaf before his first engagement, but he
resolved to “stand up to my duties like a man, let the consequences be as
they might. I had rather die like a brave man, than have a coward’s ignominy
cling around my name.” A New York veteran of two years’ fighting
responded to his sister: “You ask me if the thought of death does not alarm
me. I will say I do not wish to die . . . but have too much honor to hold back
while others are going forward. I myself am as big a coward as any could be,
but give me the ball [bullet] before the coward when all my friends and
companions are going forward.” These were not the forces of intimate
primary groups of the dispersed battlefields of the twentieth century but
pressures from larger groups in one of the last wars to be fought in long,
dense lines.56
Gettysburg was a large battlefield of over 11,000 acres. The
Confederate lines of attack stretched eight kilometers in a great arc over
fields, woods, low hills, and bluffs. A regiment fought in two or three lines,
behind which were reserves. Flight from battle was risky, since military
police in the rear shot deserters, while reserve units stiffening a
disintegrating line gathered up stragglers and stemmed routs. But in camp
and on the march, surveillance was difficult and home not far away. By late
January 1863 there had been 185,000 desertions from the Union army—who
had not so much run as drifted away.57 There was “straggling” on the march,
“French leave” (returning home without permission for a few days), and
long-term desertion. Many Confederate soldiers lacked adequate shoes,
clothing, and food and could not keep up with the punishing schedule of
marching that Lee’s strategy demanded. Others responded to heartrending
appeals from their families to return home. Lee estimated that one-third of
his force was absent at the Battle of Antietam. Official estimates of desertion
were 10 to 15 percent among the Confederates and 9 to 12 percent among
Union soldiers, but these figures are considered too low. Very few deserters
had moral qualms, far more were driven by fear and discontent with the
rigors of army life. Given opportunity, many deserted. Given more
opportunity, many more would have.

Conclusion
Chaos and fear, not heroism or moral qualms, pervaded Civil War armies.
Ideologically, the Sixth Commandment was nullified by the belief that this
was a just, even a divinely sanctioned war. Ideological commitment to a
transcendent cause had been the most important reason for volunteering, and
it endured as a motive, though it weakened into a sense of duty focused on
dogged determination to get the job done. Conscripts were less strongly
committed. Almost all were disillusioned as the war dragged on. That they
fought on was due to coercion: army discipline and punishment, moral
coercion by one’s close comrades, and the physical entrapment of the
battlefield. A predilection for violence encouraged a few, but more were
boosted by rushes of anger-fueled adrenaline. The combination produced
much bravery, pushing fear to the back burners. Soldiers could kill relatively
easily when being fired at, when ordered to do so by routinized, coercive
authority, when under moral pressure from comrades, or when committed to
the cause. Their willingness to kill, at considerable risk, was produced not by
human nature but by social pressures, social authority, and social and
political ideologies. Emotional exhaustion was the universal aftereffect
among survivors. Yet most soldiers on both sides were courageous in their
grim determination to keep on fighting and get the job done.
Was the war worth almost three-quarters of a million dead, more
wounded, and 3 million surviving soldiers experiencing intermittent terror—
without including abused civilians or the veterans who later suffered
breakdowns? The war formally abolished slavery, and the consequent
Thirteenth to Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments made clearer the
meaning of freedom, citizenship, and equality. But a better solution would
have been two American countries. Secession would have spared almost a
million lives, it would have led to mass flight northward by slaves, and it
would have spared Washington from the enduring racist input of southern
politicians. Even better would have been decades-long political struggle in
the House and Senate over cumulative emancipation proposals. Not even a
step on the road to the liberty of African Americans was worth such a price
in death, given the southern reaction that was soon to undermine
emancipation. Slavery would have collapsed anyway near the end of the
century, as soil erosion and boll-weevil infestation destroyed the cotton
industry and the profitability of slavery. We have the advantage of hindsight,
of course, but that enables us to say that this was a tragedy, unhappily hard
to avoid but made inevitable by the overconfidence in war among rulers that
we repeatedly find in the history of war.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield II

The World Wars

World War I
Infantry soldiers on the Western Front were almost all literate, and many
wrote diaries, letters, autobiographies, and novels. Unfortunately, their
letters were censored by army authorities, although we can add
psychologists’ reports on morale. In 1914 professional armies were enlarged
by reservists and lightly trained volunteers, a product of initial enthusiasm
for the war. But from 1915 or 1916, ever-larger numbers were supplied by
conscription. An astonishing 90 percent of young French men and 53 percent
of young British men were conscripted.1 Why did the volunteers sign up?
Why did the conscripts not resist? There were four main reasons.

1. Young men had imbibed a culture depicting war as an honorable

and heroic duty of masculinity.2 In the books and comics read by
schoolboys, the heroes in combat with whom they identified
always survived, to be garlanded with glory. Beautiful women
swooned over them. There was a desire for adventure and escape
from the drudgery of mundane life. War was not envisaged as
bringing death. It did not do so to the heroes in the adventure
stories.
2. This was portrayed as a legitimate war of self-defense by the
warring governments, local notables, and mass media, and few
soldiers had alternative sources of information. The intensification
of national “cages” that I charted in volume 2 of The Sources of
 Social Power meant that soldiers, whatever their regional
identities, had a “banal” sense of identity as British, German, or
French, believing that they shared distinct national ways of life.
The authorities had to convert this into a patriotism prepared to
defend what they defined as the interests of the nation. This then
escalated to the defense of civilization against barbarism, helped
by exaggerated stories of enemy atrocities and later by the desire
to avenge slaughtered comrades. Such escalation was generally
achieved despite the reality that British people had little objective
interest in defending the global British Empire, while Germans had
little objective interest in Germany’s “place in the sun.” Still less
did British or French colonial troops have an objective interest in
fighting for their imperial masters (save for the pay). It was
different for Russians and French and others whose homelands
were invaded.
3. Volunteers signed on in local units, and their commitment was
to people they knew and to local notables to whom they deferred.
They were honored and sometimes financed by their local
community, while its women pressured them to “Be a Man” and
sign up. It was very easy to do and it brought praise—it satisfied
desire for the social and sexual status of a warrior. Indeed, many
women in Britain collaborated in this by handing out white
feathers, a symbol of cowardice, to men who had not signed up.
4. Steady, guaranteed pay was a desired factor at first, because of
high unemployment, and it continued to be among the poor.

Hew Strachan suggests four ways in which soldiers were made to

continue fighting: through pressure from soldiers’ primary groups, from
ideological commitment and duty to a cause, from drilling and training, and
from punishment for those who deviated.3 I add three more mundane factors:
the battlefield as a trap, task absorption, and a claim of self-defense. All
seven had influence, applying to different extents in different contexts.
The soldiers were not initially afraid, for they expected to win quickly,
bolstered by their belief in the justice of the cause. Since they were right,
they “should” win, in the normal double sense of both moral right and
probability. But they had not been prepared for battle, which was not
remotely an adventure story. Death came raining down, but not after heroic
combat. Seventy percent of deaths came from artillery fired from a distance,
killing randomly, not aimed at anyone in particular. It was almost
insupportable to cower, unable to influence whether one lived or died. A
Bavarian lieutenant described battle as a witches’ Sabbath, blown by “a
hurricane of fire,” “like a crushing machine, mechanical, without feelings,
snuffing out the last resistance, with a thousand hammers. It is totally
inappropriate to play such a game with fellow men. We are all human beings
made in the image of the Lord God. But what account does the Devil take of
mankind, or God, when he feels himself to be Lord of the Elements; when
chaos celebrates his omnipotence.”4 This soldier shared a sense of common
humanity with the enemy, but cosmic forces beyond his power or
understanding, conveyed here through Christian metaphors, obliterated this.
Most rulers believed the war would be short, the nineteenth-century
norm in Europe. The U.S. Civil War had been long and devastating, but they
put that down to the incompetence of the Americans. Field Marshal Helmuth
von Moltke the Elder had engineered the Prussian victory over France in
1870. He spat out contemptuously and foolishly of the U.S. Civil War that it
was “armed mobs chasing each other round the country, from which nothing
can be learned.”5 In the recent Russo-Japanese War, the combination of
barbed wire and machine guns had produced high casualties, but Japanese
mass offensives had proved successful. European General Staffs drew the
lesson that offense would triumph over defense. Yet marked technological
improvement in weaponry during the Second Industrial Revolution meant
artillery batteries had become massive, rifles were more lethal, and the
machine gun could spray death around the battle front. All could be mass-
produced in existing factories.
When the war began, soldiers no longer stood up to fight. They dug
trenches protected by barbed wire to slow down attackers. Peering up over
the edge, they fired from a leaning, mostly concealed position. In this war
blazing away in the general direction of the enemy was done from holes in
the ground. Offense came with the order “Charge!” The infantry ran bent
over or crawled across no-man’s-land, exposing themselves to fire,
especially from machine guns. They were aided by surging adrenaline,
whipped up by collective yelling, alcohol, the example of junior officers, and
a sergeant at the rear posted to shoot laggards. It was suicidal. The accounts
of British and German soldiers during the battle of the Somme convey a
sense of hell on earth as the bodies of friend and foe were torn apart around
them. Soldiers said that when they charged, they were “out of their minds,”
reverting to the “primitive man lurking inside all of us.”6 Benjamin Ziemann
says their violence was “overstepping boundaries, a process in which
protagonists can lose control of themselves, leaving rational consideration
behind. . . . Soldiers in combat can become enraged, act out their anger and
enter into a state of frenzy.”7 The killing of prisoners was normal.
As defense proved superior on a static Western Front, the capture of a
single field cost many lives. Eastern Fronts differed, since the Russians
overmatched the Austrians and the Germans overmatched the Russians. Here
routs caused “forward panics” involving mass slaughter or surrender. But
both fronts produced awful casualties. A French soldier wrote to his parents:
“It is shameful, awful; it’s impossible to convey the image of such a carnage.
We will never be able to escape from such a hell. The dead cover the ground.
Boches and French are piled on top of each other, in the mud. . . . We
attacked twice, gained a little ground—which was completely soaked with
blood. . . . But one must not despair, one can be wounded. As for death, if it
comes, it will be a deliverance.”8 Note the preferred ending, to be wounded
or even killed and so removed from the battlefield.
Mass slaughter consists of many single deaths. Here is a man dying
from a gas attack, depicted by the British war poet Wilfred Owen:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. [It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country]

This poem was published posthumously. Lieutenant Owen was killed just
after being awarded the Military Cross for bravery, one week before the
Armistice, at the age of twenty-five.
 The chances of being killed were about one in five for French soldiers,
one in seven for the British. The chances of being killed, wounded, missing,
or made POWs were much higher: 76 percent of men mobilized in Russia,
73 percent for France, 65 percent for Germany, 36 percent for Britain and its
empire, only 8 percent for the United States (in its seventeen months of
fighting). Why did the soldiers accept such odds? As we saw in the last
chapter, morale does not turn on whether soldiers experience fear. They all
do. Fear, says Holmes, “is the common bond between fighting men. The
overwhelming majority of soldiers’ experience fear during or before battle.”9
Especially feared were wounds to the abdomen, eyes, brain, and genitals,
which soldiers believed made them unfit for life. Fear has physiological
consequences, adrenaline and cortisol rushes, accelerating heartbeat, and
even involuntary pissing or shitting in one’s pants, common just before
battle. Soldiers were caught short, ashamed of shitting in the trench in front
of their comrades, climbing out, lowering their pants, and having their heads
blown off.10
In battle itself, continuous mind-filling action tended to banish fear to
the back burners but afterwards was replaced by loathing for the horrors of
mutilated, decomposing, stinking corpses, body parts hanging from bushes,
and dying cries for “Mum, Mum,” “Maman, Maman” or “Mutter, Mutter.”
Such repeated sights, smells, and sounds deadened sensibilities. As a French
corporal put it, “Our repugnance became dulled, forced to live in the filth,
we became worse than the beasts.”11 Most were emotionally damaged. As
Malešević says:

Although wars are often conceptualised in instrumentalist and

rationalist terms, the actual lived experience of the combat zone is
principally defined by variety of emotional reactions. All soldiers
experience intense emotional reactions in the combat zone.
Although fear is by far the most common emotion, the combatants
tend to display a wide range of complex and changing emotional
responses including both negative emotions such as anxiety, anger,
rage, panic, horror, shame, guilt, and sadness as well as some
positive emotions including happiness, joy, pride, elation, and
exhilaration. Living in an exceptional situation of life and death,
the individual actions and responses of soldiers are profoundly
shaped by emotions.12
 Alcohol and tobacco helped deaden the sensibilities, but psychiatric
medicine and diagnosis were rudimentary. The British recognized “shell-
shock,” the French commotion (concussion) or obusite (“shellitis”), but most
higher officers assumed these were covers for shirking. There were ways of
not coping—self-wounding to get a discharge or claiming trench foot, which
restricted mobility. Soldiers felt envious of those whose minor wounds sent
them home. Psychiatric hospital admissions grew as physical casualties
increased.13 After prolonged exposure to battle, the major goal was survival:
focusing on self-protection and fighting while trying not to expose oneself to
unnecessary danger.
Debate about why they kept on fighting has been liveliest in France.
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker stress soldiers’ consent—
early ideological enthusiasm for war and the complicity of religion in war
fever, boosted by soldiers’ increasing religiosity in the face of death. In
France the war was a “crusade” maintained by a “culture of war” that
involved “the expectation of a rapid victory,” “the heroism of the soldiers,”
and the “demonized perception of atrocities committed by the enemy.”14
Letters home, they say, show that most French soldiers believed they fought
in a just, patriotic cause, that they were sacrificing in defense of the
homeland against a foreign invader.15 Their findings imply a nationalist
religiosity, not religion in itself. After all, half the Germans trying to kill
them were also Catholics. But their conclusion is that soldiers freely gave
consent to the war, for self-defense is the strongest justification, intensified
into a defense of civilization against barbarism. This claim was ideologically
reciprocated by Germans, who alleged atrocities by “savage” African and
Asian troops deployed by the French and British.
Yet other historians doubt that such transcendent ideology figured in
most ordinary soldiers’ experiences once they were locked in the trenches.
Leonard Smith and his colleagues emphasize a less ideological, more
grounded sense of patriotism among French infantrymen who felt they had
to expel the Boches (Germans) from France.16 Being mostly peasants (as all
armies except the British were), they knew this required digging trenches
every meter of the way. For them defense of the soil of France was not an
abstract concept. This view also emphasizes consent, but ideology had
become institutionalized in everyday activities.
Frédéric Rousseau has a different view, based on letters, memoirs, and
fictional works written by more than sixty soldiers.17 He accepts that the
initial rally ’round the flag response brought enthusiastic enlistment amid
patriotic rhetoric. But once soldiers experienced the gruesome realities of
trench warfare, patriotism vanished: “The so-called consent of the soldiers
was expressed within a space of extreme dependence, constant surveillance,
and heightened coercion.” Several of his soldiers flatly said, “There is no
patriotism in the trenches,” and Rousseau asks rhetorically, “What is a
soldier if not a man oppressed, bullied, dehumanized, terrorized and
threatened with death by his own army[?]”18 He says combatants obeyed
more from constraint than consent. As I have emphasized, that is the general
nature of military power. Jules Maurin also downplays consent, since by
1916, he says, the infantry, the poilus (literally, “hairy ones”), had forgotten
why they were fighting. They fought because they were told to by the
disciplining hierarchies to which they had been accustomed in their
communities. The key was unanimity among the three main authority figures
in French villages, priest, mayor, and schoolteacher, from political right to
left.19 François Cochet and André Loez bridge consent and constraint.20
Coercion did not dominate the poilus’s everyday experience, they say.
Rather, the military set boundaries, and the culture and patriotism of the
soldier became irrelevant under the perpetual pressures of the war.21 Action
outside of obedience was risky. Soldiers could only hang on, grimly fighting
with an immanent ideology emphasizing comrades, families, homeland, and
their own sense of honor—perhaps in that order.
For British troops defense was not so direct, for they were fighting
abroad. Their sense of being British extended to a degree of imperial
identity, but more important was that they were used to obeying their social
superiors—as Maurin argued for the French. They believed what their rulers
said about the necessity of the war since their own knowledge of foreign
affairs was almost zero. In the war they maintained deference to officers,
provided the officers treated their own authority as normal and did not
condescend to them.22
The rural Bavarians studied by Ziemann and the Saxons described by
Tony Ashworth’s British soldiers seem more reluctant warriors who found
their Prussian officers abusive and arrogant.23 They were indifferent to
German war aims but were held in place by a commitment to finish a job
that had been started, by religious commitment to fight a righteous war, by
commitment to their comrades, alive and dead, and by harsh discipline,
made bearable by generous leave arrangements attuned to an army of
peasants trying to keep their small plots of land viable. It is generally
assumed that the German fighting soldier was more effective than those of
the Entente, though they collapsed at the very end.
Social pressures enabled armies to hang on once patriotic sentiments
had subsided. The fear of letting down one’s comrades, copains, pals, Ka-
meraden, was almost universal, buttressed by the need to assert
masculinity.24 Fear was acceptable, everybody in all armies experienced it,
says Rousseau. But cowardice was effeminate, unacceptable to a real man.
These were still patriarchal and hierarchical societies. Austro-Hungarians
drawn from minority nations had probably the least commitment to their
regime. By 1917 many believed they would be better off in defeat, through
which they could get their own state. Yet most fought on almost to the end. It
was difficult to do otherwise. All the hierarchies were in place, and people
did what they were told in a spirit of pragmatic acceptance, because that was
how the world worked.
Yet the soldiers were not passive recipients of orders. Ashworth found
in British soldiers’ letters and memoirs independence of action partially
undermining higher authorities’ commands.25 He identified a “live-and-let-
live” system involving tacit truces between German and British non-elite
infantry along quieter front sectors. Elite units identified with their regiment,
honored its traditions, and wanted action, but others preferred a quieter life.
The system was helped by the ecology of trench warfare. The distance
between enemy front lines was from one to three hundred meters. Sentry and
listening posts were closer. The lines stretched over many kilometers. The
battlefield of the Somme was ten times the length of Waterloo or Gettysburg,
where soldiers had been close to the enemy only when under fire. This had
prevented communication between armies. Now armies were encamped
close to one another, and at quiet times they could communicate. Each
trench heard noises associated with everyday living. “Tommy” and “Jerry”
(or “Fritz”) could hear each other at breakfast, laughing, singing. In quieter
sectors the opposed units remained the same over time, so soldiers could
shout each other’s names. The men were spread out in fives along the front
line, away from close surveillance by officers, each of whom was
responsible for soldiers over several hundred meters. Battlefield ecology did
not merely entrap, it brought a little autonomy.
Live-and-let-live was a mutual strategy to subvert orders and to avoid
getting killed, more a utilitarian exchange than the result of moral qualms at
killing—though the famous 1914 Christmas Day truce and football game
between German and British troops was inflected with Christian notions of
fellowship. Ashworth says the system embodied the sociological “norm of
reciprocity”—“do unto me as I do unto you.” This required trust that the
enemy would honor the implied pact; it involved empathy and “a
consciousness of kind.” After all, they shared the same trench experience,
the same will to live, and the same conflicts with a hierarchy that wanted
them to kill and be killed. They also shared a hatred of artillery, for if our
artillery launches a massive cannonade, theirs will respond in kind—and get
us killed. It would be preferable if neither fired. Both infantries hated “fire-
eaters,” “heroes” whose aggression would bring fire back onto them.
Ashworth describes verbal contracts, mutual inertia, and rituals such as not
shelling when food was being consumed, deliberately shelling into no-
man’s-land, or helping the enemy to predict when the next bombardment
would come. Patrols might quietly pass each other in the night and soldiers
might shoot to miss. On the basis of the letters and diaries of a few
regiments, and allowing for the proportion of quiet fronts and non-elite
regiments, Ashworth gives a minimum of 13 percent and a maximum of 33
percent of soldiers involved at least once in the system.26
The live-and-let-live approach also occurred on other fronts. Ziemann’s
study of Bavarians fighting on a quiet front in the Vosges reveals similar
practices between German and French troops.27 Rousseau quotes several
French soldiers detailing friendly contacts with the enemy when front
conditions permitted.28 Sheldon tells of a German lance corporal captured in
no-man’s-land by an Australian patrol. The Australians gave him cigarettes
and offered not to take him prisoner if he would return and give them a
German steel helmet. He agreed and kept his word, returning with a helmet.
They shook hands and returned to their lines.29 This was the life most
soldiers would have wanted.
But on unquiet sectors there was carnage. At Verdun it lasted ten
months, consuming 550,000 French lives and 430,000 German lives. The
Somme offensive lasted five months. On its first day, 60,000 British soldiers
were casualties, 20,000 of them killed. The carnage at Verdun was due to
Falkenhayn drawing as many French soldiers within range of his artillery as
he could. The French generals supplied the corpses, but the troops did not
waver. Over the whole war, on average, 900 Frenchmen, 1,300 Germans,
and over 1,450 Russians died every day. The British lost “only” 457 men per
day. About 40 percent of all soldiers in the war were wounded at least once.
Medical improvements since the Napoleonic Wars were canceled out by the
graver wounds inflicted by new weapons, so more soldiers died of their
wounds than in Napoleon’s time.30 But 30 percent of soldiers operated in the
less dangerous rear, which means that overall casualty rates underestimate
those of front soldiers.
Nonetheless, both the live-and-let-live tactic and mass slaughter
alarmed commanders into changes. From 1916 the German army developed
a more fluid strategy of “defense in depth,” and they and the Austrians
developed “storm troopers,” small commando attack forces.31 The British
also turned toward using more snipers, trench mortars, machine guns, and
mines, as well as launching more commando raids. These raids were
generally ineffective, but they undermined the live-and-let-live approach,
since they could not be ritualized or predicted. Army tactics had countered
soldiers’ agency. But from 1918 such changes were integrated into a more
general use of cover and concealment, freedom of subunits to maneuver, and
combined-arms integration, all deployed more flexibly to break the
stalemate.
Ashworth comments on Marshall’s theory of nonfiring by World War II
soldiers because of moral qualms, which I discuss later. He notes that live-
and-let-live fits Marshall’s claim that soldiers failed to fire their guns, but
this was not due to moral qualms. He finds no evidence that “the tension
between humane impulses and orders to kill caused paralysis.”32 He quotes
several soldiers describing killing in matter-of-fact terms. Audoin-Rouzeau
and Becker give examples of soldiers reporting enjoying killing in hand-to-
hand combat.33 But noting that many veterans had become pacifists by the
1930s, they suggest moral qualms plagued many after the war, as I noted
regarding the aftermath of the American Civil War. Ashworth says that only
a “small proportion of soldiers hospitalised with battle fatigue had a fear of
killing.”34 This last point is confirmed by Alexander Watson’s study of
psychologists’ reports. Fear for oneself was much more important than
moral qualms.35
Smith complains that, since Clausewitz, armies have been seen as
overcentralized, and soldiers’ responses as mere “friction” in the system.36
Clausewitz did not see that his “apolitical” army was different from citizen
soldiers questioning and negotiating authority. Soldiers were not passive
victims, brutalized and slaughtered by the modern war machine. In his study
of the 5th French Infantry Division, Smith says soldiers were committed to
the war effort. They wanted France to win and were willing to fight to
achieve this. But they also believed in the “proportionality” of commands.
The risks asked of them had to be proportional to their chances of achieving
success. When commands are seen as disproportional, soldiers resist with
lassitude, reluctance to follow orders of attack, and grousing. There is a
degree of rational calculation in this. The troops decided what was possible
on their battlefield, and sometimes they imposed their own solutions of
retreat, tacit refusal to advance, or even surrender. Their immediate officers
might sympathize and lessen their demands, conveying grousing up the
hierarchy and suggesting tactical changes. Tacit negotiations between ranks
concerned acceptable responses to combat environments.
Emmanuel Saint-Fuscien shows that a sense of proportionality grew in
the French military justice system.37 This began as repressive but then eased,
as executions for cowardice or desertion became rarer (with the exception
noted below), and fewer sentences were carried out. At the front, the
exigencies of battle weakened hierarchy. Junior officers, NCOs, and men
faced the same challenges, and examples of initiative and courage by any of
them could inspire the others. Authority became more responsive, more
flexible. Military justice moved away from an aloof and authoritarian system
to a more interpersonal system suited to the needs of a skilled, democratic
army. What a tragedy that this occurred only amid mass slaughter!
And as the war ground on, discontent grew. By 1917 this was fueled in
France by hopes of peace induced by the Russian Revolution, the entry of
U.S. forces, German retreat behind the Hindenburg Line, political struggle in
Paris, and the disaster of Robert Nivelle’s Chemin des Dames offensive. This
produced a psychological threshold above which soldiers would not engage
in offensives, which exploded in the French mutinies of April–May 1917.
About 45,000 soldiers refused to obey the order to advance in a rippling
motion across a broad front. They were prepared to defend their positions
but rejected Nivelle’s policy of incessant attacks: he had breached their
implicit contract to defend France without being cannon fodder. The
soldiers’ demands ranged from better food and more leave to immediate
peace. In sending their demands to their deputies in Paris, soldiers were
recognizing the legitimacy of the republic and their own power as citizens.
They were also trying to protect themselves from execution. Smith weakens
his argument by contrasting French “citizen soldiers” with stereotypes of the
supposed “subject soldiers” of Britain (like France, a male democracy), and
Germany, half-democratic, many of whose soldiers had become socialists
toward war’s end. More to the point is that British and German soldiers were
serving abroad, trapped within their military deployments, while the
mutinous French troops were at home, under one hundred kilometers from
Paris. Many had spent their leaves in Paris witnessing strikes and
demonstrations.
The crisis was solved by Philippe Pétain’s carrot-and-stick strategy: on
the one hand, the inevitable execution of “ringleaders,” and on the other, the
promise of “tanks and the Americans,” improvements in living conditions
and fewer mass attacks.38 But all the armies had reached the end of their
tethers by mid-1918, except for the recently arrived Americans.39 Those in
the front line, with direct experience of battle, were more likely to suffer
psychological trauma.40 This is also what analyses of PTSD in recent wars
reveal (see the next chapter).
Surrendering was risky. Many were killed by captors consumed with
rage at the deaths of their comrades, or fearful that visibly escorting
prisoners back was too dangerous.41 Desertion was risky. One had to make
one’s way through numerous lines and, if one was caught, punishment
included possible execution. The rate of British, French, and German
desertions was only 1 percent, though higher among ethnic minorities.42
Because of lesser national solidarity, desertion was greater in Austrian,
Italian, Russian, and Ottoman forces.43 Yet survival chances were perversely
seen as better if one stayed, for the army command supplied food, alcohol,
tobacco, and better medical help than civilians got. The military unit
remained a protective environment, enveloping the soldier.44
Watson analyzes British and German soldiers’ censored letters home
and diaries, in addition to psychologists’ and army reports. He says most
soldiers coped quite well with appalling front conditions. Endurance was the
norm—most men adapted to the war. Resilience, not mental collapse, was
commoner, because of a combination of fear of the enemy, military
obedience, camaraderie, overoptimism concerning the likelihood of death or
injury, religious faith, patriotism, rotation systems enabling rest, and
adequate food and munitions. Religion, superstitions, talismans, and
incessant black humor gave men the illusion of control of their destinies. As
long as men believed in survival and final victory, fear was manageable.
This required faith in officers, unit loyalty, and junior officers leading from
the front (they had the highest casualty rates). Letters from loved ones added
moral and emotional support and reminded the soldiers that they were
fighting for hearth and homeland.45
The front experience did not intensify moral qualms at killing. We can
find in soldiers’ accounts occasional respect for enemy soldiers, and
appreciation when they withheld fire while medics were picking up the
wounded or the dead. There was German gratitude to a British prisoner who,
after a sudden change of fortune at the front, found himself protecting his
German captors from the wrath of his comrades. But in Rousseau’s and
Sheldon’s lengthy quotations from French and German soldiers, no one
expressed moral qualms about killing. On the contrary, battle intensified
aggression. One British lieutenant said of his soldiers, “You only have an
impartial interest in strangers even though they are Englishmen, . . . [but]
your own men downed, sets you cursing and throbbing with rage and hate.”
Comments Watson, “Casualties, far from sapping combat motivation,
actually strengthened survivors’ obligation to keep fighting.”46 Nationalist
hatreds declined, replaced by primitive hatred. Adrenaline rushes could
convert fear into fury. In their letters, when soldiers describe killing an
enemy, he is depersonalized, never described as a human being.47
This now seems a pointless war, fought neither for genuine national
interests nor for high ideals, but for “reasons of state” mediated by the
survival interests of dynastic monarchies and the diplomatic incompetence
and cult of “honor” (not backing down) of upper-class leaders who did not
themselves fight. This suggests that soldiers’ sacrifices were senseless, and
that is why we should rage at the rulers, politicians, cour-tiers, journalists,
and generals who urged them on. Never were peoples so betrayed as in
World War I, but Europe remained a class-bound continent. Soldiers obeyed
their upper-class masters, just as they had done in peacetime. Heavy-industry
workers and miners were the most likely to rebel, but most were in reserved
occupations. Obedience plus national identity were translated by constant
drilling and the enemy’s murderous attacks into a belief that national
interests were at stake. After all, “they” were trying to kill “us.” If they had
doubts as cynics or class warriors, they were still trapped within the coercive
space that is an army in a battlefield.
Obedience required the belief that the war was winnable, and this
collapsed near the war’s end, temporarily for the French in their great
mutiny and for Italians at their great defeat at Caporetto, permanently for
Russian soldiers in the east and then German troops in the west, as they lost
the sense of their own empowerment, their trust in the competence of their
officers, and their confidence in victory.48 Joshua Sanborn challenges the old
assumption that coercion was the only reason Russian peasant-soldiers
fought, arguing that they possessed a motivating sense of patriotism.49 Yet
the loss of any realistic hope of victory against the superior German army
and the increasing sense of being used as cannon fodder turned at the
beginning of 1917 into class rage and revolution.50 This was the only
revolution that occurred during the war.
But by September 1918 German soldiers were exhausted. The failure of
their last offensive had shown them how outmatched they were in material
resources. Ironically, this was so during their last advances, for they captured
such plentiful Entente supplies of food, wine, and ammunition as to cause
despair at their own resources. Now the soldiers complained of “Prussian”
officers and denounced war profiteers back home.51 They had become
republicans, often socialists. As the Americans piled into the front, they no
longer believed they could win, while the British and French and the fresh
Americans knew they would win. The German army did not disintegrate as
the Russian army had, and some units carried on fighting even in defeat, but
many whole units of soldiers and officers came forward in surrender. Watson
argues that the soldiers remained in the line until there was an “ordered
surrender” from above. Ziemann’s view seems better evidenced, that soldiers
led the surrenders while many others simply went home.52 Fear had been
contained for four long years, but as the Germans neared defeat, containment
collapsed, while for their enemies, nearing victory seemed to make sense of
the war again. There was no clear relationship between morale and regime
type, contrary to the democratic “triumphalism” to which I referred in
chapter 3. Until the end, the Wehrmacht soldier fighting for a semi-
authoritarian regime was probably superior to the soldier of the Entente male
democracies, but the Austrians commanded by a semi-authoritarian regime
and Russians fighting for a fully authoritarian regime performed worse. The
losing rulers got what they deserved for starting the war, while the winners
botched the peace and made promises about a better society that they did not
keep.
The war brought on another bout of slaughter, the Spanish flu
pandemic, which lasted three years from January 1918. Its origins are
unknown but were not in Spain. Spain had been neutral in the war and
lacked wartime censorship, so this was the first country where the flu was
freely reported—the grave illness of the king making world headlines. This
pandemic infected perhaps 500 million people, a quarter of the world’s
population, and killed between 20 and 50 million. The pandemic had two
mostly military causes. First, military encampments contained soldiers living
intimately together in very unhygienic conditions and under severe stress—
perfect germ pools carrying off innumerable soldiers before spreading to
civilians through global movement of troops home as the war ended. We
might call this the “Kansas flu,” for it was probably in a military camp there
that the flu started. The second cause was military censorship, which
successfully concealed the scale of the problem until it was too late to take
effective preventive action. Nature was striking back, but the ferocity of the
blow was social, the idiocy of war and specifically of military authority.

World War II: Ideological Warfare

World War II was very different, as we saw in chapter 8. It was not a war
caused by confusion and miscalculation, like the first war, but by ideology. It
was a war of aggression created by the militaristic ideologies of Nazi
Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy. The French, British, Russians,
and Chinese fought largely in self-defense, whereas Americans had more
mixed motives. Allied soldiers were not cannon fodder in the power ploys of
rulers, although there were imperial goals sought by British, American, and
Soviet elites that were of little interest to the masses. And this time, British
colonial soldiers, especially those of the Indian Army, were fighting for their
probable national independence after the war.
We should also blame the leaders of Britain and France for their
ideological anti-Bolshevism, however, which prevented them from allying
with the Soviets to deter Hitler in 1938 and 1939—ideology triumphing over
Realist balancing. Although this would have left Hitler in place, it might
have avoided a world war and the Holocaust. We can also blame the
Roosevelt administration for its provocative sanctions against Japan. Yet
these are mere peccadillos compared to the atrocities of the Axis powers
from the Nanjing Massacre to the Holocaust. Allied soldiers viewed this as a
legitimate war, and it was.
For the first time we have interview surveys of soldiers, mainly
American, but Russian too. The first survey concerned the Spanish Civil War
of 1936 to 1939. The pioneering sociologist John Dollard distributed a forty-
four-page questionnaire to three hundred American volunteers who had
fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on the Republican side. Of the
respondents, 74 percent said they had felt fearful when first going into
action. Fear was greatest just before battle started. Fear of being thought a
coward by comrades and officers was dominant at this stage, but when
soldiers realized fear was shared by all their comrades, this offered comfort.
Ninety-one percent of them said they either always or sometimes felt afraid
going into actions. Fear generated strong physiological symptoms. A
pounding heart or rapid pulse was felt by 69 percent, extreme muscular
tension or a sinking feeling in the stomach by 45 percent, and severe
trembling by 25 percent. Involuntary urination or defecation was
experienced by 11 percent.53 I noted this happening in World War I, though I
lacked figures there. Probably it had happened in earlier wars. Surveys of
American soldiers in World War II produced similar numbers, as we shall
see. In battle some soldiers lose control over their urinary or bowel function
because the sphincter relaxes as fear takes over the brain, causing a loss in
the brain’s regulatory function. It happens automatically, without one’s
knowledge, an example of the fight-or-flight response to a stimulus. Here
flight prevailed. The opposite response is the increase in adrenaline that
enables fight.
Inactivity fueled fear. The vast majority, 84 percent, said that active task
concentration during battle filled the mind and dispelled fear. The second-
most cited factor in overcoming fear, at 77 percent, was belief in the war
aims. Forty-nine percent stressed good leadership, 45 percent military
training, and 42 percent good materiel. These last three responses reveal the
importance of feeling oneself a member of a well-organized army with a
good chance of winning. Hatred of the enemy was admitted by only 21
percent. Discussion of war aims helped 93 percent, whereas 91 percent said
being given knowledge of the whole front made them fight better, even if the
news was fairly bad. Dollard did not ask them about moral qualms, and they
did not volunteer them. This was a volunteer brigade composed of leftists
who had crossed the Atlantic to fight in a distant country for an antifascist
cause they believed in—which led to high immanent morale. But Dollard
adds: “The soldier in battle is not forever whispering “My cause, my cause.
He is too busy for that. Ideology functions before battle, to get the man in;
and after battle, by blocking thoughts of escape. Identification with cause is
like a joker in a pack of cards. It can substitute for any other card. The man
who has it can better bear inferior materiel, temporary defeat, weariness or
fear.”
The Lincoln Brigade fought hard, yet in a losing cause, as retreat and
defeat increasingly dominated its experience. Of the 3,015 Americans in the
brigade, about one-quarter died, but ideological commitment and tight
comradeship enabled the survivors to take heavy losses and continue
fighting. Immanent ideological power, strengthening solidarity, helped
master fear.
World War II was highly ideological. The vast majority of leaders
believed their cause was just, whether that meant securing national or racial
rights and power in the world (Germany, Italy, and Japan) or defeating
fascism (China, Soviet Union, France, Britain, United States). Such beliefs
played a significant role in soldiers’ conduct, increasing their commitment.
There were, however, two different types of ideology in the war. Among the
Western Allies we see a fairly “latent” form of “immanent ideology,” the
belief by the troops that they were fighting a just war in defense of their way
of life, but these beliefs were implicit rather than explicit, there being little
propagandizing by military authorities. In contrast, the German army,
especially on the Eastern Front, the Japanese, and above all the Red Army
had explicit “transcendent ideologies” that leaders sought to implant in their
soldiers to produce higher, even self-sacrificing morale as they scorned the
risk of death. In the subsequent development of the twentieth century,
ideologies became “weapons of the weak,” which allowed technologically
inferior armies to level the battlefield by virtue of superior morale. We will
see a direct communist chain of descent in the methods used and results
produced from the Soviet Red Army to the Chinese People’s Liberation
Army (PLA), to the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA), to the
Vietnamese People’s Liberation Front (PLF). I will contrast their way of
fighting to that of their enemies in the next chapter. In this chapter I deal
with the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, and then turn to the Western Allies.

Wehrmacht Soldiers on the Eastern Front

The Wehrmacht’s will to fight right up to the gates of Berlin and the death of
Hitler gives the impression of a highly ideological army. But Kershaw insists
we see this within the context of German society, for civilian will did not
waver. He emphasizes that fighting “down to almost total devastation and
complete enemy occupation” is very rare in war. In the last ten months of
this war, July 1944 to May 1945, far more German civilians died than in the
previous five years; half the military deaths occurred in the same period—
2.6 million out of 5.3 million. Even as the Reich was collapsing, the Nazi
leadership also intensified the murder of millions of Jews and other
Untermenschen. Kershaw stresses four reasons for fighting to the death.
Above all, “the structures and mentalities of Hitler’s charismatic rule”
combined the charismatic hold Hitler had over Germans with his personal
preference to die rather than surrender. Second, the generals found it
impossible to suggest negotiations or surrender after the failure of the
Stauffenberg plot. Third, repressive control over German society was
delegated to Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, and Speer, and carried to the
local level by the long-term Nazi regional gauleiters. Fourth was the fear of
Soviet vengeance for German atrocities against Soviet citizens. Goebbels
was already broadcasting that vengeance was happening in East Prussia as
the Red Army advanced.54
The sociologists Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz offer a different
explanation of Wehrmacht dedication: the primary group of close comrades
was the main force driving the soldiers to continue fighting even when
defeat seemed inevitable.55 Attachments to anything broader are not nearly
as salient to them, nor is general ideology. They present rather thin data to
support this application of “buddy theory,” and most scholars emphasize the
ideological commitment of German soldiers, especially on the Eastern
Front.56 Of Wehrmacht frontline officers, 30 percent were members of the
Nazi Party, more than twice as many as among all Germans, while the
soldiers’ diaries reveal deep racism and a personal commitment to the
Führer, as Kershaw suggests. The Wehr-macht, like the Red Army, had
political “commissars” repetitively instructing soldiers in Nazi theory in
weekly political sessions at company level.57 This helped soldiers fight to
the bitter end and to commit terrible crimes, motivated by demonization of
Jews and Slavs and the Führer cult. Robert Cintino stresses Führer worship
and the vision of the Eastern Front as a struggle to stem a Jewish-Bolshevik-
Asiatic flood menacing Western civilization.58 Soldiers participated
willingly in genocide to help this. Harsh discipline was coupled with
licensed brutality toward the enemy. An NCO described Russians as “no
longer human beings, but wild hordes and beasts, who have been bred by
Bolshevism during the last 20 years.” Another wrote, “The great task given
us in the struggle against Bolshevism lies in the destruction of eternal
Jewry.”59 All this came back to haunt the Wehrmacht in Soviet vengeance.
The conditions of battle on the Eastern Front became awful. The
Germans were badly clothed, ill-fed, disease-prone, fighting in mud and
snow that made high-tech weapons like tanks repeatedly break down. This
produced what Omer Bartov calls a radical “demodernization,” which forced
the Wehrmacht to compensate for numerical and sometimes technological
inferiority with a more brutal fighting spirit. The traumas they experienced
led to the belief that “not only was war hell, one also had to be a beast if one
wished to survive it.” The soldiers acquired a “new concept of heroism, a
new self-perception of the combat soldier. . . . There was an anarchic
element in this celebration of death and return to savagery among the
frontline troops.”60
Stephen Fritz agrees: the extraordinary staying power of the
infantryman, the Landser, was essentially ideological.61 The National
Socialist state had “redeemed the failures of World War I and had restored,
both individually and collectively, a uniquely German sense of identity.”62
Nazi ideas resonated: “Many Landsers, previously skeptical of Nazi
propaganda, confronted what they accepted as the reality of the Jewish-
Bolshevik destruction of a whole nation.” They had invaded Russia in 1941
with forebodings but overcame them with values centered on defending the
Fatherland against an international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. They
believed their Aryan racial superiority over Jews and Slavs justified murder.
No qualms there. Fritz says they also internalized a distinctive Wehrmacht
ideology of pride in an elite German institution that instilled discipline and
solidarity. The combination of Nazi and Wehrmacht ideals led them to
believe they could transform Germany into a more classless society, already
prefigured in an army in which all ranks shared equally in rigorous training,
harsh discipline, and the burdens of the Eastern Front, and where officers
and NCOs led from the front.63
Bartov says discipline became “perverted,” so that atrocities against
civilians and enemy soldiers went unpunished, whereas slight infractions
against military regulations might bring execution. At least 15,000 German
soldiers were executed, and more were shot on the spot for desertion or
skulking—much higher numbers than in most armies of the time. Fritz says
the common Landser, unable to mitigate his suffering in any other way,
lashed out in anger and frustration against the only targets within range,
enemy soldiers and civilians, transforming the war on the Eastern Front into
a horrific bloodbath. One recalls his “almost drunken exhilaration” in battle.
Their letters and diaries express thrill in killing and a sense of freedom from
restraint.64 Battle intoxication was much rarer among Allied troops.
German soldiers in the east also feared for their lives if they
surrendered, given their own massacres of Soviet civilians and POWs. The
final days saw units flee into the arms of the Americans, who they correctly
believed would treat them better.65 The Wehrmacht fought a much more
savage war in the east than on other fronts, always excepting the uniform
massacres of Jews. Some German soldiers and airmen could not understand
why the Western Allies were not fighting with them, against communism.
But in the east they had helped create an even more ideologically determined
opponent.

The Red Army at Stalingrad

I will not dwell on the hastily created Red Army during the Russian Civil
War. Its aspirations were revolutionary, but its performance was only
marginally less chaotic than that of the White foe. In the end it won the war
because peasants hated the Reds less than they did the Whites. Nor will I
deal with the professionalization of the Red Army during the interwar
period, then disrupted by Stalin’s purges. But this had not made the Red
Army into a particularly cohesive force. Stalin worsened its predicament by
trusting Hitler’s word and so was completely surprised by Hitler’s invasion
in June 1941. Initially, the Red Army was routed. Stalin’s forced
industrialization, however, created a large modern force capable of slowing
the advance into Russia of the Wehrmacht. I focus on the moment when it
stopped that advance, at Stalingrad in 1942–43.
Our best evidence comes from interviews conducted in January and
February 1943 by historians working for the Soviet Commission on the
History of the Great Patriotic War. They interviewed soldiers, political
officials, and civilians involved in the recent battle of Stalingrad. Obviously,
no one in Stalinist times felt able to criticize Stalin or the overall Soviet
conduct of battle, but otherwise the transcripts of these interviews seem
honest reports of personal experience, not propaganda. Indeed, the absence
of references to “the heroic leadership of Stalin,” the dominant trope in
official Soviet accounts, was probably the reason the transcripts languished
forgotten in dusty archives until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then
they were unearthed by Russian historians. They allowed access to the
German historian Jochen Hellbeck.66
The transcripts are stunning in their depiction of the horrors of the five-
month battle raging from August 1942 to February 1943 and of the
sufferings unto starvation of soldiers and civilians. At first the Wehr-macht
pressed forward in massive attacks and took almost all the city after savage
fighting for every street, open space, factory, apartment, cellar, and staircase.
Virtually all the city’s buildings were destroyed either by bombing or by
street fighting. All seemed lost as casualties mounted in a Red Army trapped
between the Germans and the Volga River. Soldiers talked of death or
wounding likely to come within ten days of their joining the fight. But fierce
resistance slowed the German advance, which allowed Soviet
reinforcements to arrive across the river. Tied down in street fighting, the
Wehrmacht lost its superiority in mobility, maneuver, and precise artillery
barrage. Then fierce Soviet counterattacks in the city and to both the north
and the south of the city drove the Germans back and finally encircled them.
Hitler refused his generals’ pleas to attempt a breakout and ordered them to
fight to the last man. They did fight to the point where they were starving
and lacked the fuel necessary to effect any breakout at all. Germany’s
General Friedrich Paulus then surrendered his 220,000 remaining men. The
Wehrmacht and its Axis allies suffered 647,300 casualties in the city—
killed, wounded, or captured. It was the most decisive battle of the war, the
turning point after which the Red Army, and also the British and American
armies, could advance rather than retreat. But at a terrible cost: the Red
Army, according to official figures, suffered 1,129,619 total casualties in the
Stalingrad battles, of which 478,741 were killed or missing, and 650,878
wounded or sick, a casualty rate of over half the total force. It was worse
among tank crews trapped inside their burning infernos. Through the whole
war, three-quarters of the 403,272 Soviet tank soldiers were killed. Why did
the soldiers nonetheless continue fighting through a period when all hope
seemed gone?
The combination of harsh discipline and the penal culture of the army
was one reason, traditionally emphasized in the West (and in Germany at the
time). Anthony Beevor supports this argument, but most of his sources were
German and deeply anticommunist.67 Catherine Merridale, who interviewed
two hundred Red Army veterans, also emphasizes the fear of punishment
pervading the army, outmatched only by its hatred of the Germans, whose
atrocities were widely publicized.68 Yet Hellbeck shows this is much
exaggerated.69 Beevor’s frequently quoted figure of 13,500 soldiers
executed during the battle is wildly inflated. Hellbeck calculates that from
August 1, 1942, to January 31, 1943, 447 Soviet soldiers were executed on
the Stalingrad Front, which would be no higher than the Italian rate of
executions in this war. Roger Reese uses oral histories, memoirs, diaries, and
letters, as well as archival military and political reports, to undermine the
myth of the “blocking detachments,” supposedly executing stragglers in the
rear.70 These detachments did not fire machine guns at retreating soldiers.
Armed only with rifles, they rounded up stragglers and fleers and returned
them to the front, as occurred in most armies. They arrested a mere 3.7
percent of the soldiers they detained, and 1.5 percent received death
sentences.
The High Command and Stalin knew that coercion might be
counterproductive, producing disaffection and weakening morale. Because
the Red Army was so large, the absolute number of executions was greater
than in the other armies. But as a proportion of the army, it was only a little
more than the rate in the Wehrmacht. More were punished by service in the
“penal battalions” at the front, which often took heavy casualties. But
sometimes their penal service lasted only several days before the survivors
were returned to their original units and ranks. Many fighting in the penal
battalions saw them as no more dangerous than the rest of the front. Even a
few months fighting there was better than years in the gulag.
Reese stresses the importance of leadership for morale. He says that
before Stalingrad the High Command’s failure to adapt to the German
blitzkrieg strategy had led to disorganization, forcing Red Army units to
choose resistance, surrender, or flight. Soviet soldiers were captured when
leadership disintegrated, or were killed when small, cohesive units fought to
the end. Soviet soldiers were willing to fight, but like all soldiers, they had to
be well led. At Stalingrad there was more effective leadership, and the
soldiers responded with intense commitment. The High Command cultivated
its own version of the buddy system from late 1942 onward, ensuring that
units needing new blood because of high casualties were withdrawn from the
line and trained together with the new replacements for some weeks before
going back into battle. Merridale says that the U.S. Army did not introduce
such practices until after 1945.71
Reese says most soldiers believed they were fighting for the nation,
socialism, and Stalin, who was usually described reverentially. Even those
who had suffered prewar repression did not perceive “evil intent on the part
of Stalin or see [repression] as inherent to the economic and social
systems.”72 Injustices were blamed on Stalin’s underlings (as happened in
medieval monarchies). They fought mainly in defense of Mother Russia
against truly barbarous invaders. It seemed an obviously just war. Intense
hatred was directed against the Nazis, whose atrocities were confirmed by
the letters soldiers received from home and later by the devastation wreaked
by the retreating Germans. Finally, self-interest often kicked in: they fought
to improve their career chances. All this enabled a righteous fury to be
directed against Germans. Influenced by communism, the soldiers’
nationalism became populist and class-conscious. Socialist ideology came
from above and from the commissars accompanying every military unit, but
this was met from below by proletarian nationalism. So the army was
prepared to fight to the death. This sentiment was matched by some SS
battalions, but not by the Wehrmacht as a whole. SS General Max Simon
said, “The Russian worker usually is a convinced communist, who . . . will
fight fanatically as a class-conscious proletarian. Just as the Red infantryman
is ready to die in his foxhole, the Soviet tank soldier will die in his tank,
firing at the enemy to the last, even if he is alone in or behind enemy
lines.”73 Bolshevik gender equality as well as the need to mobilize everyone
produced 800,000 women in uniform. A few thousand became frontline
troops, unlike women in other armies.
Hellbeck claims that discipline was not just coercion. Its aim was also
“to teach self-control” and “transform [the soldier] into a self-sacrificing
warrior.”74 It had a “didactic element.”75 He adds, “The interviews also
reveal an element at odds with most western depictions: the Communist
party’s enormous effort to condition the troops. The party was an ever-
present institutional force in the form of political officers and ideological
messages. . . . Together with the secret police, the party placed the army in
an iron yoke. But even when party officials doled out punishment, the
intentions were corrective, seeking to instruct, motivate, and remake the
troops. . . . The pervasiveness and effectiveness of political involvement in
military units set the Red Army apart from other modern armies.”76
 Merridale sees the political commissars as mainly instilling discipline.77
Hellbeck sees them as instructing and motivating through incessant
discussions, lectures, reports, in addition to history lessons on Stalin’s
supposedly brilliant defense of Tsaritsyn (the former name of Stalingrad) in
the civil war.78 A commissar recalled: “What we did was talk to the men in
person and then lead by example, showing them how to fight. And in
absolutely every battle the party members were the first ones to throw
themselves into the fight.”79 A party bureau secretary in a rifle regiment
noted: “We introduced a new idea: every soldier had to start a personal
account of how many Germans he’d killed. This was essentially a stimulus
for socialist competition: to see who could kill the most Germans. We would
check these accounts, and if a comrade didn’t have any dead Fritzes, we’d
have a talk with him, make him feel the shame.”80 Peacetime shock-work
tallies were replaced by lists of enemy soldiers killed and medals earned:
“The party changed its criteria for admission. Earlier the litmus test had been
knowledge of Marxist theory and a working-class background, but now it
was military achievement. The party opened its doors to anyone who could
demonstrate having killed Germans in battle. . . . The party assumed more of
a military quality and became closer to the people.”81
The more enemy one killed, the better one’s chances of obtaining party
membership, together with the privileges this conferred on oneself and one’s
family. Party membership in the army grew during the war from 650,000 to
almost 3 million, and most of the newcomers were inducted on the
battlefield after demonstrating killing prowess. One man declared that over
three days in October, “I killed 25 Fritzes myself. I was given the Order of
the Red Banner. . . . After the battle on October 29, I submitted my
application to the party and now I’m a member.” Hellbeck (unlike Reese)
says that attachment to the primary group of close comrades was relatively
low in the Red Army, partly because of the tremendous losses occurring
every day at Stalingrad, but partly because the authorities discouraged it as
divisive. “The cement that the Red Army command used to bind together
diverse soldiers and motivate them to fight was ideology. Preached
incessantly and targeting every recruit, it was made up of accessible
concepts with an enormous emotional charge: love for the homeland and
hatred of the enemy.”82
Although this came framed in simple Marxism, nationalist vengeance
was its core and its strength. Propaganda also came with much information
about the progress of the war, especially in the form of newspapers handed
out to soldiers, but also trench tours by commissars. The soldiers were told
why they were fighting until minutes before battle, and the flow of
information resumed when it ended.83 In the Spanish Civil War soldiers had
said how important information was to morale, but most armies do not
provide it. But months-long battles made regular lectures and assemblies
difficult. Instead came propaganda through example. A commissar says that
when a special assault group was formed, two or three party members were
assigned to it to provide leadership.
Morale was high. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs
(NKVD) read millions of soldiers’ letters. They found some voiced
complaints about exhaustion and the hardship of military service. Some
letters reflected defeatist sentiments. During the period from June to August
1942, of 30,237,000 letters examined, 15,469 contained defeatist statements.
Soldiers knew their letters were being censored, but defeatism evident in
0.05 percent of cases still seems very low.84 In fact, the extraordinary
dedication of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army makes a mockery of
the democratic “triumphalism” in battle to which I referred in chapter 3.
Many soldiers admitted to intense fear in battle, at first of relentless
German attacks, their seemingly countless tanks and planes, and continuous
artillery barrages. But they explained how they mastered fear. Hellbeck
reports an infantryman in his first battle experiencing “the paralyzing fear he
felt when German fire forced him to the ground. But he also noted that the
fear evaporated the moment he realized that he had to stand up if he wanted
to avoid a senseless death: ‘I realized that we might die for nothing. It wasn’t
bravery or courage (which I had none of). I simply realized that I was going
to die unless I did something. And the only chance I had to save myself and
others was to advance.’ ” He “picked himself off the ground and was
surprised by the galvanizing effect of the battle cry that reflexively crossed
his lips: ‘I couldn’t say anything other than what anyone would have said in
my place. “For the motherland! For Stalin!” ’ ”85
The intense ideological power of populist Marxism made this a
distinctive army, most resembling the Wehrmacht in its permeation by
ideology, yet surpassing it in the extent of political education, of party
membership determined by killing rates, boosted by defense of the homeland
(which the Wehrmacht lacked). The Red Army was a terrible war machine,
but this was self-defense against a foe who its members knew had massacred
millions and who would enslave the survivors if it triumphed. The army’s
transcendent ideology enabled it to withstand enormous losses and keep on
fighting with an intensity surpassing other armies’. Its technology was not
much inferior to the Wehrmacht’s, and its numbers were greater, but its edge
was given by its superior morale. The Germans believed this came from
mindless Asiatic racial obedience. Yet obedience was mindful, full of ideas.

The Western Allies: The Lonely Battlefield and Nonfiring

This war involved more widely dispersed battlefields. Its air forces brought
aerial firepower, forcing ground forces to scatter, enabling strikes against
far-off targets, and substantially increasing civilian casualties. Despite the
initial success of tank blitzkriegs, tanks proved rather vulnerable, and
artillery batteries and infantry slogging remained the heart of ground
warfare. Infantry units often enjoyed autonomy from their officers, and
soldiers talked of an “empty” battlefield, where the enemy was rarely
glimpsed. General Sir William Slim, who led the Burma campaign, declared,
“In the end every important battle develops to a point where there is no real
control by senior commanders. . . . The dominant feel of the battlefield is
loneliness.”86
In such fighting soldiers could decide their level of commitment. They
might choose not to fire their guns. Nonfiring has figured importantly in
discussions of soldiers’ motivations because of U.S. Brigadier General S. L.
A. Marshall’s wartime reports on the rate of fire of American infantry in the
Pacific and European theaters. Though doubts have been raised about his
methods, most scholars repeat his conclusions as facts.87 Marshall’s research
was based on collective discussions with assemblies of infantry battalions,
not interviews with individuals. The virtue of this method was his ability to
construct a blow-by-blow account of particular engagements, piecing
together each man’s experience into a vivid overall narrative of battle seen
from the ground up. Marshall published over a dozen narratives of individual
encounters stretching from World War II to Korea to Vietnam.88 They are
vivid accounts of engagements that rarely went as planned, giving a graphic
sense of battle. They are almost unknown today. Curiously, they do not
mention nonfiring, except when units were pinned down by enemy fire.
Yet Marshall also wrote broader reports that give statistics on the rate of
firing or nonfiring, which are still quoted. Marshall posed open-ended
questions to each battalion and listened to their freewheeling responses. He
concluded from this that the percentage of men firing at the enemy “did not
rise above 20–25%”—a stunningly low figure. We should increase it a little
since he says only about 80 percent of the soldiers had the opportunity to
fire. Among these, 25–30 percent would fire, still a very low proportion. He
said qualms over killing others prevented firing: “The average and healthy
individual . . . has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance to killing a
fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible for
him to turn away from that possibility. . . . At the vital point he becomes a
conscientious objector, unknowing.”89
Marshall gave no evidence for this conclusion but added that weapons
serviced by crews—artillery, machine guns, weapons fired from helicopters
—were almost always fired because the individual was closely watched by
comrades. This particular finding has been repeatedly confirmed by later
research. But in the late 1940s and 1950s, Marshall’s conclusions made a
sensation among military authorities who had worried since the First World
War about what they called “passive combat personnel.” They didn’t want a
repeat of the live-and-let-live system. The authorities accepted the veracity
of his findings, and they introduced new and rather sensible training methods
simulating actual battle conditions, as he had recommended.
Yet Marshall’s statistics cannot be accepted. He appears to have
plucked them out of thin air. His reports give no details of how he arrived at
his statistics. His field notes proved sparse and gave no hint of any
quantitative calculations at all. His assistant, Captain John Westover, quotes
Marshall as saying statistics were only “an adornment of belief.” He adds
that Marshall had taken only occasional notes, and, most damagingly, that he
never actually asked soldiers about firing! Marshall’s own statements about
the number of his interviews were also varied and exaggerated.90 Perhaps
soldiers might have given him the general impression of nonfiring, but even
this is not remembered by his assistant. Marshall’s “statistics” were pure
invention.
Yet Malešević repeats Marshall’s conclusions as facts and cites six
authors who he says confirm Marshall.91 In fact, three simply repeat
Marshall’s conclusions. Three, Randall Collins, Dave Grossman, and Joanna
Bourke, do produce new information, but this fails to convince. I criticized
Grossman already when discussing the American Civil War, and I deal with
Bourke’s equivocal support later. Collins refers mainly to the pioneering
sociological research of Stouffer and his colleagues using large-scale
interview surveys of American World War II soldiers and aircrews. Yet they
offered almost no findings on nonfiring.
Instead, Stouffer and his colleagues emphasized fear. In one U.S.
infantry regiment whose soldiers were individually interviewed in France in
1944, 65 percent admitted that they had failed to do their job properly on at
least one occasion because of extreme fear. Stouffer’s large surveys of four
infantry divisions in the Pacific theater revealed physiological responses of
fear very similar to those Dollard observed in Spain. They found 76 percent
of soldiers saying they had often or sometimes felt a violent pounding of the
heart; 52 percent said they had experienced uncontrollable trembling; about
50 percent admitted to feeling faint, breaking out in a cold sweat, and feeling
sick to their stomach; 19 percent said they had vomited; and 12 percent said
they had lost control of their bowels.92 The military psychologist Ralph
Kaufman also reported a high incidence of such ailments among Pacific
infantry.93 He saw their fears as a rational response to threat; physiological
consequences included damage to the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and
respiratory systems. Bourke agrees and attacks what she sees as the overly
rationalistic theories of social scientists that ignore emotions, somatic surges,
fury, petrification, and other destructive emotional responses in battle.94 As a
social scientist, I agree.
Stouffer and his colleagues asked another large sample of soldiers what
were the most common errors committed by new replacements and more
seasoned soldiers. Blazing away, shooting too much—not too little—before
they were able to see the target, was the third-most common error for both
groups, after the sins of bunching up when on patrol and making too much
noise at night. These are all sins of hyperactivity. “Freezing,” an indicator of
nonfiring (for whatever reason), came only ninth.95 Captured Japanese
soldiers’ diaries tried to make sense of what they perceived as American
overfiring by saying the Americans were paid according to the number of
times they fired!96 In modern warfare, blazing away is like nonfiring in the
sense that both are fear-induced risk avoidance, the point being not to reveal
the location of one’s body to the enemy. And who can blame a soldier for
either tactic, given the range and lethality of modern weapons? This was
reasonably fearful behavior, not the result of moral qualms.
Joseph Blake adds the autobiographies of thirty-three ground troops.97
The first horror they usually experienced was the sight of a mutilated corpse,
friend or foe. This came before their own first action, and the sight was often
a deliberate softening-up strategy used by officers. As a consequence, “most
men, after exposure to violence, are able to commit violence with no after-
shock. Men report their first kill (after exposure) casually, as part of an
ongoing action, or if they say anything about it, talk in terms of killing as a
‘natural function,’ ‘instinctive’ etc.” Blake quotes the initial ambivalence of
the American war hero Audie Murphy: “It is not easy to shed the idea that
human life is sacred. . . . If there was any doubt in my mind, it began to
vanish in the shell explosion that killed Griffin, and it disappeared altogether
when I saw the two men crumple by the railroad track. Now I have shed my
first blood, I feel no qualms; no pride; no remorse. There is only a weary
indifference. ”98
Bourke draws on psychiatric reports and the diaries and letters of
twenty-eight British, American, and Australian soldiers in the two world
wars and Vietnam.99 This is a small and rather varied sample, and she does
not quantify, but her discussion is acute. In her first pages, she says that war
gave some the sense of awesome power, the “initiation into the power of life
and death.” One U.S. veteran says killing was thrilling, calling the bazooka
and machine gun a “magic sword” or a “grunt’s Excalibur” because “all you
do is move that finger so imperceptibly, just a wish flashing across your
mind like a shadow, not even a full brain synapse, and poof! in a blast of
sound and energy and light a truck or a house or even people disappear,
everything flying and settling back into dust.”100
Bourke adds: “This book contains innumerable examples of men like
the shy and sensitive First World War soldier who recounted that the first
time he stuck a German with his bayonet was ‘gorgeously satisfying . . .
exultant satisfaction.’ ” A lieutenant found that bayoneting Prussians was
“beautiful work.” “Sickening yet exhilarating butchery” was reported to be
“joy unspeakable” by a New Zealand sapper.101 Ferguson agreed, asserting
(though without presenting any evidence) that combat was often seen as
exciting, adventurous, even fun, because of the danger: “Many men simply
took pleasure in killing”; “Men kept fighting because they wanted to.”102
Bourke then approvingly presents Marshall’s work on nonfiring,
although it emphasizes the exact opposite sentiments to those she has just
detailed. She recounts just two instances of “passive combat personnel.” One
was World War I soldiers practicing live-and-let-live. We have seen that this
was a rational response to fear, not an expression of moral qualms. Her
second case is of World War II American paratroopers caught in a defile by a
causeway in Normandy in June 1944. Anthony King gives us more details.
This battalion had repeatedly distinguished itself in action. Yet although now
receiving incoming fire inflicting casualties, the paratroopers did not return
fire, despite urging by their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole.
The official report said they were pinned down, but Cole was more critical.
He said they would fire only if he or another officer was standing right
behind them, yelling. “Not one man in twenty-five voluntarily used his
weapon,” he emphasized. But Cole saved the situation by brandishing his
bayonet and shouting “Charge!” As he charged forward, a quarter of the
battalion immediately followed him, and more joined in as the charge
gathered momentum. The German positions were taken, though with heavy
American casualties.103 Cole won the Medal of Honor for that charge, and in
the end his men were not as passive as he suggested. Sadly, Cole was killed
before he could receive the medal. He did not suggest that moral qualms
caused his soldiers to fail to fire.
In the third and most penetrating section of Bourke’s book, she never
again mentions Marshall or passivity or nonfiring. Nor are there the
promised “innumerable examples” of men enjoying killing. Soldiers had
more complex feelings about the enemy. Said one: “Face to face with them
you couldn’t feel a personal hatred, they were like ourselves, manipulated by
statesmen and generals and war-mongers. We were—they were—cannon
fodder.”104 But this did not stop them from killing. During Allied
bombardments they could feel pity for enemy soldiers, while also declaring
that they would kill as many of them as they could. Bourke adds: “With
occasional exceptions most servicemen killed the enemy with a sense that
they were performing a slightly distasteful but necessary job.”105 She says
war allows men to commit legitimate killing that in peacetime they would
view with horror. They often felt they should feel guilty for killing, but this
feeling made them feel their humanity was restored, and this helped them
return to civilian life. “Men who did not feel guilt were somehow less than
human, or were insane: guiltless killers were immoral.”106
Thus, moral qualms among Allied soldiers were felt but were massaged
into willingness to kill, although rarely with enthusiasm. Reports of German
or Japanese atrocities also helped reduce remorse, as did racism among the
soldiers in Asian but not European theaters. But Bourke also emphasizes
Allied atrocities against prisoners and civilians in all three wars. Most
soldiers disapproved of them in principle, for military norms had created a
clear distinction between legitimate and illegitimate killing. This
“maintained men’s sanity throughout the war and helped insulate them
against agonizing guilt and numbing brutality.”107 But practices differed.
Among Blake’s cases, half mention between them twenty-five cases of
killing prisoners, and five more speak of it as a general practice. Even when
such killing was stopped by an officer, no action was taken against the
perpetrators.108 The issue presented genuine dilemmas for soldiers. Should
prisoners be killed if guarding them would remove soldiers from battle, or if
they might escape and rejoin their army? Yes, of course, said most—as they
had at Agincourt in 1415. They could sympathize with the killers, aware that
if ordered to commit atrocities themselves, they might have also complied.
Yet sadism was rare and few frontline soldiers were motivated by deep
hatred for the enemy. Bourke sees more hatred in the rear. Women were no
less aggressive than men, she says, in a blow to feminist essentialism. A
large body of research shows that those firing from a distance had more
hateful views of the enemy than those firing at short range; that rear troops
expressed greater hatred of the enemy; that frontline troops treated prisoners
better than did rear troops; that U.S. civilians hated the enemy more than did
U.S. troops; that troops still in the United States hated the enemy more than
those in war theaters; and that hatred for the Japanese was stronger among
Americans fighting in Europe than among those fighting in the Pacific
theater.109 “Anger comes out,” says Collins, “where there is little or no
confrontational fear.”110
Finally, contradicting her earlier remarks, Bourke says extreme
aggression was rare. Soldiers described this as men losing self-control: “He
lost his head completely,” “His blood was up,” he was acting out of his real
character, they said—just as American Civil War soldiers had said. That
murderous aggression was an aberration comforted them. But “survivor’s
guilt,” remorse for having lived while one’s comrades died, far outweighed
“killer’s guilt.”111
King suggests that Marshall’s conclusions had come from his interview
with Lieutenant Colonel Cole and a collective discussion with an infantry
battalion that had withstood a Japanese assault on the tiny Makin Islands of
the Pacific.112 Marshall reported that only the thirty-six machine gunners of
a battalion of over two hundred men fired at the enemy, and dead Japanese
were found only in front of these machine gun positions.113 The battalion
had mistakenly thought that the Japanese had already been defeated and had
prepared only weak defensive positions on landing on the island. When the
Japanese unexpectedly attacked, there was panic and most of them went to
ground. The official history offers an excuse for their passivity in terms of
the layout of the battlefield, but King doubts this, for the battalion’s
performance had been inadequate on the previous day when panic had
generated massive overfiring. He adds that a subsequent assault on
Kwajalein Island saw minimal firing from another battalion in which
machine gunners and one active sergeant saved the day. Obviously, there
were fallible battalions in the American army. But in Marshall’s own account
there is no hint of moral qualms, and in his other portrayals of engagements,
American soldiers performed quite well—with no cases of moral qualms.
King emphasizes passivity among American troops in Europe.114
Officers complained of units pinned down by fire, unwilling to reveal their
positions by firing back, overreliant on artillery, conceding field fire
superiority to the Germans. King lambastes British, Canadian, and American
troops in Normandy, blaming poor officer quality and inadequate infantry
training. He, Francis Steckel, and Martin van Creveld say that Allied soldiers
were inferior to the German enemy, being overly dependent on air and
artillery superiority.115 This was probably true for most of the war, contrary
to the democratic triumphalism of Reiter and Stam.116 Of course, by then the
Germans were scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel and facing
defeat. But none of these authors makes any reference to moral qualms.
Robert Engen details a survey of Canadian officers in Normandy
immediately after a battle. The officers complained about many things, but
not nonfiring. Two-thirds thought the rate of fire was adequate, one-third
complained of far too much firing. Most officers envied their German
counterparts’ ability to achieve a limited, controlled, and accurate rate of
fire.117 Craig Cameron’s study of U.S. Marines in the Pacific theater finds no
evidence of nonfiring or passivity. On the contrary, the Guadalcanal
campaign was full of wounded or sick men who should have been
hospitalized. A marine would not “crap out” if that would put a heavier
burden on his buddies. Marines were an elite force, of course. He says that
on Okinawa, a terrible encounter forced more men to leave the lines for the
hospital, but without any suggestion of skulking. Cameron concludes that
Marshall’s “is a specious argument to assuage moral sensibilities among
civilians.” In reality, he says, “the killer exists in men all along and has
simply to be brought out and encouraged. Americans proved as adept and
ruthless in the exercise of violence as their totalitarian enemies.”118
Performance and firing rates obviously varied between military units,
although moral qualms seem to have been absent.
Ben Shalit, a military psychologist, thought he might corroborate
Marshall’s nonfiring with Israeli soldiers in Middle Eastern wars. But he
failed. Nearly 100 percent of ordinary infantry and elite commandos fired
when ordered or when circumstances demanded. He also finds overfiring,
which is effective in relieving fear, since the drumming and thudding of the
weapon covers up the throbbing of fear within the soldier. Shalit describes
the commander of an Israeli commando raid counting the bullet holes in
enemy bodies and reprimanding his soldiers: “Is it necessary to drill a man
with 25 bullets when 2 would do?”119
Finally comes an oft-cited study by the British Defense Operational
Analysis Establishment’s field studies division, which in 1986 is said to have
examined the killing effectiveness of military units in over one hundred
nineteenth- and twentieth-century battles. The research compared real data
from these battles with hit rates by test subjects in simulated battles using
pulsed laser weapons that could neither inflict nor receive harm from a
virtual “enemy.” The test subjects killed far more of the simulated enemy
than the number reflected in the real historical casualty rates. Yet the
subjects could experience neither fear nor loathing in this experimental
setting, nor the noise, blindness, chaos, and ducking and weaving of actual
battle. It was a tension-free game of skill, a demonstration of the superiority
of rationality in contexts far removed from reality. Moreover, I have failed to
find the original report of this experiment and note that all who have cited it
use virtually identical words. It may not exist except as an internet myth, but
if it does, we should probably ignore it.
None of these studies mentions moral qualms as a reason for passivity
under fire, except for Bourke’s account of how qualms are overcome. Fear
was the problem, though soldiers could manage it. The generals recognized
this was the most they could expect. U.S. General George Patton reputedly
said, “Courage is fear holding on a minute longer,” and U.S. General Omar
Bradley allegedly said, “Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even
when scared half to death.”
 Surveys of American Soldiers: Buddies, Latent Ideology, and Task
Completion
The surveys by Stouffer and his colleagues found that American soldiers’
primary sense of solidarity and loyalty was not to country, army, or
regiment, but to the small group of comrades with whom they shared their
life in and out of battle. They fought not to let their buddies down, thus
enforcing group norms and supporting the individual under battle stress.120
“Buddy theory” has been repeatedly endorsed; many soldiers have said how
much of their lives they shared with comrades, and how intimate were their
relations. Sebastian Junger has vividly expressed this among U.S. soldiers in
Afghanistan: “The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump
you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard
one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The
willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail
to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.”121 Of
course, Islamist terrorists also experience this.
Soldiers sometimes feared being called a coward by their buddies more
than they feared death. Social fear mitigated existential fear, as we saw in the
U.S. Civil War. Doubts have arisen in high-casualty warfare, in which
primary groups are broken up with the arrival of unknown recruits, as in the
Civil War and among U.S. Marines in Okinawa. It was especially so in the
German army on the Eastern Front in World War II. Yet these Germans
carried on fighting and dying right to the end, driven back even to the gates
of Berlin. Bartov thinks this runs contrary to buddy theory, doubly so
because the Wehrmacht had been originally recruited on a local basis, which
at first intensified buddy relations.122 Yet for Stouffer and his colleagues,
long-term friendships did not much matter. It was their mutual
interdependence in battle that generated intimacy. Charles Moskos observes:
“The intensity of primary-group ties so often reported in combat units are
best viewed as mandatory necessities arising from immediate life-and-death
exigencies.”123 The guy next to you covered your back, eased tensions with
black humor, cursed entertainingly, lied for you if you disobeyed an order or
killed a civilian, cared for you if you were wounded, and if you died he
would send your personal possessions to your family. Mutuality in life and
death generated intense intimacy, which some described as love. New
recruits quickly became buddies. They had to, or they died. The soldier,
whatever his commitment to the cause or his obedience to orders, had as his
primary goal staying alive. This could not be done without his primary
group.
Stouffer and his colleagues also tried to establish how important
buddies were. In 1944 they asked combat infantry in Europe what kept them
going. The most common response was a drive to end the task or to get the
war done (44 percent). Not letting your buddies down came a distant second
(14 percent), followed by thoughts of home and loved ones (10 percent), and
a sense of duty and self-respect (9 percent). Ideological reasons like overt
patriotism totaled only 5 percent. Task completion, duty, and self-respect
could be combined into an implicitly patriotic sense of institutionalized
moral obligation, a latent ideology among two-thirds of the soldiers. Edward
Shils said morale in small groups presupposed “a set of generalized moral
predispositions or sense of obligation . . . some measure of identification
with the collectivity and some sense of generalized obligation and readiness
to acknowledge the legitimacy of its demands in numerous particular
situations. . . . The soldiers who thought first of getting the job done must, in
some way, have accepted the legitimacy of the ‘job’ and felt some sense of
obligation to carry it out.”124
This sense of getting the job done enabled focus on each task
confronting the soldier, each piece of ground to cover, each set of
movements, each sequence of firing, each minutia of ritual. Together they
could partially blot out the chaos and terror all around. For the majority of
the war, most German soldiers probably performed better than most
American soldiers, but this was to change. Peter Mansoor and Robert Rush
studied high-casualty U.S. infantry battles in Belgium in November 1944.125
The casualties in Rush’s regiment amounted to 87 percent of its original
strength. Both agree with Bartov that such casualties produced the collapse
of the buddy system, but they say that nevertheless the GIs grimly held on,
focused on task completion each hour of each day, helped by the knowledge
that they were advancing into Germany and would win the war soon and go
home. The Germans, used to offensive successes, lacked comparable
confidence in retreating defense, and ultimately they, not the Americans,
collapsed. Battle context matters.
American soldiers shared a taboo against flag-waving patriotism. They
declared that such “bullshit” was what civilians spouted, ignorant of the
realities of war.126 They were uncomfortable with civilian notions of
“heroism,” knowing their own imperfect behavior. They disliked having
“heroes” as comrades, since their conspicuous bravery drew enemy fire like
a magnet to the whole group. Most American soldiers had a “tacit and a
fairly deep conviction that we were on the right side, and that the war, once
we were in it, was necessary.” This institutionalized ideology was important
to Allied troops, as it was early in the Vietnam War.127 Soldiers were not so
committed if they thought the war was either unjust or unwinnable, as was
common in the later phases of the Vietnam War.
Morale could not be maintained forever. There was a learning curve.
Many novices found it difficult at first to kill a clearly visible enemy, but
they almost always did fire, and then they got used to it. They became
“battle-wise,” effective task-completing soldiers doing their duty, after about
ten days of battle, at peak efficiency after around twenty-five days. But
combat went on and on. Though historical battles had often brought as many
casualties as modern ones, they occurred over much less time—hours or a
day or two at most. There was then a long period until the next battle.
Soldiers had to gear themselves up for one single traumatic event at a time.
In contrast, modern battles have ground on and the outcome remained
inconclusive. Beset by constant stress, soldiers declined in fighting spirit.
After about forty days of battle, they were emotionally shattered, kept their
heads down, and did the minimum. Patrols lay down somewhere safe,
imaginary ambushes were claimed, sickness and self-wounding rates
increased. Campaign cycle effectiveness was maintained for up to 140 or
180 or 200 days, say different authorities, but then the soldier felt acute
incapacitating neurosis, becoming so hypersensitive to shell fire, overtly
cautious, and jittery that he was ineffective.
Of British World War II casualties, 10–20 percent were said by the
authorities to be psychiatric. Many soldiers exposed to continuous combat
virtually broke down.128 U.S. military psychiatrists said of the soldier:
“Mental defects became so extreme that he could not be counted on to relay
a verbal order. He remained in or near his slit trench, and during acute
actions took little or no part, trembling constantly.”129 Yet most soldiers
reduced their commitment, took fewer risks, and suffered. A more extreme
indicator of unwillingness to fight is desertion, though it is greatly affected
by whether the soldier is near or far from home. Desertion rates in World
War II were mostly around 5–6 percent, at the low end for most wars—and
lower than in peacetime because soldiers were abroad. German army
desertions rapidly increased through 1944 to 21 percent—end-of-war
demoralization in addition to soldiers on leave simply failing to return.
The lethality of weapons meant soldiers were no longer standing in
massed columns and lines. They would be instantly massacred if they did.
They were dispersed in cover over the battlefield. “Where the effective
soldier on the linear battlefield had to be an automaton, the effective soldier
on the dispersed battlefield had to be autonomous.”130 Military training
involved less drilling and more emphasis on task completion, as both
Marshall and Stouffer had recommended. Each unit is set a task, each soldier
is trained to accomplish a subtask within that. He is taught that to survive,
the men of a unit need each other to perform their tasks, which officially
encouraged the buddy system. It is hammered into soldiers that if they stay
focused on task achievement, they are most likely to survive. Soldiers are
comforted if they feel they can control their survival. After long exposure to
combat, however, the soldier may perceive that he cannot. Then he loses
focus on task accomplishment and his morale sinks.

Fighter Pilots: World War II and Korea

More evidence comes from fighter pilots in World War II. I add pilots in
Korea because their experience was similar, and many had also flown in
World War II. Fighter pilots are interesting because, unlike the infantry, they
are autonomous, up alone in the sky. Even in their standard four-plane
formations, the four pilots had to make their own split-second decisions in
dogfights.131 In the Korean War dogfights were even faster, for this was the
first war involving jet planes, American F-86 Sabres against MiG-15s.
There was great inequality in killing. Only a few pilots shot down most
of the enemy. Aces, those who shot down five or more enemy planes,
formed only 5 percent of all U.S. fighter pilots, yet they downed 37–68
percent of enemy planes, a number that varied according to theater. Seventy-
five percent of pilots had no kills at all.132 The British figures for the Battle
of Britain are not quite so skewed: 39 percent of pilots shot down at least
one enemy plane, 15 percent more than one, and 8 percent qualified as aces,
having shot down five or more. Collins suggests this supports Marshall’s
arguments about nonfiring and perhaps moral qualms.133
I disagree. There were four reasons for the uneven distribution of kills.
1. Flying was an extraordinarily taxing job. High accident rates not
due to combat killed 6,000 RAF personnel in World War II
(including bomber crews).134 Combat was much more difficult.
Making split-second decisions at high speed in a juddering plane
was needed to outmaneuver an enemy pilot and to get inside the
potential kill zone in his rear, when both planes were traveling at
560 kilometers per hour, and over 725 in Korea. The skill and
strength to fire steadily while maneuvering were required to
counter the enemy’s evasive response and to avoid threats from
other enemy planes. The crucial decision-making periods lasted
two seconds. “Situational awareness” and the ability to perceive
and analyze rapidly moving objects in a three-dimensional
environment were rare skills.135 Pilots rapidly trained and thrust
into battle failed to shoot down enemy planes because this skill
level was beyond them. One American flyer in Europe estimated
that “there were probably 20 per cent or so of our Group pilots on
a mission who would aggressively seek combat. Another large
block—60 per cent—would, when conditions were right, prove to
be moderately effective. Then there were those that were of little
use in air-to-air combat no matter what the conditions of encounter
happened to be.”136 Similar figures were given for Korea.137 So
skill levels helped produce different firing and killing rates.
2. This produced a statistical artifact. Many novices, especially if
low-skilled, were quickly casualties, and so they never fired before
they died or were transferred out for poor performance. A
continuous flow of short-termers increased the total number of
pilots but barely increased the number of kills. A few barely
competent pilots did survive long-term, capable of keeping in
formation and little else, protected by luck and by comrades.
3. Most World War II missions, especially American ones, were
flown in the last two years of the war, when the Luftwaffe and the
Japanese Air Force were largely destroyed. There were now more
Allied fighters, which increased the number of pilots who never
made kills. Most of their later missions were to escort the bombers
over Germany and Japan, to deter the enemy from sending up their
last fighters to attack the bombers. Ground flak fire also
concentrated on bombers, not fighters. Most fighter missions never
 encountered an enemy fighter. In their four-year war even the
American aces fired in only about one third of missions.138 In the
last two years of the war, the average American fighter pilot could
expect to meet a German fighter once in twenty-five missions.
This also increased the number of nonfirers and nonkillers.
4. There were selection biases. The best planes were assigned to
the best pilots, and the best of the best were given the leader role.
The standard American flight pattern (RAF patterns differed
slightly) consisted of four planes, a first “element” of the leader
and his wingman, plus the leader of a second element and his
wingman. The first leader’s role was to shoot down enemy planes,
and his wingman’s role was to protect his back. The second
element leader might join in if the opportunity arose, but both
wingmen were explicitly forbidden to fire unless an emergency
arose. Thus, the best pilots were entrusted with the leader
positions, and in Korea the leaders got 82 percent of the claimed
kills. On rare occasions wingmen got kills too, but over half the
pilots on missions almost never got a chance of downing the
enemy.139 So it was fully intended that only a few pilots would get
a disproportionate number of the kills.

A further study is often quoted claiming that half the F-86 pilots never
fired their guns, and of those who had fired, only 10 percent had ever hit
anything—astonishing figures. This claim was made in an article by two
military psychologists, Blair Sparks and Oliver Neiss.140 But they give no
evidence for the assertion, instead proceeding to the policy proposals that
dominate their article—more understanding of pilots’ psychology (and more
employment for psychologists!). It clearly serves the authors’ purpose if they
can claim such failure. Such a finding would surely be widely discussed, but
I found no such evidence or discussion. Until a real study is found, I am
skeptical.
A further possible indicator of pilot frailty is the aborted sortie, a pilot
turning back from the mission before combat. In World War II the U.S.
Eighth Air Force calculated this for bombers. In January 1944, 70 percent of
the 6,770 bombers completed their operational missions. Of the 30 that did
not, 61 percent turned back for weather-related problems, and 29 percent for
mechanical reasons. That means 3 percent of the total number of pilots
might have been faking it. The RAF total rate of abortions among fighters
was about 10 percent.141 On landing, the aborting RAF plane was examined
and the pilot had to defend himself before a panel of officers. If pilots
repeated abortions, alarm bells went off about possible “Low Moral Fibre”
and the pilot might be transferred. The social pressures on pilots to perform
their duty was intense in segregated airbase communities. This forced some
who should have turned back because of plane problems to continue with the
mission, and with defective speed or maneuverability they might be shot
down.
No study suggests that failure to shoot came from moral qualms. Pilots
respected enemy pilots, but during fast maneuvering they rarely saw them
clearly. Werrell gives us Korean combat stories for over thirty pilots. Only
one says he felt bad after shooting up a MiG. He saw the pilot was in agony,
trapped in a burning cockpit. His response was to put him out of his agony
by killing him. Yet one norm was shared by both sides: once a pilot ejected,
he would not be shot at. Kills meant planes, not pilots. Blake says U.S.
World War II pilots describe the plane, not the pilot, as the enemy and even
refer to it as “he” and “him.”142
So it was mainly technical, selection, and mission reasons that made
kills so imbalanced, although perhaps around 10 percent of pilots were
prevented from engaging in effective combat by fear and tension. They had
every reason to be fearful, given the death rate. But once in a dogfight, pilots
had no time for fear. Total task absorption brought exhilaration and thrust
fear onto the back burners. It was not so for the more passive bomber crews
who feared death more, although they were only half as likely to be killed.
Mark Wells says that British bomber crews had “occasional reservations”
about the civilian casualties they were inflicting, but he does not mention
anyone failing to bomb.143
A Korean War ace said after his first kills: “I was so excited that the
thought of having killed two human beings didn’t enter my mind. In the first
place, I had been spurred to action out of anger; in the second place, the
planes I had just shot down were objects, not people.” Sherwood says pilots
in Korea enjoyed pleasure and pride in their kills.144 That all countries’ aces
were feted as national heroes gave them an incentive to kill. “It’s love of the
sport rather than sense of duty that makes you go on without minding how
much you are shot up,” said one.145 In Korea pilots volunteered to extend
their tours and fly on holidays. Casualties in Korea were low, for this was a
short war fought with more pilots, many with World War II experience.
Deaths were about 10 percent, though a little higher among pilots with kills,
and higher still among aces.146 The pilots in slower fighter-bombers faced
ground fire. Sherwood notes that 147 fighters were lost in air combat, but
816 planes of all types were shot down by ground fire.147
In World War II, pilot casualties were enormous. RAF Bomber
Command (which included fighters) calculated that 51 percent of all aircrew
were killed or missing as a result of combat operations, 12 percent were
killed in accidents, and 12 percent were shot down and became prisoners of
war. Only 24 percent came away unscathed, a very low figure. Casualties in
the U.S. Eighth Air Force in Europe were similar: 57 percent killed or
missing, 17 percent lost through wounds or accidents, only 25 percent
unscathed.148 German and Japanese pilot casualties were even higher once
they began losing the air war. Their courage in carrying on was suicidal.
Despite the greater probability of death, the morale of American air
crews was higher than it was among infantry, and fighter pilots’ morale was
higher than other air crews’.149 This was due to pride in their skill; the
autonomy and freedom they enjoyed in the sky; the ability to fight back
against all attacks; their high status as “heroes” during the war; and the
segregated, comradely, and controlling community in which they lived. In
the caste system of air forces, the aces enjoyed the highest status and had
every incentive to keep on claiming more kills.150 Ideology didn’t come into
it. In Korea, pilots developed what Sherwood calls “flight suit attitude”: “a
sense of self-confidence and pride that verged on arrogance. . . . The aircraft
of preference was the high-performance, single-seat fighter. . . . This culture
placed a premium on cockiness and informality. A fighter pilot spent more
time in a flight suit than in a uniform. In his world, status was based upon
flying ability, not degrees, rank, or ‘officer’ skills. . . . Military ancestry and
institutional traditions were irrelevant to him; instead, elitism in the Air
Force was defined by skill, courage, and plane type.”151
Drilling and discipline were largely replaced by a teacher-pupil
relationship during training. Higher officers then ordered their subordinates
to perform the missions, but in the sky they were autonomous. Their high
morale gave them that extraordinary courage which has impressed all
commentators. They went into battle facing a high risk of death, under great
emotional stress, but without flinching. This was the peak of courage, not the
sudden adrenaline-charged act of the infantry hero, but a two- to three-hour
feat of endurance, repeated many times, without the descending rhythm of
commitment of long-serving infantrymen.

Conclusion
This half century contained the two deadliest wars in history, fought by
millions of soldiers. There were a few “heroes,” adrenaline-fueled soldiers
rushing headlong at the enemy, while the other extreme of moral qualms at
killing was also rare. Alas, qualms usually came after the war, too late to
save lives but disturbing the mental balance of veterans. Soldiers usually
believed that this was a just war. In the second war “transcendent ideology”
was important in the Wehrmacht and in imperial Japanese forces (as we saw
in chapter 7), and was absolutely crucial in the Red Army. Among the
Western Allies such overt ideology was rare in either war. Dominant instead
was a combination of immanent and institutionalized ideology providing
latent patriotic morale, which was linked to a sense of duty in completing a
necessary task. Then add buddy pressures and a sense that eventual victory
was coming. They were enough to keep fear manageable and restrict
shirking to keeping one’s head down. In long campaigns the pressure ground
the soldier down, often ending in psychological degradation. Since the
enemy was experiencing the same decline, the war effort was not threatened.
Fighter pilots differed, since for them task completion was enjoyable and
kills brought them high status as warriors. These rewards made them
genuinely courageous, willing to accept the higher level of risk their role
entailed.
This tells us little about human nature, except how malleable it is. But it
does tell us how mighty social power relations are, capable of disciplining
men into behavior that would be unthinkable to them in peacetime:
repeatedly trying to kill others while exposing themselves to risk of death or
mutilation. Women had a different war experience. Those in the forces were
sometimes exposed to danger, though not in the front lines, except in the Red
Army, but most women were required only to offer support to their men and
to move into their jobs. But for most men who fought, experiencing war
from the ground up was a socially induced hell. The second world war was a
rare just war, rational for the defenders and reinforced by a just peace
settlement and a balance of power that ensured fewer interstate wars
thereafter.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield III

Communist Wars

THE MAIN POSTWAR STRUGGLE was between the United States and the Soviet
Union, which had taken over from fascism as a rival for world domination.
Despite a scare or two, the Cold War saw mutually pragmatic behavior,
scaling down the threat of nuclear war, agreeing, often implicitly, to
understandings that deflected conflict to confrontation between proxies
within each superpower’s zone of interest. Overall, American and Soviet
foreign policy was bad news for many individual countries of the south, but
it was good news in diminishing the chances of nuclear war. Fear of another
major war was the main deterrent. Yet there were many smaller, often covert
armed interventions by both sides. Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan
found 215 cases between 1946 and 1975 when U.S. administrations used
armed force short of actual war—that is, MIDs—to achieve their political
objectives around the world. They were successful at attaining their
objectives in 73 percent of cases after six months, though the success rate
declined to 44 percent after three years, a rather mixed record.1 Kaplan
found 190 Soviet interventions between 1944 and 1979.2 Only in Eastern
Europe and Afghanistan were these major interventions; otherwise the
Soviets were rather cautious. Again there were rather mixed outcomes. But
attaining American or Soviet objectives did not necessarily benefit the
peoples at the receiving end.
Chapter 5 of volume 4 of The Sources of Social Power analyzed
American foreign policy during the Cold War, concluding that in some
regions it was irrational, blinded by an anticommunist ideology that saw
foreign left-of-center movements as demons or dupes, their activities
encouraging communism or anarchy. U.S. administration policy was to
undermine them, covertly or openly, by financing, arming, and supplying
logistical aid to rightist states and armed groups. Occasionally U.S. forces
intervened directly. Such policies perversely pushed liberals and social
democrats in these countries further to the left, occasionally into the embrace
of the Soviet Union, weakening the chances of implementing much-needed
reforms that would have brought the United States more allies and a better
business environment for American firms.
There were two major hot wars in the Cold War period, in Korea and
Vietnam. Although they embodied a traditional geopolitical struggle
between great powers, they were also struggles between rival transcendent
ideologies, one seeking an eventually communist world, the other a world of
capitalist democracy—although in reality the Soviets did not resemble
socialist ideals, nor did their allies, while the United States was not
cultivating regimes resembling democracy. The United States was fully
engaged in these two wars, as was China in one of them. Soviet participation
was less direct, primarily through proxies, covert actions, and sending
supplies. The United States treated its enemies in both wars as proxies for a
Soviet-led world order. The ideologies were transmitted to their armed
forces but to greatly differing degrees, as we will now see.

The Korean War

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was highly experienced, first
from its long war against the Japanese and then in the Chinese Civil War,
ended in 1949. Many soldiers in the final Manchurian campaign of these
wars had been Koreans fighting against Japanese subjugation of their
homeland. After World War II, the Korean peninsula was divided at the
thirty-eighth parallel in a truce between North and South Korean
dictatorships, communist and capitalist. Americans advising the South
missed an opportunity to pressure for land reform, which would have eroded
communist support in the South, perhaps deterring the North’s invasion. The
United States remedied this error after the Korean War. But two Koreas
could have continued to exist without war.
 From 1946 to 1950 insurrections swept the South, causing perhaps
100,000 casualties, mainly through massive government repression. So in
June 1950 North Korean forces invaded the South to assist the rebels and
create a single communist state over the whole peninsula. The North’s ruler,
Kim Il Sung, perceived that the southern government, led by Syngman Rhee,
was weakened by faction fighting and had a corrupt and mutinous army. He
was also encouraged by the fact that U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson
had not included Korea in what was called the U.S defense perimeter. Maybe
the United States would stay out of Korea. Kim Il Sung had actually waited
too long (for the insurrection was almost over) for the go-ahead from an
initially hesitant Stalin, but Kim confidently told him that he could ignite an
“internal explosion” in the South. Mao was not involved. Kim’s preparations
were secretive, thus giving the United States no chance to warn that it might
retaliate. Kim assumed a lightning strike would force the Americans, who
had a small force in the South, into a conciliatory response. If it did not, he
believed Stalin would help him fight. Yet Stalin had no intention of
committing himself to war. His idea was to fight through his North Korean
proxy. He saw gain in either inflicting a humiliating withdrawal on the
United States or in embroiling that nation in a costly war. The latter was the
outcome.
The core of North Korea’s army, the NKPA, had fought against the
Japanese in China and Manchuria. On June 25, 1950, 75,000 NKPA troops
swept down the peninsula and captured Seoul after three days. U.S. troops
supported the South Koreans from July, but the North Koreans drove U.S.
and South Korean forces southward. U.S. forces found themselves embroiled
in a civil war far from home under the aegis of the United Nations. When the
Soviets, who had earlier walked out of the UN, reappeared and vetoed the
war in the Security Council, the United States took the decision to the UN
General Assembly, then dominated by U.S. allies. The United States acted in
support of an ally, as it would repeatedly do over the next decades, in the
hope of stopping the spread of communism and maintaining U.S. power
across the world. Vital national interests were not at stake. Anticommunists
led by Senator Joseph McCarthy had denounced President Truman as soft on
communism, so Truman had to show his toughness for reasons of domestic
policy. The Korean invasion came just after a successful Soviet atomic bomb
test, the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, and the Sino-Soviet
mutual defense pact. The “who lost China” recriminations roiling
Washington could not be allowed to transition into “who lost Korea,”
although many in Washington knew Syngman Rhee was no democrat.
American leaders would not describe their country as “imperial,” but they
were seeking global domination and like leaders of all empires could not
stomach the “humiliation” inflicted by communists on retreating U.S. forces.
The global stature of the United States was threatened. So factors both
political and reputational, both personal and national, made American
intervention inevitable. Kim was on his own.
The NKPA was initially superior. Its core was experienced in mountain
warfare, ideologically committed, and faced by a poorly organized South
Korean army (ROK) that featured a corrupt officer class and low morale.
The NKPA adapted the political practices of the Chinese PLA, which I will
detail later—cell organization, collective political meetings, and much
ideological instruction, although this was somewhat undercut by its harsh
discipline and inequalities of rank. General Douglas MacArthur,
commanding U.S. troops in Korea, underestimated it, boasting, “I can handle
it with one arm tied behind my back.”3 Yet, keeping to the hills, the NKPA
infiltrated between enemy forces, bypassing the roads dominated by
American communications and control systems, and forced a series of
retreats. Only around the Pusan enclave in the far south were the Americans
and the ROK finally able to form a defensive line. The United States was
now pouring in forces, followed by other UN contingents, and the NKPA
had to frontally attack them. Its losses of men and materiel mounted, but its
attacks kept coming, reflecting soldiers capable of great sacrifice. By this
time the Americans had shifted their initial disdain for the NKPA and rated
them highly as opponents. Defeat for America was unthinkable—but
possible.
But in September 1950 General MacArthur launched an amphibious
landing farther north behind enemy lines, at Inchon, forcing the NKPA into a
two-front war for which it was ill-equipped. Outnumbered as well as
outgunned, exposed to massive American bombing, it retreated. The
National Security Council recommended that American forces stop at the
thirty-eighth parallel, which would be mission accomplished. But Truman
listened to the bellicose MacArthur, and the U.S. and UN forces pressed on
northward. The North Korean retreat became a rout. Kim told Chinese
General Peng Dehuai that his army was collapsing and that he could
communicate with fewer than 50,000 of his troops.4 Advance parties of
Americans reached the Yalu River on the Chinese border. MacArthur had
favored hot pursuit to prevent the NKPA from having time to regroup. But
this also meant that the goal had shifted from restoring the prewar status quo
to “liberating” North Korea from communism. A compliant United Nations
passed the necessary supporting resolution. It was folly.
MacArthur was on China’s doorstep, menacing Manchuria, which
contained much of China’s heavy industry. Mao was faced with U.S.
domination right up to his border. Chinese pride was infuriated that U.S.
soldiers were openly urinating into the Yalu River on the border. Few in
Washington believed the Chinese would fight, a belief that was the product
of American contempt for an underdeveloped country with a supposedly
third-rate army that was allegedly controlled by the Soviets—and Stalin
clearly did not want to fight. Some Americans who knew China and Mao
cautioned against aggression, but they were purged in the “who lost China?”
power struggle. Domestic political factionalism obstructed rational thinking.
Mao was steeped in the “parabellum” tradition of Chinese strategic
thought discussed in chapter 6, but with the Marxist twist that armed
struggle would solve both class and international contradictions.5 His foreign
policy had been to restore Taiwan by force, but the U.S. fleet had moved to
protect it and China lacked an effective navy. Mao had to back down and
was transferring troops from south to north before the Korean War loomed.
Thus, he had the troops available locally to aid Kim. He thought this was the
moment to show Chinese power to the world, surprising Stalin and stunning
Truman and MacArthur. His covert preparations began just in case force was
needed. A Chinese People’s Volunteer Force had been formed, supposedly
an autonomous army of volunteers, a pure fiction enabling China to avoid
declaring war on the United States. The initial plan was to invade and stop
near the thirty-eighth parallel. But MacArthur’s push northward had been
too rapid for this. In accordance with parabellum doctrines of flexibility and
deception, Mao shifted to an invasion while concealing force size in order to
lure U.S. troops into action against what they would believe was only a
small Chinese force. Then the Americans would be enveloped and hurled
back southward, perhaps out of Korea altogether.
In late September and early October 1950, Mao made only vague
threats to the United States, and after October 13 he fell silent, feigning
weakness. This had the desired effect of luring MacArthur even more rapidly
northward, leaving big gaps between his forward units and his
communications and supply center. American forces were now stretched out
over large areas along both coasts. In late October, Mao ordered large PLA
forces quietly across the border. They moved secretively down the mountain
chain, their orders to continue disguising the army’s true size. A small
Chinese force engaged the Americans and then retreated, giving the
impression of weakness. Some Chinese soldiers were sent out to be captured
and give false information to the enemy. The idea was to bypass Mac-
Arthur’s advance units and envelop his force from the flanks and the rear.
The surprise mass attack of November 26 proved highly successful,
disorienting the Americans. It led to a defeat at the Chosin Reservoir (Lake
Changjin to the Chinese), unprecedented in the history of American forces—
the consequence of American overconfidence. There was a hasty U.S.-UN
retreat southward, and the Chinese briefly took Seoul, the South’s capital.
But a counterattack brought the front lines back to around the thirty-eighth
and thirty-seventh parallels. The United States by this point had abandoned
hopes of seizing the whole of the peninsula and shifted back to the original
goal of restoring the antebellum status quo. This was now also the PLA’s
goal, aware that it did not have the firepower to take more territory. Both
limited their aspirations and signaled willingness to negotiate. It took
another two years of stalemated fighting to secure a truce.

UN Forces
The contrast between the UN and Chinese armies was marked. The South
Korean ROK was the largest component of the allied forces. Its troops began
the war in poor shape, their morale low. They gradually improved to the
point where they could sometimes handle North Korean forces, though they
remained inferior to Chinese forces. Of the foreign UN forces, over 80
percent were American, mostly draftees. Most did not know why they were
fighting, nor were they told why.6 The others were drawn from forty-one
countries, mixing professional and conscripted troops. Nearly 60,000 British
soldiers constituted the second-largest foreign force. Almost no one in the
UN force believed deeply in their cause in the way that soldiers in the
American Civil War and World War II had. Indeed, they reacted without
much thought of ideology in terms of survival on the battlefield. As one
American recalled:
 I didn’t feel I was defending the port of Pusan, or the rights of the
South Koreans, or the interests of the United States. I was simply
trying to stay alive. To survive from one moment to the next, to
survive the day, to survive the next day. Some people are
exhilarated by combat. They love it. They seem to thrive on it. I
knew people like that. Most people though, ninety-nine percent of
them, are scared to death. Including myself. It’s only after it’s all
over that the grand design falls into place, and you begin to see
what you had a hand in doing.

The war hero Lewis Millett was among the 1 percent. He described a
bayonet charge in terms we have already encountered, overwhelmed by
emotions and adrenaline, completely without ideology:

I know I went berserk. When you hit someone in the throat with a
bayonet, another one in the head, you got blood spraying up all
over you, nobody’s going to stay rational. In a bayonet charge,
you’re not rational in the first place. . . . You can do things that
would normally be impossible. The adrenaline gets in there, and
you do things that are just physically not possible. During that
attack I stuck a Chinaman and threw him out of the foxhole on my
bayonet and stuck him again on the way down. Well, you can’t do
that normally. Then afterward I was so weak. You could have
touched me with your finger and I’d have fallen down. After it was
all over I sat down and couldn’t get up. I’d used up all this
tremendous energy doing all these things, and I was completely
drained.7

King is scathing about the battle performance of this army, inadequately

trained and unmotivated.8 Once the Chinese arrived on the battlefield, UN
soldiers had a tendency to “bug out.” They ran away when under attack, and
they often went to ground in attack rather than press on to Chinese positions,
which would have provided them more cover. Rudy Tomedi confirms this
from interviews with U.S. veterans, and so does Brent Watson for Canadian
troops.9 None attributes poor performance to moral qualms, though Watson
mentions one Canadian who became distressed after the war: “I knew I
killed people, and sometimes I have trouble about that. That’s the hard part
about remembering. . . . Knowing that I did that and my country didn’t really
give a shit.”10 Fear made these soldiers passive. The Chinese were scathing
about the American infantry. But U.S. forces did not need high morale. They
had enormous technological superiority, and the generals used it ruthlessly in
the daytime. At night, when the planes, artillery, and tanks were blind, the
Chinese were in control and the Americans hunkered down.
S. L. A. Marshall wrote a report on American infantry morale in this
war. His methods seem to have been the same as before. He concluded that
the rate of fire by American troops in the Korean War was much higher than
in World War II, “well in excess of 50 percent of troops actually committed
to ground where fire may be exchanged directly with the enemy will make
use of one weapon or another in the course of an engagement.” He
elaborated: “In the average infantry company in Korea, between 12 and 20
percent of the men not only participate actively in the firing, but exercise
varying degrees of initiative in on-the-spot leading and taking personal
action of a type that betters the unit position and induces cohesion. In
addition to this control force, there are between 25 and 35 percent of the men
who take some part in the fire action, with varying degrees of consistency,
but without otherwise giving marked impulse to the course of events. . . .
This showing is a substantial improvement over the participation averages
among World War II troops.” He added that most of the reasons for not
firing were acceptable:

The infantry soldier, so commonly met with in World War II, who
made the stock answer: “I saw the enemy; I didn’t fire; I don’t
know why,” is strangely missing from the Korean scene. In fact,
this reply was not returned by a single man among the non-firers.
Among the reasons given by the non-firers were: “I didn’t see an
enemy target at any time and I thought it best to hold fire until I
did.” “Grenades were coming in at such a rate I couldn’t get my
head up.” “There was a rise of earth in front of me which hid their
people to view.” “I was captured from behind before I saw anyone
come against me.” “I was helping the sergeant get the machine gun
back into operation.” “There were so many of them that I held fire,
thinking they might pass us by.” “My gun was frozen and I
couldn’t find another.” And so on. All of these explanations made
sense in the situation.11
These are some of the legitimate reasons to not fire in modern wars. Russell
Glenn gives an overlapping list of reasons given by soldiers in the Vietnam
War.12 Such lists reduce substantially the residual number of nonfirers driven
by either fear or conscience. Marshall pronounced himself satisfied with the
U.S. rate of infantry fire in Korea, which is ironic given their poor overall
performance, much worse than in World War II.
The buddy system was again much in evidence, especially in defense,
but also in exerting some moral pressure against shirking. In one small study,
two-thirds of a sample of thirty American soldiers had paired with a close
buddy.13 Most had formed a friendship before electing to fight regularly
alongside each other. Raw replacements were usually taken care of by an
experienced veteran. A few disliked soldiers were excluded from the buddy
system, either because they were “duds,” shirkers who could not be relied on
for cover, or “heroes,” exposing soldiers around themselves to more risk.
Both were regarded as selfish and dangerous—as in earlier wars. The
Western troops in Korea performed not with great distinction but with
adequacy conferred by superiority in weaponry. Ironically, the Turkish
contingent in the UN force, which lacked this superiority, was said to have
fought the hardest.

The Chinese PLA

The Chinese “volunteers” were overwhelmingly illiterate peasants. Even
most officers could not read or write. Their tactics and battle order are well
described by Xiaobing Li.14 We also have evidence from U.S. and UN
sources, from Kevin Mahoney, from the recollections of Chinese generals,
and from Alexander George’s interviews in 1951 with three hundred Chinese
POWs, of whom eighty-four were interviewed at length.15 These sources
reveal that the PLA had high morale when it entered Korea. It had won
China’s Civil War only two years before, having defeated Japanese and
nationalist armies wielding superior weapons. The soldiers had received
extensive political training telling them that this would be a just war fought
with their Korean brothers against American aggression. If they did not
fight, the Americans would turn on China next—a plausible communist
domino theory. The soldiers thought they were fighting in defense of their
homeland. The director of the political department said that after the
training, 50 percent of the soldiers were ready “with a positive attitude”
toward fighting in the war, 30 percent were “intermediate elements who
would fight as ordered, but did not care if there was a war or not,” and 20
percent were “in an unsettled state of mind,” afraid of fighting the
Americans and calling the Yalu River bridge the “gate of hell.”16 As was
true in the Soviet Red Army, party members formed much of the first group,
and they would play an important role in leading and disciplining the others.
The UN soldiers had been sent to Korea without a clear mission, which
produced inferior morale, said General Du Ping, the head of the political
department of the invasion. Chinese soldiers were also more experienced in
the mountain warfare likely to be necessary in Korea. They believed they
would prevail if they could pour superior numbers into any single point of
attack.17 There were many women in both communist armies, but not in
combat roles.
The PLA had a cohesion based on relative equality between the ranks,
and all its members wore the same uniforms. The PLA had an ideological
variant of the buddy system. Soldiers were assigned to a cell of three or four
men led by one experienced, politically reliable soldier, usually a party
member. The cell held a daily mutual criticism session discussing their
experience that day. Three threes (or fours) plus a political officer
constituted a squad, which held self-criticism sessions once a week, lasting
at least one hour. Companies held such sessions less frequently. In actual
battle conditions, meetings were less frequent. Explicit ideology and moral
pressure exerted through everyday political rituals are not the norm in
modern armies, but they help still fear. The Chinese model “was imbued
with an ethical and missionary flavor” different from those of Western
armies that had no political or ideological training. They relied on latent
patriotism and tried to nurture good professional soldiers, whereas the PLA
wanted good communist soldiers.18 Chinese soldiers found these meetings
stressful. Being criticized for military or political failures and having to
expose one’s vulnerabilities, some said, felt worse than physical punishment.
There was moral pressure to be an “ideal communist.” George adds that
many learned how to cover up and conform rather than truly eradicate “evil
thoughts.”19 But this mattered less than that their actions be those of a good
communist soldier.
Western media were full of stories that North Korean or Chinese
soldiers showing reluctance to attack would be immediately shot, but this
was not true. Mao declared that his army “must have discipline that is
established on a limited democratic basis. . . . With guerillas, a discipline of
compulsion is ineffective. . . . [It] must be self-imposed, because only when
it is, is the soldier able to understand completely why he fights and how he
must obey. This type of discipline becomes a tower of strength within the
army, and it is the only type that can truly harmonize the relationship that
exists between officers and men.”20
Mahoney shows that neither communist army in Korea had violent
discipline.21 Beatings and abuses were strictly forbidden. Although
executions were laid down for the worst offenses, they were rarely carried
out (as was the norm in most armies by now, and as had long been traditional
in China). Public shaming, as described above, and political indoctrination
camps were preferred methods of dealing with deserters. Afterward the
offender would be returned to frontline duty with the same unit. Party
members expected to be punished more severely than non-party soldiers for
the same offense. Political officers were in charge of the morale of the
troops; they had welfare tasks to perform, and they were expected to be role
models in combat.
This military wielded an immanent ideological power unknown to the
U.S. and UN armies; it combined extensive teaching of Marxism, patriotic
self-defense, and moral pressure, all reinforced by everyday collective rituals
and party leadership in battle. Its members believed they were tougher than
the cosseted Americans. They were told they would have a quick and easy
victory, and they enjoyed surging down the peninsula, scornful of American
difficulties with the terrain, darkness, and weather. Chinese infantrymen had
the psychological edge, and their more confident self-reliance enabled them
to fight on against increasingly unfavorable odds and lengthening supply
chains. They relied on weapons of the weak.
The relative size of the armies is disputed. To many Western observers
it seemed that sheer weight of numbers was the main factor in Chinese
success. Yet Paul Edwards and T. R. Fehrenbach say that after the first few
months, the UN and South Korean forces outnumbered the enemy,
sometimes by two to one.22 This superiority was reduced in practice by a
lower proportion of fighting troops in U.S. forces. But better discipline gave
the Chinese an advantage. Fehrenbach and Watson agree that they were
superior in combat in the hills, especially at night. The United States
controlled the roads in the daytime, especially through its air force. But in
the hills of this mountainous country, and at night, when pilots could not see,
the PLA was in control. The U.S. Eighth Army rated the Chinese battle
efficiency as good to excellent, but the NKPA only as poor to good—but
there was much variation in performance within all armies.23
UN and U.S. soldiers repeatedly described Chinese attacks as “human
waves,” mass frontal attacks by unsupported infantry aiming to overwhelm
technologically superior defenders by sheer weight of numbers. A collection
of Korean War memoirs by U.S. veterans contains several sensational
accounts of what they perceived to be a human wave attack. Here are two of
them:

They kept coming in waves, and I kept firing. I fired my machine

gun all night long. Everybody else was firing. And the artillery
was dropping all around us. The artillery did a good job keeping
them off us. And all night long I’m thinking. These people are
crazy. They’re dying in droves, and they just keep coming on.
It was a typical Chinese infantry attack. No covering fire. No
effort to use the terrain. Just a headlong charge by an enormous
mass of men. There must have been five or six hundred of them,
screaming and yelling and blowing bugles. But they didn’t seem to
have enough weapons. Maybe the first row would have had
weapons, and the next two or three wouldn’t. The second row
would grab the weapons from the dead as they came on. . . . I think
the only thing that saved us was the artillery we called in. . . .
Another thing that stopped them was their own dead. We killed so
many that they had to climb over stacks of bodies, and it definitely
slowed the attack.24

Yet none of the soldiers quoted by Mahoney depicts bodies piled on top
of each other.25 The Chinese “did not throw away their lives in unplanned,
chaotic banzai charges, as the Japanese did during World War II, but rather
gave up their lives in attempting to stop, and destroy, the advancing
enemy.”26 If five hundred or more Chinese attacked them, these UN and
U.S. soldiers must have been caught in the eye of the storm, in the narrow
sector of the front line chosen for the attack, which was the normal Chinese
tactic.27 Most UN and U.S. soldiers would have experienced such an attack
only rarely.
 The Chinese never referred to waves. The aim was not to strike
headlong at entire enemy lines. Each Chinese regiment had a specialist
reconnaissance platoon sent forward to penetrate enemy lines. It would
deliberately draw fire to reveal UN positions, especially the weak-point
boundaries between different U.S. and UN units. Then light forces would
use stealth to get close and suddenly attack at these boundary sectors. The
tactic was always to outnumber the enemy at a narrow point of attack, as in
classical Chinese military theory. Chinese generals were conscious of their
inferiority in weaponry and accepted that they would incur heavy
casualties.28 A Chinese battle manual suggested a superiority of between
three and five attackers to each American defender, and a lesser superiority
if attacking the less well-equipped ROK.29 Such attacks created the
impression of “waves” of larger numbers than they actually had.
The PLA mounted their infantry assaults at night. Relatively small PLA
units would break through, flow around high ground positions held by the
Americans, go behind them, and interdict their supply roads. Lack of radio
communication created problems, but the PLA forces coped as best they
could with a medley of bugle, whistle, and animal noise codes. They also
gave detailed information down to the lowest ranks before a battle, and low-
level officers could react flexibly to battle conditions. Lower ranks shared
more in decision making than they did in the more hierarchical U.S. and UN
forces. The memoirs of Chinese generals give insight into campaign
strategy.30 Marshal Peng Dehuai, the head of the PLA invasion force, was
mindful of what his soldiers could and could not do. He saw that American
command of the seas made Inchon-style landings behind his lines possible.
Thus, he had to station troops down both coasts as well as on the front. Peng
understood the limits imposed by inferior equipment and by logistical
difficulties that mounted as they advanced farther away from their supply
bases in China. Eventually trucks had to travel four hundred kilometers to
the front. General Hong Xuezhi, responsible for logistics, remembers U.S.
airpower as the decisive force slowing down supplies and sometimes
stopping the Chinese advance.
Chinese soldiers gradually realized the full extent of their military
disadvantages. Their morale declined somewhat, but they remained an
obstinate foe prepared to take heavy casualties. Mao and his generals now
questioned whether their tactic of “man overcoming weapons” could
overcome such gross inequality of firepower. In February 1951 Mao lowered
the ultimate goal from throwing U.S. and UN forces out of the peninsula to
destroying as many enemy units as possible.31 When General Matthew
Ridgway took over after MacArthur’s sacking in April 1951, American
forces likewise shifted to “Operation Killer,” inflicting maximum casualties
rather than holding or taking territory. Ridgway believed he might retake the
whole peninsula, but only with casualties unacceptable to the American
people—and this has remained an American weakness, a healthy sign of
declining militarism in American society, as emphasized by liberal theorists.
After April 1951 some POW interviewees said Chinese soldiers knew
they could not win. But the army did not break, which is remarkable given
that only one to two years before, the communist PLA had incorporated
defeated Chinese nationalist soldiers into its ranks. Of George’s seventy
POWs who were junior officers or NCOs, two-thirds were former nationalist
soldiers. Their commitment might have been doubted, and maybe this was
why they had been taken prisoner, but there were few desertions. Yet under
growing strain, combat cadres and party members had to take a more active
role at the front, taking heavier losses.32 Squad and company meetings
remained active. These sent many complaints up the hierarchy, for better
rifles and for air and artillery support. They did get better Soviet rifles, but
only promises of airplanes and artillery. Soviet MiG fighter jets did arrive,
with the pretense that the pilots were Koreans, but they were fully engaged
in combat in “MiG Alley” farther north and could offer the infantry little
support.
As battle lines were consolidated, PLA units lacking a modern
command and control system could not exploit breakthroughs. U.S. and UN
forces learned to retreat after breakthroughs, so that the Chinese intent to cut
off whole divisions and destroy them could not be achieved. In a single night
only small units could be surrounded in this way. Then in the daytime U.S.
and UN forces would counterattack with massive firepower, recapture the
land abandoned during the night, and cause large numbers of Chinese
casualties. The South Koreans called it “the sea of men” confronting “the sea
of fire.” The Chinese spring offensive of 1951 stalled amid massive
casualties, and in July Mao opened peace negotiations.33
They dragged on for two years. Meanwhile, combat continued, but both
sides’ morale dipped. Generals Peng and Yang Dezhi, in charge of combat
operations, mixed attack with a defense more geared to protect the lives of
their troops. Defense rested in deep trenches and tunnels protecting soldiers
from bombers and artillery. Yang says the trenches stretched 6,240
kilometers, roughly the length of the Great Wall of China, while the tunnels
covered about 1,250 kilometers. Li gives slightly smaller numbers.34 Peng
believed trenches and especially tunnels were key in reducing the casualty
rate to acceptable levels. Attack remained the same: massed, narrow assaults
at night on weak points, with breakthroughs focused on killing enemy
soldiers, and then retreating back to safety.35 Stalemate dominated the final
two years, bad for the morale of both sides.36 Given its technological
superiority in conventional weaponry, the United States did not need to
deploy nuclear weapons. Truman had considered it, and Eisenhower rejected
a request for them by his generals. There was a stalemate between American
weaponry and Chinese morale, and the war ended with a cease-fire in July
1953, with the de facto border between the two Koreas exactly as before the
war, at the thirty-eighth parallel. There was no peace treaty and there still is
not.
Total casualties were enormous, and the proportion of civilian
casualties was higher than in World War II. Total Korean casualties reached
3 million of a total peninsular population of 30 million. Most of the dead
were North Koreans—somewhere around 215,000 soldiers and 2 million
civilians, the latter due mostly to horrendous U.S. bombing that destroyed all
their cities. There were no moral qualms among America’s leaders when it
came to killing communists. Almost a million South Korean civilians died.
U.S. estimates put PLA losses at 600,000 killed or missing and 750,000
wounded, out of a total army size of 3 million, an extraordinary rate of
casualties. This is also a high proportion of killed to wounded, reflecting the
effect of deadlier weapons and poorer medical facilities. Yet these figures
were probably exaggerated. Armies know their own casualties more
accurately than the enemy’s, and propaganda may get in the way. The
Chinese estimated their own total casualties at 1 million, but including only
183,000 killed in action, too low a figure.37 On the U.S. and UN side,
military deaths included almost 46,000 South Koreans, 37,000 Americans,
and 7,000 of other UN nations. The Chinese estimate of U.S. and UN total
casualties was 390,000, too high a figure.38 The war ended in a draw, but
death had come lopsidedly, claiming far more of those fighting for
communism.
The last phase of the truce negotiations involved the repatriation of
POWs. It was agreed that they could be repatriated to the country of their
choice. This revealed a large imbalance. Among U.S. and UN POWs, 347
chose to be repatriated to China or North Korea. In contrast, almost 22,000
of the North Korean and Chinese POWs chose not to be repatriated to their
home countries. Instead, they chose to live in South Korea or Taiwan (ruled
by nationalist Chinese). Additionally, almost 25,000 North Korean POWs
had been earlier freed to live in the South.39 All together, 46,000 soldiers in
communist armies had in effect “deserted.” Of course, they did have the
option of living among their own ethnic or racial group, which the American
“deserters” did not. But the remarkable morale of the communist troops had
required everyday rituals and discipline. Once soldiers were languishing in a
POW camp as a prisoner, that cultivation of commitment was much weaker.
So this was an ideological war in two senses: it originated in an
ideological civil war within Korea, and it was aggravated by an ideological
great power confrontation. On the communist but not the capitalist side the
soldiers were led to perceive the war as an ideological struggle through
repetitive education and everyday rituals. The combination brought together
a rather general Marxian-nationalist ideology, but it was grounded in unit
solidarity. This brought high morale. The war came as the North Koreans,
then the Americans, and finally the Chinese each seized what it thought in
Realist terms was a window of opportunity to launch a surprise attack,
without sufficient thought about what response it might provoke from the
enemy. Each first strike was successful in the short term, but each brought a
response. This was a war of mutual overconfidence, misperceptions, and
miscalculations, in which the major decisions seemed to the actors to come
from rational assessment of costs and benefits of alternatives, but which
proved so inaccurate that they generated a devastating war that served no
rational purpose and produced neither result nor peace settlement.

The Vietnam War: American Forces

For U.S. forces the Vietnam War was again intervention in a civil war in a
far-off land, a “war of choice” involving no self-defense and no
authorization by the United Nations. There was no growing groundswell of
domestic support, but after the Johnson administration invented North
Vietnamese aggressive actions in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Tonkin War
Resolution passed in the House of Representatives by 416 votes to zero, and
in the Senate by 88 votes to 2. The goal was to preserve American imperial
interests in Asia, more specifically to curb communism and supposedly to
bring democracy to Vietnam, although the government of South Vietnam
was far from democratic. But despite the anticommunism still roiling the
United States, the depth of ideological commitment to the war among U.S.
civilians or troops was shallow.
Between 1965 and 1973, 2.6 million U.S. military personnel served
within the borders of South Vietnam. Of those, 40–60 percent either fought
in combat, provided close support, or were fairly regularly exposed to enemy
attack. About 7,500 of them were women, mostly nurses. Peak strength in
Vietnam of 543,000 was reached in April 1968. Additionally, about 500,000
sailors and airmen in total were based offshore or in Thailand. It was a
young force: the average age of enlisted men was twenty-two, of officers
twenty-eight. Approximately 58,000 were killed and 304,000 were wounded,
about half of them needing hospitalization. This was a major commitment of
American resources.
The battlefield environment differed from that in Korea. American
forces had even greater control of the skies, but jungle terrain made enemy
units difficult to spot, and in open agricultural regions the enemy hid as
guerillas among the people, without uniforms, difficult to identify. There
were many small engagements, but only occasionally did the enemy
People’s Liberation Front (PLF) launch massed attacks. These were rarely
successful, although the failure of their Tet Offensive proved a Pyrrhic
victory for the Americans. The PLF fought mostly small guerilla
engagements. Initially, the Americans were all-volunteer professionals,
committed to their tasks, if not in any ideological cause, but believing that a
soldier must carry out his mission. This belief was also the best predictor of
volunteering for foreign service missions among a 1976 sample of U.S.
professional paratroopers.40
For the infantrymen in Vietnam, combat was mostly defense against
sudden attacks on their bases in addition to patrols and offensive attempts to
flush out guerillas into combat. Search-and-destroy missions predominated:
“The infantry finds the enemy, the air and artillery destroys them,” said one
general. This was meant to reduce U.S. casualty rates, but for the infantry it
was quite passive combat, and firefights were generally initiated by the
enemy. The buddy system was essential for such small unit combat, though
officers and men complained that the rotation of individuals rather than
whole units (the traditional policy) after a twelve-month service weakened it
by continually bringing replacements into the unit. Danger was not
continuous. Most patrols never encountered the enemy, although land mines
and booby traps were a perennial hazard. When the enemy was encountered,
often in ambushes, short chaotic battles ensued and casualties could be high.
By 1967, 65 percent 0f U.S. casualties had come during patrols.41 The
unpredictability of each day proved hard to take.
Moskos interviewed thirty-four U.S. soldiers and talked to many more
in field trips during 1965 and 1967, before disillusion set in. He found a
rhythm to the level of commitment. As in other wars, the first engagement
shattered the soldier’s enthusiasm and spirit of adventure. It brought respect
for the enemy but in this case enduring contempt for the South Vietnamese
ally. U.S. soldiers served in Vietnam for one year. From the third to the
eighth month of service, the soldier occupied a plateau of moderate
commitment to the combat role. In the ninth and tenth months he was most
combat-effective. Then he became reluctant to engage in offensive
operations, keeping his head down, sometimes “freezing,” while officers
with similar tours of duty turned a blind eye. At this point personal safety
overrode commitment to buddies. Moskos emphasized that buddies were
seen instrumentally, entailing less friendship in the affective sense than
mutual self-interest to remain alive. Soldiers eschewed patriotic rhetoric.
Nineteen of the thirty-four men said they were fighting to stop communism,
but they were hazy about what that was. Moskos says they had a “latent”
ideology, seeing the United States as simply the best country in the world,
worth fighting for, but when compared to the commitment of the enemy, that
was not much of an ideology.42
Marshall, with the assistance of Lieutenant Colonel David Hackworth,
wrote a brief report on an American infantry division in Vietnam during six
months of heavy fighting in 1967 before demoralization began.43 Using the
same methods as before, he came to the opposite conclusion of his World
War II report. He says the division needs “no stimulation whatever to its
employment of . . . weapons when engaged.” During prolonged
engagements, he notes, 80–100 percent of soldiers typically fired their
weapons, and most of the nonfirers were in noncombat roles. It wasn’t
unusual, he says, for one man to use three or more weapons if the fight
lasted two hours. The main problem was too much firing. He considers self-
control quite good but accepts the inevitability of firing too high, mostly
missing. He says, “An outright kill is most unusual.” That had not changed
for over a hundred years, except that late twentieth-century soldiers were
blazing away from cover.
Glenn interviewed infantry veterans, most of whom had been
conscripted.44 In other wars fear had been worse when soldiers were inactive
while receiving fire. They relieved fear by firing, even if wildly, thus
becoming active. Glenn finds this too. He quotes one soldier: “Courage
cannot be separated from the fear that has aroused it. It is, in fact, a powerful
urge not to be afraid anymore, to rid himself of fear by eliminating the
source of it. And the only way of eliminating it is through the use of fire-
power.”45
Many soldiers reported that once in action, the mind was wholly
absorbed. Fear disappeared because one did not have time for it. Of Glenn’s
258 veterans, 97 percent said they had fired when required. Since a man
might not admit his own shortcomings, Glenn asked them to estimate the
proportion of comrades who fired during engagements. The average answer
fell to 83 percent. Eighty percent gave fear as the main reason, 15 percent
mentioned soldiers’ moral qualms. One-third of these were conscientious
objectors given tasks not requiring firearms. Most soldiers had occasionally
not fired when they might have done, though this was a judgment call—for
example, does one fire, revealing one’s position, if one glimpses a larger
enemy force close by? Not firing was found mostly among raw recruits.
More shooters were found, as Marshall had suggested, in small teams firing
weapons together, like machine gunners and helicopter crews. Teamwork
generated more mutual control.46
An additional moral dilemma was prominent in Vietnam. Soldiers again
made the distinction between legitimately killing enemy soldiers and killing
civilians or prisoners, which was almost universally condemned. But in
guerilla warfare, when the enemy does not wear uniform and when women
and children sometimes hurl grenades, it was difficult to put that distinction
into practice. But it sometimes led to atrocities by rampaging adrenalized
soldiers, as in the My Lai massacre in March 1968.
Lieutenant William Calley, the commander of Charley Company, had
been told that the village was home to a VC battalion, but he already had a
reputation as a vicious killer. American morale was already plunging. This
unit was inexperienced in combat, but three weeks earlier had been trapped
in a minefield, with two deaths and thirteen wounded, and only two days
earlier, a booby trap had killed a sergeant and wounded three others. They
had not even seen the enemy. Thus, they saw this operation as revenge but
were apprehensive and fearful. Calley and Charley Company rampaged
through the village. About half the company apparently perpetrated the
atrocities, the other half stood aside watching. Almost the whole village was
killed, about five hundred people—the elderly, women, children, and babies.
No adult males were found there, or any weapons. Women were gang-raped
and their bodies mutilated afterward. Some killing began immediately, but it
then mounted as rising aggressive confidence, absolute domination of the
scene, and racism combined in the massacres of several crowds of villagers
herded together by the soldiers. These horrors were revealed only because
they were witnessed from above by a helicopter pilot with a conscience who
landed between the soldiers and retreating villagers and threatened to shoot
the soldiers unless they stopped. The army at first attempted a cover-up, but
major publicity launched first by one determined private soldier forced
courts-martial. Yet, outrageously, Calley was the only perpetrator to be
found guilty, of personally killing twenty-two villagers. He initially received
a life sentence, but served only three and a half years house arrest before
being pardoned.
A similar massacre of ninety, at the nearby village of My Khe 4, on the
same day is shrouded in mystery, since the soldiers refused to testify. No one
involved was ever charged. Operation Speedy Express killed thousands of
Vietnamese civilians in the Mekong Delta, earning its commander the title
“the Butcher of the Delta.” There were presumably other massacres, though
probably not on the scale of My Lai. Nothing has changed since Cicero
observed, “Law is silent in times of war.” The nature of the war—stressed
soldiers of falling morale, fighting a largely unseen enemy hiding among the
people, taking casualties but often unable to take normal military revenge in
open firefight—was likely to have caused atrocities.
The savagery of this war brought incapacitating anxieties later. The
U.S. Civil War had brought on the maladies described as “nostalgia” and
“melancholia.” World War I armies were stalked by “shell shock,” World
War II by “battle fatigue,” and from 1980 onward the diagnosis was
“posttraumatic stress disorder,” or PTSD, in which the soldier has terrible
flashbacks, upsetting memories, and incapacitating anxiety caused by the
trauma of battle. Estimates based on diagnoses and interview surveys of
veterans have been available since Vietnam. Of its veterans, 31 percent are
estimated to have suffered from PTSD, and this has often proven long-
lasting. “Roughly 11 percent of Vietnam veterans, over a 40-year period,
continue to suffer from clinically important PTSD symptoms, either having
the full diagnosis or very strong features of the diagnosis that interfere with
function.” Twice as many had been recently getting worse rather than
better.47
Fear figured in PTSD, but Vietnam veterans’ feelings of guilt for their
own actions or inaction worsened their condition. Said a helicopter machine
gunner: “Sometimes I think that now I’m being paid back for all the men I
killed and I killed a lot of them. If there is a judge, I figure I’m going to hell
in a hand-basket.” One doctor treating veterans said some refused to take
medication because they felt they deserved to suffer pain. “We see a lot of
feelings of guilt over what they’ve seen and done during their experience in
Vietnam,” he says, “and they don’t want to blunt that.”48 One study of one
hundred veterans found nineteen had attempted suicide, and fifteen more had
often considered it. Significantly related to their suicide attempts were guilt
about combat actions, survivor guilt, depression, anxiety, and severe fear-
based PTSD. Logistic regression analysis showed that combat guilt was the
most significant predictor of preoccupation with suicide and actual suicide
attempts. Many veterans reported that disturbing combat behavior like the
killing of women, children, and prisoners occurred while they were
emotionally out of control because of fear or rage.49
In another study of 603 male combat veterans seeking help at a
veterans’ PTSD clinic, an astonishing 91 percent reported witnessing
wartime atrocities, 76 percent said they had themselves participated directly
in killing, and 31 percent said they had participated in the mutilation of
bodies. These figures cannot be taken as representative of all Vietnam
veterans, only of those seeking help from the PTSD clinic. Behavior they
defined as immoral was coming back to haunt them. The researchers found
that involvement in wartime atrocities, as perpetrator or merely as witness,
caused PTSD and severe depression symptoms independent of degree of
exposure to combat. A sense of guilt was also associated with suicidal
thoughts and with greater postwar hostility and aggression, even after
controlling for PTSD severity. This would suggest that there is something
about participating in or witnessing wartime atrocities that is not captured by
the fear-dominated definition of PTSD.50 The 30 percent of veterans who
did suffer from PTSD included many experiencing extreme guilt. “Moral
injury” rather than “guilt” has become the preferred label among researchers
for the enduring psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social
effects of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that
transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. A further study of
1,106 Vietnam veterans found 35 percent who reported killing one or more
enemy soldiers, 7 percent reported killing civilians, and 5 percent reported
killing prisoners of war. After the war all three groups had higher symptoms
on most mental health and functional impairment measures—PTSD
symptoms, peritraumatic dissociation, functional impairment, and violent
behavior.51 Killing anyone brought on a sense of moral injury later.
So in Vietnam moral qualms did figure in soldiers’ response to killing
and participation in atrocities, but, tragically, well after these had occurred,
usually after the war was over. Moral qualms did not prevent or mitigate the
killing or atrocities. They offered no relief to the dead and mutilated
Vietnamese, and they brought postwar suffering to many American
perpetrators. Such psychological responses had probably emerged after
previous wars—but they were rarely admitted by either the authorities or the
soldiers themselves, and they were never medically diagnosed. Veterans had
suffered in silence. But war is hell, and then you go to hell, said these
veterans.
In December 1969, as the war ground on, the United States needed
reinforcements, conscription was escalated by the introduction of the draft
lottery, and morale fell. It did not help that U.S. troops were finding
American arms on the PLF dead. They believed South Korean soldiers were
selling them to the PLF. Since many educated whites evaded the draft (like
Presidents Clinton and Trump) or managed to wangle safe stateside posts
(like President Bush the Younger), new recruits were predominantly
working-class men, and African Americans were overrepresented. Their
class and racial resentments were enhanced by Nixon’s attempts from 1969
to negotiate peace. Why continue risking your life if the war was about to
end? Opinion back home also turned against the war. Desertion rates rose,
reaching just over 7 percent by 1971, but backed by another 18 percent
defined as AWOL, absent without leave. In contrast, in the twenty-first
century the U.S. desertion rate has not yet risen above 5 percent. The main
motives for deserting were not fear and loathing for battle but the attractions
of home and the inability to fit into army life, especially its discipline, which
weighed heavily on conscripted soldiers.52 But desertion inside Vietnam was
rare. Where would you de-sert to? Most demoralized soldiers stayed in the
danger zone but took fewer risks. When this was by mutual consent among
comrades, it was a passive form of buddy resistance.
The most spectacular consequence of American demoralization was
“fragging,” soldiers attempting to kill a superior officer, usually with a
fragmentation grenade, hence the term fragging. After the Tet Offensive and
as Nixon was seeking to make peace, between 1968 and 1972, almost one
thousand incidents in Vietnam involved the army or marines; hundreds of
officers and NCOs were injured, and at least fifty-seven killed. George Lepre
analyzed seventy-one cases in which a soldier was convicted, and he found
most were younger than average, many came from “broken homes,” and
two-thirds of them had not completed high school.53 Their psychiatric
reports said the offenders lacked maturity, had low self-esteem, and were
rated as poor soldiers. Drugs were often the cause. Either the soldier was
under the influence when he committed the offense or he had been
disciplined by the officer for taking drugs. Also the growth in the civil rights
movement in the late 1960s and the assassination of Martin Luther King in
1968 exacerbated racial tensions, which resulted in more racially motivated
fragging incidents. They more often occurred in the rear than at the front
line, where the buddy system often worked across racial lines.54
Demoralization was setting in as no progress was being made. But peace
was made before the army might collapse. Once the Americans left, the PLF
bided its time and then quickly rolled over the South Vietnamese army to
victory. For America the war had been a disaster. If America had been true to
the anti-imperialist values it proclaimed, then it would have supported Ho
Chi Minh and his movement in the 1950s when it had been an anticolonial
nationalist movement fighting against French imperialism.

The Vietnam War: The Communist PLF

Communist warfare was brought to its most effective level in Vietnam.
Long-lasting morale was demonstrated by the PLF, taking up Chinese PLA
practices, but also enjoying, like the Red Army, the advantages of fighting in
its homeland amid a broadly sympathetic local population. “Vietcong,” the
commonly used term in the West, was a propaganda term used by the South
Vietnamese government to suggest that the movement was really communist
Chinese. We have considerable evidence on the PLF. The Rand Corporation
was commissioned to do hundreds of interviews of PLF POWs and defectors
between 1964 and 1971, and a handful more up until 1974. These were not
scientific samples, for the South Vietnamese government (the GVN) decided
who would be interviewed. Some probably told the Vietnamese interviewers
what they thought they wanted to hear.55 They are a rich data source,
however.
The first official Rand report, by John Donnell and his colleagues, was
based on 145 interviews in 1964.56 The interviewees said that almost all the
PLF believed strongly in the justice of their cause. The movement had
already defeated the French Empire and Vietnamese feudal landlords. It
blended nationalist and socialist goals, the two most popular mid-twentieth-
century global ideologies. When American forces arrived in 1965, the PLF
saw them as yet more foreign imperialists propping up the corrupt and
reactionary GVN. The justice of the PLF cause seemed self-evident. Their
land redistribution policies were popular, especially among poor peasants. At
this stage communist forces were mainly southerners, although receiving
help from the North Vietnamese military.
The interviewees revealed the “three-three” system borrowed from the
Chinese PLA. Rank-and-file soldiers were grouped into threes, going
everywhere together, covering each other, sharing the hardships of guerilla
warfare. They held kiem-thao self-criticism sessions almost daily. Three
threes plus an officer formed a squad of ten who also held kiem-thao
sessions two or more times a month. A whole company might have a session
about once a month. All sessions aired recent experiences, what had worked,
what had not worked, and everyone was urged to contribute to the
discussion. As in the PLA, rank differences were slight. These rituals
amplified the egalitarianism of guerilla forces, but they also caged soldiers,
relying less on the coerced discipline of most armies than on an ideology
combining values and norms, institutionalized as rituals performed by
individual units and led into battle by party members. The value of struggle
toward a just communist society, the norm of commitment to the movement
and one’s comrades, and the rituals of three threes and kiem-thao put
considerable moral pressure on the soldiers.
The PLF was supported by much of the rural and small-town
population. Violence against civilians was rare, except for captured GVN
officials, in contrast to the harsh practices of the GVN and its army, the
Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN). Desertions were mostly not for
political disaffection but for personal reasons—the desire to return home and
end the physical hardship of war. These interviews revealed high morale,
belief in the cause, and confidence in victory. When John T. McNaughton,
assistant to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, was briefed on the report,
he had already developed a healthy respect for the PLF and not for the GVN.
He declared: “If what you say in that briefing is true, we’re fighting on the
wrong side.”57 He was right. Before American troops entered in 1965, the
PLF had been nearing victory, as McNaughton knew.58
Two books discuss the Mekong Delta province of My Tho on the basis
of the Rand interviews. David Hunt analyzed 285 interviews undertaken
during 1965–68.59 He confirms that PLF morale was high in the “golden
years” of the early 1960s, when the PLF organized village meetings with an
educational mission, lively discussion, and festive spirit, which villagers
enjoyed. David Elliott, using 400 Rand interviews, confirms this picture of
PLF-organized village enthusiasm in the early 1960s, noting the party’s
reach downward through village farmers’, women’s, and youths’
associations whose leaders were given extensive political training.60 Most
armies avoid political education and explicit ideology, preferring to rely on
the soldiers’ latent ideologies of national identity, supplemented by extensive
drilling, whose goal is to convert them into automatons. In the PLF, political
education, reinforced by the political officers, substituted ideology and
educational rituals for extensive drilling.
The party was selective in admitting members, but it then gave them
political training, stressing that they were members of an elite with superior
objective knowledge of the interests of workers and peasants, whom they
must both serve and lead. In this period their policies received much support.
One unsympathetic defector observed: “The people thought they were then
enjoying ‘real democracy’ because the cadres behaved nicely toward them.
Before, the villagers bent their heads and were scared when they met GVN
officials.” Elliott reveals the importance of PLF land reform in bringing
peasant support.61 Military recruits were all volunteers. The policy of
“upgrading troops” from village guerillas to district troops to main force
regulars was also an effective form of military training through experience.62
William Henderson, a former U.S. officer in Vietnam, focuses on fifty-
three men interviewed between 1965 and 1968. He emphasizes their
resilience in absorbing American firepower in the air and on the ground. He
also stresses the three-three buddy system, the kiem-thao sessions, and the
fusion of political and military structures. Each threesome was supervised by
a political cadre, a hardened party militant who reported every three days on
the men’s conformity with party goals.63 Said Ho Chi Minh: “With good
cadres, everything can be done.” Henderson notes, “The soldier was never
permitted to be an individual; rather, he was constantly reminded of his
duties to his two comrades in the three-man cell, to the squad and platoon, to
the people, and to the party.”64 This was a daily dose of moral obligation,
although allied to some direct democracy. PLF soldiers had the right to
discuss and criticize battle plans.
After the entry of the United States, the PLF had to adapt to its superior
firepower. It introduced conscription, but from the militias. After brief
military and political training, they were assigned to three-man units
alongside two experienced soldiers, one of whom was usually a party
member. Mostly young, the newcomers were also inducted into the Party
Youth Group, a further instrument of solidarity and control. Any soldier
identified as lazy or lacking commitment or who harbored “rightist
thoughts” was subject to self-criticism sessions, techniques “designed to
bring anxiety to the PLF soldier, who was culturally dependent for security
upon his relationship with a group.”65 Such moral pressure entwined military
and political ideology and organization. This was “the most sophisticated
leadership techniques in use by any army in the world today,” says
Henderson.66 It prevented “disintegration, collapse or significant loss of
military effectiveness” despite American firepower.67 This was a version of
the “man over weapons” strategy of the Chinese PLA in Korea. Increasing
casualties and campaign hardship produced more individual but not
collective desertions.
Another official Rand report, by Leon Gouré and his colleagues,
differed from this consensus. It was based on 450 interviews conducted in
1965. It is dismissive of the PLF. Interviewees said that intensified U.S. air
and artillery power was demoralizing it. B-52 bombs penetrated the shallow
bunkers and tunnels of PLF camps, and guerilla ability to hide among the
people was reduced as villagers fled from the bombing. The introduction by
the PLF of taxation and the draft forced less ideologically committed men
into the military, and this also reduced popular support.68 These arguments
were partially confirmed by Elliott, but Gouré uniquely added that PLF
cadres were now pessimistic about their chances of winning.69 Their power
within the movement was now based on coercion, not persuasion, he
claimed. His report makes no reference to the three threes or the kiem-thao
sessions. It recommends intensifying American bombing. No qualms about
civilians here.
Rand colleagues charged that Gouré was biased. His appointment as
head of the project had followed a shift inside the corporation to hard-line
Cold War policies.70 He had advocated airpower as a weapon of
counterinsurgency long before his assignment to Vietnam, and upon arrival
he immediately penned a report favoring more bombing. The air force,
delighted, ensured he got command of the next Rand survey. Gouré released
interim results after each batch of interviews, and his briefings all had the
same message: bombing was sapping the will of the enemy, so bomb more.
The air force loved it, though reporters were skeptical, doubting especially
his view that villagers whose homes were bombed would blame the PLF
rather than the Americans. Another Rand analysis of seven hundred
interviews concluded that bombed villagers blamed the GVN.71 But the
blame game was actually complicated. Hunt’s interviewees said that at first
villagers blamed the PLF for bringing retaliation bombing, defoliation,
plowing up of crops, forced relocation of villagers, and the shooting down of
anyone running.72 But they soon switched to blaming the actual perpetrators,
the GVN, the ARVN, and the Americans. Many added that the government
did not have the support of the people, whereas the PLF did.
The fullest analysis of My Tho province is David Elliott’s.73 This was a
heartland of the revolution. But its relatively flat and open ecology made it
vulnerable to bombing. Elliott says that to understand the development of the
PLF, we must grasp the interaction between the two sides’ strategies. Class
alliances shifted during the struggle. The PLF land program finished off the
landlord class, and their lands were redistributed mainly to poor peasants.
This upgraded many of them into the middle peasant stratum. The core of
the PLF now became the remaining poor peasants while the support of many
middle peasants waned, especially when agricultural taxes were imposed by
the PLF. Some went over to the GVN. But the PLF was initially more
cohesive, more politically moral, and more popular than the GVN, for the
reasons given by Donnell and his colleagues and Henderson above. In early
1965, despite the aid given by the United States to the GVN, the PLF
seemed on its way to victory.
So the U.S. military intervened directly, in the belief that another
country must not be lost to communism. Ground troops arrived, supported
by intensifying bombing of the South and then the North, too. American
bombing and defoliation from the air and from artillery on the ground
devastated PLF core regions. There were supposedly restrictions placed on
bombing civilian areas, but the rules were confused, changeable, disputed,
and often ignored. The United States sent in 550,000 ground forces and
dropped 7.7 million tons of explosives, dwarfing the 2.2 million tons
dropped during the entire World War II (and the 635,000 dropped in Korea).
Mao’s famous dictum that guerillas swam among the people as fish swam in
the sea was countered by General William Westmoreland: “It is necessary to
eliminate the ‘fish’ from the ‘water,’ or to dry up the ‘water’ so that the
‘fish’ cannot survive.”74
Draining the water had two main thrusts: destroy the economy of any
pro-PLF locality, and physically remove the population to “strategic
hamlets” in areas controlled by Americans and the GVN. This inflicted
appalling suffering on the rural population. It could not “win hearts and
minds” (proclaimed as the U.S. strategy), but it worked in the sense that the
PLF was deprived of its “water,” especially in open agrarian areas like the
Mekong Delta. Peasants who were not forcibly relocated fled from the
devastation. If they stayed, they were defined by the United States as Viet
Cong, to be killed, including women and children. Women, the “long-haired
warriors,” made a significant contribution to the PLF as soldiers, spies,
tunnel builders, and porters.75 American bombing left the PLF with fewer
fighters, fewer recruits, fewer resources for provisioning them, and fewer
social and educational programs. In My Tho the PLF was reduced to a hard
core of predominantly poor peasants and their families, living in fear while
slowly losing ground, moving and hiding, with little time for assemblies or
festive occasions. Most interviews reveal fear, especially of the random
death inflicted by unseen B-52s and long-range ground artillery. Casualties
mounted. It should have been the end of them.
Three things saved them. One was the support of reinforcements of
professionally trained soldiers and munitions from North Vietnam. As the
war continued, the northern presence in the PLF grew. The failure of the Tet
Offensive had devastated PLF forces, and they required an infusion of
Northerners. Exact figures are disputed, but it is likely that toward the end
Northerners represented almost half the main force numbers, not including
local or guerilla forces. There was also help from the Soviets and China. The
Chinese PLA rotated 320,000 troops through North Vietnam to man air
defenses against American planes, and PLA and Soviet military advisers
raced each other to get to crashed American aircraft to steal their advanced
avionics. One Chinese veteran noted that in Vietnam there were two
enemies, “the American imperialists in the sky, and the Soviet revisionists
on the ground.”76
Second, the PLF party cadres did not waver. Their casualty rate is
unknown. The minimum estimate is 444,000, the maximum over a million.
The higher figures may also include civilian victims, although the militia
system blurred the distinction. The PLA casualty rate was certainly much
higher than those of most armies at war, and given rudimentary medical
services, far more of the wounded died than in the U.S. Army. The death rate
among cadres was higher still. Given the odds against them, the PLA cadres
were foolhardily brave, trapped by commitment to an ideology reinforced by
everyday ritual wielding considerable moral pressure. There were always
replacements, and the movement just kept going. Given taxation,
conscription, and tightening military-political discipline, the PLF was using
more coercion, yet Elliott notes that POWs and defectors openly expressed
disagreements with cadres’ directives, without suffering reprisals.77
Third, they retained the sympathy of poorer peasants and others who
preferred the revolution to a GVN regime that they still viewed as corrupt
and benefiting the rich. They preferred socialist ideology even if their
understanding of it was rudimentary. Virtually all viewed Vietnam as a
single country, whereas the GVN wanted its division to continue and fought
as a stooge of foreign imperialism. It is rare among the Rand interviews to
find positive views of the government or its army, in contrast to their
nuanced views of the PLF. When PLF armed forces weakened, it was
rational for peasants to flee to safer areas or to withdraw into everyday life.
This happened in late 1968 after the Tet Offensive, when even the PLF’s
official history admits “rightist thoughts, pessimism, and hesitancy”
appeared. It happened again in 1970–71 when U.S. troops invaded
Cambodia and destroyed PLF camps there. In these periods supply lines
were badly hit and the soldiers became half-starved.
But at the slightest signs of hope, new PLF recruits appeared, men and
women alike, often unexpectedly, willing to fight or provide civilian support.
This happened in 1963, in 1967–68 in preparation for the Tet Offensive, and
in the 1972 Easter Offensive. Back in the United States, the war required an
unpopular draft. Its cost had already aborted President Johnson’s Great
Society reforms, and it was now weakening the dollar. There was a major
antiwar movement led by young men anxious to avoid the draft. Morale was
sagging among the troops, many had lost faith in the cause, were
contemptuous of the South Vietnamese allies, and no longer thought the war
winnable. The Sino-Soviet split had revealed to some in Washington that
communism was no longer as cohesive as had been believed. Why bother
fighting such a costly war for the corrupt government of a nonstrategic poor
country? Although the PLF’s Tet Offensive failed, its shock convinced
American leaders that the war was unwinnable. The ideological commitment
and staying power of the PLF were greater than those of the United States
and the GVN. This was indeed a triumph of men and women over weapons.
Their weapons of the weak had triumphed.
U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor had in late 1964 expressed
puzzlement at PLA persistence: “We still find no plausible explanation of the
continued strength of the Viet-Cong if our data on Viet-Cong losses are even
approximately correct. Not only do the Viet-Cong units have the
recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to
maintain morale. Only in rare cases have we found evidences of bad morale
among Viet-Cong prisoners or recorded in captured Viet-Cong
documents.”78
But the explanation was simple: the United States was underestimating
PLF numbers and support. Its estimates of total PLF strength at this time
were around 285,000. Their monthly estimates of PLF casualties indicated
that this total number could not possibly be maintained. Yet others realized
that these estimates were only of PLF main and local regular forces and did
not include guerilla militias organized by villages and hamlets. Village
militias had rifles and hand grenades. The grenades inflicted 20 percent of
all American casualties. Total PLF armed strength was over 600,000, and the
entire PLF infrastructure of helpers, including youth auxiliaries and civilian
laborers and porters, often women, numbered well over a million. When the
Nixon administration finally realized this, optimism collapsed: the PLF
could replace their casualties from village militias and northern regiments
and fight on indefinitely. The United States could not.79 As Henry Kissinger
remarked in 1968, “The guerilla wins if he does not lose.” Yes, but provided
he and she believe in the cause.
We don’t know exactly how many people were killed in the Vietnam
War. The Americans suffered about 58,000 deaths; their allies, the South
Vietnamese Army, lost about 250,000. Estimates of PLF casualties vary
considerably, but in 2012 the united Vietnamese government said there were
about 850,000 PLF combat or noncombat deaths. Even if that figure was
exaggerated, the disproportion is evident. The sufferings of the PLF and
sympathizers, technologically overmatched, were extraordinary. Yet they
kept on fighting, because of high morale and the support of the rural
population, whose sympathy was buttressed by organizations that blurred the
boundaries between the political and the military, and civilian and the
military—a communist version of the French revolutionary nation in arms. It
represented the terrible human costs of a thoroughly militarized society.
A postscript: the Chinese PLA invaded Vietnam in 1979, in response to
Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to overthrow the genocidal Pol Pot regime.
Two communist armies were now at each other’s throats. The PLA had been
disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and struggled against the battle-
hardened North Vietnamese Army (NVA), which relied mostly on its border
regional and militia forces. The Chinese had expected an easy victory, but,
confronted by large Vietnamese forces blocking the way to Hanoi, they soon
retreated. Though both sides claimed victory, the NVA had the better of it,
and they stayed in Cambodia.80 After revolutionary forces achieve their
revolution, they settle down into being more conventional armies, with a
decline in their ideological fervor and structural rigor. This had happened to
the Chinese PLA, and now it was beginning to happen in Vietnam, too—as it
happened also in the postwar Soviet Red Army. The ideological army cannot
endure long-term in peacetime.
The Wehrmacht, the Red Army at Stalingrad, the PLA, and the PLF are
all cases of a one-party state or movement wielding a transcendent ideology
grounded in practice at the unit level, generating morale and leadership that
can compensate, up to a point, for technological or numerical inferiority.
These are the bravest soldiers, the ones who look death in the face and fight
on, whether one approves of their ideology. From their own perspectives
they are heroes. They refute democratic triumphalist theorists of soldier
morale introduced in chapter 3. The soldiers of the democracies performed
worse, not better. When they triumphed, this was due to advanced
technology and firepower available to wealthy countries. But this simple
contrast between democratic and authoritarian regimes is misplaced. Except
for the Wehrmacht, authoritarian armies actually were more complex, since
at the level of soldier they had more participatory rituals than did the armies
of the democracies, and this led to their higher morale.
 Such practices are rare, however. There are many one-party states in the
world, but almost none wants to change the world. They merely desire to
stay in power, distributing benefits to their supporters, repressing opposition.
They use their armed forces more for domestic repression than for war.
Since they also live in fear of army coups, they promote officers for
perceived loyalty, not military competence. They bribe them, too, for
officers can participate in state corruption. To be on the safe side, these
regimes add their own supposedly loyal praetorian guards, security police,
and militias to counterbalance the army. None of these practices is likely to
create military efficiency or high morale. A one-party state without a
transcendent ideology may be coup-proof, but it is unlikely to win wars.
American military involvement in Vietnam was a defeat. It might be
callously said in its favor that the United States had so devastated Vietnam
that it would deter movements in other countries from embracing
communism, a very nasty form of deterrence. The Vietnam veteran Tim
O’Brien gives an even harsher American epitaph on the war: “A true war
story is never moral. . . . If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if
you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger
waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.
There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb,
therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising
allegiance to obscenity and evil.”81

Long-Term Trends in Battle Experience

Over the last three chapters we have seen one universal feature of wars.
They inflict a massive number of deaths and mutilations. There have been
few “good deaths,” heroic, clean, and purposeful. In modern wars death has
mainly come suddenly, unexpectedly, as randomly inflicted explosions
coming from the skies, bursting apart the human body, blood and gore
gushing and body parts flying everywhere. The sounds of battle are men
screaming and howling in their death throes or at the horror of lying
helplessly on the ground, confronting their own ghastly disfigurements,
while the survivors around them are shocked to the core, and potentially
suffering the long-term effects of what we call posttraumatic stress disorder.
To the soldiers this cannot have seemed like the rational fulfillment of useful
goals. Nor was it, as I will make perfectly clear in my last chapter. Of the
wars discussed in these three chapters, only World War II had to be fought,
and only by one side. We have no reason to believe that earlier wars were
any more heroic or cleaner or more necessary. Death had come less often
from the skies and only from nearby, but it compensated with more battering
and slashing of the body, with the same ghastly results. How different from
the environment of the decision makers and the weapons manufacturers
pursuing normal, peaceful political and economic life. They are full of hope,
achieving their goals, and that is all that matters. It is the soldiers, not the
working class, who, aside from their own atrocities, are the most truly
exploited persons on the planet.
We have, however, also seen four secular trends through the soldiers’
experience of modern battles. First, the ratio of casualties inflicted to rounds
fired reveals declining efficiency, despite the weapons’ becoming much
more lethal. In the musket era contemporary estimates of the ratio of shots
fired to casualties varied from one hit per 500 rounds to one hit per 2,000–
3,000 rounds fired.82 I earlier quoted the somewhat lower ratios suggested
for the U.S. Civil War. These numbers indicate low ability to inflict
casualties, probably due to the inaccuracy of the weapons and the difficulties
of firing them. Yet the coming of breech-loading rifles in the late nineteenth
century increased the frequency of shots fired, but not the casualty rate, and
this trend continued throughout the revolution in firepower that
characterized the twentieth century. More and more shots were needed on
average to inflict one casualty—10,000 in World War I, 20,000 in World War
II, and 50,000 in the Vietnam War. But in early twenty-first-century wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces fired an astonishing 250,000 shots for
every enemy killed!83 Equipped with automatic weapons, armies have not
become more efficient killing machines—quite the reverse. Overfiring
enables soldiers to relieve their fear by activity, spraying bullets in all
directions, while prudently retaining concealed positions—as the enemy
does, too—not because they are cowards, but because they are reasonably
fearful of these lethal weapons. Even the simple Kalashnikov wielded by
guerillas and terrorists is a far deadlier weapon than the musket. Expose
yourself to enemy fire and you die, unlike most U.S. Civil War soldiers.
Second, Ardant du Picq had observed in the 1860s the increasing
dispersion of the battlefield. This continued right into the twenty-first
century, reducing officers’ direct control over their soldiers. Drilling and
discipline no longer have the same influence as in the past, and milder forms
of skulking, such as keeping one’s head down and doing the minimum, may
have increased. Strengthening the buddy system has been one response.
Another has been an emphasis on task completion to increase the pride in
skills and the sense of duty of soldiers—most notable in the case of pilots.
Third was a very large increase in recorded psychological wounds,
probably created by more diagnosis in modern societies. But I have not
found evidence that moral qualms have prevented soldiers or airmen from
shooting at or killing the enemy. Doubtless civilians like you or me might
experience some difficulty unless we were cast into the “kill or be killed”
hand-to-hand warfare of earlier times. But trained soldiers rarely do more
than hesitate momentarily before killing. Unfortunately, human beings are
not inherently pacific, not even in today’s relatively pacific civilian societies.
Men and probably women too can kill easily if ordered to by
institutionalized, legitimate political and military authorities. The norm that
civilians should not be killed is acknowledged by most soldiers. If they
nonetheless kill civilians deliberately or by accident, they may feel a little
remorse for their actions, but rarely enough to deter them from doing it
again. They rationalize killings in terms of military necessity and explain the
worst atrocities in terms of men “losing self-control” in fearful contexts.
Moral qualms tragically come after the war, morally destabilizing former
killers.
Fourth was the killing of more civilians. There have been no significant
attempts to curb this by introducing tighter rules of war. The euphemistic
term “collateral damage” is a callous attempt to sanitize and normalize the
killing of innocents (alongside the bizarre expression “friendly fire”).
Underlying this is a separation between wartime and peacetime norms. The
morality of the latter does not apply to the former.
But if pacifist-leaning soldiers are rare, so are sadists or heroes. I have
found two contributions made by human nature in battle. First, the rush of
energy coming from the adrenal glands produced by extreme fear or anxiety
in battle commonly generates suddenly greater strength, a racing pulse and
pounding heart, increased respiration, bodily trembling, and distorted vision.
This may induce soldiers to a fighting fury, charging forward, yelling and
slaughtering anyone in the way. Alternatively, extreme fear may induce loss
of control of bodily functions or terrified flight. Human physiology, like
human psychology, is ambivalent about killing—fight or flight.
 One human emotion dominates the battlefield—fear. The prospect of
death or mutilation terrifies virtually all soldiers. What Durkheim called
“altruistic suicide,” deliberately sacrificing one’s life for others or for a
cause, is rare. Islamist terrorists are often exceptions because of their
commitment to a transcendent ideology, absent from today’s professional
armies. But fear of death or mutilation is prevalent in almost all wars. The
generals know this yet believe fear can be managed. Although fear can
incapacitate the soldier mentally or physiologically, or compel him to flee,
most soldiers do stay and fight, at first with rising, then diminishing vigor,
keeping heads down and blazing away from cover. Since the enemy is
likewise fearful and cautious, battle remains inefficiently balanced.
In modern times numerous factors may overwhelm qualms and manage
fear: desire for adventure inflected by patriotism and manly honor, drills and
discipline, professional commitment to and absorption in military tasks,
confidence in army organization and ultimate victory, commitment to one’s
buddies, commitment to an ideology, and the perceived virtue of self-
defense. Their precise mixture varies among circumstances. Modern Western
armies have not been very ideological, although they are permeated by a
latent sense of national identity and patriotism. Transcendent ideology has
figured more in communist forces, as we have just seen, and among religious
forces, as we see in the next chapter. Malešević says of small military and
paramilitary forces that soldiers were receptive to ideologies “only when
they were successfully couched in the language of comradeship, kinship,
neighbourhood, and friendship.”84 Ideologies need more concrete grounding
if they are to move soldiers to a high level of commitment. But dealing with
large armies fighting over broad fronts, concrete is also provided by patriotic
identity, hatred, and repetitive collective and educational rituals. We pin
derogatory labels on such fighters, such as “fanatics,” “zealots,” or
“pathological.” We do not care to admit that they believe more strongly in
their cause and are braver than our own soldiers. Thus, they have greater
staying power, withstanding enormous technological inferiority. Among the
combatants I have discussed, they are matched in banishment of fear and
acceptance of high risk of death only by fighter pilots, who are totally
absorbed in a difficult, dangerous, and highly skilled task that yields very
high social status. But confidence in the army’s ability to achieve ultimate
victory is more widely important. If confidence in victory crumbles, so does
the army.
 Monarchs, dictators, presidents, and parliamentary leaders initiate war,
but they do not experience battle. They are callous desk killers, inflicting
fear, death, and mutilation from afar on those they define as the enemy, on
their own soldiers, and on nearby civilians. This is perhaps the greatest
inequality in life chances in the world today. Killing in battle occurs when
rulers proclaim it as legitimate, and where their militaries create institutions
and culture that enable this to be accomplished in an orderly way so that
victory seems possible. Intense military power relations, the combination of
disciplined obedience to hierarchy and close comradeship, can overcome
human repugnance to killing and the fear of being killed. Military power
triumphant can do this; military power enfeebled cannot. I prefer the latter.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

MOST RECENT WARS HAVE been fought in the Greater Middle East. To
explain them, we must understand the relations between two main sets of
actors: on the one hand, the Muslim peoples and states of the region, and on
the other, the interventions of empires from outside the region. Up to World
War II these empires had been mostly British, French, and Russian, and they
had destroyed the last indigenous empires of the region, the Persian and
Ottoman empires. Then the Europeans were displaced by the United States
and the Soviet Union. Their interventions during the Cold War had nothing
to do with religion. Instead, the misfortunes of the region were the
possession of oil fields and a strategic position between capitalist and
communist areas. After the Soviet collapse, the United States was left as the
major imperial intervener. From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century,
direct or indirect colonial rule in the region by the British and French
empires had inspired much resistance. When the imperial torch passed to the
Soviets and the United States, they sought only informal empire, not
territorial control, using military interventions to strengthen or replace local
regimes. They sought global grandeur and oil, though they both claimed
their missions were defensive, countering the aggression of the other.
The Soviets tended to help self-described leftist states, whereas the
United States helped conservatives and monarchists. Both formally
denounced imperialism while pursuing it. Yet even before the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the region’s leftist regimes, Nasserite or Ba’athist, were
degenerating into corrupt authoritarianism, failing to sustain the economic
development they had promised. That was also true of other regimes in the
region, however, unless they had an abundance of oil, in which case they had
development for the powerful, and some crumbs for the masses. The United
States, the Soviets, and their clients had failed to bring democratic capitalism
or socialism to the region. Increasingly, local opposition movements
attacked their rulers as stooges of the imperialists promoting decadent
Western secular culture. This led opposition movements to draw on the
power resource that they alone possessed—Islam. “Islam is the solution”
became the dominant slogan of “Islamism.” The West calls this
“fundamentalism,” a return to the supposedly divinely revealed truths of the
seventh century. This increasingly became the main opposition force to
unpopular secular regimes.1
Islamism is popularly rooted in the everyday practices of the people. It
is helped by Islam’s independence from the state and lack of an
institutionalized church hierarchy, though this is truer of Sunni than of Shi’a
sects. Although the imams generally oppose Islamism, they lack much
influence.2 There have been important Islamist intellectuals, and simplified
versions of their teachings have resonated widely. Although violent jihadists
constitute only a tiny minority of all Islamists, they can elicit enough
sympathy among the masses to provide persistent recruitment of young men
and women as shock troops.
The Islamist offensive was dual, Shi’a and Sunni. In 1979 the Shi’a
Islamic Revolution in Iran overthrew the shah, widely seen in the country as
a corrupt and repressive puppet of the United States. A brief struggle for
power ensued between a more secular coalition and Islamists, who managed
to mobilize the mosques and bazaars to seize power. Their leader, the
Ayatollah Khomeini, proclaimed an expansive goal: “We export our
revolution to the four corners of the world because our revolution is Islamic;
and the struggle will continue until the cry of ‘There is no god but Allah, and
Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ prevails throughout the world.”
Such rhetoric is far removed from reality. Shi’a Islam is dominant in
Iran, but Shi’a constitute only about 15 percent of Muslims in the world.
Shi’a rule could not possibly extend to “the four corners of the world,” and
the main focus was national. Khomeini’s regime imposed a repressive
theocracy on the country, though with democratic trimmings such as
elections. Islamist rule at home and some export in the region were
spearheaded by the development of the 200,000-strong Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps, independent of the armed forces, commanding
its own separate air force and navy, and in command of Iranian missile
development—the biggest “praetorian guard” in history, established by an
autocratic regime distrustful of the regular armed forces, in this case
considered insufficiently ideological.
Among Sunnis, the Saudi monarchy had embraced Wahhābī doctrine,
the most traditional reversion to seventh-century ideals. The Saudi regime
used its oil wealth to finance Wahhābī networks of schools, universities, and
communications media across the Middle East. From these and other
transnational networks emerged small Sunni movements espousing jihad, or
holy war, to spread the faith transnationally to Sunni Muslims almost
everywhere. The most important movement initially was the World Islamic
Front, dominated by Saudis and led by Osama bin Laden, who declaimed in
1998, “Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds,
defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: ‘But when the forbidden months
are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them,
beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)’; and
peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-’Abdallah, who said: I have
been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah
is worshipped.”3
Thus jihadists, holy warriors, had penetrated both of Islam’s main sects.
The beliefs they sought to impose were sharia law and the hadith, the divine
revelations of the Prophet Muhammad, in the Shi’a case buttressed by the
authority of the ayatollahs. Jihadists advocated spreading truth through holy
war. The declared enemies of jihadi movements like Al Qaeda, the Taliban,
and Daesh (or ISIS) are not only secular Muslim regimes but also Western
regimes, especially the United States and Great Britain, who were
persistently intervening in Muslim countries, and whose supposedly
degenerate secular culture was said to corrupt Muslim society. It is common
in Western societies, and especially in the United States, to blame Middle
Eastern wars on these jihadists, and some Westerners go further and identify
Islam itself as a violent religion.
Two political scientists have offered Islam-centered theories of recent
wars. The first, Samuel Huntington, announced the coming of a global
“clash of civilizations,” some defined by their religion, others by culture and
language. He analyzed nine such civilizations but gave primacy to what he
saw as an unusually aggressive Islam embarking on clashes with
neighboring religions, principally Christianity and Hinduism. He was right
to emphasize a tense “fault line” between these religions stretching across
North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.4 Yet this fault line has
produced more communal rioting and MIDs than full-fledged wars. In fact,
more armed conflict has occurred within Islam than between it and outsiders,
while most wars with outsiders resulted from or were aggravated by Western
military aggression, which Huntington ignores.
The second, John Owen, suggests recent wars have formed a single
wave of ideological warfare sweeping across the greater Middle East,
analogous to the three previous waves of ideological wars in Europe
discussed in chapter 8. He counts nine cases between 1958 and 2009,
although he included only regime-change interstate wars.5 This excludes
nonstate jihadists like Al Qaeda, and ISIS had barely surfaced at the time he
wrote.
In reality, most of Owen’s nine wars did not significantly involve
religion. Three were initiated by American interventions against relatively
secular regimes of the region. The targets were Muslim countries, but
religious motives were not evident. Owen erroneously labels two more cases
as Islamist: the foreign invasions of Jordan in 1958 and of north Yemen in
1962. Here the intervening states were offering help in civil wars between
monarchists and leftist republicans, neither of these being Islamist and each
supported by other Muslim states. Britain aided the monarchists, the Soviets
the republicans. They also occurred too early to be influenced by the rise of
jihadism. In two further cases of civil war in Afghanistan, one side was
Islamist, but the other was more secular and was aided by the Soviets in
1979 and the United States in 2001. Islam was important here, but only on
one side. The 1980 war between Sunni Iraq and Shi’a Iran did have religious
coloration on both sides. An Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 1982
obviously had Jewish versus Muslim aspects—as did several Israeli-Arab
wars not seeking regime change—though these primarily involved a material
struggle over land. So only three of nine cases had a substantial religious
input; four involved U.S. troops, and one involved Soviet troops. They are
too disparate to be considered a single wave, and foreign, especially
American, imperialism was important. Perhaps Owen was perspicacious, for
greater religious input became evident after he wrote—but alongside the
return of imperialism.
Consider this list of American military interventions, large and small, in
Muslim countries since 1986, excluding operations designed only to secure
the evacuation or rescue of Americans from war zones: the 1986 bombing of
Libya, 1987–88 attacks on various Iranian targets, 1991 Operation Desert
Storm invasion of Iraq, 1992–2003 no-fly zones and bombings of Iraq, 1993
Somali fiasco, 1998 cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan, 2001
onward invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, 2003 onward invasion and
occupation of Iraq, 2004 onward drone strikes on at least six Muslim
countries, 2011 bombing of Libya, 2014 onward military intervention on the
ground and air in Syria. These actions were not unprovoked, and I am not
here concerned with how legitimate they were. But they reveal that the
major player in “Muslim wars” has been the United States.
Robert Pape analyzes suicide bombings and finds they are more likely
when people feel their homeland is occupied (especially when the occupier
is of a different religion), and when the occupier has far superior military
power yet is seen as lacking stomach for the fight, as they suppose
democracies to be. He concludes that suicide terrorism is a strategic weapon
of the weak, wielded by young men and women seeing themselves as
altruists for their group. During the period he studied, suicide bombings
were committed by a variety of religious and nationalist groups.6 Since then,
almost all bombers have been Muslims, and their targets have often been
nondemocratic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia. But his model does seem
particularly appropriate for struggles between Muslim jihadists and the
United States.
So there were four types of war fought in the region: Muslim states
fighting non-Muslim but nonimperial states; Islamic sects fighting against
each other; jihadists fighting against more secular Muslims; and foreign
imperialists initiating wars against both Islamic jihadists and unfriendly
states. I start with Muslim/non-Muslim wars between neighbors not
involving Western imperial intervention.

Muslim against Non-Muslim Neighbors: (1) Arab-Israeli Wars

This was a unique series of wars, the only ones fought between Jews and
Muslims and the only ones involving a people fleeing pogroms—indeed, a
Holocaust—and founding a new state whose rule involved settler
colonialism imposed on an indigenous people.
The state of Israel was founded in May 1948. Up to 2014 there were
twelve conflicts between it and surrounding Arab states and movements,
each one of which met the CoW standard for a war of over one thousand
battlefield deaths. There were also several lesser MIDs in that period. War
occurred in about half the years, a very high proportion. Almost all ended in
Israeli victories. Because of their defeats, the Arab states were forced into
lopsided peace deals with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. The
periods of peace have enabled Israelis to establish more and more
settlements over land and houses formerly owned by Palestinians, many of
whom were forced into refugee camps. Since 1967, every Israeli government
has expanded Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. Over 400,000
Jewish citizens now live in the West Bank settlements, including urban East
Jerusalem, where Arab residents cannot get building permits to confirm their
residence there. In consequence, they are forcibly evicted. There are also
lesser Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.
In 2022 landgrabbing still continued. A protest over the eviction of
Arab property owners from East Jerusalem grew into a riot, and then into
armed conflict as the Palestinian Hamas militia lobbed rockets into Israel,
and the Israeli military responded with air and artillery strikes on the Gaza
Strip. As usual, the casualty ratio was lopsided. Above 230 Palestinians were
killed, including 60 children, a sign that most casualties were probably
civilians. The Israelis lost twelve dead, including one child. Twenty
Palestinians were killed for every Israeli victim. The United States was at
first supportive of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” repeatedly vetoing a UN
resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. President Joe Biden had
several private conversations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but
he would not speak to Hamas leaders, whom the U.S. government defines as
terrorists. But in the Middle East, state terrorism is far more deadly than
paramilitary terrorism. Biden may have privately put some pressure on
Netanyahu since he faced dissent inside the Democratic Party, but Egyptian
leaders appear to have been the negotiators of the eventual cease-fire.
Religious differences are central drivers of these conflicts. The
combatants do not try to impose their religion on each other, but both believe
they have a divine right to the same land. The Hebrew Bible claims that God
promised the land of Israel to the children of Israel, and this is now inscribed
in the platforms of several Jewish political parties. To the contrary, say
Arabs, the Land of Canaan was promised to Ishmael, the elder son of
Abraham, from whom they claim descent. Muslims and Jews also revere
holy sites in the same places, such as the Cave of the Patriarchs and the
Temple Mount. Since Muslims controlled these sites for 1,400 years, they
constructed holy buildings such as the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa
Mosque. Jerusalem is thus the epicenter of conflict. Neither the initial
political elite of Israel nor the Palestinian people were renowned for their
religiosity, but in an age of nationalism, their ethnic identity as Jews and
Arabs has greatly reinforced the struggle.
On the Jewish side, extremism has been boosted by relatively poor
immigrant Jews coming from Arab countries, Eastern Europe, and Russia.
They seek land and housing and are prepared to seize them from the Arab
occupants. Their increasing numbers have improved the electoral fortunes of
Israeli conservative and religious parties pressuring for more landgrabs.
Many Israeli Jews have also learned a lesson from the Holocaust that differs
from the lesson liberals had expected, that this appalling experience would
make them more tolerant of minorities. To the contrary, most Jewish Israelis
seem to believe that to survive as a people, they must use to the full
whatever coercive powers they have—and of course the rhetoric of some
Palestinians is to “throw them into the sea.” Since Israeli Jews have the
military and political power to seize Arab lands, most of them believe they
have the right to do so, in the name of ethnic survival. Their ambition is
boosted by access to international capital, which has enabled them to build a
modern state, a modern military, and modern capitalism—to make the desert
bloom. Do we not deserve it? they ask rhetorically.
Palestinians are predominantly poor, desperately dependent in their two
enclaves on the Israelis for essential services, abandoned by foreign powers,
subjected to continuing ethnic cleansing. Their politicians are deeply divided
and have achieved little for them. Many young men and women look in
desperation for protection from terrorist militias. When they throw rocks at
Israeli police and soldiers, the Israeli response is state terrorism, bringing in
return more militia attacks. The resulting twenty-fold disparity in fatalities
alienates Palestinians further from Israel and seems to some to confirm the
Hamas claim that only armed struggle can bring satisfaction, if not actual
gains. So despite the two communities’ fierce hatred of each other, Israeli
politicians such as former Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Hamas
paramilitaries are in effect conspiring together, living off each other’s
aggression, one to win elections, the other to find new militia recruits, each
maintaining power among their own people by prolonging the struggle.
 Of course, they have not been the only players. Yet the Arab states
found that involvement burned them, while British and French power
declined and the Soviet Union collapsed. During the 1950s and early 1960s,
France was the main collaborator in the Israeli nuclear program, while the
United States tried to restrain that program. But then pro-Israeli American
Jews’ ability to organize the electoral defeat of U.S. politicians critical of
Israel, the decline of American anti-Semitism, and the growing pro-Israeli
sentiments among Evangelicals made Israel the most favored U.S. ally,
rewarded with massive economic and military patronage. Until the Afghan
and Iraq wars brought temporary U.S. aid there, Israel was for three decades
the leading recipient of its aid, amounting to between $3 and $4 billion per
year, while aid to the Palestinian authority was only between $130 million
and $1 billion. Initially, aid to Israel included much economic assistance, but
almost all aid is now military. In 2019 the United States gave $3.8 billion in
military aid to Israel, in addition to $8 billion in loan guarantees. But these
figures exclude Department of Defense “missile defense” aid, which added
another 40 percent to this total.7 The explicit promise is to give Israel a
“qualitative military edge” over all its neighbors. And just as war with the
Palestinians broke out again in 2021 came a further $735 million in high-
tech weaponry offered by the United States to Israel.
This is unique among U.S. policy failures in the Middle East, the one
case where the United States potentially had the power to put pressure on
both sides by threatening to withdraw assistance to them both unless they
came to the negotiating table. But American presidents have shown less and
less inclination to attempt this. In 1981 U.S. aid amounted to nearly 10
percent of the Israeli economy. But the decline in economic aid means that
total current economic aid is only about 1.5 percent of all aid. As for Israelis,
most leaders have lost interest in any peace process; instead, they have done
pragmatic economic deals with some Arab states, and they seem willing to
take a few intermittent casualties in Palestine for increases in territory. Peace
and genuine settlement of the dispute is now a glimmer on the far horizon.
Both sides and the United States could in collaboration bring it closer.

Muslim against Non-Muslim Neighbors: (2) Nagorno-Karabagh

These wars ranged a Muslim against a neighboring Christian country, with
no significant imperial intervention. The somewhat secularized Shi’a
Muslim regime of Azerbaijan and an Armenia adhering to the Christian
Apostolic Church dispute the territories between them known as Nagorno-
Karabagh. These territories have been recognized internationally since
Soviet times as part of Azerbaijan, although about 75 percent of the
population was then Armenian Christian. The Soviets had damped down
disputes between the communities, but in 1988, just before the Soviet
collapse, and provoked by a pogrom of Armenians in the city of Sumgait, a
large Armenian movement in the region declared independence from
Azerbaijan, aided by the rulers of Armenia, which, although formally a
secular state, has a 90 percent Christian population. The ensuing war lasted
until 1994, killing perhaps 30,000 people; around a million refugees fled
from the fighting. Religious artifacts and buildings were targeted and
destroyed in that war, but religion was less important than ethnicity in the
war. Armenian forces won and gained control over all of Nagorno-Karabagh
as well as some connecting Azeri territories depopulated through ethnic
cleansing of Azeris. Christians were now the vast majority of the people
remaining in Nagorno-Karabagh, and two successive referenda there
produced more than 90 percent of votes (on high turnouts) endorsing
separation from Azerbaijan and union with Armenia. A Russian-brokered
cease-fire uneasily held for twenty-two years from 1994 as Russia, the
United States, and France chaired fruitless mediation efforts. A brief MID
flare-up in 2016 claimed one hundred lives, but no territorial changes
resulted.
The Azerbaijan regime remained revisionist, however, and modernized
its armed forces. Azeri forces probed briefly in 2016, but in October 2020
they invaded Nagorno-Karabagh en masse. Superior military technology
overcame fierce Armenian resistance, especially through drones supplied by
Israeli-Turkish collaboration. Military operations were probably directed by
Turkish officers.8 President Recep Erdogan was aiding a fellow Turkic
people while advancing his own regional power. Armenian forces had
neither drones nor the weapons to shoot them down. Syrian mercenaries
were also recruited by Turkey, some experienced fighters, some raw recruits.
They were cannon fodder for Azeri forces on the bloody southern front to
reduce Azeri casualties—“risk transfer militarism.” After forty-four days
Russia threatened intervention, and so Azeri forces stopped. Negotiations
chaired by Russia resulted in the cession of territory, mostly outside
Nagorno-Karabagh, which Armenia had held. This makes communication
between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabagh problematic, since the connecting
roads now pass through Azeri-held territory. Two thousand Russian
peacekeepers were deployed for five years to keep them open. This was a
clear-cut Azeri victory costing at least four thousand Armenian and nearly
three thousand Azeri casualties. A few hundred civilians were also killed.
Another bout of ethnic cleansing and destruction of religious monuments
saw Armenians fleeing from the ceded territories, often burning down their
houses as they left. Azeris came in to replace them, some reclaiming
property their families had once owned. Further MIDs in which a few troops
were killed occurred in May and November 2021, Azeris seemingly the
aggressors, as they were again in 2022 when about 300 troops, mostly
Armenian, were killed. By then the Russian presence was weakening
because of the war in Ukraine. What will happen when the Russian troops
leave?
The conflict had not primarily concerned religion in the sense of
doctrinal or ritual disputes, nor did either state seek to impose its religion on
the other community. These were primarily ethnic conflicts, Azeris against
Armenians, both now governed by radical nationalist intelligentsia, to decide
who would dominate these territories.9 Nonetheless, since religion is the
core of their ethnicity, some religious hatreds were stirred up, as revealed in
the destruction of churches and mosques. Azeris were also bolstered
ideologically by the righteousness normally possessed by revisionists: this
region had belonged to us and was taken from us illegitimately by force.
Armenians were bolstered by democratic righteousness, the right of a
population to choose its government, as revealed in the referenda. Some also
feared a second genocide. Memories of the genocide at the hands of the
Turks in 1915 is an important part of Armenian identity and had been stirred
up by the Sumgait pogrom perpetrated by Azeris, whom most Armenians
call “Turks.” The United States was not involved in this war, and though
Russia had provided arms to both combatants, it was directly involved only
in settling the war. Turkey was heavily implicated, and for very mixed
motives. This revisionist struggle may not be over.

Islamic Sectarian Wars

For over a millennium Islam has contained rival Sunni and Shi’a sects,
ultimately deriving from a seventh-century succession dispute over who
should succeed Muhammad. For most of this long stretch of history, Sunni
and Shi’a uneasily coexisted, arguing about historical legitimacy and
religious ritual, occasionally fighting each other. The Shi’a, being minorities
almost everywhere except in Persia (now Iran), tended of necessity to adopt
quietist doctrines, while in Persia Shi’a clergy were usually subordinated to a
secular state. Wars broke out when sectarian conflict legitimated geopolitical
struggle, as in the many wars during 1559 to 1648 between the Sunni
Ottoman Empire and the Shi’a Persian Empire. These wars intermittently
continued until 1823. Yet these wars had reflected geopolitical more than
religious motives.
Shi’a and Sunni tend to dominate different states. Shi’a predominate in
Iran, Azerbaijan, and less substantially in Iraq and Bahrain. The rest of the
Muslim world is majority Sunni, who amount to over 80 percent of all
Muslims. Thus, in most countries significant internal conflict will pit Sunnis
against Sunnis, for the simple reason that there aren’t enough Shi’a to form a
major movement.10 The converse is true in Iran (90 percent Shi’a) and
Azerbaijan (85 percent Shi’a). There have been two major cases, however, in
which a geopolitical struggle between states was amplified by a sectarian
divide between them, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and the simmering
Iran–Saudi Arabian confrontation enduring today.
In 1980 Iraqi forces launched an invasion of Iran. For the Iranian
regime, this was a war of self-defense, defending especially its recent
Islamist revolution. The Islamic Republican Guard provided its vanguard
force, advancing in human waves, suffering heavy losses, who were
glorified as martyrs. Iran’s only ally was the Alawite Shi’a ruling (but
minority) community of Syria. On the Iraqi side, help came from many
Sunni states and from the United States. Though the government of Saddam
Hussein was predominantly Sunni, it was also rather secular. Saddam had
launched his surprise attack on Iran believing that this was a window of
opportunity, that recent revolutionary chaos had weakened the Iranian
military. But there was also a sectarian motive, for he feared the Shi’a
revolution in Iran might spark off a revolt in Iraq by the majority Shi’a
population whom he kept in a subordinate role. He also hoped to annex an
oil-rich province. So the war was both a geopolitical and an ideological
sectarian struggle with material goals added. After eight years of slaughter,
the war ended in stalemate back at the preexisting boundaries. Superior Iraqi
weapons had been countered by superior Iranian morale; a million Iranians
and half a million Iraqis were dead—the third deadliest war in modern times
in terms of deaths as a proportion of combatant country populations. Iran
was then put on the defensive by American hostility but semicovertly aided
Shi’a movements elsewhere.
The second major sectarian confrontation came after the 2003 defeat of
Saddam and the collapse of Iraq. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia were left
as the dominant regional powers, both major oil powers. Their struggle had
intensified as Islamist hard-liners took over in both countries, the ayatollahs
in Iran, and Wahhābīs in Saudi Arabia. Both had propaganda and educational
networks aimed at coreligionists abroad. They are now the core adversaries
in a geopolitical-ideological struggle increasingly involving the United
States and three other countries, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen. The main
motive of the two powers has been geopolitical grandeur in the region.
Sectarianism, however, clearly dominated their choice of allies and clients.
No alliance among any of these states crossed sectarian lines.
The Arab Spring protests in March 2011 had direct sectarian
repercussions in Bahrain, where a popular protest movement based mainly in
the oppressed 60 percent Shi’a population was crushed by Bahrain’s
minority Sunni government’s armed forces, which included many foreign
mercenaries, supplemented by one thousand Saudi and five hundred UAE
soldiers. All these forces were Sunni. The regime then destroyed about forty
Shi’a mosques, a clear gesture of sectarian repression. This had been a brief
civil war between rival Islamic religious communities in which the Sunni
government triumphed over a popular insurrection that was largely though
not entirely Shi’a.
There were bigger repercussions in Syria, where Arab Spring peaceful
protests were met by repression by President Bashar al-Assad. This turned
protest into armed rebellion aimed at removing him. The core of his regime
was the Alawite Shi’a sect. The resistance was an amalgam of largely Sunni
groups, some quite secular, such as the Free Syrian Army and the Kurdish-
Arab Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and some jihadists, like the al-Nusra
Front and ISIS. This war saw the largest recruitment of jihadists, and they
increasingly dominated the rebel forces. Samar Yazbek quotes anti-Assad
militia leaders she interviewed who voiced murderous sentiments toward
Alawites, whom they called “apostates.”11 She managed with some
difficulty to conceal the fact that she was an Alawite. Although there was an
underlying conflict between most Alawites and many Sunnis, the civil war
itself amplified murderous hatreds, exacerbated also by an influx of over ten
thousand foreign Sunnis to fight the apostate Alawite regime.
Their factional animosities greatly weakened the rebels, as did their
inferior weaponry. Lacking antiaircraft guns, they were helpless against
bombing from planes and from helicopters dropping barrels loaded with
explosives. The Saudis and Qatar supplied them with simple arms up to
2017. Shi’a Iran and Hezbollah have supported Assad, whose air force was
aided by Russian planes from 2015 onward. The secular rebels were helped
by an international coalition led by the United States from 2014, but the
coalition provided much less aid than Russia did to Assad. The Americans
also focused on attacking ISIS, not Assad. Turkish ground forces attacked
both Assad and ISIS forces, but they focused most on the Kurdish SDF
militia since President Erdogan feared Kurdish resistance movements inside
Turkey. Israeli governments have also attacked Iranian and Hezbollah forces.
Amid such confusion, the Shi’a-Sunni axis has been only one strand of the
conflict. Exploiting the chaos, the Assad regime has been able with Russian
help and American distraction to survive, the ostensible winner of a
destroyed country. The United States and Saudi Arabia were on the losing
side, but the real losers were half a million Syrian dead, as well as the
shattered survivors of areas devastated by bombing targeted deliberately at
civilians, and at least 7 million fleeing as refugees abroad. The most perverse
legacy of this internationalized civil war was the creation of Syrian
mercenary forces, young men with or without military experience but with
no job prospects in Syria, organized by the Turkish military to fight for pay
in Libya and Nagorno-Karabagh, a strategy of “risk-transfer militarism” to
protect Libyan and Azeri forces.
The third case of sectarian civil war is Yemen. The Sunni former
government of the country controls much of the predominantly Sunni south,
although Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates and regional separatists are also active
there. In the north the Houthis, a Shi’a Zaydi sect, from 2004 fought
repeated wars against the Sunni government with support from a Shi’a
population feeling exploited by the central government. A string of victories
culminated in their seizing the capital, Sanaa, in 2014. Because the Houthis
had overthrown a supposedly legitimate government, the UN authorized
sanctions against them, but not military operations. But war escalated in
2016 when Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Gulf sheikdoms began bombing
and blockading the Houthis, who receive help only from Shi’a Iran. The
Saudis are backed up by Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Bahrain, and the United Arab
Emirates, all Sunni states, in addition to the United States and Britain, who
until 2021 defined the Houthis as a terrorist organization. ISIS also attacks
the Houthis as apostates, just as ISIS in Afghanistan now bombs Shi’a
mosques. By the end of 2021 the UN estimated that the war had killed
370,000, mostly civilians. Oxfam and the UN estimated that 15 or 20 million
Yemenis would not have enough food by the end of 2021. Deaths are
resulting from lack of food, inadequate health services, and infrastructure
destroyed by Saudi-led aerial bombing and blockades and Houthi artillery
shelling. The UNHCR also noted that during 2015–20 over 4 million
Yemenis had become refugees. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—
Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death—gallop together across Syria and
Yemen.
Two more countries saw sectarian violence between Shi’a and Sunnis.
In Iraq before 2003, Saddam’s regime rested mainly on Sunnis, 35 percent of
the population, repressing the 65 percent Shi’a (these figures include Kurds
of both sects). Control was reversed after the U.S. invasion, but this sparked
a civil war that still simmers. In Lebanon Shi’a represent 60 percent of
Muslims, Sunnis 35 percent, but each sect dominates its own regions, and
Lebanese Christians outnumber each of the Muslim sects. After a period of
broadly successful power sharing, Lebanon descended into chaos, but
Muslim sectarianism was not a major cause. Hezbollah is a large Shi’a
paramilitary force in Lebanon, pursuing violence there and against Israel. It
is not fundamentally sectarian, however, for it cooperates with the
Palestinian Hamas paramilitary, which is Sunni. The war in Lebanon is only
marginally sectarian. Additionally, atrocities have intermittently occurred
against Shi’a minorities in Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Nigeria, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
All these cases reveal that sectarian Islamic aspects of civil and
interstate wars have been growing. Iran-Saudi confrontations might be
considered a more geopolitical than sectarian ideological struggle. Yet since
each side allies only with cosectarians, this suggests more religious input,
not so much doctrinal as a question of which community will dominate. This
has increasingly involved the United States on the Sunni side, as I discuss
later.

Transnational Jihadi Wars: Islamic State

Jihadi wars have received considerable attention because the jihadists have
attacked Western as well as Muslim countries. Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and its
affiliates, and Islamic State movements variously called Daesh, ISIL, and
ISIS (the collective term I will use) have spawned affiliates across most of
the Muslim world—in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South
Asia. Hezbollah is the only Shi’a organization, and it has a legitimate
political presence in Lebanon. It is much less radical, its goals limited to
Lebanon and Israel. In Syria it is halfway to being a regular army with
Iranian state support. The main movements are Sunni, like Al Qaeda, ISIS,
and their affiliates. They are nonstate and much more radical. Al Qaeda
arose among various jihadi groups who in the 1990s had been repressed by
regimes in the region. Al Qaeda then focused on small-scale attacks on the
“far enemy,” the United States, while seeking to rally local Muslim
populations in pursuit of its jihadi goals. But after 9/11, the initial defeat of
the Taliban in Afghanistan, the death of bin Laden, and major
counterterrorist security measures, Al Qaeda lost much of its capacity to
strike at the far enemy and focused on local struggles. The revival of the
Taliban, however, may increase its activism. Here I focus on the Islamic
State, which has a broader striking range and is better-documented.
ISIS militants are ideological warriors driven by an aggressive reading
of the Quran, calling for a jihad, holy war, against the unbelievers. The
Quran says that it is for Christians to choose conversion to Islam, payment of
an extra poll tax, or death; Ibn Khaldun repeated this in 1377, and it has
again risen to prominence.12 But this holy war is shorn of the two
qualifications expressed in the Quran, that jihad might refer only to wars of
defense against unbelievers, and the “escape clauses” whereby those
ignorant of the true faith might be given time to repent.13 ISIS militants seek
to force conversions of Christians and Jews and to kill those who refuse or
who are “apostates,” like Shi’a, Alawites, Yazidi and Druze monotheists,
and Kurds, a mostly Sunni ethnic group who are more mystical and tolerant.
They also attack Sunni Muslims who have flirted with Western influences.
ISIS sees apostates everywhere—selling or consuming cigarettes, alcohol, or
drugs, with Western clothes, clean-shaven men, uncovered women,
“abnormal” sexual behavior, and voting in an election.
At its peak in 2014, ISIS had taken over about 40 percent of Iraq and 60
percent of Syria, founding a short-lived ISIS caliphate. In it, if Muslims
outwardly conformed, they were not in peril. In the capital, Raqqa, “Samer”
wrote a diary of daily life. He says public attendance at executions was
compulsory. Spectators had to mask their thoughts. “It’s very dangerous to
let your true feelings show because Daesh is eyeing the crowd; we are
utterly in their grip.” There were daily floggings. Teenage girls were forcibly
married to fighters, and women were harassed by the “modesty police.”
Arbitrary taxes were levied on shopkeepers.14 A mixture of coercion,
indoctrination, and effective governance meant that locals did not resist a
regime that was simultaneously a “mafia adept at exploiting decades-old
transnational gray markets for oil and arms trafficking . . . a conventional
military . . . a sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus . . . a slick
propaganda machine.”15
ISIS denounces Shi’a ritual innovations, such as worship at the graves
of imams and processional self-flagellation, which it says have no basis in
the Quran or the sayings of the Prophet. Two hundred million Shi’a are in
principle condemned to death or forced conversion, though there are too
many of them for this to be practical. Muslim heads of state are targets, for
they have elevated man-made law above the sharia law of God. ISIS even
persuaded many that the final war between Muslims and infidels had started,
in which Muslims would eventually triumph, and the end of days would
come.16 This is a transcendent ideology glorifying atrocious religious war.
ISIS kills men, women, and children and tortures and kills prisoners.
Killing allegedly adulterous women and homosexual men, and entire
organized sex slave markets, are legitimized by its readings of Quranic texts.
Like some customs relating to the Judeo-Christian Old Testament, these
reflected practices of ancient societies that are considered horrific today. Its
deeds put ISIS in the same atrocity league as the Nazis, while adding the
religious incentive that atrocities will be rewarded in heaven. The militants
do not feel moral qualms but proudly proclaim their brutality in horrific
videos. Their text, The Management of Savagery, declares that “the most
abominable of the levels of savagery” are better than “stability under the
order of unbelief.” Their atrocities have a dual rationality, however. They are
aimed at intimidating the enemy and at showing those who join the
movement they must go to any lengths to achieve the Islamic paradise.
There is no turning back.
ISIS appeals especially to Sunnis living under Shi’a rule in Iraq and
Syria.17 It first expanded in Iraq after the American defeat of Saddam
Hussein in 2003 handed over a previously Sunni government to Shi’a
leaders. Sunni tribal paramilitaries, the Sons of Iraq, were also sidelined by
the new government. Some top ISIS leaders had previously served in
Saddam’s military or security services, and so Ba’athism had returned as
jihadism. The ISIS appeal to Syrian Sunnis grew as Assad intensified
repression and as the fractious Syrian rebel groups produced chaos. These
crises, as well as the collapse of the Arab Spring revolts, made some
Muslims speculate on the apocalyptic possibility that the great military
leader, the Mahdi, might soon come to bring about the end of days.18 Ibn
Khaldun had poured ridicule on those who in the fourteenth century believed
this to be imminent.19 Some delusions never die.
In Syria the United States gave limited help to the anti-Assad rebels
while Assad used his airpower, later reinforced by Russia’s, to pour
indiscriminate devastation on rebel-held regions.20 Between them, they
unintentionally gave ISIS space to expand in a power vacuum across Syrian-
Iraqi borderlands. Their fanaticism yielded superior morale, which enabled
them to rout much larger Iraqi government forces. It seems appropriate to
describe this with the Arabic term asabiyya, greater normative solidarity. But
the subventions provided by wealthy Sunnis abroad also enabled them to
dominate the poorly equipped secular Syrian rebels. In the ISIS caliphate
foreign donations were supplemented by bank theft; selling oil, wheat, water,
and antiquities; human trafficking; extracting ransoms for kidnapped
foreigners; and imposing taxes on local economic activity.21 Rukmini
Callimachi says that ISIS files in Mosul reveal that “the tax revenue the
Islamic State earned far outstripped income from oil sales. It was daily
commerce and agriculture—not petroleum—that powered the economy of
the caliphate.” ISIS at one point had a daily income of U.S. $3 million and
an annual revenue of $2.9 billion.22 In some areas ISIS provided effective
police, courts, and city services. It mediated tribal disputes, and its justice
was swift. Kidnapping, robberies, and extortion declined, and municipal
workers were forced back to work. Some had formerly received their salaries
while doing nothing. It also imposed price controls on commodities such as
oil byproducts.23
Though hated by virtually all Muslim regimes, the jihadists have
enough popular support to survive state persecution. Several studies reveal
the background of ISIS militants. These are based on three sources:
government estimates, captured ISIS records, and in-depth interviews with
detained, defecting, or captured militants.24 Obviously, these are not random
samples of ISIS fighters, and the various samples may be presumed to have
biases, but they are the best we have.
They were virtually all Sunni Muslims; there were just a handful of
Shi’a and Christian converts. About half came from Syria or Iraq and half
were from foreign countries—perhaps forty thousand of them, all told. Most
foreigners were from Arab countries, but at the peak the largest group came
from Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian republics, then from Arab
countries, then from Europe, with a sprinkling from much farther afield.
Tunisia contributed the largest number of Arabs, and France contributed the
largest number of Europeans. So they were a veritable international brigade.
The studies find that they were mainly middle-class and quite well-
educated, except for the group who had been detained before they could
reach Syria or Iraq, who were mainly working-class and poorly educated.
But data obtained from ISIS records indicate that this was truer of the
foreigners than of the locals. Yet majorities in all groups had experienced
unemployment (most believed this was through discrimination). About one-
quarter had a petty criminal past or had spent time in prison—rarely for
terrorist offenses, mostly for drug offenses. These, together with other
“vulnerabilities” like unemployment, poverty, and family troubles
(especially evident among women), made them susceptible to making a
major change in their life, and friends and the internet were the main
persuaders into leaving. Their internet propaganda depends on video games
(the popular war game “Call of Duty” was transformed into “Call of Jihad”),
Twitter, and Facebook, as well as short films showing idealized life in the
caliphate.
They were overwhelmingly young, in their twenties, and around 80
percent were male. Most had been single when they joined the struggle, but
half the men were married by the time they were captured, having been
found wives by ISIS. Three-quarters of the women were foreigners and were
middle-class. Most of the women became brides thanks to ISIS, and their
role was the traditional one of bearing and rearing children and caring for
their menfolk. Only a few women fought, while at least two-thirds of the
men were fighters.
Scott Atran and his colleagues interviewed seventy young men in Iraqi
refugee camps.25 Most reported that they and most Sunnis had welcomed
ISIS as leading a “glorious revolution,” implementing divine rule through
sharia law. Ninety-three percent commended the Islamic State’s provision of
effective defense, commitment to religion, and implementation of sharia,
which resulted in security, stability, and everyday travel freedom because
they abolished checkpoints. ISIS brutality and corruption had then
undermined this support. Disillusionment was common in all the interview
surveys. Yet most still favored sharia law and opposed democracy, which
they said brought only conflict—as it had in Iraq. A desire for public order
overpowered desire for liberty and democracy. Ninety-four percent believed
that Iran and America conspired to “eliminate our [Sunni] religion.” They
would support another jihadi regime, should one arise. In Dagestan young
people were recruited by an online campaign focused on Muslim humiliation
and victimhood, an idealized Islamist life, and the duty of jihad.26 Farhad
Khosrokhavar sees young Muslims radicalizing from a sense of personal
humiliation and victimization in line with an Ummah community similarly
suffering. Speckhard and Ellenberg report that their interviewees privileged
their Islamic identity. Their ideological attachments were not so much
religious as political—jihadist, caliphate, anti-Western sentiments, and Sunni
rights. But unemployment, poverty, and just “helping” also figured.27 ISIS
recruits had heard of the military failure of Arab nationalism from the Six-
Day War of 1967 onward, and the unraveling of incipient welfare states by
neoliberal Arab regimes. Lydia Wilson agrees that the ideological core was
not Islamic doctrine but “a visceral feeling of oneness with the group.”28
Life in the caliphate was depicted as idealized camaraderie between fighters
and civilians, bonded by the fight for true Islam and the threat of death. She
interviewed Iraqi ISIS fighters in a Kirkuk jail. They were poor, illiterate,
often unemployed, and from big families. She added:

They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at

crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in
the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own
[Shi’a] government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic
caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the
crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young
men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not
radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out
of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in
pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but
cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.29
All these studies downplay doctrinal motivations. The main attraction was
the defense of an idealized Islamic community.
Brian Dodwell and his colleagues analyzed over 4,600 Islamic State
personnel records for foreign fighters in 2013 and 2014.30 Of these, 10
percent had experience in jihadi movements. Four hundred were under
eighteen, considered well-suited to suicide bombing. As in the other studies,
few claimed much knowledge of the Quran. Notes made on their files by
ISIS officials indicated searches for specialized professional skills. This was
in many ways a normal business organization. When asked whether they
wanted a fighting or a suicide role in ISIS, 12 percent chose suicide, and
those were mostly from the Middle East and North Africa. This contrasted
with the 56 percent of recruits who had preferred suicide, as recorded for six
hundred Al Qaeda foreign fighters in Iraq in 2007. These were all from Arab
countries, mainly Saudi Arabia, Libya coming in second.31 But these are
both astonishing totals, proof of extreme commitment.
ISIS fighters numbered between 30,000 and 80,000 during 2014–16.
Between 2015 and 2017 jihadists operating in Europe killed nearly 350
people.32 Using big data on the online behavior of thousands of ISIS
sympathizers in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium, Tamar
Mitts found that pro-ISIS tweets were significantly correlated with local
anti-Muslim hostility, as were descriptions of an idealized life in ISIS
territories and favorable views of foreign fighters. Muslim and anti-Muslim
extremists are locked together in an escalating spiral of hatred.33
In general, recruits could choose to fight as an individual nonmember,
usually for tribal allies, or pledge total allegiance to the group, which
brought more pay and status but was a commitment for life. Anyone
pledging allegiance and then seeking to leave was denounced as an apostate
and killed. All fighters had a two- to three-month course on the Quran on top
of their military training and then were sent in roughly equal numbers either
to the front or to border patrols.
Outside the short-lived caliphate, jihadi guerillas have shifted the
battlefield from jungles and mountains to cities, hiding among civilian
populations whom regimes and Americans would prefer not to target, since
that might alienate the local population. They use the weapons of the weak,
such as Kalashnikovs, machine guns, IEDs, the suicide belt, grenades for
street fighting, shoulder-held rocket grenades, and pickup trucks. They are
beginning to use drones. The IED involves a spotter looking for oncoming
vehicles, and a second person who remotely operates the bomb’s trigger. But
both are directly communicating through cellphones with a controller far
away, perhaps in an internet café.. They were outnumbered and
technologically overmatched, especially vulnerable to airpower. Yet high
commitment and morale enabled a stream of victories over regular and
conscript Syrian and Iraqi forces from 2014 to 2016. ISIS militants provided
at least seventy-two suicide bombers between January 2013 and March
2018, and well over one hundred who knew they were likely to die in their
attacks. These assassins were venerated as martyrs. High morale was evident
in the siege of Mosul, where few ISIS soldiers surrendered. One reason, says
Khosrokhavar, is that radicalized Islamists believe that if they engage in
jihadist action, God will intervene to establish a universal theocracy.34
Democratic triumphalist theory is rebuffed. ISIS, an authoritarian
movement, generates higher morale.
But American airpower ground them down. Mosul was devastated by
bombing and fell in July 2017. More surrenders came in early October 2017,
five hundred after eleven days of fighting at Tal Afar, and over one thousand
after three days at Hawija. Finally, Raqqa, the ISIS capital, fell on October
21. Foreign recruitment had slowed as the defeats came. Some foreign
fighters now vanished in a “meltaway” strategy, others languished in
detention centers, often refused reentry to their home country. Michael
Knights and Alex Almeida report that in January 2020, 14,000 to 18,000
ISIS fighters and helpers remained in Iraq and Syria.35 ISIS attacks fell
sharply but rebounded in 2019 and 2020, scattered mostly across rural areas,
relying on small-scale IED and nighttime attacks on villages and police
stations. As the United States and its allies pulled out troops, Iraqi forces
proved less effective at coping with them. ISIS is hurt but not finished. Its
attempt at a territorial caliphate failed because it played into American
strength at fixed-position warfare. Its role in Western countries has declined
as state intelligence agencies have intensified their surveillance, and almost
all attacks are committed by loners armed only with knives, guns, and
vehicles.36 But the digital caliphate remains vigorous, and the U.S. military
in 2020 counted 600 ISIS attacks in Syria and 1,400 in Iraq. Its staying
power is greater than that of the United States, although U.S. policy has
shifted toward drone warfare, which is less costly and provokes less
opposition at home. Khosrokhavar says the “salient trait of jihadism is its
flexibility and its capacity to adapt to extreme situations through
reorganization. Al-Qaeda and the jihadist movements are the first truly
global and transnational type of terrorism to perpetuate itself over time,
transform itself in the face of international and national repression . . . and
continue its struggle in multiple forms, varying them as circumstances
change and constantly constructing new ones.”37
There are other Islamist militias. ISIS-K is the long-surviving Afghan
offshoot, with whom the Taliban government has to deal. But jihadism has
grown across the north of Africa. Al-Shabaab operates in and around
Somalia, stretching as far as northern Mozambique—though here it seems
like a local movement protesting government mistreatment of the region and
lacking much Islamist coloration. Originally formed as the armed branch of
an opposition movement in Somalia, al-Shabaab declared allegiance to Al
Qaeda in 2004. It had success during 2005–12, minimally administering
much of Somalia. Its defeat of Ethiopian forces that had invaded to assist
government forces brought it nationalist credentials. It expanded activities
with atrocities committed in neighboring countries, whose retaliatory
crackdowns on their Muslim populations increased the flow of young
recruits. Al-Shabaab has been fractious and suffered defections to ISIS, but
it still has militants and commits bombings and assaults. It remains stronger
in rural areas, where it levies taxes and administers justice.38 African jihadi
networks are also intermingling with other guerilla groups in the eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo, whose government has invited in the
Ugandan army to help combat them. U.S. advisers have been active in
combat against militant groups, as have French forces in Francophone
Africa, although President Macron announced in mid-2021 that the French
troops would soon be removed. But the Taliban victory in Afghanistan is
likely to encourage jihadi activity in many places.

American Interventions
One cannot discuss jihadi wars without mentioning the United States. After
1945 the Middle East saw American-Soviet rivalry, fighting indirectly
through proxies, with competing ideologies of global domination. The
Soviet collapse in 1991 encouraged the United States into new offensives,
fighting “wars of choice” when the nation was not itself threatened. Thus, it
became the most aggressive military power in the world. The financial cost
is no problem for the United States. As the holder of the world’s reserve
currency, it can just print more money and take on debt to finance war. The
cost of war in lives, however, proved more problematic.
Most recent enemies identified by the United States have been Muslim
dictators, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad, and
the jihadi movements Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS. Unlike the Soviet
Union, these are hardly contenders for world domination. The “Axis of
Evil”—Iran, Iraq, North Korea—denounced by Bush the Younger involved
three lesser states, termed “terrorist” to amplify their threat. The “greatness”
of America as the arbiter of world conflict, “the leader of the free world,”
remains the core secular ideology justifying interventions. American power
will bring free market (that is, neoliberal) capitalism, higher living standards,
and democracy to benighted peoples. Women’s equality has been recently
added to the mission statement. The ideology is sincerely believed by
American administrations of both parties, the one remaining bipartisan
policy in a factionalized polity.
The results of American interventions, usually for regime change, have
been poor. Since 1945 U.S. goals have rarely been achieved through war.
Korea was a stalemate, leaving the peninsula exactly where it was before the
war, and adding great loss of life. Vietnam was a defeat. Most of the East
Asian region was won for capitalism not by war but by generous trade
agreements: economic power proved superior to military power. Defeat in
Vietnam then taught Americans caution for a decade, until they credited
Reagan with winning the Cold War, which restored American confidence.
Invasions of Panama and Grenada were easy victories over minnows, while
Serbia was a victory for NATO bombing allied to Croat and Bosnian forces
on the ground, bringing Serbia to the negotiating table. None of these wars
was authorized by the United Nations, and as wars of aggression they could
be considered war crimes, though there is no authority that could impose a
criminal trial on the United States.
The First Gulf War of 1990–91 was a full-scale invasion of Iraq in
response to the invasion by Saddam Hussein’s forces of Kuwait. So the
American-led response had the UN seal of approval, which by 1990 (unlike
1950 in Korea) brought genuine global legitimacy. And it was not anti-
Islamic since Kuwait and other U.S. allies were Muslim states. President
Bush the Elder brought the war to a halt when he had regained Kuwait and
taught Saddam a lesson, for he knew he lacked the political power to form a
stable alternative government in Iraq. He had hoped Saddam’s defeat would
lead to indirect regime change, through an army coup, but none came. There
were insurrections against Saddam in the Shi’a south and the Kurdish north,
but nothing stirred in Baghdad or the heartland, and Saddam savagely
crushed the risings. Over a further decade intermittent bombing by American
and British planes failed to stop Saddam from breathing defiance. The
hoped-for military coup never materialized.
In 1998 Congress and the Clinton administration increased the pressure
by almost unanimously passing the Iraq Liberation Act, committing the
United States to work for regime change in Iraq, though the means were not
clarified. Seventy-two military coups in Arab states had been attempted
between 1950 and 2009, and half had succeeded. This spurred authoritarian
rulers to curtail the autonomy of the armed forces—just as Chinese emperors
had. Rulers appointed generals on the basis of kinship, ethnicity, and sect;
built up alternative armed forces or security police to monitor the military;
split up tribes and clans in different regiments; rewarded loyalty through
grants from oil revenues or import licenses or milking nationalized
companies—all to cultivate the notion that “whatever they have is a gift
from the regime.” There were also purges. Coup-proofing has generally
worked, but at the cost—as in imperial China—of making the army
ineffective in battle, a cost that authoritarian rulers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Syria, and Egypt were willing to pay.39 Saddam could not be
overthrown from within, but his armed forces were enfeebled. They and the
ruling Ba’ath Party were plagued with corruption, the narrowing of the
social base of support, and hostilities between the various forces created by
Saddam as counterweights to the army. There was corruption, evasion of
conscription, desertion, low morale, and poor performance. It was all
effective at keeping Saddam in power, but the record of his armed forces was
poor.40
The 2000 election victory of Bush the Younger inaugurated a president
who lacked foreign policy experience and relied on Vice President Cheney, a
hawk who appointed neoconservatives recruited from right-wing think tanks
to most of the top foreign and defense posts. The atrocity of 9/11 then further
empowered them. That the Taliban government in Afghanistan was
sheltering Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda mastermind, gave a quasi-
legitimate motive of self-defense for intervention shared by both major
political parties. Only one representative and not one senator voted against
the invasion. In theory, international law would have required the United
States first to try negotiations with the Taliban and Pakistan to bring bin
Laden to an international court of justice. The Bush administration gave the
Taliban government only two weeks to hand over bin Laden, an absurdly
short period for realistic negotiations to take place. Yet since the United
States does not accept international judiciaries, this is pie in the sky. The
Taliban were also provincials, unaware of neocon determination to destroy
those who defied the United States. American and British forces invaded
Afghanistan at the end of 2001, and then it became the common enterprise of
NATO, although Afghanistan was 11,000 kilometers from the North
Atlantic.
The hawks then also used 9/11 to claim that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi
leader, supported Al Qaeda and possessed chemical weapons, claims that
most experts knew were false. Saddam actually hated Al Qaeda, which had
denounced him as an apostate, and he was a fairly secular ruler. But he was
foolish, believing that the United States would not invade, not appreciating
the effect of his own defiance on the new administration.
It is not clear whether a Democratic administration would have invaded
Iraq in 2003. The Democrats in both House and Senate were split. Yet the
hawks believed strongly in the mission of American military interventions,
and the flawed intelligence they presented on Saddam’s alleged weapons
persuaded almost all Republicans and some Democrats to support the war.
Some hawks (like Cheney) seemed to be pursuing American oil and
economic interests, though it was difficult to see what these might be. Unlike
the 1990–91 invasion, this one was not about oil. Others put U.S. grandeur
first. Yet they all shared the belief that they could bring human rights, free
markets, and democracy to the world, no longer deterred by Soviet
retaliation. They tried to calculate the war’s costs and benefits but they
grossly overestimated U.S. power—not military power, which they saw
would be overwhelming, but the political and ideological power to establish
stable rule after victory. They thought it would be a swift in-and-out
operation, never imagining having an army of occupation there for years.
Some claimed intervention would pay for itself through oil and other trade
deals. But they were ideologically blinded by the perceived virtue of their
cause, assuming that the allure of their version of freedom and democracy
was so strong that Afghans and Iraqis would welcome U.S. forces as
liberators. Cheney declared just before the invasion: “I really do believe that
we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last
several months myself, had them to the White House. . . . The read we get on
the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want is to get rid of
Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when
we come to do that.”41
This was mind-boggling given that for ten years the United States had
been imposing economic sanctions on Iraq that were backed by bombing,
which caused civilian suffering and children’s deaths, much publicized by
Saddam. How could that have led to massive Iraqi support? But calculations
were unnecessary: the flow of history toward democracy would bring swift
victory. They were wrong, for public order is a precondition for democracy,
as Francis Fukuyama argued.42 Those young Arab refugees whom I quoted
earlier valued public order over democracy. Yet the United States produced
disorder.
Robert Draper, working from interviews with administration insiders
and newly released documents, emphasizes Bush’s own role in the rush to
war in Iraq. He says Bush experienced a conversion in 2002, conjoining
ideology and emotion to evoke a “piercing clarity of purpose” and an
“unchecked self-confidence” “to liberate a tormented people,” and “to end a
tyrant’s regime.” Meeting with the reluctant Jordanian king, he snapped:
“Saddam is a bad guy. . . . My opinion of him hasn’t changed. We need to
take him down.” Bush’s voice rose as he declaimed: “History has called us.”
Bush kept repeating that Saddam hated America because he hated freedom,
and freedom was the sacred heart of America. Draper opines, “His
increasingly bellicose rhetoric reflected a wartime president who was no
longer tethered to anything other than his own convictions.” While speaking
to Asian journalists in the Oval Office, Bush pointed to portraits of
Churchill, Lincoln, and Washington and said that he was, like them, “a
leader who knew who he was and who knew what was right.” He was “a
good versus evil guy,” the one “decider,” and he used the power of the
presidency to sideline contrary opinions within the administration. Of
course, most officials around him were hawks who agreed with him. Bush’s
rigid naïveté and lack of interest in the costs and consequences of war
appalled a few staffers, but they dared not object for fear of losing influence
or jobs. George Tenet believed his CIA’s role was to serve his “First
Customer,” the president, so dissenters within the agency were not allowed
to express criticism—or concluded it was wiser not to. Secretary of State
Colin Powell, the likeliest dissenter, caved in with a speech at the UN
declaring that Iraqi trucks using balloons for weather forecasting were in fact
mobile chemical weapons labs.43 UN delegates laughed at him. In
retirement, he alone has been contrite. But the ability of an ideological-
emotional ruler armed with presidential powers, surrounded by a clique of
like-minded advisers, to take the country to war reinforces my belief that
democracy is irrelevant to war-and-peace decisions.
The United States invaded Iraq in early 2003. It had failed to get
Security Council approval, so this invasion was in principle a war crime.
Both invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq brought swift battlefield victories
and the fall of the Kabul and Baghdad regimes. But neither brought the
desired results, as critics, including myself, had predicted.44 The wars had
little popular resonance in the United States, although most Americans
initially believed what their leaders said about the connections between bin
Laden and Saddam Hussein and chemical weapons. The British less so. But
popular interest was skin-deep and faded in the messy aftermaths. By 2011
most Americans saw the Afghan and Iraq wars as having not been worth
fighting, and they repeated this sentiment in 2016.45 They were right, though
this is very hard to say to the Americans and allies who fought there.

American and Allied Troops

Over 2.5 million U.S. troops have done tours of duty in the ironically named
operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. The United States and its
allies—Britain, Australia, France, and most NATO nations—now field
professional armed forces. Their training and commitment have provided
greater battle endurance than the American conscript army had showed in
Vietnam. Yet allied troops have failed to overcome guerillas wielding
weapons of the weak (including cyberweapons). They became an occupation
force besieged by guerilla warfare for which they were ill-suited. Apart from
the doomed attempt at a territorial state by ISIS, which was playing into the
skills of the U.S. military, there was no front and no rear in these wars, little
sight of an enemy, and less opportunity to get emotional relief by firing
back. Defusing bombs was more time-consuming than engaging the enemy.
For the U.S. infantry this is not callous warfare, as it is for its air force and
drone operators, and they are liable to fire wildly when danger erupts
unpredictably, when explosions come from anywhere and fear-reducing
retaliation is rarely possible. Local populations have offered little
cooperation out of a mixture of hostility and fear, which adds further stress
to the troops.
Junger vividly depicts the extreme. He lived with a platoon of U.S.
infantry in one of the most isolated and dangerous valleys in Afghanistan,
which was reachable only by helicopter. In this Taliban-controlled area, they
suffered firefights almost every day, and suffered four dozen deaths. But
these were men who had volunteered for the assignment, who thrived on the
excitement of battle, and who felt fear only between battles. The men lusted
to kill, some claiming they lived for the firefights, which they found
“insanely exciting.” Some took pride in the word “infidel” tattooed on their
chests. They cheered when a scout described a wounded insurgent crawling
along a mountain path toward his own blown-off leg. They admit they are
terrible garrison soldiers: ill-disciplined, violent, contemptuous of
noncombatants. Fueled by testosterone and adrenaline, disturbed by sexual
deprivation, they joke about killing and raping (even their own mothers and
sisters). Their good qualities are killing efficiency, courage amounting to
heroism, and bonding amounting to love. They will sacrifice their lives for
each other. Back home after the war, however, they experience difficulty in
readjusting to normal life. Reveling in killing has degraded their psyches,
from sadist heroes to victims.46
In these wars deaths of allied troops have been few but unpredictable.
Unexpected explosives inflicted over three-fourths of the injuries to U.S. and
British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Explosions cause atmospheric
overpressure followed by a vacuum that can penetrate solid objects, so that
soldiers may avoid blunt-force trauma but receive an invisible brain injury.
Over half the three thousand American soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and
Iraq have suffered brain damage of varying degrees. Since their average age
at the time was only twenty-three, the trauma will affect their memory,
mood, and ability to think for as many as sixty years, perhaps more. Many
who might have died of such wounds in earlier wars are now treated but left
with enduring physical, psychological, and cognitive injuries. While the
Vietnam War had a 2.6:1 wounded-to-killed ratio, the Afghan and Iraqi wars
had ratios of about 15:1 because of improved medical treatment. Amid the
exhaustion of longer deployments in the war zone, random exposure to harm
worsens the fear factor. This is the suffering we impose on our troops.
Modern weapons force soldiers to keep their heads down and fire fairly
blindly, forcing the enemy to keep his head down and also fire wildly. In
recent wars the vast majority of enemy deaths have been inflicted by pilots
from above and by rockets and drones fired from afar. Since the United
States dominates the skies, Americans need not fear death from above,
unlike the enemy or adjacent civilians.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, guerilla tactics and an enemy lurking among
civilians create morally ambiguous situations, as they had in Vietnam. In the
First Gulf War, Charles Sheehan-Miles remembers engaging two Iraqi trucks
that caught fire. As one of the occupants ran ablaze from the truck, Miles
fired his machine gun and instantly killed him. His immediate response was
“a sense of exhilaration, of joy,” but a split second later he felt “a
tremendous feeling of guilt and remorse.” The image of the man on fire,
running and dying, stayed with him “for years and years and years.” His unit
returned home, and he was awarded a medal, yet he felt “probably the worst
person alive.” He told the chaplain that he wouldn’t be able to kill again.
“It’s not that I couldn’t, it’s that I knew I could. Because it was . . . it was so
easy to pull the trigger and kill people. Yes, I was afraid of what would
happen. I was afraid of what it would do to me. What kind of person I would
become.” He later added:

In my life, I’ve only seriously considered suicide once. That was

just a few nights after the first time I killed someone. . . . But I
didn’t return home to the United States in one piece either. I was
obsessed with guilt. I dreamed about the night when the trucks
blew through our position and we killed everyone in them. I closed
my eyes and I could see it, the 24th Infantry Division in Iraq, the
biggest mechanized firing squad in history. I was . . . angry with
myself, for that moment of unbridled bloodlust when I killed for
the first time.47

Timothy Kudo, a Marine captain in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote: “War

makes us killers. We must confront this horror directly if we’re honest about
the true costs of war. . . . I’m no longer the ‘good’ person I once thought I
was. There’s nothing that can change that; it’s impossible to forget what
happened, and the only people who can forgive me are dead.”48
The worst known case of allied atrocities in Afghanistan involved
Australian troops. To its credit, the Australian military exposed it. Its
Brereton Report found “credible information to substantiate 23 incidents of
alleged unlawful killing of 39 people by 25 Australian special forces
personnel.” The victims were civilians and prisoners, and the killings
occurred amid a “warrior culture” where “blood lust” and “competition
killings” were the norm. Junior soldiers were often required by their
superiors to murder prisoners to get their first kill, a practice known as
“blooding.” They would then plant weapons on the dead to “prove” they had
been combatants.49 But in 2022 similar practices perpetrated in Afghanistan
by British special forces, the SAS, were exposed. Killing prisoners was
widespread, the frequency alarming some higher officers. Weapons were
planted on victims who had been unarmed, and squads competed with each
other for the most kills.50 Special forces induce special techniques.
Serial atrocities like this were otherwise rare, but single incidents were
common. All the parties in Afghanistan—the Afghan government, the
United States and allied forces, the Taliban and ISIS-K (an affiliate of ISIS)
—committed atrocities. Probably U.S. and NATO forces killed fewer
civilians than the two Afghan sides—if we exclude bombings. In Iraq, the
worst known allied atrocity was the massacre of twenty-four civilians—men,
women, the elderly, and children—by U.S. Marines at Haditha. The deaths
were first claimed by the military to be inflicted by a terrorist roadside bomb
that also killed a marine. But evidence showed that the civilians were
innocent victims of indiscriminate fire from marines out of control, believing
they were avenging the death of a comrade. They were highly stressed, on
their third deployment to Iraq in two and a half years. During their previous
deployment, they had fought in the Battle of Fallujah, in which thirty
members of their battalion had been killed. Stress and revenge made their
evildoing in Haditha more explicable but not excusable.
In 2003 over 60 percent of a large sample of soldiers and marines who
had fought in Afghanistan or Iraq said they had killed an enemy combatant,
and 20 percent said they had killed a noncombatant, the marines being twice
as likely to report this. Most civilians were probably killed not by deliberate
targeting, however, but by the practice of spraying around fire in the general
direction of where the enemy was supposed to be. Battle experience in the
two theaters differed. Only 31 percent of soldiers deployed to Afghanistan
reported having engaged in a firefight, compared with 71–86 percent of
soldiers and marines who had been deployed to Iraq. Consequently, those
who had served in Iraq were significantly more likely to experience PTSD.
In both theaters PTSD was positively correlated with the number of
firefights a soldier had been in.51
 Brett Litz and his colleagues have added to PTSD the concept of “moral
injury,” defined as “the lasting psychological, biological, spiritual,
behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing
witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”52
They say that moral injury and PTSD are based on different emotions. The
main emotion in PTSD is fear, and in moral injury it is shame and guilt; they
cause different chemical reactions in the brain.53 Moral injury is much more
likely to lead to suicide than is PTSD because it is self-hate: “I don’t deserve
to live.” Studies listed by Litz and his colleagues show that PTSD and moral
injury often overlap, however. David Finkel estimates PTSD sufferers as 20–
30 percent of soldiers in Iraq. The sources of their stress, manifested in
erratic, often violent behavior and terrible nightmares, usually involved
multiple memories of death or mutilation of comrades and of Afghans or
Iraqis, especially women and children. A significant thread permeating
veterans’ group-therapy sessions was postwar remorse at their own behavior.
They recounted throwing women across rooms and kicking elderly men
downstairs during house-to-house fighting in which the enemy might be
lurking around the next corner, which inspired tension, fear, and sudden
violence. There was a common practice of posing for photos with mutilated
corpses or skulls. “We never had any remorse for anybody we saw dead.
Because fuck it,” one said. “I guess I’m trying to learn compassion all over
again,” replied another. A third recounted how the Iraqi police would bring
dead bodies into their post: “They’d throw ’em in the back of a truck . . .
we’d all run down there and go take pictures. You know? And one guy—his
head was chopped off, his body was all bloated and shit, because it had been
sitting in raw sewage, you know? And now I can’t get those images out of
my mind. At the time, though, it was ‘Yeah, this is so cool. This is so cool.’ I
mean, what were we thinking? Why did we even want to go look at that
shit?”54
Another soldier picked up a piece of bone from a body. “The femur, or
something like that. I got pictures of me looking like I’m taking a bite out of
it,” he says. “What the fuck was I thinking?” “Exactly,” said another. “I had
a hard drive that I destroyed. Pictures and stuff like that, next to dead bodies,
shit like that. Horrible, horrible stuff. Horrible stuff. Us hanging out with
dead bodies. At the time, I mean we were rockin’ and rollin’, we were mean,
mean killing machines. Now I look back and I’m, like, God, what were we
doing? What were we thinking?”55 These are heartrending memories. Yet for
others remorse can be bypassed by “psychosocial maneuvers” involving
mechanisms of moral disengagement, moral justification, such as “they were
terrorists,” or “we were preserving world peace,” or “the enemy is doing
worse”: euphemistic labeling, minimizing negative consequences,
dehumanizing the victim, and displacing or diffusing responsibility.56
A few atrocities led to courts-martial. Where men were found guilty,
this was usually because comrades came forward to testify against their
comrade, which revealed that many soldiers have a sense of moral limits.
Yet President Trump in November 2019 pardoned two officers found guilty
of war crimes by military courts, and then invited them onstage as heroes at
his fund-raising events. One was awaiting trial, the other had been found
guilty and sentenced to nineteen years’ imprisonment for directing his
soldiers to shoot unarmed villagers, killing two of them. Said Trump, “We
train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”
Only a subsequent storm of protest prevented him from pardoning more
perpetrators. A navy petty officer was convicted of sharing a photograph of
himself and a corpse with the message: “I have got a cool story for you when
I get back. I have got my knife skills on.” This was in breach of the navy
code of conduct, and he was demoted and stripped of his navy SEAL pin,
but Trump reinstated him. The petty officer said he regretted nothing and
clearly enjoyed being one of Trump’s “heroes,” trotted out at his campaign
rallies.57 And yet this president wanted to pull all U.S. forces out of both
countries.
Few who committed atrocities had felt moral qualms at the time. But in
peacetime the memories of their behavior sometimes tore at their psyches
through a remorse that destroyed their mental well-being. The tragedy of
moral qualms is that they come too late to reduce the carnage inflicted on the
local peoples, civilian as well as military. But afterward American
perpetrators suffer as well. PTSD occurs in other armies, too. Simon
Hattenstone and Eric Allison interviewed eight British Iraq veterans
suffering from severe PTSD that led to violent and irrational behavior after
they left the army. They talk with horror of the things they had seen in Iraq,
of their own near-deaths, of the gruesome deaths of their comrades or of
Iraqis. Only one says he suffers moral qualms over his own actions. He says
he no longer acts like a rational man. He frequently gets into fights. “I don’t
like no one. I don’t even like myself. I’m disgusted with some of the things
I’ve done. You take someone’s life away, no matter if he’s going to kill you,
and you don’t ever get over it.” He talks about his nightmares: the
screaming, the shaking, the sweating.58
There are no stories of U.S. soldiers failing to fire in Afghanistan or
Iraq, nor was there much shirking—only isolated rumors of soldiers parking
their Humvees safely for the day while radioing in details of a fictitious
patrol, and a few soldiers deserting their posts in combat zones. But
desertions have been below 5 percent per annum, overwhelmingly when on
leave back in the United States. Surveys of U.S. soldiers have shown morale
fluctuating according to their current perception of the success or failure of
the mission. The British Armed Forces Continuous Attitudes Survey,
conducted annually, reveals declining morale in recent years, but British
morale is not helped by widespread public disapproval of its wars. In the
United States, opposition to wars seems based less on growing pacific
sentiments than on perception of mission failure.
American authorities respond to the dangers confronting their soldiers
by three forms of what Martin Shaw called “risk-transfer militarism,”
transferring elsewhere the risk to its own forces.59 First it focused on
bombing, leaving ground fighting to local forces given U.S. equipment and
training. From 2014 to 2019, 39,000 airstrikes were made by U.S.-led
coalition forces (including French and British airstrikes). The coalition
claimed in its anti-ISIS operations in Iraq that only one civilian had been
killed in every 157 airstrikes, a very rare event. But after intensive research
across northern Iraq, New York Times reporters estimated that the real rate
was one civilian death for every five airstrikes, thirty-one times higher than
the United States admits.60 In April 2019 Airwars and Amnesty International
estimated that the final assaults on the ISIS capital of Raqqa in mid-2017
killed over 1,600 civilians by bombing and artillery fire. The United States
admitted to 180 civilian fatalities. Estimates of ISIS militant fatalities are in
the range 1,200 to 1,400, fewer than the number of civilians killed. During
their three-year reign in Raqqa, ISIS murdered at least 4,000 civilians in cold
blood. They were worse in ferocious killing, but the United States topped
them in callous killing. ISIS deliberately kills civilians, and the Taliban kills
civilians it suspects have any connections with the enemy. In contrast, the
United States does try to avoid hitting civilians, and since the 1990s lawyers
specializing in international law have been part of the bombing teams. Yet,
predictably, this often fails to prevent civilian deaths.
 Second, U.S. administrations outsourced military tasks to private
contractors. Blackwater is one of several corporations providing mercenary
soldiers for guard units. Four of its men, former U.S. Army soldiers,
achieved notoriety in 2007 when they suddenly opened fire and killed
fourteen to eighteen Iraqi civilians, including women and children; the men
were apparently panicked by a car that would not stop. They received prison
sentences for murder or manslaughter, but President Trump pardoned them.
These corporations hire labor mainly from poor countries, and these recruits
are paid far less than American soldiers or laborers and work for much
longer periods. In 2008 U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) counted over
266,000 foreign workers supporting military operations in the Middle East
and Afghanistan—about the same as the number of U.S. troops deployed
there. In World War II, 14 percent of all personnel working for the U.S.
military had been civilians; now they were half, almost all foreigners. The
total stayed above 200,000 until late 2012 and then declined as the United
States withdrew most of its troops in the region. In 2008 only 15 percent
were U.S. citizens, 47 percent were host nation nationals, and the remaining
38 percent were third-country nationals, especially Indians and Filipinos.
Eight percent were armed guards, and the rest were unarmed and in logistics,
but still at risk. Over 3,300 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan died between
September 2001 and August 2017, compared with about 6,900 U.S. military
casualties.61 This is another product of risk transfer militarism—let private
contractors and foreigners take more of the risk.
The third way to reduce U.S. casualties is through the terrestrial robots
and aerial drones of the early twenty-first century. Robots are sent to war
zones just as fast as the U.S. military can get its hands on them. By 2010
there were more than two thousand deployed in Afghanistan. Two-thirds of
them were used for investigating and detonating IEDs, for which the
infantrymen who had previously done this manually are profoundly grateful.
The remaining one-third were used for reconnaissance and surveillance, such
as handheld robots that enable soldiers to see around corners, again
considerably reducing the danger for them. It is often predicted that the
battlefield of the future might be dominated by robots, though others believe
that cyberwars disabling enemy computer systems will take over from actual
fighting.
Aerial drones are far cheaper than piloted planes, and their operators are
never killed. More than forty countries as well as several guerilla movements
(including Hamas and the Houthis) now use armed drones, supplied mostly
by the United States, China, Israel, and Iran. Though these are new weapons,
their technology is relatively simple. So far high-tech defense against them,
such as Israel’s “Iron Dome” system, has been effective at intercepting them,
perpetuating the advantage to the more advanced states, but this advantage
might not last for new generations of drones. They are another potential
weapon of the weak. At present the United States has by far the biggest
drone force. It was greatly expanded under Barack Obama, and then
expanded again under Trump. Its “pilots” are about 10 percent of all U.S.
pilots. American and British operators guide the drones over the Middle East
from Kansas, Nevada, Virginia, and Lincolnshire. This is the aerial warfare
of the future, an extreme form of risk transfer militarism. We can no longer
accuse political and military leaders of sacrificing many American lives; 69
percent of Americans approve of the use of drones, only 19 percent
disapprove, and 86 percent of veterans approve.62 Drone operators are
unique warriors, in no danger at all. True, they can fall off their chairs in
excitement or get carpal tunnel syndrome from endlessly tapping the keys.
Robot weapons might presage an age where few soldiers are at risk on the
battlefield, though their operating bases would remain targets. But if only
one side can afford them, carnage ensues, as happened among the targets of
American wrath and among Armenians in 2020.
The pilots glimpse through satellite video the everyday lives of victims,
and they often study them for some time before the decision is made to
launch. They see the terrible effects of their own missiles. Psychological
studies revealed that in 2010, 11 percent of U.S. drone pilots reported high
levels of stress, and 5 percent suffered from PTSD—far less than returning
infantrymen from Iraq and Afghanistan. A repeat survey in 2014 also found
11 percent of the pilots reporting high levels of distress, but this time only
1.6 percent had PTSD. The biggest stressors were not related to combat or
moral qualms, however, but were “operational,” resulting from
understaffing, rotating shift work, extra administrative tasks, long hours, and
career blockage—stressful perhaps, like many other work-related hardships,
but not raising moral difficulties.63 Yet their quit rate was three times that of
other pilots. There is a shortage of trained drone operators, despite the fact
that the task has been opened to women, and the shortage puts more pressure
on the operators. They have to work “incessantly,” says an RAF drone
operator. For fighter pilots, the pressure had been intense but sporadic,
whereas drone operating involves tiring concentration for most of an eight-
hour shift. Chris Cole says many colleagues could not handle the disconnect
between the drone shift and family life at home.64 U.S. defense secretary
Chuck Hagel had proposed a special medal for the best drone operators, but
a storm of criticism from the military forced him to withdraw it: those who
do not face danger should not get medals. The RAF began to award medals
to drone operators in 2019, though without the clasp that certifies danger
experienced.
Corey Mead watched U.S. drone pilots train and was impressed by their
skills in identifying legitimate targets, deciding when to attack, and precision
targeting. He did detect “tension between what members of the military feel
is right and what their work requires. I observed this in the discord between
trainers’ rhetoric about how much they disliked killing people—they
repeated this to me frequently—and their unabashed excitement, also
expressed frequently, about the times they were able to launch strikes and
kill ‘bad guys.’ Hating killing, but enjoying the chance to kill. The
competing impulses may have seemed irreconcilable, but they were
everywhere.” Mead also notes the contrast between the boredom of 97
percent of the work—long hours of intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance—and the remaining 3 percent, which the instructor called the
“cool” or “exciting” part, dropping bombs and firing missiles. “This is the
job that drone operators wait for, and that wakes them up no matter how
sleepy or dulled they are from the surveillance work on their shift.”65 When
the crunch came, like “real” pilots before them, it absorbed their minds.
Killing was not quite callous indifference, but they had help from
desensitizing mechanisms like the expression always used for the victims,
“bad guys,” and the resemblance of their work to video gaming, a harmless
but addictive activity. They knew that sometimes they might hit not just the
“bad guys” but also their wives, children, or neighboring civilians. Yet the
U.S. Air Force and the RAF have reassured them and the general public by
issuing civilian casualty rates that are absurdly low, helping assuage qualms.
Yet an internal U.S. military report concluded that civilian casualties in
Afghanistan inflicted by drones were higher than those inflicted by manned
aircraft.66

The Consequences of Interventions

By June 2020 total U.S. fatalities were 52,000, 60 percent of them in the Iraq
theater. U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan have cost
American taxpayers well over $3 trillion since 2001. But this is an
underestimate. The U.S. war in Korea had been financed largely by raising
taxes on the rich. This was also the case with the war in Vietnam. But
America’s Islamic wars were not financed this way. Indeed, under Bush the
Younger and Trump, taxes on the rich were reduced. Instead, these wars
were financed by debt, and by the time the debts are paid off in 2050, the
cost of the two wars will have been $6.5 trillion, plus $2 trillion more for all
the veteran fighters’ health care, disability, and burial benefits. But that is
only money, not lives.
Afghanistan provided local allies on the ground for the initial invasion,
and the government managed, with NATO help, to hold on to Kabul and half
the country for twenty years, although the Taliban revived to control the
other half. The United States joined a fifty-year-old civil war and over the
next twenty years exacerbated it. In 2020 U.S. forces estimated that the
Taliban still had in excess of 50,000 fighters, in addition to several thousand
part-timers. The Afghans claimed to kill one thousand Taliban every month,
mostly through U.S. bombing. Just as they had in Vietnam, American
leaders calculated that such a loss rate would finish off the enemy. They
probably exaggerated the kill rate, but, as it had in Vietnam, the enemy kept
on replenishing its forces. If an eldest son died, the next one would step in.
And the enemy received help from neighbors. The Pakistani intelligence
agency provided safe havens for Taliban leaders in Pakistan, and the
movement recruited frontline fighters from among the 2 million Afghan
refugees and seminary students in Pakistan.67
On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was killed by American special forces,
perhaps aided by Pakistani officials. The Taliban have shown some hostility
to ISIS, and Al Qaeda now has a marginal presence in the country, so the
original goal of the invasion was largely achieved. Yet fighting dragged on
under Obama because the Afghan government was not strong enough to
stand on its own. President Trump’s policies zigzagged, but in 2020
negotiations began. Trump said U.S. forces would be withdrawn by May 1,
2021, if the Taliban consented to a peace deal. The Afghan government was
excluded from the negotiations and ignored, while it was unlikely that the
Taliban would keep their word. But Trump wanted out and he upended the
negotiations by withdrawing troops anyway, removing his major bargaining
chip. The Biden administration inherited this no-win situation and swiftly
withdrew in July and August 2021. The Taliban now triumphed with a speed
that surprised almost everyone. But Afghan forces always depended on U.S.
airpower and special forces, calling in U.S. airpower when in difficulties.
Now they suddenly could not. Rural areas had been the main battlegrounds
of the war, and most villagers there had experienced terrible U.S. bombing
and drone strikes as well as brutal counterterrorism operations in which the
Americans turned a blind eye to (and sometimes joined in) the many
atrocities committed by Afghan special forces. Much of the countryside
welcomed the Taliban victory.68 Taliban morale and belief in their cause far
exceeded those of the government soldiers, who were also aware of the
massive corruption in their officer corps. These were the major factors in the
ten-day collapse. Though the pictures of Afghans clinging to the U.S. planes
leaving Kabul airport eerily resembled the photos of Vietnamese clinging to
U.S. helicopters as they left the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1975, the
Taliban, unlike the NVA/PLF, did not even wait for the last American soldier
to leave before they seized Kabul. Both these victors were successful
ideological armies.
Withdrawal from Afghanistan was a betrayal that led to the murder of
many Afghans who had collaborated with the NATO coalition or the Afghan
government. It might also be a terrible step backward for Afghan women
and Afghan education in the cities, though in this respect the Taliban are
reflecting the traditional values and practices of the countryside. If the
Taliban can maintain order and peace, that would probably be preferable for
most Afghans to a continuation of a bloody war with many civilian
casualties. Peace is better than war. But the Taliban seem unable to repress
ISIS-affiliated terrorists, and the economic outlook for the country is dire.
The Taliban do not inspire confidence in their ability to manage the
economy. Yet U.S. troops were achieving neither victory nor a negotiated
deal, and they were unlikely to even if their numbers had been doubled.
There was no rational alternative, no point in dragging failure on longer.
I had predicted that outcomes would be worse for these countries than
their sufferings under their earlier dictators and that interventions would fuel
more terrorism.69 I predicted that in Iraq the United States would have to
rule through the Shi’a and the Kurds, who could win elections because they
form a majority of the population—an ethnocracy rather than a democracy.
This would fuel sectarian war among Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurds. In Iraq the
United States initially had no local allies, for it had relied on a small group
of Iraqi Shi’a exiles, among whom Ahmed Chalabi was the most prominent.
They had not been in Iraq for thirty years or more and so were quite
unknown there. They could not form an effective government, as the U.S.
military swiftly realized. But they had just enough influence in Washington
to persuade the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Jerry Bremer, to
dissolve the twin pillars of Iraqi government, the Ba’ath Party and the army,
both of which the exiles hate.70 That had the effect of dissolving all
government. As a committed neoliberal, like most of the Bush
administration, he also grandly declared that Iraqi industry would be
privatized. Regime change would be both political and economic. Eric
Herring and Glen Rangwala list a catalogue of American errors: privileging
exiles over domestic elites; de-Ba’athification; indiscriminate use of force;
little interaction between Iraqi and U.S. officials; inability to provide water,
electricity, and employment; privileging American corporations; high
turnover of Coalition Provisional Authority staff; torture; and promoting
divisions between local and national actors to prevent them from challenging
the occupation.71 Sectarian identities intensified after the occupation began.
But the error from which all these flowed lay deeper: to invade Iraq at
all, since substantial local allies on the ground were not available. This meets
the standard of irrationality I laid down in chapter 1: the objective observer
would judge that the goal of the war could not be met whatever the
circumstance. U.S. forces had to fall back on the Shi’a parties, supported by
their militias and ironically by Shi’a Iran, which led to ethnocracy, not
democracy, and to civil war, Shi’a against Sunni, while Kurds were able to
establish their own autonomous administrations in the districts they
controlled. Nor could much industry be privatized, for there was enough
opposition to this to produce economic disorder. Disorder encouraged
jihadists, which culminated in ISIS—an irrational policy from beginning to
end. ISIS was crushed, for the moment, however, and the ethnic-religious
tensions are currently simmering rather than exploding. Iraq was only a mild
disaster. Its governments tottered but survived. ISIS and Shi’a militias are
still biting, but these are mostly gnat bites.
In March 2011 came a military intervention for regime change in Libya
against Gaddafi’s idiosyncratic dictatorship. A rebellion had begun in the
east, and Gaddafi’s forces were getting the better of the fighting. He was a
repressive dictator, but he had oil and he was neither of the right nor the left,
but persisted in defiance of the United States. A UN resolution was passed
authorizing member states to enforce a no-fly zone and use “all necessary
measures” to prevent attacks on civilians. In practice this became a NATO
bombing campaign of government infrastructures, perhaps killing around a
thousand civilians—although casualty estimates vary wildly. The Gaddafi
government then announced a cease-fire, rejected by the rebels. This was a
regional, not a sectarian war. They were all Sunni.
Burned by Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration “led from
behind,” contributing not ground forces but naval bombardment of coastal
cities, aerial bombarding of a hundred targets, and a drone strike destroying
Gaddafi’s personal convoy moments before his death. Bombing was aided
by the French, British, and Canadian air forces. Gaddafi was killed in
October, and NATO forces then withdrew. The predictable consequence of
this short war was the disintegration of the Libyan state and civil wars
between several militias, still ongoing, backed by numerous foreign powers.
Without the repressive hand of Gaddafi, the country descended into disorder,
civil strife, terrorism, and even slave markets. Thousands of jihadists poured
into the country. These outcomes were due mainly to the locals themselves,
yet the destruction inflicted by the Western powers made things much worse.
In Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, foreign interventions have
exacerbated existing civil wars; in Iraq the intervention created civil war.
These ventures did not benefit these countries or democracy. They were
irrational.
American commitment to rebuild them after the war has been minimal.
Between 2001 and 2019 the United States spent $1.5 trillion dollars in
Afghanistan. Of this, less than 9 percent went to “reconstruction” programs,
and even much of this went to training the Afghan army and police forces.
Only 4 percent of the total budget went to civilian projects. “If you look at
the overall amount of money spent in Afghanistan, you see a tiny percentage
of it went to help the people of the country,” Robert Finn, former
ambassador to Afghanistan, told U.S. government investigators. “It almost
all went to the military and even most of that money went for local militia
and police training.” The Watson Institute’s “Cost of War” concurred: “The
majority of U.S. international assistance spending related to Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Pakistan is for military or security purposes rather than economic
and social development.” The institute estimates that between 2001 and
2022, U.S. military and security spending due to such wars was $8 trillion.
Development program funds there totaled $189 billion.72 The institute also
estimates that these wars have killed over 900,000 people.
Of course, in two of these countries U.S. invasions had destroyed local
military and police capabilities. European Union countries spent mostly on
humanitarian and infrastructural projects. Since Afghans knew the United
States would sooner or later go home, corrupt elites felt they should
distribute benefits to their patronage networks while they could. Especially
profitable was inventing “ghost soldiers,” men for whom pay and supplies
arrived but who did not actually exist. A senior State Department adviser
reported to the investigators: “Afghans knew we were there temporarily, and
that affected what we could do. . . . An elder in Helmand [said], ‘Your
Marines live in tents. That’s how I know you won’t be here long.’ ”73 The
Taliban adage was “You have the watches. We have the time.” And so it
proved.
Somalia is a miniature Afghanistan. The United States remains
involved against al-Shabaab, with only about one hundred troops left there
after Trump withdrew another five hundred, but with CIA operatives as well,
paying mercenaries, drone bombing (sometimes hitting civilians), and
subsidizing a deeply corrupt, unpopular government. This is doing no good.
It is supposedly preventing an al-Shabaab attack on the United States, for
which al-Shabaab has no capability.
U.S. forces were more than twice as powerful as those of any other
state in the world but they had two enduring domestic weaknesses. First,
Americans are squeamish about the cost—not apparently in money but in the
number of U.S. casualties. In the Iraq War of 2003 only 4,000 Americans
were killed—compared to 500,000–600,000 Iraqis. In previous wars
Koreans, Vietnamese, and Afghans had taken much heavier losses than U.S.
troops. I noted the rise of risk-transfer militarism earlier. American leaders
have managed to keep a low military profile by keeping the body bags few
and unpublicized. Yet this has a military downside. Enemies believe they can
outlast U.S. forces since Americans cannot endure casualties. From Korea
and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, they have been proved right.
The second weakness is fragile popular support for wars. When
Americans learn of interventions involving ground troops, they get excited
on the sidelines. They cheer on their team playing away from home, but they
make no sacrifices themselves. I called this in Britain during the Falklands
War “spectator sport militarism.”74 They wait with bated breath in the early
stages, cheering on their side in a rally ’round the flag. But this is only skin-
deep. Political rhetoric treats U.S. soldiers as sacred, lauds them as “heroes”
uniquely “serving their country.” Politicians who avoided active military
service themselves, like Bush the Younger and Trump, like to bathe in the
reflected glory of photo ops surrounded by soldiers displaying medals. But,
except in cases that can be plausibly claimed by rulers to threaten national
survival, as for Americans after Pearl Harbor and during the period from
9/11 to initial victory in Afghanistan, the troops cannot rely on adoration for
long. If things did not go well, we turned our backs. Who wants to support a
losing team? The public lost interest and returning soldiers were not greeted
as heroes, which they might have been had these ventures been short or
successful. Our recent wars have not been driven by deep emotions,
insecurities, and ideologies, unlike those of the jihadists. Ours are the
ideologies not of the masses but of the elites who decide foreign policy.
The Obama administration revealed lessening resolve, though without
major policy changes. Trump, despite his blustering style, and apart from
Iran, retreated a little, though impulsively. In 2019 he twice ordered all
American troops out of Syria—only to reverse himself after aides implored
him to reconsider. He then did suddenly withdraw U.S. troops from the
Syrian-Turkish border, abandoning his Kurdish SDF allies to Turkish
attacks, forcing them into Russian and Syrian arms, weakening their ability
to guard thousands of captured ISIS soldiers and their families. His abrupt
and unilateral force reductions in Afghanistan were ill-timed, given his
ongoing negotiations with the Taliban. And while he cut back troops in
Afghanistan and Iraq to 2,500 each and reduced U.S. forces in Europe by
one-third, he steadily increased the military budget: from $767 billion under
Obama to $818 billion in 2017 and $935 billion in 2020. This included a 50
percent increase in spending on nuclear warheads. The combination of
withdrawal and more military spending makes sense only for domestic
politics—drum-beating rhetoric without risk to American lives. It also drains
U.S. budgets of an ability to deal with the severe equity problems besetting
American society and of flourishing U.S. economic power abroad. The total
U.S. development aid budget for 2020 was $19 billion, only 2 percent of the
military budget. Under Biden military spending remained flat, and though he
removed U.S. forces from Afghanistan, over 40,000 American troops were
still stationed around the Middle East in late 2021, including 2,500 active in
Iraq and 900 in Syria. Drone operations continued, mainly aimed at Islamist
groups.

Three American Blind Spots

American geopolitical choices might appear calculative and instrumentally
rational. They are proclaimed as such, since Realist theory’s hometown is
Washington, D.C. Careful calculation of the resources and likely decisions of
allies and enemies, and frequent use of war-gaming and diplomatic-gaming
scenarios makes it all seem rational. Yet for seventy years, American policy
has had three blind spots stymieing its foreign interventions, refuting any
notion that this is rational policy in terms of either means or ends.
First, most American politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, still
believe in an imperial civilizing mission, a responsibility and capacity to
bring order, democracy, free enterprise, and general beneficence to the
world. Most sincerely believe this, yet it is unachievable and it naturally gets
a little corrupted by American interests along the way. Since U.S. allies
outside Europe and East Asia are more authoritarian than democratic, U.S.
policy is in practice more committed to the capitalist than the democratic
mission, and it often uses force rather than inducements. The problem is that
in an age of rising nationalist and religious resistance, imperial goals,
however beneficently expressed, cannot be attained. The United States can
no longer install indigenous client regimes, let alone democracies, that can
keep order as effectively as most of the overthrown dictators—or as
effectively as other empires in previous centuries. Nor can Americans, amid
ensuing disorder, mobilize their economic power to bring the promised
vibrant economy. The combination of military violence, political disorder,
and economic stagnation undermines American ideological power, exposing
it as hypocrisy. Interventionism exaggerates America’s powers, and actual
military intervention weakens them. Its persistence despite repeated failures
can be understood only in terms of the lack of any real military rival. No one
can withstand U.S. forces in fixed battle. It is otherwise in the case of low-
intensity warfare and the political aftermath.
The second blind spot is failure to understand the laws of cause and
effect, not just in the Middle East. U.S. governments have identified North
Korea as an enemy since the late 1940s. U.S. forces killed 2 million North
Koreans—20 percent of the total population—in three years of carpet
bombing during the Korean War (as we saw in chapter 13). Whatever their
hatred of their own regime, North Koreans hate America with good reason.
In the seventy years since the beginning of the Korean War, the United
States has never made a sustained effort to negotiate a permanent peace
treaty, hoping that the communist North Korean regime would simply
collapse. Is it any surprise that in response North Korean regimes have made
a sustained drive to acquire nuclear weapons? They are seen as necessary
self-defense—though this is delusional. A U.S. offer of friendship and
economic assistance would do better for both sides, as it would have at
almost any point during the previous half century.
Similarly, jihadi and other threats have been exacerbated by American
actions. Iranian meddling in Lebanon resulted from the failed Israeli-U.S.
war against Syria in the early 1980s. In Iraq Iranian meddling followed the
U.S. wars against Saddam. In Yemen Iranian meddling resulted from Saudi
and UAE attacks on the Houthis, backed by the United States. The main
causes of the new jihadi movements obviously lie within Muslim countries.
But the main reason terrorists attack Americans and the British is their
military interventions (the second reason is perceived discrimination against
Muslims in the West, more important in Europe than in the United States).
Bin Laden himself gave three reasons for attacking the United States: the
presence of its forces in Saudi Arabia, its support for expansionist Israel, and
its 1991 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent bombing and starving of
children there. He later added the invasions of Afghanistan and (again) Iraq
—as, of course, did ISIS.
The effects of bombing and drones are almost invisible to Americans
but devastating for the locals. Basra, Raqqa, and other cities are liberated
from ISIS but destroyed, having suffered many civilian deaths and lost even
more who fled as refugees. The young men from Mosul I quoted earlier hate
America for what they say it has done to their country. Millions of Muslims
who suffer from these policies will not view the United States as liberators,
although many realize that ISIS is worse. Among those millions are
thousands who will fight, and hundreds who will accept suicide missions.
They lack the resources to conquer or hold a state, but they use the weapons
of the weak to sustain long-term asymmetric warfare. If they suffer reverses
at home, they encourage Muslims in the West to take up terrorism, which a
few are willing to do. The 2019 defeat of the ISIS caliphate reduced the
number of new recruits—but not the number of sympathizers, from whom
new militants emerge. American drones kill ISIS and Al Qaeda leaders, but
new leaders arise. Extreme Islamism is a hydra, the mythological nine-
headed water snake. We cut off its most visible head, but other heads rise to
menace us. In the Greek myth one is immortal. The solution is not war. It is
to moderate U.S. policies in the region.
The third blind spot, especially visible in the Middle East, is
conservatism—not conservative in the party political sense, since Democrats
support it as well, but in its attachment to tradition, which I have found so
important in war making across the centuries. Conservatism represents past,
not present, visions of American power. U.S. policy makers act as if this
were 1942, when the United States charged in with military power to rescue
the world from evil. Subsequent rebuffs in Korea and Vietnam should have
cast some doubt on such confidence, but it was boosted again by the fall of
the Soviet Union. Yet throughout, definitions of friend and foe inherited
from the past are unchanged, even though reality has changed.
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Israel are still seen as the most
dependable allies despite alternative ways of getting oil and other energy
sources, and when Israel is now the dominant and the only nuclear military
power in its neighborhood. Unswerving support for Israel is
counterproductive to peace, alienating Arabs across the region, perpetually
creating a few Islamic terrorists. Domestic politics helps determine this
foreign policy, as we have seen in most other wars. In this case, both U.S.
parties fear the electoral consequences of antagonizing pro-Israeli lobbies,
and across the Bible Belt there are fervent Evangelical Christians who
believe that the Jews must be in possession of the Temple Mount before the
“Rapture,” the Second Coming of Christ. Shades of the return of the Mahdi!
Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo hinted that he shares this ridiculous
view. There is on the Palestinian side no comparable political lobby.
Of course, the United States must guarantee Israel’s right to exist. But
behind much Arab hatred lies American support for Israel’s continuing
aggression, its seizure of lands that have been Arab for a millennium. In the
past, a slap on Israel’s wrist was delivered for such incursions. President
Trump instead endorsed Israeli landgrabs in his so-called Peace Plan of
January 2020. Indeed, in order to get Arab states to sign accords with Israel,
he gave concessions to them all—high-tech military planes to the UAE,
switching to support Morocco’s claims to the western Sahara, dropping
Sudan from the State Department’s list of terrorist states. But approving
Israeli expansions makes unviable the Palestinian state to which American
foreign policy is theoretically committed. President Biden might return to
the slap-on-the-wrist days, but not to genuine peace brokering. There is
some shift among younger Americans toward more sympathy for the
Palestinians, yet Israelis offer steadily increasing support to settlements in
Palestinian lands for which the grinding down of Palestinian society is a
precondition. It is difficult to see the end of this ghastly cycle: Israeli
expansionism blessed by the United States creates more terrorism, which
leads to more repressive Israeli policy, which creates more terrorism, and so
on and so on.
Conservatism also ensured that the United States has joined in the
sectarian war, on the Sunni side, with the exception of its war with ISIS and
its presently faltering alliance with the majority Shi’a Iraqi government.
Administrations and Congress would vehemently deny this bias. But
consider the evidence. In Iraq it had offered no help to the Shi’a community
in the 1990s, though this had presented the most credible opposition to
Saddam Hussein. U.S. administrations further support the Saudis and the
Gulf sheikdoms—which are Sunni—and oppose Iran and Hezbollah—which
are Shi’a—in their struggle for regional dominance. The United States
supplies 85 percent of Bahrain’s military equipment and from 2002 declared
Bahrain to be a “major non-NATO ally.” In the 2011 uprising the
Americans’ “major concern is that a fall of the Al Khalifa regime and
ascension of a Shiite-led government could increase Iran’s influence and
lead to a loss of the use of Bahrain’s military facilities.” Bahrain is the base
of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, whose main purpose, says the Department of
Defense, is to counter Iranian military power in the Gulf. The British were
also major military suppliers, and in 2012 they supplied to the Bahrain
regime a large consignment of weapons suitable for police and paramilitary
repression. The Obama administration tried to talk the king into more
conciliatory policies, but it did nothing, not prepared to risk the anti-Iran
alliance for the sake of human rights. Then the Trump administration
removed all human rights issues from its support for Bahrain.
Sunni Saudi Arabia has been an ally since 1945, receiving massive
military aid. Since then, it has changed from a weak tribal confederation
sitting on massive oil reserves, anticommunist, and needing protection, to a
modern repressive state and aggressive military power. Communism is gone
and Saudi oil reserves are of less importance for the United States. Iran has
been defined as an enemy since 1979, although Iranians take the hostility
back to the 1953 CIA- and British-backed coup that overthrew an elected
government and installed the shah. In 1980, after the fall of the shah, when
Saddam attacked Iran, the United States provided him with billions of
dollars in credits to buy arms, coordinated his arms buying in the West, and
provided intelligence support. Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and other
Sunni states assisted Iraq. Iran was alone, without allies.
In 2015 President Obama supported the Saudi-led offensive against the
Shi’a Houthis in Yemen, a much lesser American contribution than in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Libya and Syria, for it merely involved
coordinated U.S. military and intelligence support from CENTCOM and
U.S. midair refueling of coalition aircraft. The refueling ended amid
congressional alarm at civilian casualties in 2018, but U.S. naval ships still
aid the Saudi blockade. Britain and France also help the Saudis. The Trump
administration’s “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran included U.S.
naval forces intercepting vessels carrying arms to the Houthis. In 2019
Trump also handed the Saudis a Patriot air defense battery, and the State
Department declared: “We stand firmly with our Saudi partners in defending
their borders against these continued threats by the Houthis, who rely on
Iranian-made weapons and technology to carry out such attacks.” The
Houthis say that they are merely defending themselves, though they have
begun to extend self-defense into lobbing missiles into Saudi Arabia and the
UAE. They usually deny that they are receiving weapons from Iran, but they
have occasionally said that only Iran will supply them with weapons. True,
since 2015 American administrations have provided over $2.4 billion in
emergency humanitarian aid for Yemen, mostly to repair the damage done
by allied bombing and blockading.
U.S. policy makers have repeatedly argued that the Houthis are only a
pawn in the regional power game of Iran.75 But the Saudis are playing the
same game, and U.S. administrations help them. Growing humanitarian
outrage produced an easing of support under Obama and Trump. The Biden
administration then announced three further significant steps, declaring in
February 2021 that U.S. offensive operations in Yemen would cease, as
would export of precision-guided munitions to the Saudis or the UAE (but
other arms sales would continue), and a State Department negotiator would
go to Yemen to attempt to bring the warring sides together—a welcome
breach of the State Department’s formal ban on negotiating with “terrorists.”
But the State Department asserts that its shift has been purely on
humanitarian grounds and still regards the Houthis as terrorists. They are
defined as terrorists because they are the enemies of our Saudi allies, not
because their behavior is any worse than theirs. We should have neither
enemies nor allies in this civil war. We should merely offer humanitarian aid
and help for the Yemenis to resolve their differences.
President Trump had intensified hostility toward Iran in 2019 by
arbitrarily withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal framework agreement
among Iran, the UN Security Council, and the European Union. All other
signatories declared that UN weapons inspectors’ reports showed the
agreement was working. But Trump instead intensified U.S. sanctions on
Iran and authorized a missile strike on the Baghdad airport that killed
General Qassim Suleimani, commander of the elite Iranian Quds Force, a
branch of the Revolutionary Guards. This enraged the Iraqi government,
which was revealed not to be sovereign in its own land. This series of
responses had a negative effect, isolating Iranian reformists and increasing
the power of hard-liners, especially those committed to developing nuclear
weapons. After all, Israel, its main enemy, already has nuclear weapons. The
Biden administration hopes to return to the nuclear agreement, though at the
moment both sides insist that the other move first. To move first would be
regarded as “backing down,” a sign of cowardice! That is how World War I
started. Agreement to move simultaneously is the way to solve this and avert
possible war.
The United States does not need to choose sides between Sunni and
Shi’a. Americans are equally indifferent to Sunni and Shi’a dogma, and
Saudi Arabia is even less democratic than Iran. It is an absolute monarchy
with no freedom of assembly or speech. Iran has elections to a parliament,
though the candidates are vetted for their loyalty to the regime. Yet public
demonstrations are frequent in Iran but not in Saudi Arabia. During 2020–21
there were repeated mass demonstrations in the streets of Iran on economic
issues, especially by retirees, workers, and farmers. The security forces often
responded harshly, but the demonstrations kept on coming. Saudi citizens,
still less the foreign workers often held in slavelike conditions, rarely dare to
do so. Nor does Iran carve up its dissidents into little pieces. Neither of these
regimes could be termed benevolent, but the Saudis are worse.
Externally there are differences, too. U.S. administrations constantly
denounce Iranian “terrorism” abroad. The hand of Iran can be detected in
two types of intervention. One is helping Shi’a communities—in Syria,
Yemen, and Lebanon. Iran is helping coreligionists, just as the Saudis are.
The second type of intervention is against the United States and its proxies,
in the Persian Gulf and in Afghanistan (if the rumors of Iran paying the
Taliban for killing American soldiers are true). But they are, after all,
attacking Iranian interests. The United States and China are inevitably rivals,
but there is no necessary reason for the United States and Iran to be rivals.
And in one respect, Iranian interests are the same as America’s. This Shi’a
regime is deeply opposed to Sunni jihadists. Its Quds Force has helped
combat Al Qaeda and ISIS in Afghanistan and the Middle East. In contrast,
the Saudis supply more jihadists than any other country, often recruited
through the Wahhābī schools they finance abroad. The economic issues
involved are declining in importance. The Saudis have 25 percent more oil
reserves than Iran, but these are 30 percent less than U.S. reserves, following
shale oil and gas finds. In any case, market exchange is cheaper than war in
securing oil, as the Japanese, Chinese, and Europeans know. The Saudis are
economic allies, providing profits for Western arms producers and investing
their oil profits in the West. There is now a very large joint Saudi and
American business lobby in Washington. But the Saudis will continue to
invest their oil profits in Western economies. An alternative American policy
of mediating between Iran and Saudi Arabia would pay a large peace
dividend in the Middle East. The main stumbling blocks to a new policy on
the Iranian side are its calls to destroy Israel and its sponsoring of Hezbollah.
But if the incentive was there to change tack on Israel, Iran might take it—as
Egypt and Jordan had earlier done. There is no good reason against trying it,
only the blinkers of tradition and the short-term horizons of powerful interest
groups.
The nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea are worrying but have
been mainly caused by U.S. policy identifying them as state terrorists. They
think the Gaddafi example shows what happens to an enemy of the United
States who gives up nuclear weapons. Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear
deal and crippling sanctions brought poverty for many Iranians. These
measures were supposed to bring Iran to the conference table to accept more
stringent American demands. Predictably, the reverse happened, as in most
conflicts we have seen. Iranian leaders, their personal, religious, and national
honor at stake, refused to “back down.” Quite the reverse: they launched
attacks on oil tankers docked off the Emirati coast, and more tentatively on a
U.S. base in Iraq. In September 2019 the Iranian Air Force launched twenty
drones and precision-guided cruise missiles on Abqaiq, an important Saudi
oil field and processing center, causing serious damage. Mutual provocation
is under way. Iran has recommenced work on its nuclear program, and it
says it will renounce the nuclear deal. Trump’s main motive for the anti-Iran
policy was probably domestic: talking tough was popular among his base—
domestic politics interfering with rational geopolitical calculation.
For these three reasons, American foreign policy in the region is not
rational. We have seen that this is not unique to the United States. I have
shown that many rulers’ grasps of reality have been feeble. But American
militarism is unreal, bad for Americans, worse for the Middle East, the
triumph of bipartisan conservatism that is wedded to the past, not present
realities or needs. Asked to do the impossible by politicians, U.S. forces
coped as best they could, but they could not win. Ultimate failure forced
major withdrawal from both Iraq and Afghanistan, and minor withdrawals
from Libya, Syria, and Yemen. As I grow older, my behavior comes to
resemble American imperialism. I march into a room and then forget why I
am there.
Yet U.S. leaders could learn from past failure. They have begun to
sidestep their formal ban on negotiating with “terrorist” states and
movements, engaging in secretive back-channel communication with the
enemy. They could learn lessons from imperial China: paying tribute to
barbarians not to attack them was far cheaper than fighting wars against
them. American wealth can afford it. Tribute was a Chinese development
program for barbarians. The United States should use the economic powers
it has, not the military-political powers it lacks. Remember that
impoverished Iran cannot offer much economic aid to its allies abroad, and
the United States can easily outspend Iran. I am advocating not isolationism
but peaceful interventionism.
American leadership can achieve more through “soft power” than war,
as Joseph Nye has long argued.76 U.S. power has often been hegemonic,
seen as legitimate by other countries. U.S. diplomats and politicians have
repeatedly acted as conflict mediators—as in the Camp David and Dayton
accords. U.S. development programs give grants and loans to poorer
countries, although it helps to be an ally like Israel, the biggest recipient. In a
country as rich as the United States, cash can usually buy off the chances of
war. After all, the United States bought the Louisiana territory from France
and Alaska from Russia. Development programs offered to North Korea and
Iran with strings attached could stop their nuclear programs and make them
friendlier. The precedent is that between 1980 and 2018 the United States
provided Egypt with over $40 billion in military aid and $30 billion in
economic aid so that Egypt would make peace with Israel. The wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq have so far cost $3.5 trillion. I am not suggesting
ending development programs for friendly countries. That would be only
rewarding villainy!
It is a major obstacle to peace that U.S. citizens have suffered so little
from recent wars. Wars are far away, casualties have been low in a
professional army in which subcontractors and foreign workers also take
losses, and drones are the key attack force. This reduces publicity back
home, except when jihadists attack on American soil, but this is much rarer
than in a Europe that contains discontented Muslim communities, and much
rarer than homegrown American militia bombings and school shootings. So
counterproductive conservatism endures in Middle Eastern policy, provoking
little public interest. This gives free rein to Wall Street and business lobbies
involved in Saudi Arabia and to pro-Israeli lobbies. Policy stuck in the past
does not work. It is grounded not in Realism but in irrationality. This is not
an anti-American rant. It is normal in wars, most of which are irrational.

Conclusion
In its history, Islam has been neither more nor less war-prone than other
faiths. The Quran contains brutal passages, just as does the Old Testament.
The early Islamic waves of conquest were in contrast to the pacific
tendencies of early Christianity.77 Thereafter Islam may have fought almost
as many wars as did Christendom, but it was more tolerant of other religions
at home. Most recent wars have been in the Muslim Middle East, although
the region has been also beset by Western (secular) imperialism. Religion
mattered, for it was a primary marker of community identity, yet these were
not religious wars like the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War, in which both
antagonists were defined by their religion. Just one side, the jihadists,
declared itself favored by divine power and cherry-picked the most brutal
passages in the Quran to justify its atrocities. Underlying these wars were
three causes:
 1. the failure of Muslim rulers, influenced by Western
developmental ideologies, to tackle the poverty and corruption of
the region, which led neither to liberal democracy nor to socialism
but to corrupt authoritarian regimes provoking popular resistance
and repression;
2. the rise of distinctively Islamic solutions offered for those
problems, generating at the extreme small, murderous jihadi
movements brandishing texts from the Quran;
3. imperial interventions, in the Cold War by the United States and
the Soviets, then by the United States and Russia, assuming that
military intervention could overthrow unfriendly regimes and
bring capitalist democracy (capitalist autocracy in Russia) to
Muslims. Instead, it increased disorder, which increased the
influence of jihadists as perverted forms of anti-imperialism.

U.S. attempts at regime-change wars since 1990 mostly achieved

battlefield victory but failed to establish order, let alone democracy, thus
intensifying jihadism. Iraq had few jihadists before U.S. intervention
because most Sunnis were satisfied with Saddam’s rule and most Shi’a were
cowed. In Afghanistan the Taliban had seized power with U.S. help since
their more secular enemy had been backed by the Soviets. Before the U.S.
invasion, Taliban killings of civilians had been relatively few, but afterward
civilian casualties inflicted by all sides rose. Other wars occurred without
U.S. ground troops, but only in the two small wars in Nagorno-Karabagh
was there no U.S. participation. In other cases, the United States, with
British and sometimes NATO support, offered military help to one side in a
war. This might have been decisive in the Israeli-Arab wars, but probably
not elsewhere—in the Iran-Iraq War and civil wars in Iraq, Libya, Yemen,
and Bahrain. U.S. military aid helped destabilize the region, making
jihadism more attractive to a small minority of Muslims. Better the United
States had acted as a neutral referee, helping settle these disputes through
conciliation laced with incentives.
American policy in the region had three blind spots: exaggerating the
powers of the U.S. military, failing to distinguish cause and effect in enemy
hostility, and inability to adjust policy to cope with regional changes. The
United States has sleepwalked its way into aggravating conflicts between
Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, and between Muslims and Jews, revealing the
irrationality of American policy. Failure is not unique to America, for I have
stressed the role of irrational policy making through history. But remedy is at
hand: rely more on American economic and diplomatic power, less on
military power. That would yield more order and less war in the Middle
East, enhance U.S. influence in the region, and lessen jihadi attacks on the
West. This would not solve the problems confronting Muslim societies, but
it would help.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Possible Futures

NO ONE CAN PREDICT the future accurately, yet bleak prospects for war are
often suggested: war between the United States and China, nuclear war
leading to a “nuclear winter” that will destroy human civilization, the
unleashing of biological or chemical weapons, climate change wars, or
induced disease pandemics. Since all these dire scenarios might bring utter
disaster for humankind, a large degree of Realist rationality is obviously
needed in the future.
Danger intensifies with proliferating weapons of mass destruction.
Several minor powers might be on the way to acquiring nuclear weapons.
Iranians currently see their nuclear program as a potent symbol of their
country’s status and a necessary form of self-defense against Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the United States. This is already drawing Israeli cyber and
bomb attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities (with the complicity of U.S.
intelligence agencies). If these drive Iranian nuclear facilities farther
underground, Israelis might be tempted into a preemptive nuclear strike. The
Turkish president has announced that he is contemplating acquiring nuclear
weapons, and Saudi rulers are also rumored to be considering it. Recent
Chinese assertiveness may be perceived as a potential nuclear threat in East
Asia, which might induce Japan and South Korea to acquire nuclear
weapons.
The danger of a conflagration worsens with more nuclear states. The
nuclear age has so far contained two main pairs of face-to-face rivals—the
United States and the USSR or Russia (for British and French weapons
would not be launched independently of the United States), and India and
Pakistan. They have stared each other in the face, saber rattling, but deterred
by the horrendous specter of nuclear war. Yet with many nuclear powers the
balance becomes more fragile, since states—especially those of different
types—cannot easily predict the actions of all the others. That is how World
War I started. International terrorists present a further threat if they can
capture a weapon of mass destruction—more probably biological or
chemical than nuclear—which is especially worrying if militants believe that
heaven awaits those who kill heretics. It seems scientifically possible for a
pandemic to be introduced into an enemy country, though keeping control of
its spread might be difficult, even impossible. On a more cheerful note,
cyberwars might disarm the enemy without casualties. Nuclear, chemical,
and biological deterrence might work, in which case peace will predominate
globally; or they will not work, in which case human civilization might end.
But given the persistent irrationality of humans starting wars, one cannot be
too hopeful.
What if Russia or China and the United States backed by NATO square
off against each other? They would all claim legitimacy for their actions.
Established powers claim the legitimacy of a defensive posture while
revisionists claim they are righting a past wrong. Revisionism of borders is
currently the major threat to world peace as self-righteousness envelops the
world’s three greatest military powers, one hitherto dominant, the other two
rising and revisionist.

Putin’s Revisionist War in Ukraine

The war of 2022 in Ukraine may have shocked many, but it was fairly
predictable and it revealed many traditional features of warfare—mainly the
negative ones. Russian revisionism—the demand for “lost territories”—had
intensified in recent years, revealed in successive military interventions in
Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine, all formerly tsarist Russian and
Soviet territories. Success in earlier ventures under Putin’s leadership had
led to increasing confidence in the Kremlin that desired ends could be
attained by military means. As I have emphasized, the best predictor of new
aggression is success in previous aggressions. Hitler had launched an
escalating series of aggressions: the Rhineland, Sudetenland, the rest of
Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United
States, though the combination of the last three proved his undoing. Will
Putin’s endgame be similar?
Armed conflict in Ukraine erupted in 2014 when the elected president,
who had become unpopular when he bowed to Russian pressure and
abandoned talks to enter the European Union, was overthrown by massive
pro-Western street demonstrations. In response, Russian soldiers in disguise,
the “little green men,” met with scant resistance as they swiftly occupied
largely Russian-speaking Crimea. The West denounced this but did little,
apart from limited economic sanctions. It was difficult to see what more they
could do, short of full-scale war. In eastern Ukraine armed separatists in
Donetsk and Luhansk, the two mainly Russian-speaking provinces of the
Donbas region, declared independence. Their militias were aided by more
little green men from Russia. Yet they faced determined resistance, and this
soon forced Putin into sending in regular Russian forces. Even so, they could
not prevail and stalemate resulted. By 2021, 14,000 people had already been
killed in a mixture of regular and irregular warfare.
Yet Putin’s rhetoric was already going much further. He proclaimed that
an independent Ukraine should not exist at all. It is part of Russia, he
claimed—as indeed it had been for most of its history before 1991. Many
Russians agreed with him. In the buildup to his full-scale invasion of 2022,
the normal blend of fear and overconfidence fueled Putin’s actions. The
understandable part of Russian fears derived from the eastward expansion of
NATO, begun in 1999 as Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined it.
Further expansion came as seven more countries joined in the early 2000s:
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. All
these countries wanted to join NATO because they feared Russia, and,
except for Slovenia, they had been part of the tsarist empire or the Soviet
Union. During this period NATO and the United States took full advantage
of Russian inability to mount more than verbal protests. The Kremlin noted
that NATO expansion was contrary to American assurances given by
Secretary of State James Baker to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand
eastward (in return for Russia’s accepting the unification of Germany). By
late 2021 there were NATO missile sites in Romania and Poland, NATO
exercises in the Baltic states, and American military aid to former Soviet
states in Central Asia. Russian leaders felt encircled. Alongside the
economic policy disasters inflicted on Russia by Western neoliberals, this
had weakened the influence of both the West and Russian liberals and it
enhanced the popularity of Russian and Slavic nationalists. The NATO
expansion was peaceful, since it was at the invitation of Russia’s neighbors.
But also provocative in Russian eyes was the November 2021 signing of a
“charter on strategic partnership” between Ukraine and the United States that
called for Ukraine to join NATO; the United States also promised
“unwavering commitment” to the reintegration of Crimea into Ukraine.
NATO’s expansion produced much self-satisfaction in Washington and
Brussels: they were cutting Russia down to size.
Some warned that such provocations would be counterproductive once
Russian power revived. Backed by nationalist and Slavophile factions, Putin
used his popularity as the man who had brought social order to Russia, and
he used his authoritarian powers to repress dissent and increase military
spending at the expense of living standards. The grim irony of this NATO
expansion is that its forces have remained irrelevant to the war in Ukraine,
insufficient to deter Putin. In fact, they enraged him. Most Americans had
also had enough of war after recent military disasters, and the Western
Europeans had even less appetite for war. So U.S. and NATO encirclement
could not actually restrain Russia. But this also meant that Russian fears
were exaggerated.
In February 2022 blowback came when Russian troops massed along
Ukrainian borders and invaded Ukraine across three fronts. This was far
more than border revisionism. It was attempted imperial reconquest. Putin’s
initial plan seems to have been to subjugate the whole of Ukraine. He
thought that Kyiv, the capital, would swiftly fall, that he could take over the
whole of the Donbas, create a land bridge through southern Ukrainian
territory between the Crimea and Russia, and seize the whole of the south of
Ukraine, making the country landlocked. Politically, this might result in
either incorporating Ukraine into Russia or leaving a puppet Ukrainian state
in Kyiv and the west of the country.
Military weakness on the ground in Europe meant that NATO could not
send forces into Ukraine. Nor did NATO members wish to use air power to
establish a no-fly zone (as they had done in Iraq), since they feared
escalation, and Putin hinted that this might force him to turn to the nuclear
option. Instead, NATO relied on the economic power of its members and
their willingness to supply arms to the Ukrainians. Initially, Putin was not
much discomforted by this. His conception of Russian “greatness” was
grounded more on military than on economic power, and he believed
anyway that he could compensate economically through greater cooperation
with China and India. Chinese leaders are conscious of the similarities of
Russian claims in Ukraine to their own revisionist claims to Taiwan. They
are now also willing to push the envelope against the United States, and so,
like Indian rulers, they willingly buy Russian oil at discounted prices.
Russian fears of NATO partly explain Putin’s warmongering. Four
more factors played important roles. The first was ideological. This was not
a war driven strongly by economic motives, though Putin obviously hoped
victory would bring economic benefit. His starting point was the ideological
identification of himself with the Russian state and people—a common
delusion among rulers. Here it came with a primarily military sense of
“grandeur” and “honor,” emotionally supercharged by shame and
humiliation over the decline of Russian power after the Soviet collapse,
which he described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth
century, a “genuine tragedy” for the Russian people. Russia must erase that
tragedy, ruthlessly, brutally. He added that the ongoing collapse of Western
hegemony is irreversible: things will never be the same. The battlefield to
which destiny and history have called us is a battlefield for our people. Putin
believed he could do it and become Russia’s new historic savior, honored
forever. During the invasion he compared himself to Peter the Great and his
western wars—which had lasted twenty-one years! Comparable delusions
have been common among dictators insulated from reality by like-minded or
yes- men around them. Putin was a throwback to the time of would-be great
conquerors of earlier chapters.
Second, in terms of military power, Russian forces and Putin himself
had become overconfident because of earlier successes, though these had all
been against rather puny powers with no significant airforces. Ukraine had a
significant airforce and indeed Russia has never been able to dominate the
Ukrainian skies. Russians had become inured to killing civilians as well as
soldiers through campaigns in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria. But the
Ukrainians constituted a much more significant military power that had been
receiving American arms and training over several years. The flattening of
the cities of Grozny and Aleppo were Putin-ordered atrocities reminiscent of
earlier conquerors’ destruction, as well as of all sides in World War II. Putin
and his generals had already shown that in war they did not count the cost in
lives.
 Third came Putin’s personal political motive, his belief—correct if he
could achieve victory—that war could bolster his popularity at home, which
was just beginning to falter. Playing the nationalism card and demonstrating
strength was popular, helped by control of the Russian media. Combined,
they generated a strong rally ’round the flag response. As we have seen,
perceived political advantage has been a common cause of war, though it can
rebound on the ruler if the war is not a success.
Fourth came generalized political contempt for Ukrainians. Putin was
shrewd and instrumentally rational in calculating some of the relative costs
and benefits of war. Yet his hatred of and contempt for Ukrainians had been
intensified by growing differences between the two political regimes. Since
2004 Ukraine had been moving closer to Western democracy, whereas Putin
had intensified autocracy. He also manipulated Russian historical memories
of the “Great Patriotic War,” calling the Ukrainian government fascist and
genocidal, drawing on the fact that some Ukrainian nationalists had thrown
in their lot with the Nazis in order to be free of the Soviets. Yet over a
million Ukrainians had died fighting in the Red Army, and President
Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish, making him an unlikely candidate for
fascism. There are some neo-Nazis among Ukrainian paramilitaries, as in the
Azov Battalion. Yet the Ukrainian government had been trying to squeeze
them out, while there are also fascists in the separatist militias. There is no
evidence whatsoever of genocide by Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian regime is
less corrupt and more democratic than Putin’s.
Putin, like many aggressors before him, despised his enemies and
disparaged their powers. Russian military superiority seemed assured: a
shark swallowing a minnow. Had Kyiv fallen within three days, as some
Washington military pundits predicted, or within six days, as the Russian
generals apparently expected, Putin might have got away with his invasion.
The West would have huffed and puffed but done little. But Ukrainians, with
modern weapons, fired up by nationalism, fueled by the emotional power
derived from defending their homeland, fought tenaciously, with bravery,
skill, and solidarity and displayed more tactical agility in the field by
granting local commanders autonomy. The hierarchy-bound, arrogant
Russians thought the invasion would be easy and so could not adapt to local
battlefield conditions. Their folly was clear when they attacked with tanks
without infantry support. Initial Russian defeats lasted long enough for anger
abroad to grow against Russia, sparking an economic and weapons-
supplying counterattack. Putin had unintentionally strengthened the
solidarity of his foes. He had expected that declining American will power,
revealed during the period of Trump’s fawning, divisions among the
Europeans, and an inexperienced German chancellor would produce divided
responses.
Yet the West’s response, led by the United States, was stronger and
more united than he had expected. This should not have surprised him after
the Ukrainians showed initial resistance, for the Americans and NATO could
now seize the opportunity of cutting Russia down to size without committing
any troops of their own. They were able to fight a proxy war, he was not.
Western sanctions greatly harmed the Russian economy, even though
Western leaders knew sanctions would also hurt their own economies.
Supplies of weapons to the Ukrainians also escalated. For the first time since
World War II, the German government, dominated by socialists and greens,
sent arms abroad and announced an increase of 100 billion euros in German
military spending. The whole of Europe joined in the sanctions. Sweden,
Finland, and Ukraine announced they would apply to join NATO, while
Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia applied to join the EU. Even those rulers
whom Putin had considered his friends, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary and
Recep Erdogan in Turkey, were equivocal. Only China and India offered him
a measure of economic support.
All this was of his own making. It had not helped Putin that he and his
diplomats had spent weeks lying that Russia would not invade. Diplomats
are used to being economical with the truth, but they hate being taken for
complete fools. Their anger intensified ideological commitment to the
principle of self-determination, to which Ukrainians were believed to have a
sacred right. Both NATO and Putin had unwittingly strengthened the very
threats they had feared. Caught in the middle of their irrational struggle were
mangled Ukrainian bodies, devastated cities, and tattered refugee columns—
the normal horrors of wars, especially horrifying Westerners as the wartime
sufferings of nonwhite peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East had not.
There had been ways to avoid this war, although they were now
unacceptable to the parties. It had been reasonable for Russia to desire
greater security. Ukraine might have taken the Finnish or Austrian post–
World War II routes and been accorded neutrality between NATO and
Russia. Since NATO had not originally wanted Ukraine as a member, agreed
neutrality might have been part of a good solution. Now, of course, no
security guarantees made by Putin are believable. Declaring Ukrainian
neutrality would simply be an invitation for a later Russian attack.
Principles, not pragmatism, ruled. Putin’s vision of grandeur and
NATO’s principle of sovereignty: the Ukrainian government must have the
absolute right to regain sovereignty over its former territories. Strong
principles often lead to war, but they can be compromised by geopolitical
pragmatism, motivated by the need to avoid war. There must be negotiations
at some point. The only alternative would be a clear-cut victory. Putin was
still confident of eventual victory, and he still did hold enough Ukrainian
territory to be able to claim a lesser victory, and so was uninterested in
negotiations. Paradoxically, the only viable path toward negotiations for the
West was to up the weapon supplies to produce either stalemate or recapture
of territory by Ukrainian forces, either of which might bring Putin to the
negotiating table. In the meantime, mutual mass slaughter ruled.
In the Donbas, with its majority of Russian speakers, the Minsk
Accords of 2014, never implemented, could have given it significant
autonomy within Ukraine. Events had also gone too far for this solution.
Alternatively, plebiscites might have been held whereby regional
populations decide for themselves which state they wish to live in, as
happened in Europe in the interwar period. Putin opposed these alternatives
because he believed he could conquer the Donbas (and indeed the whole
country) by force, and then administer his own phony plebiscites. Many
locals would probably have voted for union with Russia, but Putin’s brutal
invasion has probably reduced their number below majority level. Ideally,
the main principle involved should have been neither commitment to
national honor and grandeur (Russia) nor inviolable sovereignty (the United
States and its allies), but the right of peoples to self-determination. But Putin
was not interested in that. It may be necessary for Ukraine to give up Crimea
and the territories of the former separatist “republics” in order to gain back
remaining Russian-occupied areas. Russia would have to agree to Ukraine’s
joining NATO, for that would be Ukraine’s only protection against a further
Russian invasion. Yet it is hard to imagine Putin agreeing to that, either. But
how much is given up by each side will depend on the fortunes of war.
War is the worst option not only because it is an efficient killing
machine, but also because its outcome is unpredictable. Starting a war is
extremely risky. Realist theory assumes that rulers’ decisions usually have a
rational basis. True, Putin carefully planned his course of action over several
years. He cautiously assembled his forces for Ukraine over at least several
months. He chose what he thought was the right moment to strike, given
recent Belarusian dependence on him, European disunity, a new,
inexperienced German government, and a soft-spoken U.S. president.
Perhaps he waited until after the end of the winter Olympics to avoid
discomforting China. These were all indications of instrumental rationality.
Yet though Putin is undoubtedly a clever and calculating man, his reasoning
had become subverted by emotions, by ideology, by his need for personal
political survival, by his need to please nationalist and Slavophile factions,
and by his blinkered contempt for those he defined as his enemies—like
many other aggressors of history.
The risk soon became glaring, as Ukrainian forces held on, repelling
Russian attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv, forcing Russian retreat with heavy
losses. When this first wave failed, attack was redoubled in the Donbas,
reserve forces were moved in, and tactics honed in Chechnya and Syria were
resumed. Eastern and southern cities were devastated, not by tanks, but by
long-range artillery, missiles, carpet bombing, and cluster munitions. These
were overwhelmingly unguided because Russian stocks of precision
weapons were diminishing, and so soldiers and civilians were being killed
fairly indiscriminately. Cities were razed before Russian forces advanced on
the ground—a strategy not likely to win hearts and minds, but effective in
death-dealing: a ghastly form of rationality. The performance of the Russian
armed forces has been quite dismal, and so far Putin’s escalations—a partial
mobilization and the lobbing of rockets and drones against Ukrainian cities
and civilians—seem signs of weakness rather than strength. Much of this
falls within the category of a war crime, although such brutal tactics—
including deliberate targeting of civilians—had also been the traditional
warfare of industrial societies and was used by all sides in World War II. Yet
the Russian advance was very slow, and then it stopped. It is unclear how
long either of them can continue. It is impossible to give even approximate
casualty figures, but fatalities so far have probably exceeded 50,000.
I have stressed the unpredictability of battle, and I cannot predict the
outcome of this one (I write in late 2022). The war will probably drag on a
while yet, since neither side looks as though it will achieve a rapid victory
(provided the West does not falter in its weapons supplies and sanctions),
and neither side is interested in negotiating. Perhaps Russian numerical
superiority and the indifference of Russian leaders to their large casualty rate
will eventually succeed in devastating and conquering the whole of the
Donbas. Perhaps Putin might declare victory at this point—or he might not
stop. Even if Russian forces were to secure battlefield victory in the east,
guerilla resistance and political turbulence would probably ensue there. Of
course, most locals may care more about the war ending than who wins it.
Kremlin leaders might face years of quagmire in Ukraine, inducing gradual
economic and military decay: a Pyrrhic victory. This might eventually affect
Putin’s ability to continue ruling. A coup against him remains the hope of
many for a negotiated solution, though his authoritarian rule seems very
solidly rooted. On the other hand, the recent initiative has lain with the
Ukrainians, who have made considerable gains in the east and south. But if
their momentum continues, this increases the chances that Putin might
escalate to a nuclear response, perhaps at first only of battlefield nuclear
weapons but still devastating not just for soldiers but also for the
surrounding civilian population. The American response to this is unclear.
Threats of retaliation have been made, but they have remained vague. But
Putin’s absence of rationality so far does not inspire confidence in the
rationality of his future actions. Yet further Russian expansion is unlikely
given the blowback among neighbors seeking NATO and EU membership.
They reason correctly that otherwise a Russian victory would lead to more
invasions. Rarely does anyone gain from a major war—except the
armaments industries. That this has been so irrational a war should not
induce surprise. That is a quality shared by most wars. We should not portray
Putin as a madman, for his folly is not uncommon among rulers.

Chinese Revisionism
Chinese revisionism has more fronts but as yet has not involved as much
militarism. It might, however, be aggravated by the Russian example or if
the United States refuses to accept its rise. The current U.S. defense strategy
is to be the “preeminent military power in the world,” accompanied by
“favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the
Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.” Though widely accepted in the
past, this now seems provocative to a far more powerful China, especially
when intensified by Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” aimed at China, and Trump’s
grotesque insults. China’s defense strategy proclaims, “China will never
follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony,” and “As
economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversification
develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development, and win-
win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times.” While we
should doubt such modesty, China is potentially dominant in its region,
though not the world, as the United States has been.
There are still great military disparities between these two powers.
Current U.S. military spending is probably more than twice that of China
(although Chinese statistics are rather opaque). The United States has around
six hundred overseas military bases, while China will shortly have three to
five. The United States has several military bases close to China, but China
has none near the United States (the same disparity exists with Russia). In
2021 China had about three hundred nuclear warheads, and the United States
had four thousand. The Chinese aim to reach one thousand by 2030, and
they already have the “nuclear triad,” the ability to launch missiles from air,
land, and sea. The United States had twelve aircraft carriers and two under
construction, whereas China had three. The United States has launched many
overseas wars in the last sixty years; China has engaged only in border
skirmishes—which leads some observers to cast doubt on Chinese fighting
ability. But a new arms race is potentially looming over hypersonic weapons,
space arms, and cyberweapons, in which China is no laggard. The fear is that
an attack that disabled space satellites or command-and-control systems
could escalate in unpredictable ways. At present there are no channels of
communication between the United States and China over such weapons as
there was over nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet
Union. Nor is economic power so skewed. In 2019 China’s nominal GDP
remained only just behind the United States’, and it is ahead if measured in
gross Purchasing Power Parity; but China has a far bigger population, so its
GDP per capita was only one-fifth of the American. Yet its economy will
continue to grow.
China currently plans expansion to restore the full extent of former
Chinese empires. This revisionism means securing full control of Hong
Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet, plus slivers of territory along the border with
India (which the regime dubiously claims is in accordance with the 1890
Anglo-Qing Treaty), the return of Taiwan, and predominance in the South
China Sea. These targets lay within the Ming or Qing empires, and past
imperial glory is important in modern Chinese nationalism.1 Regime
legitimacy rests not only in economic prosperity and longevity but also in
bringing unity and order to Chinese lands. Official Chinese ideology states
that one hundred years of submission to foreign powers ended in 1949.
Thereafter, Mao made China free, Deng made China wealthy, and Xi is
giving China global strength. This national revitalization rests on popular
revisionism, though it is boosted by regime manipulation. There is a
widespread sense that all these domains are rightly Chinese, bringing a
nationalist righteous tone to aggression that is not easy to turn aside. At the
same time, as is normal in border disputes, rivals in contested zones feel as
strongly in the justice of their case, and India, Japan, and Vietnam are quite
substantial powers. Further MIDs are likely on the China-India borders for
strategic and status interests.
In Hong Kong Chinese repression has ruthlessly mounted into a tragedy
for a population used to far more civil freedoms than mainland Chinese
enjoy. The West has been helpless to intervene, except with rhetoric and
economic sanctions that harden Chinese repression. China seems prepared if
necessary to run down this great financial and trading entrepôt, currently a
valuable economic asset, rather than yield an iota of control. For the Xi
regime, domination is a value rationality to which even economic prosperity
is subordinated.
The Chinese offensive in Xinjiang is claimed to be aimed at jihadists.
The years 2013 and 2014 saw two terrorist attacks by Uyghurs. In response,
Xi promulgated a “comprehensive security framework,” calling for vigilance
toward a jihadi “virus” against which Chinese Muslims must be
“inoculated.” He urged local Chinese officials to “use the organs of
dictatorship” with “absolutely no mercy.”2 The policy seemed vindicated to
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders when a few contacts between
Uyghurs and Islamist organizations abroad were unearthed, as well as the
presence of Uyghur fighters among Middle Eastern and Afghan jihadists.
These fighters may have not yet taken jihadism back into Xinjiang, although
affiliates of al Qaeda and ISIS have declared a desire to do so. Hence, the
forcible “reeducation” of up to a million Uyghurs and Kazakhs is claimed as
“counterterrorist preventive repression.” It includes deporting thousands of
Uyghur young women to factories in distant provinces of China. Such
measures may be counterproductive, amplifying what is at present a minimal
terrorist threat, an example of confusion of cause and effect.
Most mainland Chinese regard Taiwan as part of their country, stolen
away by Japan in 1895, and China prevented in 1950 from taking it back
again by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Chinese rulers might be encouraged into
adventurism by the recent imperialism of their Russian ally. The American
military commitment to Taiwan has been vague, and the United States does
not recognize Taiwan as a separate state to avoid provoking China. Yet in
May 2022 President Biden seemingly abandoned this “strategic ambiguity”
by promising to defend Taiwan should China attack it. Was he simply going
off script, which is a personality trait of this president? The pro-China
element in Taiwan is weakened by the Hong Kong repression, and a deal
between the two Chinas seems unlikely. The most likely war scenario might
be a Chinese regime in domestic trouble turning to diversionary war fever
over Taiwan. If this led to an invasion attempt, Chinese forces might
accomplish this quickly unless the United States intervened. The U.S.
response might depend on its own domestic considerations. It is conceivable
but unlikely that a full-fledged war between China and the United States
might be the outcome, but unintended escalation into war has happened too
frequently in human history to rule this out. Here the UN is of no help to
Taiwan, since it recognizes China but not Taiwan, and China is a permanent
member of the Security Council.
The Chinese claim to control the South China Sea, which is called its
“historical waters.” This is a challenge to several Asian countries and to the
American fleet stationed there. The claim centers on the islands of Senkaku,
possessed by Japan, and two isolated archipelagoes, the Spratly Isles
(formerly uninhabited) and the Paracel Isles, each containing tiny islets,
rocks, cays, and reefs. Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia all
claim some of the Spratlys and have established small bases and airports
there. China claims all the Spratlys and is establishing much bigger bases
there, which caused the Philippines to go to a UN arbitration tribunal in
2016. The ruling was that no single country had exclusive rights to the isles,
but China refused to accept this and has continued to construct artificial
islands for military purposes. The Paracels do have a permanent population
of about a thousand fishermen on an island controlled by China. But
Vietnam also claims the Paracels, and both have produced historical records
indicating nominal control there in different historical periods. These islands
are important as fishing grounds and have potential undersea oil and gas
fields, but their strategic significance is greater, for they lie astride the
shipping lanes through which a third of the world’s maritime trade passes.
The other states contesting the isles cannot credibly challenge Chinese
military power, nor do they want to alienate China, so they are reluctant to
object to Chinese encroachments. Japan, however, has installed missile
batteries on the island of Ishigaki, only three hundred kilometers from
Taiwan, part of a package of military upgrades in its small Pacific islands.
But in the North Pacific, China is beginning to challenge American military
dominance. Material interests are secondary. The main problems are rival
claims to geopolitical status and domination.
So Chinese rulers are assertive on all four power sources. Their
nationalist ideology defines domestic opponents as traitors and terrorists
undermining national unity; they seek Asian and even global economic
power serving strategic as well as profit motives; they are embarked on more
high-tech weaponry as well as expansion in the South China Sea; and they
have a stable authoritarian political order attractive to many other would-be
authoritarians, a factor in the faltering of democracy around the world. None
of this is deterred by American rhetoric, which is easily parried. To
accusations of Chinese repression, they cite American drones killing
civilians; to American capitalism, they counterpose the Great Capitalist
Recession of 2008 and their own faster recent growth; to the virtues of
American democracy, they posit bought American elections, racism, and
fighting in the streets. These are not foolish accusations, although the
failings of American democracy pale beside the repression exercised by the
CCP.
Chinese rulers seem not to want to expand territorial control beyond
former imperial boundaries. To the west, they do not want to govern more
Muslims. To the north, Russia is a formidable opponent; to the south, so is
India; and to the east, so is Japan (if backed by the United States). To the
southeast, less powerful regional states would prefer accommodation with
China. Its “Belt and Road Action Plan,” announced in 2015, will encompass
northerly land routes (the “Belt”) and southern maritime routes (the “Road”)
to encourage trade relations with Asia, the Middle East, and Europe,
primarily through infrastructure investments and economic aid—economic,
not military, power—though China has threatened trade embargoes and
sanctions, which are also American tactics, of course. But Chinese rulers
lack interest in the form of foreign regimes, unlike their American
counterparts. The Taiwanese issue apart, other powers need not fear war
with China unless they provoke it. It is difficult for U.S. leaders to accept
this expansion of Chinese power, but the peace of the world depends on it.
The obvious failure of recent American military aggression has, we can
hope, drummed greater Realism into its leaders. Realistically, there is little
the United States can do to stem Chinese repression at home or the growth of
Chinese power in its own region. Yet it should hold the existing level of
defense over Taiwan and counter the Belt and Road program with its own
aid and development program. Trump took a giant step backward from this
when he took the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That
decision should be reversed and the partnership deepened. The United States
should continue to stand for the virtues of democracy and human rights,
though that stance is being undercut by the very visible decay of democracy
in America itself.
Material interests should offer restraint, but mutual desire for status and
honor by rulers might suggest otherwise. The level of economic
interdependence between Western Europe and Russia is quite high, centered
on Russia’s energy industry, and that between the United States and China is
now very high: the United States had over half a trillion dollars of trade with
China in 2020, reinforced by a wealth of educational and scientific
exchanges and mutual interests over pandemics and climate change.
Growing trade between Britain and Germany before 1914 did not stop their
warring with each other, but today’s interdependence is orders of magnitude
greater. As recently as the Cold War period, the Soviet Union was largely
autarkic. Autarky no longer exists for any country. I have often doubted
rulers’ commitment to material interests while making war-and-peace
decisions. But for Chinese or American rulers to ignore such an
unprecedented level of mutual material interests would be stupidity of the
highest order. That might induce a certain degree of hope, except that
children’s games over who is to dominate the playground, irrelevant to the
concerns of their peoples, are baked in to the institutions and culture of
geopolitics. Recent rising tensions between the great powers lend some
support to pessimistic Realism, which sees wars as ensuing from the inherent
anarchy and insecurity of geopolitical space. In the end, however, wars are
rarely possible to predict.

Existential Threats
Unfortunately, a far more serious crisis is now in sight, and solving it
requires much closer collaboration between all the powers. If no action is
forthcoming on the conflicts just mentioned, nothing disastrous would
happen. Inactive peace would be good news. But climate change differs. If
nothing is done and major mitigation policies are not implemented, it is
certain natural and human disaster on a global scale will ensue. No problem
with predicting here. Doing nothing is not a rational option, 95 percent of
climatologists say. According to the estimate of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), if we continue “business as usual,” relying on
fossil fuels, the earth’s average temperature will rise by 2.6°C to 4.8°C
above preindustrial levels by 2100. Implementing the 2015 Paris
Agreement’s “unconditional Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs)
would still lead to a global temperature rise of 2.9°C to 3.4°C by 2100,
which would continue to rise thereafter. Current NDC target levels need to
be tripled if emission reductions are to meet the Paris goal of 2°C warming,
and increased fivefold for the 1.5°C goal, the real solution. The UN says
these gaps can still be bridged, but each year we get further away from a
solution except in rhetoric. Yet even the rhetoric is contested, especially by
the U.S. Supreme Court, which has proudly privileged “originalist” rhetoric
in banning the federal government from issuing climate regulations, relying
on eighteenth-century notions of justice—when no one could have envisaged
the climate crisis we now face.
Accelerating rates of carbon emissions, ice cap melt, seawater and sea
acidity rises, heat waves, forest fires, floods, cyclones, and species
extinctions beyond previous experience have characterized the last two
decades. Emissions for 2020 were the highest recorded, and average
temperatures rose by 2°C rather than the 1°C annual rise of the previous
decade. The climate becomes more sensitive to greenhouse gases as it
warms, so that emission and temperature rises might be exponential. The
2021 report of the UN IPCC confirmed this and found that we are already
locked into harmful changes in the ocean, ice sheets, and global sea levels,
which will continue for centuries to come, whatever our policies. Using a
784,000-year-long reconstruction of sea-surface temperatures and a
paleoclimate simulation that includes atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and
vegetation factors, researchers calculated a range of warming of between
4.78°C and 7.36°C by 2100.3 Anything over 4°C would be catastrophic, but
even the range of 2–4°C would bring widespread disaster. High-emissions
regimes like the United States, Brazil, and Australia were recently removing
laws designed to reduce emissions. That is suicidal. Reason does not rule in
climate change. Short-term sectoral profit backed by ruinous consumerism
does, and they will ruin the earth if unchecked. The positive side is that
people in rich and poor countries alike are now directly experiencing these
disasters, so that politicians are beginning to enact emission-lowering
policies. That is already happening in the United States under the Biden
administration, China under Xi, and across Europe. But will their measures
go far enough, will they even be revoked, and can they lower the rising
emissions of poorer countries as they develop?
Climate change has not yet directly produced wars, although sustained
local drought preceded both the Sudanese and Syrian civil wars. But if
leaders do not negotiate a lowering of greenhouse gases, violent conflict for
declining resources will rise. Poor states are unable to take or enforce
expensive measures, and they lack the military power to challenge more
privileged states, so the specter might not be interstate wars, but massive
refugee flows beating up helplessly against the defensive walls of wealthy,
privileged countries. One can conceive of mass extinctions of humans more
easily than wars. One postapocalyptic scenario would be a halving of the
global population through genocides, pandemics, or famines that could
produce an era of emissions reductions for the survivors. Yet there is also a
potentially brighter scenario. Any successful global response to climate
change would have to be achieved by major international cooperation. A
byproduct of this would make countries less likely to war against each other.
Perhaps the path toward Kant’s perpetual peace might be through combating
climate change.
Raymond Aron saw only two ways to world peace: a universal state or
the international rule of law.4 Resurgent nationalism is currently moving us
away from both. Optimistic liberals see a global civilizing process. They
might concede that it is slower and more uneven than initially suggested, but
they see present exceptions as blips in the long run. But my history of war
suggests that periods of war alternate with periods of peace. This will
probably continue for a good while yet. Recent Russian imperialism shocked
the world into realizing that even in Europe war is not dead. We cannot
explain war or peace by relying on universals like human nature or the
essential nature of societies, as historical pessimists did. Nor can we support
evolutionary theories of the rise of peace, or Realist theories that assume that
rational calculation of odds determines war-and-peace decisions. This is an
admittedly uncertain ending, but wars have always been the product of
unpredictable human decisions that might have gone differently, and which
might do so in the future. I wish I could share the optimism of the liberal
tradition. Goldstein concludes: “Today, bit by bit, we are dragging our
muddy, banged-up world out of the ditch of war. We have avoided nuclear
wars, left behind world war, nearly extinguished interstate war, and reduced
civil wars to fewer countries with fewer casualties. We are almost there.”5
Regretfully, this mixes reality with hope. In the words of an American
soldier-president: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every
rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and
are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of
its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any
true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of
iron.”6
Rulers should fully commit to international institutions to combat war
and climate change, consider undertaking wars only in self-defense,
calculate carefully what is self-defense, calm the emotions and the temper,
never demonize potential enemies, consult advisers of varying views, and
use soft power unless attacked. If both parties to disputes think only of self-
defense, there will be no more wars.
 Conclusion
Patterns of War

MOST INTERSTATE wars have been irrational in terms of either means or

ends, and often of both. Here I summarize the evidence and explain why
irrationality has dominated. Most interstate wars that have been rational in
terms of ends would be actually termed wars of aggression as defined by the
Nuremberg Tribunal and then by the Rome Statute which set up the
International Criminal Court. Yet international courts have brought no
prosecutions for wars of aggression since Nuremberg. It would bring more
peace if they did, for then military interventions might be only those
authorized by the UN. This is utopian, of course, since 42 countries have not
signed up to the ICC or the Rome Statute (123 countries have), and the
nonsigners include the United States, Russia, and China. It would also help
if arms sales abroad, other than for policing, were banned, but this is also
utopian. I have little faith in the present capabilities of the UN, and major
military interventions would still have to be led by U.S. forces, but the
outcome of multilateral measures would be better than recent unilateral
interventions by the United States and its allies.
War is not universal, but it is ubiquitous, occurring in all regions and
periods, if varying in frequency and intensity. Yet years of peace have far
outnumbered those of war, and the large majority of interstate conflicts have
been settled by conciliation or continue to fester amid grumbling. But boring
peace has been considered less noteworthy than exciting wars, from early
inscriptions, chronicles, and sagas to today’s mass media. Wars sell better
than peace. So war is neither genetically hardwired into humans, nor quite as
important as it is often represented. Nor is it hardwired only into men. Men
have caused and fought virtually all wars, but this is due to their culture and
institutions, not their genes, whereas guerilla forces and recent armies have
included many women. For over 90 percent of their time on earth, humans
fought very few wars, but when fixed agrarian settlements generated states
and social classes, organized war became ubiquitous. Societies, not universal
human nature, cause wars.
Marxists explain the origin of war as a product of class exploitation. In
precapitalist modes of production, they say, peasants were in physical
possession of the land, and lords had to extort the surplus from them through
force. The reverse Mafia-like sequence was also common, whereby peasants
put themselves under the protection of local armed men when threatened by
armed men from elsewhere. The result was the same: peasants were forced
to yield up surplus to lords, whose privileged lifestyles, castles, fineries, and
weapons depended on it. This, I think, is a valid theory pertaining to the
origins of war.
Yet military power is only one of the four main ways for humans to
acquire whatever material or ideal resources they may desire. I have asked
why rulers use military power rather than rely on cooperative ideology,
economic exchange, or political diplomacy to attain foreign policy goals. I
focused mainly on interstate wars, though including civil and extrastate wars
when these intruded. In chapter 10 I found no long-term or short-term trend
toward either more or less war, provided we add interstate, civil, and
extrastate wars together and note increasing civilian casualties, arms sales,
and internationalization of recent civil wars. Overall, war is neither more nor
less meaningful today than in the past.

Anarchy and Hegemony

The dominant theory of interstate war has been Realism, which deploys
three major concepts: anarchy, hegemony, and rationality. Anarchy contrasts
the rule of law within states with its absence in international space. Thus,
rulers’ anxieties about other rulers’ intentions, as well as fears for their own
survival amid anarchy, inevitably entail “security dilemmas,” by which two
or more powers periodically escalate into war. This is often true, especially
in wars of mutual escalation. Yet Realists minimize domestic causes of war.
Eckstein, for example, sought to explain the Roman Republic’s wars almost
entirely in terms of geopolitical anarchy.1 In chapter 4 I showed this made
some sense in the very early wars of the republic, but domestic power
relations were much more important causes later on. Most of its wars were
wars of aggression, which led first to regime change abroad and then to
imperial conquest of peoples who did not threaten Roman survival. Instead,
the economic, ideological, and political institutions and culture of Rome had
been subordinated to militarism.
Realism minimizes the importance of norms. Almost all wars before the
modern period were between neighbors, but so was most foreign trade and
ideological diffusion of shared norms, religions, and in the case of trade,
agreed-on regulatory procedures. Liberal theorists emphasize pacific norms,
like Confucianism, religious injunctions, or United Nations resolutions,
which have aimed at limiting or regulating war. Some shared norms do
restrain warriors, as in siege warfare or the treatment of prisoners or
civilians. These norms often fray, but those who surrender hope the norm
will be respected. Shared norms may alternatively embody warrior virtues
that favor war, however, as in the feudalisms of China, Japan, and Europe or
in modern fascism. Norms may restrain or amplify hostilities.
The opposite of anarchy in Realism is hegemony: peace will follow if a
single state has military power coupled with the legitimate authority to set
the norms of geopolitics. In many regions one great imperial state emerged
out of a plethora of contending small states. Yet to achieve imperial peace,
countless lives had been sacrificed in war, and most imperial states
continued to make war against newly perceived enemies until their decline
and fall. A rare exception was Tokugawa rule in Japan, where peace
predominated for 250 years after the dynasty had achieved hegemony,
although this was helped by its island ecology, which made wars against
foreigners difficult. Hegemony has also been region-specific, as in imperial
China’s relatively peaceful tributary diplomacy with states in its east and
southeast but more warlike relations in other regions. The American
informal empire since 1945 was hegemonic over Western Europe, moved
toward hegemony after three decades of wars in East Asia, yet was not
achieved in the Middle East or Latin America.
So hegemony may sometimes reduce war but is too rare to be the main
cause of peace. There are other causes of peace. War is costly, especially one
likely to last long. Sometimes balances of power among several states
encourage peace. Some rulers have clearly preferred peace, such as the
Confucian gentry-bureaucrat class of China, some ancient Greek city-states,
eleventh-century Song China, the Iroquois Confederacy, postcolonial Latin
America, recent centuries in Scandinavia, and recent decades in Western
Europe. In the Cold War, the United States and the Soviets respected arms
treaties and nonintervention in each other’s sphere of influence. In all these
cases, peace had its own virtues. It permitted extraordinary economic
development in Song China and in the postwar world, where it also avoided
nuclear war. Though anarchy and hegemony are useful aids in explaining
war and peace, the push of anarchy is no stronger than the pull of peace. We
have seen perennial tugs-of-war between them.

Rationality
Realists say war-and-peace decisions hinge on rational choice of means and
ends. Defensive Realists say that states value above all the goal of survival
and so calculate rationally the means of ensuring this. Aggressive Realists
say that states calculate the ends of economic or strategic profit from war set
against its cost in treasure and lives and the likelihood of military victory. If
the odds seem favorable, states will go to war. States will initiate war when
militarily strong and choose defense or diplomacy when weak. These
hypotheses are plausible, and we have seen some confirming examples of
them.
Yet I have preferred to write not of states but of rulers, whether
individuals or smallish groups. We have seen that these have made the
decisions, and they possess cognition, emotions, and values, which states
lack. States, however, are important as political institutions and networks
within which rulers operate. These stretch outward into civil society,
carrying orders, constraints, and resources two ways between the center and
the periphery. So for rational foreign policy there must be both rational
decision makers and some overall coherence to the rules and practices of
these institutions. The extent of state coherence has varied, and there has not
been a consistent historical trend toward either more or less coherence. The
Roman Republic had considerable coherence in decisions for war. Senate
and popular assembly rules were clear, as they were in some ancient Greek
city-states. The Chinese imperial state was fairly coherent with its two
courts, one dominated by the emperor and his kin, the other by the gentry-
bureaucrat class. The main problems confronting coherence were the
relations between them, as well as the sheer size and the succession crises of
the empire. In feudal monarchies, coherence depended on relations between
the prince and his leading vassals, who enjoyed much autonomy. Their
relations might be harmonious or fractious and were intermittently bedeviled
by succession crises. In theory, today’s representative democracies have
clear rules for war-and-peace decisions, but the size and complexity of
modern states can subvert this—as in the chaotic multi-institution decision
making that caused World War I or the “shadow” neoconservative networks
confusing the chain of command in the Bush the Younger administration,
both of which reduced the rationality of decision making. A high level of
institutional coherence has been quite rare.
Rulers always think their decisions for war are rational in terms of both
means and ends, and they will surely try to avoid a war they believe they are
likely to lose. It is difficult to probe their motives, which have obviously
been varied. Yet we can pose a simple question: Do those who initiate wars
win them? Obviously some do not, but that may only indicate
understandable mistakes. It might reach the level of irrationality of means if
initiators systematically either lost them or fought very costly wars with no
victor. Quantitative data are available for wars since 1816, and I can add my
own historical cases.
Melvin Small and David Singer concluded that between 1816 and 1965
initiators were victorious in thirty-four of forty-nine wars, which apparently
indicates relatively rational decision making. Yet in over half these cases, the
initiator was a major power attacking a minor power. Of these nineteen
confrontations, the major power initiated hostilities on eighteen occasions
and won seventeen. This is hardly surprising, since a war between a shark
and a minnow is not much of a risk for the shark. When minnows fought
minnows, the initiator won fourteen and lost seven, but when sharks fought
sharks, the initiators won three and lost five. So initiating hostilities was less
likely to bring victory when the combatants were great power near equals.
The authors add that there was only one stalemate war among their cases
(which I find hard to believe).2
Reiter and Stam found fifty-six of initiators in the period 1816–1988
were winners, and only thirty were losers. The authors had discarded all
wars ending in a draw from their analysis, however. Draws are really a loss
for both sides, costly in lives and money, which renders the war pointless,
even in some cases of self-defense. If we add to the losers the seventeen
initiators who fought costly draws, we get forty-seven losers to set against
the fifty-six winners—only slight odds in favor of risking war.3 Lebow in his
sample found that initiators won forty-six, lost forty-five, and drew six—
poor odds. And the states initiating the nine biggest wars all lost them! In his
sample the odds got worse: since 1945 only 26 percent of initiators achieved
their goals, rising to 32 percent if success means merely defeating the
enemy’s forces in the field (as in Iraq in 2003).4 So when Ralph White
studied only twentieth-century wars (after the age of imperialism), he found
that aggressors lost twenty and won only five, with five draws—very bad
odds. I analyzed in chapter 9 postcolonial wars in Latin America. Initiators
lost six wars and won only two.5 There were also five mutual provocations
and five costly stalemates. All eight of the rulers who initiated wars,
whatever the outcome, were thrown out of office because of the wars. This
sorry record did bring a “delayed reaction Realism”—a belated desire to
process conflict not through war but mere MIDs and mediation.
So aggressive war was risky: there was usually only around a 50
percent chance of success. Would you initiate a war with such odds? But
millions of people today take on projects with scant chance of success—like
opening start-up companies. In the United States they have only a 60 percent
chance of survival after three years, 50 percent after five, and only 30
percent after ten. The U.K. figures are 40 percent, 36 percent, and 33
percent. Given the lure of wealth and autonomy, hope springs eternal, as it
does in war. Consider also a massive global industry whose customers are
mainly losers. Yet the gambling industry is booming. Its gross gaming
revenue (GGR), the difference between revenues and payouts, is rising, and
GGRs are projected to reach $565 billion in 2022. The industry exists only if
there are more losers than winners. Gamblers are risk-accepting; they get
excited by the act of gambling, and they are hopeful. So are rulers, especially
since in war they are usually gambling with other people’s lives. Most war-
and-peace decisions are made in a context of risk-induced anxiety, hope, and
unexpected interactions that are hardly conducive to reason.
But given the order to prepare for war, generals calculate campaign
plans and mobilize resources. Quartermasters’ logistics dominate this phase,
and it is highly calculative. Then comes contact with the enemy, and all hell
breaks loose. As we saw, battle is felt by the soldiers as fearful chaos, from
the ferocious body-on-body slashing of earlier history to modern callous
warfare in which soldiers blaze away at a distance, keeping heads down, but
vulnerable to random death inflicted from the skies. Carefully laid plans can
rarely be implemented because of the enemy’s unexpected behavior or the
unanticipated battlefield terrain—Clausewitz’s “friction” of battle and Ibn
Khaldun’s “hidden causes” of outcomes. Various commanders, including
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder and Napoleon, have been credited with the
adage “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first
contact with the main hostile force.” The outcome of six of the seven biggest
battles of the Hundred Years’ War was the result of unexpected terrain or
enemy action. Most of the battle victories of the U.S. Civil War did not result
from initial strategies. The small-scale engagements by U.S. World War II
units vividly described by S. L. A. Marshall were decided by unexpected
terrain or enemy dispositions, mistakes, acute or fortunate decisions, and
bravery by small groups. The decision for war submits rulers, generals, and
soldiers to the fickle fortunes of battle. Today the lack of predictability is
obvious in Ethiopia, Yemen, and Ukraine.
I recap the extent of calculation of means in my main historical cases.
The Roman senate debated war-and-peace decisions at length; it focused on
the economic profit war might bring, not on the cost in lives. There were
deviant cases, such as Caesar’s wars in Gaul and Britain, which were not
expected to be profitable. Here the main motives were domestic politics:
most senators wanted Caesar far away, where he could not foment trouble in
Rome, while Caesar’s faction wanted him to command legions abroad and
then bring them back to foment trouble in Rome (which he duly did). The
senators rarely doubted military victory, so discussion of military odds was
confined to how many legions should be mobilized. War was usually
endorsed unless jealousies stopped a rival senator from getting the chance to
command the armies or unless other wars were ongoing and therefore
stretching resources. Senators were sometimes overconfident, and defeat
resulted. But their response was to dig deeper into manpower resources and
emerge with eventual victory, as in the Punic Wars. The eventual success
rate of Roman-initiated wars was high. War for the Romans, however, was
not really a “choice”—it was what Romans did, by virtue of their militaristic
institutions and culture. In contrast, the goal of economic profit was more
important for the Carthaginians, and they did not sacrifice as much for
military purposes. So they lost the Punic Wars and were destroyed.
 The rulers of the two ex-barbarian dynasties of China, the Yuan and the
Qing, behaved like Romans. They also could dig deeper into resources than
their enemies because militarism was baked in to their institutions and
cultures. Military power restructured the other three sources of power. As in
Rome, war was considered the surest way to wealth, political power, and
status, honor, and glory alike. War was what Mongols and Manchus, Aztecs
(Incas less so), and Arab conquest dynasties did whenever opportunity or
insult seemed to arise. They continued aggressing until they reached hubris,
sometimes induced by Nature’s deserts, jungles, or oceans. This finally
constrained them into preferring diplomacy and peace—a delayed-reaction
Realism. Until then, rulers were constrained more by institutionalized
militarism than by calculation. But perhaps my rather aggressive cases—the
Roman Republic and the Mongol, Manchu, Aztec, and Arab dynasties—
were atypical.
So I examined the milder two Song dynasties of China. The first Song
emperor, Taizu, was a model Realist, fighting and winning offensive wars
after cautious initial probes to test whether victory was likely, and carefully
building up adequate forces. Yet his successors initiated six offensive wars
resulting in only one success, one costly draw, and four defeats. Muddying
rational calculation were righteous revisionism demanding the return of “lost
territories,” attempts to divert domestic political power struggles, an
emperor’s overweening ambition, or choosing the wrong allies, as in the
crucial final wars of the two dynasties (the only major geopolitical cause).
Other Song rulers preferred peace or defense over aggression, less because
of weakness than because they pursued economic and social development,
following liberal, not Realist, precepts, and preferring diplomacy, cultural
cooperation, and production and trade. In contrast, the last Song emperors
(and the last Ming emperors, too) were relatively weak but hastened collapse
by striking out impulsively, in denial of weakness, rather than settling for
accommodation. The Song present a mixed bag.
Luard said that most European rulers between 1400 and 1940 who
started wars lost them.6 He surely exaggerated in perceiving no careful
calculation of means among rulers, but war was mainly what a medieval
ruler did when feeling slighted or ambitious or when diverting the turbulence
of younger sons or bolstering his or her own domestic power. These
motivations and the lure of status, honor, and glory then dictated calling out
the barons, levying taxes or borrowing, and setting off for battle with
whatever levies showed up, which the ruler could not predict. Again, war
was less a choice than what a ruler felt constrained to do in particular
contexts. Later European rulers fielded professional armies and navies, but
they still mostly warred when feeling slighted or ambitious. It was not
always a question of “choice” because conflict stances might escalate into an
unintended war. From the sixteenth century came a wave of neomercantilist
naval wars with material goals and the belief that the international economy
was zero-sum—for one country to gain, another must lose. This was more
calculative, although there were also ideological wars in this period, at first
religious, then revolutionary-nationalist. Finally, global imperial conquest
was launched by Europeans in which the lure of profit fused with righteous
ideologies of civilizational and racial superiority.
In World War I no aggressor initially invoked economic goals. Instead,
they demanded status in the geopolitical system and the honor of defending
allied client states to ensure the survival of their dynasties (though German
rulers did hope for more profitable colonies). Many calculations were made
by many actors, but war resulted from cascading diplomatic mistakes and
incoherent policy formation. A plethora of political institutions produced
unpredictability and brinkmanship that perversely meant that no one would
back down. Most rulers were confident of victory, but they had a backup
belief that this would be a short war, since economies could not support it for
long. How wrong they were! So the rulers of Germany, Austria-Hungary,
Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, the leading initiators, secured not only
their own defeat but also the fall of monarchy itself. Some at the time
warned that this might happen, but they lost the domestic power struggle.
Yet all the rulers lost heavily in this dreadful war, except for the two
outsiders who picked up the pieces, Americans and Bolsheviks. This war
was irrational for everyone else.
In World War II rationality was disrupted more by ideology. This
obstructed Allied defense strategy in the late 1930s. War might have been
prevented or delayed if France and Britain had allied with the Soviets to
deter Hitler, as many suggested at the time. There were geographical and
political obstacles to this in Eastern Europe, but ideology was the main
problem, since most French and British rulers feared communism more than
they did fascism. So Stalin, isolated, made his 1939 Non-Aggression Pact
with Hitler, and there was no balancing alliance. In the Far East, Japanese
rulers despised the Chinese, underestimating their nationalist resolve; and
Japanese and American rulers miscalculated each other’s reactions and got
into an unanticipated total war. War was initiated by German and Italian
fascists and Japanese semi-fascists. Their economic motives were
subordinated to a vision of imperial conquest achieved by martial ideologies
despising the “decadence” of the liberal powers and China, and the
“barbarism” of communism. Early successes prevented rational long-term
calculation of military and economic odds. The Axis rulers believed their
martial spirit would overcome daunting odds of numbers and technology.
For them this war embodied Weber’s “value rationality,” commitment to
ultimate values overriding instrumental rationality. Their initiation of war
was suicidal.
In the Korean War, North Korean, American, and Chinese rulers all in
turn aggressed, underestimating their enemies, blinkered by ideology. They
could reach only a bloody stalemate, which achieved none of their objectives
and led to a bitterness across Korea that still poisons East Asia. After Korea,
U.S. presidents were better at propping up client regimes than at changing
them, but in Vietnam they failed to achieve either and suffered defeat
through underestimating the ideological commitment and normative
solidarity of their opponent. Reagan’s pressure on the Soviet Union did help
bring about Soviet collapse, but the main causes of that collapse lay within
the Soviet Communist Party. The recent spate of wars in Muslim countries
has seen some initial battlefield victories for the United States and its allies,
yet neglect of political power predictably thwarted goal achievement. U.S.
interventions greatly damaged Afghanistan and Iraq and contributed together
with other actors to the chaos rending Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The United
States has not achieved its goals in any significant war since 1945, apart
from the Cold War, a remarkable series of failures by the world’s
superpower. At the moment Putin seems far from attaining his goals. So
from early history to the present day, initiating major war probably resulted
more often in failure than success, while there was substantial irrationality of
means.
Of course, some wars are rational in terms of ends, initiated for
potential or actual profit that was achieved, mostly in raids and in imperial-
conquest wars between highly unequal adversaries, while other wars are
rational because fought in self-defense with a good chance of success. But
benefit in these cases was almost entirely zero-sum: for some to gain, others
must lose. In Central and South America, pre-Columbian empires and
Spanish and Portuguese empires alike fought wars devastating indigenous
peoples, which embodied a ghastly racial form of rationality, bringing
benefits to a few conquerors but massacres of the defeated. Spanish and
Portuguese imperialisms, like other subsequent European imperialisms,
would today be classified as war crimes, and often as genocides. In contrast,
subsequent Latin American decisions were increasingly rational because
rulers learned from “bad wars” not to make more. There were no serial
aggressors here. Instead, rulers learned to move toward lesser MID conflicts
and diplomatic mediation.
Some wars might be considered rational in hindsight, having sparked
unintended benefits such as economic development, while conquest may
bring creativity by blending hitherto distinct social practices. It may also
provide more social order. Roman rulers always claimed this, as indeed did
most imperialists. Recent scholars have emphasized the creativity generated
by the blending of diverse cultures within the Mongol Empire. Yet peace
also brings order and creativity. Ibn Khaldun assessed the economic
consequences of early Arab wars. The conquerors seized great wealth for
themselves and their followers, for “booty was lawful property,” but always
at the expense of the conquered. Orderly imperial rule, however, did
generally boost economic growth and tax returns for the first two
generations of a dynasty, but then came decline in both, leading eventually to
the collapse of the dynasty in wars: a rather mixed bag.7 When dealing with
early modern European warfare, the Industrial Revolution, and the two
world wars, I found that even the unintended benefits of war, though real
enough, have been exaggerated and pale beside war’s devastation. The
counterfactual of whether civilization could have been furthered better
through peace may be unknowable. But there is a major countercase. In
Song China peace favored major technological innovation and economic
development—and it was defeat in war which ensured the end of the
extraordinary development under the southern Song.
The post-1945 period has seen extraordinary technological and
economic progress in the Northern Hemisphere, but was this due to
American hegemony or to the mere fact of peace there—a peace in reaction
to the most devastating war in human history. Statistical data drawn from
national income accounts are available on the economic impact of wars since
1945. They show that war reduces GDP per capita, even though the main
losses, of life and the destruction of physical and human capital, do not
figure in these income accounts.8 We cannot calculate such detail in earlier
wars, but chroniclers imply that interstate wars were zero-sum—for some to
gain, others must lose—and they stress the devastation of regions in which
campaigns occurred. Admittedly, this is far from perfect evidence, and the
economic effects of war need much further research. I tried to end my cases
with a rough guess at who benefited and who lost. Generally, more lost than
won. Given the certainty that war kills millions, my conclusion is that most
wars are pointless and irrational in terms of both means and ends. Why are
there nonetheless so many of them?

Political Power: Whose Decision?

Most decisions for war, whether made by a representative democracy, an
oligarchy, a monarchy, or a dictatorship, were made by a small coterie of
rulers, advisers, and other powerful persons—and sometimes by a single
monarch, dictator, prime minister, or president. There is very little
democracy in foreign policy. The extreme potential case, thankfully not yet
realized, is the sole authority of the American president to release nuclear
missiles that could destroy the world. That might also be said of both Putin
and Xi. A recent example of a consequential single ruler of the United States
was George Bush the Younger. His personal drive to war in Iraq was
discussed in chapter 14. Decisions have been made by rulers and their close
associates, not nations or the capitalist class, with influential colonial
bankers and merchants, arms industries, and media barons as exceptions.
Most capitalists prefer to do business amid peace, but they adapt quickly to
ways of making profit from war. As I showed in chapter 10, contrary to the
views of most political scientists, modern representative democracies have
been no less likely to make war, whether or not this was war against other
democracies, provided we include all their small colonial wars and the direct
democracy found among many indigenous peoples. Ideally, democracy
should make a difference, but in practice foreign policy decision making is
not very democratic.
The people are rarely responsible for wars, not because they are
virtuous but because they are barely interested in either sense of that word.
They do not see their personal interests at stake, and they lack interest in
foreign affairs. Representative democracy includes hundreds of elected
persons sitting in parliaments passing laws. Yet they depend for reelection
on their constituents, and so they mirror their lack of interest in foreign
policy. In the U.S. Congress, for example, few representatives or senators
show much interest in foreign policy. They leave it to the foreign affairs
committees. If their chairs and highly respected committee members agree
with the administration, foreign policy is rubber-stamped, unless powerful
interest groups intervene (or a gross violation of human rights provokes
them into moralizing rhetoric). This is why congressional votes for war in
the United States have been so lopsided. In this country a plethora of think
tanks add advice, yet congressional votes suggest that dissonant advice is
ignored.
Of course, public opinion does play a role in most modern societies
(rarely in large historical societies), but it is usually somewhat manipulated
by political leaders, entrenched vested interest groups, and media barons.
Where geopolitical relations become fraught, conflict becomes normalized
and foreign threats become “nationalized,” in the sense that the public,
lacking much knowledge of foreign affairs, can be fairly easily persuaded
that national interests are at stake, as their leaders claim. As war looms and
as it starts, a rally ’round the flag mentality usually occurs, lasting long
enough to persuade leaders that the public actually wants war. Sometimes
the result may be complex interactions among leaders, vested interests, mass
media, and mass publics, but the initiative in decision making almost
invariably lies with the leaders.
Democracy is a desirable system for deciding domestic issues in which
the people show interest. But democracy has not proved its worth in war-
and-peace decisions. The people have known little about the “enemy”
beyond what rulers tell them. In the past people saw war as defense of their
lord or monarch. Obedience was their duty, reinforced by institutionalized
rituals and by coercion. Today the people often do identify with the nation
and its rulers and so can be persuaded that even an aggressive war is self-
defense or that the enemy is evil. Americans, for a time, and Russians, under
severe censorship, will support a war claimed to be waged in self-defense or
good against evil—and leaders invariably assert both.
In some societies men have been addicted to war (and women accepted
addiction as normal), as did some pastoralists in northern Eurasia and the
Middle East. Decisions for war were made by the khan or emir and his
intimates, but there was popular enthusiasm for war. More widespread in
human history, however, has been the ethos of masculinity and manliness
pervasive in patriarchal societies, including our own, which for most men
smothers any pacific tendencies with the smear of cowardice. This has been
especially powerful while mobilizing soldiers once war has been decided on.
At this stage, women are often complicit in the ethos of manliness—or at
least men think they are and so feel they must prove their manliness to them.
Fear of demonstrating cowardice in the eyes of comrades and women is then
important in keeping men enduring the horrors of battle, as we repeatedly
saw in chapters 11–13. This may have been the most popular prop of
militarism.
In a few societies, quasi-representative decisions for war have involved
many more people. In some Greek city-states, decisions were made by the
citizen body as a whole—20–40 percent of adult males. Many were probably
involved in some early Sumerian city-states. They were in the state of
Tlaxcala, Mexico, in 1519, and among many native American peoples.
There was more limited citizen participation in the popular assemblies of the
Roman Republic and in twentieth-century liberal democracies. Modern
public opinion surveys may give the impression that most people have
serious views on matters of war and peace, while politicians “acting tough”
may win popular support before the reality of war sinks in. Yet these are
generally paper-thin sentiments easily shredded by war itself. Some sectional
interests do favor war or peace, and some constituencies willingly supply
soldiers because alternative channels of advancement are absent—like the
overrepresentation of southern white officers and African American men in
U.S. forces, or the role of Gurkhas in British armies.
Yet even in representative governments, decisions for war have been
steered by manipulative rulers abetted by special interest groups and
compliant mass media (where these exist). In the Roman Republic senatorial
elites manipulated the popular assemblies into war. Parliaments in England
generally left matters of war and peace to monarchs and their ministers,
except during the mercantilist eighteenth century, when merchants and
bankers joined in. Nineteenth-century British colonial policy debates reliably
emptied the House of Commons, and the people showed little interest in
empire except when native atrocities committed against British people were
publicized. Hitler’s lies about murders of Germans in Danzig in 1939,
Roosevelt’s distortion of the USS Greer’s 1941 brush with a German
submarine, and Johnson’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam in 1964
were pretexts for war believed by most citizens. The administration of Bush
the Younger, helped in Britain by Tony Blair, fed false information to
gullible publics in 2002–3 about Saddam Hussein’s supposed links with
terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The Putin government denied in
2014 that the masked men who seized Crimea were regular Russian troops,
and in 2020 Putin claimed that Russian mercenaries and Russian planes in
Libya were not Kremlin approved, although their weaponry could only have
come from Russian army supplies. Putin’s lies about his war in Ukraine were
many. The U.S. Congress is constitutionally empowered to declare war, but
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has usually ratified decisions
already made by presidents. Launching World War II was a partial
exception, since until the attack on Pearl Harbor Congress had blocked
Roosevelt’s attempts to join the war. So Roosevelt retaliated with covert
means and trickery to supply Britain with aid. In 2001, during the panic
induced by the 9/11 terrorist attack, Congress passed—with only one
dissenting vote—the Authorization to Use Military Force Act, allowing the
president to use force abroad without congressional approval if such conduct
was in pursuit of terrorists or those who harbor them. The president decides
who is a terrorist. The act is still in force. By 2018 it had been used forty-one
times to attack nineteen countries.
Once war is declared, popular support grows in the first months, for
“they” really are trying to kill “us.” Volunteers sign up in numbers, but
rallies ’round the flag, helped by propaganda of the enemy’s atrocities, are
temporary. Conscription becomes necessary. Soldiers continue to obey the
order to fight since they are under discipline and believe that this is the way
the world works. Varying degrees of value commitment among soldiers—
high in religious and communist armies, and among the conquistadores,
quite high in Roman Republican armies and in World War II, lower in most
wars with professional or conscripted soldiers—is reinforced by repetitive
drilling, harsh discipline, and entrapping battlefields. Yet a secret ballot held
the day before battle would probably produce a majority of soldiers voting
against battle, except perhaps in elite regiments. Alternatively, the rulers
who chose war could do the actual fighting—alas, these are utopian
solutions.
People believe their rulers’ narratives since they lack alternative
knowledge. Popular street demonstrations in favor of war (or peace) do
occur, but the demonstrators are small proportions of the population. If war
proves unpopular, this is because it is not going well, or because of
opposition to domestic consequences, such as conscription and extra taxes or
debts. Anticipation of this, especially taxes, is one of the main deterrents to
rulers considering war. War-and-peace factions within ruling groups do
exist; there is also lobbying by special interest groups, and students and
intellectuals mobilize for causes. That is as popular as war-and-peace
decisions generally get. So the problem shifts away from why human beings
make wars to why rulers do. One inference is clear: the best antidote to war
would be direct participation by citizens in popular assemblies to decide war
or peace. Alas, this is also utopian.

Political Power: The Nature of Rulers

Since rulers make wars, their preferences and personalities matter. Some
rulers focus on stability, the economy, social welfare, or justice and oppose
the conscription and higher taxes war requires. Others favor war as
profitable or heroic, necessary for grandeur and glory, and willingly raise
taxes and initiate conscription. Some strike warrior poses. Rulers’ sagacity
and war record matter. Sequential victories enhance prestige and vassal
loyalty and make future wars more likely. Rulers are capable or incompetent,
calm or impulsive, brave or timorous, suspicious or trusting. Contrast three
successive Ming emperors—Yongle, the successful warrior; Xuande, the
administrative innovator; and Zhengtong, the incompetent. Contrast the cruel
warrior Henry V with the mentally challenged Henry VI, or the peace-loving
Chamberlain with the bellicose Churchill, or the cautious, conscientious
Obama with the erratic, ignorant Trump. Of course, to describe rulers or
their policies in terms of just one or two character traits is grossly
oversimplified. Stalin was paranoid about domestic opposition but naively
trusting of Hitler. Trump was chronically distrustful of others and regarded
business and political relations as battle zones, but he was not a militarist
abroad. Yet in Latin America I attributed four of fifteen wars to reckless
presidents initiating or provoking wars they would probably lose. The
chroniclers told “great men” narratives, exaggerated but containing some
truth. Since personality differences are contingent, Realists dismiss them as
“noise” in their models, but we must not confuse models with explanation.
Monarchs, dictators, and presidents rarely make policy on their own.
Most decisions come after rulers listen to opinions at court or in councils or
assemblies. Yet outcomes depend as much on the ruler’s ability to control
the information flow, generally by appointing like-minded advisers, or on the
balance of domestic political power, as on accurate perception of external
realities. For example, debates over Japanese imperialism in the early
twentieth century were settled by political power in Tokyo shifting rightward
through domestic crises caused by the Great Depression, repression of the
working class, collapse of political parties, and assassinations of prominent
opponents. Rulers’ preferences shifted from international market nudging to
informal empire to territorial imperialism. Since domestic issues dominate
political debate most of the time, war-and-peace decisions depend on which
faction—conservative or reformist, right or left, centralizers or
decentralizers, frontiersmen or men of the core—has acquired influence on
domestic issues. Of course, they were almost all from the dominant class and
ethnic groups, and they were almost all men. For most politicians, foreign
policy is peripheral vision. Bush the Younger came to power primarily on
domestic issues, ignorant of the outside world. He let Vice President Cheney
make most appointments to foreign and defense posts, and Cheney chose
hawks. They and a converted Bush manipulated Congress into wars.
Rulers have launched many wars to shore up their domestic political
power. Others find it impossible to back away from a war going badly,
which would seem to signal weakness. Marxists stress the diversion of class
conflict, but this has been uncommon since war is prone to increase rather
than reduce class conflict, especially in defeat. It did figure in the reasoning
of monarchs on the brink of World War I, but revolution was the actual
consequence, as skeptics at court had warned beforehand. Repression of the
working class, “solving” class conflict, fueled interwar militarism in
Germany and Japan. Diverting intra-elite conflict has been much more
common, launched by rulers beset by rivals or seeking to counter an
impression of weakness—like Taizong or Edward III and Henry V of
England. Such rulers try to factor into their decision making whether this
will work, but it depends principally on whether the war is successful. But
weak as well as strong rulers launch wars.
Fearon suggests one way conflict escalates. A standard tactic is for one
side to strengthen its bargaining power by issuing threats.9 To carry
credibility, these need to involve significant costs and be made publicly,
perhaps by withdrawing diplomats, seeking the support of allies, or moving
troops. This may provoke the rival to reciprocate. The protagonists now find
themselves in a downward spiral toward a war they had not initially
intended. They might prefer to back down, but this brings what Fearon calls
“audience costs.” To back down signals weakness and dishonor in the eyes
of the domestic audience. These costs worsen as the crisis escalates, making
it harder to avoid war. Fearon suggests honor results from modern
nationalism. Yet he is too modest. We saw “audience costs” in all periods,
among ancient Chinese dukes, the emperors Taizong and Chongzhen, the
emperor Claudius, medieval monarchs, leaders plunging into World War I,
General Galtieri, and Saddam Hussein, among others. Rulers face domestic
threats from opposition parties, factions at court or in a single party, military
coups, or rival pretenders to the throne. So they try to convey strength and
honor by not backing down. Monarchs may also wish to prove that they
really are the Son of Heaven or anointed by God, as we saw in China and
pre-Columbian America. Putin wants to prove he really is a new Peter the
Great.
Rulers may also fear their generals and deliberately weaken the armed
forces to lower the threat of military coups. So they are less likely to initiate
wars, but it may encourage others to attack them. Shah Muhammad II of the
Khwarazmian (Persian) Empire separated his massive army into smaller
detachments stationed in different cities, in fear of his generals. So Chinggis
Khan picked them off one by one and destroyed his empire. The Roman
Republic’s unending wars conversely enhanced the generals’ power, and
they eventually overthrew the republic. Subsequent Roman emperors used
praetorian guards for protection from the army, with mixed results. The Inca
and Middle Eastern regimes sought coup-proofing by reducing the army’s
autonomous power. Saddam Hussein self-destructed this way. Stalin almost
self-destructed, purging his senior officer corps in the late 1930s, thus
hamstringing the Red Army. In contrast, few African rulers have devised
effective coup-proofing. Between 2000 and 2020 seventeen successful
military coups occurred in a continent where militaries are deployed more
for domestic than for international purposes. In such cases we see a
contradiction between military and political power—each undermining the
other. Yet in contrast, stable democratic and communist regimes have both
retained civilian control of the military.
Dynastic monarchy has been the most common regime type, with its
own rhythms of war. Unclear rules of succession and polygynous marriages
all made wars of succession more likely, as was true among the Mongols,
Chinese, and Inca. The absence of a competent male heir often led to civil
war between claimants, which invited interventions by foreign rulers.
Dynasties rarely lasted more than a hundred years, as Ibn Khaldun also
noted of Arab kingdoms.10 In succession crises only one claimant could win,
and the others usually lost their lives, but hopeful ambition had bent their
perception of the odds. Civil wars lasted for a quarter of China’s two-
thousand-year imperial history. Such wars rarely occurred in city-state
republics like Venice and some elected monarchies, such as the Aztec, where
ruling oligarchies had devised agreed-on procedures to choose the next ruler.
Modern republics, constitutional monarchies, and one-party states have their
own agreed-on rules of succession. Nonetheless, rulers’ personalities,
preferences, reproductive abilities, and ambition all influence war-and-peace
decisions.

The Three Main Motives for War

Three motives for war stand out above the others. Historians often
emphasize two, “greed and glory,” and political scientists have explained
civil wars in terms of “greed and grievance.” Those launching aggressive
war usually visualize economic benefits and promise them to their soldiers
and subjects, but acquiring more territories or tribute and subjects or
submissive clients also brings rulers the gratification of greater status and
honor in the geopolitical system, both for themselves and for their states, the
two being seen by them as identical. Glory is the highest level of status and
honor, for it has the advantage, rulers believe, of being eternal, whereas
profit is only for now. So status, honor, and glory combine in an ideological-
emotional package of motives. In a few societies the populace may share to a
limited extent in this—for example, many Roman citizens, many modern
Germans and Japanese during their periods of military success, and
Americans more recently, though now this package is mixed with nostalgia
for a past, more glorious period. But a third main motive is the intrinsic
enjoyment of domination over others, found especially in conquest and
raiding, and particularly among the great conquerors of history, but often
shared by their soldiers, who abused, looted, and raped enemy populations.
We have seen these three motives—greed, status-honor-glory, and
domination—repeatedly entwining in my case studies in ways not easy to
disentangle.
 Economic motives (greed) have obviously been important. Balancing
economic costs and benefits against casualties and the likelihood of victory
is the core of Realism, and rulers—and adventurist bands like the
conquistadores—did try to assess these odds. Yet this involves four separate
metrics, and there is no way to set lives, the chances of victory, economic
profit or loss, and longer-term strategic advantages against each other in any
systematic way. They had to make rough assessments.
The cost in lives may have been less of a deterrent to war, as most
rulers did not risk their own lives. In history they began in the center of
battle formations, well-protected but still at some personal risk, as Crassus,
Harold Godwinson, and Richard III all discovered. More accurate archery
forced rulers and generals back to command from a vantage point in the rear,
and then firearms forced them even farther back. By the twentieth century
they had become desk killers, sending out younger men to distant deaths.
Few campaigns in any era have been called off because rulers feared heavy
losses. Quite the reverse: they were more likely to intensify calls for
“sacrifice,” which they were not making themselves. Three recent U.S.
presidents ordering wars had been effectively draft dodgers—Clinton, Bush
the Younger, and Trump. In the past many rulers saw their soldiers as
“scum,” drawn from the uncivilized lower classes. Their lives could be
casually spent. Modern soldiers have also expressed fear of being used as
cannon fodder. We saw French troops in World War I demanding their
sacrifice be “proportional” to the chances of success, whereas in 2021
Afghan troops fled when their sense of proportionality was shattered by
sudden American withdrawal. So the risk of death, the main cost of war, is
usually minimized by rulers, making war more rational to them than to
soldiers or civilians.
Yet the financial costs of war often did deter rulers. War requires
increased taxes or debts, as well as conscription, which are unpopular and
take resources from the economy. Many rulers were reluctant to squeeze
peasants hard for fear of rebellion or damage to the economy, which would
then reduce the taxes and men available for future war. Easy targets and
short wars were not ruinous, nor were rule-governed wars with few
casualties, but losing or lengthy wars might threaten rulers’ downfall. The
decision was often for peace. A few astute militaristic rulers, however,
devised reforms harnessing military and economic relations together to yield
economic growth that could fuel war—like the legalist reforms of the
Chinese Warring States, sixteenth-century cadastral reforms in Japan,
seventeenth-century fiscal reforms of England and Holland, and twentieth-
century military Keynesianism. These were strategies making war more
economically attractive to rulers with vision and the political skills to
implement reform. Nonetheless, if economic profit was the sole motive of
rulers, there would have been far fewer wars.

The Four Types of Offensive War

Offensive wars must be distinguished from defensive wars and from the
middling category of mutual provocation and escalation. I divided offensive
wars into in-and-out raiding; intervention to change or prop up a regime
abroad (informal imperialism); war to seize slivers of border territory; and
territorial conquest followed by direct imperial rule.
In raiding, goals appear as mainly material—looting movable wealth,
animals, slaves, and women. Successful raiders, however, also enjoy status
among their followers, and they enjoy domination in itself, exulting in the
fear in their victims’ eyes, especially evident in rape. Raiding was normal
among “barbarian” peoples possessing military resources. In Asia and Africa
their raids continued until the eighteenth century but have now died out
except in failed or very poor states. Looting has been perpetrated by modern
troops, however, notably by Nazi, Japanese, and Red Army troops in World
War II, by Chinese nationalist forces in Vietnam at the end of that war, and
by Iraqi soldiers in 1991 and 2003.
Military intervention aimed at foreign regime support or change was
frequent in the early phases of Roman and European “informal empires” and
in pre-Columbian Latin America. Rule was through local clients. Yet it has
persisted through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in American
military interventions. The goal may be geopolitical, to protect an ally, or
economic, for tribute, better access to raw materials or terms of trade, or
simply to enjoy wielding dominance over others.
Wars over slivers of border territories have become the most common
wars. Aggression here is not always regarded by international law as a
criminal act because the contending parties often have a case. Since the
collapse of direct empires was followed by the creation of many new or
restored states, border disputes and revisionism have grown. They involve
mainly economic and strategic goals. Yet “revisionism,” a claim to recover
“lost” or “stolen” territories, has added righteousness to them. This
subverted the pacific Confucian bias in imperial China, and it was prominent
in the Hundred Years’ War and some Latin American cases. Timur the Great
claimed to be only recovering Chinggis Khan’s realm. German revisionism
led to World War II, to regain territories lost in the first war. Russian
revisionism today seeks to recover some of the territories lost in the collapse
of the Soviet Union, though this was probably intended as the conquest of
whole countries, territorial empire being the final goal. Chinese revisionism
today seeks full control of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang, and
offshore naval expansion—all to restore control over lands and seas formerly
dominated by Chinese imperial dynasties. Restoring lost territory was
deemed a righteous war by Azeris in 2020, but Armenians maintain a rival
revisionism. Israelis and Palestinians find it impossible to negotiate a sharing
of their promised but lost lands. Wherever there are lost territories,
revisionism stirs, blending motives of moral right and economic and
strategic interest. This is the dominant danger of warfare today.
But it is not everywhere. Postcolonial Latin America has seen relatively
few border wars, and relatively few interstate wars at all, for three main
reasons. First, states had limited fiscal resources, enough to finance a brief
war, but raising new taxes was difficult and soon debts and political
discontent would mount. Part of the risk of war is that rulers cannot predict
how long a war will last. Second, settlement was easier in the ecological
heartland of the new states (once indigenous peoples were removed) rather
than near borders, which tended to be in mountainous, jungle, or desert
regions where the old Spanish maps were often unclear. Since settler
expansion was rarely around borders, wars there were less likely. Third,
where a newly independent state occupied the same area as a former Spanish
provincial, treasury, or judicial district, this strengthened the legal principle
of uti possidetis—new states should retain the old borders. This assisted
mediation of border disputes by outsiders.
African countries also inherited colonial borders, which discouraged
border wars except in the Horn of Africa, where the British, French, Italian,
and Ethiopian empires had left their own border conflicts to plague their
successors. In Southeast Asia, most colonies inherited the territories of
former kingdoms, which made postcolonial restoration of sovereignty easier.
The successor states of the Habsburg Empire also inherited its provincial
boundaries and so rarely fought against each other. Nor did many post-
Soviet successor states. The Tajik-Kyrgyz skirmish in April 2021 was an
exception, but most post-Soviet wars have been between a revisionist Russia
and other peoples, as in the Caucasus and Ukraine.
Wars of imperial conquest add seizure of territory and direct rule over
peoples. They have almost died out today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine
being the main recent exception. The great conquerors I examined—Qin Shi
Huang, Chinggis Khan, Qianlong, the Japanese triumvirs, and Napoleon—
all took care in preparing their wars, signs of instrumental rationality. But
their goal became conquest and domination for the status, honor, glory,
world transformation, and even immortality they believed this would bring
—value more than instrumental rationality, using Weber’s term.
The conquerors sacrificed countless lives to this vision. They saw their
military conquests less as choice than as an obligation to follow their destiny
or the will of the gods, as probably did other great conquerors like Sargon of
Akkad, Thutmose III of Egypt, Tiglath-pileser III, Cyrus II of Persia,
Alexander, Attila, Timur, Asoka, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, Aztec kings, and
many others who were styled “The Great,” “The Earth-Shaker,” “The World
Conqueror,” and the like. They slaughtered millions and brought benefit to
only a few. Most of these conquerors were highly intelligent, like Chinggis
and Timur the Great. Ibn Khaldun, after several interviews with Timur,
commented: “Some attribute to him knowledge, others attribute to him
heresy . . . still others attribute to him the employment of magic and sorcery,
but in all this there is nothing; it is simply that he is highly intelligent and
perspicacious, addicted to debate and argumentation about what he knows
and also about what he does not know.”11 Yet Timur also said, “The whole
expanse of the inhabited part of the world is not large enough to have two
kings.”12 Most great conquerors were intelligent megalomaniacs, leaving
triumphal stelae, arches, and sculptures whose grandiose inscriptions and
depictions boast more of the territories and peoples conquered than of the
well-being of the realm. We can probably add rulers of less well-documented
precolonial American and African empires, such as Aztec rulers, the Songhai
Empire’s Sonni Ali or Chaka Zulu—and the failed world conqueror, Hitler.
Yet conquest produced what are interchangeably called “empires” and
“civilizations”—Egyptian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Roman, Hellenic, Persian,
Turkic, Muslim Arab, Mughal, Mongol, Chinese, Spanish, British, Aztec,
Inca, Maya, American, and so on. These imperial civilizations all eventually
replaced worlds of small peoples, tribes, and city-states, mainly through
aggressive war. But they also developed mission statements that listed
bringing order, freedom, civilization, and often the true faith to the
conquered, and these became motives or pretexts for further wars. We should
be cynical about most of these claims, and civilizations of multiple city-
states also existed for long periods before their eventual conquest by empires
—as was true of ancient Sumer, classical Greece, and Mesoamerica.
Conquerors depended on loyal followers and obedient clients, on
compliant, militarized subjects, and on legitimacy of rule. Qin emperor Shi
Huang also drew on legalist reforms, Chinggis cited earlier Mongol
expansion, Napoleon inherited the levée en masse, Hitler had the Wehr-
macht and the SS. They knew they had to extract material rewards for their
followers and clients, in addition to tribute and taxes for themselves, but they
also knew that victories would cement follower and client loyalty and their
own fame and wealth. Men would follow a leader who had been successful,
but conquerors were in a sense trapped by their own success, compelled to
continue conquests by a mixture of Durkheim’s “malady of infinite
aspiration,” the need to keep on rewarding followers, and fear that the
militarism they had cultivated might produce threatening rivals should their
conquests end. In these pages Mongol and Aztec rulers were conspicuously
trapped by their ambitions. This was the tyranny exerted by their personal
histories.
The great conqueror is now rare—though Putin would like to be one.
Rarity is obsolete, for three reasons. First, the rise of nationalism legitimizes
states inhabiting a sanctified world order of states; second is the replacing of
interstate wars by civil wars; and third is the rise of electoral democracies
with competitive elections and short-term rulers. Rulers in the twenty-first
century have aspired to notions of “greatness” more elevated than base
profit, but not amounting to conquest—with the major exception of Putin.
Americans’ sense of national greatness combines pride in idealized
American values and the power of the U.S. military. Support for both is the
undying refrain of politicians, baked into their ideology. Benevolent
American mission statements are backed by enormous military budgets,
justified in terms less of national defense or material gain than of “defending
American democratic values”—this by the Pentagon, the biggest
authoritarian organization in the world! “Defense” is also meant to indicate
self-defense, even though it is carried through aggression to the whole
world. Not even the Romans had such pretensions—though they did share
the American pretext for war that intervening abroad was merely defending
one’s allies.
So although, overall, wars have not declined through human history,
some types of war have declined, especially those creating great
civilizations. There is now one great global civilization, containing rival
imperial cores exploiting very dispersed peripheries. But future wars
between those imperial cores might end all human civilization, and 2022 has
seemed to stoke such fears.

Ideological-Emotional Power
Ideologies and emotions fill in the gaps of human rationality when scientific
knowledge and certainty fall short. They enable action in the absence of full
knowledge, important here since war is usually a risky shot in the dark.
Emotions play a major role in descents toward war amid uncertain
environments conducive more to anxiety and feverish emotions than to calm
calculation. Disputes may escalate through minor provocations, hostile
words, saber rattling, a clash of patrols, the sinking of a ship, maltreatment
of citizens abroad, and rumors of atrocity. Hatred, anxiety, fear, and desire
for honor, status, and domination combine into complex emotional states.
Publicizing the other’s escalations and atrocities intensifies hatred, making
further escalation likelier. Some rivals are seen as “evil” or “terrorists.”
America is the Great Satan, Iran was a part of the Axis of Evil. Negotiating
with evil is difficult, and for the United States it is currently illegal. Hatred is
countered not by love for the enemy but by pragmatic appeals for a
compromise solution. Emotions are invoked more for war, pragmatism for
peace. Emotions intensify during war, making it harder to disengage.
Some political scientists also stress that emotional overconfidence or
unreasonable fear (or both) lead into modern war. Lebow, analyzing twenty-
six twentieth-century wars, says failure of decision making was mainly due
not to imperfect information or commitment problems (as Realists say), or to
material interests (as Marxists and economists say), but to sentiments of
honor, status, or revenge.13 Weakening rulers seek to defend or recover
political status, especially domestically, while dominant rulers rarely rest
satisfied, wanting ever more status. All want to maintain a sense of honor.
Aggression derives from rash overconfidence or an exaggerated fear of an
external threat, both boosted by indignant self-righteousness overriding
contradictory information that might counsel peace. When both sides exhibit
these emotions, damaging mutual brinkmanship follows. Most spectacular
was the downward spiral of decisions leading to World War I, where
brinkmanship, reluctance to back down, maintaining rulers’ status and that
of their states, and demonstrating fidelity to allies combined to make war the
path of honor rather than reason. For Austria-Hungary and Russia, honor
was seen as necessary for the dynasties’ very survival. A monarchy without
honor is illegitimate, said Habsburg and Romanov courtiers in 1914.
Van Evera examined modern cases of provocation by a ruler that caused
others to actually start the fighting. He says great powers have been overrun
by unprovoked aggressors twice, but six times by aggressors provoked by
the victim’s “fantasy-driven defensive bellicosity.” The major threat to
states, he says, is “their own tendency to exaggerate the dangers they face,
and to respond with counterproductive bellicosity.” He emphasizes fear.14
White stresses overconfidence, saying that twentieth-century rulers starting
wars underestimated the resistance of the target or the chances of others
intervening to help the target because of a “lack of realistic empathy with
either the victims or their potential allies.”15 We saw mixtures of fear,
overconfidence, and lack of empathy in earlier warfare too. These modern
studies did not include colonial wars where empathy was even less in
evidence.
The bonding effect that societies exert on their members was identified
in Arab armies and societies of his time by Ibn Khaldun as asabiyya,
normative solidarity generating a collective will to pursue further goals. He
argued that this was the fundamental bond of human society and the basic
motive force of history, and it was at its purest in the nomadic Arab societies
of his time. This concept permeates his world history. He focused on
bonding between followers and rulers, strong at the beginning of a dynasty,
but then weakening through successive rulers, as they began to merge with
conquered populations, so losing their original tribal collective strength.
Durkheim’s theory of solidarity was more static. He stressed the normative
solidarity of a whole society conferring trust and confidence in the strength
and virtues of one’s own group. In war asabiyya led to solidarity,
commitment, and bravery by soldiers, especially in religious and communist
forces and among long-distance freebooters such as Vikings or
conquistadores.
 But solidarity had an external downside, for it involved a lack of
empathy with and understanding of the enemy—society as a cage,
imprisoning the people within its stereotypes of the other. In wars the troops
confidently marched singing into battle, expecting to be home soon, unable
to imagine enemy troops at that moment doing likewise, with the same brio.
Because rulers deny justice to the enemy’s cause, they underestimate its
sense of righteousness and the morale of its soldiers. Putin is the latest
example of this. Such rulers view enemy resources opaquely, guided by
external signifiers of strength and intentions, like rumors of political disunity
or discontented generals, lower soldier morale, a supposedly inferior race or
religion, or cultural decline or cowardice, or the accession of a child, a
woman, or a supposed weakling (a comedian perhaps) to power—mixing
understandable mistakes with self-delusion.
Overconfidence also results from blurring fact and value. Rational-
choice theory strives to be scientific, keeping fact and value apart. “What is”
governs the world, not “what should be.” We social scientists are all taught
this. Yet human beings do not operate like this, including social scientists on
our days off. We all blur fact and value. In war this most often appears as the
belief that our cause is just, and so we should achieve victory. The English
word “should” has a double meaning—our cause is just, so victory is
morally desirable, but also our victory is probable. Both Union and
Confederate soldiers were convinced in 1860 that they should win quickly
because their cause was just. In World War I, British troops should be back
home by Christmas, German troops before the autumn leaves fell. Roman
senators believed all their wars were just, blessed by the gods, and so they
would always win, adding righteousness to their aggression. Chinese
Confucian and legalist theorists saw this as a philosophical problem. They
mostly concluded that a just and virtuous ruler would defeat an unjust and
despotic one because the people would offer him more support. Right makes
might. Whether this is true is debatable, but if rulers believe their cause is
just, they tend to think they should win (in both senses). If only one side
feels especially righteous, its morale may be higher and its battle
performance better, as ancient Chinese theorists and Ibn Khaldun argued.
But if both sides have that feeling, the result is a more murderous war, like
the Thirty Years’ War or World War II. For the protagonists, wars are moral
as well as material clashes. Such emotional distortions tend to be universal
in human groups, although not all lead to war.
 Rarer are ideologies in the sense of generalized meaning systems
combining grandiose claims to knowledge and values, a clear distinction
between good and evil, and sometimes the goal of imposing these on the
conquered, such as a religion or fascism or democracy. Yet here
overconfidence and distortion especially grow. Putin demonized Ukrainians.
American administrations demonized the ayatollahs, Saddam, and Gaddafi,
and some members wanted to forcibly export democracy there. But they
were very overconfident. They knew military power would bring victory in
the field, but they were deluded about political aftermaths, for they believed
in the global justice of their cause, and in good versus bad guys. They
“should” be welcomed by Iraqis, they “should” achieve order and
democracy. Yet killing the dictator and destroying his regime made things
worse than if he had managed to keep order. A degree of repression is better
for most people than the disorder resulting from a failed intervention.
Religions in historical wars played varied roles. Aztecs and Incas had
clothed war in divine rituals, some of them quite savage. Medieval
Christians often preached peace, but they went on crusades and massacred
heretics, while many peasant revolts became millenarian. Islam had initially
expanded as a warrior religion, but thereafter it became more tolerant of
religious minorities than was Christianity, though disrupted by the cyclical
wars identified by Ibn Khaldun, in which purist Islamic warriors swept into
the decadent cities, only to gradually succumb to city pleasures, lose their
asabiyya, and suffer defeat, usually in the fourth generation of a dynasty, at
the hands of the next wave of purists. Most Japanese wars were secular, yet
the feudal period saw some armies of Buddhist monks, and Buddhism was
manipulated to support early twentieth-century Japanese militarism as well
as today’s militarism in Myanmar. Confucians were ambivalent about war,
whereas Buddhists and Daoists were more pacific, yet their popular
rebellions were sometimes fired by religious millenarianism.
Overall, however, most ideological warfare against an “evil” enemy has
been modern, contradicting Weber’s assertion of the increasing
rationalization of modern society. I identified three waves of ideological
warfare that began in Europe: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of
religion; French revolutionary wars leading to global nineteenth- and
twentieth-century wars of national liberation; and twentieth-century global
wars between communist, fascist, and liberal capitalist regimes. Some
suggest a current fourth Islamic wave, but though jihadists are strongly
ideological, most recent wars between Muslims have not been, and they
have also involved Western imperialism, as we saw in chapter 14. Racial
ideologies were also key to modern European and Japanese colonial wars,
dooming their empires to a short life, since they prevented the assimilation
of natives into the imperial identity, unlike peoples conquered by the ancient
Romans and Chinese.

Symmetric and Asymmetric Wars

Three typical power balances affect the chances of success in war. The first
is where one party is so superior in power resources that its victory and
consequent gains seem certain. It may be rational for sharks to attack and
swallow minnows or weakening big fishes. U.S. secretary of state John Hay
rejoiced in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt in July 1898 of victory over the
Spanish Empire and its wooden ships: “It has been a splendid little war,
begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and
spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.” The second and third
types are more puzzling. Why do minnows go to war against sharks, rather
than submit? And why do evenly matched powers launch wars against each
other, given probable mutual devastation?
I consider first the shark’s reasoning. Gross military inequality has been
common in wars of imperial conquest, usually the result of economic and
political inequality. In ancient China and medieval western Europe and
Japan, as in pre-Columbian America, rulers mobilizing more efficient states
in more fertile lands could achieve low-cost military victories against less
well-developed peoples on the periphery, which gave them an incentive to
make aggressive war. Conquered lands were given to military veterans or
settlers, and natives might be enslaved or enserfed. In Europe the core
powers developed more effective states and more science-based capitalist
economies, thereby conferring enough military superiority to conquer most
of the world. Gross power inequalities conferred by uneven economic
development help explain why some regions and periods of history saw
more wars of imperial conquest than others.
That war is rational for sharks faced with minnows is morally
deplorable and is in principle criminal under UN norms, though prosecutions
have not occurred since Nuremberg. Yet the sharks need not conform to
Realist theory by carefully calculating the odds. Their obvious superiority
makes victory likely. Nor did Realist “anarchy” figure where one party was
much stronger than the other, in many wars seeking regime change as well
as in wars of imperial conquest, from Rome to China to Europe—and
probably to other expanding civilizations, too. Stronger rulers have rarely
felt insecure, except against domestic opponents.
History, however, has not always favored the sharks. “Barbarians,” with
their lesser economic and political development, had cavalry superior in
flattish terrains to the bigger infantry-centered forces of agrarian states.
Here, uneven modes of economic and military power made war more likely.
Marxists stress the role of uneven economic development in history. I extend
unevenness to military development. This also set off a dialectical
development of warfare. Swift in-and-out raiding by war bands brought easy
pickings, but a sequence of raids brought forth larger punitive retaliation
from the agrarian state. In response, a few barbarian rulers developed their
loose tribal confederacy into a more cohesive state and added infantry and
siege warfare, which enabled them to fight back and even conquer. Both
sides borrowed each other’s military techniques and fought combined arms
warfare, conquered territories, and even achieved a partial merging of the
two peoples, a dialectical process. For the few triumphant rulers and their
rewarded followers, this was highly rational, but it was not for the masses.
Did the scale of Emperor Qianlong’s warfare—mobilizing 600,000 soldiers
and laborers while committing genocide against the Zunghars—benefit the
peoples of China? I doubt it, even though some revisionist historians have
bizarrely hailed his reign an Age of Enlightenment because of his artistic
dabbling.
Today, we see a great white shark thrashing helplessly amid the
shallows. The United States has the world’s most powerful economy and
military, far superior to those of its recent enemies. Yet battlefield victories
have not led to desired results, for three reasons. First, the United States
cannot (and does not want to) directly rule foreign territories, nor can it find
reliable local clients through whom it can rule indirectly, except perhaps in
Latin America, where conservative elites share its goals. The nationalist and
religious ideologies of modernity prevent the recruitment of many local
clients, as achieved by earlier empires. Where clients are recruited, this may
exacerbate local ethnic or religious divisions—as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Libya. Military interventions have brought disorder, and order is the primary
political goal of most peoples, on which any democracy would have to be
grounded. Second, weapons of the weak (the guerilla cell, the Kalashnikov,
the suicide bomber, and so on) can sustain asymmetric warfare against a
technologically superior enemy. Third, most Americans are only armchair
warriors, unwilling to serve or to see wars drag on if they cause many
American casualties. The financial cost is no obstacle, but the human cost is.
This reflects the fact that American society (despite its proliferation of guns)
is not at its core militaristic. But these three weaknesses ensure that
American wars are not simply a series of understandable mistakes. They
predictably fail, and so are irrational in terms of ends.
The second type of case comes when, for minnows, suing for peace and
submitting might seem more rational than fighting. Rulers who submit can
usually keep their domains if they swear allegiance to the more powerful or
shift toward compliance with its policies. Some did take this route to
survival, and conquerors often gave them the alternative of submission or
possible death. The Inca specialized in this. Saddam Hussein could have
survived this way, as have other dictators who cozy up to the United States.
Yet often minnows choose to fight. They may try to balance the odds by
counting on allies. Yet as Realists note, allies’ words may not translate into
deeds, or they may be bribed into switching sides (and the great conquerors
were usually good at this diplomatic strategy). Sometimes the sharks even
feast together on the minnows lying between them. Poland was partitioned
three times by the surrounding great powers. Balancing rarely works in the
long term unless strong normative trust is shared by the allies.
The other two reasons involve emotions and constraints. First, minnows
are often overoptimistic because of the tyranny of history. Having survived a
sequence of wars against lesser foes, they are unprepared for a superior one,
and they are “caged” within the constraints of their own society, which limits
accurate perception of the enemy and enables ideologies and emotions to
distort vision. When the war is one of self-defense, they also believe their
cause is just, meaning that they “should” both morally and probably win.
This has been evident among Ukrainians. Native people confronting the first
waves of European imperialists were often unaware that behind these small
forces would come wave after wave of soldiers and settlers. The natives may
have already committed a few atrocities against white people, which enraged
the imperialists. Yet they were doomed anyway. In modern times only the
Japanese and then the Chinese found the space and time to build up effective
resistance to foreign imperialists.
 Second, minnow rulers feel compelled to fight to maintain honor and
status. Feudal rulers often went down fighting with honor. They felt they had
no choice. Saddam self-destructed for status and honor. He did not allow
himself to be seen complying with U.S. demands on chemical weapons
(when he really was) because defiance was his badge of honor. That was his
contribution to his doom. Tiny states have survived on all continents, but
through submission, not battle (unless in a region of tiny states, like Central
America, where several attempts at regional hegemony failed). A weaker
ruler choosing resistance in the sights of a strong one was likely to die, and
his kingdom, too.
The proliferation of vanishing kingdoms casts a shadow over defensive
Realism’s belief that survival is states’ major goal, for overwhelmingly they
have failed to survive. This was as true in pre-Columbian America as
anywhere, though it was not true of postcolonial Latin America, where
balancing against would-be hegemons was successful in six wars (and failed
in none), aided by local terrain and colonial border legacies. After the 1830s
all its states survived. In contrast, only one of over seventy polities in post-
Zhou China survived. Sixteenth-century Japan saw over two hundred polities
reduced to just one. The more than three hundred states of Europe were
whittled down to thirty by the twentieth century, a process lasting many
centuries in the West but coming in a nineteenth-century rush in central
Europe. An unknown but large number of states and tribes disappeared from
Italy and around the Mediterranean as Rome came to dominate.
Human “civilizations” have expanded by eliminating most of the
world’s polities. They did this in three main ways: defeat in war; submitting
to the threat of force; and entering a union through marriage or inheritance
contracts. In three admittedly smallish studies, of sixteenth-century Japan,
medieval and modern Europe, and the world since 1816, most vanishing
states died in battle, say John Bender, Norman Davies, and Tanisha Fazal.16
This was less so of pre-Columbian America, where threats usually sufficed
for the Inca, and where the Aztecs conjoined war and intermarriage in their
strategies. But vanishing no longer occurs. Iraq survived when Saddam was
killed, for the survival of states in the post-1945 world is almost guaranteed
by international institutions and nationalist sentiments. Rulers are defeated
and killed, but the countries survive. Conquest followed by direct imperial
rule may be finished, with the possible exception of Ukraine.
 The third type of odds is symmetric warfare between near equals, like
Greek city-states, the Chinese Warring States, Han Chinese dynasties
struggling against ex-barbarian empires, wars among the major Japanese
daimyo, and wars between the major powers of modern Europe. A strategic
premodern reason tempted rulers into attacking a near equal, for it gave the
advantage of occupying enemy soil so that the attacker’s troops could live
off the land, wasting enemy resources while not wasting their own. But a
defender who avoided defeat yet failed to throw back the invader would
retreat, laying waste to his own domains in the path of the invader, to
deprive him of the ability to live off the land. The more the retreat, the
longer became the supply lines of the attacker. The initial advantage was
exhausted and the armies became bogged down in stalemate, as we
repeatedly saw. The extreme was the ability of Russian rulers to use their
landmass to lure their enemy on to defeat.
Great powers fighting each other seem irrational because of the scale of
destruction and death. Yet two ways to lessen the pain existed. The first was
to develop rules of wars that kept the death rate in battle low for the
dominant classes. This was extreme in Aztec “flower wars,” but common in
China during the Spring and Autumn period, and in Europe in the Middle
Ages, and then again in the century following the Peace of Westphalia in
1648. War was not absent in these periods, but it was mutually regulated,
which reveals a rational calculation of ends. War might not be so costly—for
rulers and the upper classes. But that did not last.
The second way to lower pain was through wars of deflection. In
ancient China and in Europe, wars between the major core powers could be
partially deflected on to less powerful peoples on the periphery or on to the
lesser allies of the other. Here the major powers were not occupying the
entire space of geopolitics. Empires were built on expansion into the
peripheries, much as Rome expanded around the Mediterranean, or Zhou
rulers of ancient Chinese states expanded among the “people of the field,” or
Britain and France fought each other repeatedly across the world in the
eighteenth century, when their peace treaties typically conferred territorial
gains on both of them at the expense of colonized natives. This developed
into a division of the spoils in the “Scramble for Africa” and in late imperial
China, where the major foreign powers contributed military units to a joint
force repressing Chinese resistance—a WEPO perhaps (West Pacific
Organization), long before NATO. Wars of deflection cost less and brought
territory, treasure, and imperial status. Major powers in Asia and Europe
could expand cheaply across their peripheries, and Europeans then did so
across the globe. The Cold War deflected superpower conflict onto lesser
clients as the United States and the Soviets fought each other only indirectly,
in proxy wars using client states and movements, a rational strategy for the
superpowers, though not usually for their clients.
Realist theory has been based on data on wars since 1816, mainly in
Europe, which had a particular geopolitics: its states occupied the whole
space first of Europe and then of the world. There were soon very few small
kingdoms to vanish, just major states and their colonies and client states.
And because rulers were caged inside their domains, ignorant of their rivals’
intentions and capacities, this might appear to them as a Realist security
dilemma amid geopolitical anarchy. There have been other cases of rival
rulers filling up the whole space of a geopolitical system, but there have
been periods and places where this was not so, where expansion and
deflection were possible, and so war was not simply grinding frontal
confrontations between major powers. Yet Roman and European expansion,
and Chinese and Japanese unification, culminated in life-and-death struggle
between sharks. Occupying the whole space of the regional geopolitical
configuration, and unable to regulate or deflect war, they fought predictably
costly frontal battles against each other. This is the key puzzle of the third
type of case. Why did they continue fighting each other?
Again the preservation of status and honor was important, but warring
was amplified by ideological-emotional sentiments and by contexts invoking
anxiety, fear, and hatred of “evil” rivals, as in those European-initiated
waves of ideological warfare. Here the aggressor wished to transform the
society of those it attacked, while the latter wished to protect their way of
life. The most extreme example of this was Soviet resistance to Nazi
Germany, for death or slavery awaited Jews, communists, and even all Slavs
if the Nazis won in the east. For these groups, self-defense involved a truly
desperate survival rationality.
But more frequently the aggression of sharks against equals resulted
from path dependence—rulers faced with rivals were tempted to follow the
paths that had brought them past success. Victories begat confidence, which
made war a more likely outcome of a dispute. Cumulative swallowing meant
that Rome, the last few Chinese Warring States, the last few Japanese
daimyo, and the surviving major rulers in early modern Europe had grown
accustomed to victory. Most finally got their comeuppance, but the sequence
of victories had baked in the culture and institutions of militarism. Earlier
success also strengthened martial virtues, the praising of heroes over traders;
rulers perceived war, not trade, as the way to wealth, career success, social
status, honor, and glory. In this way military power was elevated over other
sources of power. The Roman Republic was the extreme case of baking in,
but although Roman militarism was unusually long-lived, war was also
baked in to the Warring States of ancient China, the ex-barbarian dynasties
ruling imperial China, the Aztec and Inca dynasties, the early rulers of Arab
dynasties, sixteenth-century daimyo lords in Japan, medieval European
princes, Prussia-Germany and Japan in modern times, and today Putin’s
Russia.
Baking in also helps define friend and foe, as it does in current
American foreign policy, which defines Iran as the enemy, the Saudis as
friends, and Israel as a truly intimate friend, all for reasons—handed down
from the past and today possessing less relevance—that amplify Israeli-
Palestinian conflict and an incipient civil war between Shi’a and Sunni
Muslims. This is geopolitical immobility, not anarchy, history’s tyranny; it
saves rulers beholden to entrenched pressure groups the trouble of figuring
out where today’s interests lie. Other examples were the Song dynasty’s
inability to figure out changing power relations among ex-barbarian polities,
Yuan dynasty wars continuing in hostile ecologies, and Napoleonic and
Hitlerian overreaching.
Conversely, repeated war defeats or costly draws lower ambition,
eventually undermining militarism—a delayed-reaction Realism, as in
imperial Rome after repeated inconclusive wars with the Parthians and
northern barbarians. Since mutual exhaustion was common in Latin
American wars, rulers were not repeat offenders. They came to prefer saber
rattling followed by mediation. Japan’s terrible civil wars in the sixteenth
century produced widespread yearning for peace, which aided Tokugawa
hegemony. More common was a shorter-term effect. Four times in Western
Europe its worst wars—the Thirty Years’ War, Napoleonic Wars, World War
I, and World War II—produced a postwar period of greater diplomatic
activity. In the first three this was, alas, only temporary. Will the fourth
period last longer? China under some Han and Song dynasty rulers reacted
to defeat with conciliatory diplomacy, as did American politicians for a
decade after defeat in Vietnam. It is unclear whether the recent spree of
unsuccessful wars will result in long-term caution by American rulers since
they have discovered risk transfer militarism, the contemporary form of wars
of deflection, deflecting the risk of death away from one’s own troops onto
enemy soldiers, civilians in war zones, and hired contractors and
mercenaries, all dying far from the public gaze.
We can perceive an outline of the development of warfare through the
ages. Each region in which states and class divisions emerged saw
intermittent warfare by those states against the clan, tribal, and stateless
groups on their peripheries, then absorbing them. When possessing military
advantages, peripheral groups could hit back, but this also involved their
forming their own states. As each region was filled with states, their warfare
turned more against each other, although incentives for conquering further
peripheral peoples continued. The militaristic institutions and culture that
had grown up on profitable little wars were then turned on bigger wars
against each other. This warfare was at best zero-sum: for some to gain,
others must lose, but since the losers disappeared, so did their history. What
is recorded for our consumption is the success of imperial civilizations,
whether these consisted of a single state or several competitors. But in
present-day societies the whole world is filled up with states whose
legitimacy is supported by international institutions. War between the major
states can no longer be rational—although there is no guarantee that rulers
will be rational. Contemporary battlefields have been largely transferred to
the spaces inside weak states. So wars are historical sequences in which the
experience of past generations lies heavily on the brains of the living,
sometimes (as Marx said) as nightmare, but more often as exciting fantasy.

Conclusion
I began with the question why rulers choose war to achieve ends rather than
relying on softer sources of power—economic exchange, cooperative
ideologies, or geopolitical diplomacy. Rulers do exercise some freedom of
choice. But choice is not quite the right word, since decisions also embody
social and historical constraints of which the actors are not wholly aware,
constituting part of their taken-for-granted reality. Sociology sees humans as
creating social structures, which then become institutionalized, constraining
subsequent action. Decisions are influenced by constraints deriving from
overconfidence, social caging, varied emotions, intolerant ideologies,
domestic politics, militarism baked in to institutions and cultures, and the
tyranny of history. There are thus different levels of war causes—motives,
emotions, ideologies, as well as ecological, geopolitical, and historical
contexts, and erratic processes of escalation. Their varied interactions
through time and space may defeat any simple theory of causes, as Raymond
Aron noted. In response, some Realists have broadened rational choice to
include all these factors, but their different metrics make it difficult to assign
them relative weights, and if all these are regarded as rational, the theory
becomes circular and we cannot identify irrationality. I did, however,
simplify the motives contributing to causes into the main three: greed, status-
honor-glory, and the enjoyment of domination.
On rationality, rulers’ decisions over whether to make war or peace
were sometimes careful, calculating pros and cons, but miscalculation
occurred too often to support a rational-choice model, though there was also
a delayed-reaction rationality, whereby rulers realize they have bitten off
more than they can chew. But in an age of nuclear weapons and climate
change, delayed-reaction Realism would be too belated for human survival.
Combined economic and military power—seizing material resources
through war—is the heart of Realist and Marxist theory. This is sometimes
rational for the winners, although it is overwhelmingly zero-sum, where for
some to benefit, others must suffer. But the perennial intervention of
emotions and ideological and political motives weakens the rationality of
both means and ends.
The offensive wars that go according to plan are mostly those in which
sharks attack minnows, or in which wars among the sharks are deflected
onto the minnows. Their military superiority means they do not need much
calculation of odds, for they are likely to reap the benefits of victory. And
since the winners write history, and the losers vanish, victory in war is seen
as commoner, more profitable, more rational, and more glorious than it
really has been. But war does not often pay, for all sides lose where war
involves material costs greater than its spoils can justify, where there is no
clear winner, or where war does not resolve the dispute in question. These
probably constitute the majority of wars. Raiding might pay off if it does not
become too repetitive, in which case retribution comes. Regime change or
support might be done cheaply, but benefiting only one party, as in Latin
America, or expensively, with war and without benefit, as in recent
American ventures. Some wars over slivers of territory have brought benefit
for the winners where valuable economic or strategic resources were
obtained, but these wars are also intensified by emotional revisionism.
Imperial wars of conquest benefited victorious rulers and attendant
merchants, bankers, settlers, clerics, and officials of empire—but not usually
the colonizer’s people as a whole, and certainly not the exploited, enslaved,
or exterminated natives of the colonies. Wars in self-defense are generally
considered as both rational and legitimate, and some are both. But in many,
submission would be more rational. The benefits of war are rarely shared
widely.
War is the one instance where losing one’s temper may cause the death
of thousands. War pays us back more swiftly for mistakes than any other
human activity. Humans are not calculating machines—more’s the pity,
since peace is more rational than war. If the social world did conform to
rational theory, if rulers did carefully calculate the costs and benefits of war,
trying hard to set emotions and ideologies aside and ignoring domestic
political pressures, they would see that most wars are too risky and inferior
to economic exchange, the sharing of norms and values, and diplomacy as
ways of securing desired goals. Realism is fine as a normative theory,
showing rulers how they should act for maximum benefit, but it is not a
description of reality, for they do not act in this way. So we actually need
more Realism, for this would bring more benefit through peace!
War is the least rational of human projects, but humans are only
erratically rational creatures, as we know from our everyday lives, and from
my examples of business start-ups and gambling. Rulers are asked in matters
of war and peace to make decisions with momentous consequences, though
they are armed only with the sketchy information, the ideologies, and the
emotions of their imprisonment within the blinkers of their societies amid
anxiety-producing, unfolding environmental and geopolitical constraints and
the tyranny of history. The task of surmounting this is often beyond rulers, as
it might be beyond us, too. Human beings are not genetically predisposed to
make war, but our human nature does matter, if indirectly. Its tripartite
character, part rational, part emotional, part ideological, when set inside the
institutional and cultural constraints of societies, makes war an intermittent
outcome. Human nature does matter, and that is why when wars are fought,
they are mostly fought for no good reason.
Han Fei remarked in the third century BCE: “No benefit is more constant
than simplicity; no happiness more constant than peace.” It is better and
simpler to choose peace, which is more rational, less lethal, simpler, and less
risky, tomorrow being more or less like today.
 Notes

Chapter One. Military Power and War

1. Mann, 2003.
2. Nietzsche, 1923: 43.
3. Ratchnevsky, 1992: 153.
4. Aron, 1973: 65–69.
5. Weber, 1978: 24–26, 399–400.
6. Sun Tzu, 1993: 3.2.
7. Clausewitz, 1976: 75.
8. Ibid.: 101.
9. Goertz et al., 2016: 27.

Chapter Two. Is War Universal?

1. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 346.
2. Lahr et al., 2016.
3. Meyer, 2018.
4. López-Montalvo, 2018.
5. Dolfini et al., 2018.
6. Ferguson, 2003; Kelly, 2000; Nakao et al., 2016.
7. Malešević, 2017: 73–83.
8. Eckhardt, 1992: 24.
9. Keeley, 1996.
10. Ferguson, 1997, 2013a, and 2013b.
11. Gat, 2006, 2017.
12. Ferguson, 1995.
13. Gat, 2017: 27.
14. Kimber, 1990: 163.
15. Warner, 1958: 158.
16. Walker et al., 2011: table 2; Fry, 2007, 2013.
17. Ember and Ember, 1997.
18. Santos-Granero, 2010.
19. Fry and Söderberg, 2013.
20. Dyer, 1985: 8–9.
21. Mann, 1986: chap. 2.
22. Malešević, 2010: 90–92.
23. Coker, 2014: 202.
24. Otterbein, 2004.
25. Scott, 2017: 7; emphasis in original.
26. Graeber and Wengrow, 2021.
27. Malešević, 2022: chap. 1.
28. De Waal, 2006: 148; cf. MacMillan, 2020: 13–14; Malešević, 2022: 19–21.
29. Coker, 2021.
30. Gat, 2017: 37; 2006.
31. Pinker, 2011.
32. Collins, 2008.
33. Ibid.: 27.
34. Ibid.: 28–29.
35. Malešević, 2017.
36. Parkin, 1987.
37. Ibn Khaldun, 1958.
38. Gleditsch, 2004.
39. Wesseling, 1989: 8–11; 2005.
40. Luard, 1986; Levy, 1983.
41. Luard, 1986: 24, 35, 45.
42. Lemke, 2002: 167–71, 181; Centeno, 2002: 38–43.
43. Malešević, 2010: 95.
44. Webster, 2000.
45. Laffineur, 1999.
46. Graeber and Wengrow, 2021: 434–39.
47. Hsu, 1965: 56, 64.
48. Coker, 2014, 2021.

Chapter Three. Theories of the Causes of War

1. Clausewitz, 1976: 77.
2. Gilbert, 1947: 266.
3. More, 1952: 201.
4. Levy, 1988: 666–70; Blainey, 1971.
5. Mann, 2005.
6. Levy, 1988: 662.
7. Robinson, 2001.
8. Crawford, 2007.
9. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, 2012; Reiter and Stam, 2002.
10. Downes, 2009.
11. Desch, 2002.
12. Ibid.: 44.
13. O’Brien and Prados de la Escosura, 1998.
14. Mack, 1975; Arreguín-Toft, 2005.
15. See Sanderson, 1999: 34–49; Turner and Maryanski, 2008: 170–74. For archaeological objection,
see Weisdorf, 2005.
16. Blanton et al., 1993; Hayden, 2001: 251–54.
17. Halsall, 2007; Heather, 2010.
18. Pedersen, 2014.
19. Fearon and Laitin, 2003.
20. Ibid.
21. Jervis, 1978.
22. Wendt, 1999.
23. Waltz, 1979: 92, 118.
24. Mearsheimer, 2001: 31.
25. Bueno de Mesquita, 1981.
26. Howard, 1983: 14–15, 22; emphasis added.
27. Fearon 1995: 380.
28. Cf. Jackson and Morelli, 2011.
29. MacMillan, 2020: 24.
30. Mearsheimer, 2009: 246.
31. Lebow, 1981.
32. Ibid.: 147.
33. Waltz, 1979: 138; Wendt, 1999: 279.
34. Levy, 2011.
35. Van Evera, 1999: 256.
36. Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, 1988.
37. Levy, 2011: 25–26.
38. Kant, 1891: 47.
39. Van Evera, 1999.
40. Sherman, 1879.
41. Clausewitz, 1976: 86, 101.
42. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 354.
43. Kant, 1891.
44. Bull, 2002.
45. Katzenstein, 1996: 4–6.
46. See Malešević’s critique, 2010: 64–70.
47. Lebow, 2010.
48. Van Evera, 1999: 16–34.
49. Blainey, 1973: 112–15.
50. Ibid.: 47–54, 159, 122.
51. Wright, 1957: 267.
52. Collins, 2008.
53. Owen, 2010.
54. Black, 1998: 22.
55. Cooney, 1997.
56. Lebow, 2010: 74.

Chapter Four. The Roman Republic

1. Harris, 1979: 10.
2. Sallust, 1992: 4.67.16.
3. Tacitus, 2010: chap. 30.
4. Harrer, 1918.
5. Livy, 1.32.5.
6. Ager, 2009; Harris, 1979: 166–75; Rosenstein, 2007: 338; Erskine, 2010: 38–39.
7. Hoyos, 2019a: 160–63.
8. Harrer, 1918.
9. Quoted by Eckstein, 2006: 308.
10. Thucydides, 1972: chapter 17.5.
11. Eckstein, 2006.
12. Terrenato, 2019.
13. Ibid.: 153.
14. Ibid.: xv.
15. Ibid.: 192.
16. Ibid.: 185.
17. Ibid.: 248.
18. Scheidel, 2009: 59–60.
19. Terrenato, 2019: 254
20. Raaflaub, 1991: 570.
21. Harris, 1979: 178–82; Beard, 2015: 163.
22. Eckstein, 2006: 47, 53, 215–16.
23. Alonso, 2007.
24. Harris, 1979, 2016.
25. Hoyos, 2019b; Gruen, 1986.
26. Gruen, 1986: 730.
27. Ibid.: 397–98.
28. Ibid.: 730.
29. Podany, 2010.
30. Ager, 2009.
31. Ibid.: 24.
32. Rosenstein, 2012: 217–18.
33. Oakley, 1993.
34. Polybius, 1889: 36.4.
35. Barton, 2007: 250–52.
36. Mattern, 1999: 194.
37. Rich, 2008.
38. See, for example, Harris, 1979; Hoyos, 2019a.
39. Scheidel, 2009: 74.
40. Tan, 2017.
41. Mattern, 1999: 65–79.
42. Rich, 2004: 58–59; Morley, 2010: 27.
43. Gruen, 2004.
44. MacMullen, 2000.
45. Kay, 2014.
46. Beard and Crawford, 1985: 76–77.
47. Ward-Perkins, 2005.
48. Rosenstein, 2012: chap. 6.
49. Harris, 1979: 34–35.
50. Suetonius, 1913: 77.
51. Morley, 2010: 25–29, 33; Rich, 2004; Rosenstein, 2007.
52. Tacitus, 1996: book 15.53.
53. Mattern, 1999.
54. Gruen, 1986: 288–315.
55. Ibid.: 418.
56. Scheidel, 2019: 80.
57. Sallust, 1899: chap. 4.
58. Hoyos, 2019a: 38.
59. Harrer, 1918: 35.
60. Gruen, 2004; Mattern 1999: chap. 4.
61. Taylor, 2015, 2017.
62. Rich, 2004.
63. Mattern, 1999: chap. 4.
64. Scheidel, 2019: 67.
65. Clark, 2014: chaps. 2–5.
66. Taylor, 2015: 18–19.
67. Rosenstein, 2007: 226–37; Beard, 2015: 163–65; Harris, 2016: chap. 2; Scheidel, 2019: 64–69.
68. Eckstein, 2006: 254–57.
69. Terrenato, 2019: 112–18; Beard, 2015: 154–56; Eckstein, 2006: 126–27.
70. Morley, 2010: 26; Beard and Crawford, 1985: 74.
71. Erskine, 2010: 12–15; Rosenstein, 2007; Mattern, 1999: 115.
72. MacMullen, 2000.
73. Pilkington, 2019; Miles, 2010; Hoyos, 2015.
74. Harris, 2006.
75. Hoyos, 2019b: chap. 4; Terrenato, 2019: 86–92.
76. Pilkington, 2019.
77. Whittaker, 1978: 71; Miles, 2010: 76.
78. Miles, 2010: 43, 76, 95, 367.
79. Harris, 2006: 150–90.
80. Hoyos, 2019b: 187–91.
81. Whittaker, 1978.
82. Palmer, 1997.
83. Polybius, 1889: 1:10, 11.
84. Pilkington, 2019: 170.
85. Polybius, 1889: 1:13.10–13.
86. Ibid.: 1:63; emphasis in original.
87. Hoyos, 2015: 76–77.
88. Whittaker, 1978: 89–90; Hoyos, 2019b: 179–85.
89. Rosenstein, 2012: 126; Harris, 1979: 201–5.
90. Rosenstein, 2012: 127–75.
91. Livy, 1853: 22.58.
92. Ibid.: 22.51.
93. Taylor, 2015: 38; Hoyos, 2015: 132–90.
94. Rosenstein, 2007: 238, 248.
95. Erskine, 2010: 44.
96. Hoyos, 2015: 270–76.
97. Rosenstein, 2012: 233.
98. Morley, 2010: 14.
99. Hoyos, 2019b: 66–67, 77, 81.
100. Plutarch, 1960: 15.5.
101. Beard and Crawford, 1985: 74, 85.
102. Hoyos, 2019b: chaps. 5, 6.
103. De Souza, 2008; Brunt, 2004.
104. Lee, 2008.
105. Kulikowski, 2019.
106. Scheidel, 2019: 69.
 Chapter Five. Ancient China
1. Hsu, 1965: 56, 64; Hui, 2005: 150–55; Li, 2013: 182, 186–87.
2. Zhao, 2015.
3. Lewis, 1990: 33–35; Hsu, 1999: 566.
4. Lewis, 1990: 39; Zhao, 2015: 126.
5. Hsu, 1999: 557.
6. Walker, 1954: 56–58.
7. Hsu, 1999: 569.
8. Hui, 2005: 54–64.
9. Li, 2013: 163–64; di Cosmo, 2002a: 120–23.
10. According to Hui, 2005: 152, 156.
11. Elvin, 2004: 96–98.
12. Gumplowicz, 1899.
13. Di Cosmo, 2002a: chap. 3; Falkenhausen, 1999: 453, 584–89; Li, 2013: 178–80.
14. Sun Tzu, 1993: 7.20.
15. Hsu, 1965.
16. Lewis, 1999: 603; Hsu, 1965: 8–11.
17. Andrade, 2016: chap. 11.
18. Graff, 2002: 23; Sun Bin, 2003: 31–37.
19. Lewis, 1990: chap. 2; Rosenstein, 2009: 25–27; Li, 2013.
20. Hsu, 1965: 62–65; Hui, 2005: 54–64.
21. Hsu, 1965: 58–62, 68, 77, 89; Hsu, 1999: 554; Kiser and Cai, 2003.
22. Li, 2013: chap. 10.
23. Yates, 2008: 46–49.
24. Pines, 2012.
25. Storry, 1982: 60.
26. Gittings, 2012; Sun Bin, 2003: 95; De Bary and Bloom, 1999: 179.
27. Pines, 2018.
28. Sun Bin, 2003: 110, 112.
29. Quoted in Paul, 2004: 73.
30. Sun Tzu, 1993: 9.25.
31. Turchin et al., 2021.
32. Di Cosmo, 2002a: 155–59.
33. Turchin et al., 2021.
34. Hsu, 1999: 553–62; Lewis, 1999: 593–97; Falkenhausen, 1999: 525–26.
35. Hsu, 1999: 568.
36. Lewis, 1999: 619–20; cf. Lewis, 1990: chaps. 1 and 2, pp. 172–73.
37. Kiser and Cai, 2003; Zhao, 2015; Li, 2013: 223.
38. Sun Tzu, 1993: 113.
39. Hui, 2005: 78.
40. Zhao, 2015.
41. Lewis, 2007: 17.
42. Ibid.: 37.
43. Hui, 2005: 68, 73–79.
44. Hsu, 1965: 91, 107–16; Lewis, 1990: 48–49, 54; 2007: 30–35; Zhao, 2015; Li, 2013: 234–40.
45. Lewis, 2007: 47–52.

Chapter Six. Imperial China

1. Andrade, 2016: 312–15.
2. Dabringhaus, 2011; Li, 2013: chap. 12, esp. 284; de Crespigny, 2016: 321–22.
3. Zhao, 2015: 274–79.
4. Ibid.: 282, 15.
5. De Crespigny, 2016: 508.
6. Wang, 2013a.
7. Paul, 2003.
8. Fairbank, 1974.
9. Wang, 2011.
10. Ibid.: 32.
11. Wang, 2013a.
12. De Crespigny, 2016: 121–26, 164; cf. Loewe, 1974.
13. Wang, 2013a: 239–44.
14. Johnston, 1995.
15. Lorge, 2014.
16. Ibid.: 2.
17. Skaff, 2009: 171.
18. Kang, 2010: 82–106.
19. Zhang, 2015: 12–15.
20. Kang, 2010: 89–93, 105.
21. Graff, 2002.
22. Swope, 2009; Lorge, 2005: 131–39.
23. Lee, 2017: 84, 141.
24. Kang et al., 2018.
25. Wang, 2011: 152–56.
26. Phillips, 2011: 151–56.
27. Zhang, 2015: 160.
28. Fairbank, 1974; Wang, 2011: chap. 6.
29. Kang, 2010: chap. 6.
30. Yates, 2008: 35–40.
31. Kang, 2010; Zhang, 2015.
32. Lee, 2017.
33. Ikenberry, 2011: 61.
34. Cox, 1981: 139, 38.
35. Scheidel, 2019: 281–82.
36. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 347.
37. Kradin, 2019.
38. Di Cosmo, 2002b.
39. Khazanov, 2015: 362; Paul, 2003.
40. Perdue, 2005: 35.
41. Biran, 2004, 2017.
42. Scheidel, 2019: 289.
43. Khazanov, 2015: 360.
44. Rosenstein, 2009: 42–44; Li, 2013: 269–78.
45. Di Cosmo, 2002b.
46. Johnston, 1995: 247; 1996: 219–21; Kang, 2010: chap. 7; Wang, 2011: 136–37.
47. Tao, 1983: 81.
48. Perdue, 2005: 31–32.
49. Yu, 1967: 6–19, 45–46; cf. de Crespigny, 2016: 162–63.
50. Tillman, 2005: 147; Wang, 2011.
51. Zhang, 2015: 150–51; Rossabi, 1983.
52. Wang, 2011.
53. Wang, 2013b.
54. Hansen, 2019; Zhao, 2015.
55. Worthy, 1983: 38.
56. Wang, 1983; Franke, 1983; Tao, 1983.
57. Wang, 2011.
58. Tao, 1983.
59. Lorge, 2015: 125–30.
60. Ibid.: 282.
61. Lorge, 2008.
62. Tillman, 2005; Rossabi, 1983; Wang, 1983: 54–62; Hansen, 2019.
63. Tillman, 2005.
64. De Weerdt, 2016.
65. Smith, 2015; Lorge, 2015.
66. Wang, 2011: 60.
67. Andrade, 2016: chap. 1.
68. Hansen, 2019.
69. Peterson, 1983: 224–31; Tao, 1983: 71.
70. Lorge, 2015; Smith, 2015.
71. Lewis, 2000; Graff, 2002: 247.
72. Lorge, 2015.
73. Ratchnevsky, 1992: 40–41, 89–90, 152, 159–60; cf. Biran, 2004.
74. Biran, 2004.
75. Hassig, 1988; Isaac, 1983.
76. Lamb, 1927: chap. 7; Ratchnevsky, 1992: 188–96.
77. Kim, 2009.
78. Rossabi, 1988: 101.
79. Lorge, 2005: 150–54.
80. Dardess, 2012.
81. Wang, 2011: chap. 5.
82. According to Andrade, 2016: 113.
83. Zhang, 2015: 119–52.
84. According to Dardess, 2012.
85. According to Swope, 2014.
86. Perdue, 2002: 376.
87. Elliott, 2009: 86.
88. Elliott, 2001; Dabringhaus, 2011; Waley-Cohen, 2009.
89. Perdue, 2002: 393.
90. Lorge, 2005: 165.
91. Perdue, 2002: 390.
92. Ibid.: 283.
93. Perdue, 2005: 284–87.
94. Theobald, 2013: 9, 5.
95. Elliott, 2009: 88–92, 100.
96. Dabringhaus, 2011.
97. Fairbank, 1968; Arrighi, 2007: 314–20; Andornino, 2006; Wang, 2013.
98. Lorge, 2005: 172; Chia, 1993.
99. Giersch, 2006: 47.
100. Ibid.: chap. 4; Dai, 2004: 182–83.
101. Giersch, 2006: 12–14.
102. Wang, 2018.
103. Andrade, 2016: 8, 238.
104. Sun Bin, 2003: 110, 112.

Chapter Seven. Medieval and Modern Japan

1. Friday, 2004: 6.
2. Farris, 2006: 164, 185–87.
3. Conlan, 2003: 219, 7; cf. Turnbull, 2008.
4. Friday, 2004: chap. 5.
5. Morillo, 2001.
6. Friday, 2004: 155–59.
7. Farris, 2006: 194–98.
8. Berry, 1994.
9. Ibid.: 23.
10. Ibid.: 48; 2005: 835–36.
11. Farris, 2006: 209.
12. Lamers, 2000: chap. 1.
13. Bender, 2008.
14. Lamers, 2000.
15. Farris, 2006.
16. Berry, 1982: 29–34.
17. Lamers, 2000: 76, 98, 103–4.
18. Berry, 1982: 161; cf. Stalker, 2018: chaps. 5 and 6; Turnbull, 2002.
19. Berry, 1982: 126–30; quote, 81.
20. Lamers, 2000: 163, 170.
21. Berry, 1986: 243–47; Roberts, 2012: 7; Ikegami, 1995: 152–63.
22. Berry, 1982: 81, 150–55.
23. Berry, 1986: 242–43.
24. Ferejohn and Rosenbluth, 2010.
25. Farris, 2006.
26. Ibid.: 211.
27. Berry, 1982: 107–10; Turnbull, 2002: 73.
28. Berry, 1982: 113–20.
29. Moore, 1988.
30. Ikegami, 1995.
31. Totman, 1988: 48, 63.
32. Tarling, 2001: 25.
33. Metzler, 2006: chap. 2.
34. Duus, 1995; Matsusaka, 2001; Brooks, 2000.
35. Duus, 1995: 175–84.
36. Lone, 2000: 100–105.
37. Dickinson, 1999: 256; Evans and Peattie, 1997: 124.
38. Shimazu, 2001, 2009.
39. Duus, 1995; Lone, 2000: chaps. 8–10.
40. Duus, 1995: 203, 399–423; Eiji, 2002.
41. Duus, 1995: 431, 284–88.
42. Kim and Park, 2008; Eckert, 1996; Chou, 1996; Cha, 2000; Ho, 1984; Maddison, 2003: table 4.
43. Gluck, 1985: 90, 216–17.
44. Dickinson, 1999: 151, 242–56.
45. Hata, 1988: 282–86.
46. Peattie, 1975: 29, 57–63.
47. Metzler, 2006: 128.
48. Peattie, 1975: 100.
49. Iriye, 1997: 50–62.
50. Peattie, 1975: 96–98; Barnhart, 1987; Jordan, 1987.
51. Humphreys, 1995.
52. Wilson, 1995: 253–55; Young, 1998.
53. Iriye, 1997: 13–26.
54. Ibid.: 26–28.
55. Benson and Matsumura, 2001: 21–38; Nish, 2002.
56. Taira, 1988: 578–89.
57. Woodiwiss, 1992: 58–66; Gordon, 1985: 416–25, 251; 1991: 203.
58. Garon, 1987: 198–218; Taira, 1988: 637–46; Odaka, 1999: 150–57; Gordon, 1985: 250–51; 1991:
287–92.
59. Berger, 1977: 85, 225, 333–34, 345–46; Snyder, 1991: 134.
60. Gordon, 1991: 302–15.
61. Nakamura, 1988: 464–68.
62. Metzler, 2006: 199–256.
63. Berger, 1977: 105–17, 346; Gordon, 1985: chaps. 9–10; Nakamura, 1988.
64. Lockwood, 1954: 117; Iriye, 1974; Duus, 1995: xv–xviii; Sugihara, 2004.
65. Brooks, 2000: chap. 5.
66. Peattie, 1975: 114–33.
67. Bix, 2001: 228–41.
68. Matsusaka, 2001: 354.
69. Barrett and Shyu, 2001.
70. Mitter, 2000.
71. Maddison, 2003: 25.
72. Young, 1998: 307; cf. Nish, 2002: 177–82.
73. Wilson, 2002.
74. Brooks, 2000: 200–207; Nish, 2002: 180.
75. Tarling, 2001: 42.
76. Peattie, 1975: 186–90; Hane, 1992: chap. 12; Bix, 2001: 308–13.
77. Bix, 2001: 317–23.
78. Barnhart, 1987: 89.
79. Ibid.: 90, 104–14.
80. Berger, 1977: 67–74.
81. Bix, 2001: 254.
82. Kershaw, 2007: 91.
83. Kennedy, 1999: 501–2.
84. Tsunoda, 1994; Toland, 1970: 144–45.
85. Lynn, 2003: 238–40.
86. Miller, 2007; Barnhart, 1987.
87. Miller, 2007: 242.
88. Kershaw, 2007: 91–128.
89. Kennedy, 1999: 513–14.
90. Quoted ibid.: 515.
91. Iriye, 1987: 149–50; 1991.
92. Evans and Peattie, 1997: 447, 471–82.
93. Tarling, 2001: 76–78; Kershaw, 2007: 365.
94. Kershaw, 2007: 128, 478.
95. See, for example, Wood, 2007.
96. LeMay, 1965: 387.
97. Pike, 2015.
98. Lynn, 2003: 248–49, 262–80.

Chapter Eight. A Thousand Years of Europe

1. According to Heather, 2010.
2. Ward-Perkins, 2005.
3. Scheidel, 2019: 159, 162–64; Bisson, 2009.
4. Black, 1998: 47.
5. Keen, 1984.
6. Kaeuper, 1999: 38; Keen, 1999: 4–5.
7. Bartlett, 1994.
8. Turchin, 2003.
9. Luard, 1986: 24–34.
10. Howard, 1983: 14.
11. Davies, 2011.
12. Rogers, 2000; Lynn, 2003: chap. 3.
13. Rogers, 1993.
14. Howard, 1983: 14–15.
15. Luard, 1986: 193–95.
16. Lynn, 2003: 80.
17. Honig, 2001: 119.
18. Honig, 2012.
19. Honig, 2001: 117.
20. Andrade, 2015.
21. Pascua, 2008: 194–96.
22. Mann, 1986: 463–69.
23. Owen, 2010.
24. Luard, 1986: 195–205.
25. Ibid.: 204.
26. Scheidel, 2019.
27. Ibid.
28. Wendt, 1999.
29. Holsti, 1991: 64, 84; Luard, 1986: 44–52.
30. Quoted in Lynn, 2003: 132–36.
31. Howard, 1983: 13.
32. Quoted in MacMillan, 2020: 25.
33. Lynn, 2003: 140–41.
34. Ibid.: 155–56.
35. Holsti, 1991: 108–9, 112; Luard, 1986: 205–12.
36. Dalrymple, 2019: 329.
37. Yazdani, 2017.
38. Grinin and Korotayev, 2015.
39. Owen, 2010: chap. 4.
40. Parker, 1971; Ellis, 2003: 9.
41. Fazal, 2007.
42. Holsti, 1991: 141; Luard, 1986: 52–56.
43. Holsti, 1991: 142–45.
44. Owen, 2010: 278.
45. Yazdani, 2017.
46. See Mann, 1993, 2012, for fuller explanations.
47. Aron, 1973: 24–25.
48. Mann, 1993: 764–66.
49. Clark, 2012; Otte, 2014.
50. Otte, 2014: 506.
51. Judson, 2016.
52. Otte, 2014: 508.
53. Malešević, 2010; MacMillan, 2020.
54. Owen, 2010: chap. 5.
55. Kershaw, 2007: 254–56.
56. Ibid.: 290.
57. Kershaw, 1998: chap. 13.
58. Kershaw, 2007: 479.
59. Simms and Laderman, 2021.
60. Kershaw, 2007: 382–430.
61. MacMillan, 2020; Marwick, 1975.
62. Mann, 2004.
63. See Mann, 2012: chap. 9; Mann, 2013: chaps. 2–4.
64. Wimmer, 2013.
65. Luard, 1986: 205.

Chapter Nine. Seven Hundred Years of South and Central America

1. Townsend, 2019; Berdan, 2014, 2021; Cervantes, 2020: chaps. 6–9; all use these sources.
2. Hassig, 2007: 314–15.
3. Ibid.: 312.
4. Berdan, 2014: 169–70.
5. Isaac, 1983.
6. Townsend, 2019: chap. 2.
7. Berdan, 2014: 157–59.
8. Townsend, 2019: 79, 249–55.
9. Cervantes, 2020: chap. 9.
10. Hassig, 1988: 128–32, 172; Townsend, 2019: 53.
11. Daniel, 1992; Hassig, 1988: 75–94.
12. Hassig, 1988: 236–50; Berdan, 2021: 181–82.
13. Townsend, 2019: 72.
14. Graeber and Wengrow, 2021: 370–73.
15. Townsend, 2019: chap. 5.
16. Cervantes, 2020: 173.
17. Rostworowski, 1999; D’Altroy, 2014; McEwan, 2006; Cervantes, 2020: chaps. 13–15.
18. McEwan, 2006: 127.
19. Rostworowski, 1999.
20. Julien, 2007: 342–44.
21. McEwan, 2006: 127.
22. D’Altroy, 2014: 340–41.
23. Hyslop, 1984; McEwan, 2006: 118–28.
24. Covey, 2020: 61–63.
25. D’Altroy, 2014: 324.
26. Bray, 1992: 230.
27. D’Altroy, 2014: 349.
28. Rowe, 2006.
29. Rostworowski, 1999: 46.
30. Cervantes, 2020: chap. 14.
31. Andreski, 1966: 211.
32. Holden, 2004: 4.
33. Scheina, 2003: part 10; Loveman, 1999: 43–59, 105–14.
34. Lemke, 2002; Gochman and Maoz, 1984: 607; Franchi et al., 2017: 12.
35. Mares, 2001: 37; Mares and Palmer, 2012: 2.
36. Franchi et al., 2017: 10–11.
37. Jones, 2014.
38. Lemke, 2002: 167–71, 181; Centeno, 2002: 38–43; Arocena and Bowman, 2014: 52–53.
39. Gochman and Maoz, 1984: 605.
40. Palmer et al., 2015: 230.
41. Gochman and Maoz, 1984: 609; Palmer et al., 2015: 235; Ghosn et al., 2004: 151.
42. Mares and Kacowicz, 2016: table 9.1; Hensel, 1994.
43. Dominguez and Mares, 2003; Battaglino, 2012: 131.
44. Dominguez and Mares, 2003: 13.
45. Centeno, 2002.
46. Tilly, 1975: 42; cf. Mann, 1986, 1993.
47. Centeno, 2002: 66, 87, 122.
48. Ibid.: 194.
49. Mazzuca, 2021.
50. Burr, 1967.
51. Holsti, 1996: 156–57.
52. Mares, 2001: 17.
53. Ibid.: 113–30.
54. Ibid.: chaps. 3–4; cf. Dominguez and Mares, 2003.
55. Gibler, 2012.
56. Grafe and Irigoin, 2006: 240.
57. Mazucca, 2021.
58. As listed in Grafe and Irigoin, 2006: appendix 2; cf. Dominguez and Mares, 2003.
59. Carter and Goemans, 2014.
60. Goertz et al., 2016: chap. 7.
61. Scheina, 2003: 427.
62. Centeno, 2002: 49.
63. Whigham, 2002, section 2; Leuchars, 2002; Henderson, 2016.
64. Braumoeller, 2019: 106–7; Whigham, 2017: 580.
65. Fazal, 2007: 41.
66. Whigham, 2017; Leuchars, 2002.
67. Bethell, 1996: 8.
68. Ibid.: 4.
69. Whigham, 2017.
70. Collier, 2003: 51–52.
71. Ibid.
72. Burr, 1967; Sater, 2007; St. John, 1994.
73. Sater, 2007: 21–25, 347–56; Henderson, 2016.
74. Burr, 1967.
75. Henderson, 2016.
76. Braumoeller, 2019: 107.
77. Zook, 1960; Niebuhr, 2018.
78. Chesterton, 2013.
79. Shesko, 2015.
80. Ibid.
81. Mares and Palmer, 2012; Zook, 1964.
82. Zook, 1964.
83. Mares and Palmer, 2012.
84. Ibid.: 67.
85. Ibid.; Mares, 1996.
86. Mares and Palmer, 2012: 130.
87. Durham, 1979; Anderson, 1981.
88. Henderson, 2016.
89. Corbacho, 2003; Mares, 2001: 155–58.
90. Mares, 2001: 157–58.
91. Centeno, 2002: 129; Holsti, 1996: 166–67.
92. Henderson, 2016.
93. Migdal, 2001: 137–50.
94. Mares and Palmer, 2012: 132.
95. Mann, 2013.
96. Arocena and Bowman, 2014: 52–63.
97. Haftel, 2007.

Chapter Ten. The Decline of War?

1. Excellent summaries of social thought on wars can be found in Joas and Knoeble, 2013; and
Malešević, 2010: 17–50.
2. Joas, 2003: 128–33.
3. Ward, 1903.
4. Go, 2013.
5. Sumner, 1898.
6. Clausewitz, 1976: 260.
7. Gumplowicz, 1899: 116–24.
8. Treitschke, 1916: 395–96.
9. Weber, 1988: 60–61. I thank Stefan Bargheer for help in translating this.
10. Luft, 2007.
11. Simmel, 1903: 799.
12. Caillois, 1939, 2012.
13. See, for example, Joas, 2003; Malešević, 2010; Joas and Knoeble, 2013.
14. Mueller, 2009; Gat, 2006, 2017; Pinker, 2011; Goldstein, 2011.
15. Mueller, 2004: 17–18, 161.
16. Elias, 2012.
17. Durand, 1960; Fitzgerald, 1961; Scheidel, 2019: 43–45.
18. Hanson, 2005.
19. Flory, 2006.
20. Brunt, 1971.
21. Weatherford, 2004: 118; Morgan, 2007; Frankopan, 2015: 162.
22. Di Cosmo, 2002a: 6.
23. Biran, 2018.
24. Anonymous, 2011.
25. Khazanov, 2015.
26. Ratchnevsky, 1992: 129, 151; Giessauf, 2011; Biran, 2018.
27. Joveyni quoted in Spuler, 1972: 32–39.
28. Ratchnevsky, 1992: 129–33.
29. Lorge, 2005: 85–88.
30. Schmidt, 2011; May, 2007: 118–20; Sverdrup, 2017: 347.
31. Sverdrup, 2017: 347–48.
32. Frankopan, 2015: 161.
33. Morgan, 2007: 82, 137–38; May, 2011.
34. Anonymous, 2011.
35. Pinker, 2011: 195.
36. Braumoeller, 2019.
37. Eckhardt, 1992: 131.
38. Malešević, 2010: 119–20.
39. Cederman et al., 2011.
40. Blainey, 1988: 4.
41. Gat, 2017: 131–36.
42. Braumoeller, 2019: 94.
43. Sarkees et al., 2003: 65; Sarkees and Wayman, 2010.
44. Walter, 2017.
45. Wesseling, 2005.
46. Etemad, 2007: 92.
47. Tocqueville quoted ibid.: 86.
48. Mann, 2005: 100–107.
49. Wesseling, 1989.
50. Ibid.
51. Etemad, 2007: 89.
52. Ibid.: 93.
53. Kimber, 1990: 160.
54. Evans and Ørsted-Jensen, 2014.
55. Wesseling, 2005.
56. Bairoch, 1997: 638.
57. Etemad, 2007: 94.
58. Aron, 1997: 227.
59. Mueller, 1988.
60. Gat, 2017.
61. Goldstein, 2011: 15.
62. Ibid.: 309.
63. Roser, 2016.
64. Migdal, 2001.
65. Fazal, 2007.
66. Roser, 2016; Strand and Hegre, 2021.
67. Braumoeller, 2019: 86–92, 114; Cirillo and Taleb, 2016.
68. Marshall, 2017.
69. Clauset, 2018.
70. Beard, 2018.
71. Dupuy et al., 2017; Strand et al., 2019.
72. Hensel, 2002.
73. Themnér and Wallensteen, 2014; Dupuy et al., 2017; Pettersson and Eck, 2018; Strand et al., 2019;
Braumoeller, 2019: 85.
74. Harrison and Wolf, 2012, 2014.
75. Goertz et al., 2016; cf. Roser, 2016.
76. Braumoeller, 2019: chap. 8.
77. Marshall, 2017.
78. See, for example, Melander et al., 2009.
79. Crawford, 2015.
80. Goldstein, 2011: 260–64.
81. Lacina and Gleditsch, 2005.
82. UNHCR, 2020, 2021; Marshall, 2017.
83. Caplan and Hoeffler, 2017.
84. Eisner, 2003, 2014.
85. Du Roy and Simbille, 2018.
86. Somashekhar and Rich, 2016.
87. Sharara et al., 2021.
88. Thome, 2007.
89. All figures are from Lopes da Silva et al., 2022.
90. Collins, 1974.
91. Kaldor, 1999; Münkler, 2005.
92. Wimmer, 2013; Malešević, 2010: 311–14.
93. Arreguín-Toft, 2005.
94. Ibid.; cf. MacMillan, 2020.
95. Quoted in Malešević, 2010: 83.
96. Quoted in Bourke, 1999: 209.
97. Wezeman et al., 2022.
98. Strand et al., 2019: figures 3 and 4.
99. As did Cirillo and Taleb, 2016.
100. Gat, 2006: 662.

Chapter Eleven. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield I

1. Holmes, 1985: 210.
2. Stanhope, 1888: 18.
3. This is all covered in Raaflaub, 2007.
4. Goldsworthy, 1996: 30, 244–47.
5. Melchior, 2011.
6. Keegan, 1976: 78–116.
7. Ardant du Picq, 1947: 88–90, 154.
8. Keegan, 1976: 97–107, 171–74.
9. Collins, 2008: 83–133.
10. Josephus, 1987: bk. 6, chap. 8, sections 44–46.
11. Tolstoy, 2009: bk. 10, chap. 36.
12. Holmes, 1985: 84.
13. Linderman, 1987; Hess, 1997; McPherson, 1997; Manning, 2007; Adams, 2014; Steplyk, 2018.
14. Linderman, 1987: 7–17, 61.
15. Steplyk, 2018: 27, 75; McPherson, 1997: 68–69, 100–101.
16. Manning, 2007: 21, 31.
17. Marshall, 1947.
18. Grossman, 1995.
19. Laidley, 1865: 69; emphasis in original.
20. Malešević, 2010: 220, 221, 229; cf. Jacoby, 2008: 90.
21. Rottman, 2013.
22. Adams, 2014: 114–15; cf. Steplyk, 2018.
23. Griffith, 1989: 86.
24. Ibid.: 84–90.
25. Keegan, 1976.
26. Adams, 2014: 63.
27. Griffith, 1989: 111–13.
28. Hess, 1997: 57–59.
29. Ardant du Picq, 1947: 263–73.
30. Ibid.: 115.
31. Ibid.: 120.
32. Ibid.: 111–12.
33. Griffith, 1989: chap. 2.
34. McPherson, 1997: 72, 77.
35. Hess, 1997.
36. McPherson, 1997: 72–74.
37. McPherson, 1997: 6–7, 79; Adams, 2014: 111–12, 115.
38. Hess, 1997: 150.
39. Linderman, 1987: 261–62.
40. Hess, 1997.
41. Adams, 2014: 111.
42. Griffith, 1989: 50.
43. Hess, 1997: 74–93.
44. Ibid.: 75.
45. Adams, 2014: 70.
46. McPherson, 1997: 39–42.
47. Sherman to Major General Logan, December 21, 1863, ehistory.osu.edu.
48. Brown, 1970: 86–93; Stannard, 1992: 171–74.
49. Adams, 2014: 166.
50. McPherson, 1997: 163–66.
51. Weitz, 2008: 284–85.
52. McPherson, 1997: 46, 47.
53. Ibid.: 49–51.
54. Hess, 1997: 114–17.
55. McPherson, 1997: 87.
56. McPherson, n.d.; McPherson, 1997: 87.
57. Holmes, 1985: 84.

Chapter Twelve. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield II

1. Roynette, 2018: 260.
2. Ibid.: 261.
3. Strachan, 2006.
4. Sheldon, 2005: 292.
5. Lebow, 2010: 137.
6. Sheldon, 2005; Middlebrook, 1972.
7. Ziemann, 2017: 74.
8. Horne, 2005: 909; my translation.
9. Holmes, 1985: 204–5, 182, 267–69; cf. Bourke, 2005: 199; Rousseau, 1999: 155.
10. Bourke, 2005: chap. 7; Rousseau, 1999: 155–60.
11. Rousseau, 1999: 223, 228.
12. Malešević, 2022: 184.
13. Jones, 2006: 239–41.
14. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2002: 93–103.
15. Cf. Horne, 2005.
16. Smith et al., 2003: 101–12.
17. Rousseau, 1999.
18. Ibid.: 309; my translation.
19. Maurin, 1982: 599–637.
20. Cochet, 2005; Loez, 2010.
21. Loez, 2010: 43.
22. Bond, 2002.
23. Ziemann, 2007; Ashworth, 1980.
24. Rousseau, 1999: 111–18.
25. Ashworth, 1980.
26. Ibid.: 173–75.
27. Ziemann, 2007.
28. Rousseau, 1999: 229–30.
29. Sheldon, 2005: 391.
30. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2002: 21–25.
31. Ziemann, 2017: 26–27.
32. Ashworth, 1980: 215.
33. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2002: 39–42.
34. Ashworth, 1980: 215–16.
35. Watson, 2008.
36. Smith, 1994.
37. Saint-Fuscien, 2011.
38. Pedroncini, 1967; Smith, 1994; Horne, 2005; Loez, 2010.
39. Keegan, 1976: 335; 1999: 331–50, 401.
40. Jones, 2008.
41. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2002: 40.
42. Ziemann, 2017: 32–33, 103–19; Maurin, 1982: 522.
43. Wildman, 1980: 203–45.
44. Keegan, 1976: 274–78, 314–17.
45. Watson, 2008: 66.
46. Ibid.: 69.
47. Ibid.: 70.
48. Wilcox, 2014.
49. Sanborn, 2003.
50. Mann, 2012: 176–85.
51. Ziemann, 2007: 142–53.
52. Cf. Boff, 2014.
53. Dollard with Horton, 1943.
54. Kershaw, 2012: xvii.
55. Shils and Janowitz, 1948.
56. Bartov, 1991; Fritz, 1995; Cintino, 2017.
57. Bartov, 1985; Lower, 2005; Bartov, 1991: 132.
58. Cintino, 2017: 3.
59. Ibid.: 158–62.
60. Bartov, 1991: 26.
61. Fritz, 1995.
62. Ibid.: 10.
63. Ibid.: 188–97.
64. Ibid.: 146–49.
65. Cintino, 2017.
66. Hellbeck, 2015.
67. Beevor, 1998.
68. Merridale, 2006.
69. Hellbeck, 2015: 58.
70. Reese, 2011: 160–73.
71. Merridale, 2006: 199.
72. Reese, 2011: 13.
73. Quoted in Merridale, 2006: 214.
74. Hellbeck, 2015: 53, 61.
75. Ibid.: 51.
76. Ibid.: 19.
77. Merridale, 2006: 63–68.
78. Hellbeck, 2015: 149.
79. Ibid.: 43.
80. Ibid.: 188.
81. Ibid.: 22.
82. Ibid.: 181, 22.
83. Ibid.: 67–68.
84. Ibid.: 67.
85. Ibid.: 50.
86. William Slim, speech to the officers of the Indian army, quoted by Lewin, 1976: 71.
87. See, for example, Collins, 2008: 43–54; Dyer, 1985: 118–19; Holmes, 1985: 58; Keegan, 1976:
74; Malešević, 2010: 220–21; 2022: 179; Jacoby, 2008: 90–91; Ferguson, 2006: 521.
88. Marshall, 1944, 1968, 1969.
89. Marshall, 1947: 54, 79.
90. Spiller, 1988; Glenn, 2000; Chambers, 2003; Engen, 2008, 2011.
91. Malešević, 2010, 2022.
92. Stouffer et al., 1949: table 3, 201; Collins, 2008: 46–49.
93. Kaufman, 1947.
94. Bourke, 2005: 289.
95. Stouffer et al., 1949: 283
96. Glenn, 2000: 30.
97. Blake, 1970.
98. Quoted ibid.: 340–41.
99. Bourke, 1999.
100. Ibid.: 2.
101. Ibid.: 19.
102. Ferguson, 1999: 357–58; cf. MacMillan, 2020: 81.
103. King, 2013: 48–49; emphasis in original.
104. Bourke, 1999: 155.
105. Ibid.: 154.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.: 229.
108. Blake, 1970: 342–43.
109. Stouffer et al., 1949: 159; Bourke, 1999: 145–49; Malešević, 2010: 224–25; MacMillan, 2020:
78–79.
110. Collins, 2008: 77, 67–70.
111. Bourke, 1999: 219, 208.
112. King, 2013: 45–48.
113. Marshall, 1968: 56.
114. King, 2013: 170–80.
115. Steckel, 1994; van Creveld, 1982.
116. Reiter and Stam, 2002.
117. Engen, 2008, 2009, 2011.
118. Cameron, 1994: 51, 201.
119. Shalit, 1988: 142.
120. Stouffer, et al., 1949: 98–100, 135–40.
121. Junger, 2011: 229.
122. Bartov, 1991: chap. 2.
123. Moskos, 1970: 73.
124. Shils, 1950: 22–24.
125. Mansoor, 1999; Rush, 2001.
126. Stouffer et al., 1949: 150.
127. Moskos, 1970.
128. Keegan, 1976: 335; Holmes, 1985: 214–16, 326.
129. Dyer, 1985: 144.
130. Hamner, 2011: 11.
131. Sherwood, 1996: 71.
132. Gurney, 1958: 258; Sherwood, 1996: 77–78; Wells, 1995: 49; Zhang, 2002.
133. Collins, 2008: 387–99.
134. Wells, 1995: 31.
135. Sherwood, 1996: 79.
136. Wells, 1995: 48.
137. Werrell, 2005: 125.
138. Toliver and Constable, 1997: 348.
139. Sherwood, 1996: 77–79; Werrell, 2005: 137–38, 144–45, 166.
140. Sparks and Neiss, 1956.
141. Wells, 1995: 105, 129.
142. Blake, 1970: 339.
143. Wells, 1995: 99; cf. Blake, 1970: 339.
144. Sherwood, 1996: 71, 91–94.
145. Bourke, 2005: 209–10.
146. Werrell, 2005: 196, 278.
147. Sherwood, 1996: 98–99.
148. Wells, 1995: 45–46, 115.
149. Stouffer et al., 1949: chap. 7.
150. Chancey and Forstchen, 2000: 80, 131–36.
151. Sherwood, 1996: 6, 38, 67.

Chapter Thirteen. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield III

1. Blechman and Kaplan, 1978.
2. Kaplan, 1981.
3. Quoted in Cumings, 2010: 14.
4. Li, 2014: 39.
5. Johnston, 1996.
6. Edwards, 2006: 143–46.
7. Tomedi, 1993: 22, 110.
8. King, 2013: 181–82.
9. Tomedi, 1993: 67; Watson, 2002.
10. Watson, 2002: 176.
11. Marshall, 1951: 4, 61–62.
12. Glenn, 2000: 41–46.
13. Little, 1964.
14. Li, 2014.
15. Mahoney, 2001; Li et al., 2001; George, 1967.
16. Li, 2007: 91.
17. Li et al., 2001: 63, 67–69, 115–16.
18. George, 1967: 27–35.
19. Ibid.: 88.
20. Quoted ibid.: 25.
21. Mahoney, 2001.
22. Edwards, 2018: 59–61; Fehrenbach, 1963: 103, 137, 170.
23. Mahoney, 2001: 109.
24. Tomedi, 1993: 129, 136.
25. Mahoney, 2001: chaps. 5 and 6.
26. Ibid.: 94.
27. Edwards, 2018: 59–61.
28. Li, 2014.
29. Mahoney, 2001: 83.
30. Li et al., 2001.
31. Li, 2014: 61.
32. George, 1967: 133.
33. Li, 2014: 111–23, 132–33, 180.
34. Ibid.: 219–21.
35. Li et al., 2001: 149–55, 175.
36. Fehrenbach, 1963: 109, 264.
37. Li, 2014: 239.
38. Li et al., 2001: 43.
39. Birtle, 2006: 36.
40. Cockerham and Cohen, 1981.
41. Moskos, 1970: 136, 141.
42. Moskos, 1975.
43. Marshall and Hackworth, 1967.
44. Glenn, 2000.
45. Ibid.: 36.
46. Ibid.: 46–48, 160; cf. Collins, 2008: 52–59.
47. Marmar et al., 2015.
48. All Things Considered, National Public Radio, December 16, 2017.
49. Hendin, 1991.
50. Dennis et al., 2016; cf. Marx et al., 2010.
51. Maguen et al., 2009.
52. Holmes, 1985: 86.
53. Lepre, 2011.
54. Cf. Moskos, 1970: 78–80.
55. See Hunt, 2008: appendix, for a critique.
56. Donnell et al., 1965.
57. Halberstam: 1972: 366; Elliott, 2010: 70–74.
58. Elliott, 2003: chap. 14.
59. Hunt, 2008: 38–46.
60. Elliott, 2003: chap. 11.
61. Ibid.: 355, 374, 454.
62. Ibid.: 378–80.
63. Henderson, 1979.
64. Ibid.: 40.
65. Ibid.: 89.
66. Ibid.: 73.
67. Ibid.: 94.
68. Gouré et al., 1966.
69. Elliott, 2003: chap. 13; Gouré et al., 1966.
70. Elliott, 2010: chap. 3; Robin, 2001; 190–93.
71. According to Elliott, 2010: 182–84.
72. Hunt, 2008: 117–35.
73. Elliott, 2003.
74. Ibid.: 1133.
75. Taylor, 1999.
76. Li, 2007: 205, 220–22.
77. Elliott, 2003: 937–39.
78. Quoted in Welch, 2011: 121.
79. Hiam, 2006: chap. 5; Elliott, 2010: 193–95; Elliott, 2003: chap. 13.
80. Li, 2007: 250–59; Li, 2014: 248.
81. O’Brien, 1990: 65.
82. Collins, 2008: 57–59.
83. Report of the General Accounting Office, quoted by Buncombe, 2005.
84. Malešević, 2022: 154.

Chapter Fourteen. Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

1. Grinin, 2019.
2. Ibid.: 30.
3. World Islamic Front Fatwa, February 23, 1998:1.
4. Huntington, 1996.
5. Owen, 2010.
6. Pape, 2006.
7. Sharp, 2022.
8. Derluguian, 2021.
9. Ibid.
10. Agha and Malley, 2019.
11. Yazbek, 2015: 234–37, 246–47.
12. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 297.
13. Donner, 2007: 299–300.
14. “Samer,” 2017.
15. Weiss and Hassan, 2015.
16. Wood, 2016; McCants, 2015.
17. Khatib, 2015.
18. McCants, 2015: chap. 5.
19. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 394.
20. The effects are horrifically described by Yazbek, 2015.
21. Khatib, 2015.
22. Callimachi, 2018; Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2020.
23. Weiss and Hassan, 2015: 222–24.
24. Ginkel and Entenmann, 2016; Dodwell et al., 2016; Wilson, 2017; and Speckhard and Ellenberg,
2020.
25. Atran et al., 2018.
26. Sagramoso and Yarlykapov, 2020.
27. Khosrokhavar, 2017; Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2020: table 5.
28. Wilson, 2017.
29. Wilson, 2015.
30. Dodwell et al., 2016.
31. Fishman and Felter, 2007.
32. Hegghammer, 2021.
33. Mitts, 2019.
34. Khosrokhavar, 2017: 21.
35. Knights and Almeida, 2020.
36. Hegghammer, 2021.
37. Khosrokhavar, 2017: 38.
38. Hansen, 2013; International Crisis Group, 2018.
39. Quinlivan, 1999; Kandil, 2016.
40. Sassoon, 2012: 129–61; Blaydes, 2018: 266–304.
41. Cheney, 2003.
42. Fukuyama, 2011.
43. Draper, 2020.
44. Mann, 2003.
45. Pew Research Center, 2011, 2016.
46. Junger, 2011.
47. Skelly, 2006; Sheehan-Miles, 2012.
48. Kudo, 2011.
49. Brereton Report, 2020.
50. O’Grady and Gunter, 2022.
51. Hoge et al., 2004.
52. Litz et al., 2009.
53. Maguen and Litz, 2012.
54. Finkel, 2013.
55. Ibid.
56. Bandura, 1999.
57. Phillips, 2019; Cooper et al., 2019.
58. Hattenstone and Allison, 2014.
59. Shaw, 2002.
60. Khan and Gopal, 2017.
61. Moore, 2019.
62. Pew Research Center, 2011: chap. 5.
63. Chappelle et al., 2010, 2014; cf. Armour and Ross, 2017.
64. Cole, 2017.
65. Mead, 2014.
66. Lewis and Holewinski, 2013.
67. Mashal, 2020.
68. Massing, 2021.
69. Mann, 2003.
70. Alshaibi, 2022.
71. Herring and Rangwala, 2006: 147–59.
72. Crawford, 2021.
73. Gibbons-Neff, 2021.
74. Mann, 1988: 183–87.
75. Sharp, 2020.
76. Nye, 1990.
77. Donner, 2007; Niditch, 2007.

Chapter Fifteen. Possible Futures

1. Zhao, 2006.
2. Ramzy and Buckley, 2019.
3. Friedrich et al., 2016.
4. Aron, 1973: 15.
5. Goldstein, 2011: 328.
6. Eisenhower, 1953.

Conclusion
1. Eckstein, 2006.
2. Small and Singer, 1970.
3. Reiter and Stam, 2002.
4. Lebow, 2010.
5. White, 1990.
6. Luard, 1986: 268–69.
7. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 263, 355–65.
8. Thies and Baum, 2020.
9. Fearon, 1994.
10. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 227–29.
11. Ibid.: 12.
12. Barthold, 1956: 60.
13. Lebow, 2010.
14. Van Evera, 1999: 192.
15. White, 1990.
16. Bender, 2008; Davies, 2011; Fazal, 2004.
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 Index

Tables are indicated by t following the page number.

Surnames starting with “al” are alphabetized by remaining portion of surname.
Achaean League, (i), (ii)
Acheson, Dean, (i), (ii)
Adams, Michael, (i), (ii), (iii)
Afghanistan: ISIS in, (i); NATO intervention in, (i); refugees from, (i); Taliban in, (i)
Afghanistan War (U.S.), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Africa: civilian vs. military fatalities in, (i), (ii)t; colonial conflicts in, (i); European imperialism and,
(i); global war trends in, (i); homicide rates in, (i); interstate wars in, (i), (ii); postcolonial conflicts
in, (i). See also specific countries
Ager, Sheila, (i)
aggressive wars: American interventions as, (i); Ancient China, (i), (ii); asymmetric warfare and, (i);
defined, (i); Europe, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); geopolitics of, (i), (ii); ideological power and, (i), (ii);
Imperial China, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii); Japan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Latin America, (i), (ii),
(iii), (iv), (v), (vi); militarism and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Muslim countries, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv);
nationalism and, (i); patterns of war, (i), (ii), (iii); political power and, (i), (ii); rationality of, (i),
(ii), (iii), (iv), (v); Roman Republic, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
(2022), (i), (ii), (iii); types of, (i), (ii); universality of war and, (i). See also border wars; imperial
conquest wars; raiding wars; regime change/reinforcement wars; specific wars
alcohol use by soldiers, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Alexander the Great, (i)
Algeria, colonial conflicts in, (i)
alliances: Ancient China, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); Aztecs, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); balancing theory and, (i),
(ii), (iii), (iv); Carthaginians, (i); democracies and, (i); European, (i), (ii), (iii); geopolitics and, (i);
Imperial China, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Inca, (i), (ii), (iii); Islamic sectarian wars and, (i); Latin America,
(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii); marriage as vehicle for, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); Medieval
Japan, (i), (ii); Modern Japan, (i), (ii); Roman Republic, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); World War I,
(i); World War II, (i)
Allison, Eric, (i)
Almeida, Alex, (i)
al-Nusra Front, (i)
Alonso, Victor, (i)
Al Qaeda, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
al-Shabaab, (i), (ii), (iii)
American Civil War, soldiers’ experiences in, (i), (ii)
Amnesty International, (i)
An Lushan, (i), (ii)t, (iii)
anarchy: fear caused by, (i), (ii); geopolitics and, (i); Hobbesian anarchy, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v);
patterns of war and, (i)
Ancient China, (i); Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 BCE), (i); Warring States Period (475–221
BCE), (i), (ii)
Andean Community, (i)
Anderson, Thomas, (i)
Andrade, Tonio, (i), (ii)
Andreski, Stanislav, (i), (ii)
Antiochus III (Greece), (i)
anti-Semitism, (i)
Appian, (i)
Arab-Israeli Wars, (i)
Arab Spring protests, (i), (ii)
Ardant du Picq, Charles, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Arendt, Hannah, (i)
Argentina: border disputes, (i); Chaco War (1932–1935) and, (i); Falklands (Malvinas) War (1982–
1983), (i), (ii); Platine War (1851–1852), (i); Rio Protocol (1941) and, (i); War of the Triple
Alliance (1864–1870), (i)
Aristotle, (i)
Armenia: border disputes, (i); Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, (i)
Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN), (i)
Aron, Raymond, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Arreguín-Toft, Ivan, (i)
Ashworth, Tony, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
al-Assad, Bashar, (i), (ii)
asymmetric warfare, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Atahualpa, (i)
atomic bombs, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Atran, Scott, (i)
Attalus I (Greece), (i)
Attila the Hun, (i), (ii)
Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, (i), (ii)
Augustus (Roman emperor), (i), (ii), (iii)
Australia: Afghanistan War and, (i); archaeological evidence of warfare in, (i), (ii); colonial conflicts
in, (i)
Austria: Austro-Prussian War (1866), (i); Congress of Vienna (1815) and, (i); World War I and, (i)
Austro-Hungarian Empire, (i), (ii)
Austro-Prussian War (1866), (i)
authoritarianism: Ancient China, (i), (ii), (iii); coup-proofing and, (i); economic success of, (i);
Europe, (i), (ii); Imperial China, (i); Latin America, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); military justice and, (i);
Modern China, (i); Modern Japan, (i); morale and, (i); Muslim countries, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v);
Russia, (i), (ii); World War I and, (i), (ii)
Azerbaijan: border disputes, (i); Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, (i); Shi’a Muslims in, (i)
Azov Battalion (Ukraine), (i)
Aztecs, (i), (ii)
Aztec Triple Alliance, (i), (ii)
Ba’athists, (i), (ii)
Bahrain: Shi’a Muslims in, (i), (ii); Sunni Muslims in, (i); Yemen and, (i)
Bairoch, Paul, (i)
Baker, James, (i)
balancing theory: alliances and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); asymmetric warfare and, (i); European civil wars
and revolutions, (i); European imperialism, (i); geopolitics and, (i); Japanese imperialism, (i)
Balkan Wars (1912–1913), (i), (ii)
Bartlett, Robert, (i)
Bartov, Omer, (i), (ii)
Battle of Cuaspad (1863), (i)
Battle of Gettysburg (1863), (i), (ii)
Battle of Midway (1942), (i)
Battle of Tumu Fortress (1449), (i)
Battle of Yungay (1839), (i)
Beagle Channel conflict (1982–1983), (i)
Beard, Mary, (i), (ii)
Beard, Steven, (i)
Becker, Annette, (i), (ii)
Beevor, Anthony, (i)
Belgium, ISIS support in, (i)
bellicosity, (i)
Bender, John, (i), (ii)
Bentham, Jeremy, (i)
Berlin Conference on Africa (1884), (i)
Berlin, Treaty of (1885), (i)
Berry, Mary, (i), (ii)
Bertrand du Guesclin, (i)
Bethell, Leslie, (i)
Biden, Joe: Afghanistan War and, (i); Israel and, (i), (ii); Saudi Arabia and, (i); Taiwan and, (i)
Bin Laden, Osama, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Biran, Michal, (i)
Black, Jeremy, (i), (ii)
Blainey, Geoffrey, (i), (ii), (iii)
Blair, Tony, (i)
Blake, Joseph, (i), (ii)
Blechman, Barry, (i)
Boko Haram, (i)
Bolivia: border disputes, (i); Chaco War (1932–1935), (i), (ii); War of Confederation (1836–1839), (i),
(ii); War of the Pacific (1879–1883), (i)
Bolshevik Revolution, (i), (ii), (iii)
border wars: Africa, (i), (ii); constructivism and, (i); economic power and, (i); Europe, (i); Imperial
China, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii); International Court of Justice mediation of, (i); Latin
America, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); as major threat to peace today, (i); Modern China, (i); patterns of war
and, (i), (ii); rationality of, (i); Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (2022), (i), (ii), (iii). See also specific
wars
Bormann, Martin, (i)
Borneo: Imperial China’s tributary diplomacy and, (i); Japanese militarism and, (i)
Bosnia-Herzegovina: Austrian seizure of (1878), (i); NATO intervention in, (i)
Bourke, Joanna, (i), (ii)
Brabant, Duke of, (i)
Bradley, Omar, (i)
Braumoeller, Bear, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Bray, Tamara, (i)
Brazil: European imperialism and, (i), (ii); Platine War (1851–1852), (i); Rio Protocol (1941) and, (i);
War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), (i); in World War II, (i)
Bremer, Jerry, (i)
brinkmanship, (i), (ii)
Britain: Acts of Union (1800), (i); European imperialism and, (i); Falklands (Malvinas) War (1982–
1983), (i), (ii); fighter pilots in World War II, (i); imperialism by, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); ISIS support in,
(i); Japanese imperialism and, (i); Japanese militarism and, (i); Latin American War of
Confederation (1836–1839) and, (i); medieval warfare in, (i); police homicides in, (i); Washington
Naval Treaties (1922), (i); World War I and, (i), (ii); World War II and, (i), (ii). See also specific
colonies
British Defense Operational Analysis Establishment, (i)
British East India Company, (i), (ii), (iii)
Brunt, Peter, (i)
Buddhism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, (i), (ii)
Bugeaud, Thomas-Robert, (i)
Bull, Hedley, (i)
Burgundians, (i), (ii)
Burr, Robert, (i)
Bush, George H. W., (i)
Bush, George W., (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Caesar. See Julius Caesar
Caillois, Roger, (i)
Cairo Declaration (1964), (i)
Calgacus, (i)
Calley, William, (i)
Callimachi, Rukmini, (i)
callous vs. ferocious killing, (i)
Camacho, Manuel Ávila, (i)
Cameron, Craig, (i)
Carter, David, (i)
Carthaginian Empire: Punic Wars, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Roman Republic and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Caste Wars of Yucatán, (i)
Catholics: Aztecs and, (i); in England, (i); Peace of Westphalia (1648), (i); religious warfare in Europe
and, (i)
causes of war, (i); constructivism, (i); ecology context for, (i); economic power, (i); emotions, (i);
geopolitics, (i); ideological power, (i); in Latin America, (i); liberalism, (i); military power, (i);
overoptimism, (i); political power, (i); Realist theory on, (i); in Roman Republic, (i), (ii); tyranny
of history, (i)
Cederman, Lars-Erik, (i)
Celts, (i)
Cenepa War (1995), (i)
Centeno, Miguel, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Central America. See Latin America
Central American Federation, (i), (ii), (iii)
Central American Wars (1876, 1885, 1906–1907), (i)
Cervantes, Fernando, (i)
Chaco War (1932–1935), (i), (ii)
Chalabi, Ahmed, (i)
Chamberlain, Neville, (i)
Chanyuan Covenant (1005), (i)
Charlemagne, (i), (ii)
Charles IV (king of France), (i)
Charles V (king of France), (i)
Charles VI (king of France), (i)
Charles le Téméraire, Duke of Burgundy, (i)
Chávez, Hugo, (i)
Cheney, Dick, (i), (ii), (iii)
chevauchée tactics, (i)
Chiang Kai-shek, (i), (ii)
Chile: border disputes, (i), (ii); Rio Protocol (1941) and, (i); Santiago Declaration (1952), (i); War of
Confederation (1836–1839), (i), (ii); War of the Pacific (1879–1883), (i)
China: border disputes, (i); global war trends and, (i); Great Leap Forward, (i); Japanese militarism as
response to perceived threat from, (i), (ii); Korean War and, (i), (ii); military spending in, (i);
Nanjing Massacre (1937), (i); nuclear program in, (i); revisionism by, (i), (ii); South China Sea
disputes and, (i). See also Ancient China; Imperial China
Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
chivalric ideology, (i)
Chivington, John, (i)
Chongzhen (Chinese emperor), (i), (ii)
Churchill, Winston, (i), (ii), (iii)
Cicero, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Cintino, Robert, (i)
Cipriano de Mosquera, Tomás, (i), (ii)
civilian vs. military fatalities, (i), (ii)t; Iraq War, (i); in Korean War, (i); trends in, (i); in Vietnam War,
(i), (ii)
civil wars: in America, (i), (ii); in France, (i); in Germany, (i); internationalization of, (i); Japan, (i); in
Roman Republic, (i); in Spain, (i)
Cixi, (i)
Clark, Christopher, (i)
Clark, Jessica, (i)
Claudius (Roman emperor), (i), (ii)
Clauset, Aaron, (i)
Clausewitz, Carl von, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii); On War, (i), (ii)
climate change, (i)
Clinton, Bill, (i)
Cochet, François, (i)
Coker, Christopher, (i), (ii), (iii)
Cold War: ideological power and, (i), (ii); interventions and conflicts during, (i), (ii), (iii); Latin
American interventions, (i); Muslim country interventions, (i). See also Korean War; Vietnam War
Cole, Chris, (i)
Cole, Robert, (i), (ii)
collateral damage, (i). See also civilian vs. military fatalities
collective power, (i)
Collins, Randall, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii); Violence, (i)
Colombia: border disputes, (i); Chile and, (i); in Korean War, (i); Leticia War (1932–1933), (i); War of
the Cauca (1863), (i)
Common Peace movement, (i)
Comte, Auguste, (i)
Concert of Europe, (i)
Confucius and Confucianism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Congress of Vienna (1815), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
constructivism, (i)
Cooney, Mark, (i)
Correlates of War (CoW) research project, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Cortés, Hernán, (i)
corvée labor: Ancient China, (i); Aztecs, (i); Inca, (i)
Costa Rica: border disputes, (i); Central American Wars, (i)
coup-proofing: in Africa, (i); authoritarianism and, (i); in Imperial China, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Inca, (i),
(ii); in Muslim countries, (i), (ii); one-party states and, (i); in Roman Republic, (i), (ii), (iii);
weakening of armed forces for, (i)
Cramer, Joseph, (i)
Crassus, (i), (ii), (iii)
Crawford, Neta, (i)
Creveld, Martin van, (i)
Crimean War (1853–1856), (i)
Croesus of Lydia (king), (i)
Cromwell, Oliver, (i), (ii)
Crusades, (i)
Cuaspad, Battle of (1863), (i)
Cuba, (i)
Cuitláhuac, (i)
Curr, Edward, (i)
Cyrus II (Persian king), (i)
Dalai Lama, (i)
Dalrymple, William, (i)
D’Altroy, Terence, (i), (ii)
Daoism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Davies, Norman, (i), (ii)
decline of war, (i); European views after Enlightenment, (i); liberal optimism and, (i); Pinker’s study
of early history and Mongols, (i)
De Crespigny, Rafe, (i), (ii)
defensive wars: Ancient China, (i); defined, (i); Europe, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); geopolitics of, (i);
ideological power and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Imperial China, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii),
(ix), (x), (xi); Japan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); Latin America, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); offensive wars
distinguished from, (i); rationality of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii); Realism and, (i), (ii),
(iii); revisionism and, (i); Roman Republic, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); soldiers’ experiences in, (i), (ii),
(iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix); terrorism and, (i). See also specific wars
Deng Xiaoping, (i)
Denmark: Protestants in, (i); Schleswig Wars (1848–1851 & 1864), (i)
Desch, Michael, (i)
desertion: in American Civil War, (i); consequences of, (i); fear and, (i), (ii); in Vietnam War, (i); in
World War I, (i); in World War II, (i), (ii)
De Weerdt, Hilde, (i)
Di Cosmo, Nicola, (i)
distributive power, (i)
Dodwell, Brian, (i)
Dollard, John, (i), (ii), (iii)
Dominguez, Jorge, (i)
Donnell, John, (i), (ii)
Downes, Alexander, (i)
Draper, Robert, (i)
drone warfare, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
drug use by soldiers, (i), (ii), (iii)
Du Ping, (i)
Durham, William, (i)
Durkheim, Emile, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Ebro, Treaty of (226 BCE), (i)
Eckhardt, William, (i), (ii)
Eckstein, Arthur, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
economic power: American Civil War and, (i); causes of war, (i); defined, (i); Hundred Years’ War
and, (i); as motive for war, (i); of Roman Republic, (i)
Ecuador: Cenepa War (1995), (i); Chile and, (i); Ecuador–Peru Wars (1830s to 1990s), (i); Paquisha
War (1981), (i); Rio Protocol (1941) and, (i); Santiago Declaration (1952), (i); War of the Cauca
(1863), (i); Zarumilla War (1941), (i)
Ecuador–Peru Wars (1830s to 1990s), (i)
Edward the Confessor, (i)
Edward II (king of England), (i)
Edward III (king of England), (i), (ii), (iii)
Edward VI (king of England), (i)
Edwards, Paul, (i)
Eisenhower, Dwight, (i)
El Cid, (i)
Elias, Norbert: The Process of Civilisation, (i)
Elizabeth I (queen of England), (i), (ii)
Ellenberg, Molly, (i)
Elliott, David, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Elliott, Mark, (i), (ii)
El Salvador: Central American Wars, (i); Soccer War (1969), (i)
Ember, Carol, (i)
Ember, Melvin, (i)
emotions: as cause of war, (i); ideological power and, (i); patterns of war and, (i). See also ideological
power
Engen, Robert, (i)
England: homicide rates in, (i); Hundred Years’ War, (i); imperialism and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); medieval
warfare in, (i), (ii); Norman conquest, (i), (ii); Protestants in, (i). See also Britain
Erdogan, Recep, (i), (ii), (iii)
Eritrea: border disputes, (i); civilian vs. military fatalities in, (i), (ii)t
Etemad, Bouda, (i)
Ethiopia: border disputes, (i); civilian vs. military fatalities in, (i), (ii)t
Etruscans, (i)
Europe, (i); archaeological evidence of warfare in, (i); barbarian waves following fall of Roman
Empire, (i); explanations for militarism and warfare in, (i); global war trends since 1945 and, (i);
Hundred Years’ War, (i); imperialism conflicts, (i); medieval warfare, (i); military spending in, (i);
religious warfare, (i); soldiers’ experiences in early modern period, (i); Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648), (i), (ii); World War I, (i); World War II, (i). See also specific countries
European Union, (i), (ii)
Evans, Raymond, (i)
existential threats, (i)
Fabius Maximus, (i)
Fairbank, John, (i)
Falkenhayn, Erich von, (i), (ii)
Falklands (Malvinas) War (1982–1983), (i), (ii)
Fan Sui, (i)
Fanon, Frantz, (i)
Farris, William, (i)
Fazal, Tanisha, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
fear: alcohol and drugs used to combat, (i); anarchy causing, (i), (ii); desertion and, (i), (ii); as
dominant battlefield emotion, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); fighter pilots and, (i); “forward panic,” (i),
(ii), (iii), (iv); ideological power and, (i), (ii), (iii); inactivity causing, (i); insecurity causing, (i),
(ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); military discipline and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); morale and, (i), (ii), (iii); morality
and, (i), (ii); nonfiring and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); overfiring and, (i), (ii); peer-group coercion and, (i),
(ii), (iii), (iv), (v); political power and, (i); PTSD and, (i); rationality and, (i), (ii); Roman Republic
diplomacy built on, (i), (ii), (iii); skulkers and, (i). See also soldiers’ experiences
Fearon, James, (i), (ii), (iii)
Fehrenbach, T. R., (i)
Ferdinand VII (king of Spain), (i)
Ferejohn, John, (i)
Ferguson, Brian, (i)
ferocious vs. callous killing, (i)
feudalism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
fighter pilots: aborted missions, (i); accident rates, (i); Korean War, (i), (ii); task absorption by, (i);
World War II, (i)
Finkel, David, (i)
Finland, women soldiers in, (i)
First Gulf War (1990–1991), (i)
Five Pecks of Grain (religious movement), (i)
Flory, Stewart, (i)
“forward panic,” (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Fourth Macedonian War (150–148 BCE), (i)
France: arms exports by, (i); Burgundians in, (i); Catholics in, (i); civil wars and revolutions in, (i),
(ii); colonialism in Asia, (i); European imperialism and, (i); Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), (i);
Hundred Years’ War, (i); imperialism by, (i), (ii); ISIS support in, (i); Japanese imperialism and, (i);
Latin American War of Confederation (1836–1839) and, (i); medieval warfare in, (i); Nagorno-
Karabagh conflict and, (i); police homicides in, (i); soldiers’ experiences in early modern period,
(i); soldiers’ experiences in World War I, (i); World War I and, (i), (ii); World War II and, (i)
Franchi, Tassio, (i)
Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), (i)
Franklin, Benjamin, (i)
Frankopan, Peter, (i)
Franks, (i), (ii), (iii)
Franz Ferdinand (archduke), (i)
Free Syrian Army, (i)
Friday, Karl, (i)
Fritz, Stephen, (i)
Fry, Douglas, (i)
Fukuyama, Francis, (i)
Gaddafi, Muammar, (i), (ii), (iii)
Gaius Laelius, (i)
Galtieri, Leopoldo, (i), (ii), (iii)
García Moreno, Gabriel, (i)
Garon, Sheldon, (i)
Gat, Azar, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Gauls, (i), (ii), (iii)
Gaza Strip, (i)
gender differences in warfare, (i), (ii)
Geneva Conventions, (i), (ii)
Genghis Khan. See Chinggis Khan
geopolitics: in Ancient China, (i), (ii), (iii); causes of war, (i); elements of, (i); in Imperial China, (i),
(ii); in Japan, (i); in Latin America, (i); Roman Republic, (i)
George III (king of England), (i), (ii)
George, Alexander, (i), (ii)
Germany: arms exports by, (i); Burgundians in, (i); civil wars and revolutions in, (i); European
imperialism and, (i); ISIS support in, (i); police homicides in, (i); post-WWII military spending
limits in, (i); religious warfare in, (i); World War I and, (i), (ii). See also Nazi Germany
Gettysburg, Battle of (1863), (i), (ii)
Gibler, Douglas, (i)
Gilbert, Gustave, (i)
Gleditch, Nils, (i)
Glenn, Russell, (i), (ii)
Gloucester, Duke of, (i), (ii)
Gochman, Charles, (i), (ii)
Godwinson, Harold, (i)
Goebbels, Joseph, (i)
Goemans, H. E., (i)
Goering, Hermann, (i)
Goertz, Gary, (i)
Goldstein, Joshua, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Gorbachev, Mikhail, (i)
Goths, (i)
Gouré, Leon, (i)
Gracchi brothers, (i)
Graeber, David, (i)
Grafe, Regina, (i)
Graff, David, (i)
Gramsci, Antonio, (i)
Gran Colombia, (i), (ii), (iii)
Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, (i), (ii)
Great Leap Forward (China), (i)
Great Wall of China, (i)
Greece: Peloponnesian War, (i); Roman Republic and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); soldiers’ experiences in,
(i)
greenhouse gases, (i)
Grey, Edward, (i)
Griffith, Paddy, (i), (ii), (iii)
Grinin, Leonid, (i)
Grossman, Dave, (i), (ii), (iii)
Grotius, Hugo, (i)
Gruen, Erich, (i), (ii), (iii)
Guatemala in Central American Wars, (i)
guerilla warfare, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Gumplowicz, Ludwig, (i), (ii)
gunboat diplomacy, (i)
Habsburgs, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Hackworth, David, (i)
Haftel, Yoram, (i)
Hagel, Chuck, (i)
Hainault, Jacqueline, Countess of, (i)
Halifax, Lord, (i)
Hamaguchi, Osachi, (i)
Hamas, (i), (ii), (iii)
Han Fei, (i), (ii), (iii); Han Feizi, (i)
Han dynasty, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
Hannibal, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Hanson, Victor, (i)
Harris, William, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Harrison, Mark, (i)
Hassig, Ross, (i)
Hattenstone, Simon, (i)
Hay, John, (i)
Hayes, Rutherford B., (i)
hegemonic power: causes of war, (i); Imperial China and, (i), (ii); patterns of war and, (i)
Heian period (Japan 794–1192), (i)
Hellbeck, Jochen, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Henderson, Peter, (i), (ii), (iii)
Henderson, William, (i)
Henry I (king of England), (i)
Henry II (king of England), (i)
Henry IV (king of England), (i)
Henry V (king of England), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Henry VI (king of England), (i)
Henry VIII (king of England), (i), (ii), (iii)
Hensel, Paul, (i)
Herodotus, (i), (ii)
Herring, Eric, (i)
Hess, Earl, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Hezbollah, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Hideyoshi, Toyotomi, (i), (ii), (iii)
Hilferding, Rudolf, (i)
Himmler, Heinrich, (i)
Hirohito (Japanese emperor), (i), (ii), (iii)
Hitler, Adolf: balancing theory and, (i); ideological power and, (i), (ii), (iii); rationality of war and, (i),
(ii), (iii); Soviet Union and, (i), (ii), (iii)
Hobbesian anarchy, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Hobhouse, Leonard, (i)
Ho Chi Minh, (i)
Holden, Robert, (i)
Holland: imperialism and, (i), (ii), (iii); Protestants in, (i)
Holmes, Richard, (i)
Holocaust, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Holsti, Kalevi, (i), (ii), (iii)
Holy Roman Empire, (i), (ii)
homicide rates, (i)
Honduras: Central American Wars, (i); Soccer War (1969), (i)
Hong Kong, (i), (ii)
Hong Xuezhi, (i)
Hoover, Herbert, (i)
Houthis, (i), (ii)
Howard, Michael, (i), (ii), (iii)
Hoyos, Dexter, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Hsiang Shu, (i)
Hsu, Cho-yun, (i)
Huang Lao, (i)
Huáscar, (i)
Hui, Victoria Tin-Bor, (i), (ii), (iii)
Hulagu Khan, (i)
Hull, Cordell, (i)
Hundred Years’ War, (i)
Hungary: in NATO, (i); Protestants in, (i)
Hunt, David, (i)
Huntington, Samuel, (i)
Iberians, (i)
Ibn Khaldun, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
ICC (International Criminal Court), (i), (ii)
ICJ (International Court of Justice), (i), (ii), (iii)
ideological power: American Civil War and, (i); causes of war, (i); chivalric ideology, (i); defined, (i);
European imperialism and, (i); fear and, (i), (ii), (iii); immanent, (i); institutionalized, (i); Korean
War and, (i); patterns of war and, (i); racism and, (i); Roman Republic, (i); transcendent, (i);
Vietnam War and, (i); in Western Europe, (i); World War I and, (i); World War II and, (i), (ii), (iii)
IEDs (improvised explosive devices), (i), (ii), (iii)
Imperial China, (i); barbarians of northern frontier and, (i); Chanyuan Covenant (1005), (i); civil wars,
(i); infrastructural power in, (i); northern frontier, (i); Qing dynasty (1636–1912 CE), (i), (ii); Sino-
Russian Border War (1652–1689), (i); Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), (i), (ii); state politics of, (i);
tributary diplomacy in East and Southeast Asia, (i); war-and-peace decisions, (i); Yuan dynasty
(1271–1368 CE), (i), (ii)
imperial conquest wars: asymmetric warfare and, (i); decline of, (i); defined, (i); Imperial China, (i);
Japan, (i); patterns of war and, (i), (ii); rationality of, (i); Roman Republic, (i), (ii), (iii); Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine (2022), (i), (ii), (iii). See also imperialism; specific wars
imperialism: in Africa, (i); British, (i), (ii), (iii); Chinese, (i); Dutch, (i), (ii), (iii); European, (i);
French, (i), (ii); in India, (i), (ii); Japanese, (i); in Korea, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); in Latin America,
(i), (ii); Portuguese, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); by Roman Republic, (i), (ii)
improvised explosive devices (IEDs), (i), (ii), (iii)
Inca, (i); asymmetric warfare and, (i); ideological power and, (i); infrastructural power, (i)
India: border disputes, (i); British imperialism in, (i), (ii); colonial conflicts in, (i); military spending
in, (i); women as soldiers in, (i)
Industrial Revolution, (i), (ii), (iii)
Indus Valley civilization, (i)
infrastructural power: in Ancient China, (i); in Europe, (i); in Imperial China, (i), (ii), (iii); in Latin
America, (i), (ii); modernization of wars and, (i), (ii); in Roman Republic, (i), (ii); violence and, (i)
Inoue, Junnosuke, (i)
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), (i)
International Court of Justice (ICJ), (i), (ii), (iii)
International Criminal Court (ICC), (i), (ii)
Iran: Islamic Revolution in, (i); nuclear program in, (i), (ii); Shi’a Muslims in, (i), (ii); Soviet invasion
of, (i); Syrian civil war and, (i); U.S. interventions and, (i)
Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), (i), (ii)
Iraq: First Gulf War (1990–1991), (i); invasion of Kuwait, (i); ISIS in, (i); Islamic sectarian conflict in,
(i), (ii); Shi’a Muslims in, (i); Sunni Muslims in, (i)
Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (U.S.), (i)
Iraq War (U.S.), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Ireland: medieval warfare in, (i); potato famine, (i); women soldiers in, (i)
Irigoin, Maria, (i)
Iroquois Nations’ League, (i)
Ishiwara, Kanji, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
ISIS, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Islam. See Muslims
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Iran), (i), (ii)
Israel: Arab-Israeli Wars, (i); Islamic sectarian conflict and, (i); Nagorno-Karabagh conflict and, (i);
nuclear program in, (i); Six-Day War (1967), (i); U.S. alliance with, (i), (ii)
Italy: civil wars and revolutions in, (i); in Holy Roman Empire, (i); imperialism and, (i)
Jacobites, (i)
James IV (Scotland), (i)
James VI (Scotland) and I (England), (i)
Japan: archaeological evidence of warfare in, (i); cadastral reforms, (i); embargoes against, (i);
escalating imperialism period (1905–1936), (i); Genpei War (1180–1185), (i); Imperial China’s
tributary diplomacy and, (i), (ii), (iii); informal imperialism period (1868–1904), (i); medieval
warfare, (i); Meiji Restoration, (i); militarism rampant period (1936–1945), (i); Nanjing Massacre
(1937), (i); post-WWII military spending limits in, (i); Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), (i); self-
isolation of, (i); Separation Edict (1591), (i); South China Sea disputes and, (i); Tokugawa Peace
(1603–1868), (i), (ii); Warring States (Sengoku) period (1467–1590), (i); Washington Naval
Treaties (1922), (i); World War II and, (i); Yuan dynasty clashes with, (i)
Jews: Holocaust and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); in Israel, (i)
jihadi movements, (i), (ii)
Jinchuan Tibetans, (i)
Jin dynasty, (i)
Joan of Arc, (i)
John (king of England), (i)
John II (king of France), (i)
Johnson, Lyndon, (i), (ii), (iii)
Johnston, Alistair, (i)
Josephus, (i)
Joveyni, (i)
Julius Caesar, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Junger, Sebastian, (i), (ii)
Justin, (i)

Kamakura dynasty (1192–1603 CE), (i)

Kang, David, (i), (ii), (iii)
Kant, Immanuel, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Kaplan, Stephen, (i)
Kato, Tomosaburo, (i)
Katzenstein, Peter, (i)
Kaufman, Ralph, (i)
Kay, Philip, (i)
Keegan, John, (i), (ii)
Keeley, Lawrence, (i)
Kenya: archaeological evidence of warfare in, (i); colonial conflicts in, (i)
Kerensky Provisional Government (Russia), (i)
Kershaw, Ian, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Keynesian economics, (i)
Khan emperors of Imperial China: Qing dynasty (1636–1912 CE), (i); Yuan dynasty (1271–1368 CE),
(i)
Khomeini, Ayatollah, (i)
Khosrokhavar, Farhad, (i), (ii)
Kiangxi (Chinese emperor), (i)
Kijuro, Shidehara, (i)
Kim Il Sung, (i)
Kimber, Richard G., (i), (ii)
King, Anthony, (i), (ii), (iii)
King, Martin Luther, Jr., (i)
Kissinger, Henry, (i)
Knights, Michael, (i)
Konoe, Fumimaro, (i), (ii), (iii)
Korea: as “hermit kingdom,” (i); Imperial China’s tributary diplomacy and, (i), (ii), (iii); Japanese
imperialism and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); Japan’s Warring States Period and, (i). See also North
Korea; South Korea
Korean War: casualties and fatalities in, (i), (ii); Colombia sending soldiers to, (i); fighter pilots in, (i),
(ii); rationality of, (i); soldiers’ experiences in, (i)
Korotayev, Andrey, (i)
Kosovo, NATO intervention in, (i)
Kublai Khan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Kudo, Timothy, (i)
Kuwait, Iraq’s invasion of, (i), (ii)
Kyrgyzstan, border disputes in, (i)
Lacina, Bethany, (i)
Laderman, Charlie, (i)
Laidley, Major, (i)
Laitin, David, (i)
Lalman, David, (i)
Lamers, Jeroen, (i)
Latin America, (i); Aztecs, (i); Beagle Channel conflict (1982–1983), (i); border disputes in, (i);
Central American Wars (1876, 1885, 1906–1907), (i); Chaco War (1932–1935), (i); Ecuadorian–
Columbian War (War of the Cauca) (1863), (i); Ecuador–Peru Wars (1830s to 1990s), (i);
explanations for militarism and warfare in, (i); Falklands (Malvinas) War (1982–1983), (i);
homicide rates in, (i); Inca, (i); interstate wars in, (i); Leticia War (1932–1933), (i); Platine War
(1851–1852), (i); postcolonial era, (i), (ii); precolonial empires, (i); Soccer War (1969), (i); Spanish
civil wars and, (i); U.S. Mutual Security Programs, (i); War of Confederation (1836–1839), (i);
War of the Pacific (1879–1883), (i); War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), (i). See also specific
countries
League of Nations, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Lebanon: Hezbollah in, (i); Islamic sectarian conflict in, (i); Israeli incursion (1982), (i)
Lebow, Richard Ned, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Lee, Ji-Young, (i)
Lee, Robert E., (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
LeMay, Curtis, (i)
Lemke, Douglas, (i)
Lenin, Vladimir, (i)
Lepidus, (i)
Lepre, George, (i)
Leticia War (1932–1933), (i)
Leuchars, Chris, (i)
Levy, Jack, (i), (ii), (iii)
Lewis, Mark, (i), (ii)
Li Xiaobing, (i), (ii)
Liang dynasty, (i)
Liao dynasty, (i), (ii)
liberalism: causes of war, (i); Imperial China and, (i)
Libya, intervention in, (i), (ii)
Lincoln, Abraham, (i)
Linderman, Gerald, (i), (ii), (iii)
Litz, Brett, (i)
Livy, (i), (ii)
Locke, John, (i), (ii)
Loez, André, (i)
López, Carlos Antonio, (i)
Lord’s Resistance Army, (i)
Lorge, Peter, (i), (ii), (iii)
Louis XI (king of France), (i)
Louis XIV (king of France), (i), (ii)
Lu Wenhuan, (i)
Luard, Evan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Lucanians, (i)
Luther, Martin, (i)
Lynn, John, (i)
MacArthur, Douglas, (i), (ii)
Macartney, George, (i)
MacDonald, Ramsay, (i)
MacMillan, Margaret, (i), (ii), (iii)
Macron, Emmanuel, (i)
Magna Carta (1215), (i)
Mahoney, Kevin, (i), (ii), (iii)
Malešević, Siniša, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Malory, Thomas, (i)
Malvinas (Falklands) War (1982–1983), (i)
Mamertines, (i)
Manchu dynasty, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Mann, Michael, (i), (ii); The Dark Side of Democracy, (i); Incoherent Empire, (i); The Sources of
Social Power, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Mann, Thomas, (i)
Manning, Chandra, (i), (ii)
Mansoor, Peter, (i)
Mao Zedong: Great Leap Forward and, (i); Korean War and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Marxism and, (i);
revisionism and, (i)
Maoz, Zeev, (i), (ii)
Mapasingue, Treaty of (1860), (i)
Mares, David, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Marius, (i), (ii)
Mark Anthony, (i), (ii)
Marshall, Monty, (i), (ii)
Marshall, S. L. A., (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Marwick, Arthur, (i)
Marx, Karl, (i), (ii); 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, (i)
Marxist theory, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
mass-mobilization warfare, (i)
Matilda (empress), (i)
Mattern, Susan, (i), (ii)
Maurin, Jules, (i)
Maya, (i), (ii)
Mazzuca, Sebastián, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
McCarthy, Joseph, (i)
McEwan, Gordon, (i)
McNamara, Robert, (i)
McNaughton, John T., (i)
McPherson, James, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Mead, Corey, (i)
Mearsheimer, John, (i), (ii), (iii)
mediation: in Imperial China, (i); Japanese militarism and, (i); in Latin America, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v),
(vi), (vii), (viii), (ix); League of Nations and, (i); in Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, (i); patterns of war
and, (i); rationality of war and, (i), (ii); in Roman Republic, (i), (ii); United Nations and, (i)
medieval warfare: in Europe, (i); in Japan, (i)
Meiji Restoration, (i), (ii)
Melchior, Aislinn, (i)
Mencius, (i), (ii)
MERCOSUR, (i)
Merridale, Catherine, (i), (ii)
Middle East: global war trends in, (i); Roman Republic aggression in, (i); transnational jihadist wars
in, (i). See also specific countries
MIDs. See Militarized Interstate Disputes
Midway, Battle of (1942), (i)
Migdal, Joel, (i)
Miles, Richard, (i), (ii)
militarism: defined, (i); in Europe, (i); in Japan, (i); in Roman Republic, (i), (ii), (iii)
Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs): in Ancient China, (i); defined, (i); in Japan, (i); in Latin
America, (i); trends in, (i)
military discipline: fear and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); soldiers’ experiences, (i), (ii), (iii)
military justice, (i)
military power: as cause of war, (i); defined, (i); routinized coercion within armed forces, (i); rules
restraining, (i)
Mill, John Stuart, (i)
Millett, Lewis, (i)
Mills, C. Wright, (i)
Ming dynasty (1368–1644), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Minsk Accords (2014), (i)
Mithridates VI (king), (i), (ii)
Mitre, Bartolomé, (i)
Mitts, Tamar, (i)
Mo Tzu, (i)
Moctezuma, (i)
Moltke, Helmuth von, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Mongols: Ancient China and, (i), (ii); casualties and fatalities of conflicts, (i), (ii)t, (iii); Imperial
China and, (i); infrastructural power, (i); Qing dynasty and, (i). See also Khan emperors of Imperial
China
Monroe Doctrine, (i)
Montaigne, Michel de, (i)
Montesquieu, (i)
Moore, Barrington, (i)
morale: fear and, (i), (ii), (iii); in Korean War, (i); in Vietnam War, (i), (ii); in World War I, (i), (ii); in
World War II, (i)
morality: American Civil War, (i); Confucius on, (i); fear and, (i), (ii); ideological power and, (i); in
Vietnam War, (i), (ii); of Wehrmacht soldiers in World War II, (i); of World War II Allied soldiers,
(i); World War I soldiers’ experiences and, (i)
More, Thomas: Utopia, (i)
Morgan, David, (i)
Mosca, Gaetano, (i)
Moskos, Charles, (i), (ii)
Mozambique: al-Shabaab in, (i); civilian vs. military fatalities in, (i), (ii)t
Mueller, John, (i), (ii), (iii)
Mughal Empire, (i)
Muhammad (prophet), (i)
Muhammad II (Persian shah), (i)
Murphy, Audie, (i)
Muslims: Arab-Israeli Wars, (i); authoritarianism and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); in Balkans, (i); Iberians
and, (i); Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, (i); in Ottoman Empire, (i); recent wars in Muslim countries,
(i); sectarian wars, (i). See also Shi’a Muslims; Sunni Muslims
Mussolini, Benito, (i)
Myanmar: Imperial China’s tributary diplomacy and, (i), (ii), (iii); refugees from, (i)
My Lai massacre (1968), (i)
Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, (i)
Nakao, Hisashi, (i)
Namibia, colonial conflicts in, (i)
Nanjing Massacre (1937), (i)
Napoleon Bonaparte, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
nationalism: as cause of war, (i), (ii); in China, (i), (ii), (iii); in Europe, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); in Latin
America, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); overoptimism and, (i); in Russia, (i); World War I and, (i); World
War II and, (i)
National Security Council (U.S.), (i)
Native Americans: American Civil War and, (i); casualties and fatalities from colonial conflicts, (i)t,
(ii), (iii)
NATO: Cold War and, (i); expansion of, (i); global war trends and, (i); Libya and, (i); Syria and, (i)
Nazi Germany: Operation Barbarossa, (i); soldiers’ experiences in, (i); World War II and, (i)
Neiss, Oliver, (i)
Netanyahu, Benjamin, (i), (ii)
Netherlands: colonialism in Asia, (i); in Holy Roman Empire, (i)
New Zealand, colonial conflicts in, (i)
Nicaragua: border disputes, (i); Central American Wars, (i)
Nietzsche, Friedrich, (i)
Nivelle, Robert, (i)
Nixon, Richard, (i), (ii)
Nobunaga, Oda, (i), (ii)
nonfiring, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
nonstate actors, (i), (ii). See also specific organizations
Normans, (i), (ii)
North Korea: Korean War and, (i); nuclear program in, (i); as U.S. blind spot, (i)
nuclear weapons, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Nye, Joseph, (i)
Obama, Barack: Afghanistan War and, (i); China and, (i); drone warfare expanded by, (i); Libya and,
(i); military spending and, (i); Saudi Arabia and, (i)
O’Brien, Tim, (i)
Operation Barbarossa (Nazi Germany), (i)
Operation Desert Storm (1991), (i)
Operation Enduring Freedom, (i)
Operation Iraqi Freedom, (i)
Orbán, Viktor, (i)
Organization of African Unity (OAU), (i)
Organization of American States, (i)
Ørsted-Jensen, Robert, (i)
Otte, Thomas, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Otterbein, Keith, (i)
Ottoman Empire: Bosnia-Herzegovina and, (i); Hungary’s alliance with, (i); rise to power of, (i);
Russia and, (i); Shi’a Muslims in, (i); Treaty of Berlin (1885), (i)
Otto the Great, (i)
overfiring, (i), (ii)
overoptimism, (i), (ii), (iii)
Owen, John, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Owen, Wilfred, (i)

Palestinians, (i)
Palmer, David, (i), (ii), (iii)
Pan-American Union, (i)
Pape, Robert, (i)
Paquisha War (1981), (i)
Paraguay: Chaco War (1932–1935), (i), (ii); Platine War (1851–1852), (i); War of the Triple Alliance
(1864–1870), (i)
Pareto, Vilfredo, (i)
Paris Agreement (2015), (i)
Parker, Harold, (i)
Parsons, William Sterling, (i)
path dependence, (i), (ii), (iii)
patterns of war, (i); anarchy and hegemony, (i); ideological-emotional power, (i); motives for war, (i);
nature of rulers, (i); political power and, (i); rationality, (i); symmetric vs. asymmetric warfare, (i);
types of offensive war, (i)
Patton, George, (i)
Paulus, Friedrich, (i)
Pax Romana, (i)
Peace of Westphalia (1648), (i), (ii)
Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), (i)
Pearl Harbor attack (1941), (i), (ii), (iii)
Pedro II (Brazilian emperor), (i), (ii)
Peloponnesian War, (i)
Peng Dehaui, (i), (ii), (iii)
People’s Liberation Army (PLA, China): Korean War and, (i), (ii); Vietnam War and, (i), (ii)
People’s Liberation Front (PLF, Vietnam), (i), (ii)
Perdue, Peter, (i), (ii)
Peru: border disputes, (i); Cenepa War (1995), (i); Ecuador–Peru Wars (1830s to 1990s), (i); Leticia
War (1932–1933), (i); Paquisha War (1981), (i); Rio Protocol (1941) and, (i); Santiago Declaration
(1952), (i); War of Confederation (1836–1839), (i), (ii); War of the Pacific (1879–1883), (i);
Zarumilla War (1941), (i)
Pétain, Philippe, (i)
Philip the Good (duke of Burgundy), (i)
Philip V (Macedon), (i), (ii)
Philip VI (France), (i)
Philippines: Imperial China’s tributary diplomacy and, (i); Japanese militarism and, (i), (ii)
Phoenicians, (i), (ii)
Pilkington, Nathan, (i), (ii), (iii)
Pines, Yuri, (i)
Pinker, Steven, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)t, (v), (vi), (vii)
Pizarro, Francisco, (i)
Platine War (1851–1852), (i)
Plato, (i)
Plutarch, (i)
Podany, Amanda, (i)
Poland: in NATO, (i); Soviet invasion of, (i)
police homicides, (i)
political correctness, (i)
political power: causes of war, (i); defined, (i); patterns of war and, (i). See also geopolitics
Polybius, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Pompeo, Mike, (i)
Pompey, (i)
Portales, Diego, (i)
Portuguese imperialism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Powell, Colin, (i)
power (generally): collective vs. distributive, (i); economic, (i); ideological, (i); military, (i), (ii); over
others vs. through others, (i); political, (i)
power transition theory, (i)
praetorian guards, (i)
prisoners of war (POWs): Allied soldiers’ experiences in World War II and, (i); Korean War, (i), (ii),
(iii); World War I, (i)
Protestants, (i); Peace of Westphalia (1648), (i); Reformation, (i)
Prussia: Austro-Prussian War (1866), (i); expansion of, (i), (ii); Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), (i);
imperialism and, (i); militarism of, (i); Schleswig Wars (1848–1851 & 1864), (i)
Ptolemaic kingdom, (i), (ii)
PTSD. See posttraumatic stress disorder
Punic Wars (Roman Republic), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Putin, Vladimir, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Pyrrhus of Epirus, (i), (ii)
Qatar and Syrian civil war, (i)
Qianlong (Chinese emperor), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Qin dynasty, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Qing dynasty (1636–1912 CE), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)

raiding wars: Ancient China, (i); asymmetric warfare and, (i); defined, (i); ecological contexts for war
and, (i); economic motives for, (i), (ii), (iii); Europe, (i), (ii); Imperial China, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv);
Latin America, (i); motives for, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); patterns of war and, (i), (ii); Roman
Republic, (i), (ii), (iii); universality of war and, (i). See also specific wars
Rand Corporation, (i), (ii)
Rangwala, Glen, (i)
Rankin, Jeannette, (i)
rape as warfare, (i), (ii)
rationality: fear and, (i), (ii); Korean War, (i); patterns of war and, (i); value rationality, (i), (ii), (iii),
(iv); Vietnam War, (i); of war, (i); World War I, (i); World War II, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Reagan, Ronald, (i)
Realist theory: anarchy and, (i); Ancient China, (i); causes of war, (i); hegemony in, (i); Imperial
China and, (i), (ii), (iii); Latin America, (i); Punic Wars and, (i); rationality of war, (i); symmetric
warfare and, (i); World War I, (i), (ii)
Reese, Roger, (i)
refugees, (i), (ii)
regime change/reinforcement wars: defined, (i); Europe, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); Imperial China,
(i); imperialism and, (i), (ii); Japan, (i), (ii); Latin America, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); motives for,
(i); Muslim countries, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); Roman Republic, (i), (ii), (iii); U.S. interventions,
(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi). See also specific wars
regional differences in warfare, (i)
Regional Integration Agreements (RIAs), (i)
Reiter, Dan, (i), (ii)
religious warfare: in Europe, (i); European militarism and, (i); ideological power and, (i), (ii); Muslim
sectarian wars, (i)
revisionism. See border wars
Rhee, Syngman, (i), (ii)
Ribbentrop, Joachim von, (i)
Richard the Lionheart, (i)
Richard II (king of England), (i)
Richard III (king of England), (i)
Ridgway, Matthew, (i)
Rio Protocol (1941), (i)
Rio Treaty (1947), (i)
Rogers, Will, (i)
Roman Empire, (i)
Romanovs, (i), (ii), (iii)
Roman Republic, (i); aggression and militarism in, (i); art of war for, (i); citizenship rights in, (i), (ii),
(iii); civil wars, (i); class identities and conflicts in, (i), (ii), (iii); economic motives for war, (i);
explanations for militarism and warfare in, (i), (ii); fetiales system in, (i); Fourth Macedonian War
(150–148 BCE), (i); geopolitical system and militarism in, (i); grandeur and glory as motive for
 war, (i); ideological motives for war, (i); infrastructural power in, (i); legionary economy, (i), (ii);
Punic Wars, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); Second Macedonian War (200–196 BCE), (i); Seleucid War
(192–188 BCE), (i); self-defense and militarism in, (i); Social Wars (91–87 BCE), (i); soldiers’
experiences in, (i); Third Macedonian War (171–168 BCE), (i), (ii)
Roosevelt, Franklin D., (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Roosevelt, Theodore, (i)
Rosas, Juan Manuel de, (i), (ii)
Rosenbluth, Frances, (i)
Rosenstein, Nathan, (i)
Roser, Max, (i)
Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, María, (i), (ii), (iii)
Rottman, Gordon, (i)
Rousseau, Frédéric, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, (i), (ii)
Rush, Robert, (i)
Russia: arms exports by, (i); Bolshevik Revolution in, (i), (ii), (iii); European imperialism and, (i);
global war trends and, (i); Japanese imperialism and, (i), (ii), (iii); military spending in, (i); NATO
expansion and, (i); Ottoman Empire and, (i); Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), (i); Syria and, (i);
Treaty of Berlin (1885), (i); Ukraine invasion (2022), (i), (ii); women as soldiers in, (i); World War
I and, (i), (ii)
Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), (i)
Sadatoshi, Tomioka, (i)
Saddam Hussein, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Saguntines, (i)
Saint-Fuscien, Emmanuel, (i)
Saint-Simon, Henri de, (i)
Salamanca, Daniel, (i)
Sallust, (i), (ii), (iii)
Samnites, (i), (ii)
samurai, (i), (ii)
Sanborn, Joshua, (i)
Sand Creek massacre (1864), (i)
Santiago Declaration (1952), (i)
Sapa Inca, (i), (ii)
Sargon of Akkad, (i)
Sarkees, Meredith, (i)
Saudi Arabia: Islamic sectarian conflict in, (i); Sunni Muslims in, (i); Syrian civil war and, (i), (ii);
U.S. alliance with, (i); Yemen and, (i)
Scheidel, Walter, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Scheina, Robert, (i)
Scheler, Max, (i)
Schleswig Wars (1848–1851 & 1864), (i)
Schumpeter, Joseph, (i)
Scotland, medieval warfare in, (i)
Scott, James, (i)
SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), (i)
Second Macedonian War (200–196 BCE), (i)
Seleucids, (i), (ii)
Seleucid War (192–188 BCE), (i)
self-defense wars. See defensive wars
Sengoku (Warring States) Period (Japan 1467–1590), (i)
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, (i), (ii)
Serbia: NATO intervention in, (i); World War I and, (i), (ii)
Seville Statement on Violence (1986), (i)
Shalit, Ben, (i)
Shang Yang, (i), (ii)
sharia law, (i), (ii)
Shaw, Martin, (i)
Sheehan-Miles, Charles, (i)
Sheldon, Jack, (i), (ii)
shell-shock, (i), (ii)
Shenzong (Chinese emperor), (i)
Sherman, William Tecumseh, (i), (ii), (iii)
Sherwood, John Darrell, (i)
Shi Huang, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Shi’a Muslims: in Azerbaijan, (i); in Bahrain, (i), (ii); in Iran, (i), (ii); Iran–Iraq War and, (i); in Iraq,
(i); ISIS and, (i); Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, (i); in Ottoman Empire, (i); sectarian wars, (i); in
Syria, (i); U.S. interventions and, (i)
Shils, Edward, (i)
Shining Path, (i)
Shunroku, Hata, (i)
Simmel, Georg, (i)
Simms, Brendan, (i)
Simon, Max, (i)
Singer, David, (i)
Sino-Russian Border War (1652–1689), (i)
Six-Day War (1967), (i)
Skaff, Jonathan, (i)
skulkers, (i)
slavery: American Civil War and, (i); European imperialism and, (i); Roman Republic and, (i), (ii)
Slim, William, (i)
Small, Melvin, (i)
smallpox epidemic, (i)
Smith, Adam, (i)
Smith, Leonard, (i), (ii)
Soccer War (1969), (i), (ii)
Söderberg, Patrik, (i)
Solano López, Francisco, (i), (ii), (iii)
soldiers’ experiences, (i); Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, (i); American Civil War, (i); buddy theory, (i),
(ii), (iii), (iv); desertion, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); drilling and disciplining, (i), (ii), (iii); early modern
period in Europe, (i); fighter pilots, (i); Korean War, (i); long-term trends in, (i); military justice
and, (i); nonfiring, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); peer-group coercion, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); recruitment,
(i); Roman Republic, (i); skulkers, (i); Vietnam War, (i); World War I, (i); World War II, (i)
Somalia: al-Shabaab in, (i); civilian vs. military fatalities in, (i), (ii)t; intervention in, (i); NATO
intervention in, (i)
Sombart, Werner, (i), (ii); Händler und Helden, (i)
Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Soule, Silas, (i)
South Africa, homicide rates in, (i)
South America. See Latin America
South American Free Trade Area, (i)
South China Sea, (i)
Southeast Asia: Japanese militarism and, (i); tributary diplomacy by China, (i). See also specific
countries
South Korea and Korean War, (i)
South Sudan, refugees from, (i)
Soviet Union: Cold War interventions in Muslim countries, (i); Commission on the History of the
Great Patriotic War, (i); global war trends since 1945 and, (i); Nagorno-Karabagh conflict and, (i);
Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany, (i); soldiers’ experiences in World War II, (i); women as
soldiers in World War II, (i); World War II and, (i)
Spain: archaeological evidence of warfare in, (i); Aztecs and, (i); civil wars and revolutions in, (i), (ii);
in Holy Roman Empire, (i); imperialism and, (i), (ii), (iii); Inca and, (i); Latin American
imperialism by, (i), (ii); medieval warfare in, (i); women soldiers in, (i)
Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), (i)
Spanish flu epidemic (1918), (i)
Sparks, Blair, (i)
Speckhard, Anne, (i)
Speer, Albert, (i)
Spencer, Herbert, (i)
Spring and Autumn Period (Ancient China 771–476 BCE), (i)
Stalin, Joseph, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Stam, Allan, (i), (ii)
Steckel, Francis, (i)
Stephen of Blois, (i)
Steplyk, Jonathan, (i)
Stimson, Henry, (i)
Stimson Doctrine (U.S.), (i)
Stouffer, Samuel, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Strachan, Hew, (i)
Sudan: archaeological evidence of warfare in, (i); civilian vs. military fatalities in, (i), (ii)t; Yemen
and, (i)
Suetonius, (i)
Sui dynasty, (i), (ii), (iii)
Suleimani, Qassim, (i)
Sulla, (i)
Sumatra, Japanese militarism and, (i)
Sumner, William, (i)
Sun Bin, (i), (ii); The Art of Warfare, (i)
Sun Tzu, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); The Art of War, (i), (ii), (iii)
Sunni Muslims: in Bahrain, (i); Iran–Iraq War and, (i); in Iraq, (i); ISIS and, (i), (ii); in Saudi Arabia,
(i); sectarian wars, (i); U.S. interventions and, (i)
Sweden: Protestants in, (i); wars of, (i)
Syria: Arab Spring protests in, (i); Hezbollah in, (i); internationalization of civil war in, (i); ISIS in,
(i); refugees from, (i); Shi’a Muslims in, (i)
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), (i)
Tacitus, (i), (ii), (iii)
Taiwan: Chinese revisionism and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Imperial China’s tributary diplomacy and, (i);
Japanese imperialism and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Taizong (Chinese emperor), (i), (ii)
Taizu (Chinese emperor), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Tajikistan, border disputes in, (i)
Takahashi, Korekiyo, (i)
Talbot, John, Earl of Shrewsbury, (i)
Taliban, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Tang dynasty, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Tanzania, colonial conflicts in, (i)
Tarentines, (i)
taxes: Ancient China, (i); European imperialism and, (i), (ii); Imperial China, (i); Japan, (i), (ii);
Roman Republic, (i), (ii)
Taylor, Maxwell, (i)
Taylor, Michael, (i), (ii)
Tenet, George, (i)
Terrenato, Nicola, (i), (ii)
terrorism: jihadi movements and, (i), (ii); September 11, 2001 attacks, (i), (ii). See also specific
terrorist groups and organizations
Thatcher, Margaret, (i), (ii), (iii)
Third Macedonian War (171–168 BCE), (i)
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), (i), (ii), (iii)
Thome, Helmut, (i)
Thucydides, (i), (ii)
Thutmose III, (i)
Tibet: Chinese revisionism and, (i), (ii); Imperial China and, (i), (ii)
Tiglath-pileser III (Assyrian king), (i)
Tilly, Charles, (i), (ii)
Timur the Great, (i)
TINs (transnational ideological networks), (i), (ii)
Tocqueville, Alexis de, (i)
Tojo, Hideki, (i), (ii)
Tokugawa Ieyasu, (i), (ii), (iii)
Tokugawa Peace (Japan, 1603–1868), (i), (ii)
Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace, (i)
Tomedi, Rudy, (i)
Townsend, Camilla, (i)
transnational ideological networks (TINs), (i), (ii)
transnational jihadi wars, (i)
Trans-Pacific Partnership, (i)
Treaty of Berlin (1885), (i)
Treaty of Ebro (226 BCE), (i)
Treaty of Mapasingue (1860), (i)
Treitschke, Heinrich von, (i)
tributary diplomacy: Aztecs, (i); Carthaginians, (i); by China in East and Southeast Asia, (i); economic
power and, (i)
Truman, Harry, (i), (ii), (iii)
Trump, Donald: Afghanistan War and, (i); China and, (i); draft avoidance by, (i); drone warfare
expanded by, (i); Iran and, (i); military spending and, (i); pardoning of military officers by, (i);
Saudi Arabia and, (i); Trans-Pacific Partnership and, (i)
Tumu Fortress, Battle of (1449), (i)
Túpac Inca Yupanqui, (i), (ii)
Turchin, Peter, (i)
Turkey, Nagorno-Karabagh conflict and, (i)
tyranny of history, (i), (ii)
Ukraine: refugees from, (i); Russian invasion (2022), (i), (ii), (iii)
United Kingdom. See Britain
United Nations: aggressive war and, (i); High Commissioner for Refugees, (i), (ii); Korean War and,
(i), (ii); liberalism and, (i), (ii); peacekeeping forces, (i), (ii); Yemen and, (i)
United States: Afghanistan War, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); arms exports by, (i); blind spots in geopolitical
choices, (i); Chaco War (1932–1935) and, (i); Civil War, soldiers’ experiences in, (i), (ii); Cold War
interventions in Muslim countries, (i); consequences of interventions by, (i); fighter pilots in
Korean War, (i); fighter pilots in World War II, (i); First Gulf War (1990–1991), (i); global war
trends and, (i), (ii); homicide rates in, (i); interventions in Muslim countries, (i); Iraq War, (i), (ii),
(iii), (iv); ISIS and, (i); Israel’s alliance with, (i), (ii); Japanese imperialism and, (i); Japanese
militarism and, (i), (ii); Korean War, (i); in Latin America, (i); Latin American War of
Confederation (1836–1839) and, (i); military spending in, (i); Mutual Security Programs, (i);
Nagorno-Karabagh conflict and, (i); Native American casualties and fatalities from colonial
conflicts, (i)t, (ii), (iii); Oriental Exclusion Act (1924), (i); Philippines and, (i); police homicides in,
(i); Rio Protocol (1941) and, (i); soldiers’ experiences in World War II, (i); Syria and, (i), (ii);
Treaty of Berlin (1885), (i); Vietnam War, (i); Washington Naval Treaties (1922), (i); World War I
and, (i); World War II and, (i), (ii)
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), (i)
Uruguay: Platine War (1851–1852), (i); War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), (i)
Uyghurs, (i), (ii), (iii)
value rationality, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Van Evera, Stephen, (i), (ii), (iii)
Van Kirk, Ted, (i)
Vattel, Emeric de, (i)
Veblen, Thorstein, (i)
Vegetius, (i)
Venezuela: border disputes, (i); refugees from, (i); War of the Cauca (1863) and, (i)
Vietnam: Imperial China’s tributary diplomacy and, (i), (ii), (iii); Japanese militarism and, (i); women
as soldiers in, (i); Yuan dynasty clashes with, (i)
Vietnam War: casualties and fatalities in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); desertion rates, (i); rationality of, (i)
Visigoths, (i), (ii), (iii)

Wagner Group, (i)

Wahhābīs, (i), (ii), (iii)
Wales, medieval warfare in, (i)
Waltz, Kenneth, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Wang, Yuan-kang, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Wang, Zhenping, (i)
war: civilian vs. military fatalities, (i), (ii)t; defined, (i); in earliest human societies, (i); ferocious vs.
callous killing, (i); gender differences, (i); global trends since 1945, (i); just vs. unjust, (i);
modernization of, (i); rationality of, (i); regional differences, (i); sexual motives, (i); technological
changes in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); theories on causes of, (i); universality of, (i). See also aggressive
wars; causes of war; decline of war; defensive wars; patterns of war; specific countries and wars
Ward, Lester, (i)
Warner, Lloyd, (i)
War of Confederation (1836–1839), (i), (ii)
War of the Cauca (1863), (i)
War of the Pacific (1879–1883), (i)
War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), (i)
Warring States Period (Ancient China 475–221 BCE), (i), (ii)
Warring States (Sengoku) Period (Japan 1467–1590), (i)
Warsaw Pact, (i)
Washington Naval Treaties (1922), (i)
Watson, Alexander, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Watson, Brent, (i)
Watson Institute, (i), (ii)
Weatherford, Jack, (i)
Weber, Max, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Weitz, Mark, (i)
Wellington, Duke of, (i), (ii)
Wells, Mark, (i)
Wendt, Alexander, (i), (ii), (iii)
Wengrow, David, (i)
Wesseling, Henk, (i), (ii)
West, Rebecca, (i)
West Bank, (i)
Westmoreland, William, (i)
Westover, John, (i)
Westphalian system, (i), (ii), (iii)
Whigham, Thomas, (i), (ii)
White, Ralph, (i), (ii)
Whittaker, C. R., (i), (ii)
Wilson, Lydia, (i)
Wilson, Woodrow, (i)
Wolf, Nikolaus, (i)
women as soldiers, (i), (ii)
World Islamic Front, (i)
World War I: casualties and fatalities, (i), (ii), (iii)t; Europe, (i); ideological power in, (i); Japan and,
(i); rationality of, (i); soldiers’ experiences in, (i); women as soldiers in, (i). See also specific
countries
World War II: Allied soldiers’ experiences in, (i); casualties and fatalities, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)t, (v);
desertion rates in, (i); Europe, (i); ferocious vs. callous killing in, (i), (ii); fighter pilots in, (i);
rationality of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Red Army experiences in, (i); soldiers’ experiences in, (i);
Wehrmacht soldiers’ experiences, (i); women as soldiers in, (i). See also specific countries
Worthy, Edmund, (i)
Wright, Quincy, (i)
Wu Gong, (i)
Wuzi: Art of War, (i)
Xi Jinping, (i), (ii)
Xi Xia, (i), (ii), (iii)
Xiang Gong, (i)
Xuande (Chinese emperor), (i), (ii), (iii)
Xunzi, (i)

Yamamoto, Isoroku, (i), (ii), (iii)

Yang Dezhi, (i)
Yazbek, Samar, (i)
Yazdani, Kaveh, (i)
Yellow Turban (religious movement), (i)
Yemen: Islamic sectarian conflict in, (i), (ii); NATO intervention in, (i)
Yongle (Chinese emperor), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Yongzheng (Chinese emperor), (i)
Young, Louise, (i)
Yu, Ying-shih, (i)
Yuan dynasty (1271–1368 CE), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Yungay, Battle of (1839), (i)
Zarumilla War (1941), (i)
Zelensky, Volodymyr, (i)
Zhang, Feng, (i), (ii)
Zhao, Dingxin, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Zhao dynasty, (i), (ii)
Zheng He, (i)
Zhentong (Chinese emperor), (i), (ii)
Zhenzong (Chinese emperor), (i)
Zhou monarchy, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Ziemann, Benjamin, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Zunghars, (i), (ii), (iii)