War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  The whole process depends on Leviathan’s being strong enough not only to punish its own subjects but also to defend them, because, of course, the game of death that Leviathan is playing with its subjects is nestled into other games that Leviathan is playing with its neighbors. A Leviathan that wins productive wars, picking up +10 points each time, will eventually dominate its neighborhood, swallowing up its former rivals. It will turn into something like the Roman Empire, within which trade, empathy, and so on flourish on a much larger scale. Eventually, it may even become a globocop.

  Reality, of course, is messier than simplifying games such as the Pacifist’s Dilemma. In the late nineteenth century, as we saw in Chapter 5, the globocop ran into unanticipated feedback loops as its success in running an international system made everyone richer, which stimulated new industrial revolutions, which then created rivals that undercut the globocop’s ability to punish rule breakers. By 1914, several players had concluded that the payoffs from using force had risen back above the payoffs from peaceful cooperation—with catastrophic results. And then things got worse: in the 1930s, the Pacifist’s Dilemma abruptly morphed into a game of hawk-and-dove. Most European governments, traumatized by the bloodletting of World War I, consistently pursued peace at any price, which left the field free for Hitler to turn hawkish. He almost won the game in 1940, again in 1941, and a third time in 1942, before the British, Soviets, and Americans finally figured out how to play. Once that happened, of course, the game’s unforgiving logic could only lead one way, and by 1945 the Allies had beaten Hitler at his own violent game. Most of Europe and East Asia were in ruins, about a hundred million people were dead, and the United States had the bomb.

  Payoffs now changed out of all recognition, because nuclear weapons began driving the penalty for using force up toward infinity. According to the cold rules of the game, even without a single globocop to impose penalties, force could only have positive payoffs if it was applied so timidly—in insurrections, coups, and limited wars—that it did not provoke a violent countermove. If either superpower did anything that challenged the other’s survival, both would lose the game. Logic therefore demanded that force become obsolete, and, following the logic, the Soviets and Americans managed for decade after decade not to go to war. But the problem, as Ronald Reagan memorably put it, was that having two nuclear-armed hemispherical cops instead of one globocop was “like having two westerners standing in a saloon aiming their guns at each other’s heads—permanently.” Everything would be fine, so long as neither gunslinger ever had a bad day.

  Getting Past Petrov

  Game theory got its big break in the incongruously beautiful setting of Santa Monica, California. Realizing in the early 1950s that the game of death had taken an alarming turn, the American government outsourced to the RAND Corporation the job of figuring out—objectively and scientifically—how to avoid blowing up the world. RAND’s solution was to lure away from Ivy League universities one brilliant mathematician after another and set them to calculating the payoffs from every conceivable move in the game.

  These chalkboard warriors were a quirky crowd of geniuses. The best known today is John Nash, the hero, if that is the right word, of the bestselling book and film A Beautiful Mind. Nash had proved that payoffs could be set up so that bitter rivals would work their way toward a mutually satisfactory balance (what mathematicians call a Nash equilibrium) without resorting to force. This suggested that nuclear deterrence really should work, so long as the people playing the game remained steely-eyed and rational. Nash’s own judgment, however, did not inspire confidence. He began hearing voices, had his security clearance revoked after he was arrested for indecent exposure in a men’s room, and then turned into a schizophrenic recluse.

  Fortunately, the men who made the decisions about nuclear war and peace were less brilliant but more grounded than Nash. But in the absence of a globocop, and with unknown unknowns thicker on the ground than ever before, even someone as stolid as Dwight Eisenhower soon found himself losing sleep, drinking milk for his ulcers, and suffering heart troubles that put him in the hospital. The tiniest miscalculation or accident could mean the end. In theory—in games played on a blackboard over and over again—deterrence made perfect sense, but in reality the fate of the world hung on the snap judgments of men like Petrov. Deterrence lacked stability, and without that, there can of course be no evolutionarily stable strategy.

  Throughout history, the only stable solution to the game of death has always been for someone to win it, meaning that the only way to get past moments like Petrov’s was for one hemispherical cop to defeat the other. The Cold War’s arms race, proxy wars, spies, and coups were all attempts to find a game changer, a gradual or sudden shift in the balance of power that would bring the other side to its knees (or prevent the other side from bringing us to our knees). In the early 1980s, many Soviet strategists began worrying that precision weapons would undo them (the expression “revolution in military affairs” was in fact coined by Soviet analysts to describe this new technology). They were right, although not in the way they expected.

  The American computerization of war changed the military balance in Europe enough for Moscow to start exploring ways to fight without going nuclear, but hindsight has revealed that what mattered most about Star Wars, Assault Breaker, and the other newfangled weapons was that countering them would be really, really complicated and costly. The Soviet economy could churn out tanks, Kalashnikovs, nuclear warheads, and ICBMs but could not rise to—or pay for—the computers and smart munitions that promised to dominate 1990s battlefields.

  This leap in the costs of war came at the worst possible time for Moscow. Much of the Soviets’ success in the 1970s had been paid for by oil exports, driven to sky-high prices by war and revolution in the Middle East, but between 1980 and 1986 the cost of a barrel of oil fell by almost 80 percent, wiping out much of Moscow’s disposable income. Adding to the Kremlin’s woes, while the productivity of American workers surged by 27 percent between 1975 and 1985 and that of western Europeans by 23 percent, Soviet citizens’ output grew just 9 percent, and their eastern European subjects only performed 1 percent better. Communist farms were so inefficient that productivity barely rose at all. Consequently, grain imports (especially from the United States and Canada) more than doubled, paid for largely by huge loans from banks in the American alliance. One debt crisis followed another.

  “Force,” Clausewitz famously insisted, is “the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object.” Therefore, Clausewitz concluded, we should not hesitate to kill if that seems like the best way to break the enemy’s will to resist, but when killing is not the best way, we should not waste our time doing it. The brilliance of the grand strategy of containment that the United States unveiled in the late 1940s was that it recognized this. Most of the time, American policy makers rejected the dovish claim that two hemispherical cops could coexist indefinitely, and most of the time they also rejected the hawkish counterclaim that victory would come if the United States just waged its proxy wars more aggressively. Instead, they followed a middle course that played to American strengths.

  The United States had inherited Britain’s mantle as the great outer-rim power and with it Britain’s role as a liberal Leviathan, promoting free markets, elections, and speech. The way to leverage liberal strength, American strategists realized, was to wage liberal war, using freedom as a weapon to undermine the Soviets’ will to resist. The United States could only wage this kind of war if it had an invisible fist to back up the invisible hand, and so, divisive and distasteful as this was, Washington had to keep building hydrogen bombs, fighting proxy wars, and cozying up to dictators. But through it all, American leaders had to remember that bombs, battles, and brutality would not by themselves deliver victory—that could only be delivered by the Soviet Empire’s own subjects as they waited in line at the store, cursed at cars that would not start, and bought Bruce Springsteen LPs on the black market. Little b
y little, the invisible hand would choke the will out of communism.

  The plan was hardly a secret. As early as 1951, the American sociologist David Riesman had both mocked and celebrated it in a short story called “The Nylon War.” In it, the Pentagon top brass sells liberal war to the White House by explaining that “if allowed to sample the riches of America, the Russian people would not long tolerate masters who gave them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners.” The president agrees, the air force rains stockings and cigarettes from the Russian skies, and communism collapses.

  The reality was, of course, not so simple, but little by little, Stalin and his successors came to understand the importance of stockings. A year after Riesman’s story came out, the Soviet premier told China’s foreign minister (“jokingly,” the transcript says) that “the main armament of the Americans … is nylons, cigarettes, and other goods for sale … No, the Americans don’t know how to wage war.” Before the decade was out, however, the Soviets had learned that the only way to win the Nylon War was for their own ideologues to push back, denying the truth of American claims and highlighting capitalism’s unfairness. Thanks to the fact that nuclear weapons meant that a shooting war would effectively be suicide, the Soviets never seriously considered the path chosen by hundreds of rulers in earlier times, who had responded to economic decline by attacking their more prosperous neighbors and taking their rich provinces or trade routes. Instead, Soviet leaders let the liberal war of attrition grind on until it broke their empire apart.

  The Politburo let this happen not because the apparatchiks had all been listening to “War” but because they knew force could not solve their problem. Invading West Germany or South Korea would not make the Soviet Empire as rich and productive as the American; it would just bring on Armageddon. For thirty years, the Soviets managed to paper over most of the cracks, convincing many of their subjects (and even some outsiders) that the empire was flourishing, but by the 1980s this was no longer possible.

  By then, egg rationing and the other indignities of 1940s austerity were just distant memories for most western Europeans, but in eastern Europe it was all too easy to feel that they were on their way back. “It was a struggle to get basic things like washing powder,” a Polish nurse remembered. “I had to wash my hair with egg yolks because there was no shampoo … If we didn’t have information about life elsewhere, that would have been different. But we were conscious of the way [other] people lived.” And if anyone still had doubts that the Soviet bloc was losing the economic war, the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor swept them away in 1986, flooding Ukraine with radiation and exposing the incompetence and dishonesty of the Soviet regime in a way that could not be covered up.

  “We can’t go on like this,” Mikhail Gorbachev had confessed to his wife in 1985, just hours before he was appointed Soviet premier. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Gorbachev, recognizing that the Soviet Empire’s will to resist was ebbing away, staked everything on one big bet. He would restart economic growth by promoting restructuring (perestroika) and transparency (glasnost) while—at all costs—avoiding recourse to violence, which could only end badly.

  Many Americans assumed that this must be another clever move in the game of death (so clever, in fact, that they could not quite figure out what the Soviets might be trying to do). “I was suspicious of Gorbachev’s motives,” National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft later confessed. “My fear,” he explained, “was that Gorbachev could talk us into disarming without the Soviet Union having to do anything fundamental to its own military structure and that, in a decade or so, we could face a more serious military threat than ever before.”

  There were times when it looked as if Scowcroft might be right. In October 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev sat across a table in Reykjavík and actually started talking about banning all nuclear weapons. This threw American defense experts into a panic. The Soviets might be terrified of NATO’s new, high-tech arsenal, but Americans—who knew that few of these wonder weapons were yet in service—were equally terrified that without nuclear deterrence their conventional forces in Europe would be hard-pressed to hold off the much larger Soviet armies. Gorbachev, however, was not trying to trick anyone, and it slowly became clear that he really was serious about playing the game without using force. No one knew what to make of it.

  “Did we see what was coming when we took office [in January 1989]?” George Bush the Elder later asked, admitting, “No, we did not.” And if Bush had somehow seen how 1989 would turn out, and had claimed in his inauguration address that before his term ended he would oversee the collapse of the Soviet Empire and Russia’s retreat to the borders Germany had imposed on it in 1918, everyone would have thought that this archrealist, former CIA director had gone completely mad. For more than forty years, the United States had been scheming, plotting, and killing, all to break the Soviets’ will, but when the endgame finally arrived, it took everyone by surprise.

  A few months after Bush’s inauguration, an official committee in Hungary concluded that the country’s 1956 rebellion against the Soviets had been a “popular uprising against an oligarchic system of power which had humiliated the nation.” In Stalin’s day, such a report would have been equivalent to a collective suicide note. Even under Khrushchev or Brezhnev, the consequences could have been serious. But not only did Gorbachev not have anyone shot; he tacitly signaled agreement.

  Encouraged, in June 1989 the Hungarians gave a retrospective public funeral to a former premier whom the Soviets had shot. Two hundred thousand mourners turned out, but still Moscow made no move. Without consulting anyone, the Hungarian prime minister announced that budgetary problems prevented him from renewing the barbed wire along the border with Austria, and since the old wire violated health and safety rules, it would have to be rolled up. A hole, hundreds of miles wide, was about to appear in the Iron Curtain. In a panic, East German communists asked the Kremlin to intervene, only to be told, “We can’t do anything.”

  Any amount of concession, Gorbachev reasoned, was better than risking the collapse of the whole Soviet system by using force. Not everyone agreed, and in December, Romania’s thuggish dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, had his troops shoot demonstrators. The country rose against him, the Soviets did nothing, and on Christmas Day he and his wife were themselves shot.

  East German communists, scrambling and bungling almost as badly, lurched in the other direction and threw open the gates of the Berlin Wall. East Germans rushed west; West Germans strolled east; all kinds of people danced on top of the wall or took hammers to it; and nothing happened. “How could you shoot at Germans who walk across the border to meet other Germans on the other side?” Gorbachev asked the next day. “The policy had to change.”

  The events in Romania suggested that Gorbachev was right, but by the summer of 1989 the Soviets probably had no winning moves left. Changing one policy just led to irresistible pressure on the next policy. Less than three months after the Berlin Wall came down, East Germany’s prime minister told Gorbachev that the two Germanys wanted to merge into one. This could only happen, Gorbachev replied, if the unified Germany were demilitarized and neutral. A proposal was put to the Americans, but Bush refused to withdraw the quarter of a million American personnel in West Germany. Gorbachev pulled his 300,000 troops out of East Germany anyway, and the new, reunited Germany joined NATO.

  With the benefit of hindsight, it is perhaps not surprising that once the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, and Bulgarians had walked away from the Soviet Empire, the Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Chechens, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Mongolians would follow. What does still seem remarkable, though, is that the Russians themselves decided that they wanted nothing more to do with their own empire and announced their withdrawal from the Soviet system. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev signed a decree formally dissolving the Soviet Union.

  By playing the g
ame without violence, Gorbachev got a bad payoff, but the only obvious alternative—using force to hold the eastern Europeans down and to resist any American effort to roll back the empire—would have paid off much, much worse. Russia had been defeated, getting shoved unceremoniously out of the inner rim and even out of much of the heartland, but at least this had happened with barely a shot being fired. Five hundred million lives had been on the line during Petrov’s moment of truth in 1983, but when the end of the Cold War finally came, fewer than three hundred people actually died.

  The United States had won the greatest and most unexpected triumph in the history of productive war (Figure 6.10). The world had a new glo-bocop.

  Figure 6.10. A lot to smile about: Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan bring down the curtain on the Cold War, and a billion people live to fight another day.

  Footnotes

  1I say “according to the film” because, Richard Wrangham tells me, while Freddy, Scar, and their different behavior patterns are all real enough, the two chimps actually live on opposite sides of Africa—Freddy in the Ivory Coast, and Scar in Uganda. The filmmakers took a little artistic license and stitched two separate tales together. The moral of the story, though, seems to survive this flexible approach to reality.

  2A hundred points strikes me as overoptimistic, given what we know about the scale of commerce in most periods of history, but since the numbers in these games are all made up, it hardly seems worth quibbling.