Perhaps There
Will Be
No More Wars in the Next Century
By JONATHAN
POWER
January 6, 1999
LONDON - Will historians a hundred years hence look at
the end of the twentieth century much as we now look at the
end of the nineteenth and say, `unfortunately the peace and
prosperity of that moment was but an interlude before the
bloodiest century in mankind's history?' Will they conclude
as Aldous Huxley did, that "Every road towards a better
state of society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, by
threats of war, preparations for war. That is the truth, the
odious and unacceptable truth."
The pessimists of our day have grist for their
mill--President Bill Clinton has just announced he wants the
largest rise in the military budget since the end of the
Cold War build up under Ronald Reagan: the nightmare of
containing and restraining Iraq and North Korea continues;
civil wars that target civilians more than soldiers are all
over the place; and nuclear weapons are proliferating in
states that don't have the secure command and control
systems of the old nuclear powers.
Despite all these ominous developments the big picture IS
good, arguably far better and more inherently stable than it
was in 1899. Major war, involving the most powerful
industrialised states, those capable of massive destruction
far and wide, is much less likely than it has ever been.
Unlike in previous ages neither economic, religious or
ideological forces point us or push us in the direction of
war. War, pace Lenin, in the age of nuclear and high-tech
weapons, is a loss-making enterprise. Virulent religious
strife, once the cause of so much bloodshed in Europe is now
limited to former Yugoslavia. Communism in Europe is
practically dead and the credo of the west, democracy, does
not lend itself to wars of conversion. War, moreover, has
lost most of its glamour. Honour and heroism, the old
virtues for every war from the time of the Illiad to General
Douglas MacArthur got lost in the jungles of Vietnam. Mr
Clinton came to power by defeating two Second World War
heroes. Despite the occasional recourse to cruise missiles,
he can hardly be regarded as a martial figure.
The state no longer is made by war for the purpose of
making war. The modern industrial state is, par excellence,
an economic institution. Democracy, not so long ago an
uncertain, precarious achievement, is today deeply embedded
in all the most advanced economies. And democracies do not
seem to go to war with each other either. Elections,
increasing political and economic transparency, the
separation of powers, a watchdog media, the urge of young
men to make money not war and, in Europe, not least, the
formation of the single currency, make serious all out war a
remote possibility. (Let us put on one side the aberration
of Margaret Thatcher's mini war with the Argentine generals
as "two bald men fighting over a comb" and such bizarre
analysis as Martin Feldstein writing in Foreign Affairs, who
argues what even Mrs Thatcher doesn't believe that a future
collapse of the single currency could lead to a new European
war.)
But this sense of common security is, of course, confined
to Europe, North America and Japan--and, it should be added,
South America which, for all its historic tendencies towards
bravado, over the last two centuries is the continent that
has least gone to war.
In the Middle East, all the old-time ingredients of war
making are present--financial greed over a scarce resource
and religious fervour, combined with the new-time
ingredients of modern weapons. Still, combative though many
of the countries in the region tend to be, they lack the
capacity to wage major war in the World War sense. Outside
the western world only China and Russia could do that; and
it is these two states that hold in their hands the peace of
the 21st century, to make it or break it.
Russia, potentially dangerously, claims a sphere of
influence in the territory of the former Soviet Union; China
in the South China Sea. Yet neither are in any real sense
preparing for major war. Both are essentially inwardly
preoccupied and neither are committed, as were their
orthodox communist predecessors, to the violent overthrow of
present day political, military and economic
arrangements.
~The practice of war, once the prerogative of the strong,
instead is increasingly the tactic of the weak~, argues
Michael Mandelbaum in the current issue of Survival, the
journal of the International Institute for Strategic
Studies. His argument, eloquently developed at length, is
that ~the great chess game of international politics is
finished, or at least suspended. A pawn is now just a pawn,
not a sentry standing guard against an attack on a king~.
We'll still have our Kashmirs, Iraqs and Rwandas but, he
argues, over time they are becoming less numerous and the
stakes for the rest of the world are lower.
That doesn't mean that the next century won't have some
bad wars. Doubtless there will still be plenty of those. But
major war, involving a clash of the best armed gladiators,
with convulsions on a scale that twice consumed the young
men and the innocents of the twentieth century, could be in
abeyance.
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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