War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  7

  THE LAST BEST HOPE OF EARTH: AMERICAN EMPIRE, 1989–?

  Can’t Get There from Here

  Monday, November 26, 2012, was a modern miracle. For an entire day (in fact, from 10:30 on Sunday night until 10:20 on Tuesday morning), not a single person was shot, stabbed, or otherwise done to death anywhere in New York City. There had been no such day since comprehensive data collection began in 1994, at which point the Big Apple averaged fourteen killings each day. In fact, we have to go back more than fifty years, to a time when records were spotty and the city had half a million fewer people, to find another day without violent death. All in all, in 2012 just one New Yorker in twenty thousand died violently—probably an all-time low.

  New York is not, of course, the only place in America. In Chicago, murders rose by one-sixth in 2012, while San Bernardino, California—where half the homeowners owe more than their houses are worth and the city government has gone bankrupt—saw killings jump 50 percent (“Lock your doors and load your guns,” the city attorney advised). And as 2012 drew to a close, a psychopath in Newtown, Connecticut, gunned down twenty schoolchildren, six staff members, his own mother, and then himself. Yet New York was more typical than Newtown: despite the nightmarish exceptions, the nation’s murder rate fell in 2012.

  In fact, New York is fairly typical not just of the United States but also of much of the world. Homicide is in general retreat. Roughly 1 human in every 13,000 was murdered in 2004; by 2010, the figure had fallen to just over 1 in every 14,500. Deaths in war went the same way. Interstate wars—typically the biggest and bloodiest conflicts—almost disappeared. Civil wars in the wake of state failures continue (in 2012, civil war killed about 1 Syrian in every 400), but the statistics suggest that these conflicts are becoming rarer too.

  Averaged across the planet, violence killed about 1 person in every 4,375 in 2012, implying that just 0.7 percent of the people alive today will die violently, as against 1–2 percent of the people who lived in the twentieth century, 2–5 percent in the ancient empires, 5–10 percent in Eurasia in the age of steppe migrations, and a terrifying 10–20 percent in the Stone Age (Figure 7.1). The world is finally getting to Denmark, and Denmark itself—where just 1 person per 111,000 was murdered in 2009, representing a lifetime risk of violent death of just 0.027 percent—gets more Danish every day. Most wonderful of all, for every twenty nuclear warheads in the world in 1986—when Bruce Springsteen rerecorded “War”—there is now only one. Fifty years ago, Strategic Air Command (charged with delivering nuclear weapons) was at the cutting edge of the U.S. Air Force; nowadays, most air force officers consider going into the nuclear branch career suicide.

  Figure 7.1. Almost there: rates of violent death, 10,000 B.C.–A.D. 2013

  Nor is that the end of the good news. As has happened so often across the last few thousand years, falling rates of violence have gone hand in hand with rising prosperity. When the United States took over as undisputed globocop in 1989, the average human being generated just over $5,000 of wealth.1 By 2011, the most recent year with complete data, that had doubled. Asia had benefited most, with coastal China, parts of Southeast Asia, and a few regions in India going through their own industrial revolutions. These fueled the greatest migration of peasants into cities in history, lifting more than two billion people out of absolute poverty (defined by the World Bank as surviving on less than $1 per day). Latin America, Africa, and eastern Europe initially went backward, thanks to debt crises, the AIDS epidemic, and postcommunist collapse, respectively, but all have gained ground since 2000 (Figure 7.2).

  Figure 7.2. The rich get richer, and the poor get richer faster: the speed at which wealth grew in different parts of the world between 1980 and 2010. Globally, the average person was 2.2 times richer in 2010 than in 1980, but the average Asian was three times richer. Africans and Latin Americans got poorer in the 1980s and eastern Europeans in the 1990s, but all have gained on northwestern Europeans and their settler colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) since 2000.

  Figures 7.1 and 7.2 are remarkable graphs, showing that the world is getting not just safer and richer but also—as inequalities between the continents decline—fairer. Even more remarkable, however, is the explanation for all this good news, argued throughout this book: that productive war has made the planet a better place. This is a paradoxical, counterintuitive, and frankly disturbing notion (and, as I mentioned in the introduction, not one that crossed my mind before I started studying the long-term history of war). But the evidence of archaeology, anthropology, history, and evolutionary biology seems conclusive.

  Violence evolved 400 million years ago as a way to win arguments (initially, between proto-sharks that wanted to eat other fish and other fish that did not want to be eaten). It has been a hugely successful adaptation, and almost all animals now use it. Some have even evolved to use violence collectively, and when territory is involved, this violence can be lethal. War has come into the world.

  Human history is one of the shorter twigs on the evolutionary tree, but it is by far the most unusual. We alone can evolve culturally as well as genetically, responding to changes in the payoffs from the game of death by altering our behavior rather than waiting thousands of generations for natural selection to change us. Because of this, since the end of the last ice age we have found ways to use violence that—paradoxically—have lowered the payoffs from using further violence.

  When the world warmed up after 10,000 B.C., animals and plants of all kinds reacted by reproducing. For most species, hard times returned when hungry mouths outran food supplies, but in the lucky latitudes humans solved this problem by evolving culturally and becoming farmers. Farming had its costs, but it also supported many more people, and the resulting crowding created caging. For chimpanzees and probably for ice-age humans too, territoriality meant that the highest payoffs in the game of death came from killing competing groups, but caging meant that incorporating defeated enemies into larger societies paid off better still. “Incorporation” is a bland word for a process that included so much plunder, rape, enslavement, and displacement, but because competition rewarded conquerors who turned themselves into stationary bandits, the long-term result of all this violence was pacification and rising prosperity.

  By 3500 B.C., stationary bandits were evolving into genuine Leviathans, able to raise taxes and punish recalcitrant subjects. The process began in what we now call the Middle East because that was also where farming had begun, and it was therefore the place where caging and competition had gone furthest; but over the next few thousand years most of the lucky latitudes moved the same way.

  Each region in the Old World’s lucky latitudes went through a similar sequence of revolutions in military affairs (although, for reasons we saw in Chapter 3, and above all the absence of horses, the sequence in the New World differed somewhat). First came fortifications, as an answer to endemic raiding; attackers responded by learning how to besiege walls they could not climb. Next, in Eurasia, came bronze, for offensive weapons and defensive armor. Then there was discipline, to persuade wild young men to attack despite the danger and to stand their ground against murderous enemies. By 1900 B.C., herders on Eurasia’s steppes learned to harness horses to chariots, bringing speed and fluidity to battlefields. By 1200 B.C., warriors around the Mediterranean found ways to fight back, but in the first millennium B.C. the initiative shifted toward masses of iron-armed infantry, which conquered huge empires all across Eurasia’s lucky latitudes.

  Each revolution was a race between offense and defense, but, as I have insisted throughout this book, war was never a case of what evolutionists call the Red Queen Effect. The race did not leave everyone in the same place, because it transformed the societies that ran it. Every revolution required Leviathans to get stronger, and stronger Leviathans drove down rates of violent death still further.

  Nor do the facts fit comfortably with the theory of a unique Western way of war, invented by the Greeks
in ancient times and raising European fighters above everyone else in the world. In reality, people all across the lucky latitudes invented a single productive way of war, and what it produced was stronger Leviathans, safety, and wealth. In the first millennium B.C., people got to Chang’an, Pataliputra, and Teotihuacán as well as Rome.

  Another theme in this book, though, is that everything in war is paradoxical. By the end of the first millennium B.C., Eurasia’s productive wars were reaching what Clausewitz called a culminating point, at which behavior that previously produced success started delivering disaster. The ancient empires’ expansion increasingly entangled them with the steppes. Here, highly mobile horsemen could cover vast distances and strike into the empires almost at will, but the great infantry armies that had created the empires struggled to survive at all on the arid grasslands. From China to Europe, cavalry came to dominate the battlefield, and for more than a thousand years—from roughly A.D. 200 through 1400—the lucky latitudes and steppes were locked in a terrible cycle of productive and counterproductive wars. For every productive war that produced bigger, safer, and richer societies, a counterproductive war broke them down again. Leviathans lost their teeth, rates of violent death rose, and prosperity fell.

  One day, not too far away, physical anthropologists will have studied enough skeletons to put precise numbers on these rates, but for the time being, we have to rely on the impressionistic evidence that I reviewed in Chapters 1–3. For prehistory, we can combine analogies from twentieth-century Stone Age societies with the small but growing body of skeletal evidence, but for the ancient empires and the age of steppe migrations we have to rely largely on the societies’ own literary accounts. I argued in Chapters 1 and 2 that these writings make it almost certain that the ancient empires reduced rates of violent death and in Chapter 3 that rates rose again after about A.D. 200, but at the moment there is frankly no way to know precisely how much they rose and fell.

  My own estimates—that the risk of violent death was in the 2–5 percent range in the ancient empires, rising to 5–10 percent in the times of feudal anarchy—will doubtless be proved wrong as evidence accumulates, but that, it seems to me, is how scholarship is supposed to work. One researcher makes conjectures; another comes along and refutes them, putting better conjectures in their place. But if nothing else, I hope this first stab at putting actual numbers on the table will provoke others to disprove them by collecting better data and devising better methods that reveal where I went wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Venus and Mars

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

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