Clearly, the experts disagree deeply over the roles of war and government in making the world safer and richer. What that kind of disagreement usually means, in my experience, is that we have been looking at the question in the wrong way and therefore finding only partial and contradictory answer. We need a different perspective.
No one should count himself rich unless he can afford his own army.
The Romans in Britain accomplished this much better than the Americans in Vietnam, winning hearts and minds because they had already robbed the Britons of their freedom to fight back.
Bad workmen blame their tools, bad historians blame their sources.
The first sign that the ancient empires were approaching their culminating points was the onset of diminishing returns to conquest. So long as the Romans stayed near the Mediterranean Sea, size was no great issue, because water transport was relative cheap and fast. But in a world where armies moved at the pace of an oxcart, pushing inland - into Germany, Romania, and Iraq - drove costs upward. It cost almost as much to load a ton of grain onto carts and drag it ten miles overland as it did to ship it from Egypt to Italy, and despite the Romans’ famous roads, by the first century AD the gains from war - whether measured in gold or glory - rarely seemed to justify the costs.
Pursuing the nomads into their hiding places, the Persians learned, could be almost as problematic as doing nothing, because infantry could not force nomad cavalry to fight if they did not want to.
The conclusion emperors eventually reached was that the hard power of expensive expeditions onto the steppes worked best when combined with softer, albeit still pricey, techniques. The most popular was containment, which usually meant building walls to keep the nomads out. Walls could not keep nomads out altogether, but they did at least channel where the horsemen came in.
The most successful (or, perhaps, least unsuccessful) strategy was bribery. Nomad raids killed a lot of people and lowered the empires’ tax take, so why not just pay nomads not to raid? As long as the bribes cost less than preemptive war, protection money was a win-win-win proposition - the emperors saved cash, the peasants in the borderlands saved their lives, and the nomads saved themselves a lot of trouble. Two thousand years on, bribery retains its appeal in asymmetric warfare: by handing out $70M in cash to Afghan warlords in 2001, the CIA also saved a lot of money, lives, and trouble.
What should really have alarmed these civilized gentlemen, however, was not the nasty nomads who came riding in on horses. It was the even nastier microbes that came riding in on the nomads.
Right up to the 20th century AD, the biggest killer in war was always disease. By bringing together thousands of men, packing them into small spaces, feeding them badly, and leaving them to wallow in their own filth, armies acted as petri dishes in which microbes could multiply madly. In crowded, unsanitary camps, exotic viruses thrived even when they killed their human hosts, because there was always another host to leap to. Dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid, and tuberculosis: these have ever been the soldier’s lot.
Battered by migrations, disease, and declining yields, the complicated networks of tax and trade that had been built up by centuries of productive war began unraveling. In China, as tax revenues shrank and the costs of defending the frontiers grew, some 2nd century AD civil servants started suggesting that the wisest path was simply to stop paying the troops. After all, they reasoned, the western border where Qiang rebels/invaders were doing so much damage was a long way from the capital at Luoyang; how bad could things get if the government simply left the army to fend for itself?
The answer: very bad indeed. Soldiers turned into bandits, plundering the peasants they were supposedly defending, and generals turned into warlords, obeying only those orders that suited them. “These strongest and bravest of the empire,” the official Gong Ye noted, “are dreaded by the common people.” In AD 168, with the plague raging everywhere and the army disintegrating, palace eunuchs launched a coup against the 12-year-old emperor and the circle of friends and in-laws who controlled his policy. It was a disaster. Government broke down altogether as civil servants murdered each other by the thousands in purge and counter-purge. Law and order began collapsing too, and rebellions claimed uncounted lives through the 170s and 180s. In 189, the most terrifying of the warlords on the western frontier marched on Luoyang, torched the city, and kidnapped the latest boy-emperor.
For feudal kings slithering down the slopes of counterproductive war, these arrangements had an obvious advantage: the throne lo longer had to pay professional soldiers to fight or bureaucrats to raise taxes. However, organizing armies this way also had disadvantages. The first was that kings now had little leverage over their followers, who often cared more about their own fame and glory than any larger plan, tending to plunge into battle (or to run away) as the mood took them.
Kings who did not win battles did not win plunder either, and despite all the oaths and talk of duty, kings who had no loot to hand out got little loyalty from their men.
As generation succeeded generation, the webs of duty and obligation binding a king and his knights grew increasingly tangled. Clever or lucky lords used inheritance, dowry, and purchase to expand their estates, but each new estate brought new obligations. All too soon, a man would find himself owing allegiance to multiple masters.
The kingdom can be held by the army, and the army by gold; and gold is acquired through agricultural development; and agricultural development through justice and equity. Therefore be just and equitable.
The ruler depends on the state, and the state depends on its people. Oppressing the people to make them serve the ruler is like someone cutting off his own flesh to feed his stomach. The stomach is filled but the body is injured: the ruler is wealthy but the state is destroyed.
“You have three things we want, powder, musket, and shot. And we have three things you want: men, women, and children.” On this basis, between 1500 and 1800, Europeans bought something like 12 million people from warring African chiefs for shipment across the Atlantic.
Trade in Asia should be conducted and maintained under the protection and with the aid of your own weapons, and those weapons must be wielded with the profits gained by the trade. So trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.
By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectual than when he really intends to promote it.
In 1776 - the very year that The Wealth of Nations were published - Britain’s American colonists relieved their motherland of the need to decide whether to follow Smith’s advice by rebelling. Traditional-minded politicians assumed that losing the colonies would ruin Britain’s Atlantic trade, but events soon showed that they were wrong and Smith was right. Anglo-American commerce regained its prewar level in 1789 and just kept growing.
Just look, he said, at the Navigation Acts, which England passed in 1651. These laws, designed largely to exclude Dutch rivals from English colonial trade, were disastrous in purely economic terms. Shutting out the Dutch shrank England’s markets and made everyone poorer. In strategic terms, however, the laws were vital, because growing Dutch power threatened England’s very survival. “As defence,” Smith pointed out, “is of much more importance than opulence, the act of navigation is, perhaps, the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England.”
The Navigation Acts threw into sharp relief the fundamental problem of the Atlantic economy - a problem that is shared with every other part of the open-access order. Markets could not work well unless governments got out of them, but markets could not work at all unless governments got into them, using force to pacify the world and keep the Beast at bay. Violence and commerce were two side of the same coin, because the invisible hand needed an invisible fist to smooth the way before it could work its magic.
For two generations, Britain had (usually) been willing and able to play globocop because, as late asl 1860, it was the only truly industrialized economy on earth. British factories turned out better, cheaper goods than anyone else’s, and so long as the seas were safe for free trade, these could always find buyers. Britons could then use their profits to purchase food wherever it was best and cheapest, and the farmers selling the food could use the profits from these sales to buy more British goods, allowing the British to buy more food… and so on. Britain had the money to play globocop, and needed to play globocop to keep making money.
Everyone involved prospered, but Britain prospered most of all. Its GDP almost tripled between 1820 and 1870, increasing from 5 percent to 9 percent of the world’s total (today it is 3 percent). Ships and bases to keep the sea-lanes open cost money, but the British economy grew so fast that they seemed like a bargain, costing less than 3 percent of GDP.
Strategically, though, the economic triumph was a disaster for Britain, because its strategy, much like the strategies of the ancient empires 17 centuries earlier, had overshot its culminating point. The US’s economy outgrew Britain’s in 1872, and in 1901 so did Germany’s. Every newly wealthy government now built a modern fleet to project its power and prestige. Britain stayed in front, more than quadrupling the size and firepower of its navy between 1880 and 1914, but its share of global gunnery nonetheless declined. The globocop could take on any plausible combination of enemies but could no longer intimidate everyone at once.
If Britain was the world’s policeman, we might think of the new industrial giants as being rather like urban gangs. The globocop, like any cop, had to decide whether to confront these rivals, cut deals with them, or do some combination of the two. Britain could wage trade wars on its rivals, wage shooting wars on them, or make concessions. The first two options threatened to ruin the free trade that made Britain rich; the third, to strengthen the rivals so much that Britain would no longer be able to play globocop.
Germany, though, was a different matter. It belonged to the inner rim, which gave it direct access to the heartland. Seen from London, a strong, united, industrialized Germany looked like the kind of place that might turn the heartland’s resources against the outer rim. “If Germany were to ally herself with Russia,” Mackinder worried, it “would make use of the vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight.”
Seen from St. Petersburg, however, the other side of the same coin seemed more urgent - the danger that Germany might get the upper hand against France and Britain and then turn the outer rim’s resources against the heartland. The real risk was not of Germany’s allying with Russia; it was of Germany’s conquering Russia. Napoleon had tried this, but reaching all the way from the outer rim to Moscow had been too much for him. Germany, however, might fight the reach from the inner rim more manageable.
Politicians in Berlin saw a third dimension. To them, the big danger was not that Germany would exploit the outer rim or the heartland; it was that the outer rim and the heartland would combine to crush Germany between them, which had almost happened several times since the 18th century. That, German leaders concluded, had to be prevented at all costs, and this simple strategic fact largely explains 20th-century Germany’s tragic history.
Why was Lloyd George so badly wrong? Some blame the Treaty of Versailles for being too harsh, leaving Germany seeking revenge. Others blame it for being too soft, leaving Germany intact instead of reversing its 1871 unification. Others still blame the US Congress for refusing to ratify the treaty of Britain and France for scheming to exploit it. The truth, though, is much simpler. Real peace required a strong globocop.
In the liberal democracies of the American alliance, millions marched in campaigns for nuclear disarmament, sang protest songs, and lined up to see Dr. Strangelove. Coming of Age-ism’s assumption that war was good for absolutely nothing, under any circumstances, swept the field.
But none of this solved the planet’s problem. As in every earlier age, so long as anyone thought that force might be the least bad answer to their problems (or so long as anyone thought that someone else might be thinking that), no one dared forgo weapons, and as with every vicious new weapon since the first stone ax, once the bomb had been invented, it could not be “disinvented” (Eisenhower’s word). If all the warheads in the world were scrapped, they could be replaced in a matter of months - which might mean that banning the bomb would be the most dangerous action imaginable, because a treacherous enemy might secretly rebuild its arsenal and launch a devastating first strike before its rule-abiding rival could make enough bombs to deter it.
For many years, the US 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 US could not “assume 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 and friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.” This meant accomplishing one big thing:
“Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.”
The growing contrast between European and American attitudes to violence has occasioned much comment, but there is no mystery about it. Europeans are from Venus because Americans are from Mars. Without the American globocop protecting the peace, Europe’s dovish strategy would be impossible. But on the other hand, without European dovishness, the US could not afford to go on as globocop. If the EU had acted more hawkishly over the past 15 years, the costs of countering it would already be undermining the American position, just as the costs of countering Germany undermined the British globocop 100 years ago. Mars and Venus need each other.
Between 1945 and 1989, the best way for western Europe to play the game of death was by being warlike enough to help deter the Soviet Union but not so warlike as to alarm the Americans (disagreement over exactly where that sweet spot was partly explains France’s departure from NATO’s unified command structure in 1966). Since 1989, though, facing no serious security risks at all and being able to rely on the US to punish any and all hawks, western Europe has become even more dovish. The result: unlike British governments a century ago, American administrations have never had to worry that their money and protection were nourishing European rivals that would challenge their ability to act as a globocop.
“When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told West Point cadets in 2011, “our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.”
The US let China become such a rival for the same reason that the UK let Germany and the US itself become rivals in the late 19th century: it made the globocop richer too. In fact, China’s rise was an extraordinarily good financial deal for America. Because Chinese imports were so inexpensive, most American workers saw their living standards improve, even though their wages were stagnant; and because China lent much of its profits back to the US by buying a trillion dollars’ worth of Chinese imports. As a final touch, cheap Chinese goods exerted deflationary pressures that prevented cheap Chinese credit from setting off rampant inflation. Everybody won.
After 1989 capitalism saved China. After 2009 China saved capitalism.
And just in case “Peaceful Rise” still sounded alarming, Beijing softened its image still further in 2008 by changing the label to “Peaceful Development.” This, spokesmen explained, was part of an ancient Chinese strategic culture, rooted in Confucianism. Rather than using force to resolve disputes, China had always relied on virtue, showing by its humane example that cooperation would make everyone better-off.
Americans have often made similar claims about their own policies. As long ago as 1821, John Quincy Adams argued that the US made its mark on the world through the “benignant sympathy of her example.” But despite these fine words, the US has regularly resorted to force, and throughout history, in fact, geopolitical shifts on the scale of China’s takeoff have always been accompanied by massive violence.
China, like everyone else, has to play the game of death. Since the 1980s it has mostly played the game well, which means (as it always means) being dovish when that works and hawkish when it does not. Far from substituting Confucius for Mackinder, China is an “uber-realist power.”
Recognizing its military weakness, diplomatic isolation, and strategic vulnerability, for a generation after Mao’s death China avoided confrontation while pouring money into military modernization. Between 1989 and 2001, spending grew almost sevenfold.
“The inevitable analogy,” says the strategist Edward Luttwak, is between China today and Germany in the 1890s. But while both countries spent massively to turn industrial might into military might, China’s spending has been smarter than Germany’s. Kaiser Wilhelm challenged the UK directly by building a battleship fleet, but China is challenging the US asymmetrically.
Chinese investment has gone mostly into submarines, mines, and short-range ballistic missiles. These cannot contest American dominance of the oceans, but they can make the waters around China too dangerous for the US to operate in. Success may be close: war games played by the RAND Corporation in 2009 suggested that already by 2013 China would be able to win an air war over Taiwan. Its thousands of missiles would quickly suppress land-based Taiwanese fighters, and with American planes forces to operate from carriers deployed out of missile range (“over the horizon,” in military-speak) or from distant Guam, a mainland invasion of Taiwan would stand a good chance of success.
Nothing is clear in the western Pacific because the fog of unknown unknowns is denser here than anywhere else on earth. And yet it is here that the most important decisions have to be made. “If we get China wrong,” one Washington insider admitted, “in 30 years that’s the only thing anyone will remember.”
The reason this island-grabbing scenario seems so unlikely is that despite China’s military buildup, American dominance remains overwhelming. Aggression would call down on China a counteroffensive that American planners call “AirSea Battle.” The US has well-developed plans for cyberwar and would open with a massive electronic strike, paralyzing China’s power grids and finances, blinding its satellites and surveillance, and jamming its command-and-control systems. Cruise and ballistic missiles, guaranteed to land within five or ten yards of their targets even after flying thousands of miles, would crater China’s military runways and annihilate its surface-to-air defenses. Virtually undetectable stealth planes - B-2 bombers, F-22 fighters, and eventually F-35s too - would streak deep into the interior, flattening missile launchpads. China would lose the initiative within hours, and while American admirals might still hesitate to sail close to the Chinese coast, their naval aircraft and missiles would sink any Chinese ship foolish enough to put to sea and would pulverize any breach in the island chain.
Globocops, like real cops, pay huge reputational costs for brutalizing the innocent. Democratic globocops pay higher costs still, and when the intended victim is alos the globocop’s banker, beating him up becomes a truly terrible idea. The Pax Americana, like the Pax Britannica before it, is as much a diplomatic and financial balance as a military one, and winning a preemptive war would hurt the Americans almost as much as the Chinese.
Mutual assured destruction no longer applies, because India, Pakistan, and Israel (if or when Iran goes nuclear) know that a first strike against their regional rival could conceivably take out its second-strike capability. So far, antimissile defenses and the globocop’s guarantees have kept order. But if the globocop does lose credibility in the 2030s and after, nuclear proliferation, arms races, and even preemptive attacks may start to make sense.
Once again, it seems that there is no new thing under the sun. Brain-to-brain interfacing is just the latest chapter in an ancient story. Two billion years ago, bacteria began merging to produce simple cells. Another 300 million years after that, simple cells began merging into more complex ones, and after another 900 million years complex cells began merging into multicelled animals. At each stage, simpler organisms gave up some functions - some of their freedom, in a sense - in order to become more specialized parts of a bigger, more complex being. Bacteria lost bacterianess but gained cellness; cell lost their cellness but gained animality and ultimately consciousness; and now, perhaps, we are about to lose our individual animality as we become part of something as far removed from Homo Sapiens as we are from out ancestral cells.
If you want peace, prepare for war. War has not been good for absolutely nothing, because - uncomfortable as it is to face the fact - war is the only method humans have found for moving from tiny Stone Age bands with rates of violent death in the 10-20 percent range to today’s vast, globalized society with a rate below 1 percent. War has made the planet peaceful and prosperous; so peaceful and prosperous, in fact, that was has almost, but not quite, put itself out of business. Hence the final paradox in this paradoxical tale: If we really want a world where war is good for absolutely nothing, we must recognize that war still has a part to play.