It may be a little odd to post something so extensive on a presentation that I did not even attend, but since the US Army War College has been charitable enough to share the material from its 21st Strategy Conference on YouTube, I was able to catch Dr Jeremy Black’s contribution to this event, which I found highly stimulating, for a number of reasons.
You can view the full presentation here (H/T Weichong Ong), but as a recap (and to allow me to comment somewhat), these were some of the points that stuck with me:
‘we ought to be cognisant of the fact that the majority of the world’s population are not involved in wars with us, that the majority of the wars in the world don’t involve us and that we don’t define, in our experience, warfare’
This has to do with the data points and experiences we use to define and think about war. Two aspects of this strike me as quite staggering; both relate to what I might term ‘strategic solipsism’:
First – the persistence with which war is understood, in the Western world, as occurring on an isolated battlefield and ending, decisively, when one force is militarily defeated. Statistically, this heuristic notion is clearly an anomaly, and historically, it may be nothing more than a grossly simplified recollection of some of those wars that disproportionately shape our understanding of the term (primarily the Second World War). Clearly, the recent re-emergence of ‘irregular warfare’ or of ‘wars among the people’ have helped to challenge this conception somewhat, but this is also an understanding of war that is firmly entrenched and one that I believe still exerts a powerful influence on our worldview.
Second – the stubbornness with which we seek to export our historically questionable and statistically insignificant understanding of war on the rest of the world. Jeremy Black comments on this in his presentation, noting that ‘one of the difficulties is that our entire analysis of military affairs is predicated on the view of a kind of paradigm power diffusion, in other words, we set the standards and the other peoples are supposed to, in some way, conform’. As Black further notes, this may in fact be ‘an absurdity’.
A second memorable part of the presentation deals with the unprecedented global economic growth in the last 60-70 years, which Black posits as a bulwark against the inherently destabilising effects of the simultaneous processes of democratisation and growing populism. Black goes on to argue that if we can’t replicate this economic growth, there are going to be larger numbers of unmet expectations and grievances worldwide, grievances that tend to be interpreted on the basis of historicised distinctions, often along the lines of ethnicity, regionalism or religion (though he also proposes the comeback of ‘class’ as a growing factor in explaining political violence).
This reminded me of E. H. Carr’s excellent Twenty Years’ Crisis, about the 1919-1939 period of course, a time he described as marked by:
the abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first decade to the grim despair of the second, from a utopia which took little account of the reality to a reality from which every element of utopia was rigorously excluded.
Will we face a similar crisis in the coming century? Carr presented his twenty years’ crisis as resulting from the breakdown of an international order whose relevance had long lapsed, and the failure of Western powers to adapt to the conditions of the new inter-war era. The problem, really, was the stubborn conviction in many Western capitals of a ‘harmony of interest’ among nations, in toothless legalism and the irrationality of war given the recent and very destructive experience of World War I.
These tendencies appear eminently repeatable. Indeed, it is quite conceivable that our enduring strategic solipsism and lack of enforcement mechanisms for the order that we seek to champion (be it through NATO or even the US military, following Iraq and Afghanistan) may, particularly against the backdrop of growing economic and political instability, bring about a very similar crisis in the century to come.
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I don’t want to derail what I’m sure will be a lively and thoughtful discussion on this topic, but…
I was at this conference, and easily the best Jeremy Black highlight for me was when he eviscerated Michael Vlahos’ idiotically romanticized “sacred war” theory.
Unfortunately, the Q/As aren’t included in the video, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
And yet you find Michael’s wife “kinda hot.”
Sounds a bit depressing and Malthusian to me… what about an argument that there’s probably never been a safer time to be a fighting age male? That the incidence of war is declining? Here’s a fun TED talk from Steven Pinker on precisely that theme:
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
Interesting presentation, but is Pinker not basically saying that we should be pretty happy about the last 60-70 years. Which is pretty much the point made by Jeremy Black in his presentation and by me above. The issue is whether the trends that have allowed for the stability of this era will persist.
Pinker cites a few reasons to be optimistic: states keep us safe (harmony of political interest); we value life more today; war is too costly (harmony of economic interest); and we are naturally compassionate (with our friends and family, groups that are expanding).
Interestingly Carr’s book deals with very similar arguments. His chapter ‘The Apotheosis of Public Opinion’ demonstrates how excessive faith in public opinion and its alleged moral strength misled the Western powers as to the changing political reality facing them. He makes the broader point that what was considered to be a harmony of interest, politically or economically, was really a specific order advancing the West’s interests, and that would be challenged. And so on.
To quote Jeremy Black once more, I do not ‘sleep with Clio’ so I don’t know what the future holds, but I am inclined to see the stability of the last half-century as a product of our ability to enforce it, not as evidence of a growing global community of interest leading us linearly toward perpetual peace (which seems to be the argument Pinker is proposing).
Harmony of economic interests between states isn’t always strong enough to deter war. Germany and France did a good deal of trade in the First World War while Japan was reliant on American metal and oil before the Second. Economics is often enough to encourage diplomacy, but we should remember that sometimes ideology or a greater goal can overcome it.
In my opinion the world is more peaceful (in interstate wars) for several reasons. We have an international organization with some credibility at stopping conventional wars. Nuclear arsenals among the three nations most likely to go to war (U.S, Russia and China) make them unlikely to fight each other. Lastly, the dominant political model at this time encourages nation states and limited interference with each other (Kosovo, Iraq, South Ossetia et al are more aberrations).
Well, he did only have a 10 minute pop at it, and it’s not his field – but Azar Gat makes some similar points, if I recall him rightly, Michael Howard too: culture can moderate violence, even if we do not (as I do not) see any great teleology to it.
Taken over a longer timeframe – say 500 years – I see merit to an argument that modern states allow for longer, higher quality lives, albeit accompanied by some pretty severe upward spikes in violence, owing to their great capacity for efficient use of force.
When I saw the name I thought this was going to be how wars are considered to be ‘over’. Is there any research on how leaders define that?
Black’s refinements to the notion of war termination, seems to be military history (or our understanding of military history) catching up to Hobbes (and not just in the way Pinker suggested). In arguing that a few years of truce is not peace, or that the end of war only comes with the internalization of defeat, we are really just applying the Hobbesian state of war/nature.
At the same time, I think this is, in some ways, a “return to normalcy” for international politics, because we have been living in a really exceptional time period of strong state sovereignty underwritten, as Black notes, by nuclear deterrence, and then uncontested Western conventional military power, along with unprecedented economic growth. The salience or endurance of these effects is still up for debate.
There was a paper last year, “Deconstructing our Dark Age Future,” that this presentation reminded me of. The thrust was that a lot of our fears about the decline of the Westphalian system and rise of irregular war, are really products of historicised, American/Western ideas about state sovereignty running into the realities of declining relative power. So too, it seems, are our ideas about warfare in general.
Thanks for the references to P. Michael Phillips’ piece in Parameters, which can be found here. I haven’t finished reading it, but it seems extremely relevant to the topic. From the introduction: