https://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-ab...
The explanation for the decline of violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb. The theory of the Nuclear Peace is evaluated in chapter 5, pp. 268–278. I think it’s unlikely. World War II proved that conventional warfare was already unthinkably destructive, so the superpowers were already deterred plenty from provoking a third world war. Also, since the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so disproportionate to any strategic goal, its threat is for all practical purposes a bluff, which is why so many non-nuclear powers have defied nuclear ones since 1945. Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.
The U.S. was never going to chose between Spain and Canada in advance of actual fighting (or Canada and France re similar issues), because the larger nuclear-fueled conflict with Russia made dumping allies overboard foolish; whoever began shooting would have lost. I would argue that the nuclear standoff trickles down.
Frankly, this looks to me like Pinker is reasoning from a provably false premise. Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.
The Congo War killed ~4 million people, including 300,000+ via direct killings. The Yugoslav Wars killed 100,000+. The Second Gulf War, 400,000 deaths, 100,000+ from direct killings. The Syrian Civil War is 400k and counting.
The rejoinder, I suppose, is that Canada and Spain is a first-world example and none of my are. I don't buy it. First, because the use of proxy wars is a defining feature of 20th century combat; war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria is directly linked to great-power conflict. Second, because Pinker's example is a silly one; both because war over flatfish would have been a money-loser and because Canada and Spain are NATO signatories operating under the nuclear shield of other nations. Shooting war between NATO member states is regularly described as a nightmare scenario that would escalate nuclear tensions worldwide; Pinker is naively or dishonestly equating "owning no nukes" with "lacking nuclear defense".
Pinker has been repeatedly criticized for his focus on combat deaths, and with good reason. The technological advances of war have shifted the balance of casualties from combatants to civilians, and increased the fat-tail risk of escalating conflicts. This is another iteration of the same.
As for nuclear weapons being "disproportionate to any strategic goal" and "for all practical purposes a bluff"... I hope to god he's right, but tactical nuclear weapon use is back on the table in Russia and strategists don't seem to agree with him.
Great powers have interests in every war ever, but when Yugoslavia broke up, the USSR and in 1999 Russia were too weak to be considered equal adversaries.
In the early 90s the country fell apart and a tyrant started three wars ending in ethnic cleansing and genocide. When he started a fourth one in 1999, a short and by modern warfare limited campaign finally stopped him.
The link to great power conflict I had in mind there was the pressure cooker effect of Tito's dictatorship, which suppressed the major conflicts of the region without solving them. But it's a rather different entity than wars with direct meddling, and I can't judge the counterfactual: would a lack of Communist dictatorship have caused an earlier and more peaceful dissolution, or simply hastened what happened anyway?
It's a bad example and I shouldn't have used it; thank you.
This is my main reservation about the Better Angels thesis: we may be replacing regular threats of (relatively)limited scope with existential threats. It seems like we are building a complex ratchet mechanism made up of entangled components. Many of these threats don't actually disappear, but are held in abeyance by continual technological progress, resource substitution, or our own fears of upsetting the ratchet.
I think Pinkerian thought is strong when it argues that we are currently in a much better time than, say, the Plagues of Justinian, where war, disease, and famine affected a huge part of the western hemisphere. But I wonder if our present condition is more fragile than our large population and social/technological advancement would lead us to believe.
Sorry, but that sounds like a load of folk psychology. Leaded gasoline on the other hand, well, see here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis
(see especially this section: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis#Evidence..., and the one on alternative explanations immediately below.)
And see also, the absurd boatload of articles Kevin Drum written on about it for MotherJones:
https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&dcr=1&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Cc...
(this google query has the results sorted by date, this: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-crime-co... is their oldest article on the matter, and this [note that this one takes a bit until it gets to the point, but it gets there]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/11/crime-and-the... is their newest on it.)
They've also been caught on film laughing and bragging about killing civilians.
In some lines of thought, that's the definition of illegal...
I mean, yes, they have peacekeeping forces. Those forces are not keeping the peace by force. In fact, there have been times when they have stood aside while one side violated the peace, because the UN force's rules of engagement didn't allow them to use force to prevent one side from starting the war back up.
That term isn't right, since there are a few other countries involved, but it brings to mind the right associations.
No way, no how. Russia's economy, at their peak, was 1/7th of the size of the USA's. At the end of WW2, it's unlikely they could have beaten western Europe, let alone kept the US out, who were clocking 50% of world GDP at the end of '45.
Equally, the USA could have never beaten Russia in the USSR itself. The entire nation was an absolute fortress. The armies of tanks, that would be vulnerable to air power in an offensive war, would be absolutely unstoppable in a defensive war, where you don't have long supply lines.
GDP captures something meaningful, but in terms of ability to project power it's only somewhat correlated. In a Communist state, it captures even less, because pricing mechanisms are all off kilter.
For much of the USSR's post WW2 existence, it could likely have invaded and taken much of continental Europe using only conventional weapons. The USA had troops stationed in Germany not in hopes of stopping any invasion, but to buy a little bit of time and to make its defensive pledges plausible to allies: thousands of American dead would mean it would have to join in a total war, instead of calculating costs and benefits of total war (which would be unacceptable). Even then, other counties worried about America's commitment to an incredibly costly war with the USSR: that's part of why France developed its own nuclear deterrent and left NATO.
Discussion of whether the USA or USSR would "win" an all out war between them is almost besides the point: they both possessed enough military power that the only way to win would be to, um, not to play.
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I think there are two factors at play here:
1. The USSR's power projection was really good because it's really hard to convince people to fight for capitalism. For communism, on the other hand, you always have a million volunteers.
2. The USSR's military credibility when it comes to a land war in Europe was based on the fact that they were preparing for a near-home or home defense scenario. So, instead of investing in expensive fleets, aircraft carriers, and bombers, they invested in tanks, close-support aircraft, and anti-air stuff. The Atlantic would prevent the US from effectively responding to massive columns of tanks, since tanks are very heavy and hard to transport and supply. However, it also means that the USSR wouldn't be going anywhere with its massive war machine. It wouldn't have any ability to threaten anything outside of euroope. So the obvious result of any conventional war would have been the US conventionally bombing every Russian city to dust.
The Soviets lost to the incredibly poor country of Afghanistan. Vietnam's GDP was/is a small fraction of Russia's, yet America still lost and communism spread through the region. If war came to Western Europe again, I find it unlikely that America could've won.
One of the first things Kruschev did was cut ground forces by a third, to rely on missiles for a deterrence based defence because they realisec they couldnt match the west in conventional capability.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30753784-the-internation...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/opinion/sunday/outlawing-...
[3] https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-oona-hathaway-an...
> From 1816 until the Kellogg-Briand Pact was first signed in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one territorial conquest every 10 months. Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year... The average amount of territory seized between 1816 and 1928 was 114,088 square miles per year...
> Since World War II, conquest has almost come to a full stop. The average number of conquests per year fell drastically — to 0.26 per year, or one every four years. The average size of the territory taken declined to a mere 5,772 square miles per year. And the likelihood that any individual state would suffer a conquest in an average year plummeted — from 1.33 percent to 0.17 percent, or once or twice a millennium.
It does actually. The only difference is how long it took and arguably Dresden was in worse shape than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
> I'm not trying to diminish the scale of destruction in Dresden
Well, forgive me.
> but there are many cities other than it that got destroyed in similar, "conventional" way
No, there aren't. That's exactly why Dresden stands out.
> I don't see why it should be treated in a special way.
You really should go and have a look at those before and after pictures then. They are nothing short of incredible.
Warsaw, Breslau or Tokyo (and Rotterdam, for that matter) do not compare even though the destruction there was widespread.
I don't think it should be treated as a "most destroyed city" contest, but you should really research the scale of destruction in the cities I've mentioned. [1] looks quite comparable to [2], [3] looks arguably worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_destruction_of_Warsaw#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...
[3] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2d/10/af/2d10af195da2779dbd4c31ddf...
From [2]: "By January 1945, between 85% and 90% of the buildings had been completely destroyed; this includes up to 10% as a result of the September 1939 campaign and following combat, up to 15% during the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 25% during the Uprising, and 40% due to systematic German demolition of city after the uprising"
It's not me underestimating the scale of destruction of Dresden, but rather you underestimating the scale of destruction in other cities.
[1] http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Bombing_of_Dresden...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_destruction_of_Warsaw
It really must have required special kind of ignorance to write this sentence.
If you compare overall damage then Dresden had less than 50% of its building destroyed, while Warsaw had been destroyed in 80%-90%.
No. Dresden was bombed on 15 February 1945 [0]. The British continued night raids until the end of the war, peaking in March, and with the last raid on Berlin on the night of 21/22 April (76 Mosquitos) and the final raid on the night of 25/26 April [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden#Second_World_War
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command#Strategic_b...
Bigger raids happened after Dresden as well and Harris gave his opinion: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” Luckily he alone didn’t make describe I guess.
Obviously the WW3 will make look WW2 like a piece of cake.
"Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation." 1983
Tom Lehrer - So Long Mom (A Song for WW III)
I'm also reminded of the flavor of the Olympic Games during the Cold War as almost a "proxy war" between the Soviets and the U.S.
There can and should be other options to settle differences, but in the end, people and groups who have gone through all the other options will still always have the choice to simply physically resist the outcome, and there is no other counter to that than sufficient physical force to overcome the resistance. War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is.
Perhaps when it comes to sovereign states, but with individuals you have things like tort law, instead of simply killing the person you have a dispute with. Why couldn't there be something like that on the international level?
It only takes one bad actor to light the fuse that ends the world.
Never thought about that. It's hard to tell, Everyone was in some sort of cold war with Germany before the two world wars. Nobody wanted to fight and this is what led Germany to conquer very quickly a number of countries.
I see this as the basis for cold wars and other international competitions, conflicts are converted into other outlets.
But setting that aside, when would they have come into conflict? Prior to WWI, the US did its best to stay out of international affairs, and Russia wasn't trying to export a political philosophy. In the gap between the wars, the Soviet Union was preoccupied with internal concerns.
It's very hard to compare the potential for conflict post-1945 between the two powers with any period of time before that. Russia and the US simply weren't all that relevant to each other (Alaska aside).
Otherwise you could just crop-dust your downwind neighbors and be moved in before anyone could even report an attack.
I still don't understand why we're allowed to stockpile nerve gas given the past 100 years of warfare and treaties.
https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-Hitler-use-his-extensive-sto...
The Vietnam War would seem to belie your claim
Yet that one rule is broken multiple times a year by multiple nations in multiple regions on earth.
Source: https://files.prio.org/publication_files/prio/Gates,%20Nyg%C...
[0] http://www.mn.uio.no/math/english/research/projects/focustat...
Overwhelmingly what we've seen in the way of war deaths since WW2, is in civil war and genocides by Socialist, Communist and Fascist regimes.
When a war happens we ask ourselves why, and the international community works to try to prevent it the next time. That would be truly alien to a world leader even a couple centuries ago.
[0] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-16/us-now-involved-134-w...
Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.
You're saying it was about oil primarily. Yet the US didn't take Iraq's oil. The US didn't even secure an outsized share of contracts related to Iraq's oil. The US vaporized a trillion dollars, along with suffering tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, trying to stop the Iraqi civil war in which Iraqis killed hundreds of thousands of each other.
Simultaneously over that decade the US technologically unlocks its massive shale oil resources, making Middle Eastern oil almost entirely moot strategically. So much so, that the US is now merely about 10% of Saudi oil demand.
And the US got what out of all of that Iraq mess when it comes to oil? The US stuck its military where it shouldn't have been, and it did so for geo-political reasons, not economic reasons. The US was a massive loser economically from that effort to try to weaken Russia, it was an economic disaster. The net 'benefit' over two decades will be perhaps close to a negative two trillion dollars all-in.
> You're saying it was about oil primarily.
Those aren't conflicting explanations; the US is concerned about the friendliness of governments in the region largely because it cares about how they manage oil supplies (both for price and geostrategic reasons like making sure we have access and our enemies do not in a major crisis.)
And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
No, it's not, because the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy.
If we were in a major war with China now and that was true, it would suggest that the policy had been unsuccessful in achieving a key goal, but even then wouldn't refute that that had been the policy goal.
> And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
Perhaps (though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use) but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
Of course it's about who buys (ie who can supply their economy with the energy it needs). The entire political value of oil is that it's critical to most economies. You keep saying that it's about controlling the oil, the point of that control is to use it for self-benefit. If the US were doing what you're claiming, it would be denying oil to China. You say that there is value in being able to deny oil supply to enemies - and then you pretend the US wouldn't have an interest in denying oil supply to China to slow its economic ascension (it obviously would benefit massively if it could partially suffocate China's growth via oil). These are contradictions in your theory, as China swims in Middle Eastern oil supply.
> though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use
Russian and Iranian oil production is drastically beyond their peacetime economic consumption. I can't imagine where you're trying to go with that.
> but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
You're refuting yourself there. Then why didn't the US deny Chinese access to Iraqi oil? China almost immediately began benefiting immensely from Iraq's oil as production ramped up after the worst of the shutdown. Saudi's primary customer is now China and that is going to get a lot more dramatic in the coming decade. Those two points collapse what you're claiming.
If the US wanted to press an advantage, it would destroy Saudi Arabian and Iraqi oil supplies (use an ISIS-like mess), which would hammer China's economy by removing 1/4 to 1/3 of their oil supply. The US is now one of the few major nations that can fully support itself on energy. Instead, the US is actively protecting both Saudi and Iraq, while the largest US rival - China - benefits the most from that protection.
The US shale oil issue has also really flipped the script as well; it's something I don't think anyone was predicting at the time. The rapidity of solar and wind's rise is another surprising thing.
I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that. I just mean that, yes, China is dominant now, and there's a certain global socioeconomic-political dynamic. But at the time leading up to the Iraq war, the world was a very different place in terms of global politics and energy economics.
It is probably more fruitful to argue over whether or not the US government anticipated these geopolitical changes well enough. But to point to things that happened later as a rationale for what transpired before seems backward to me.
In some ways, the transition we've witnessed is from a oil-cold-war dynamic involving the US and Russia/USSR to a vacuum, made by renewable energy and Asian and European economic growth. As an American, I feel like we should sidestep issues about Euro-Asian supremacy and American-Russian decline, and take a hard look at what assumptions we often make, and what it increasingly looks like is that many of the old political blocs are starting to seem irrelevant to a prosperous future. I think America has a dominant role it can play, and will, if it just starts being forward-looking instead of backward-looking.
It didn't vaporize any money whatsoever, in fact, Halliburton (and many of the hundreds of military strategy companies in the MIC) did quite well with their new economy.
Halliburton share prices from 2003-2005: https://i.imgur.com/UgPNCBg.gif
NY Times article about the division of Iraq oilfields: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/business/energy-environmen...
All commodity companies and prices soared at the same time, it wasn't at all isolated to Halliburton or oil. That was due to a debased dollar, which also sent all dollar-based GDP numbers skyrocketing around the world simultaneously. Go to Google and type in: "Czech GDP" or "Colombia GDP" (or dozens of other nations) and witness the incredible spike from ~2003 to ~2008, that's the dollar in action (ie the dollar losing value). Gold similarly soared historically for the same reason. It all crashed simultaneously as well. Those GDP figures almost all have gone down since ~2013, that's the dollar in action again, this time the dollar gained immense strength which sent oil down to ~$26.
Iraq's oil production is at an all-time high, and that oil belongs to them. They're currently directly competing with the vast US domestic oil production.
If the US had started the Iraqi war over oil, it wouldn't have willingly left Iraq when asked to, and it would have used its military to lock up all the oil contracts and supply coming out of Iraq, for itself and its closest allies, effectively annexing the oil. That didn't happen.
My first thought was that they ought to have a monument to the Rosenbergs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg), if that is the approach they're taking.
Those who advocate nuclear disarmament are basically advocating a return to increasingly-bloody world wars every few years.
Of course, it's also true that the leaders who are afraid to confront each other directly are more likely to resort to proxy wars that cause massive pain and suffering in their own right. But that's a different problem that will have to be solved by different means.
I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigger deterrent of war - at least among the developed countries of the world: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the world saw the atom bomb's capability for destruction, the motivation to avoid war increased significantly (to put it lightly).
Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."