There’s a post over at Outside the Beltway I’d like to draw your attention to on the decline of war from the second half of the 20th century to the present. I’d intended to comment on this in a post of my own but his will do. Here’s a snippet:
In a mass media environment where we hear about horrible events from all over the world every day, it’s easy to think the world is falling apart. Or at least getting worse. But, according to Harvard Prof. Steven Pinker, the world has been becoming more peaceful and less violent throughout the history of civilization–and continues to do so&@133;
Take particular note of the graphic attached to the post. I won’t bother reproducing it here but, since much of this post is based directly on it, the post may not make a great deal of sense to you without it (it may not make much sense to you with it but that’s another issue).
First, if you needed a graphic illustration, literally, of the Pax Americana, the American Peace, for good or ill here it is. All of the spending (and borrowing) borne by Americans, all of the loss of life has bought this. We have made war futile. Attention must be paid.
That would probably be denied vehemently by some (which is largely why I’m posting this here rather than at OTB) and I recognize that the Europeans, in particular, reject this explanation. IMO it’s blindingly obvious and has some implications. Our challenge going forward is to preserve the peace while doing it at a cost we can bear. I sincerely believe that in a couple of centuries the history of our times will be seen by how successful we are at that.
Second, look at the jump ups in the light blue bars, the increases in battle deaths in interstate war. With two exceptions those jumps are when America went to war, first during the Second World War in the 40s, Korea in the 50s, Viet Nam in 60s and 70s, and the first Gulf War in the 90s. The jump during the 1980s is almost certainly primarily due to the war between Iran and Iraq while the jump in the late 1990s was presumably due to a number of small, bloody conflicts that took place largely without the notice of the American media because we weren’t involved in the fighting.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are invisible. Painful and costly as they’ve been to us they haven’t provided the number of battlefield deaths that previous wars have done.
Finally, how you choose your terms is important. The graph reflects battlefield deaths in interstate wars, civil wars, and colonial wars. It does not reflect the hundreds of million of deaths due to countries killing their own people. We will never know how many people were killed in Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran, and so on, murdered by their own governments. They don’t show up on the chart.
Were these deaths added to the chart it would strip away any illusion that the present is less violent than the past. But Leviathan’s hand reaches only so far.
“First, if you needed a graphic illustration, literally, of the Pax Americana, the American Peace, for good or ill here it is. All of the spending (and borrowing) borne by Americans, all of the loss of life has bought this. We have made war futile. Attention must be paid.
That would probably be denied vehemently by some (which is largely why I’m posting this here rather than at OTB) and I recognize that the Europeans, in particular, reject this explanation.”
As to attention being paid, why do I find myself thinking of High Noon, and especially its final scene?
Actually, most Europeans I’ve talked to acknowledge the benefits of pax americana. They don’t necessarily like the details of how we do it, and they’re allergic to any suggestion that we had altruistic motives, but they know they live in a safe zone created by the United States. American power made the EU possible.
Personally I think “Pax Americana” is a secondary factor compared to nuclear weapons.
We had nuclear weapons in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. So did the Soviet Union and China. Still lots of war. What we didn’t have was the network of military bases that we have now. And now there’s no Soviet Union.
The only two new countries to have obtained nuclear weapons since 1990 are Pakistan and North Korea. If you’re saying that Pakistan’s obtaining nuclear weapons has resulted in a sudden outbreak of peace,you’ll need to explain it a little more.
The big problem with that chart is that it begins with the 1940’s – probably the single decade with the most wartime casualities in all of human history. It sets the bar for “peace” far too low.
I think it’s possible that the present is less violent than the past, but only somewhat so. The 1940’s were a severe outlier and while important, should not be looked at as a baseline.
I don’t think the 1910’s or 1930’s would have been much better what with WW1 and the Japanese in China and other fun times. And I wonder how good the data is for earlier times.
You beat me to the punch, Michael. In addition to the wars there were the various genocides which aren’t battlefield casualties but certainly count as violence in some form. The Armenian genocide. The genocide of Greeks and Assyrians in Anatolia. Several million people died during the Russian Revolution. The deCossackification of the Don area, the Kulaks, and on and on, mounting into the millions.
Dave,
Yes, and nuclear weapons were a principle reason we never let those relatively little wars become big wars. We purposely limited the scope of conflict in Vietnam and Korea, for example, because of the fear of starting a conflict with the Chinese and Soviets which would lead to war in Europe and nuclear conflict. It’s also ironic that the US was an active belligerent in many of those wars, yet we should credit ourselves with making war futile?
I don’t think that’s the case. We’ve downsized considerably to a few major hubs. Once you account for the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have fewer forces stationed overseas. Just to give some examples, we used to have bases in Iceland, Philippines, Libya, and Iran – bases with permanently stationed units. We have far fewer such bases now and fewer units actually stationed overseas.
Is there any solid evidence that we are the cause? I don’t think so but we are probably a factor. Certainly our cold war alliance structure and the division of the world in two armed camps for most of the last 1/2 of the 20th century tended to reduce a major conflict by raising the stakes – but nuclear weapons were instrumental to that because they made the cost of a WWIII much to high.
I don’t think the 1910’s or 1930’s would have been much better what with WW1 and the Japanese in China and other fun times. And I wonder how good the data is for earlier times.
Sure. But the creator of the graph could have easily included those decades in the chart – we do have figures for those years and earlier, error-ridden as they might be. But choosing the 1940’s as a starting point is a rhetorical decision that should be noted.