Warlords, Inc.

by Noah Raford

  Why It Just Might Work

  This brings us back to the question of whether there is any realistic prospect of overcoming the political obstacles that are so formidable as to render the programs of both radical and mainstream environmentalists unrealistic. Why should our suggested political project fare any better? Why should mixing environmentalism and producer republicanism produce a viable, powerful hybrid, much less a magic bullet? Why should a new Green Social Democracy, struggling to establish itself under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, do better in remaking failing systems than warlord entrepreneurs do in exploiting system breakdown? Is it at all realistic to think we might create a path whereby we eventually find ourselves with modest Portlands outnumbering Puntlands and Pyongyangs?

  Hope arises from two fundamental and connected facts. First, none of the political economies and political cultures of the modern world is monolithic or completely controlled by those wedded to the status quo. They are shot through with tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions, even societies (such as the United States) where dominant groups have been quite successful in legitimating themselves and institutionalizing their hegemony. Middle classes and “publics” are highly variegated, both within and across societies, and full of ambivalence. This represents an opening for those who would save the system from itself. As system failures and breakdowns accumulate in the climate-changed and crisis-ridden world that is coming, along with ever more credible warnings of worse to come, the existing high-modernist narrative will become less and less convincing and its hegemony harder and harder to sustain. More people will be increasingly open to a new “education.” Second, some of the necessary political culture is still there, deep in the American grain, substantially co-opted, but never eliminated by the hegemonic, hyper-materialistic version of the “American way of life.” Elements of producerist republican political culture are, in fact, being asserted in current public debate, including in right-wing constituencies, whose knee-jerk opposition to environmentalism may be weakened by a green producerist republicanism that invokes new versions of familiar old values.63

  Again, we note that the result must include lawful coercion—including the use of paramilitary force, if necessary—against ostrich-like status-quo dead-enders, their quasi-fascist successors, and self-serving warlords of all kinds. But it should also be noted that the producerist republican tradition is full of episodes of armed citizen militias—even rising to the level of armies—defending their way of life and their communities against enemies of various kinds. Historically, this may have been reprehensible as often as it was admirable—and we see quasi-fascistic manifestations of it all over the world today. But we can also find many episodes that contain positive examples and lessons that might be modernized and incorporated in the larger project we are proposing. The great French social democratic leader and theorist Jean Jaures proposed exactly such a project.64 It is not unreasonable to dream of Portlands—joined in regional Hanseatic-type leagues—successfully defending themselves against warlords and perhaps even against fascist regimes (given that no one is going to be able to afford much in the way of air forces or missiles). (Of course, a lot will depend on whether the world still contains deliverable nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.)

  The most we can do now is prepare a suite of building blocks that might allow such a project to get off the ground once current political economies and governments are in profound, undeniable crisis due to the socioeconomic consequences of climate destabilization. Such preparation must include maximizing the development of clean-energy and decarbonization technologies and the elaboration of disaster mitigation, management, and adaptation programs. But above and beyond such efforts, we require the construction of a politics and a cultural narrative that prioritizes shared public goods and responsible citizenship, creating a higher capacity for authoritative, collective decision making. That new politics and cultural narrative must persuasively explain the need for everyone in the world to give up material affluence as either a practice or an aspiration (constructing what we might think of as an enlightened “lower-middle-class” model of material sufficiency and sharing—drawing on “producer republicanism”—as a universal moral imperative). Turning the social sciences, the professions, public intellectuals, academia, and the modern middle classes in general decisively in this direction—and away from technocratic utopianism—is the most urgent imperative, particularly in the United States. And none of this can be accomplished absent the decisive political defeat of those who are determined to maintain their wealth and privilege no matter the cost.

  We recognize that realization of our hopes on any grand (i.e., sufficient) scale is unlikely, but the foregoing is the best strategy we can think of and, in any case, as Mike Davis says, “either we fight for ‘impossible’ solutions … or become ourselves complicit in a de facto triage of humanity”—which Davis counts (quoting a UN report) as “a moral failure on a scale unparalleled in history.”65 Unlike much radical green thinking, our analysis is not predicated on semireligious or New Age hopes for a spiritual revolution; it is firmly rooted in class and social analysis. Clearly, in order to succeed at any grand scale, a broad, cross-class coalition must be developed, based on the conviction that continuing commitment to high-modernist affluence makes one complicit in a civilizational and human catastrophe of unfathomable proportions. Is it possible for the middle and lower-middle classes in the most advanced societies (and the largest societies, in particular) to become part of the solution instead of part of the problem? The human potential is there, but can it be widely realized within the current conjuncture and available time frame?66 It may well be that we cannot retool (technologically, institutionally, culturally, psychologically) fast enough, given the inertia of the old ways and the power of those who blindly insist on carrying those old ways forward. We cannot know, but what we can say is that it looks like the next couple decades will be our last chance to build the political and human-capital base that might make the conversion possible.67

  11 Bringing the End of War to the Global Badlands

  Hardin Tibbs

  Weapons production is a major global business. The Stockholm Internatinal Peace Research Insititurre estimates that by 2013 the total sales of the world’s largest arms-producing companies had reached about $402 billion a year, a more than 20 percent increase since 2006.1

  The international trade in small arms and light weapons is a booming part of the overall arms business. According to an estimate by the Project on Light Weapons at the American Academy of Sciences, in 2000 the legal trade was running at $7 to $10 billion annually, with perhaps $2 to $3 billion circulating through black-market channels.2 In the 1990s, following the end of the cold war, more than one hundred ethnic and sectarian conflicts broke out, killing over five million people and creating tens of millions of refugees. Most of this devastation was caused not by heavy weapons but by handguns, machine guns, and grenades. These are the weapons of choice in internal conflicts, because they are so readily available, cheap, portable, easy to use, and deadly. And they are being mass-produced in ever-increasing numbers for a global market.2

  Mass production of military equipment actually makes little military sense for nation-states, because overseas arms sales constantly erode national advantage (even if offset by technological back doors) and offer very narrow economic advantage in terms of jobs. But they do, of course, continually throw up new opportunities for private profit. From a commercial perspective, the loss of national advantage through overseas sales, even in peacetime, becomes a justification for new products that offer further advantage, however transient. For example, if the United States loses its original advantage in night-vision technology because of the technology’s widespread availability, commercial producers can persuade the government, say, to subsidize research and development to extend the performance of night-vision equipment in smoke by using new wavelengths.

  This pattern is not new, but the growth drive of busin
ess and sheer scale of production, combined with an active black market, translates into out-of-control global overkill. It pushes national defense budgets deeper into unsustainability, and rather than addressing genuine threats, it is making them worse. Nation-states are being taken for a ride.

  The status of weapons as just another globalized product category effectively means that weapons production is now suffering from strategic reversal. When a strategy is overused, it turns into its own opposite—a paradox that is well known to military theorists. The term is usually applied to the strategy of a combatant, as with the repeated use of maximum surprise by the Israeli army. Over time, Israel’s adversaries came to anticipate surprise as the usual Israeli mode of operation, and the element of surprise became its own opposite.

  We have now reached the point where strategic reversal even applies to war itself: or at least to the industrial-era idea of war—the notion of “total war” first described by the renowned military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Total war turns out to be self-defeating when waged in a world in which postindustrial societies are steadily converging to form a single, global social and economic entity.

  Consider the context in which industrial nation-on-nation war traditionally took place. In the nineteenth century, when Clausewitz was writing, the dominant international actors were clearly identifiable nation-states with small, culturally homogenous populations. Geographic distance was a significant form of deterrence, and advanced military technology was relatively slowly changing, predictably distributed, and affordable. Everyday life for most people in most places was relatively circumscribed, with most social and business transactions simple and occurring locally. National decision making was largely independent of other nations, was not overly complex, and had implications that did not extend very far into the future. Indeed, it was mainly the present rather than the future that was considered, since events unfolded at a manageable pace.

  These conditions still existed as recently as the mid-twentieth century. Today, literally none of them remains true. Nation-states are only one class of powerful global player, and geography is only partly a deterrent factor. Populations are large, highly mobile, and ethnically mixed, and social and business interactions are complex and global. Advanced technology is fast-changing, increasingly powerful, and highly disruptive. Advanced weapons are sold in a global marketplace, yet they may be unaffordable even to the countries that produce them, while the impacts of war on the natural environment threaten everyone. Events unfold rapidly in front of a global media audience, and national decision making is complex, risky, contested, globally interlinked, and to a great extent, focused on an uncertain future.

  The loss of the effectiveness of conventional war has not gone unnoticed. In 1995, Israel’s President Shimon Peres wrote, “True, there are still generals who don the uniforms of the past, but they are hard pressed to find fronts where their armies can be used.”3

  Strategic reversal applies to nuclear weapons too—the ultimate instruments of total war. Toward the end of his life, Robert McNamara, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and architect of the Vietnam War, proposed that nuclear weapons should be abolished, because they threaten “the destruction of nations”—the very thing they are supposed to protect. Similarly, Paul Nitze, who in 1950 drafted National Security Council Memorandum 68, the effective charter of American Cold War policy, said he could “think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons” and recommended that America should “unilaterally get rid” of them. These are explicit recognitions of strategic reversal.4

  Though the strategic drawbacks of nuclear weapons have been appreciated for some time, the implications of the globalization of war have begun to sink in only more recently. Conventional war depends on the nation as the unit of war, but the industrial production of armaments for a global market makes no sense under the logic of nation-on-nation war and, perversely, only feeds asymmetric risk by arming non-state actors.

  Perhaps instinctively appreciating these strategic reversals, hyper-linked affluent societies no longer feel as they once did about war. During most of the modern era, the cost and horror of nation-on-nation war was an acceptable trade-off, because war was acknowledged as a vital means of social protection.

  Today, war is increasingly seen as pathological, even sociopathic. This is partly because it has been getting more lethal for civilians. The ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties has been rising steadily since the eighteenth century. The civilian casualty rate was 40 percent in the First World War, over 60 percent in the Second World War, 85 percent in the Israeli-Lebanon war of 1982, and it has risen to as much as 90 percent for U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, according to a 2009 estimate published by the Brookings Institute. The environmental consequences of war can also be a serious threat to health and well-being long after a conflict ends—and can become a significant liability for aggressors.5 The high rate of birth defects in Iraq attributed to the use of depleted uranium in munitions is a case in point.

  In addition, the cultural acceptance of war is changing. Over the last two decades, the level of psychological literacy in well-educated societies has been rising, and there is now very little tolerance for violence of any kind. At the same time, the horizon of ethical concern has been widening to encompass the planet as a whole, and this is one aspect of a deep shift in cultural values occurring around the world. Digital communications tend to make all actions transparent, and they highlight failures of ethics, principles, and accountability. In this context, any display of warlike behavior comes under increasing scrutiny, and any political leader initiating a war is likely to be seen as, at best, psychologically unsophisticated and, at worst, sociopathic. This helps explain worldwide consternation at the United States’ circumvention of the Geneva Protocol and use of torture during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  The perception of sociopathy is reinforced when continuing military research leads to dehumanizing and ultimately delegitimizing innovations, such as pharmaceuticals to suppress guilt, robotic weapons, and drones operated from half a world away.

  The shift in the cultural status of conventional war from social protection to social pathology is yet another example of strategic reversal. Taken together, all these instances of strategic reversal mean that the logic of full globalization transcends the logic of conventional war. This effect—and the future it points to—could be termed “the end of war.” Yet, so far, it does not mean that security threats have disappeared.

  The active threats now are not between nations in the pre-globalization sense, but in the ungoverned spaces created by incomplete globalization. All nations face this common challenge. Globalization without global governance is spawning a global badlands that is unstable, prone to state failure and economic breakdown, awash with illicit firepower, and a major source of asymmetric attacks.

  Non-state warlords, whether politically motivated actors or the bosses of organized crime, exploit the veins of weakness that snake between and through nations, leveraging social asymmetries and disaffections, even as post–financial crisis spending cuts bite and weaken the influence of the state. The warlords are the unintended beneficiaries of the existing obsolete game of maximum global sales of weapons for total war. They are the ultimate unprincipled players with itchy trigger fingers, and they inherit the capability for overkill. This is Mad Max, armed courtesy of nation-states fatally attracted to nostalgic notions of punching above their weight.

  If clinging to conventional preparations for war actually strengthens these asymmetric threats, what can be done? Global society wishes for an end to violence—something that can hardly be repudiated. Yet if violence still exists and threatens the progress that has already been achieved, it needs to be countered in some way.

  The best way to think about this may be to view things in a much longer time window. We live in an interregnum between the national and the global. The world has already reached a stage of global
development from which, thanks to digital communications and air travel, it seems unlikely to turn back. But this development falls short of its full potential. In an optimistic future, the end point of our current path of global development is global social and political integration, in which there is genuinely global governance able to address potential conflict of all types at all geographic scales.

  The progression toward the end of war is clearly visible in the number of major conflicts. Reports from institutions in the Swiss-based International Relations and Security Network show that the number of major wars (conflicts with at least one thousand combatant deaths per year) fell from twenty-four in 1990 to only four in 2007.6

  Similarly, Harvard professor Steven Pinker has assembled persuasive evidence that violence in human society is actually in decline.7 According to the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Database, worldwide battle deaths in the first decade of the twenty-first century were 0.5 per 100,000 a year, which is lower than the homicide rate in the world’s least violent countries. In absolute numbers, annual battle deaths have fallen by 90 percent, from half a million per year in the late 1940s to thirty thousand per year in the early 2000s. During this period, interstate war shrank to vanishing point, and the greatest source of deaths was civil war. Even civil wars have become less lethal. In 1950 the average armed conflict of any kind killed thirty-three thousand people; by 2007 it killed less than one thousand.

  Over the same period, the number of democratic nations has been growing and, according to Spencer Weart, former director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, well-established liberal democracies have never made war on one another.8 In 1989 the NGO Freedom House reported that only 41 percent of the world’s nations were democracies, while in 2010 they reported a total of 60 percent. The predominance of industrialized democracies also suggests that even looming resource shortages are unlikely to lead to a resurgence of nation-on-nation war. The function of the resources is to allow production for the global market, while war tends to disrupt the global market, making it a counterproductive means of securing access. Technological developments that reduce the need for raw materials represent a more plausible line of response.