o n wa r s

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 ON
WARS
MICHAEL MANN

New Haven and London

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Preface vii

1. Military Power and War 1

2. Is War Universal? 15
3. Theories of the Causes of War 30
4. The Roman Republic 52
5. Ancient China 89
6. Imperial China 109
7. Medieval and Modern Japan 145
8. A Thousand Years of Europe 180
9. Seven Hundred Years of South and Central America 225
10. The Decline of War? 271
11. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield I: From Ancient
Times to the American Civil War 311
12. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield II:
The World Wars 337
13. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield III: Communist
Wars 378
14. Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 413
vi Contents

15. Possible Futures 464

conclusion Patterns of War 481

Notes 519
Bibliography 547
Index 585
 Preface

In 2013 i finished the fourth and final volume of The Sources of Social
Power, as well as two papers that did not fit into that book. While work-
ing on these papers, I realized that although I had always emphasized the
role that military power plays in the development of human society, I
had never really examined in any systematic way its main mechanism,
war. And so for the last eight years I have engaged in a wide-ranging
exploration of wars through human history—with a bit of prehistory
added, too.
My fascination with war owes nothing to any personal experience of
it. Family lore tells me I was born in a hospital basement during the last
World War II German bombing raid on Manchester. If so, that was my
last experience of war. Conscription in Britain was abolished the year be-
fore I would have been liable for it, and by the time I became an Ameri-
can citizen I was too old to be drafted. I have never possessed or fired a
gun. Some sociologists study themselves—they write, for example, on
their own class, ethnic, or sexual identity—but anthropologists and other
sociologists, including myself, are fascinated by the task of trying to un-
derstand alien ways of life. For me, one such alien way has been war.
I have to thank the Covid-19 pandemic for enabling me to work
single-mindedly if remotely during the last two years of this research
project, with the help not only of the magnificent UCLA Young Re-
search Library, but also of the internet resources provided by JSTOR for
journal articles, Z-Library for online access to most of the many books
I sought, and Wikipedia, useful for swift checking of dates and facts. But
I must admit at the start that my reading has been restricted to works in
English or French.

vii
viii Preface

I would like to thank my literary agent, Elise Capron of the Sandra

Dijkstra Agency, for her support and marketing skills. I am intellectually
indebted as always to John A. Hall, as well as to Randall Collins and Siniša
Malešević for their seminal works on violence, even if I have sometimes
disagreed with them. I thank my UCLA colleagues and graduate students
of the Sociology 237 seminars. I pay homage to the classical writers on
war from Sun Tzu through Polybius and Ibn Khaldun to von Clausewitz,
Ardant du Picq, and Raymond Aron. I must thank a horde of archaeolo-
gists, anthropologists, and historians for their very many empirical studies,
which I have gratefully looted. I thank political scientists for clarifying the
theoretical issues at stake. And I thank two anonymous reviewers of my
manuscript for pertinent criticisms that I have tried to address.

Nicky Hart has been my constant companion for over forty years.
Without her love, support, intellectual stimulation, and reminders of the
sunny side of life, I would not have been able to complete this rather
dark project. On similar grounds I would like to thank my children, Lou-
ise, Gareth, and Laura. May they—and the whole of humanity—be as
fortunate as I have been, in never having to fight or to suffer as civilians
in wars.
 chapter one
Military Power and War

W
ars reveal human beings behaving at their worst, kill-
ing and maiming each other in very large numbers. It is
easy to deplore this. Herodotus quoted King Croesus
of Lydia as saying in the sixth century bce, “No one is
stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers
and in war fathers bury their sons.” In the eighteenth century Benjamin
Franklin said, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” Rebecca
West in 1941 put it more pungently when describing armed conflicts in
Yugoslav history: “It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference be-
tween history and the smell of a skunk.” But what determines whether
war or peace is chosen? Are wars driven by human nature, the nature of
human society, or other forces? Are wars rational? Do they do any good
at all? My answer in the broadest terms is that there is an element of ra-
tionality in wars but that this element gets entangled to varying degrees
within the emotions and ideologies of human beings, especially their rul-
ers, and within the social structures and cultures of human societies. The
combination often drives rulers in the direction of wars that are rarely
rational and that bring benefit to only a small proportion of human be-
ings. If humans and their rulers were predominantly rational beings,
there would be far fewer wars, an ideal worth at least aiming for.
I analyze many wars, hence the plural of my title. Most studies of war
have been conducted by historians and political scientists who are interna-
tional relations (IR) specialists. The latter have focused on wars involving

1
2 Military Power and War

the major powers of Europe since 1816, which period provides quantita-
tive data sets of wars. Their preferred method is statistical, but it is also
Euro- and modernity-biased. In contrast, historians study wars in many
periods and regions. They also remind us that wars do not come as sepa-
rate, independent cases to be aggregated into statistical models. They
come in sequences, in which experience of the past deeply influences the
living. Few historians, however, dare to engage in comparative analysis
across different regions or periods of history. I dare do this by drawing on
their detailed analyses.
As a comparative and historical sociologist, I cover sequences of war
and peace over several regions and periods of history, chosen because
they offer well-documented cases containing varied war frequencies—
namely, Rome, imperial China, the Mongols, Japan, medieval and mod-
ern Europe, pre-Columbian and Latin America, the world wars, and
recent American and Middle Eastern wars. Well-documented means ample
written records exist, but many societies have not left such records. I re-
gret that I have neglected historical South and Southeast Asian wars as
well as classical Greece for reasons of length, language, and personal ex-
haustion. I do not claim that mine is a representative sample of wars.
That is not possible to provide, since the total number of wars remains
unknown and many known ones are only minimally recorded, as in the
colonial wars touched on in chapters 8 and 10. I deal with sequences of
wars, for wars rarely come singly, and the past constrains the present.
This is the tyranny of history. I present simple statistics where they are
available. I focus on interstate wars, but since these are often linked to
civil wars and extrastate wars (wars involving nonstate contenders), I dis-
cuss them, too, where relevant and where records exist. Military power is
also used for domestic repression, which has been a precondition for rul-
ers’ ability to make any wars at all, but I will not discuss such repression
in much detail.
In the course of history, war has obviously changed enormously in
weapons, techniques, and organization. The lethality of weapons has
grown exponentially over the last few centuries, and the devastation of
airpower was added in the twentieth century and cyberwar in the twenty-
first. This required major changes in military organization and tactics.
The organization of state armies has become much more complex, and
the nature of battle has fundamentally changed. Body-on-body “fero-
cious” killing has partially given way to “callous” killing from a distance.
Soldiers no longer stand upright in battle. They would be decimated if
 Military Power and War 3

they did. Modern soldiers disperse in small units over larger battlefields,
seeking cover, living underground—quite successfully, since their casualty
rate has not increased, despite far more lethal weapons. Military medicine
has produced a major decline in those dying from their wounds, accom-
panied by greater consciousness of psychiatric ailments. Yet weapons, es-
pecially airpower, have increased the civilian casualty rate, and it is now
routine to define the total population of a country as the enemy. In the
modern period political and religious ideologies justifying war have pene-
trated more deeply into social structure. Finally, our evidence has greatly
increased in a modern surge in literacy, adding ordinary soldiers’ writings
and social surveys to chroniclers’ narratives in earlier periods.
In contrast, the causes of wars and the nature of war-and-peace deci-
sions have changed much less. The biggest variations have been among
different types of war. I distinguish wars of aggression, defense, and mu-
tual provocation or escalation. I also distinguish four main types of ag-
gressive war: (1) in-and-out raiding, (2) using military power to change or
strengthen regimes abroad to make them compliant, a form of indirect
imperialism, (3) conquest and direct rule over slivers of border territory,
and (4) conquest and direct rule of territorial empires. Obviously, a war of
aggression leads also to defense by those attacked, whereas many wars mix
up elements of more than one type. Also important has been the differ-
ence between symmetric and asymmetric warfare, that is, whether com-
batant forces were near equals in power or grossly unequal. Each of these
types of war has had certain common features through the ages, so that
generalizations are possible. But there is a historical contrast between
raiding and imperial conquest, on the one hand, and regime change and
slivers of territory, on the other. The former pair have almost disappeared
from the earth in recent decades, whereas the latter pair endure.
As a sociologist I hold to two methodological principles: on the one
hand, the need for analytical and conceptual rigor, which is necessarily
generalizing; on the other, the need to grasp empirical reality, which is in-
escapably varied. There is always tension, I hope creative tension, between
the two. I start with the universal concepts and one near-universal as-
sumption framing my research. I assume that we humans seek to increase
our valued resources—material possessions, pleasures, knowledge, social
status, and whatever else we might value—or at least that enough of us do
this to give human society its dynamism, its history. And in order to main-
tain or increase our resources, we need to exercise power, defined as the
ability to get others to do things that otherwise they would not do.
4 Military Power and War

There are two different faces of power. First, power enables some
humans to achieve their goals by dominating others. This is “power
over” others, called distributive power or domination, and it generates
empires, social stratification, social classes, and gender and racial domi-
nation. These are all drivers of war. Second, however, power also enables
humans to cooperate with each other to achieve things that they could
not achieve separately. This is “power through” others, or collective
power. Human development would not be possible without collective
power, people cooperating to achieve their goals, while almost all known
societies have contained distributive power relations, that is, social strati-
fication. Collective and distributive power are closely entwined, espe-
cially in the minds of rulers, who normally claim that their power over
others is wielded to the benefit of all, just as imperialists claim that they
bring the benefits of civilization to the conquered—as have Chinese,
Roman, European, Soviet, and now American rulers.
In the volumes of my Sources of Social Power, I distinguished four
sources of power: ideological, economic, military, and political. I have
also come to make three adjustments to this scheme. First, I distinguish
political power exercised within rulers’ domestic domains and “diplo-
matic,” peaceful geopolitical power exercised abroad. Second, I pair ideol-
ogies with emotions since both surpass empirical knowledge. Ideologies
and emotions “fill in the gaps” between pieces of scientifically and empir-
ically ascertainable knowledge. We do not have objective knowledge of
the world, and so we act with the help of generalized meaning systems
(such as liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, religion, or family values)
and emotional commitments. The two are entwined, since powerful ide-
ologies lead to strong emotions. Third, I have seen these four power
sources as means to achieve whatever goals people have. I still believe
this, but now I explicitly add that power can be seen as an end in itself,
which I will explain more in a moment.
Control over these power resources offers the principal ways in
which others can be induced to do things that they would not otherwise
do. Wielding ideological, economic, military, and political and geopoliti-
cal power is the principal means to achieve desired goals. So to explain
war, we must understand why humans choose war rather than use eco-
nomic exchange, shared cooperative ideologies, or peaceful politics or
geopolitics to secure valued ends. In fact, more disputes are settled or
simmer by these means, without leading to war. Geopolitics contains two
distinct elements: the effect of the geographic, ecological environment
 Military Power and War 5

on human action, as stressed by late nineteenth-century writers; and the

international relations between states and communities, as stressed by
today’s political scientists. Perhaps the choice of war is not quite the right
word. Rulers may feel constrained by the warrior role they believe is re-
quired of them. War is simply what Roman senators or Mongol khans or
French kings or American presidents do, habitually, when they feel
slighted or sense opportunity. Indeed, they do often feel they have no
choice in particular situations but to go to war.
The vast majority of people throughout history seem to have pre-
ferred peace to war, so far as we can judge. They have felt that they could
achieve their desired goals better through economic exchange, shared
ideologies, or diplomacy than through the exercise of military power. So
I am seeking to explain the exceptions, to explain war.

The (IR)Rationality of War

Are wars rational? The basic issue is whether wars do achieve desired and
desirable goals. If so, we might call a war rational; if not, it might be irra-
tional. But we must distinguish between rationality of means and ends.
Rationality of means concerns efficient decision making, which is mea-
sured and calculative, balancing goals against means, probably after some
debate, according to the best information knowable at the time, and
where the means of war seem to be adequate for reaching desired ends.
Irrationality of means occurs when the decision for war is made for hasty,
uninformed, emotional, or ideological reasons and when the means are
predictably inadequate to achieving the ends. Often the ends sought
through war are not reached. But this can happen for many reasons, not
all of which were predictable at the time of the decision to go to war.
War proved a mistake, but this was not evident beforehand—mistaken,
but not irrational.
So I add the legal principle of the reasonable person or bystander.
Would such a person have judged that war would achieve its ends? Obvi-
ously, rulers who commit to wars always think this is rational behavior.
Adolf Hitler thought so when invading Russia, declaring war on the United
States, and slaughtering Jews. But few others thought so, including many of
his generals. The judgment of rationality rests with contemporaries or later
scholars, including myself. There is room for disagreement, but a charge of
irrationality may be made where these observers conclude from the avail-
able evidence that the desired ends could not have been reached, whatever
6 Military Power and War

the later contingencies of the war. For example, this was my own view just
before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, as expressed in my book Inco-
herent Empire.1 Making the generous assumption that the main goal of the
Bush administration was the replacement of Saddam Hussein’s autocracy
with a democratic state, U.S. forces never had significant Iraqi allies who
shared this desire, and they had not prepared at all for confronting sectarian
divides among Iraqis. As I predicted, the Americans had to strike a deal with
some sectarian groups to rule over others, and a disorderly ethnocracy, not
an orderly democracy, resulted. This was an irrational war fought for a de-
lusory goal. So, largely, was the Ukrainian invasion launched by President
Putin in 2022. But in most wars the folly is not as glaring as this. Whether
there is irrationality of means may be arguable.
Judging the rationality of ends is problematic, since ultimately it in-
volves a judgment about whether war produces “benefit,” and for whom.
Benefit is contestable. Hitler devised an extraordinarily efficient program
to kill Jews, six million of them killed in only four years, a rationality of
means perhaps unequaled in all of history. Hitler and his acolytes be-
lieved that this genocide was also rational as an end, since they feared
that the mere existence of Jews threatened civilization itself. But virtually
no one else has believed this or would consider the end to be rational in
the sense of bringing any general benefit. To us, Hitler seems maniacal in
his pursuit of this goal. But this is an extreme case, and whether and to
whom a goal brings “benefit” is often arguable.
We are on somewhat safer ground with the narrower materialist view
of rationality as identified by Realist and Marxist theorists. They see wars
as mainly aimed at economic gain or geopolitical survival (or both), from
which the likely profit or secure survival derived from war may or may
not exceed its cost. There are four elements involved in this calculation:
weighing (a) the cost in money and (b) in lives against (c) the likelihood
of victory and (d) the rewards likely to ensue from victory. In my case
studies I try to assess the extent to which each of these elements is taken
into account. This kind of economic-military trade-off constitutes instru-
mental rationality, as Max Weber defined it. Where the costs are predict-
ably greater than the profit, war would be materially irrational. Yet even
this measurement is difficult since economic profit, casualty rates, and the
chances of victory do not share the same metric, and there is no way of
calculating how many deaths suffered are worth how much profit made
for what chances of victory. If human life is considered sacred, perhaps no
death is worth any amount of profit—the pacifist position.
 Military Power and War 7

Yet there is an intermediary position, for proportionality might be

applied. As we shall see, soldiers in battle often try to apply this: they will
accept risking their lives provided they are not being used as cannon fod-
der and if there is a good chance that victory is achievable. If they per-
ceive this is unlikely, they will try to subvert orders or mutiny or desert.
Under proportionality we might decide, for example, that the twenty-
one worst wars and atrocities in history in terms of deaths, which I list in
table 10.1, each of which resulted in the deaths of over three million
people, could not be considered rational, even if they brought profit for
the aggressors. But how many deaths would be worth it? There is no sat-
isfactory answer to this. Great conquerors may pay scant attention to the
lives of an “enemy” population, or indeed to their own troops’ lives.
From their point of view, the choice of war is rational, since it benefits
them and their circle. But we may feel that the benefit is not widespread
enough to be justified. At a minimum, we must carefully assess what ben-
efit accrues to what proportion of the people, and to judge how rational a
war is accordingly. Though we shall find that wars have varied consider-
ably in these terms, in general we shall see that most of them are irratio-
nal in terms of such means and ends.
Yet wars may be also aimed at desired but nonmaterial goals, such as
glory, honor, assuaging anger, exacting revenge, or pursuing an ideology.
Power may also be a valued end in itself. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “What
is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power,
power itself, in man. What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness. What
is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is over-
come. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war.”2
Those who command may get intrinsic enjoyment from dominating
others, regardless of what other benefits they might experience. They
enjoy the emotions they elicit from subordinates and conquered peoples,
ranging from adoration and admiration, through respect and envy, to ha-
tred, fear, and sheer terror. Chinggis (Genghis) Khan is reputed to have
said, “Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize
his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride
his gelding, use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and support, gaz-
ing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as
sweet as the berries of their breasts.”3
Political correctness prevents modern leaders from saying such
things, yet power remains an intoxication that might need no other justi-
fication. As the philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron said,
8 Military Power and War

“The satisfactions of amour-propre, victory or prestige are no less real

than the so-called material satisfactions, such as the gain of a province or
a population.”4 These satisfactions are somewhat ineffable, not easily
quantified. They may also bring not benefit but disaster to the people as
a whole. The pursuit of status, prestige, and honor by “statesmen” for
themselves and their state is an important source of war, independent of
what other rewards they might get from it. Moreover, a sense of excite-
ment and enjoyment in power may even trickle down quite broadly
among the people, as it probably did among the Romans and Mongols
and does among many Americans today, proud of their country’s military
power, which seems to boost their own egos.
When domination and glory are desired ends in themselves, this may
fit Max Weber’s second form of rationality, value rationality, which he de-
fined as “belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, re-
ligious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of
success. . . . The more the value to which action is oriented is elevated to
the status of an absolute value, the more ‘irrational’ in this [instrumental]
sense the corresponding action is. For the more unconditionally the
actor devotes himself to this value for its own sake, . . . the less he is in-
fluenced by considerations of the consequences of his action.”5
His term value rationality may seem paradoxical, but it certainly fits
Hitler’s perversion of rationality. Many powerful groups may be driven
by values overriding everything else—values for hatreds, glory, honor, or
ideological transformation. Rulers pursuing such ends might calculate
precisely the means available for achieving them. But are the ends “ratio-
nal”? The benefits they bring are usually distributed very unequally;
small elites benefit most. They may indicate endless ambition, without a
resting place—the malady of infinite aspiration, in the sociologist Emile
Durkheim’s words. The main problem of an infinite aspiration to con-
quer is the number of lives it destroys. War is a peculiar activity: it is de-
signed to kill a very large number of people, and this surely requires a
very high level of justification. Self-defense is generally considered such
a justification, but we will see that this is quite an elastic concept.
So I will tread carefully when dealing with the rationality of war,
trying to distinguish means from ends, errors from irrationality, costs
from benefits, the odds of victory, and social constraints. I try to assess
who benefited and who lost from the wars I discuss—for whom exactly
was war rational in the sense of beneficial? The answer is often almost
no one.
 Military Power and War 9

Defining Military Power

Human societies involve conflict and cooperation among persons wield-
ing varying blends of ideological, economic, military, and political or
geopolitical power. These provide the key dynamic of human history to-
ward the development of more and more complex and powerful socie­
ties. Conflicts may be relatively peaceful—using mixtures of ideological,
economic, or political-diplomatic power—or they may be warlike, re-
sorting to military power. Military power may also achieve desired ends
when merely threatened, without war following. The Chinese military
strategist Sun Tzu wrote in the sixth century bce, “The supreme art of
war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”6 War is only one way of
achieving ends, and we must ask in what circumstances human groups
turn to military power to achieve their goals.
So the first of three additional themes in this book concerns the
causes of war—when, where, by whom, and why war rather than peace is
chosen or stumbled into. If we want to achieve Immanuel Kant’s ideal of
perpetual peace, we need to know what to avoid that otherwise might
lead to war. I devote eight chapters to examining the causes and rational-
ity of wars through human history.
My second additional theme concerns the culmination of war, in bat-
tles, and its cost in terms of death or mutilation. I focus on exploring
how soldiers—normally men—are induced to accept such a risk. Why do
they fight despite the strong possibility that they will end up dead or
physically or psychologically mutilated? Few soldiers actually like battle,
so how do they cope with their dominant mental states in battle, which
are fear and loathing? Many have argued that soldiers have moral qualms
that are important in influencing their behavior in battle. I treat the
management of fear, loathing, and moral qualms in three more chapters.
These focus mainly on wars from the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury until today. Alas, this reduction of focus is necessary because these
have been the only wars in which most soldiers have been literate and
have thus left written records. I must apologize to sailors for excluding
their experiences, but this book is long enough without them. Flyers do
get some attention, though obviously only in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries.
My third additional theme concerns whether there has been a de-
cline of war, either throughout human history, or only in modern times,
or indeed merely since the end of World War II. In chapter 10 I dissect
10 Military Power and War

all these claims skeptically. No long-run or short-run trends can be dis-

cerned in the frequency of war. But this is not conventional military his-
tory. I neglect tactics, weapons, battle formations, and the like, except
when they influence the answers to the questions mentioned above.
Military power is the social organization of lethal violence. It coerces
people to do things they would not otherwise do by the threat of death
or serious injury. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz
said, “War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”7
Military power is physical, furious, unpredictable. Above all else, despite
the positive lures of army recruitment drives and despite armies’ role in
alleviating natural disasters, the main point of militaries is to kill people.
Since a lethal threat is terrifying, military power evokes distinctive psy-
chological emotions and physiological symptoms. The emotional inten-
sity of approaches to war, and of wars themselves, and of actual battle, is
much higher than the relatively pragmatic calm of economies and poli-
ties, while ideologies come both hot and cold. Clausewitz added a high
level of chance: “War is the realm of uncertainty: three quarters of the
factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or
lesser uncertainty. . . . War is the realm of chance.”8 He said this was due
to the “frictions” of battle, where nothing goes as planned. The Duke of
Wellington said war was “guessing what was at the other side of the hill.”
These generals suggest a random element in war that obviously threat-
ens our chances of reaching an overall theory of war.
These are the distinctive features of military power, separating it
from the other three power sources. This is not to deny an often close
relationship between political and military power, and I focus mostly on
interstate wars. But wars between communities lacking states, civil wars,
and nonstate guerilla forces will all play important roles, and so will con-
tradictions between military and political power revealed, for example, in
both coups and “coup-proofing” by rulers who deliberately weaken their
armed forces to protect themselves from their own generals. We cannot
merge these two forms of power.
Routinized coercion dominates within armed forces. Rank is all. Mil-
itary power provides the most rigid form of class structure found in
human societies. Those of higher rank must be obeyed, to a degree that
is unknown in ideological, economic, or political organizations. Soldiers
have formally signed away their free will. They cannot freely leave if they
find war not to their taste. They are under intense military discipline,
which is intended to stifle the urge to cower or flee. Their lives are dom-
 Military Power and War 11

inated by orders, however unpleasant or foolish officers might seem,

however savage the drilling and disciplining involved. If they do not
obey, they will be physically harmed, and sometimes even killed.
There are exceptions. Guerillas and other less formal militaries, like
tribal and some feudal forces, are freer in the sense that they may chal-
lenge orders and even decide to walk away from combat if they are dissat-
isfied. In modern armies there are also written codes of conduct that in
principle limit the power of higher ranks. You need to be very brave, how-
ever, to invoke such codes against your officers. There are differences even
among modern state armies—for example, between the rigid discipline of
eighteenth-century Prussian forces and the more easygoing American
armies of today. Nonetheless, armies wield fundamentally coercive power
within as well as without, to create a military culture in which for lower
ranks choice, rational or otherwise, may be very restricted.
Yet armed forces have a dual organizational form, combining the ap-
parent opposites of hierarchy and comradeship, of intense discipline and
strong esprit de corps, especially in elite regiments. These combinations
are cultivated by commanders so that soldiers will not rationally respond
to fear with flight, as you or I might. The commanders may also provide
alcohol or drugs to dampen soldiers’ sense of danger. This is again dis-
tinctive to organizations deploying lethal force. But military power
wielded externally, over enemy soldiers and civilians, is the most puni-
tive, fearsome, and arbitrary power of all.
Militaries depend on the other power sources: economic supplies
and the logistics to deploy them; ideological morale based on varying
combinations of solidarity, loyalty, patriotism, and belief that the war is
just and can be won; and political resources in the form of conscripted
manpower and revenue streams. Yet military power once mobilized has
an ultimately autonomous existence, for it alone can lay lives and territo-
ries to waste. Mostly it plays an intermittent role. In peacetime, which is
most of the time, it may be confined to barracks, guard duties, parades,
and exercises. It may slumber as a distinct military caste living in its own
communities on the fringes of society. In many tribal or feudal societies
and among guerillas, “armies” barely existed at all outside wartime. Yet
when war threatens, military power comes onto center stage in explosive
bursts, terrifying, destructive, and unpredictable.
The four sources of power are ideal types, and most real organizations
combine elements of more than one of them. Some economic organizations
wield some lethal power, as in systems of slave labor; and in ideological
12 Military Power and War

organizations, heresy may be met with death. There are lesser forms of
coercion—employees discharged may be blacklisted by other employers,
and someone who quits an ideological movement may suffer social ostra-
cism. If you live in a given political community, you are willy-nilly a citizen-
subject of that community, subject to its laws and punishments. Many states
inflict capital punishment and all forcibly fine or imprison or inflict physical
harm on lawbreakers. All forms of power organization wield some coercion,
many of them inflict physical punishment, and a few kill. But armies are
far more consistently and lethally coercive—within as well as without, since
casualties are suffered by all. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour prime minister of
Britain in the 1920s, remarked: “We hear war called murder. It is not: it is
suicide.” It is both.
There are also more benign aspects of military organization, mani-
fested in enthusiastic enlistment, warm comradeship, handsome uniforms,
banners, stirring brass bands, belief in a cause worth fighting for, and pa-
triotism. But in war these are secondary to inflicting death. The enthusi-
asm shown upon enlistment rarely survives long. This book is not about
the glories of military history. War is hell, and militaries train soldiers for
hell. Soldiers themselves come to know this. Civilians often do not.
One further definition. Militarism combines the power predomi-
nance of military elites in society, ideological exaltation of military vir-
tues above ideologies of peace, and extensive and aggressive military
preparedness. Militarism comes in degrees: some societies are highly
militaristic, others much less so—and so less likely to start wars.
Few rules restrain military power. “Rules of war” are difficult to en-
force, even in the era of Geneva Conventions and the International
Criminal Court. So far war crimes trials have been conducted only
against the losers of wars. The major charge brought against Nazi
leaders at Nuremburg was launching aggressive war, and this was also
prohibited in principle in the United Nations Charter and in later inter-
national treaties. But aggressive war has disappeared as a charge from
war crimes trials, which have focused on two other offenses, crimes
against humanity and genocide. Since U.S. wars today are mainly aggres-
sive, no American politician could accept that this charge be levied.
Numerous norms have also spread concerning “just” versus “unjust”
practices of warfare, but there have been many infringements, too.
Norms have especially concerned the treatment of fellow officers, of
prisoners, and of civilians, especially old men, women, and children, yet
these are often breached. The relative paucity of rules or norms is unlike
 Military Power and War 13

economic or ideological power—and especially unlike political power

whose core is law. War is the least lawlike, least predictable sphere of
human action—which makes both rational decisions and causal analyses
more difficult.

Defining War
A war is a lethal conflict between two groups organized by rival states or
communities, or by rival communities within countries riven by civil war.
Although interstate and civil wars are often kept apart in analyses, in re-
ality about one-third of wars mix them together. But how big does armed
conflict have to be to count as war? Not duels, or brawls, or even a mere
skirmish between rival patrols. But where do we draw the line? Do we
need to? Most political scientists have followed the “Correlates of War”
(CoW) research project, which has produced statistics on wars since
1816. It has defined war as an armed dispute that causes one thousand or
more battle-related fatalities inflicted within a twelve-month period. I
will not stick rigidly to that, and indeed lesser levels of fatalities have
been recently added by political scientists. A word of warning here: two
different terms, casualties and deaths (or fatalities), are used for losses. Ca-
sualties is the broader term, meaning all soldiers removed from battle by
death, wounds, capture, or having gone missing. Unfortunately, some
sources stating losses do not make clear which is being referred to.
Setting a required minimum number of deaths makes quantitative
analysis easier, and one thousand fatalities has the merit of including only
significant wars, but any threshold figure should merely be a rough
guideline. A conflict resulting in only five hundred battlefield deaths be-
tween two small countries is surely as significant for them as are five
thousand deaths in combat between two big ones. Furthermore, many
uses of military power fall short of war as defined above yet involve the
use or threat of lethal force. So political scientists have introduced an in-
termediary category between war and peace, “Militarized Interstate Dis-
putes” (MIDs), defined as conflicts in which the threat, display, or use of
military force short of war by one state is explicitly directed toward the
government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory
of another state. These range in intensity from mere threats to combat
short of one thousand casualties. Gary Goertz and his colleagues note
that the absence of war does not necessarily indicate peace. The Cold
War produced no fighting between American and Soviet forces, but one
14 Military Power and War

might not be inclined to call this “peace.” So they enumerate five catego-
ries of growing conflict short of war.9 These are relevant to whether re-
cent history has seen a decline of war, for decline might take the form of
a shift across these categories to lesser violence rather than to full peace.
Statistical analysis of war frequency and casualties is possible only in
the modern period—though rough figures are more widely available. But
statistics have limitations. These count all wars as one, no matter how big
(if it is over one thousand casualties), yet the two world wars dwarf the
twentieth century. Explaining them is likely to be a far more significant
exercise than explaining large numbers of lesser conflicts. Separating
them as single cases also ignores the fact that wars come in sequences,
each one influencing the next. Severity can be measured through the
number of deaths or casualties, but the quality of estimates varies greatly.
Civilian casualties are not included in the CoW measure of war, and they
are often impossible to calculate. Quantification also downplays history
and geography. The wars of different epochs and ecologies probably dif-
fer. The most obvious difference through time is the exponentially in-
creasing lethality of weapons, which require major adaptations. As Will
Rogers remarked, “You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for
in every war they kill you in a new way.” Each place and period has idio-
syncrasies, which makes generalization challenging.
Historical records are biased toward narrating war rather than peace.
War is exciting, peace boring. Can you “narrate” peace? It doesn’t
change. Great monuments like castles, triumphal stelae and arches, stat-
ues of warriors, and paintings of battles survive, often considered great
works of art, whereas peaceful peasants and workers leave few traces.
Since the winners of wars write the records, they suppress the losers’ ex-
periences and extol the glory, not the shame, of war. Nowadays, however,
victors’ accounts are challenged. Revisionism is now necessary for the
award of a history PhD, and there is much pulling down of statues of
warriors and slavers. Alas, this is belated criticism. There are periods and
regions for which written records, let alone statistics, of war are not
available, as in much of precolonial Africa. Imperial powers kept tallies of
their own dead but didn’t count dead natives. Especially difficult are esti-
mates of civilian deaths caused by war but indirectly, through malnutri-
tion and disease. We can estimate, if to varying degrees in different
periods and regions. But I now turn to a widely accepted generalization:
war is universal because it is human nature.
 chapter two
Is War Universal?

H
ow widespread is war? Are we doomed to repeat, genera-
tion after generation, Plato’s observation that “only the
dead have seen the end of war”? Perhaps war is hardwired
into either human nature or human society. All complex so-
cieties have had specialized groups of armed persons, and almost all have
raised armies. But have they all gone to war? There are two main sets of
findings on this question: whether war existed among very early human
societies, and variations in the incidence of war across space and time.
They both strongly suggest that war is not genetically programmed into
human nature.

The Earliest Human Societies

Much of the argument concerns the very earliest societies, which, since
the time of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many have believed
lacked war. Others have endorsed Ibn Khaldun’s fourteenth-century
statement: “Wars and different kinds of fighting have always occurred in
the world since God created it. It is something natural among human be-
ings.”1 The argument continues today.
Archaeologists are our first witnesses. They have found no remains
indicating organized warfare before discovery of a site in the Sudan
along the Nile River, dated to around 10,000 bce. In that site twenty-
four of fifty-nine well-preserved skeletons were found in close proximity

15
16 Is War Universal?

to what may have been parts of weapons—suggestive of group combat,

perhaps, but not conclusive. Clearer was the discovery of twenty-seven
skeletons at Nataruk in Kenya, datable to 8000 bce. Twelve of these were
well-preserved, ten of them showing evidence of a death inflicted by a
spear, arrow, or club. The bodies had not been given a proper burial,
which suggests that this was not a feud within a single community, but a
small war between rival bands.2 Nataruk was then adjacent to Lake Tur-
kana in a resource-rich environment, so it could have been a struggle be-
tween groups over rights to irrigated land or fishing. But there is no
indication of who the victims were or whether they were settled there.
In Australia there is evidence in cave paintings of duels between indi-
viduals dating to 8000 bce; there are paintings of group confrontations
datable to 4000 bce. In Central Europe disorganized mass burials of per-
sons conjectured to have died from either battle or execution date from
the period 5600–4900 bce.3 In Spain rock art similarly suggests a growth
in organized violence from the sixth to the third millennium bce, related
to the appearance of agriculture, more social complexity, and the emer-
gence of war leaders, identifiable by their burial goods, commanding
groups of warriors.4 Archaeologists of the early Bronze Age, from around
3000 bce in Europe, have correlated injuries on skeletons with unearthed
weapons of the time to conclude that these were deaths in combat. For a
little later period in the Balkans, it is estimated that weapons and body
armor represented about 5–10 percent of total bronze remains.5 Yet in
Central Asia there is no clear evidence of war until 3000 bce. In America
the first evidence dates to 2200 bce. In Japan right up to 800 bce, only
about 4 percent of skeletons reveal evidence of a violent death, and there
are no known cases of group deaths from violence. As Hisashi Nakao and
his colleagues observe, such gross variations across human communities
suggest that war is not built into our nature.6
We cannot be certain that these were the first cases of warfare, for
such an argument would rest on an absence of earlier finds. Perhaps ear-
lier evidence of war may be found in the future. Yet at present it seems
likely that minimally organized warfare began sometime after 8000 bce,
much later in some regions of the world, and it probably related to settled
farming.7 As William Eckhardt had earlier concluded in his review of the
literature, “War was a function of development rather than instinct.”8
Anthropologists have long disputed such issues. Lawrence Keeley
claimed that early hunter-gatherer societies were extremely warlike.9 But
Brian Ferguson went through Keeley’s early cases one by one, arguing
 Is War Universal? 17

that they had been cherry-picked.10 He concluded that only a few com-
munities regularly practiced warfare. Azar Gat defended Keeley by as-
sembling data on two groups, Australian aborigines and peoples of the
Pacific Northwest of Canada and the United States. He says they offer
“laboratories” in which primitive peoples observed by Westerners were
as yet “uncontaminated” by the violence of Western imperialism.11 Con-
tamination makes it difficult to generalize from the experience of pres-
ent-day hunter-gatherers to prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Recently
warlike groups, such as today’s Yanomami of Brazil, appear to have devel-
oped much of their ferocity in response to Western colonialism.12 But
Gat claims that his two uncontaminated groups were violent, probably
more so than modern societies in that a higher proportion of men died
as a result of violence.
Gat focuses on hunter-gatherers in Australia, using anthropologists’
estimates of killing rates in different regions.13 The numbers killed in
war are given over periods varying from ten years to three generations,
yet the estimates of total male population are apparently one-point-in-
time figures, and they do not take account of additional comings of age
of young men each year. Recalculating their figures to do this would give
violent death rates among men of 5–10 percent. These figures are still
quite high, comparable to rates found in modern wars. Yet in a band of
forty people that contained twelve men of fighting age, if archaeologists
dug up three whose wounds indicated a violent death, the rate would be
25 percent—higher than in modern armies but perhaps an artifact of
small numbers.
Hunter-gatherer war bands normally numbered fewer than thirty
men, and war was occasional and brief. It had to be brief since virtually
all healthy adult males in the community participated in them, and if
they were away on campaign, there would be no meat or fish for their
families. So before any attack was launched, the men would go on a
hunting expedition to provide enough food for their families during
their absence, but this had to be short. Gat says that in a war involving all
adult males, if an armed encounter went badly, most of the adult male
population might be killed. The highest death rates were almost never
found in set-piece battles, which were often terminated at the first casu-
alty. Instead, the most fatalities occurred in surprise ambushes. The ele-
ment of surprise could lead to a rout and massacre, followed by the
incorporation of most of the women and children of the defeated into
the victorious group. In terms of the proportion of a population killed,
18 Is War Universal?

these episodes have been surpassed in modern times only by genocides in

which the women and children are massacred, too. They were quite rare
events, however, not typical of normal aborigine skirmishing.
Richard G. Kimber concludes that “aborigines appear to have been
no different from other peoples on earth in that, despite a generally har-
monious situation, conflict did occur.”14 He also emphasizes the far more
massacres committed on aborigines by European settlers in Australia.
Lloyd Warner suggested that the death of young males allowed polygy-
nous marriages to continue.15 Peace would have created major conflict
between sex-starved young men and the clan leaders, who typically had
more than one wife. Polygyny was common among Australian aborigi-
nes, but uncommon among most other hunter-gatherers.16 Carol Ember
and Melvin Ember agree with Gat in seeing Australian aborigines as
rather warlike, as were the fishing communities of northwest Canada, at-
tributed to fixity of settlement around natural harbors, which generated a
healthy surplus.17 The Calusa of southern Florida were a more extreme
example of a warlike fishing community, engaged in large-scale slaving
raids, able to support three hundred full-time warriors.18
Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg provide a broader global survey
of twenty-one simple hunter-gatherer societies.19 In twenty of them, the
median level of lethality during a period of one to three years was only
three. Of these incidents, 64 percent involved one killer, one victim—a
murder or a fight. Only in twelve events among these twenty bands was
there a killing of persons from a different band. So war between bands
was rare, and homicide was more common. None of these twenty bands
was Australian. The twenty-first band was exceptional. It contributed no
less than 76 percent (thirty-eight of fifty) of the total number of inter-
band disputes, and this included seven strings of related killings, whereas
the other twenty bands had only two strings of killings among all of
them. The deviant group was the Tiwi of northern Australia. So indige-
nous Australians were rather aggressive, but elsewhere hunter-gatherers
made war rarely or not at all. The reason may be that they were clan so-
cieties which generate larger social units sharply distinguished from
other clans. Gat has refuted Rousseau’s claim that primitive peoples were
inherently pacific, but he has not shown that they were very warlike.
Warfare was rare.
Some early warfare was rarely deadly, according to anthropologists’
accounts of peoples in the interior of New Guinea who had had no con-
tact with white men. The men of two bands would meet in a clearing,
 Is War Universal? 19

sometimes by earlier agreement, and stand in parallel lines facing each

other, just inside either archery or spear-throwing range. They would
shout and swagger defiance and then throw or shoot. When one or per-
haps a few were hit, battle would stop, the men would disperse, and any
victim would be carried back to his village. Neither side was capable of
the coordination necessary to conquer the other or seize its territory.
Slaves were valueless in their economy, and more territory was only of
marginal value. These communities had neither the motivation nor the
ability to make war. Ritual combats were ways of venting grievances and
displaying one’s honor and bravery in a relatively safe way.20 Aggressive
behavior might flare up into violence, but this was ritually managed to
stop short of anything we might call war.
Such rituals might have been more successful than any achievements
made by the diplomats of history or by today’s international institutions of
conflict mediation sponsored by the United Nations and other agencies.
War was avoided over millennia, partly unintentionally, by maintaining a
mixed economy of horticulture and hunter-gathering from which war
rarely emerged, partly by deliberately avoiding the development of classes
and states, developing only what anthropologists call “rank” inequality of
status without inherited inequality of material possessions or political
power.21 If we could do without classes and states, there would probably
be no more war, an admittedly utopian prospect.
The likeliest conclusion is that pre-state communities contained in-
terpersonal violence but only rarely warfare.22 Christopher Coker argues
the opposite, but only by merging the two.23 Organized warfare may
have emerged first in fixed fishing and agricultural settlements producing
substantial surpluses and was enhanced when classes and states appeared.
Keith Otterbein says settled agriculture normalized organized warfare,
but it was helped by armed bands inherited from previous bands of hunt-
ers of large game.24 War then escalated when peoples were trapped
within fertile ecologies like wetlands and river valleys, so they could no
longer run away from attackers without major sacrifice. Their lands were
worth defending, and outsiders thought they were worth attacking.
Early states were surrounded by mobile “barbarians,” hunting and
gathering, foraging, practicing slash-and-burn horticulture or pastoralism.
James Scott notes that for a very long time most of the world’s population
lived in such communities, and only a small minority lived under states:
the first warring Sumerian states came “only around 3,100 bce, more than
four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism” because
20 Is War Universal?

mixed, decentralized economies predominated.25 To explain the appear-

ance of states and wars, he emphasizes the growth of grain crops, which
ripen all at the same time and are highly visible, impossible to hide. Thus,
they can be taxed, seized, and stored. Armed thugs could do this by force
and become an idle ruling class living off others’ surplus, helped by armed
retinues, city walls, administrative records, and wars to acquire slaves—all
serving to cage the people under their rule. So began almost all the world
civilizations. Other anthropologists disagree, seeing granaries as evidence
of collective sharing of resources. David Graeber and David Wengrow
have suggested that in early city-states relatively egalitarian and somewhat
“democratic” political institutions—such as town councils, neighborhood
ward associations, and political assemblies that included many women—
oscillated with institutions embodying more class inequality, aristocracy,
monarchy, and patriarchy.26 We cannot discern which made the more
wars, though threats from outside peoples often forced egalitarian groups
to place themselves under the protection of armed men. If these men
could manage to hold on to power or if outsider “marcher lords,” already
featuring kings and aristocracies, triumphed, then history’s dynastic em-
pires appeared and the scale of warfare increased.
So more than 95 percent of the 150,000 years of humans living on
earth had passed before the appearance of warring states. This means
that warfare is not genetically programmed into us. Biology is not des-
tiny; we are doomed to warfare not by our genes, but by societies. The
1986 Seville Statement on Violence, signed by distinguished scholars in
biology, psychology, ethology, genetics, and other human sciences, de-
clares that war is not genetically based, that we have not inherited a ten-
dency to make war from our animal ancestors, and that there has been
no natural bias toward aggressive behavior. Nor do some racial groups’
genes dispose them to more or less warlike behavior. Geneticists have
shown that despite superficial differences between human communities
in the shape of the nose, the color of the skin, and so on, human beings
are remarkably similar in their DNA sequences. Currently, about 85 per-
cent of human genetic variability has been found within racially defined
groups, only about 15 percent between them. Malešević provides a de-
tailed critique of essentialist genetic and biological explanations of vio-
lence and of explanations in terms of universal, stable, and biologically
uniform human emotions relevant to violence.27
Can we derive answers from our nearest relatives? Gorillas are not ag-
gressive. In a Rwandan forest I sat within a meter of a group of gorillas
 Is War Universal? 21

without any sense of danger. They ignored my presence although an enor-

mous silverback male brushed against my arm as he came ambling by me.
But humans share more genes with bonobos (apes) and chimps. Bonobos
are much less aggressive than chimps, but humans are more varied than ei-
ther. When relations between human groups deteriorate, they can become
much more violent and on a much larger scale than relations among
chimps. When human relations are good, they are very good, accompanied
by much greater payoff from neighborly relations than bonobos manage.
Humans do more than just mingle and have sex, like the peaceful bonobos.
They trade, share elaborate ceremonies, and generate the forms of cooper-
ation that led to their unique social development. “When it comes to in-
tergroup relations, we beat our close relatives on both the positive and
negative ends of the scale.”28 Coker notes that no fewer than seventy spe-
cies aggress violently against members of their species, but only the
human species makes organized warfare.29 Yet only humans also devise
complex, flexible, cooperative divisions of labor. Extreme variability of vio-
lence and cooperation seems to be distinctive to our species.
Individuals vary in propensity for violence. We all know people who
are aggressive, others who are meek and mild. We will see that a few sol-
diers like violence, for reasons of either sadism or heroism, but most sol-
diers do not. In many areas of social behavior, personality differences
matter little. The growth of capitalism depends not on a few persons
with distinct personalities but on large numbers of entrepreneurs and
workers whose personal differences will tend to cancel each other out.
But war-and-peace decisions are made by small numbers of persons,
sometimes by a single monarch, dictator, prime minister, or president.
Because of the powerful social role they occupy, their personalities mat-
ter considerably to outcomes of war and peace. Attila the Hun was likely
to make war, whereas Edward the Confessor preferred peace, and the
history of white America is from one mad king, George III, to another,
Donald Trump. Such idiosyncrasies limit general theory.
Yet whatever the human propensity for violence, cooperation has
played a larger part in social development. Those who fight die; those
who cooperate survive and prosper—a peaceful version of the survival
of the fittest. Like most behavioral characteristics, this one involves
opposites—we may have a propensity for violence, but we also have one
for cooperation (as we do for love and hate, introversion and extrover-
sion, and so on). Gat identifies cooperation, competition, and violent
conflict as the three fundamental forms of social interaction and says that
22 Is War Universal?

humans choose among them.30 He offers the paradox that war is both in-
nate and optional, by which he means that it is close to the behavioral
surface, triggered with relative ease. Steven Pinker’s bifurcation of human
nature into inner “angels” and “demons” is similar.31 For war-and-peace
decisions I prefer the metaphor of a balance. Human beings are perched
in the center. If their behavior tilts in one direction, we get war; if it tilts
in the other direction, we get peace. But the question is: What tilts them
one way or the other?
Randall Collins in his brilliant book Violence tilts a little toward
peace.32 Using a host of empirical descriptions of violence drawn mostly
from modern brawls, he suggests that most humans do not like violence
and are not very good at it. Confrontations rarely lead to actual physical
violence. Fights that do break out tend to range bullies against the weak
and are not like those in the movies. They are clumsy, imprecise, and
frenzied, involving more flailing and slapping than solid punching. By-
standers rarely get drawn in, as they often do in the movies. He adds that
in war soldiers are fearful to go “over the top,” and they have bowel
problems at the prospect. Violence is “hard,” he says, because “humans
are hard-wired for interactional entrainment and solidarity,” and this
propensity “is stronger than mobilized aggression.”33 Thus, most people
stick at bluster and bluff. To be violent, Collins says, most people have to
overcome fear and tension, and this happens either in ritualized encoun-
ters in which status concerns are primary, as in duels, or in unusual situa-
tions when people are “sucked into” what he calls a “tunnel of violence,”
when normal perceptions are distorted, pulse rates accelerate as cortisol
and adrenaline flood the body, and there is forward momentum down
the tunnel produced by a quick-fire sequence of events. One example is
“forward panic,” found especially in micro-conflicts in which bullies at-
tack the weak without mercy, but found also in wars, when one army fal-
ters and begins to flee, emboldening the other to rush forward and
engage in a killing frenzy. It is forward panic, he concludes, that leads to
most of the lethality of war.
Yet Collins hedges his bets with a principle of “social evolution”—
the growth of military power organizations. Armies have devised tech-
niques for keeping men fighting, even though they may be afraid—the
entrapping infantry phalanx, perpetual drilling, cultivating esprit de
corps, and an officer hierarchy backed by military police. At first tribal
warfare consisted of short skirmishes and involved much ritual defiance
but considerably less action. Thus, the capacity for violence has increased
 Is War Universal? 23

with greater, permanent social organization. Violence is not primordial,

and civilization does not tame it; the opposite is nearer the truth, Collins
says.34 Civilization makes killing easier, more organized, more legitimate,
and more efficient, adds Malešević.35 Yet armies are highly efficient orga-
nizations only before they encounter the enemy. Then all hell breaks
loose. Battles are chaotic and terrifying, the soldier sees that the enemy is
trying to kill him, there is no escape (as there is in street brawling), and
his own survival becomes unpredictable. Fear, anger, uncertainty seize
the mind, and reason is subordinated to emotion. As one side flees dur-
ing an incident of forward panic, the most murderous sentiments among
the victors are suddenly induced as fear and uncertainty are released.
Anger swells at those responsible for the fear and the deaths of com-
rades. Their charge forward, accompanied by triumphant cries, rein-
forces emotional hatred. For Collins serious violence needs both strong
social controls and unusual situations.

Variations in the Frequency of War: Gender and Region

Militaries have been overwhelmingly masculine. When we glimpse the
mass armies of Rome, China, Japan, pre-Columbian America, Europe,
and elsewhere, we must visualize them as dense phalanxes of men, not a
female face in sight. Higher officers were older men, while rankers were
youngish males. Warrior norms, masculine and machismo, have ampli-
fied the gender bias. The sense of honor so important in war has been
masculine, “being a man.” Irregular guerilla forces throughout history
have contained women, but fighting soldiers in regular armed forces
have been men. The average male is physically stronger and faster than
the average female, so that males on average made better soldiers in the
battlefield body slashing, which lasted for most of history. This is pre-
sumably why armies were male, and it may be why patriarchy enshrining
male dominance became the norm in human societies. Men were armed,
women were not. In earlier hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies
that lacked war, there was relative equality between the sexes. Maybe
Amazon warriors existed, though this has not been proved, but women
have mostly predominated among camp followers. In recent times many
women have had nonfighting roles, as medics, drivers, clerks, cooks, and
computer operators. So is war only part of male genetic makeup?
Women now, however, can equally fire guns and drive tanks, planes,
and drones, and more are becoming fighting soldiers. In World War I
24 Is War Universal?

many women served as noncombatants in all armies, and some died per-
forming their duties. But in 1917 the Kerensky Provisional Government
in Russia, desperate for soldiers, founded fifteen women’s fighting units.
The first Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, all volunteers, was sent to
the front and fought with greater enthusiasm than their war-weary male
conscript comrades. Since the men wanted the war ended, they hated
these women, who seemed to want to prolong it. A second Battalion of
Death was disbanded as the Kerensky government changed policy, but
about five hundred of these women went on their own initiative to the
front. A female light cavalry Cossack unit also went, and another unit
was posted to defend the provisional government headquarters in the
Winter Palace. Months later it was overwhelmed by mostly male Bolshe-
vik soldiers. Veterans of such units then fought on both sides in the Rus-
sian Civil War, though not in all-female units. Russia led the world in
female death dealing.
In the interwar period women fought in the Finnish, Spanish, and
Irish civil wars, as they probably had in earlier civil wars. In World War
II thousands of women fought in the Red Army and the Serb resistance.
Slav women still led in killing! In the Indian National Army allied with
the Japanese the Rani of Jansi was a regiment of women. Elsewhere, few
fought. British and German authorities in World War II authorized
women to staff antiaircraft batteries but not to pull the trigger, a task re-
served for masculinity.36 In the Vietnam War over one hundred thousand
women fought for the PLF (the Vietcong) and the NVA (the North Viet-
namese Army), especially as guerillas and in bringing supplies along the
Ho Chi Minh Trail. They took heavy casualties. From the 1970s about a
dozen regular armies have in principle accepted women into almost all
roles, but in practice women have rarely fought. Since modern killing
rarely requires big muscles (except for infantry carrying loads of up to
forty-five kilos), it is only a matter of time before women will become
equal killers. In the U.S. and British air forces there are already women
drone killers. We are discovering that supposedly masculine and ma-
chismo sentiments might not be necessary features of militarism, though
these were ever-present in the armies of the past. Female participation in
war atrocities will come, as it already has in some civil wars. War is not
programmed genetically into human beings or only into men. But cul-
turally and in numbers, it has obviously been male so far.
The human nature of soldiers is largely (though not entirely) irrele-
vant. What matters is that they obey orders. They are always initially ter-
 Is War Universal? 25

rified, they would often prefer to flee than fight, but they do usually
fight, and only a few desert. They are not genetically programmed to do
this; they fight because they are socialized and drilled and disciplined,
and because they are trapped in their military formations, especially on
the battlefield. Clearly, however, there are personality differences. Some
soldiers are braver or more vicious than others.
Exaggerating the frequency and scale of war is widespread. Ibn Khal-
dun noted that in his time chroniclers grossly exaggerated the size of
armies because sensationalism sold.37 There is a persistent internet myth
(whose source is unclear) that of the supposed 3,400 years of recorded
human history, only 268 have been entirely peaceful. This is bizarre.
Who could possibly know this? Yet even if it were true, it would only
mean that somewhere across the world one dispute turned into war
every fifteen months. The vast majority of human groups in any given
year would be at peace. Scholars have given estimates of wars in Europe
over several centuries varying between 1.1 and 1.4 wars per year. Again,
that means that somewhere in Europe slightly more than one war was
ongoing, so that almost all its very many states were at peace. Ditto with
estimates for historical China. Though complex societies containing
states and social classes have a propensity to make war, their years of
warfare are far outnumbered by their years of peace, and their conflicts
are far more likely to have been settled by diplomacy, or they remained
as running sores without wars.
For warfare since 1816, we can draw on statistical data that reveal
large differences between countries and regions. The CoW criterion of
at least one thousand battle deaths in a single year reveals sixty-six inter-
state wars occurring since 1816. Of these sole or main warring states, 54
percent were European.38 Yet this is an understatement. If we add the
seventy-one CoW colonial wars fought by the Europeans against state-
less peoples, their contribution rises to 68 percent. But this still under-
counts colonial wars. In the forty-three-year period from 1871 to 1914,
the British, French, and Dutch between them probably fought at least a
hundred military engagements against native forces—about 2.5 wars per
year.39 Thus, Europeans have probably perpetrated well over 80 percent
of all wars since 1816, an astonishing disproportion, considering that Eu-
ropeans contributed only 15 percent of world population at the begin-
ning and 11 percent at the end of this period.
Europeans were from Mars. Evan Luard pushed back the statistics
for war in Europe over another four centuries to the year 1400, and Jack
26 Is War Universal?

Levy did it to 1494.40 They reveal that Europeans’ propensity for war re-
mained quite high over half a millennium. In the period 1400 to 1559,
Luard finds an average of 1.4 wars fought per year; from 1559 to 1648,
the average was 1.25 per year; and from 1648 to 1789, he says it was only
0.29—but these were mostly big wars between the great powers that had
a consequent large rise in casualties.41 Such averages conceal big differ-
ences between countries. At the extreme, Sweden and Norway fought no
wars at all after 1816, but in earlier centuries Sweden had fought many
wars, which indicates differences between time periods as well as coun-
tries. In the post-1816 data sets, no other continent or region has been
anywhere near as warlike as Europe. Latin America since 1833 has had
only about twelve such interstate wars (see chapter 9).
In the nineteenth century, wars among Africans probably in-
creased—and the scale of warfare certainly increased—as African leaders,
influenced by Western imperialism, conquered empires of their own. We
know that some of this, like that in the Zulu kingdom, was bloody, but
numbers of casualties are unknown. Nonetheless, African interstate wars
have been almost nonexistent since the colonial powers departed (though
civil wars have raged there). Before then, Europe had led in war making,
followed at a distance by Asia, then the Middle East, and Latin America
and Africa lagging behind. The African and Latin American postcolonial
ratios of interstate wars are three to five times less than the global aver-
age.42 My tentative conclusion is that other continents and countries in
modern times came more from Venus than Mars—though not entirely,
for few known societies have been entirely free of war over long periods.
We know of both warlike and relatively peaceful cases in all periods
of history. In ancient Near Eastern history we can perhaps contrast war-
ring Sumerian city-states and then Sumerian dynasties with the more
peaceful Egyptian Old and Middle Kingdoms.43 There are two likely ex-
planations. First, the economic wealth of Egypt was protected from mili-
tary predators by deserts, and so states did not have to invest heavily in
fortifications; on the other hand, the wealth of the Sumerian cities was
open to attack from adjacent plains and hills, and so they built up sub-
stantial fortifications. But, second, Egypt was mostly a single kingdom,
again encouraged by the ecology of the Nile Valley, whereas Sumer,
though a single culture, was divided into city-states that warred intermit-
tently with each other.
Archaeologists no longer believe in a “Mayan Peace.” The Maya of
pre-Columbian Central America appear from their paintings, sculptures,
 Is War Universal? 27

and texts (now deciphered) to have become highly war-prone.44 Weap-

ons, a few fortifications, and depictions of violence have been found on
Minoan Crete, but they are rare, and violence seems to have been more
ritualized than murderous.45 Graeber and Wengrow connect this to what
they see as the political dominance of women in Minoan society.46
The Indus Valley civilization may have been the most peaceful of all.
A century of excavations has unearthed two major and several minor cit-
ies with sophisticated water and sewerage systems, standardized weights
and measures, literacy, but no evidence of palaces, temples, armies, wars,
armor, weapons (except those designed for hunting animals), or skeletons
bearing the marks of violent death. We have depictions of men and gods
fighting wild animals, but not fighting other humans or gods. The archi-
tecture of the cities suggests a relatively egalitarian and highly coopera-
tive society that was engaged in much trade with Mesopotamia and
India, but apparently not in wars. In the decline and collapse of the civili-
zation, there are no ash deposits of burned buildings, nor do citadels re-
veal the kinds of damage we associate with fighting. Flooding from sea
and river seems a likelier cause of collapse. It is possible that future exca-
vations or a successful deciphering of its script will reveal more violence,
but at the moment this civilization stands as the longest-lived exception
to the ubiquity of war. Part of the explanation might be ecology, for the
lands around were relatively barren, supporting few people and no sig-
nificant rival state, and the few partially fortified settlements found were
by the seacoast, where pirates might come from afar. This does not ex-
plain why there seem to have been also no civil wars. There were a num-
ber of distinct cities, but no evidence of conflict between them.
There have been better-documented but shorter periods of more
recent peace. For 250 years, from 1637, Korea was a peaceful “hermit
kingdom,” avoiding relations with other countries apart from tribute em-
bassies sent to China and opening one port to Japanese merchants. For a
further hundred-plus years, Korea initiated no foreign wars, though it
was attacked several times. Japan was also self-isolating and peaceful for
250 years from the early 1600s. Switzerland has not declared war since
1531, although it suffered brief civil wars, and some Napoleonic wars
were fought by foreigners in Swiss territory. Sweden has not experienced
war since 1814. Thus, large differences have existed between regions and
periods.
After World War II came an abrupt European reversal. Since
then Western Europeans, like Africans and Latin Americans, have fought
28 Is War Universal?

almost no interstate wars, while the Middle East, Asia, and the United
States have taken over martial leadership. In fact, war participation by
Western Europeans elsewhere in this period has been almost nonexistent
if we exclude Britain and France. The other Europeans were now sud-
denly from Venus. Before 1945 it might have been thought that war was
structurally programmed into European society, but the same generation
that had made the most cataclysmic war of all switched to peace—
indeed, that is part of the explanation. Thus, “European character” is
neither inherently warlike nor inherently peaceful. It has fluctuated ac-
cording to social and geopolitical context.
We find similar time differences in China. Here we have historical
records from the eighth century bce. Between 710 and 221 bce (the date
of the founding of the unified Qin Empire) there were wars in 75 per-
cent of these 489 years, at an average of about 1.6 wars each year. These
figures are comparable to those of martial-era Europe.47 The Chinese
were also from Mars. After 221 bce, wars involving China decreased,
though with big variations between regions. There were also civil wars,
where dynastic succession was disputed. But as the Chinese Empire de-
clined, Japan rose, and since Russia also became expansionist in the Far
East, warfare revived significantly there. Since 1945 Japan has again been
peaceful, while some other East Asian countries have had wars. The
United States has also had an uneven record, its military aggression hav-
ing peaked in the most recent decades. But there has been no war with
Canada since 1812.

Conclusion
Given such geographical and historical contrasts, the causes of war do
not lie in the evolution of an essential human character, as Coker has
claimed.48 Indirectly, of course, human nature does matter, for that yields
hot tempers and aggressive ideological commitments, but these are vari-
ably distributed. Instead, the causes of war lie in differing social roles,
class and state structures, and institutions and cultures that tilt the war-
peace balance and killing ratios one way or the other. I explore this
in chapter 4 onward, using historical narratives of six relatively well-
documented cases. I have selected one case where wars were always
frequent—ancient Rome; two where they began frequent but then be-
came fewer—ancient China and medieval and modern Europe; one that
showed great fluctuations—late medieval to modern Japan; one where
 Is War Universal? 29

interstate wars were at first plentiful and then became rare—precolonial

and postcolonial Latin America; and one making the most recent and
most global wars—the United States. Where possible I discuss their co-
lonial wars too. To these cases I add a brief description of postcolonial
Africa in which interstate wars have been rare but civil wars common. I
hope that this variety, combined with my global span, protect me from
possible charges of modernism, Eurocentrism, or cherry-picking my
cases to fit some particular theory. It also allows me to explain why some
times and places have been much more warlike than others. But first I
explore how others have viewed the causes of war.
 chapter three
Theories of the Causes of War

T
he causes of war are many. They concern the motives and
the powers of the rival protagonists—desired ends and avail-
able means—the nature of the issues in dispute, escalating in-
teractions, and the broader contexts, ecological, geopolitical,
and historical, that might escalate disputes into war. All must figure in an
explanation of war.
There have been many motives for making war. Economic motives
include seizing wealth, land, and labor, free or unfree, getting tribute,
dictating the terms of trade, and the mixed economic-sexual seizing of
women. Political motives are aimed at enhancing rulers’ domestic politi-
cal power, rewarding one’s clan and clients, and deflecting internal con-
flicts onto foreign enemies. Geopolitical motives aim to enhance status
in the geopolitical system, aid threatened allies, co-ethnics, or coreligion-
ists abroad, preempt perceived threats by others, and avenge earlier in-
sults or defeats. Military motives include enjoying imposing terror, being
confident in victory, and self-defense. Ideological motives include ag-
gressive nationalism, forcing religious or political ideologies on others,
militarism internalized as a desirable code of conduct, and pursuing re-
dress for a perceived slight, revenge, honor, status, or glory through war.
All these motives are goal-oriented and assume some degree of means-
ends rationality and calculation.
The number and diversity of motives are striking, and they generally
come not singly but in combinations varying through the descent into

30
 Theories of the Causes of War 31

war. Descent adds interactions between rulers and their armed forces. As
Clausewitz observed, war “is not the action of a living force upon a life-
less mass . . . but always the collision of two living forces”—and often
more than two.1 Motives alone do not tell us why war happens, since al-
ternative means are available to achieve most desired ends. For example,
one can obtain wealth through peaceful cooperation and economic ex-
change, or by threats or trade embargoes short of war. Why is war some-
times chosen instead? There is not agreement about this among scholars
of war.

Political Power: Inside Societies and States

Who exactly makes war-and-peace decisions? We talk of Rome against
Carthage or the Chinese against the Mongols or the United States against
Iraq. These are unavoidable simplifications, but we should not assign mo-
tives to states or nations. The decision makers are always specific human
beings, and they are almost always small coteries of rulers and their advis-
ers. Persons have motives and emotions, institutions do not. Elites often
contain rival war-and-peace factions—Werner Sombart’s Händler und Hel-
den, merchants and heroes. They dispute the merits of war versus peace,
or war versus trade, or offense versus defense. Their struggles will often
decide whether there is war or peace.
In complex societies containing a division of labor, the conduct of
war is usually assigned to a professional warrior caste. Warriors have
their own motives, which might be more or less warlike (since they are
generally aware of the horrors and limitations of war). Some generals
might prefer not war but a climate of fear, so that they are given large re-
sources without risking their lives. Political rulers may conversely fear
their generals’ power to mount coups or rebellions, and so they may de-
liberately weaken them, reducing the likelihood of making aggressive
war; this happened persistently in imperial China (see chapter 6) and was
also important in the recent Middle East (see chapter 14).
Historians often emphasize popular pressures on war-and-peace de-
cisions, but I am skeptical. The masses are rarely involved in such deci-
sion making since they lack interest—in both senses of the word—in
foreign policy. “Popular” pressures can turn out influential pressure
groups or mobilize crowds but only rarely the mass of the people. Some
pressure might well up from below, but most is organized by pressure
groups with special interests at stake, or are stoked by mass media for
32 Theories of the Causes of War

whom war fever sells or by students who love to demonstrate. There are
some warrior-dominated societies, like the Mongols and the early Mus-
lim Arabs, and also a few ideological wars in which a mass movement
pressurizes rulers. Yet Hermann Goering, a leader of such a mass move-
ment, dismissed this when arguing with the U.S. jurist Gustave Gilbert
in his Nuremberg prison cell in 1946 before his execution:

Goering: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why

would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war
when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm
in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; nei-
ther in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter
in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of
the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a
fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people
have some say in the matter through their elected representa-
tives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Goering: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice,
the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same way in any country.2

Goering was right, although saying so did not exactly help his
chances of survival! Even in the United States the president and his ad-
visers can manipulate their way into wars. War is the sport of rulers. For
the masses the main curse is war, not who wins it. Yet institutionalized
power relations ensure that the masses follow their rulers into battle,
even sometimes with enthusiasm. They have no alternative sources of
knowledge to what their rulers tell them about the evils of the enemy,
and they are usually ignorant beforehand of how terrible war will prove
to be—for wars are irregular events. In advance, war seems like a mascu-
line adventure story to young men. Reality strikes for soldiers only in
their first battle, while reality dawns on civilian populations, male and fe-
male of all ages, only in long, costly wars or when war is fought in their
own fields and cities. Wars may be only superficially popular—but that is
 Theories of the Causes of War 33

enough to start them, and then they entrap everyone. Soldiers can be
trapped by military hierarchy, the battlefield, their own values, or their
sense of duty in “getting the job done.” Former president Herbert
Hoover declared in a 1944 speech: “Older men declare war. But it is
youth that must fight and die.” War is a conspiracy among old rulers to
kill the young. War has also normally been a male activity, although
women have generally regarded war as necessary and encouraged their
men to fight, shaming them if they don’t. Few women have been paci-
fists; rather, they were not asked to fight.
The rarity of popular interest in foreign policy has attracted cynical
views of war as a political tool wielded by the upper class. Thomas More
gave sixteenth-century expression to this in his Utopia: “The common
folk do not go to war of their own accord, but are driven to it by the
madness of kings.”3 Marxists present a modern version: war is a ruling-
class strategy to deflect internal class conflicts onto an outside foe. Yet
Levy presents evidence suggesting this is rare, and Geoffrey Blainey says
a government weakened by domestic strife might want to promote a
rally ’round the flag sentiment by conjuring foreign threats but is un-
likely to go so far as to declare war.4 Instead, he finds in the period 1816–
1939 that a nation weakened by internal strife is more likely to be
attacked by others. It is also dangerous for rulers to arm their subjects.
Victory in the 1914–18 war might have boosted Habsburg and Romanov
dynasty rule, as was intended by those pressing for war. But defeat
brought revolution by workers and peasants bearing guns, as dissenters
in both courts had warned. “War fever” does dampen class tensions in
the short term, and a quick victory legitimizes rulers, but prolonged war-
fare does so only if successful (and even then not always). Today, disputes
among nuclear powers cannot rationally be translated into war, but pro-
moting fear of the other is useful to preserving one’s rule. The current
terrorist threat is typically exaggerated, but it places society on a perma-
nent threat alert, increasing state power and reducing civil rights while
not risking major war.
Marxists are right that the ruling class makes the decisions for war,
and other classes die as a result. They are also right to note that in pre-
capitalist modes of production with economic surpluses, these were usu-
ally extracted from the direct producers by force in the form of unfree
labor statuses, such as serfdom, corvée labor, and slavery, all supervised
by military power. This was necessary for the rulers to live in luxury or
to fight any wars at all. But are wars a rational strategy by dominant
34 Theories of the Causes of War

classes to deflect class conflict? The rulers would have to be confident

that they would win the war quickly—although we will see that overcon-
fidence in victory is normal. It may be more common for rulers to go to
war to demonstrate their political strength to rival elites. The deflection
of conflict within ruling classes rather than between them might have
been more typical.
Political scientists used to argue that democracies do not go to war,
but this is not true. Institutionalized democracies do rarely suffer civil
wars since they have routinized electoral procedures for regime succes-
sion, whereas monarchies and dictatorships are intermittently plagued by
succession crises, and democratizing societies in ethnically plural socie­
ties are vulnerable to civil war and ethnic cleansing, as I showed in my
book The Dark Side of Democracy.5 The “democratic peace” argument has
been modified into the claim that democracies do not go to war against
other democracies. Levy says, “The absence of war between democracies
comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international
relations.”6 But this comes from focusing on wars between major repre-
sentative democracies, mostly Western, in the period since 1816. This ig-
nores the earlier war making democracies of history such as some Greek
city-states and some early Sumerian city-states—highly imperfect de-
mocracies, yes, but so are our own.7 Modern colonial wars involved many
native peoples who had direct democracies in which the whole commu-
nity or all men decided on war or peace, and anyone had the right not to
fight. Such groups often fought against each other. One curious contrary
case was the Iroquois Nations’ League, which embodied a “Great Law”
of peace lasting from 1450 to 1777.8 During this time the nations kept
their own political autonomy and decided their own policies. Yet the in-
dividual nations waged war against outsiders, killing, torturing, and even
sometimes eating them, but they never warred against each other or col-
lectively, as a league. Finally, whatever constitutions say, in most modern
democracies decisions for war are more often made by the executive
branch than by parliaments, let alone by the people.
Yet political science has spawned a “triumphalist” democratic school
seeing democracies as not only more pacific but more successful in the
wars they do fight.9 Yet Alexander Downes says that Dan Reiter and Allan
Stam combine those attacked (called targets) with those joining a war
later (joiners), and that they exclude wars in which there is no victor.10
When targets and joiners are separated, and draws are included (for they
indicate lack of success), democratic states, whether initiators, targets, or
 Theories of the Causes of War 35

joiners, are neither more likely to win nor more likely to lose wars. Other
political scientists maintain that democracies fight more effectively, hav-
ing bigger economies, stronger alliances, better decision making, more
public support, and better soldier morale. Michael Desch has roundly
criticized this, finding no significant relation between war capacity and
regime type.11 He concludes: “The good news is that contrary to some
defeatists inside and outside the U.S. government, democracy is not a lia-
bility for a state in choosing and effectively waging war. The bad news,
however, is that democracy is not as large an asset as triumphalists main-
tain. In sum, regime type hardly matters.”12 The twentieth-century armies
of authoritarian Germany, the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam enjoyed
superior morale to their democratic opponents. When we add Islamist
fighters (see chapter 14), ideological morale compensated for the techno-
logically superior armies confronting them.

Economic Goals, Military Means

Seeking material gain is an important cause of war, and military power
supplies the means. Calculating the relations between them dominates
much theory. Yet why choose war to get richer? War is costlier in money
and lives, it is riskier since it may result in defeat or a costly draw, and it
makes enemies. On the plus side, victory may yield immediate reward in
the form of tribute, but this may last only as long as you can enforce it.
Conquest and direct rule may give more secure possession of resources,
especially of geographically fixed resources like fertile soils, minerals, or
harbors, but their administration is costly. Slaves, normally acquired by
war, permit more intensive exploitation than free waged labor. Slavery,
however, has costs in its need for coercive supervision and its lack of
labor flexibility (you don’t lay off slaves when business is bad).
Sexual motives have usually figured in raiding. Raiders typically
raped women or carried them off as wives or concubines or slaves. The
motives were to satisfy sexual desire, to exercise dominance, or to increase
the victors’ rate of reproduction, thereby making their group stronger.
Rape is also easy for armed men to accomplish. In modern warfare rape
remains common; indeed, the highest total of known rapes in a single
campaign was perpetrated by Red Army soldiers in 1945, who raped an
estimated 2 million German women. Though today rape is still common,
carrying women off is much less so, except in nonstate armies. In earlier
societies raiding rather than full-scale war was often sufficient to carry off
36 Theories of the Causes of War

loot, slaves, and women from territories that the raider could not stably
control.
For much of history, victors reaped the spoils of war—land, loot,
slaves, women. Provided war was not too costly and they survived, rulers
and most soldiers could benefit and war might be rational for them in
terms of ends. This was Weber’s “booty capitalism”—risky but profitable.
But the general population back home might not benefit. European ex-
pansion into the world was rational in terms of ends for many younger
sons and settlers, but not for most of the population. Probably only two
European countries, Holland and Britain, made a net long-term profit
from their colonies.13 Perception of profit was what mattered, however,
and overoptimism was normal among war makers. The conquistadores,
soldiers, merchants, plantation owners, and settlers directly participating
in colonial ventures might make a large profit if they survived the battles
and diseases. The risks were great, but so were the potential profits,
though the financiers staying at home did best. Few Americans have de-
rived material benefit from recent wars. Many, perhaps most, defensive
wars are rational in ends if successful, though they rarely bring additional
material resources.
Wealth can also be sought by military threats short of war, aimed not
at conquest but at tribute or coercing the terms of trade. The different
types of empire identified in volumes 3 and 4 of my Sources of Social Power
involved varying degrees of military coercion. Informal empire, for ex-
ample, threatens military power but uses it only in short bursts aimed
not at territorial conquest but at demanding homage and tribute or dic-
tating the terms of production or trade. “Tributary empires” receive trib-
ute from rulers who otherwise might remain in control of their domains.
If they refuse, they may be removed and replaced with more reliable
clients. There is also the reverse tributary case, where an empire pays
tribute to its neighbors so that they will not attack it. It was cheaper for
China to pay off barbarians than pay for military forces to fight them.
The United States today can learn from this (see chapter 14). While bet-
ter-developed societies may make forays against less well-developed ones
by virtue of perceived military superiority, they themselves may be
tempting targets for less economically developed but militarily skilled
raiders, as Rome and China were for barbarian neighbors: they offered a
spectacle of such riches that if the barbarians could raid and run away it
might be rational to try it. The inhospitable terrain of their homelands
and their military mobility gave them motive and opportunity.
 Theories of the Causes of War 37

Those seeking war for economic gain should be constrained by their

material means of making war—the cost in both money and lives of mili-
taries and their effectiveness relative to their rivals. Military power may
tempt states into aggression if they perceive easy pickings. Yet many wars
are fought between powers or alliances of powers that are evenly
matched, and these tend to produce longer, costlier wars. It is less clear
why their rulers should rationally choose war rather than other means of
increasing rewards. The opposite puzzling case is where lesser powers
defy and fight those that are much stronger. Why do they not do the ap-
parently rational thing and give in? On occasion, military tactics may off-
set inferior numbers. Ever since Sun Tzu’s time, military writers have
stressed that concentration of forces against the enemy’s weakest point in
battle matters most, not overall inequality of forces. Yet since both sides
are trying to do this, the bigger battalions generally do win, though there
are exceptions. Political scientists have also tried to find good reasons for
the weak to resist the strong, though only for modern wars.14
Most wars are fought between neighbors over disputed border terri-
tories, who claim this is rational in both economic and strategic terms.
Yet they usually add on moral assertions, bringing emotions into the dis-
pute, especially in “revisionism,” whereby one party claims the right to
territory it used to own but then lost—as do Russia and China today or
the extraordinary pitting of a claim based on one thousand years of Arab
land ownership in Palestine against a rival Jewish settler claim dating
back to a purported gift by Jehovah himself! Wherever territory is lost,
there will be revisionism. Economic interests tend to be quantifiable and
capable of compromise, as in splitting the difference in rival territorial
claims. But deaths cannot be objectively measured against profit, and if
we add righteous emotions, compromise becomes difficult. It is rare to
find a war that does not invoke notions of right and justice. Economic
power relations do cause disputes, while escalation to war should include
calculating costs, benefits, and relative military strengths; yet other moti-
vations, emotions, and situations are necessary to explain why the hor-
rors of war are accepted so often.

Contexts 1: Ecology
I will place war-and-peace decisions amid the contexts of geography and
history. Geography was emphasized in late nineteenth- and early twenti-
eth-century geopolitical theory, but recently geography has given way to
38 Theories of the Causes of War

politics. Archaeologists suggest that war began when human groups set-
tled fixed natural environments that could support them and which they
called their own—as John Locke had argued. When peoples irrigated
fertile river valleys, they were trapped there by Mother Nature. If they
left, it would be to less fertile land. Their lands were worth defending,
and less economically privileged neighbors with military resources
thought they were worth attacking. The sight of wealthy cities with fer-
tile fields and fat animals lured pastoralists skilled at raiding. So cities
built up their military defenses and perhaps retaliated with punitive raids,
and war intensified. Wars were made likelier by ecological disjunctions
between fertile river valleys, irrigated or not, and savannas, mountains,
and jungles around whose economies generated distinctive military re-
sources. This explanation is not founded only on ecologies, but on how
they generate different economic and military resources for the human
communities located at a specific site.
Moreover, a disjunction between the carrying capacity of the land and
population growth can threaten survival, to which warfare might be a ra-
tional response or at least a gamble on one’s ability to seize land, or it
would be if starving people were good fighters. Darwinian sociologists em-
phasize population pressure as a spur to social evolution, but most archae-
ologists disagree.15 In ancient Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica, growing
state complexity and more war were correlated with population decline,
not increase.16 Warlike “Great Migrations” across Eurasia have often been
attributed to population pressure, but recent scholars have argued that
other pull-and-push factors mattered more. The pull was the lure of richer
lands and cities and the push was military pressure from other peoples at
their backs.17 Climatic changes also mattered. In the thirteenth century the
weather favored Mongol expansion as the normally cold, dry steppes of
Central Asia enjoyed their mildest, wettest period for a thousand years,
which caused an increase in grass, war horses, and Mongols.18 Mass migra-
tion has often led to war, for settlers favor conquest. They want land and its
natural resources at the expense of natives, who might be exploited as la-
borers or slaves, or expelled and in extremis exterminated. James Fearon
and David Laitin showed the importance for modern civil wars and their
guerillas of ecology.19 Civil wars have flourished primarily in rugged ter-
rains that allowed the weaker protagonist to hide and survive.
Ecology in interaction with social structures may encourage either
war or peace. Societies in pre-Columbian America lacked both the wheel
and draft animals (llamas were an exception of limited utility), and so
 Theories of the Causes of War 39

faced more daunting logistics of political and military power. The link
between ecology and types of military formations (infantry, cavalry, and
the like) and the influence of ecology on campaigns and battles have re-
ceived much attention from military writers throughout history. Mother
Nature does not lead us into war, for war is a human choice, yet choices
are affected by ecology’s effect on society.

Contexts 2: The Tyranny of History

Karl Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) begins: “Men make
their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not
make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances exist-
ing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all
dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Marx was applying this striking image to revolutions but it is also ap-
posite to wars. International relations (IR) theories of war tend to lack
history. Sequences of wars are neglected in favor of comparison of indi-
vidual cases taken out of their historical contexts; such theories disregard
how the past may influence or constrain present decisions for war or
peace. Historians obviously do focus on causal flows through time, al-
though they rarely hazard long-term or comparative generalizations. My
cases are not single wars (except for the American Civil War) but se-
quences of war (and peace) over long periods, the longest being an al-
most three-thousand-year account of war in China. Past wars weigh on
the brains of present decision makers, but not only as nightmares. A
major predictor of civil wars is earlier civil wars in a specific locale.20 The
same is true for interstate wars. Sociologists call this “path dependence”:
the present path depends on, or at least is substantially constrained by,
past paths. Though we cannot convert path dependence into a law, it is a
tendency in contexts where the past was relatively successful. Past victo-
ries lead to increased ambition, overconfidence, and ultimate hubris.
Militarism becomes “baked in” to cultures and institutions, so that war
becomes seen as normal and even virtuous, making it more likely.

Contexts 3: Geopolitics, Realism

From Thucydides through Machiavelli to contemporary political scien-
tists, geopolitics has been seen as the endless pursuit of power by rival
states, inevitably leading to wars between them. “Realism” has been the
40 Theories of the Causes of War

dominant theory. States are the sole actors in an “anarchic” international

space; there is no arbiter above them wielding international law, in con-
trast to the rule of law that routinely exists within states. Thus, states can-
not be certain of other states’ intentions, but they reason that the greater
their own power, the less likely they are to be attacked. So they all build
up their power. This, however, leads to “security dilemmas.” To ensure a
state’s security, its leaders must prepare for possible war, building up mili-
tary power, perhaps only for defense, but this alarms rivals into escalating
their military preparedness, too.21 Contagious feelings of insecurity make
war more likely. It might take only one aggressive community or state,
for whatever reason, to begin a process of escalation. Sometimes none of
those caught up in escalation might have originally wished for war. Real-
ism can be “offensive” or “defensive.” John Mearsheimer, an offense ad-
vocate, says states will ceaselessly pursue more and more power, whereas
Kenneth Waltz, on defense, says balances of power make states content
once they have acquired enough power to survive and feel secure.
Insecurity also means that all protagonists claim to be fighting in
self-defense, which is generally considered legitimate. Many rulers whom
we might consider to be aggressors paradoxically claim that they are the
threatened ones, striking out in fear of other predatory states. German
rulers in 1914 declared that Britain was “strangling” them across the
world, and that Russian military modernization would soon threaten
them on land. Japanese rulers struck out in World War II using the same
metaphor, the main strangler being the United States. Such fears were
not groundless, although it was the German and Japanese responses that
produced war. Since Realists attribute readiness for war as necessary self-
defense against the uncertainty of geopolitics, they tend to absolve rulers
of blame for provoking acts of aggression. Yet rulers can always try diplo-
macy instead of war. Humans seek collective as well as distributive
power—cooperation, not conflict—to achieve what they desire. And they
may pursue their goals using any of the four sources of power, not just
military power.
It is true that most geopolitical relations are less rule-governed than
relations within states, except for civil wars, palace coups, and repressive
rulers who kill large numbers of their own people. But we should treat
“anarchy” as a variable, present in varying degrees. Wendt identifies
three degrees of anarchy in European history.22 The most warlike he calls
Hobbesian anarchy, where states share almost no norms and perceive
other states as enemies. He locates this in pre-1648 Europe. The me-
 Theories of the Causes of War 41

dium level he calls Lockeian anarchy, where European states perceived

others as rivals but accepted norms like the notion of “live and let live,”
recognizing each other’s right to exist. He says this typified the post-
1648 Westphalian system of Europe. The lowest level of anarchy he calls
Kantian, where states cooperate with each other, influenced by an
“other-help” conception based on “collective identity” and shared norms
of conduct: war is displaced in favor of cooperation, as in post-1945
Western Europe. I find the first two of his periods problematic (see
chapter 8), but real-world geopolitics does contain varying degrees of an-
archy. Contrast in this volume the highly anarchic environment of six-
teenth-century Japan (chapter 7) with the mild case of postcolonial Latin
America (chapter 9).
Realists note an alternative to anarchy. A single hegemonic state can
knock heads together to achieve geopolitical order and peace because it
has overwhelming military and usually also economic power in its re-
gion, as well as leadership regarded as legitimate by other states. It com-
bines what Max Weber called domination and authority. The model
cases are Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States since
1945. Yet hegemons are uncommon. If a state seems potentially hege-
monic, others may form “balancing” alliances against it. Yet there was no
balancing against the hegemony of Britain, the United States, the Roman
Republic, or the Chinese Qin dynasty, so there are specific preconditions
of balancing alliances. Rulers must be confident that their alliance can
defeat the would-be hegemon and that their allies will live up to their
commitments, for if some make a deal with the hegemonic power, the
others are at greater risk. Anarchy means allies cannot be fully trusted.
Indeed, a balancing coalition also requires normative solidarity among
the allies, but norms are absent from Realist theory. The allies must also
fear the dominant power if they are to combine against it. This has not
been so since 1945 in Western Europe, where the United States is seen
as protecting those countries from worse predators. The notion of anar-
chy is useful but variably so.
I am more skeptical about Realists’ other core thesis: that states are
self-interested, unitary actors rationally pursuing carefully calculated
means for pursuing their goals and seeking to maximize their prospects
for survival and growth. Thus, we should find that rulers choose war
rather than more peaceful forms of power when it can better achieve de-
sired goals. There is, however, implicit tension between Realism’s two
theses of anarchy and calculation. Anarchy breeds anxiety and fear of
42 Theories of the Causes of War

others, which rises as the possibility of war looms, but these are emo-
tional states conducive to reckless, angry, or panicking behavior rather
than calm calculation. Decisions for war or peace are usually made in
highly fraught environments of growing tensions, domestic and foreign.
Thus, not all Realists stress calculative efficiency. Waltz argued that
states often act in nonstrategic, reckless ways, but he does not abandon
rationality altogether; he says that when states act recklessly, the system
punishes them, whereas states that act rationally are rewarded by the sys-
tem. Here rationality of means lies not with the individual state actor but
with the hidden hand of the system.23
Mearsheimer expresses the commoner Realist view: “Great powers are
rational actors. They are aware of their external environment and they
think strategically about how to survive in it. In particular, they consider
the preferences of other states and how their own behavior is likely to af-
fect the behavior of those other states, and how the behavior of those
other states is likely to affect their own strategy for survival. Moreover,
states pay attention to the long term as well as the immediate conse-
quences of their actions.”24 States are said to act “with relative efficiency.”
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita makes this into an “expected utility theory” of
war: states go to war when the expected benefits exceed the expected
costs.25 Calculation leads to fairly accurate predictions of when war will
bring gain. A few historians concur; Michael Howard says: “Men have
fought during the last two hundred years neither because they are aggres-
sive nor because they are acquisitive animals, but because they are reason-
ing ones. . . . Wars begin by conscious and reasoned decisions based on the
calculation, made by both parties, that they can achieve more by going to
war than by remaining at peace.”26
Fearon criticizes Realist theorists, saying, “War is costly and risky, so
rational states should have incentives to locate negotiated settlements
that all would prefer to the gamble of war.”27 I agree. Whatever the anar-
chical threats, more is needed to push states over the brink into risky,
costly war. So he adds three factors that he believes can save the Realist
model: states can miscalculate because of imperfect or asymmetric infor-
mation, whereby one state has private information and incentives to mis-
represent it; commitment problems whereby mutually preferable
bargains are unattainable because at least one state would have an incen-
tive to renege on a deal; and some issues are indivisible, preventing a
compromise.28 But Fearon’s actors remain “genuinely rational, unitary
states,” and he excludes the role of emotions, ideologies, or power strug-
 Theories of the Causes of War 43

gles within states, all of which we will see perpetually permeate decision
making. Human action is not in fact dominated by instrumental rational-
ity, pragmatic calculation, and understandable mistakes. Margaret Mac-
Millan notes that even if a struggle seems material, defenders always try
to protect what they hold dear, so that emotions are always involved.29
Some Realists acknowledge factional power struggles within a state. But
they say that these rarely undermine rational strategic thinking and so
can be treated as “noise.” Mearsheimer says: “Unit-level factors usually
do not have much effect on foreign policy-making, and when they do,
they do so in ways that are consistent with balance-of-power logic. Do-
mestic political calculations are not likely to undermine sound strategic
thinking.”30 This is hard to believe, and we will see that it is not true.
Some political scientists do introduce noninstrumental elements into
geopolitics. Richard Ned Lebow, analyzing twenty-six twentieth-century
wars, says wars emerge out of periods of dislocating political crises.31 He
identifies three types: crises arising from the ruler’s attempt to mobilize
domestic and foreign support for war; spinoff crises resulting from unin-
tended secondary confrontations with third parties if accommodation is
tried; and brinkmanship crises, the most common type, when a ruler tries
to force an adversary to back away from a commitment. Misperception,
especially of the resolve of the enemy, is a major cause of war when there
is brinkmanship: “As learning and steering capacity diminish, policy
comes to resemble a stone rolling downhill; it can neither be rerolled nor
can its path be altered.”32 And crises are not conducive to calm rational
calculation. If only political leaders did carefully assess the pros and cons
of war! Realism, like its competitor, liberalism, is in reality a normative
theory that says to rulers, “This is how you should behave if you are ratio-
nal.” But, alas, they often do not.
Most political scientists focus on war between major European pow-
ers since 1816, where the statistical data sets can be found. This leads to
biases, some of which I have already noted. Here are two more. These
great powers had virtually filled up the space of their geographical core,
so that this really was a multistate system. Today this has become a world
multistate system that offers almost no possibilities for expansion, except
extraterrestrially. In these space-filling multistate systems, sometimes
states win wars, sometimes they lose, and sometimes they fight inconclu-
sively. But they do not die. It is a board game of diplomacy in which all
the players stay on the board. Both Waltz and Wendt say that the death
of states is rare.33 This might be true of major modern states, but it is
44 Theories of the Causes of War

false of much of the rest of history. Most wars discussed in this book re-
sulted in an enormous number of states disappearing. Successful states
became bigger through imperial swallowing up of the “vanished king-
doms” of history. The number of disappeared societies greatly exceeds
that of the survivors, on all continents. This presents a conundrum for
defensive Realism: Can states act “with relative efficiency” to ensure
their survival when the vast majority do not survive?
IR theorists say that some geopolitical configurations generate wars
more than others, but they cannot agree on which.34 Significant correla-
tions (on post-1816 statistical data) between geopolitical configurations
and war are rare. Multistate systems sometimes produce many interstate
wars, as they have historically in Europe, but not in postcolonial Latin
America or Africa. There is no agreement about whether “bipolar” (two
great powers) or “multipolar” (many powers) entities dominate a geopo-
litical system—or whether an equal or an unequal distribution of power
between states causes more war.35 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David
Lalman examined different distributions of power and the number and in-
ternal cohesion of alliances and found no significant correlations with
wars.36 Nor did decision makers act as if they were constrained by such
variables. Some writers say international trade brings peace, but others
dispute this.37 A balance of power between many states is sometimes asso-
ciated with peace, but not among the city-states of classical Greece or the
warring states of ancient China. Balances are fragile. As Kant nicely put it:
“A lasting universal Peace on the basis of the so-called Balance of Power
in Europe is a mere chimera. It is like the house described by Swift, which
was built by an architect so perfectly in accordance with all the laws of
equilibrium, that when a sparrow lighted upon it, it immediately fell.”38
Power transition theory says that preponderance in power by a sin-
gle dominant state decreases the likelihood of war, a weak form of hege-
mony, but if a dissatisfied challenger achieves power parity with the
dominant state, the probability of war increases. Rising powers some-
times do make war, but many don’t. Germany spectacularly did so in the
twentieth century, but the simultaneous rise of the United States at the
expense of British power was peaceful. Here the normative solidarity of
Britain and the United States was important, but norms are neglected by
Realism. As for the United States, its rising power had led it into only
minor participation in interstate wars until 1941, when the country had
already risen and was actually attacked. Only after 1945, when the
United States was already hegemonic over most of the world, did Ameri-
 Theories of the Causes of War 45

can foreign policy embody substantial militarism. We might expect other

rational rising powers to wait until they achieved superiority before turn-
ing to military aggression, but neither Germany nor Japan did wait. And
adding other periods and regions, we see wars occurring in far more var-
ied circumstances than Realism suggests. Something is wrong with the
theory if it does not lead to empirically supported conclusions.
Stephen Van Evera analyzes thirty modern wars.39 He says Realists
have mistakenly attributed war to the “gross structures” of geopolitics,
like those just mentioned. In his wars, these explain almost nothing. Yet
he argues that more “fine-grained structures of power” do help explain
war. He identifies four: first-move advantages privileging attack over de-
fense; “windows of opportunity,” whereby striking now gives a state a
temporary edge; the relative ease of conquest; and cumulative resources
whereby aggression yields further resources that enable a state to con-
tinue aggressing. Realism should focus on these, he concludes. Yet he ac-
tually shows not that these four do lead to war, but that belief in them by
rulers does. If rulers believe there is a first-move advantage or a window
of opportunity or easy conquest or cumulative resources, then war is
more likely. This is a useful finding, but such beliefs are false as often as
not, agrees Van Evera.
Finally comes entry into battle, an arena of emotions and chaos. Gen-
erals strive hard to maintain their rationality here, to implement an initial
plan but also to adapt flexibly to changing events. Yet look at two famous
generals who doubted their rational ability to accomplish this. Here is
William Tecumseh Sherman on causes: “Wars do not usually result from
just causes but from pretexts. There probably never was a just cause why
men should slaughter each other by wholesale, but there are such things as
ambition, selfishness, folly, madness, in communities as in individuals,
which become blind and bloodthirsty, not to be appeased save by havoc,
and generally by the killing of somebody else than themselves.”40
And here is Clausewitz on battle: “So-called mathematical factors
never find a firm basis in military calculations. From the very start there
is an interplay of possibilities, probabilities, good luck and bad that
weaves its way throughout the length and breadth of the tapestry. In the
whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of
cards. . . . War is the realm of uncertainty: three quarters of the factors
on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser
uncertainty.”41
This had also been expressed by Ibn Khaldun:
46 Theories of the Causes of War

Victory and superiority in war come from luck and chance. . . .

There are external factors such as the number of soldiers, the
perfection and good quality of weapons, the number of brave
men, skillful arrangement of the line formation, the proper tac-
tics, and similar things. Then there are the hidden factors. These
may be the result of human trickery . . . occupying high points
. . . hiding in thickets or depressions [or] rocky terrain and simi-
lar things . . . suddenly appearing when the enemy is in a precari-
ous position. . . . These hidden factors may also be celestial
matters, which man has no power to produce for himself. They
affect people psychologically, and thus generate fear in them. . . .
An Arab proverb says: “Many a trick is worth more than a tribe.”
It is thus clear that superiority in war is, as a rule, the result of
hidden causes, not of external ones. The occurrence of opportu-
nities as the result of hidden causes is what is meant by luck.42

If they are correct, could humans rationally choose war to achieve their
goals? In war as in Clausewitz’s gambling metaphor, most players are losers.

Liberalism, Constructivism, Emotions

A rival English or liberal school in IR theory sees geopolitics as dual, in-
volving both anarchical tendencies and benign international institutions
and culture. Kant had argued that “perpetual peace” might be attainable
under three conditions: representative government, a universal norm of
hospitality toward strangers and traders, and an international federation of
free states.43 He took comfort from the fact that in his time representative
government, international trade, and international law were spreading, but
he accepted that there was a long way to go. Hedley Bull similarly found
hope in representative democracy, the economic interdependence of
global capitalism, and an international “society of states” centered on the
United Nations, all sharing common norms and interests.44 Comparable
institutions restrained anarchy in the past, such as the medieval Church in
Europe or Confucian education in China. Liberals say that common
norms emerge because states share a fear of unrestricted violence and seek
rules on the use of force, the sanctity of agreements, and property rights.
Statesmen do pursue their own self-interest, but not at any cost, and the
desire for peace is based on its considerable virtues. Liberals stress “inter-
national orders,” collective agreements between states made to preserve
 Theories of the Causes of War 47

peace, like the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Congress of Vienna in

1815, and the United Nations today (see chapters 8 and 15). Some liberals
go further today, seeing a “world society” composed of states, nonstate col-
lective actors, and individuals, all recognizing their mutual dependence
and shared norms and values—a pacific spin on globalization theory. Yet it
is not clear that either global capitalism or representative democracy leads
necessarily to peace, or indeed that war is even declining across the world.
A third school of IR theory, constructivism, rejects Realist materialism
and stresses social identities, seeing interests not as objectively grounded
in material forces but as resulting from ideas and culture constructed in
social interaction. Thus, constructivists do not assume rationality. Peter
Katzenstein emphasizes “the cultural-institutional context of policy on the
one hand and the constructed identity of states, governments, and other
political actors on the other.”45 Institutions embody norms, identities, and
cultures. Norms give actors their identity. Culture refers to both evalua-
tive and cognitive standards defining how actors operate and how they in-
terrelate. I largely agree, though I call this sociology, while noting that
constructivism overplays cultural creation. Social institutions were origi-
nally constructed and then adapted by actors over long periods, some be-
coming deep structures, constraining actors at later points in time—such
as the state, the Catholic Church, or capitalism. They are all composed of
actors, but actors constrained by institutions that have lasted much longer
than themselves. Sociology also contains a “cultural” approach to war,
which is closer to constructivism, and it also neglects constraining power
institutions, including those relevant to war-and-peace decisions.46
Constructivism also allows for emotions, neglected by Realists and
some liberals. Lebow in a data set of ninety-four wars between major
powers between 1648 and 2008 finds 107 dominant motives among the
initiators of wars.47 A concern for “standing” (status) or honor mostly
motivated sixty-two wars, and another eleven were motivated mostly by
vengeful territorial revisionism. Insecurity and fear, stressed by Realists,
and material greed, stressed by Marxists, Realists, and liberals alike, ac-
count for only nineteen and eight cases, respectively. So sentiments of
honor, status, and revenge produced over 70 percent of offensive wars
and a wish for material gain only 9 percent. His powers are all European
except for the United States and Japan since the 1890s and China since
1949. Nor does he discuss the most common warfare over many earlier
centuries: the swallowing up of minnows by sharks. Would his findings
apply to other contexts?
48 Theories of the Causes of War

Overoptimism
War is especially puzzling: when weak fight strong powers rather than
negotiate or submit, and when states or alliances of roughly equal powers
fight each other, since their war will probably be prolonged and costly.
We might expect such rulers to rationally show more caution. At most
only one side can win, and often both sides lose more than they win.
There would surely have been no World War I if the statesmen had care-
fully calculated the odds. Van Evera says false optimism by both sides
preceded every major war since 1740.48 He and Blainey note that rulers
persistently exaggerate their chances of victory, which has led to more
wars than Realism would warrant.49 Of course, all that is needed is for a
single ruler to be rash enough to start a war imprudently. This may have
been the case with Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Ukraine. Van Evera
mainly attributes overconfidence to chauvinist myths embedded in mod-
ern nationalism. This emphasizes the nation’s virtues and commitments,
is ignorant of other nations, and minimizes their strength and virtues.
But rulers were overconfident long before nationalism appeared, trapped
within the sentiments they have for their own community, contrasted
with their negative and inaccurate views of foreigners—this would be the
negative aspect of Durkheim’s stress on the normative solidarity of soci-
eties. Blainey offers a “catch-up” Realist theory: “War can only occur
when two nations decide that they can gain more by fighting than by
negotiating.” But “wars usually begin when fighting nations disagree
on their relative strength,” and “wars usually end when the fighting na-
tions agree on their relative strengths.” Rulers might eventually calculate
accurately, but not before they get burned by war and mass deaths. He
adds that the initial overoptimism is due to “moods which cannot be
grounded in fact . . . by which nations evade reality”—hardly Realism.50
Quincy Wright wrote: “International conflict is not in reality between
states, but between distorted images of states. It is probable that such
distortions, stereotypes, and caricatures are major factors in the situa-
tions of international conflict. . . . The false images depend not on misin-
formation about the immediate situation, but on prejudiced conceptions
and attitudes rooted in distant history, in the national culture, or in the
minds of important persons in the decision-making process.”51
Obviously human beings are not just calculating machines some-
times prone to errors. We are emotional and ideological creatures, as we
know in our personal lives. Sometimes it is not clear that any calculation
 Theories of the Causes of War 49

of odds is being made in a headlong rush to war down what Collins de-
scribes as the “tunnel of violence,” in which perceptions narrow as blink-
ers come down, and a rush of adrenalin overwhelms caution—as also
happens to soldiers in battle.52

Ideological Power
It is sometimes argued that human groups distinguish between killing
within their own community and killing outsiders. Aware that the former
raises moral dilemmas, they apply an “internal ethic” to make fine distinc-
tions between murder, manslaughter, self-defense, and legitimate retribu-
tion. Such distinctions are not applied to foreign enemies, to whom a
weaker “external” ethical ideology is applied. Yet this argument is under-
mined by the frequency of civil wars in which worse atrocities occur, and
wars have often ensued in which combatants saw each other as sharing the
same culture. The Sumerian city-states warred with each other yet be-
lieved they all belonged to a single ethnic group, the “blackheads.” Greek
city-states fought each other and yet shared Hellenistic culture. In Europe
Christians fought Christians and rulers were often kin-related. Human
beings can make war whether or not they consider the enemy as alien.
But some wars seem especially ideological. John Owen identified four
modern waves of ideological warfare: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
European wars of religion; the wars of revolutionary and Napoleonic
France; twentieth-century wars among fascism, communism, and liberal-
ism; and Islamic wars from 1979 onward.53 These waves generated intense
ideological polarization diffused through what he calls transnational ideo-
logical networks (TINs). I discuss such waves in chapters 8 and 14, accept-
ing the first three, but with skepticism about the fourth. But I add that
empires have legitimated conquest by claiming to be a “superior” civiliza-
tion, on the basis of ideologies of racism or religion that favor eliminating
or forcibly civilizing supposedly savage or degenerate peoples.
Jeremy Black combines ideologies and emotions into a concept of
“bellicosity”—how favorably rulers view war itself and how entranced
they are by military symbolism. He sees some communities as “warfare-
societies,” in which intense militarism ensures “that the relationships be-
tween ends and means cannot be comprehensively calculated”—rationality
of means cannot operate.54 I add that militarists are more risk-accepting of
war. Black says bellicosity is hard to measure and does not explain when
bellicosity intensifies. He says rulers generally have clear ideas of what
50 Theories of the Causes of War

they want, but these get inflected by bellicosity and other ideological prej-
udices, so that the conceptions of alternatives required by rational calcula-
tion of means are absent.
I distinguish in my work three types of ideological power: transcen-
dent, immanent, and institutionalized. Some wars—between religious
sects, or among socialism, fascism, and liberal capitalism—involve a clash
of transcendent ideologies all seeking to remake the world and impose
their beliefs on others. Such ideological wars make the enemy seem evil,
which increases casualties and atrocities. Second, immanent ideology re-
inforces the solidarity and morale of a collectivity, including armies.
Quite high morale is present in most effective armies, but in chapter 13
I show that some communist forces possessed an excess of both these
first two types of militarism, making them more formidable fighters, able
to compensate for technological inferiority with a more self-sacrificing
morale. But most wars are not so ideological, and transcendent and im-
manent ideologies do not last long. They settle down into the third type
of ideology, institutionalized ideology. In the case of militarism, social ac-
tors have internalized the inheritance of past experiences of victory,
which bequeaths to further generations baked-in militarist institutions
and cultures. Historical practices infuse the minds and institutions of the
present. The weight of history is conservative: people keep doing what
seemed to work in the past—path dependence. Conversely, if war proves
repeatedly unsuccessful, bellicosity should falter. In between the two
there is likely to be a cultural lag period when bellicosity endures when it
should not, as it did recently in the United States.
All three types of ideology constrain conceptions of self-interest. Com-
mitment to bellicose values such as honor and physical courage may over-
come normal human repugnance at killing others and normal fear of being
killed oneself. Militarism seduces through rituals, values, and norms—heroic
sagas, divine blessing of the banners, colorful parades, brass bands, anthems,
medals, and a culture that extols heroism, clothes battles with moral worth,
promises glory—even afterlife—to the slain, and confers honor and status
on its heroes. Together these stir our hearts, predisposing us to war.
A sense of honor is important. Mark Cooney discusses it among
American inner-city gangs. Gang leaders respond violently to any “disre-
spect.”55 If they do not respond, they lose respect and masculine honor in
the eyes of their own gang. Cooney emphasizes that the slightest behav-
ior perceived as disrespectful can be the trigger for violence, even homi-
cide. The responsibility attached to leaders traps them into violence.
 Theories of the Causes of War 51

They fear status loss within their own gang more than they fear the
enemy gang. He says that codes of honor were especially strong among
the aristocracy of the past. Their ideology valued the warrior more than
the peacemaker, but now honor has slipped down to lower-class gangs.
Yet in all ages his model also fits statesmen, the word revealing a
claim by leaders to personify the state. They identify their own career
success, personal honor, and status with the state’s. They seek, in varying
degrees, personal glory and grandeur for their state. Human emotions
like ambition, righteous anger, vengeance, humiliation, and desperation
are applied to the state. Lebow observes that powerful states are more
likely to feel slighted, even humiliated, than weak ones: “Anger is a lux-
ury that can only be felt by those in a position to seek revenge.”56 Weak
states are used to being slighted and learn to live with it. Perhaps the
main reason the Bush administration launched an invasion of Iraq in
2003 was fury over Saddam Hussein’s decadelong defiance and disrespect
of the United States. This is felt as both a personal and geopolitical af-
front. Statesmen or stateswomen believe they lose face personally if they
do not respond with toughness to slurs and threats, and they believe that
their state will lose face in the system of states. If both rulers in a dispute
are imbued with prickly honor, neither will want to be seen backing
down, and it is difficult to find compromise solutions to disputes, as we
saw in the descent into World War I.

Conclusion
We have seen varied motives, disputes, and contexts as well as different
theories of war-and-peace decisions. It is easy to be skeptical about one-
size-fits-all theories like Realism. But can we go further in establishing
the relative weights of the many components of war-and-peace deci-
sions? At the macro level it is perhaps a struggle of the rather materialist
duo of economic and military power versus the potentially less rational
duo of ideological-emotional and political power. But this is muddied by
wars resulting from interactions between different factions and commu-
nities that bounce unevenly, unpredictably toward war or peace. Wars
never start accidentally, says Evan Luard, but they often result from the
unintended consequences of interactions. Several causal chains may in-
teract contingently, and their conjunction may not have been planned by
anyone. All this provoked Raymond Aron into declaring that a general
theory of war was impossible. But I will have a shot at one.
 chapter four
The Roman Republic

R
ome was an empire long before it was ruled by emperors, and it
was almost always at war. Between 415 and 265 bce, peace
seems to have ruled for only thirteen years, and for only four-
teen between 327 and 116 bce.1 The first emperor, Augustus,
claimed in 14 ce that the doors of the temple of Janus, closed during
peacetime, had before his reign closed only twice since the founding of
Rome. In his forty-five-year reign, he said, it had been closed three times,
suggesting that he was a man of peace. Such figures may mislead. Rome
became a very large empire, and its regions were not all at war at the same
time. In any one region wars were occasional, but there was normally
a war going on somewhere. Nonetheless, this is a formidably enduring
record of militarism that few states in history could match. Three main
explanations have been offered: war was self-defense; it was a consequence
of a geopolitical system in which Rome was no more aggressive than oth-
ers; and Rome was the aggressor because of its militaristic social structure
and culture. The third explanation becomes the most appropriate, as mili-
tarism became thoroughly baked in to Roman culture and structure, con-
straining daily actions in ways of which the actors were largely unaware.

Three Explanations of Roman Militarism: (1) Self-Defense

A sense of insecurity certainly looms over later Roman accounts of the
city’s early years. They imply that Rome had to fight in self-defense or be

52
 The Roman Republic 53

conquered by other Latin peoples or by tribes descending from the hills

and the north. Rome was sacked by Gallic tribes from the Po Valley in
390 bce, and later authors argued that the ethos remained kill or be
killed. This may have been true early on, and then occasionally later as
large groups of barbarians came raiding, but Roman authors generalized
the argument to cover the centuries. Almost all its wars were deemed de-
fensive and “just.” Not everyone agreed. Sallust quotes a letter he says
was sent by Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, describing the Romans:
“They have possessed nothing since the beginning of their existence ex-
cept what they have stolen: their home, their wives, their lands, their em-
pire. Once vagabonds without fatherland, without parents, created to be
the scourge of the whole world, no laws, human or divine, prevent them
from seizing and destroying allies and friends, those near them and those
afar off, weak or powerful, and from considering every government
which does not serve them.”2
Tacitus quotes a long speech supposedly uttered by the Caledonian
chieftain Calgacus, including this description of Romans: “They have
plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger. . . . They
are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor. . . .
They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this
they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing
remains but a desert, they call that peace.”3
Sallust and Tacitus were criticizing Roman militarism but preferred
to express it through the mouths of enemies. Cicero was more measured:
“Wars were waged with the Celtiberi [Celts or Gauls] for actual exis-
tence, not for rule; with the Latins, Sabines, Samnites, Carthaginians,
and with Pyrrhus [a Greek king] the struggle was for rule”—that is, wars
for rule were wars of choice, not of survival.4
War-and-peace proposals were put to a senate composed of rich aris-
tocrats by the two consuls, who had to be in agreement. There was then
a thorough debate, provided there was a quorum, at one point fixed at
two hundred senators. Total membership was upward of three hundred.
New senators were appointed by the consuls, not elected. Debate could
last for a whole day. Every senator present had in theory to speak in turn,
and because of the time constraint, filibustering was possible. The popu-
lar assemblies generally ratified senate decisions, but a proposal could be
vetoed by a plebeian tribune. In this respect the republic exemplified Re-
alism’s rationality-of-means model, a rule-governed debating system
with the merits and demerits of war discussed at length, more than in my
54 The Roman Republic

other case studies. Debate mostly lacked high emotions because it was
focused on the likely gains in wealth and loot from a war, not on violent
emotions, unless this was the response to some killings of Romans. They
also had enormous confidence in their military means. If the gains were
thought great, military means would be provided, while likely Roman
losses of life were rarely calculated. Two factors did counsel restraint.
First, if the legions were already engaged in war elsewhere, the proposed
war would probably be deferred. Second, domestic politics might inter-
vene. Senate rivalry meant that some favored peace out of jealousy of the
consul who would be appointed to command the legions and grab the
loot. There was careful but limited calculation.
Once the decision was made, specialized priests (fetiales) carried the
senate’s terms to the potential enemy.5 If their terms were rejected, they
would cast a spear into enemy territory, or into a sacred piece of land in
Rome symbolizing enemy territory. Both were declarations of war. The
ritual invoked the support of the gods and so brought justice to the war.
When Latin sources seemed to imply a defensive war, they actually meant
a just war. Greek sources, like Polybius, emphasize imperial conquest, not
self-defense. Moreover, the terms they offered were nonnegotiable. The
enemy must accept them or be at war. So “defense” was actually a provo-
cation to war. The fetiales system decayed in the third century, but Roman
“diplomacy” continued to be tough. The senate sent ambassadors to offer
Roman terms. If those terms were not accepted, a state of war existed—no
bargaining.
Attempts at mediation by others were considered insulting. A nonne-
gotiable stance was less common among the republic’s major rivals, Car-
thage and the Hellenistic states.6 This was not Roman self-defense; it
was more a pretext based on leaders’ belief they were divinely privi-
leged.7 “Defense” included going to the assistance of friendly polities or
factions in polities that sought Roman help. The goal was not only to
help allies, but also to dominate them afterward. Roman domination was
thus extended. Cicero quotes the Roman general Gaius Laelius: “Our
people in defending the allies have now gained control of all lands.”8
This “offensive defense” was the dominant Roman policy in campaigns
and conquests fought against many peoples: the Marsi, Samnites, Etrus-
cans, Umbrians, Gauls of north Italy, Sabines, Vulsinienses, Lucani, Tar-
entini, Brutii, Picentes, Sallentines, and the Greeks in Italy. It was highly
successful, as the Romans conquered the whole of Italy by 275 bce.
Almost all these peoples eventually disappeared from history through de-
 The Roman Republic 55

feat in war. Some wars went through several stages of offense and
defense. The wars against the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus began when
the senate broke a treaty after the Roman fleet menaced the last demo-
cratic Greek city-state in Italy, Tarentum. The Tarentine democrats re-
sponded fiercely, fearing defeat and oppression, calling on Pyrrhus to
help them. He invaded Italy in 280 bce, recruited Samnite and Lucanian
allies, and fought several very costly battles against Rome—hence the ex-
pression “Pyrrhic victory.” This was a more defensive phase for Rome.
But Roman ability to keep on raising legions forced Pyrrhus out of Italy.
The Tarentines surrendered in 272 bce, and Rome completed the con-
quest of Italy. The way was open to Greece and Sicily.
Most leaders claim their wars are waged in self-defense, usually di-
vinely blessed, and their own people normally believe them. If Romans
sincerely believed this, it made a difference in their behavior. But as an
explanation for Rome’s continuing to go to war, defense was limited
mostly to its early years and to lesser phases of its wars of expansion.

Three Explanations of Roman Militarism:

(2) The Geopolitical System
The second explanation is Realism’s version of self-defense, blaming war
on an anarchic multistate system. War is said to have resulted primarily
from the insecurities of the geopolitical system, not from the nature of
particular states, rulers, or peoples. No central authority existed to which
rival states could turn for a diplomatic settlement, and the only way to
punish an aggressor was by fighting—a Hobbesian “war of all against
all”—the inevitable logic being that the strong defeated the weak. Some
ancient authors agreed. Demosthenes said it would be better if all states
behaved morally, but they don’t: “All men have their rights conceded to
them in proportion to the power at their disposal.”9 Thucydides quotes
the Athenian response to pleas for mercy from the city-state of Melos:
“Right is in question only between equals in power, while the strong do
what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”10
Arthur Eckstein is the main modern exponent of Realism on Rome.11
He rejects, as most Realists do, “unit-level” analysis, which emphasizes
the internal structure and culture of states and communities. The threat
from the external geopolitical environment was what mattered, yielding
a perpetual Roman sense of insecurity and violent response. After strug-
gles with Latin and Etruscan states, the Gauls of the Po Valley, the
56 The Roman Republic

Volsci, and the Samnites, came the Greek city-states in southern Italy,
sometimes backed by the Hellenistic monarchies, and then the states of
Greater Greece, the Carthaginian Empire, the peoples of the Middle
East and North Africa, and the tribes of Europe and the Balkans. Rome
was militaristic, he agrees, but this was normal among ancient states and
tribes around the Mediterranean, trapped in the same “cruel logic.”
Rome was merely the most successful.
Nicola Terrenato casts doubt on this.12 He says that in the sixth to
the fourth centuries bce, Rome, like many Italian communities, consisted
of an urban center and an agricultural hinterland dominated by aristo-
cratic clans. The center was gradually becoming statelike, but before the
fourth century goals were primarily those of dominant clans, not the city,
and Rome’s “army” comprised the retinues of aristocrats, fighting for pri-
vate clan goals, and raids, especially for cattle, were the main type of war-
fare. Communities lacked clear boundaries and did not occupy the whole
space of even that zone of Italy. Yet through exchange with neighbors
they came to share some common culture. Most Roman wars with
known locations were fought not against other lowland urban centers,
but against the tribes of the north and the Apennine Hills, especially the
Samnites. Against the Gallic tribes, most war was self-defense in re-
sponse to raiding, but the Romans repeatedly initiated wars against the
Samnites because they blocked Roman ambitions to conquer a realm
stretching from coast to coast.
Yet the incorporation of neighboring lowland urban centers into
Rome, says Terrenato, was less through warfare than through negotia-
tions, not between states, since this was not yet a multistate system.
Neighboring clans, especially those with kin connections in Rome,
would negotiate alliances with Rome, often to repress class conflict
within their own communities. Rome attracted neighboring aristocracies
because it defended their rights against the lower classes and granted
them Roman citizenship. This pressure for regime change made it “at
worst the lesser evil and at best a golden opportunity” for some elites,
who aided Rome’s absorption of their own community.13 This involved
faction fighting with clans opposing absorption. He sees “a grand bar-
gain between elites across the peninsula that would be the main catalyst
of its political unification.”14 They cared “little for the destiny of any spe-
cific state and much about that of their own lineage, they weaved in and
out of the various political systems, jumped on passing bandwagons, and
jockeyed for position, all the while trying to stay on the winning side.”15
 The Roman Republic 57

This is persuasive for the two centuries following the establishment

of the republic in 509 bce. Since many prominent Roman families had
non-Roman origins, wars may have been less common than later Ro-
mans believed.16 They were perhaps reading back into earlier history the
world of an Italy filled with states they themselves inhabited, and they
were neglecting class conflicts within and class solidarities between com-
munities. Terrenato concludes, “The situation in central and southern
Italy after the conquest is essentially compatible with a model that re-
gards wide-ranging elite interaction and negotiation as the primary fac-
tors that drove the transition.”17 There were wars, but some polities
disappeared because their elites sought a change of regime. By 264 bce,
Rome had made more than 150 treaties with polities across Italy, bilat-
eral but asymmetric, embodying a Mafia-type Roman protection racket.
After 338 bce, allied Latin city-states were forbidden to maintain official
relations with one another to prevent alliances among them. Rome’s trib-
utaries had to contribute military levies and fund their military opera-
tions. Roman citizens paid a direct tax earmarked for the military, while
allies supported their own levies.18 The most urbanized rival peoples,
Etruscans and Greeks, were divided in fractious city-states.
So in the fifth and fourth centuries bce Rome expanded across central
and southern Italy, a mini-empire becoming more statelike, as were other
Mediterranean polities, such as Phoenician colonies (e.g., Carthage), Syra-
cuse, Marseille, and Tarquinia. Terrenato emphasizes “the limited range of
options that remained open for those states that were not expanding. For
them, small-scale neutrality and independence must have been increas-
ingly unrealistic. . . . It became clear to the elites involved that their only
viable choice was to lend their support to whoever offered the better
terms. . . . These states began negotiating the terms of their incorporation,
especially in central Italy, where they were tightly clustered together.”19
Terrenato and Scheidel emphasize a shift in early Roman history
from diplomacy to Mafioso threats, to regime change, and finally to con-
quest. It was from then on, with the emergence of real states, that Eck-
stein’s Realism might be applicable, and this was an insecure
environment.20 As William Harris and Mary Beard note, however, almost
all Rome’s wars were then fought outside its own or its allies’ territories,
which suggests offensive expansion.21 One advantage of offensive war is
that it lays waste to enemy territory rather than one’s own. Harris says
that the Romans initiated more offensive wars than the Samnites or the
Etruscans once Rome was clearly established.
58 The Roman Republic

Eckstein offers some sketchy data on Greek states. He says Athens

was at war in two-thirds of the years from 497 to 338 bce, and other
states engaged in war in over 90 percent of years over short periods. At
least one of the Hellenistic monarchies was at war for 97 percent of years
over a 163-year period. Yet since there were between four and nine mon-
archies at any one time, the average for any single one of them would be
a war in under half the years—still a high rate, however. Three Hellenis-
tic rulers, Attalus I, Philip V, and Antiochus III went to war every year,
but over only a twenty-five-year period.22 Victor Alonso challenges the
view that Greek city-states were at war almost all the time.23 The focus
on Athenian-Spartan rivalry obscures the fact that many states stayed out
of war for long periods. Argos and Corcyra abstained from war for most
of the fifth century, as did Megara, the Achaean Confederacy, and the
Common Peace movement in the fourth century. Regions such as Aeto-
lia, Epirus, and Crete adhered to neutrality and non-alignment, as did
many of the Greek colonies abroad. Alonso emphasizes the role of diplo-
macy in mediating Greek conflicts. Though Greeks believed that war
was frequently inevitable, they sought to limit its scope and delay its out-
come while pursuing diplomacy. Once war had started, they accepted
truces, capitulations, and protection of heralds.
Rivals sometimes launched offensives against Rome, but less often,
whereas the frequency and duration of Roman wars is unparalleled.
Polybius said the Romans were more ferocious than Hellenistic states in
dealing with defeated enemies. We shall see that the Carthaginians were
not as warlike as the Romans. Eckstein’s geopolitical argument has some
limited explanatory power, varying and declining through time, but we
must add the third theory of Roman wars.

Three Explanations of Roman Militarism:

(3) Roman Aggression
This explanation accepts the notion that the geopolitical environment was
unstable, but it argues that Rome, propelled by domestic militarism, be-
came the main aggressor. Among classical writers Polybius and Cicero
came close to this, and Harris is the main modern scholar.24 Harris does
not see a conscious long-term policy of imperialism, for expansion came
piecemeal and opportunistically (which is not unusual in empire building).
But success breeds success and there was a consistent thrust of aggression:
Rome kept doing it. Dexter Hoyos agrees, as does Erich Gruen, regarding
 The Roman Republic 59

Roman policy in Italy and the west, but not Rome’s relations with the
Hellenistic world.25 Gruen portrays Rome as being long indifferent to the
Greeks, unwilling to enter into treaties with them, cautious about enter-
ing a region where multiple developed states competed. At this stage there
was little thought of annexation in the east. He concludes, “Hellas ulti-
mately fell under Roman authority not because the Romans exported
their structures to the East, but because Greeks persistently drew the
westerner into their own structure—until it was theirs no longer.”26
Yet during the second half of the third century bce Greece was a side-
show. Rome was fully committed in its wars against Carthage. As we will
see, this immediately became a major Roman imperial venture into the
eastern Mediterranean (followed by a phase of desperate defense in Italy).
But in 201 bce as soon as the Second Punic War ended in decisive Roman
victory, the legions began intervening in Greece. Gruen says Rome “blun-
dered” into the Second Macedonian War, 200–196 bce, yet the senate re-
vealed it was determined to go to war, as it was in the Seleucid War in
192–88 bce against Antiochus.27 This major commitment of forces in-
cluded withdrawing legions from Spain and Gaul, and it produced the
first Roman incursion into Asia. The senate was also determined to fight
the Third Macedonian War (171–68 bce) against Perseus. After victory the
senate divided Macedonia into four client republics and permanently sta-
tioned legions in Greece. In the Fourth Macedonian War, in 150–48 bce,
these legions quickly defeated an attempt to reunite the Macedonian king-
dom. Finally, the Achaean League of Greek city-states launched a desper-
ate rebellion against Rome but was quickly defeated in 146 bce, which
culminated in the Roman sacking of Corinth—in the same year the city of
Carthage was obliterated. This looks like determined aggression.
Gruen makes some concessions. He says several times that Rome
would not tolerate threats to the Adriatic. He agrees that the Punic Wars
provoked more Roman imperialism, and he agrees with Harris that when
the senate did decide to fight, it fought until victory was fully achieved,
whether or not it saw vital interests at stake, and even if the enemy
wanted to come to terms, as Perseus did. Gruen concludes that Rome’s
ultimate “willingness to assume imperial responsibility . . . [was] the ef-
fect of numerous individual decisions in ad hoc situations, not a grand
design to control the East.”28 Yet I have narrated a cumulative imperial-
ism whose level of aggression steadily increased once imperial control of
the Carthaginian territories was completed. Carthage is the missing
player in Gruen’s account.
60 The Roman Republic

There were different stages of Roman aggression. First came the pu-
nitive raid, not just to carry off goods and slaves, but also to punish peo-
ples and rulers who would not submit. Roman diplomacy was built on
fear, instilled through punitive campaigns. This did not at first involve
territorial conquest, only pillaging and destroying to demonstrate that
Rome could make uncooperative neighbors suffer. The troops were en-
couraged to loot but the goal was also to secure cooperative client rulers
through regime change or stiffening. Thus, directly ruled Roman territo-
ries were ringed by client monarchies, republics, and tribes. But Rome
rarely rested satisfied with indirect imperialism. Second, seeking more
direct control, Romans invaded to conquer, either installing Roman con-
suls or stationing advisers and perhaps legions there to supervise the
ruler. This brought more systematic plunder and slavery, vital to supply
labor for mining and agriculture, the core Roman economic sectors. The
third stage was to suppress rebellions, widespread after conquest. The
key was swift response to stifle revolt before it spread. Local troops were
flung into action. If they failed, a larger army was mustered to crush reb-
els and install more direct rule. All three types were fought mostly on
land. Roman naval power was weak until it took on Carthage. The main
function of Roman navies was to patrol coastlines and suppress piracy.
The decision makers for war were in theory drawn from the citizens
who served in the legions and paid the taxes, perhaps one-quarter of
male inhabitants, and no females. No one else counted. But the decisions
occurred within the senate and the popular assemblies. The senate was
dominant, and it was dominated in turn by wealthy aristocrats. The pop-
ular assemblies also had powers, but they had class-weighted voting sys-
tems favoring lesser aristocrats, and the moderately prosperous census
classes provided the heavy and medium-heavy infantry. This was a repre-
sentative system, but weighted by class—and most of the leaders, the
consuls in the senate and the tribunes in the assemblies, were aristocrats.
The people of Rome could demonstrate, riot, and strike (collectively
marching out of Rome), and they always had sympathizers in the popular
assemblies, especially on domestic issues like debt and taxes. The assem-
blies rarely contested senate decisions for war, though they voiced dis-
content about long-running wars. A few aristocratic senators were
disproportionately responsible for Rome’s wars.
Evidence of aggression comes from the absence of Roman diplo-
macy, unlike elsewhere in the ancient Middle East. Amanda Podany de-
tails many diplomatic treaties, oaths, and gift exchanges made, and for a
 The Roman Republic 61

time adhered to, between the cities and empires of the Bronze Age in the
Middle East region—Ebla, Mari, Mittani, Hittites, Kassites, Egypt, and
more.29 Resolving conflict through mediation and arbitration also fea-
tured in Greek and Hellenistic international relations.30 These proce-
dures seem to have been unknown to the Romans. Romans let Greeks
resolve their own differences but themselves rarely participated. Sheila
Ager says, “The formal structure of the fetial formula undeniably implies
that judgement of some sort has already taken place before Rome even
embarks on war. In some sense, Rome has already been to ‘arbitration,’
for a judgement has been rendered that the enemy is the guilty party. For
a mere human to offer his third party diplomatic skills when Rome has
already received heaven’s judgement on the matter would therefore be at
the least superfluous, and . . . might be construed as presumptuous and
offensive.”31
There were a few unjust wars, Romans acknowledged—when Rome
was defeated! This proved the gods had not been consulted, for they
would have declared defeats to be unjust.
Romans indignantly rejected attempts at mediation. Attempts to ne-
gotiate by Greek and Carthaginian ambassadors indicated “the posture
of one great power to another, not of a submissive inferior to an ac-
knowledged superior,” and were unacceptable.32 Ager adds that the most
a third party could do in a dispute between Rome and a Greek state was
to plead mercy for the Greeks. In the later empire, Rome met states of
equal powers in the east, the Parthians and Persians, and then had to ne-
gotiate treaties. Before then, when dealing with groups who were not en-
emies, Rome did occasionally conclude nonaggression pacts or recognize
each party’s distinct spheres of influence, but these were temporary. Hos-
tages were taken but only by the Roman rulers who never offered their
own hostages. War sometimes deliberately provoked other states, and
Roman dominance expanded through defending and then absorbing al-
lies, but both were claimed as self-defense.33
Polybius tells us that those defeated by Rome and who then capitu-
late: “surrender all territory and the cities in it, together with all men and
women in all such territory or cities, likewise rivers, harbours, temples,
and tombs, so that the Romans should become actual lords of all these,
and those who surrender should remain lords of nothing whatever.”34
Although the norm was that defeated enemies should be treated
mercifully, “the Roman response to the entreaties of the defeated could
not be calculated, any more than the responses of soldiers or muggers or
62 The Roman Republic

rapists to the pleas of their victims. . . . That, for the Romans, demon-
strated the fulness of their power.”35 They paid less attention to acquiring
direct control of territories than to instilling fear into their inhabitants.
All dissent would be countered with “terror and awe that they hoped to
produce in the enemy; and the moral and status issues, such as the need
to repress superbia, avenge injuriae, and maintain the honor or decus of
the empire. It was on these things that, as they believed, their security
depended; it was for these that they fought.”36 The Roman treatment of
allies was constitutionally the same as of defeated enemies—their land
would be formally confiscated by the Roman state. Some was kept to
found colonies for Romans, although most was given back to those per-
ceived as reliable allies. Treaties offered degrees of citizenship to the al-
lies, but Rome alone would dictate matters of war and peace. Trusted
allies could rule themselves—but they must provide troops to assist
Rome.37 So the rulers of Rome fought mostly aggressive wars.

Economic Motives
Once the republic was securely established by the early third century
bce, two main motives, greed and glory, drove Romans into war. They
came bundled together with political ambition.38 Economic motives
meant looting removable wealth, receiving tribute, seizing farmland, and
acquiring slaves. By the first century bce there were over a million war-
acquired slaves in Italy, about one-fifth of the population.39 Territorial
control usually came later to ensure security of control. Rome did not
develop more sophisticated policies of economic acquisition because it
almost never conceived of a realm of economic power relations separate
from other power realms. There was no mercantilism, and military de-
fense of trade simply meant combating pirates, not dictating the terms of
trade. Conquest and expropriation, or subordination and tribute taking,
not trade on unequal conditions, dominated economic acquisition.
War making depended on funding from those paying the property
taxes. Yet with expansion, the upper classes, members of which became
governors or officials of conquered states and siphoned off most of the
spoils, kept the state’s treasury adequate for normal expenses, but not for
more. The upper classes did not want a successful general or a popular
demagogue using public wealth to finance either tyranny or public wel-
fare. This began a three-way struggle between the senatorial elite, the
generals, and more popular forces. The Roman people suffered a loss in
 The Roman Republic 63

power when the property tax was abolished in 167 bce. Since they no
longer funded wars, their voice was marginalized.40 The taxes, indemni-
ties, and loot expected from a war were carefully assessed beforehand, as
Realists would expect, but for the elite’s private gain. Of course, they
often had limited information, and mistakes were made, as in an invasion
of the Arabian desert, wrongly assumed to contain fabulous wealth.41
By the time the republic was prosperously established, loot was con-
sidered too base to figure in dignified senate speeches. Obsession with
booty was a persistent criticism levied against rivals, for they all sought it.
Claims to act morally were important in Roman upper-class discourse,
but acquiring booty was more important in reality.42 If civilians tried to
stop the looting of their homes or the raping of their wives or daughters,
they would be shown no mercy, especially if the legionaries had suffered
casualties in the campaign. Defeated enemy soldiers and civilians in their
many thousands provided most of the slaves of Rome, and they were
sometimes the greatest source of profit from war. Generals profited most
but donated some captives to their soldiers. Slave traders following the
armies then bought them from the soldiers. Rape generally went unpun-
ished, though it was prosecuted in peacetime and bore the risk of execu-
tion (though not if the victim was a slave or prostitute). Ransoming
wealthy prisoners was common. Ordinary soldiers might calculate on
profit coming from victory—provided they lived—and they received a
basic level of pay. Accepting the risk of death seemed normal to citizens
at the moment of enlistment, whether conscripts or volunteers. Once en-
listed, they had lost the ability to control their lives and were at the mercy
of decisions made by the senate and the generals. The booty of war was
their compensation for their exploitation by the state and the upper class.
The land and part of the booty went to the state, but most booty was
claimed by the soldiers in quantities according to rank.43 In the third and
second centuries bce, the distribution of the spoils became more unequal
and in response, the “Social Wars” exploded, a rebellion by Rome’s allies,
outraged they were not receiving their fair share and impoverished by
the neglect of their farms during their long military service. Discontent
with Roman rule and the distribution of spoils had precipitated defec-
tions of allies to Hannibal in the Second Punic War. Elites acquiring of-
fices in conquered provinces, especially governors, diverted revenues into
their own pockets. This was constantly railed against but was normal
practice. Once a territory was conquered, the publicani, the public con-
tractors, also arrived seeking profits from army and administration.
64 The Roman Republic

A second material motive was for land seized from the defeated,
leased to the rich or given to Latins or Roman colonists, or granted out-
side any formal structure. This began soon after the foundation of the
republic, although we have details only from much later. Veteran colo-
nies were designed to stiffen the loyalty of newly conquered territories,
producing population transfers of many thousands moving from old to
new Roman territories, increasing Romanization and war support among
veterans and ambitious civilians.44
There were some longer-term economic benefits. Booty did inject
much capital into the economy, while slavery increased agricultural
yields and wine exports, but this was entirely at the expense of those
looted and enslaved. Yet Philip Kay detects an “economic revolution”
during the mid to late republic.45 What I termed in volume 1 of The
Sources of Social Power the “legionary economy” yielded some more gen-
eral benefits from better communications infrastructures constructed by
the legions, the economic demand coming from the army and the state,
and the provision of relative order. An unintended consequence of levy-
ing taxes on the conquered peoples was that they had to convert their ag-
ricultural surpluses into cash, which encouraged commercialization.46
Living standards and population rose, though not enormously.47 On the
other hand, the many rebellions brought exemplary repression as tribes
and cities were annihilated to deter others from rebelling.48 But if you
behaved yourself, life improved a little. For the Romans, militarism was
institutionalized into everyday economic life. Their material greed prob-
ably provided the most widely shared motive for imperialism among the
different social classes and legionary ranks. It was a conscious choice for
acquisition through conquest, but increased trade was also a conse-
quence. There is, however, the counterfactual possibility that economic
growth might have been alternatively stimulated by peace.

Ideological Motives: Grandeur and Glory

Like all empires, Romans justified conquests ideologically: their version
was that their rule brought peace and the rule of law to less civilized peo-
ples, and so was blessed by the gods. Rome was a state of laws, imposing
its order on the conquered through war.49 Peace was valued, but mainly
as propaganda. Although atrocities such as Caesar’s near-genocide in
Gaul were denounced, there was almost no pacifism. Nor was there tran-
scendent religion justifying or denouncing war. Romans were religious in
 The Roman Republic 65

the sense that they regularly performed rituals to deities in whom they
believed, but there were multiple gods and you could choose your own.
As was common in the ancient world, Roman leaders consulted the au-
guries (usually the behavior and entrails of birds) before making deci-
sions. A bad omen might delay battle for a day or two but not stop it
altogether. After a defeat, however, it was often said that the omens had
been bad. Suetonius quotes Caesar as saying, “The omens will be as fa-
vorable as I wish them to be.”50 Roman wars were not usually driven for-
ward by transcendent ideologies, religious or secular, or indeed by high
emotions, for emotions were cooled down by the rituals involved in de-
bate and quasi diplomacy, except where rebellions had killed many
Roman citizens.
War had become the means to achieve all things material and ideal:
wealth, fame, and glory for the leaders, grandeur for the state. Status,
influence, political power, refusal to show weakness, and domination for
its own sake were shared by senators, generals, and to a lesser extent their
soldiers.51 Tacitus remarked, “The lust for power, for dominating others,
inflames the heart more than any other passion.”52 Prestige and glory for
the rulers, once institutionalized, becomes grandeur for the state, involv-
ing more militarism than material goals, which are restrained by calcula-
tions of profit and loss. Greedy generals will make war only if they see
profit. But fame, prestige, glory, and grandeur in a militarized society are
valued for their own sake, almost whatever the profit or loss. Susan Mat-
tern says honor, revenge, and aristocratic competition were the main
forces driving foreign policy.53 Gruen agrees that economic motives were
far less important than status in explaining Roman wars in the Hellenistic
world.54 He sees the Third Macedonian War, for example, as caused by
senators’ fear of losing face, showing “that Rome was not a helpless, piti-
ful giant,” a rather odd way of expressing it!55 Walter Scheidel explains
endless war thus: “Unless we believe in decades of inadvertent mission
creep, the aristocratic quest for glory coupled with a pragmatic desire to
keep Italian mobilization structures fully operational is the most econom-
ical explanation for this outcome.” He adds that in 157 bce, after sixty-
eight consecutive years of warfare, when Rome had run out of targets, the
senate immediately launched a new campaign in the Balkans to ensure
that the people would not be softened by a lengthy peace.56
Ambition for glory among the elites was hereditary. Roman command-
ers, said Sallust, “as they called to mind their forefathers’ achievements,
such a flame was kindled in the breasts of those eminent persons, as could
66 The Roman Republic

not be extinguished till their own merit had equaled the fame and glory of
their ancestors.”57 The ideology was not transcendental. It had no goals
higher than bringing order and profit through Roman rule. But it was im-
manent, strengthening the solidarity of the lineage and the republic.
Militarism was institutionalized into politics and ideology. Serving in
the field became the main way to public office. Polybius says young men
had to serve with distinction during ten campaigns before they could
stand for public office. Distinction meant showing valor and leadership
skills in battle, which Sallust adds made the young keen to make their
bravery conspicuous. Promotion through the hierarchy of public offices
(from which ascending levels of profit flowed) depended on valor and
victory, right up to senate level. Ordinary soldiers could also receive hon-
ors and promotions. A medal for bravery or promotion to centurion gave
prestige, and its receipt was proudly carved onto tombstones. Some in all
classes had war-making incentives. This was not the ageism of modern
warfare, whereby old civilians send out young soldiers to die. Rome’s
aging leaders had already experienced battle themselves. Even the self-
declared near-pacifist Cicero, who rose as an intellectual, lawyer, and
politician, had done military service (and hated it). When he conquered
mountain tribes while proconsul in Cilicia, he demanded a Triumph. He
did not get it, but he did get the spoils of office. The highest public offi-
cials were the two consuls, drawn from senatorial ranks. One would be
delegated ever since the founding of the republic in the mid-fifth century
bce to command the legions in the field together with a professional
general. Their term of office lasted only a year, so if they wanted glory
and wealth, they had to get on with war quickly.
Generals used the riches won from wars to strengthen their political
power in Rome.58 Rome entered wars even when lucrative pickings were
unlikely. Caesar’s two invasions of Britain were motivated more by his
desire to best his rivals and dominate the senate. Cicero observed,
“There is not a bit of silver in that island and no hope of booty except
from slaves.”59 Later, Claudius, the third emperor, conquered Britain
mainly because victory would overcome his political difficulties. The de-
sire to achieve domination, honor, and reputation came to triumph over
money, say Gruen and Mattern.60 Michael Taylor finds that from 200 to
157 bce, military expenses were about 75 percent of all state expenses,
and that few wars were profitable for the state, since the taxes and loot
received from them was less than the military expenses.61 But war was
profitable for the generals extracting loot.
 The Roman Republic 67

Only about one-quarter of consuls did not engage in war.62 The

other three-quarters hoped to get the highest accolade, the Triumph,
when a victorious general marched with his soldiers through Rome, dis-
playing the riches he had looted, providing circus spectacles, showering
delicacies and trinkets on the people, while enemies were marched in
chains before being enslaved or killed. The victor basked in the adulation
of the city. The main restraint on the number of Triumphs was other
senators’ resentment of their rivals’ successes. One-quarter of consuls did
get a Triumph. Writers of the Late Republican period such as Livy, Sal-
lust, and Tacitus disapproved, seeing Triumphs as a corrupt degeneration
of the simpler, austere ceremonies of earlier times. The fame sought by
Roman generals grew through time, a sign of the institutionalization of
militarism. Architecture increasingly reflected military glory, as can be
seen in surviving triumphal arches and columns and in statues erected to
the goddess Victory. Monumental public building meant much was spent
on displays of power and glory, just as medieval Europe’s cathedrals dem-
onstrated the Church’s glory. Taylor says such monuments represented
another 10 percent of total state expenses. Again there were mixed mo-
tives of self-glorification and intimidating the world and the populace
with the grandeur of Rome.63 But all these forms of greed and glory de-
pended on Rome’s having the military might to win wars at an acceptable
level of cost. Triumphs required victories.

The Roman Art of War

Citizenship and class jointly structured the way Rome fought wars.
There were four legal criteria of class identity: ancestry, patrician or ple-
beian; six census ranks based on wealth and political privilege, in which
the senatorial and equestrian ranks were classified above the ordinary cit-
izens; honors granted so that a self-made man’s family could become
“noble” plebeians; and citizenship rights ranking freeborn Romans above
the partial citizenship given the allies. All these statuses came with rights
under law. All male citizens had to fight. They had originally provided
their own weapons, armor, and horses, according to the resources speci-
fied by the six census ranks. Census taking was established in Rome from
the fifth century bce, and we have numerous census totals recorded from
234 bce onward. Its purpose was to count manpower available for the
legions—all free males above the age of seventeen, not women, children,
or slaves—and to allocate it by class. There was a parallel in the same
68 The Roman Republic

years in Warring States China, but these two cases were, I think, unparal-
leled mobilizations of military power in the ancient world. The censor
was always an official of the highest standing, whose decisions could not
be overruled. The census became an overall population count only later,
during the empire.
Roman citizen-soldiers had democratic rights, including electing
some of their officers. But there was a tension between the inclusive na-
ture of citizenship and class inequalities (as in democracies today). The re-
sult then was class struggle and army mutinies, recorded from the fifth
century bce onward. When pay was not forthcoming or when soldiers felt
deprived of loot, or badly led, or forced into too many battles, they might
resist. We don’t know how frequent mutinies were, but they were a refusal
to accept disliked conditions of service, not a refusal to fight. But their
sacrifices had to be proportional to the chances of victory and rewards,
and this indicated soldiers’ determination to defend legal privileges.
So these rulers and the citizens were devoted to making war, and
they were efficient at it. The republic, once institutionalized, could rap-
idly extract taxes for war and raise and logistically maintain legions in the
field. It probably mobilized a larger proportion of the total population
than any other state before modern times, and modern states have much
larger state and local bureaucracies. Rome had a very small bureaucracy:
only about 150 civil servants in Rome, and perhaps 150 senatorial and
equestrian administrators, plus small staffs of public slaves in the prov-
inces. Such a tiny bureaucracy could not effectively govern an empire of
around 50–70 million people spread over 100,000–200,000 square kilo-
meters deploying legions totaling between 200,000 and 300,000 disci-
plined, logistically supported soldiers. But this state was really run by its
militaristic class structure, defined by nobility, wealth, and military ser-
vice, whose combination of collective solidarity and hierarchy of rank
conferred considerable infrastructural power. The republic centered on
the senatorial and equestrian classes, which shared a common culture
and were politically organized in the senate and shared the popular as-
semblies with heavy infantry and medium-heavy infantry middling
classes. All participated in a career structure that tied together army
command and political office, providing the spoils of war and political
office. The military-political class structure provided the core of the
state, not the few “bureaucrats,” who were often slaves. As Scheidel says,
“The Roman state that arose from these arrangements was one narrowly
focused on warfare and little else.”64 This war-addicted republic had an
 The Roman Republic 69

economy largely “off the books,” making war for greed and glory. So de-
spite what I wrote in my 1984 article on despotic and infrastructural
power, the Roman Republic actually had extensive infrastructural power
and a despotic power confined to controlling the poor, the conquered,
and the enslaved.
The fighting qualities of the Roman soldier are often exaggerated. As
happens in all armies, on occasion the soldiers got frightened, ran, or de-
serted. There were defeats, those against Hannibal and Mithridates, king
of Pontus, being the best-known. Jessica Clark counts forty-three defeats
in the second century bce alone, but she adds that the senate did not al-
ways count them as such and always saw them as setbacks on the road to
eventual victory.65 In 53 bce at Carrhae in modern Turkey, defeat came at
the hands of a Parthian army dominated by horse archers. The Roman
commander Crassus had scorned advice to attack the Parthians through
Armenia and instead marched his troops straight across the desert, en-
gaging in battle without resting his men, in open terrain suited to horse
archers. Roman weakness in cavalry meant the archers could not be dis-
persed. Firing from outside the range of Roman spears during a whole
day, they caused substantial infantry losses, although the line stood firm.
Now Crassus made the error of sending forward part of his force, break-
ing up the legions’ cohesion. The Parthian heavy cavalry charged and the
lines began to disintegrate. The legionaries, their officers, and Crassus
were slaughtered. After Carrhae, vengeance was required. To accept de-
feat was unthinkable. Caesar was preparing an expedition to avenge
Crassus when he was assassinated. Mark Anthony did launch a Parthian
expedition but was defeated in 37 bce, having ill-prepared his troops for
mountain combat. The senate kept on authorizing attacks on Parthia,
and some victories were achieved, but the troops were never able to fin-
ish the enemy off. Rome had been more intrinsically bellicose than suc-
cessful, yet declaring that final victory is inevitable means you carry on
aggressing. Roman armies kept coming back from defeats. They had
been successful while Roman rulers could tolerate only victory. Belatedly,
Parthian persistence taught Romans Realism.
There had been two main military virtues of Roman citizenship
(Eckstein and Harris agree). First, it was geared to warfare. It generated
comradely bonds among citizen-soldiers, while its legally and militarily
entrenched class privileges strengthened legitimate hierarchy. Intense
comradeship and unquestioning obedience to hierarchy are the main
requisites of an effective army. The citizen body became larger than rival
70 The Roman Republic

states’, expanding to include all classes of free men. Taylor says that the
Romans could muster a peak deployment of 175,000 soldiers in 190 bce
(other estimates are higher). By comparison, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic
kingdoms spent much less of their wealth on the military and so could
mobilize only about 80,000, and though the Macedonian kingdom was
more militarized, it was also smaller and poorer and mobilized only
45,000. Taylor notes that Carthage could on occasion mobilize more
men than Rome, but they were drawn mainly from tributary states,
which had weaknesses.66
Citizens were lightly taxed, for their main duty was onerous military
service, which evolved into a duration of six to fourteen years (according
to need) for the assidui, citizens with the property qualification. The draft
went smoothly and there were no troop shortages, not even when virtu-
ally all assidui were called up in the Second Punic War. But then came
some reluctance, and in 107 bce Marius abandoned the property qualifi-
cation, recruiting poor, paid soldiers who would expect a grant of prop-
erty at the end of their service. A further change was instituted by
Emperor Augustus, who established a volunteer, professional, and paid
army with a service obligation of sixteen years. These reforms broke the
tight links between citizenship and the army that had provided the re-
public’s coup-proofing.
Legionaries expected a share of the loot, and many could expect land
when they finished their service. To satisfy them required victories, a self-
reinforcing system. Soldiers who survived could achieve more prosperity
and respect from family and neighbors. So Roman soldiers and veterans
were an important pressure group for war. They fought well both because
rewards depended on victory and because of the brutal class-based disci-
pline, intensive drilling, and citizen esprit de corps of the legions. The le-
gion was superior because of the dual nature of Roman citizenship, which
yielded class solidarity at the top and hierarchy down below.
The second advantage of Roman citizenship was its flexibility toward
allies. Although Romans viewed peace as something imposed by them on
a defeated enemy, repression was limited by a desire to enhance their
military manpower, and this was achieved, uniquely in the ancient Medi-
terranean world, by gradual extensions of citizenship.67 Eckstein saw the
crucial Roman advantage as its “divorce of citizen status from ethnicity
or geographical location,” which allowed the creation of a citizen body
dwarfing other ancient states, coming close to being a “unified nation-
state.”68 After allies and former enemies had subordinated themselves to
 The Roman Republic 71

Rome, they were given a degree of citizenship consonant with their past
behavior, present attitudes, and strategic location. A few were granted
full citizenship, others had citizen status without the right to vote, others
had lesser rights. Those who had fought against Rome might be killed or
enslaved and have their property expropriated. This has the look of a
highly rational war-making strategy.
It is not entirely clear why Rome adopted this uniquely expansive
citizen strategy. The foundation myth was that when Romulus defeated
the Sabines, he promised citizenship to Sabine war captives held in
Rome. We saw that some early non-Roman elites negotiated their way
into Roman citizenship. This happened, for example, in Veii, the nearest
Etruscan city. In 396 bce the Romans took the city. Archaeologists have
detected continuity of settlement, and Rome apparently allowed it to op-
erate as before, but under its authority. In 390 Veiians were among four
new citizen tribes created after the Gauls sacked Rome, expanding the
pool of military recruits.69 Highly attuned to battlefield advantage, Rome
viewed winning wars as more important than preserving the exclusivity
and purity of citizenship, in contrast to the Greeks. In Greek city-states
like Athens, all freeborn males were citizens, but slaves, foreign residents,
and allies could not become citizens. Though the Carthaginians were
probably not so restrictive, they had a merchant empire lacking extensive
landmasses with large populations. Only when defeated in the First
Punic War did they acquire tributary states in Iberia and North Africa in
order to field more troops. The reason that the Romans were the most
successful warriors was that their social structure, their political rights,
and their culture were all subordinated to military efficiency—a truly
militaristic society.
By the late republic, citizenship was held by Italians, colonies of
Romans established elsewhere, Romans or their descendants living else-
where, some city populations throughout the empire, and client allied
rulers. Women were not citizens since they did not provide military ser-
vice, though they had legal rights. The grant of citizenship if one proved
one’s loyalty was a major factor keeping allies loyal—the one area of gen-
uine Roman diplomacy. The allies did not pay taxes, nor did the Romans
usually take tribute from them. Instead, allies delivered annual military
service. Since this symbolized their subordination, it was important to
use allied auxiliaries regularly, another incentive to make war often.70
The advantages for the allies were that they had a right to loot, while
Rome brought peace between them.
72 The Roman Republic

Each Roman legion was flanked by allied auxiliaries often outnum-

bering the legionaries. Without them, Rome would have been weak in
cavalry and javelins. That they fought together on the battlefield required
close coordination of drilling and tactics, which solidified the relations be-
tween Rome and its allies. Most ancient empires fell because rivals took
advantage of revolts in conquered provinces. Hannibal tried in Italy to
draw away Rome’s allies, offering them alliance with Carthage. Some wa-
vered, but they knew he could not give them rights equal to those of
Roman citizenship, and they knew that Rome would keep on fighting
whatever the odds. Being on the winning side was all-important to them
as minor powers. Thus, Rome rarely sued for peace or searched for com-
promise, even when in dire straits. Three Samnite Wars, three Punic
Wars, four Macedonian Wars: by digging deep for victory, Rome kept its
allies loyal.71 The allies initially kept their own languages and culture, but
from the first century bce the allies became Romans in culture, language,
taxes, censuses, oaths, baths, architecture, and law.72 Assimilation was not
forced on them, for they desired Roman favor and civilization.
The two military virtues—breadth of citizenship and its extension to
allies—brought Rome larger manpower reserves than its rivals. Beard and
Eckstein agree, but they claim that Rome’s opponents were just as milita-
ristic, focusing as they did on ferocity of culture and praise for warriors.
More critical for militarism is the need that other institutions be subordi-
nated to military efficiency. In the nineteenth century Prussia became more
militaristic than Austria-Hungary, not primarily for reasons of culture but
because it had a military machine dominating the state. Rome’s power
structures were subordinated to military efficiency. Greek states valued a
citizenship restricted by class and ethnicity for political reasons. In Car-
thage militarism was subordinated to trade. That is why Rome was unusu-
ally aggressive and fought and won so many wars.
Each refusal to accept defeat, whatever the cost, brought final vic-
tory. Roman militarism was not unique, but it was more relentlessly pur-
sued, more enduring, and more institutionally embedded. War was a
reasonable bet for achieving booty and glory. The confidence of legion-
aries in their superiority made the odds seem more favorable. In periods
of defeat, the risk was much greater. Then brutal discipline and intense
drilling had to kick in to nullify fear and motivate the struggle for ulti-
mate victory. Roman legions suffered defeats, but they won the wars. For
an example, I turn to the third-century bce Punic Wars, fought against
Carthage.
 The Roman Republic 73

The Punic Wars

The surviving sources on the Punic Wars were all written later than the
events described and they are pro-Roman—Polybius the least so. We can
combine archaeological evidence, synthesized by Nathan Pilkington,
with the largely text-based accounts of Richard Miles and Dexter
Hoyos.73 But because the Roman senate ordered the destruction of Car-
thage’s records after final victory, we know little of its version of events.
Eckstein again sees the Punic Wars and concurrent wars against
Greek states through the lens of Realism. He says that the eastern Medi-
terranean world had been formerly “balanced” between three great Helle-
nistic powers, the Seleucid, Ptolemaic, and Antigonid successor dynasties
to the empire of Alexander the Great. But through internal conflict in the
Ptolemaic state, from 207 to 188 bce the eastern Mediterranean suffered a
“power-transition crisis,” as the balance ended and anarchy increased.
Wars to establish hegemony broke out. Rome, says Eckstein, was pulled
into this partly by fear of unrest or of a new hegemon, partly by commit-
ments to its allies, and partly by its long-established traditions of imperial
expansion. Carthage was similarly pulled in, he says. Rome’s triumphs in
the Greek and Punic wars signaled the rise of a new hegemon.74 This
makes some sense, but to understand the Punic Wars we must also exam-
ine the different sources of social power within Rome and Carthage.
The city-state of Carthage, on the North African coast in what is
now Tunisia, was an offshoot of Tyre, a Phoenician city in Lebanon. The
Latin word punicus meant Phoenician. Carthage became a self-governing
city-state penetrating its hinterland, but for centuries it remained a
minor colony. It originally had kings, perhaps elected, but then acquired
a constitution with an aristocratic senate and a more popular assembly.
Around 340 bce Aristotle said admiringly that it combined monarchical,
oligarchic, and democratic elements and deflected internal conflict
abroad by sending groups of citizens to found other Carthaginian states.
There was a shared ruling-class culture and shared military-service obli-
gations for citizens of Carthage and its African hinterland. The main dif-
ferences from Rome were that merchant and aristocratic families could
act more autonomously, and military offices were rigorously kept apart
from civilian and religious offices; in Rome militarism also dominated
the state and religion. Two annually elected “suffets,” resembling Roman
consuls, exercised judicial and executive power but not military power.
Generals were appointed separately, often picked by the officers, and
74 The Roman Republic

were then ratified by the city authorities. Militarism was not as central to
the state and society as in Rome.
Carthage was said by Justin to have invaded Sicily in 550 bce and again
around 525. Herodotus adds an invasion in 490 bce, defeated at the Battle
of Himera. Many scholars have followed them in dating Carthaginian im-
perialism this early. Hoyos gives a detailed account from Greek sources of
the campaign leading to Himera, and Terrenato mentions several wars in
Sicily between Carthage and Syracuse through the fifth century.75 Yet the
battle at Himera probably involved men from other Phoenician colonies,
argues Pilkington, adding that there is no archaeological evidence for any
Carthaginian military venture abroad until an opportunistic invasion of
Sicily in 409 bce, when Syracuse had been weakened by its long war with
Athens.76 Carthaginian forces razed several Greek cities on the island and
established at least two settlements, while leaving alone indigenous Sicilian
towns. Before this, Carthage had established sufficient control over its Afri-
can hinterland to support the city and armed forces. Carthaginian rule
brought more prosperity to fertile Tunisian land that had been previously
underexploited. Rule over the indigenous peoples was not very onerous,
enabling the fusion of these Africans into a Carthaginian identity. They be-
came the mainstay of its army, alongside other mercenaries, while citizens
dominated its navy. But the port of Carthage remained small and lacked
dry-dock facilities until the mid-fourth century bce. There were merchant
ships but no fleet capable of carrying a large invasion force. Perhaps the
fleet of 490 bce came from several Phoenician cities.
Unlike Rome, Carthage then became a major trading state, at first
through trade with Athens and other Greek city-states, especially by ex-
porting grain from its own hinterland. Small Phoenician colonies in Sar-
dinia and southern Gaul were also subordinated, sometimes forcibly,
though they retained their own political institutions, which indicates in-
direct Carthaginian rule. C. R. Whittaker and Miles emphasize the non-
imperial nature of Carthaginian power even in the third century bce, and
it was for long more a federation than an empire.77 Rome was the only
true empire in the western Mediterranean world. Carthage controlled
key ports and had widespread political connections but no imperial sys-
tem of conquests or annexations. After 350 bce Carthage maintained
large fleets in a big new port facility, dominated more North African ter-
ritory, and founded colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, and Iberia. This involved
troops, although not much war was involved. Miles says Carthage’s for-
eign policy “stands in stark contrast to the power politics” of Rome’s
 The Roman Republic 75

plunder and subjugation policies. “There is little evidence of territorial

conquest, administrative control, collection of taxes, commercial monop-
olies or the appropriation of foreign policy.” Carthage created a “middle
ground on which Phoenician, Greek and indigenous populations inter-
acted and cooperated.”78 Perhaps this is a little too glowing, as Harris ar-
gues, for Carthage did wage war, had some militarism in its culture and
institutions, restricted citizenship tightly, and dealt harshly with discon-
tent.79 But Hoyos says Carthage waged far fewer wars than Rome and
the effect was to produce generals who were “amateurs” in comparison
with the Roman generals (Hannibal excluded).80 Whittaker went through
the attributes of empire—territorial conquest, colonial governance, trib-
ute, and unequal trade.81 In the fifth and fourth centuries bce he found
only reciprocal agreements with other cities and peoples for port of trade
rights favoring Carthaginian ships, since their naval power protected
shipping. Military power did not dominate Carthaginian economic, po-
litical, and ideological institutions. Much expansion was by private mer-
chant houses with their own small fleets. Think of several British East
India Companies, not the British Empire.
This was only a coastal empire, focused on port cities, and the hin-
terlands needed to supply them. After the invasion of Sicily, troops were
stationed there, but there is no sign of political institutions. The popula-
tion subject to Carthaginian rule in Sicily and Sardinia remained small
and largely self-governing. Carthage avoided conflict in Greece and with
Rome and played no role in the Italian mainland. Polybius says Rome
and Carthage concluded three treaties recognizing each other’s spheres
of influence, and trade between them produced a Carthaginian merchant
district in Rome.82 In the third treaty, signed in 279 bce, Rome and Car-
thage pledged to aid each other in case of a threat from the Greek king
Pyrrhus. Since Rome still lacked much of a navy, a Carthaginian fleet
would, if required, transport Roman troops across the seas. The treaty
was not activated, but it implied a loose alliance. Pyrrhus then entered
Sicily, forced Syracuse to submit, and attacked the Carthaginians, push-
ing them to the west of the island. They were saved by his maltreatment
of other Greek settlements in Sicily, which joined with Carthaginian
forces to drive Pyrrhus off the island in 276, leaving a balance of power
between Syracuse and the Carthaginians, and other Greek and indige-
nous settlements alongside them. Carthage was still not revealing impe-
rial ambitions and Rome lacked equal sea power. War between them was
not inevitable.
76 The Roman Republic

Then came a window of opportunity. The Mamertines, “Sons of

Mars,” a band of Italian mercenaries, had seized Messene, the closest port
to mainland Italy, and held it for twenty years. They had slaughtered the
inhabitants, for which they were universally condemned as war criminals,
and had then run the city as a base for piracy on land and sea. Syracuse fi-
nally sent a force that defeated them. The remaining Mamertines, retreat-
ing into the citadel, appealed in 264 bce to both Carthage and Rome for
help. The Carthaginians had a fleet nearby and sent some troops into the
city, but then they moved out. We don’t know why. There was some de-
bate among the Roman senators about the morality of aiding the Mamer-
tines, especially when they themselves had just put to death renegade
Roman soldiers, allies of the Mamertines, who had similarly murdered the
citizens of Rhegium in Italy. The senate—unusually—failed to reach a de-
cision and passed it on to the popular assembly. Polybius gives a detailed
account of the decision. He says the Romans feared Carthaginian power:

Carthaginian aggrandisement was not confined to Libya but had

embraced many districts in Iberia as well. . . . Carthage was, be-
sides, mistress of all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian
seas: they were beginning, therefore, to be exceedingly anxious
lest, if the Carthaginians became masters of Sicily also, they
should find them very dangerous and formidable neighbours,
surrounding them as they would on every side, and occupying a
position which commanded all the coasts of Italy. . . . Should
they avail themselves of the voluntary offer of Messene and be-
come masters of it, they were certain before long to crush Syra-
cuse also, since they were already lords of nearly the whole of
the rest of Sicily. . . . They felt it was absolutely necessary not to
. . . allow the Carthaginians to secure what would be like a bridge
to enable them to cross into Italy. The people, however, had suf-
fered much from the previous wars, and wanted some means of
repairing the losses which they had sustained in every depart-
ment. Besides these national advantages to be gained by the war,
the military commanders suggested that individually they would
get manifest and important benefits from it. They accordingly
voted in favour of giving the aid.83

The appeal to greed undercuts the claim that this was really self-defense,
for the “manifest and important benefits” accruing to Roman citizens
 The Roman Republic 77

meant plunder and tribute, “justified” by the threat of future strangula-

tion. In reality Carthage was not a threat. Polybius’s sources were written
near the end of the Punic Wars by historians reading back their present
into the past. Carthaginian ships had long patrolled the straits, protect-
ing trade from pirates without showing signs of territorial ambitions in
mainland Italy, and Carthage was in defensive mode in Sicily, deploying
few troops there. If Carthage had been seen as the main threat in Sicily,
the obvious strategy would have been to ally with Syracuse against Car-
thage, but this was the opposite of what Roman forces did.
In 264 bce a Roman invasion force crossed the straits and took Mes­
sene, beginning the first Roman war fought outside Italy. Roman and Car-
thaginian forces initially avoided each other, and the Romans instead went
southeast to attack Syracuse, forcing it to submit to Roman rule. Only
then did they turn westward toward Carthaginian settlements, having re-
alized the relative weakness of the Carthaginian presence. It was oppor-
tunism aimed at direct territorial control. Carthaginian forces followed
the cautious strategy they had pursued against Sicilian Greeks. Defending
a few fortified towns, their outnumbered troops hoped to sap the Roman
will to continue fighting so that a negotiated settlement could be reached.
A treaty delineating separate spheres of interest was possible. Rome could
have continued as a northern Mediterranean power, Carthage as a south-
ern, and Carthaginian strategy on the island aimed at preserving the status
quo. But Roman goals had expanded into conquering the whole island.
Carthaginian leaders felt they could not accept this because as a maritime
power trading across the Mediterranean, Carthage needed some control
of the straits. Since Roman leaders must have realized this, they knew they
were starting a major war with a power whose navy dominated the seas. I
suspect a war party in the senate had a longer-term ambition. Polybius’s
ambivalence might indicate a similar suspicion.
War began, its first phase taking place in Sicily. The Carthaginians
poured in reinforcements, and bloody, inconclusive warfare ensued, both
in Sicily and in North Africa. Carthage was at first dominant at sea. Rome
had the advantage of its expanding citizenship and a much larger popula-
tion from which it could draw troops for land fighting. Pilkington says
Carthage could draw on a maximum of about 200,000 men of fighting
age from its African territories and colonies elsewhere.84 Apart from its
African hinterland, the Carthaginians had not acquired landmasses with
large populations. Thus, it had only about one-half of Rome’s potential
soldiers. Carthage had to make up numbers with levies from tributaries
78 The Roman Republic

and mercenaries, perhaps costly and of lesser loyalty. Carthage had to

twice divert resources to suppress rebellions among North African
troops. The Romans also detached some of Carthage’s tributaries in Ibe-
ria and Numidia. Rome had the edge on land.
At first Carthage was a naval power and Rome was not. Yet the Ro-
mans again demonstrated an ability to subordinate the economy to war
and exploit the resources of Greek city-states that it now dominated in
the western Mediterranean. Private finance was mobilized to build fleets
whose design was based on a recovered Carthaginian vessel, using Greek
craftsmen, while adding improvements such as raised, strengthened prows
for ramming and boarding (though these proved vulnerable in storms).
Battle performance improved, and in 256 bce a Roman fleet of over three
hundred ships defeated the main Carthaginian fleet, also over three hun-
dred vessels, off Cape Ecnomus in the south of Sicily. There was further
fighting for a few years, but Carthaginian soldiers in Sicily, their supply
lines cut, surrendered. Later that year a Roman army invaded Africa. The
ultimate weakness of a commercial empire now revealed itself. Carthage
struggled to find more troops; Rome continued to raise them.
Polybius says the First Punic War was “the greatest war in history in
its length, intensity, and scale of operations.”85 But the Carthaginians
now sued for peace. The senate exacted heavy terms: a war indemnity
paid over ten years and the loss of Sicily and other islands. Polybius con-
cludes rather euphemistically: “It was not by mere chance or without
knowing what they were doing that the Romans struck their bold stroke
for universal supremacy and dominion, and justified their boldness by its
success. No: it was the natural result of discipline gained in the stern
school of difficulty and danger.”86
Romans then took advantage of Carthaginian preoccupation with a
Numidian revolt to seize Sardinia and Corsica, hitherto Carthaginian.
The senate then demanded a further indemnity from Carthage. These
unprovoked, treaty-breaking acts made further warfare inevitable, as
Polybius notes.87 So far this had been all Roman aggression.
But this had provoked an aggressive Carthaginian response. Its rulers
now sought direct control over further African territories, and they
looked to Spain to build up resources to counter further Roman aggres-
sion and to pay the indemnities. They already had trading depots along
the coast, and they now moved inland through campaigns against indige-
nous peoples, planting a more direct imperial rule over them, aided by
marriage alliances with local elites and new settler cities.88 This was now
 The Roman Republic 79

territorial imperialism, a defensive response to Roman expansion, though

offensive against the inhabitants of Africa and Spain.
The Treaty of Ebro in 226 bce allowed Carthage to expand in Spain
south of the Ebro River while Rome took the north. This was breached by
Rome when it supported the city-state of Saguntum, south of the river.
The Saguntines had attacked a nearby city-state allied to Carthage, believ-
ing they had Roman protection. Carthage’s commander in Spain, Hanni-
bal, moved quickly to defeat Saguntum in 219 bce. He would spare the
population, provided they were “willing to depart from Saguntum, un-
armed, each with two garments.” He needed to pay his army and bribe the
wavering assemblies in Carthage with the spoils of the city. They were
more cost-conscious than Romans, and Hannibal, unlike Roman com-
manders, had to contend with an assembly peace faction. The citizens of
Saguntum declined his offer and tried to destroy the city, so Hannibal or-
dered a bloodbath. The senate declared that this was a casus belli and that
Carthage had breached the Ebro treaty. Roman ambassadors were then
sent to demand Hannibal be handed over and taken to Rome as a war
criminal—a typically unacceptable Roman demand, made so that Rome
could claim that refusal made this a “just” war. Polybius blames both sides,
as do most modern historians. Nathan Rosenstein says that neither Car-
thage nor Rome wanted war, but neither would back down, whereas Harris
blames the Roman senate for using the Saguntines to provoke Hannibal
into war.89 The provocation seems to have been mutual, however.
The Second Punic War lasted seventeen years, until 201 bce. Hanni-
bal, well aware of Rome’s greater potential reserves, struck quickly at the
Roman heartland.90 He took his soldiers and his elephants in Spain over
the Alps into Italy. He had support from several Celtic tribes and tried to
bring Rome’s Italian allies over to his side, releasing all their captured
prisoners and promising to restore the freedoms of those who allied with
him. At the height of his power in Italy, perhaps 40 percent of Italian cit-
ies had promised him their allegiance, though most were more cautious
in their actions, anxious not to provoke Roman rage. After Hannibal’s
great victory at Cannae in 216 bce, in which Livy asserts 50,000 Romans
were killed, Livy says Hannibal told his prisoners that “he was not carry-
ing on a war of extermination with the Romans, but was contending for
honour and empire. That his ancestors had yielded to the Roman valour;
and that he was endeavouring that others might be obliged to yield, in
their turn, to his good fortune and valour together. Accordingly, he al-
lowed the captives the liberty of ransoming themselves.”91
80 The Roman Republic

At this moment Hannibal did not march straight on Rome but of-
fered negotiations, a decision sometimes considered his biggest mistake,
since Rome never negotiated. Livy quotes one of his generals urging an
immediate march on Rome.92 Hannibal replied, “I commend your zeal,
but I need time to weigh the plan which you propose,” to which the gen-
eral responded, “Assuredly, no one man has been blessed with all God’s
gifts. You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how
to use it.” Yet Hannibal had probably calculated that taking Rome would
involve a long siege that threatened supply difficulties while his forces
remained static, vulnerable to attack. He wanted not the destruction of
Rome but recognition of the equal stature and independence of Car-
thage. Cannae is also well over three hundred kilometers from Rome.
Hannibal’s alliance with King Philip V of Macedon in 215 bce put
pressure on Rome, which faced a possible two-front war. Hannibal
marched around Italy for fifteen years, ravaging Roman territory. The Ro-
mans resorted to stalling “Fabian” tactics, made famous by the general Fa-
bius Maximus. Hannibal was hurt by the defeat of his brother Hasdrubal,
who had brought reinforcements into Italy. When Rome sent legions to
detach Carthaginian allies in Spain and Numidia, Hannibal was in trouble,
unable to get reinforcements or defend his Italian allies. Again, Roman al-
lies and mobilization policies made the crucial difference.93 Hannibal also
faced a faction in Carthage that opposed sending him reinforcements. The
commercial instincts of Carthaginian leaders prompted them to send
more resources to Iberian campaigns than to Hannibal in Italy. With the
economic resources of Spain, members of this faction believed they might
reestablish a balance of power with Rome. Hannibal was eventually re-
called to Carthage and lost a final battle with the Romans at Zama in Af-
rica in 202 bce. His government then sued for peace and exiled him.
Carthage, unlike Rome, had not subordinated all its sources of power to
war making. Commercial and military calculations remained distinct.
Faced with Rome, wavering between them would destroy them.
The Roman senate kept raising new legions. There were no rebel-
lions, no peace factions within the senate, just class solidarity and compe-
tition between senators for command against Hannibal, and the fame
and spoils that would bring. Over 70 percent of Roman citizens aged
seventeen to thirty were drafted to fight, which in modern times, Rosen-
stein notes, has been equaled only by the Confederate states in the
American Civil War. The disasters in Italy, says Livy, did not induce
the Romans “to breathe a word about peace.”94 The final peace treaty of
 The Roman Republic 81

202 bce stripped Carthage of most of its territories, most of its fleet, and
the right to make war without Roman permission, as well as the payment
of a huge annual indemnity over a fifty-year period. When Carthage of-
fered to pay this off in a single installment, Rome refused—it was a long-
term means of demonstrating Carthage’s subordination, a status ploy.95
During this war the Romans had avoided a two-front war with Philip V,
king of Macedon, only by conceding a treaty favorable to Philip. This was
remedied in 200 bce when they invaded his kingdom. The senate responded
to a call for help from the Greek states of Pergamum and Rhodes, which
were feeling threatened by a projected alliance between the kingdom of
Macedon and the Seleucids, another Hellenistic monarchy in southwestern
Asia. These smaller powers feared they would be overcome, and the sena-
tors seized the opportunity to use their enlarged armies to achieve con-
quests in Greece also.
The Romans had won the Punic Wars. Carthage had been defeated,
but a war party led by Cato declared repeatedly that “Carthage must be
destroyed.” The city still had rich pickings, and greedy Romans were keen
to take them. Hoyos says no Roman could have believed that Carthage
was still a threat.96 Rosenstein laments, “The Republic’s declaration of war
on Carthage in 149 stands as a permanent stain on its honour.”97 Polybius
and Appian say the senate made a secret decision to attack Carthage,
while encouraging a Numidian prince to attack it first. When Carthage
resisted, the senate claimed this was in breach of the treaty requiring Car-
thage to first seek its permission for war. Claiming a just war, a Roman
army arrived in Africa in 149 bce and besieged Carthage. The city offered
to surrender, but the Roman generals demanded they hand over all weap-
ons, abandon the city, and found a new city at least sixteen kilometers
from the sea—an offer they could not accept. After a three-year siege the
city was stormed and looted.98 Perhaps 150,000 Carthaginians were killed
and 50,000 survivors, mainly women, were sold into slavery. Archaeologi-
cal excavations confirm that the whole city was burned and razed to the
ground, not a soul remaining—emotional revenge for past humiliations,
out of all proportion to them. The loot did pump wealth into the Roman
economy, and taking North Africa into public ownership, the state redis-
tributed it to Romans. In the same year Corinth was destroyed by Roman
forces, the pretext being that Roman ambassadors, again offering unac-
ceptable peace terms, had been insulted. Some citizens were slaughtered,
the rest enslaved, and the city declared extinct. Yet archaeology reveals a
lesser scale of destruction than at Carthage.
82 The Roman Republic

The Roman senate showed that it would achieve domination free of

any rival. The Punic Wars had revealed an imperialism and resistance to
negotiations unmatched by the Carthaginians. The end of Carthage was
more than just payback for its earlier victories. Along with Corinth’s ex-
tinction, it was a dire warning to any people who might contemplate re-
sisting Rome. Eckstein helps us identify a dangerous geopolitical
environment, but Harris gives us the reason war triumphed over diplo-
macy in handling it—an opportunistic but cumulative Roman militarism
baked in to its social structure. Carthaginian power structures could not
match such single-mindedness.

Endgame of the Republic: Civil Wars

Roman militarism reached its apogee in overthrowing the very republic
that had institutionalized it. Roman conquests had increased inequality,
and peasant soldiers had fought to their own detriment. While away on
military service, aristocrats had bought their lands with the spoils of war
and cultivated them with slaves the soldiers had conquered. The new
slave-based villa agriculture generated higher yields and economic
growth—at the expense of soldiers and slaves alike. Rising expectations
of war profit heightened corruption by governors and generals, intensify-
ing electoral bribery for high office. The state had acquired extensive
public lands, which the wealthy of Rome could lease to create estates
worked by slaves. Many peasant farms could not compete, and farmers
were forced off their lands into a poverty-stricken existence in Rome,
whose population rose greatly. Their rising discontent was paralleled by
that of slaves, who across different regions mounted large-scale revolts in
136–30, 105, and 72–70 bce (the last famously led by Spartacus).
These conflicts led to more violent Roman politics. During 133–21
bce, the two Gracchi brothers exploited their power as tribunes of the
assemblies to seek radical reforms, backed by a large influx of people vot-
ing in the assemblies. The twin political institutions of the republic, sen-
ate and assemblies, were now at odds. The Gracchi sought to redistribute
lands that the rich had acquired to veterans and landless citizens, and to
offer more rights to the allies—the social democrats of the ancient
world, fiercely opposed by most senators, who represented the rich. The
unequal distribution of the spoils of war generated an enduring polariza-
tion of Roman politics between reform-minded populares and conserva-
tive optimates. But the Gracchi brothers were assassinated by optimates
 The Roman Republic 83

before their reforms bore fruit. These murders may have been the first
political bloodshed in the city of Rome for three centuries, and they re-
duced the political power of the popular classes.
The senate aborted the reforms but unrest remained. Discontent
among allies grew: manpower shortages meant their military service ob-
ligations were mounting. They were doing most of the fighting. This
provoked in 91–87 bce the Social Wars of the allied Italian peoples, who
demanded full citizenship, equal share in pay and spoils, residence and
contract rights, and marriage with Romans. Rome was pressured into
granting most of their demands. But this did not end unequal imperial-
ism. The upper classes continued to amass large fortunes, while more le-
gionaries were dispossessed or indebted. The elite destroyed the
republic. They “lacked willingness to abide by the norms under which
they had grown up” (a parallel for today).99
The embedding of Roman armies in the senate, the popular assem-
blies, and the citizen population as a whole had produced an outcome
similar to modern civilian control of the military. Coup-proofing strate-
gies had not been required. But now the social bonds had been broken
and wars had increased the power and autonomy of generals, which en-
croached on the power of the senate. During the 80s bce, two rival gen-
erals, Marius and Sulla, managed in turn to restore order by force and
intimidate the senate into appointing them as consuls. They had re-
cruited armies more loyal to themselves than to the state by extending
military service to the lower classes, offering them bounties and land
upon discharge, and granting more citizen rights to allies. The ensuing
civil wars of the period involved much plundering in order to pay the
troops and ensure their loyalty to their generals.
Marius was an arriviste populist and used his popular backing to break
the rules of Roman politics, including standing for reelection to the consul-
ship on multiple occasions—and winning. Sulla, an aristocrat, was backed
by optimate senators. In 88 bce their rivalry escalated into civil war when
Sulla violated a constitutional taboo by marching his army into Rome and
forcing Marius and his followers to flee the city. After the death of Marius
in 86 bce, Sulla seized control, styling himself “Dictator to Restore the Re-
public,” killing and seizing the property of opponents and distributing it to
his own supporters. The institutions representing the dominant classes of
Rome had lost their power. Now a general spoke for them.
That began the death throes of the republic, but it did not solve fac-
tionalism. Disorder followed the death of Sulla. In 59 bce two generals,
84 The Roman Republic

Pompey and Julius Caesar, joined forces with Crassus, a man of enor-
mous wealth acquired through buying up property confiscated by Sulla.
They seized power in Rome and established a triumvirate. Caesar styled
himself protector of the Marian legacy and courted popular support with
reforms opposed by most of the senate. He was granted an extraordinary
ten-year command in Gaul to get him away from Rome, but his string of
victories there enabled him to build up a formidable army and wealth.
The Gauls, he said, were emotional, impulsive, credulous, fickle, quick to
anger, politically unpredictable, and constantly intriguing. They were
therefore a threat, needing a firm Roman hand. They certainly got it.
Plutarch says his campaign killed a million Gauls and enslaved another
million.100 Think of the horrors such numbers must have involved. His
goal was political power in Rome. He needed money from slaves and
military prestige to ensure this and to outdo Pompey.
Crassus died at Carrhae, leaving Pompey and Caesar as twin dicta-
tors. They both had armies, and Pompey also had a senate majority.101
The inevitable civil war began when Caesar took his army into Italy in
49 bce, crossing the River Rubicon. Pompey was defeated and murdered,
and the senators opposing Caesar were mopped up. But when Caesar
adopted the title Dictator in Perpetuo, a conspiracy of sixty senators assas-
sinated him. Caesar’s followers won the ensuing civil war, and in 43 bce
came the triumvirate of Mark Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian, ruling dif-
ferent regions. This produced more civil wars, ending with the victory of
Octavian, Caesar’s great nephew, adopted son, and heir, in 31 bce. At first
Octavian preserved the shell of the senate and assemblies. In 27 bce a
tame senate granted him the titles of Augustus and “First Citizen of the
State.” He ruled as de facto emperor until 14 ce, followed by many em-
perors. The republic was finished by its own militarism.

Postscript: The Roman Empire

Under Augustus, Rome became formally an empire. The term Pax Ro-
mana was coined, referring only to the internal peace of the empire, not
its foreign relations, which differs from modern usages of similar terms—
Pax Britannica and Pax Americana. Since Augustus was determined to keep
military power pointing outward, foreign wars continued. Glory remained
the principal motive for war among the emperors.102 Conquests all around
the Mediterranean followed. The emperors said they made war in order
to bring peace to the conquered peoples.103 The emperors in theory con-
 The Roman Republic 85

trolled the army, but its practical autonomy threatened them. The devel-
opment of praetorian guards was an attempt at coup-proofing, but then
their loyalty might be problematic. Civil wars were rare, but coups com-
mon. There were seventy emperors in total, and only twenty seem to have
died of natural causes. Between twenty-seven and thirty-five were assassi-
nated or died in prison, nine died in battle, and five committed suicide.
Militarism slackened as a professional army detached war from citi-
zenship, so that culture and institutions became divorced from military
power, as resources became stretched over a vast empire, and as frontiers
adjoined regions with little wealth or fierce resistance so that war became
not worth the cost. In the east against Persia a more defensive strategy
brought treaties and hostage exchanges.104 But the western empire be-
came vulnerable to militarism. Civil wars broke out between rival emper-
ors whose soldiers were loyal to their generals, who became provincial
warlords. No one intended to destroy the western empire. Collapse came
as an unintended consequence of their struggles. The barbarians mat-
tered as they became a larger proportion of Roman armies.105 But for al-
most a millennium, Rome was perhaps the most successful example of
militarism the world has ever seen. After its fall, no European state had
equivalent military power for over a thousand years. The only equal was
the Chinese Empire. Their secret was not a powerful bureaucratic state,
but the embedding of dominant classes in political institutions.

Roman Conclusions
Seven reasons explain why the Roman Republic made war so continu-
ously. One more explains why this did not last forever.

1. Early Roman growth was due to mixed defensive war, Mafia-

style protection rackets, and negotiated upper-class alliances
in an Italy not yet filled by states, which offered opportunities
to expand over other peoples. Then going to the defense of an
ally and gaining dominance over both enemy and allied re-
gimes was a mixed offensive-defensive strategy that allowed
Rome not to fight on its own territory. Insecurity receded as
Rome enforced more regime changes and conquered more
territories and peoples.
2. Offensive warfare needs success to become repetitive. Rome
was militarily effective because militarily defined classes were
86 The Roman Republic

entrenched in the senate, the popular assemblies, and the

legions. Politically, the senate dominated, debating the likely
gains, though not usually the costs, of proposed wars. But
calculations—rationality of means—were dominated by opti-
mism about Roman military power. This proved not to be mis-
placed since Romans dug deeper and sacrificed more for war
than did their enemies. Legally guaranteed rights were held by
citizens in return for lengthy service in legions that thus pos-
sessed cohesion resulting from citizen solidarity. The privileges
varying by social class strengthened legitimate army hierarchy
and enabled the intensive drilling, discipline, logistics, and flexi-
ble maneuvering of large legionary armies by a very small state.
Thus, domestic political power relations produced effective
legions, helping lead to success in aggressive wars.
3. Romans granted varying degrees of citizens’ rights to allies,
thereby reinforcing their loyalty and more than doubling the
size of Roman armies. Battlefield success was enhanced by
prioritizing military power over exclusive citizenship, unlike
Rome’s Greek and Carthaginian rivals. This involved “society”
in its two senses, one modern, meaning a collective body of
citizens, the other relating to the original Latin root word
socius, a confederation of allies.
4. Allies’ allegiance required Roman victories. Client peoples
fear above all the defeat of their protector. If they sense weak-
ness, they may change sides. But Rome kept on winning.
Roman rulers scorned diplomacy, which meant that they could
not counter possible grand alliances among their rivals by
means of negotiations. They issued demands and refused com-
promise, while defeats merely made them dig deeper into
manpower reserves than their enemies could. That gave allies
confidence in Rome’s ultimate victory. This wavered only tem-
porarily under Rome’s greatest challenge, Hannibal’s invasion
of Italy.
5. This combination of causes meant that Roman militarism
became baked in to its economy, ideology, and politics
more than in other states around the Mediterranean. Scheidel
agrees: “The four sources of social power—ideological, eco-
nomic, military, and political—were unusually tightly bundled
together: members of the same narrow elite acted as political
 The Roman Republic 87

leaders, military commanders, and priests, and controlled the

largest private fortunes.”106 Roman success was not due simply
to a better military, disconnected from society. All sources of
power were sacrificed to war making. This eventually brought
success even after reverses in battle, which generated territory,
wealth, and slaves for Romans; it intensified a bellicose culture
transmitted across generations; and it subordinated economic,
ideological, and political institutions to military needs. This
was no longer war by careful, pragmatic calculation of cost, as
in Realist theory. It was war whatever the cost. Repeated wars
were due primarily to domestic power structures.
6. Benefit accrued mainly but not only to the upper classes. The
dual pursuit of greed and status through glory, the two being
closely entwined, also brought political office, becoming the
main motives of politician-generals and soldiers alike, justify-
ing the risk of death. Romans saw conquest, not trade (co-
erced or not), as the major mode of economic acquisition.
Carthage mixed the two and was militarily weaker for it.
7. Rulers carry on doing what works, and Roman militarism and
imperialism intensified with success. Ambition grew from
achieving mere dominance over neighbors to conquest and
territorial empire. By the time of the Punic Wars, Rome was
the major aggressor around the Mediterranean. Any people
that defied Rome would be destroyed—Carthago delenda est,
and Corinth too. Such ferocious retribution involved an un-
usual phase of emotional amplification of imperialism. An au-
tonomous ideology, however, was not a characteristic of
Roman imperialism. Rather, militarism was built into everyday
life experience, especially into the economy and the political
career structure, seemingly natural and taken for granted. The
proximate cause of wars of aggression was victory in earlier
wars. Path dependence helps explain why Romans kept on
making war. We will see that this was merely one of the most
extreme forms of conquest imperialism, commonly found in
historic warfare.
8. But war making eventually weakened the republic, intensify-
ing inequality and discontent, opening fissures between the
senate and popular assemblies, overturning the coup-proofing
links between citizenship and the army, and allowing generals
88 The Roman Republic

to build autonomous power bases. Military power was de-

ployed in Italy and in Rome itself in civil wars whose winners
became dictators, destroying the republican polity. Militarism
had become suicidal for the republic.

The Roman upper classes were the main beneficiaries of war, fol-
lowed by legionaries who survived intact, merchants trading with the le-
gions and in conquered provinces, and foreign upper classes who
switched allegiance when they perceived Rome would win. The allies
took heavy losses but benefited if they got Roman citizenship. Defeated
peoples suffered massacres, rapes, pillage, and slavery. The Romans de-
stroyed hundreds of “vanished kingdoms.” The region benefited a little
from Roman economic growth, but whether more peaceful development
might have occurred across the Mediterranean had Rome shared power
with Greeks and Carthaginians is unknowable. Less tangible was the
Roman contribution to civilization—law, literary works, mosaics, sculp-
tures, aqueducts, baths, straight roads—but achieved with great loss of
life. Overall, these wars probably benefited few of the peoples around the
Mediterranean. Rationality of ends was mostly confined to Roman elites
and their dependents.
 chapter five
Ancient China

B
etween 710 and 221 bce, 866 wars are mentioned in the Chi-
nese annals, but many were probably minor skirmishes (MIDs).
Over the period 656–221 bce, there were 256 wars involving
“great powers”—one every 1.7 years. In the last phase of the
Warring States period, 356–221 bce, there was a war every 1.4 years.
Most of these encounters probably met the CoW standard of one thou-
sand battle deaths in a year, although exaggerations are common in the
records, and we can rarely be sure about army size or casualty rates. The
number of polities was reduced from over seventy in 771 bce to about
twenty in the mid-fifth century bce. The Warring States period then saw
this reduced to just one, the empire of Qin.1
So there were many “vanished kingdoms,” and the likelihood of any
single polity being at war grew through time. Dingxin Zhao says that fif-
teen of the twenty wars whose casualties surpassed 20,000 occurred at
the end of the Warring States period.2 Yet such statistics only indicate
that, on average, somewhere in China a war was occurring between at
least two states. In any single year until near the endgame, most states
were not at war. Nevertheless, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu in the sixth
century bce, begins, “Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of
life and death, the Way to survival or extinction.” The questions for this
chapter are: Why so many wars, why so many state extinctions, and were
wars rational in terms of either means or ends?

89
90 Ancient China

Before 771 bce the Western Zhou Chinese monarchy had expanded
through quasi-colonial conquest of mostly stateless agriculturalists and
hunter-gatherers. As in early Roman Italy, there was not yet a multistate
system. The Zhou launched wars because they could win them, for they
had greater economic and military power than their neighbors. They did
not seize great wealth. Slaves and military conscripts were the main prize,
and Zhou settlers might develop more intensive agriculture in conquered
areas. Many peripheral peoples bowed to reality by submitting to threats
without going to war. Their elites’ daughters might be married off to Zhou
aristocrats as a symbol of their absorption into the Zhou realm. Rule was
feudal, though different from European feudalism. As their realms ex-
tended, rulers shifted from being mere heads of clans and lineages and sta-
bilized their conquered realms by “enfeoffing” kin and allies in small walled
towns and military colonies, in which these became lesser replicas of the
king, while their own hereditary “ministers” became lesser replicas of them-
selves—the typical devolution of power we find where feudal regimes are
unable to directly control large territories. The eldest son of the principal
wife or concubine inherited lordship, though younger sons received lesser
hereditary office at court or served as soldiers and might be enfeoffed in
more peripheral towns.3 Younger sons agitated for more conquest.
Armies were formed of lineage levies whose core was aristocratic chari-
oteers. A clan chief might have a few full-time soldiers, but most were con-
scripted peasants. As in other feudal regimes, as Marx said, armed force was
necessary to extract surplus from the direct producers so that the upper
classes could live well and not fight wars at all. Yet exploitation had its lim-
its. The core class problem in near-subsistence agrarian societies was that
taking too much of the surplus or too many of the peasants as soldiers or
slaves harmed the productivity of farms on which rulers depended to fight
their wars. They could not squeeze too hard. Taxes were moderate and
armies small and confined to a campaigning season when farm labor was
less important. But peasants were also taken as corvée labor, given the great
height and depth of city walls found by archaeologists. Warfare remained
key for aristocrats, their culture bellicose. Mark Lewis says, “Defense of
one’s honor was the primary spur to battle,” but as Zhao adds, there were
also economic, political, and geopolitical motives. Lacking much evidence,
we cannot disentangle them.4 Then the kings’ power weakened in a typi-
cally feudal way as power shifted downward through this hierarchy of lin-
eages. They lacked the infrastructures to control their vassals or stop their
feuding. They began to suffer defeats by incoming peoples.
 Ancient China 91

The Spring and Autumn Period, 771–476 bce

In 771 bce came disaster. The Zhou, racked by a disputed succession, saw
their capital sacked by men they called uncivilized—barbarians. The survi-
vors fled eastward, where the Zhou lords set up their own polities as
“dukes” over which the king retained only a symbolic kingship. Ritual def-
erence was shown to him, and no one else could claim the title of king.
The indigenous people of the new domains either were conquered and
enserfed or submitted to ducal power to keep their freedom. Since these
states were founded by military power and continued to extract the surplus
by force, militarism continued. China was divided into many independent
lordships—one chronicler says there were 148, but there were at least 70,
most of them tiny; a few acted as overlords to their smaller neighbors.
States were at first rudimentary, and ministers and officials were de-
pendent on personal relationships between dukes and their vassals. The
duke could assign offices to his vassals but had little power over them
once they were installed. An effective vassal enjoying high office might
acquire enough retainers to challenge the duke, and so might cliques of
discontented vassals excluded from office. Dukes were male, although
dowager queen mothers might govern as regents on behalf of a boy suc-
cessor, a practice surviving right through to Cixi, the final dowager of the
Chinese Empire, who died in 1908 just before the fall of the last dynasty.
Civil wars were caused by a duke’s failings, especially in war, by the
absence of a direct male heir, by the accession of a boy or apparent weak-
ling, or by the rise of a discontented lineage group. Palace coups were
more common, when discontented kin killed a duke and seized his
throne. Zhao finds that about half the dukes of three major states were
assassinated—an extraordinary proportion, which might seem to render
irrational the pursuit of political power, except that there was no es-
cape—even kin who sought only a quiet life were killed in coups, as were
the kin of those staging unsuccessful coups. The domestic fears of inse-
cure dukes fueled foreign wars, for to secure domination at home re-
quired soldiers acquired in war, and victories abroad brought loot for
retainers and loyal soldiers, who could then be deployed domestically.
Thus, war was the way to acquire resources for extracting the surplus
from those who actually produced it. This Marxian circular process rein-
forced the lure of war.
Geopolitics was fairly anarchic, yet so was domestic politics, which
often led to civil war between rival lineages. Chinese thinkers believed
92 Ancient China

war was inevitable because of either human nature or the nature of soci-
ety. The primary value was political order, as is usual in disorderly socie­
ties. War imposing order was therefore righteous but generally brief.
These were highly class-divided societies in which the masses shared lit-
tle of the culture of their rulers. Peasants saw little of the state. Taxes,
military service, and corvée labor were extracted by local vassals.
There was a shared culture among elites in the core zones. One en-
during diplomatic form was the hegemon—a duke coming to exercise
some authority over other rulers through arbitration of disputes and con-
vening of assemblies to issue agreements. An edict of 657 bce proclaimed,
“Let there be no damming of irrigation water, no withholding sales of
grain, no changes of heirs apparent, no promoting of concubines to re-
place wives, and no involvement of women in state affairs.” Another de-
clared: “Let not office be hereditary, nor let officers simultaneously hold
more than one office, and in the selection of officers let the object be to
get the proper men, and let not a ruler take onto himself to put to death a
great officer. . . . Make no crooked embankments, and impose no restric-
tion on the sale of grain, and let no boundary markers [be] set without
announcement.” These were probably good intentions rather than actual
practice, although Cho-yun Hsu says this was an “interstate community,”
adding a liberal tinge to Realist geopolitics.5 Yet hegemony was not heri-
table, struggles over the next hegemon were common, and all five of the
hegemons were from different ducal houses. These hegemons do not fit
political scientists’ usage of the term since they had nothing like the pow-
ers exercised by the British and American empires—or of later emperors
of China. They were uneasily perched as first among equals in an arena
that still had “empty” spaces for expansion.
There were short-term peace agreements and even attempts at en-
during ones. In 579 bce the rulers of Qi, Qin, Jin, and Chu convened a
conference at which they agreed to pursue peace and limit army size.
Alas, this was only rhetoric. In 546 Hsiang Shu, a Sung diplomat, lobbied
Chinese courts to negotiate a treaty to end all wars. Wanting to seem to
be on the side of virtue, fourteen major rulers drew up an agreement. A
dispute then erupted over who should sign first. Some then refused to
sign, and the signers ignored it anyway. Hsiang Shu presented a signed
copy to his chief minister, who responded that war was an inevitable tool
of statecraft. To seek to abandon it was folly. He tore up the treaty in
front of him.6 In 541 bce a peace conference received the news that Lu
forces had just invaded the small state of Ju. There was a proposal that
 Ancient China 93

the conference punish the delegate from Lu. But the chief minister of Jin
responded: “Territory is defined by battle. It belongs to one state at one
time, to another state at another time. Where is the constancy? . . . Sup-
porting large states at the expense of the small ones is the way a leading
state has acquired its leading status. What else is useful? Which state has
not lost some land? Which presiding power can pass judgement?”7 It was
not far from Hobbesian anarchy. War was normal, baked in to culture
and institutions.
Yet one secular tendency appeared amid the confusion: the swallowing
up by dominant rulers of lesser ones through war, mafia-like protection
rackets, and a few marriage alliances. Eventually there were only twenty,
including seven much bigger than the others. The ensuing Warring States
period saw space-filling geopolitics in which “great powers” alternately
fought and negotiated with each other, rising and declining amid two cen-
turies of balancing alliances and instability. These unstable balances of
power defeated all attempts by individual dukes to maintain dominance
temporarily achieved.8 All the while, smaller domains were vanishing.
The aristocrats saw war and militarism as normal. Victory brought
both glory and material gains, in the form of more territories and peo-
ples, which could be converted into a bigger military for further wars. But
dukes also fought wars if they felt slighted, to defend their honor or right
a wrong or recapture territory lost by defeat in a past war, or when they
felt threatened at home and sought to demonstrate strength through war.
An army raised could be turned to domestic repression. As in Rome,
there were many motives for war, but we lack the knowledge to rank
them in importance. When war was so baked in to social life, it was not
so much “chosen” in preference to the other sources of power; it was the
normal way in which conflicts were settled. It is difficult to discern how
much careful calculation of means was involved in war decisions, but cal-
culations had to include the likely responses of other states that might be
supposed allies or enemies. Diplomatic luck and skills were important.
Warrior motives deriving from religious or secular ideologies were
absent, which was not the case in Europe. For repeat victors, conquest
was self-sustaining—though there were always more losers than winners,
as the declining number of states confirms, which would not seem to in-
dicate much accurate calculation by most of them. Aristocratic culture
glorified lineage, patriarchy, blood, war, oaths, and covenants of fealty.
Codes of honor in battle were shared, making warfare not too costly for
the aristocrats, as was true in medieval Europe. Some rulers fought in
94 Ancient China

person, though it was more common to use kin as generals. Conquest

was justified as spreading order and civilization to the uncivilized.
Once horses were domesticated, aristocrats’ chariots dominated war-
fare. Their weapons were of bronze, which only the wealthy could afford.
Armies were around 5,000 to 25,000 men in the Spring and Autumn pe-
riod, campaigns lasted a few weeks, and most battles were decided in a
day. Though the bigger states often clashed with each other, until the
Late Warring States period the ecology of China enabled states to par-
tially deflect their conflicts onto mutual expansion through conquest of,
and rule over, less well-developed peoples on the peripheries. Only the
central zone was filled with states. The incentive to make aggressive war
increased for Zhou states adjacent to the periphery.9
Up to the mid-sixth century, an archipelago of city-states expanded
control over stateless and tribal peoples, the “country dwellers,” while
major states annexed minnows. “Early hegemonic rivals typically attacked
the lesser states that were sandwiched between them and largely avoided
direct confrontations.”10 Victories dominate surviving annals, for the an-
nals of defeated rulers usually vanish. The conquerors of the country
people founded walled towns fed from their hinterland, the “well fields,”
which were distributed among friendly indigenous people, military
veterans, and other settlers. The towns were inhabited by the “people of
the state [or city].” Around them the “people of the field” or “country
people” might owe labor service or payment in kind to the cities, but not
initially military service, in order to keep them disarmed. City fortifica-
tions became stronger and included lateral barriers to the free flow of
people within the city, which suggests authoritarian control.11 It was a
form of Gumplowicz’s “super-stratification,” a class structure imposed by
the victors of war over the vanquished.12 The peoples farther away lived
in so-called empty spaces outside the control of states, which were inhab-
ited by “those who will not come to court,” less “civilized,” lacking “duty”
or “moral instruction.” The notion of a state as a bounded territory arose
in the fifth century bce. Before then, the walled towns formed a network
of nodes, each sustained by a rural periphery of uncertain boundaries.
The non-Zhou peoples, like the “uncivilized” Rong and Di, were gradu-
ally absorbed. They began as farmers, shepherds, and mountaineers, but
by 400 bce they had disappeared as separate peoples from the records.
Military service, corvée labor, intermarriage, and cultural assimilation
had generated a single people calling themselves the Hua Xie, the
Chinese.13
 Ancient China 95

Dukes made war to acquire wealth and peoples, to increase their

population and specifically their army size, but also to acquire status and
glory, just as Roman aristocrats did. Again, these motives were closely
interwoven. Polities were identified by the name of the ruling dynasty, a
ducal house, not a state. Offensive war was incentivized, for it might
bring loot or conscripts, and it spared one’s own agricultural base from
devastation. Sun Tzu in his Art of War advised the Wu king, “When you
plunder a countryside, let the spoil be divided amongst your men; when
you capture new territory, cut it up into allotments for the benefit of the
soldiery.”14 His recommended distribution was very unequal: “If he is a
noble he will receive 10,000 mou of land; if he is a farmer, artisan, or
merchant he will be permitted to seek service at court; if he is a slave or
bound to menial service he will be freed.” But most settlers benefited, as
did younger sons with meager inheritances. They were risking their lives
but were militarily dominant and lived behind defensive walls. The ex-
pected utility of war was high—the only avenue of advancement.15
War was rational in terms of ends achieved by the surviving winners—
obviously not for the losers.
Concentration of power in the ruler and his court grew with the exten-
sion of state control into the hinterland, as military power translated into
political power.16 Army service was originally owed only by the nobility and
the people of the state, but it was then extended to the country dwellers in
return for granting them fuller property rights to the land, so that military
power became baked in to the economy of China. As the size of states in-
creased, armies grew to up to 50,000 men, mainly peasant infantry armed
with newly available iron weapons, cheaper and stronger than bronze
weapons. The exploitation of iron brought about what is often described as
a military revolution, though its diffusion from Anatolia across Eurasia
took seven hundred years. But the aristocratic chariot disappeared. Larger
armies required more drilling, and manuals describe complex battle forma-
tions. Armies required more logistical support, so states acquired new func-
tions, such as censuses to determine conscription and taxation. Taxes were
usually only up to 10 percent of income, but in a subsistence economy that
could be severe. County administration replaced lineage patronage, which
indicates more political centralization, as do fewer civil wars and palace
coups. Leading ministers were less aristocratic than dependents of the
monarch. More intense warfare required greater agricultural productivity,
assisted by irrigation projects. Trade increased. These were small steps to-
ward resolving the feudal military paradox: costlier warfare might lower
96 Ancient China

the agricultural surpluses needed to finance it. War was initially bad news
for the conquered, many of whom were enslaved, but it might eventually
bring economic and other civilizational benefits—provided the conquered
did not rebel, for then they would be slaughtered.

The Warring States Period, 475–221 bce

The states now began to form permanent administrations and had fron-
tiers dotted with walls and forts. Wars became costlier in money and
lives, for fewer easy preys remained. The space-filling core grew, though
expansion brought new peripheries. Army size by the end of the Warring
States period ranged up to several hundred thousand men, much bigger
than forces in Rome or Europe before Napoleon. Soldiers were drilled
to be capable of shifting formation rapidly, as they were in European
armies only from the sixteenth century ce.17 Casualties rose, as little
mercy was shown to the defeated. The dead and prisoners alike would be
beheaded and the heads presented to the generals, who rewarded soldiers
according to the number. There are accounts of “taking sixty thousand
heads.” After the battle of Changping in 260 bce, the Qin victors claimed
to have inflicted 450,000 casualties on the defeated Zhao. Such figures
may be inflated, but drilling and killing had skyrocketed.18 The risk of
death or mutilation for soldiers rose, but most were conscripts who
lacked free will. They were fed and minimally paid, and they might as
veterans be awarded a small farm on conquered land, the silver lining for
the survivors.
Because of the growing lethality of war, sophisticated literature on
war strategy and tactics arose, like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, advising
generals how to win without fighting and how to practice ambushes,
feints, and deceptions of one’s own strength, to strike where the enemy is
weak and never where he is strong—tactics intended to avoid murderous
frontal pitched battles. They were widely read among elites. Their strata-
gems might mean that states weaker in material resources could defeat
the bigger battalions. The end product was more losers than winners,
which suggests much miscalculation. The distinction is often made be-
tween a “Chinese way” of war and a “Western way,” expressed in a
contrast between Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, particularly the latter’s em-
phasis on annihilating the enemy through frontal assault. The contrast is
real enough between them, but today both are required reading at West
Point and the Chinese Military Academy.
 Ancient China 97

Nonetheless, periods of negotiated peace lasted much longer than

wars, and so there was tension between a preference for institutions
guaranteeing peace versus opportunities to intervene in dynastic succes-
sion crises and in peripheries. Peace was rendered fragile as rulers used
peacetime to introduce military reforms, which led their rivals also to
improve their militaries—the Realist security dilemma. By the mid-
fourth century bce, all seven surviving major states had implemented re-
forms suggested by “legalist” theorists to gear the economy and the state
more tightly to war needs. A mass of peasants owing military service re-
placed lineage-organized militaries.19 Militarism now affected the people
more intensely.
The surviving large states had institutionalized militarism, internal-
izing “glory” as an end, making them confident of success in the next
war. Indeed, they were overconfident, for when they lost—and all but
one eventually did—they might disappear as autonomous states. So from
419 bce, with a bigger jump after 317 bce, wars resumed, costlier and
fiercer, producing greater chances of death for soldiers and greater debts
for states. Defeat might destroy quite major states.20 During the fourth
century bce, rulers began to style themselves as kings, and deference to
the Zhou monarch collapsed. By then professional soldiers rather than
the dukes went into battle. Dukes could play with the lives of others.
This phase was probably more ruthless than it was in medieval Eu-
rope, where Christendom and kinship networks meant that a petty
prince conquered by a major kingdom might be treated mildly. He might
pay an indemnity and swear loyalty to the new king. Though this also
sometimes happened in China, in other cases the defeated aristocracies
and soldiers were put to death or enslaved en masse. One cause of the
decline of the aristocracy in the late Warring States period was the kill-
ing of so many of its families.21 Multistate alliances grew, seeking peace
through deterrence but periodically activated for war.
During the Warring States period peripatetic intellectuals sold expert
advice to rulers.22 The sayings of some survive, philosophers like Confu-
cius and Mencius, legalists like Shang Yang and Han Fei, and military
writers such as Sun Tzu and Sun Bin. Despite their many differences,
most reacted to the Warring States period by arguing that China was des-
tined to be one realm under a single state: “all under heaven,” ruled by the
“Son of Heaven.” They believed in Realist style that only a hegemonic
power could enforce peace over all China.23 This view drew on the Zhou
ideological legacy of universal kingship, now with the cosmic resonance of
98 Ancient China

returning the natural world to its proper course. None of these intellectu-
als defended the autonomy of individual states. They hoped that one day
one ruler would come, and realistically, he could come only through war.24
This belief encouraged several thrusts by individual states for hegemony
across the central China region. Yet all failed, until Qin.
Confucius (born 551 bce) said little about war, but he taught that
creating the moral person and the good society involved five virtues: be-
nevolence, charity, and humanity; honesty, uprightness, and the ability to
tell right from wrong; knowledge; faithfulness and integrity; and propri-
ety, ceremony, ritual, and worship. He emphasized filial piety and strict
ritual adherence to one’s given social role, a conservative program aimed
at protecting society from uncertainty and disorder, the greatest threat to
good government and social harmony. Action by both the individual and
the government should aim at morality, not profit or utility. Yet only an
elite of morally and intellectually superior men could refine their innate
moral goodness or overcome innate badness and decide policy. Since
states could not create such a man, this elite must have some autono-
mous power from the ruler. This idea later bore fruit in a Confucian bu-
reaucracy.
Confucius said that a ruler is morally obliged to maintain peace, by
force if necessary, while for the people war is a justified last resort to re-
move inhumane kings. But when asked to give a ruler advice about the
conduct of war, he refused. When questioned on the purpose of govern-
ment, he replied, “Give the people enough to eat, and enough soldiers to
defend them, and they will have confidence in you.” But which of the
two should be given up first? Confucius replied, “Give up the soldiers.”
Yet rulers could ensure victory in war through just and humane policies
that would win popular support.
Mencius (active in the fourth century bce) denounced war: “In wars
to win land, the dead fill the fields; in wars to seize cities, the dead fill
their streets. This is what we mean by teaching the earth how to eat
human flesh.” The ruler had been installed by heaven solely for the ben-
efit of his people, and human nature tends toward and desires goodness.
The truly good ruler would be looked up to even by the people of neigh-
boring states, who will “turn to him like water flowing downwards with a
tremendous force.” To wage an expedition for the improvement of peo-
ple’s lives was acceptable, but he added: “In the Spring and Autumn An-
nals, there are no just wars. They merely show that some wars are not so
bad as others.” Mo Tzu (ca. 480–ca. 390 bce) condemned aggressive war
 Ancient China 99

on both utilitarian and moral grounds. Aggressive war did not pay, except
for a few winners, and their peoples rarely benefited, since war required
high taxes. He criticized the moral double standard of violence being il-
legitimate within a state but legitimate in interstate relations; aggressive
war was morally the same as murder. He favored defensive war, however,
giving expert advice to rulers on defensive fortifications, and his support-
ers formed a militia to help small states resist big ones. Alas, they were
on the wrong side of history, as armies became bigger and bigger, and
sharks swallowed up the minnows.25
Few Confucians were pacifists. They gave two legitimate reasons for
making war. First, China was the universal state, of greater moral author-
ity than any rival. So if a foreign ruler refused to perform rituals of sub-
mission, war against him would be just. Second, wars were just if they
helped reunite “all under heaven,” restoring the unity of China. Xunzi
(born ca. 300 bce) remarked, “Human nature is evil, and goodness is
caused by conscious [or intentional] activity.” He saw the military strata-
gems of Sun Tzu as working only against a state in which ruler-subject
relations had broken down. “For a tyrant to try to overthrow a good
ruler by force would be like throwing eggs at a rock or stirring boiling
water with your finger.” Virtuous rulers would win wars over despots
since their soldiers and people would be more committed. Virtuous rul-
ers would not fight against other virtuous rulers—an ancient variant of
democratic peace theory. Sun Tzu said the moral ruler benefits from a
“moral law” that “causes the people to be in complete accord with their
ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by
any danger.” An immoral ruler at odds with his people will fail regardless
of his skill in the art of war. Sun Tzu added, “If one is not fully cognizant
of the evils of waging war, he cannot be fully cognizant either of how to
turn it to best account.”26 There is a parallel here with Waltz’s version of
Realism in which those states that act wrongly will be punished by the
system. If only that were true.
Legalist theorists subordinated morality to politics. The early Zhou
period was seen as having been a time of plenty and peace—“the people
were few whereas goods were plenty; hence people did not compete,”
said Han Fei, blaming population growth for ruining that idyll. Scarcity
produced greed, conflicting interests, and war. Legalists saw the state as
the only source of order and morality, so all should be subordinated to it.
Since no one can say who deserves the title of “superior man,” the ruler
could not rely on a ministerial elite. Ministers were concerned only with
100 Ancient China

their own interests, and a ruler must be absolute and create an order in
which only those who benefit society through agriculture and war should
be rewarded and promoted. Those who fail should be punished. The
meritocratic yoking together of agriculture and war under an authoritar-
ian ruler would yield a successful and orderly state. Reward and punish-
ment should be the twin “handles” of policy, said Han Fei. The ruler
must subordinate his ministers to strict bureaucratic controls. Yet the
Han Feizi text is full of references to weak and incompetent rulers as well
as great rulers who annexed many states but whose successors then lost
all. “The intrinsic contradiction between an institutionally infallible and
humanly erring sovereign is the major source of tension in the Han
Feizi,” says Yuri Pines.27 Yet Han Fei seems to imply the resolution of the
tension: the incompetent ruler will fall, and the most competent one will
eventually produce “all under heaven.” But even military strategists such
as Sun Tzu and Sun Bin claimed to abhor war. The latter’s Art of Warfare
declares: “Abhorrence of war is the highest military principle. A distaste
for war is the most basic principle of the True King. Between heaven and
earth there is nothing more valuable than man. [Thus,] you must go to
war only if there is no alternative.”28
Chinese theorists often speculated on the causes of war. One example
is in Wuzi’s Art of War, written around the turn of the fourth century bce.

There are five matters which give rise to military operations.

First, the struggle for fame; second, the struggle for advantage;
third, the accumulation of animosity; fourth, internal disorder;
and fifth, famine. . . . There are also five categories of war. First,
righteous war; second, aggressive war; third, enraged war; fourth,
wanton war; and fifth, insurgent war. Wars to suppress violence
and quell disorder are righteous. Those which depend on force
are aggressive. When troops are raised because rulers are actu-
ated by anger, this is enraged war. Those in which all propriety is
discarded because of greed are wanton wars. Those who, when
the state is in disorder and the people exhausted, stir up trouble
and agitate the multitude, cause insurgent wars.”

And he offers solutions: “There is a suitable method for dealing with

each: a righteous war must be forestalled by proper government; an ag-
gressive war by humbling one’s self; an enraged war by reason; a wanton
war by deception and treachery; and an insurgent war by authority.”29
 Ancient China 101

War was considered righteous when dedicated to order or the restora-

tion of order. But if order already existed, there could be no righteous war.
The major states seem more pragmatic than the intellectuals. They
alternated wars and peace conferences, making and switching alliances—
all rather Realist. Yet Sun Tzu stated, “Peace proposals unaccompanied
by a sworn covenant indicate a plot,” which implies that sworn covenants
might be relied on.30 But why did wars continue when casualties in-
creased and their expected utility declined? The risk of death and debt
might outweigh possible gains. Part of the answer is that rulers were not
at risk themselves since they hired generals who were professional sol-
diers, mostly younger sons enjoying upward mobility through soldiering.
Defeated rulers of states whose soldiers had fought with honor and
then surrendered might be enfeoffed by the victor, given title to their
lands but in the victor’s realm. There was a Realist calculation: attack
when the rival seems weak or when a minor or a woman succeeds, or
when he or she is already engaged in a war on another front. But there
was also overoptimism about the chances of victory, as their final come-
uppance revealed.
Rulers also had to face new threats from the periphery. “Uncivilized”
nomads and seminomads of the north and west became more formidable
enemies once horses and camels were dressed with saddles and stirrups.
This development produced horse archers with durable composite bows
and iron-tipped arrows. The twin military “revolutions” of iron and cav-
alry are emphasized in Peter Turchin and his colleagues’ analysis of the
diffusion of military technology across the globe in early historical times,
though the diffusion of iron was slow because of the complex smelting
techniques required.31 It did not reach the Americas or Australasia. It is
not known whether tools or weapons, if either, came first. Cavalry’s strik-
ing range was greater than “barbarian” peoples’ capacity to institutional-
ize political rule, so their initial threat was raiding. Chinese frontier
states then realized they must field horse archers, and they built great
walls for defense and to fence off newly conquered territory from bar-
barians seeking their lands back. Chinese pressure also tended to consoli-
date the barbarians into larger military federations that mimicked the
Chinese in seizing grazing lands for cavalry horses and iron deposits for
weapons and tools.32 The Chinese adapted in turn, taming wastelands
and thereby enabling new settlements and more soldiers. Thus, frontier
states gained a military advantage, as they had bigger populations and
armies than the states of the old core.
102 Ancient China

In the sixth century bce, China was dominated by four states, Qi, Jin,
Qin, and Chu, all located on the peripheries, ruled by “marcher lords”
who could combine agricultural infantry and pastoral cavalry. I showed
in volume 1 of The Sources of Social Power that marcher lords became a
major feature of early empires, and Turchin and his colleagues have con-
firmed this as a general feature of early historical warfare.33 In China
these four peripheral states were joined in the fifth century by two states
along the southern periphery with mixed Zhou-barbarian populations or
barbarians who had adopted Zhou culture and institutions.34 The War-
ring States period saw the sharks protecting, dominating, and then swal-
lowing up minnow states in a kind of “offensive defense”—expansion
through defending allies—which we have seen was also the Roman strat-
egy. A Jin minister observed: “If we had not taken over the smaller states,
where would be the gain? Ever since the reign of Wu Gong and Xiang
Gong, Jin annexed many states. Who bothered to investigate?”35 Surviv-
ing, unmutilated soldiers benefited from victory, while the losers died or
suffered. Most peasants probably didn’t care who ruled them.
There was also path dependence. War had worked in the past for
these states, baking in the institutions and culture of militarism. States
carry on down the path that has brought them success. Many states for
whom war had not brought success had vanished. For successful states, the
pursuit of power and glory became intrinsically desirable, bringing respect,
high social status, and profit. Victors left a legacy of literature and monu-
ments glorifying war. Bellicosity dominates the historical record because
the winners wrote it. The meek inherit neither the earth nor its history.
Lewis says: “The chief activity of these states was combat. . . . They
were states organized for warfare.”36 Militarism had several sources: the
need to extract a surplus from the peasants, an ecology enabling outward
expansion, the increasing integration and bureaucratization of state,
army, and economy, and Legalist ideology urging the moral imperative
of commitment, obedience, and sacrifice for one’s state.37 Zhao detects
four main regional war zones, each seeing one state located on its pe-
riphery dominating the smaller states of the central core. Three of these
states were also located in more defensible ecologies, having better bor-
ders and fewer neighbors than their rivals. Between 403 and 350 bce
they had also implemented the military and economic state-strengthen-
ing reforms urged by legalists.
But why was the final outcome of these wars different from that in
Europe? Unlike Europe, all the Chinese states were eventually con-
 Ancient China 103

quered by one of their number. There were far, far more losers than win-
ners. They should have heeded Sun Tzu:

He who knows the enemy and himself

Will never in a hundred battles be at risk;
He who does not know the enemy but knows himself
Will sometimes win and sometimes lose;
He who knows neither the enemy nor himself
Will be at risk in every battle.38

Few rulers could meet such a high standard.

European attempts at continental hegemony failed, unlike Chinese
endeavors. This is generally explained by “balancing theory”: a state’s
aiming at hegemony was countered by a balancing alliance of the other
states. The Habsburgs, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler were all frus-
trated. Indeed, this had happened to several would-be hegemons in
China before Qin. Balancing theory sometimes worked. But Hitler was
not in fact thwarted by a balancing alliance within Europe, either in the
1930s, when Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and minor powers failed
to agree to an alliance, or during World War II, when Western Europe
was rescued from afar by the United States and the Soviet Union. Dur-
ing the Cold War the United States again rescued Europe, this time
from the Soviet Union. Europe wasn’t very different from China. Victo-
ria Tin-Bor Hui notes the failure of fifteenth-century Italian city-states
to balance against France and the Habsburgs and the failure of the Hel-
lenistic empires to balance against Rome, which picked them off, one by
one, as we saw in the last chapter.39 The Qin conquest of China was just
another example of such balancing failure. We will see another failure in
Japan. Balancing failure seems more common than success.
Zhao adds two reasons for political-military dominance.40 First,
China lacked religious institutions capable of restraining the state com-
parable to those of Christianity in Europe and Islam in Muslim coun-
tries. Chinese elites did not believe in transcendental divinity, or in an
afterlife. Ancestral cults legitimized first the Zhou royal line and then the
aristocratic order. Neither the Confucian nor legalist tradition advanced
transcendent ideologies, for both emphasized order and obedience to the
state. Daoism preached quietism. Later, Buddhism was more controlled
by rulers than Christianity was in Europe. None of these theories pro-
moted individual rights. Second, economic actors lacked autonomy.
104 Ancient China

China had no independent merchant associations, guilds, or autonomous

cities, as Europe did. Cities were ruled by state officials. Economic acqui-
sition through conquest rather than trade was prioritized. Rulers knew
they should promote economic well-being to get a revenue base to fi-
nance large armies. They interfered with existing markets and promoted
economic infrastructures, production, and trade. The economy was
somewhat statist (insofar as a near-subsistence peasant economy could
be) and did not offer a counterweight to the militaristic state. The ab-
sence of autonomous economic and ideological power institutions is im-
portant in explaining Chinese state militarism.
In the fourth century bce balancing began to fail. In 221 bce the
state of Qin finally conquered the others and founded the first empire
over China. Qin dynasty rule proved short-lived, but the successor Han
dynasty lasted four hundred years and institutionalized a single imperial
state across the core of China. This expanded through many dynasties
into the twentieth century ce. The sequence of feudal expansion, col-
lapse, reconstitution, and then consolidation into fewer states is reminis-
cent of both Europe and late medieval Japan. In the end China, like
Japan but unlike Europe, was unified into a single state.
Why did Qin and not another state achieve hegemony? Ecology
mattered: Qin was at the extreme north and west of the Warring States.
It may have had the advantage of a marcher lord position at the cusp of
the pastoral-agricultural divide, like almost all the later conquerors of
China, for the effectiveness of the pastoralist horse archer was now be-
coming evident. Moreover, it did not face rival states on two of its four
sides. On the other two sides a single mountain pass conferred a strong
defensive position. To the north and east it could expand against lesser
foes, acquiring their populations to increase the size of armies. Qin was
outside the main line of fire of most wars.41 Its rulers waited for most of
their rivals to weaken each other before they attacked. Qin’s final assault
had a good chance of victory, but an even better chance of avoiding de-
feat, because of its good defensive position.
Qin’s geopolitical strategy was also important. Hui emphasizes the
“clever,” “devious,” and “Machiavellian” stratagems of Qin rulers, “divid-
ing and ruling” among opponents, waiting for them to weaken each
other in warfare. The chroniclers stress the varying diplomatic talents
and personalities of kings and dukes, the varying military talents of their
generals, and their advisers’ complex scheming. Yet it strains credulity
that Qin rulers should have enjoyed a monopoly of intelligent strategy
 Ancient China 105

lasting over the 135 years of Qin’s ascent, and they did fight more wars
than their rivals. Yet since their territorial gains were piecemeal and op-
portunist, they did not unduly alarm rivals. In this period its fifty-two ex-
pansionist wars encountered only eight allied balancing responses. In
266 bce the appointment of Fan Sui as a senior minister ushered in a
policy shift. He urged “irrevocable expansionism,” arguing that the way
to dominance was to wage war against one’s neighbor in alliance with
more distant powers that could force the neighbor into a two-front war.
This could expand the state, and “each inch or foot gained was the king’s
foot or inch.”42
Rulers were well-versed in geopolitical alternatives. Balancing against
a would-be hegemon was called vertical strategy, whereas horizontal strat-
egy favored conciliating the leading power and sharing in its rise. Hori-
zontal strategy assumed from past experience that no state could remain
ascendant for long, so it was not risky to side with a more powerful ruler.
That was soon proved wrong, but Qin had not seemed an existential
threat until too late. Qin had led an alliance defeating the last previous at-
tempt at hegemony, by the Qi king who was about to assume the Zhou
title of Son of Heaven. So Qin forged an alliance with five others, defeat-
ing Qi. Now there was only one other ruler of comparable strength to
Qin, the Zhao ruler, as well as five weaker others. Zhao might have orga-
nized a balancing coalition, but states not directly threatened by Qin pre-
ferred to stay neutral. Zhao was trying to swallow up another state when
Qin attacked it, so Zhao had to fight on two fronts, Qin on only one.
After fluctuating fortunes lasting three years, Qin triumphed. The last re-
maining states might have allied with each other. But once Zhao was de-
feated, they wavered between vertical and horizontal options.43 For some,
coming to terms at that point seemed the better fate. Terms were granted
confirming the local powers of rulers if they accepted Qin sovereignty.
Broader domestic reforms also underlay Qin victory. Hui contrasts
the “self-strengthening” character of Qin reforms with the “self-weaken-
ing” reforms of European states. The Europeans operated in a monetary
economy permitting loans, sale of public offices, tax farming, and hiring
mercenaries. She sees these as “easy” but “self-weakening” means of wag-
ing war, since they weakened the rulers’ control over powerful civil soci-
ety groups. The most successful European states from the seventeenth
century onward did not weaken themselves in this way. Holland and
Britain developed state-enhancing tax and financial institutions and
achieved hegemony through global empires, though not in Europe itself.
106 Ancient China

The legalist reform movements of the fifth and fourth centuries bce
sought to forge new relations between the warring states and their popu-
lations, parallel to Rome and resembling the European states of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet this was not participatory citi-
zenship. It was a form of authoritarianism sidelining the aristocracy and
extracting military service from peasants in return for easing serfdom
and granting leasehold tenures and eventually property rights. This
might be seen as a lessening of coercive extraction of the surplus, but it
was significantly called “lodging the army among the people,” which
baked the coercion of militarism in to everyday life. Meritocratic military
reform also meant soldiers could rise through the ranks. Generals came
increasingly from unknown families.
Under Shang Yang, chancellor of Qin, the reforms went deepest and
the populace was mobilized for mass sacrifices. He declared, “The means
by which a ruler encourages his people are offices and rank; the means
by which a state arises are agriculture and war.” The goal was to create a
single class, “men of service in farming and warfare.” If agriculture is the
sole source of energy, and warfare its only outlet, the people will risk
death to serve the state. The state produces energy and manpower for
battle. The effective ruler makes the people “forget their lives for the
sake of their superiors” so they “delight in war” and “act like hungry
wolves on seeing meat.” For Shang the most useful outlet of energy is
war. There must “always be another war to fight, another enemy to de-
feat.” Surpluses must be consumed by war, for settling into enjoyment of
the surplus would lead to self-interested squabbling and idleness. Lewis
observes that this “sucks in more and more resources to be consumed in
wars that no longer serve any purpose save to keep the machine run-
ning.”44 This is war for its own sake.
The Qin ruler Shi Huang was a megalomaniac who claimed heav-
enly powers and declared that his dynasty would reach to the end of
time and the limits of space. He had nourished this ideal secretly. Now,
to transcend his humanity and become immortal, he ascended Mount
Tai to communicate with the highest god. He inscribed his triumphs in
verse on the peaks of mountains throughout his realm. Six have survived.
They declare blessings had been bestowed on all within the four seas,
“wherever sun and moon shine,” “wherever human tracks reach,” even
extending to the beasts and the plants. The range of his power and be-
neficence was universal.45 The path to that end had been repetitive,
baked-in warfare.
 Ancient China 107

Conclusion
Ancient Chinese polities inherited a feudal mode of warfare. Inequalities
between polities encouraged the strong to conquer or demand fealty
from the weak, and wars of conquest could be fought against weaker pe-
ripheral peoples. Sharks swallowed minnows, but they were more cau-
tious about other sharks. Coups, rebellions, and civil wars between
lineages threatened rulers, giving them political motives to raise armies,
demonstrate strength in foreign wars, and use their armies to crush re-
volt and extract the surplus from the peasants. Honor, revenge, humilia-
tion, and the like intermittently added more emotional, less material
motives, though the annals rarely delve into character except when scan-
dals were involved. Inheritance norms gave incentives for younger sons,
as they did in Europe, but here lineage rivalries were also important.
War gave ambitious young men opportunities for upward mobility after
the age of chariot warfare. Conflict between major polities was often
“deflected” onto weaker ones, making it less deadly for major polities.
This resulted in the path-dependent growth of militaristic institu-
tions and cultures baked in to state power, in to warrior ideologies and
ambitions for greed and glory across the generations—as in the Roman
Republic. Neither religions nor cities and merchants could counterbal-
ance warriors. Although Confucians were generally more pacific than le-
galists, both advocated that order-enforcing states fight “just” wars.
Ideological power did not undercut state power, as the Church in Eu-
rope sometimes did. Major states then turned against each other, fighting
costlier wars. Victorious states carried on fighting, eventually overconfi-
dently, and all but one plunged to defeat. Rationality of both means and
ends weakened. “Mistakes” were not occasional but systemic, because a
mishmash of motives and opportunities intervened: greed, demonstrat-
ing political power at home, pursuing honor and righteousness, anger,
and revenge. The result was either overconfidence in victory or a more
resigned view that war was the only way for human beings to settle dis-
putes and for China to become reunited—which Confucian and legalist
theorists endorsed. All four power sources are necessary to explain the
patterns of war in China.
There came a fourth century bce “arms race” to integrate economic
and military power as legalist reforms brought the masses into war in re-
turn for economic concessions. There was a little support for liberal the-
ory in the many treaties and intermittent recognition of a hegemon, but
108 Ancient China

Qin unified China through conquest. In the Changping campaign Qin’s

harnessing of economic to military power gave it more staying power
than Zhao, but campaign contingencies were decisive in the end. Realism
has dominated IR theory of war in the post-1816 context of struggles be-
tween fairly equal major powers, all of which survived. Ancient China
was a different context, more typical in the history of a world where the
strong swallow the weak, and the weak cannot retreat into guerilla war-
fare. It had finally brought only one winner out of the seventy-plus who
had begun in post-Zhou China. The fundamental contradiction in an-
cient Chinese warfare was that, on the one hand, rulers practiced much
military and diplomatic calculation, aided by much military, economic,
and political expertise, yet the result was the defeat and disappearance of
all but one ruler. Realism sets a much higher standard of calculation of
means and ends than was realistically possible here.

Who benefited? The dukes and vassals of victorious states might benefit
during their lifetimes, if they were not cut down by coups or wars. Set-
tlers moving into conquered lands might benefit, while rulers and peo-
ples who submitted without fighting did not lose much. Limited
economic privileges came in return for more military service, as more
lives were risked in ever-larger armies that suffered greater casualties.
Chinese cultural civilization was largely for the upper classes. Qin unifi-
cation was seen as likely to bring order to China, but it is finally impossi-
ble to say whether the millions of casualties and the devastation
produced by hundreds of wars were justified by the much later creation
of a somewhat more peaceful and very long-lasting realm. One can con-
jecture an alternative path of development, through a more peaceful
multistate Chinese civilization, but this seems a long way from the reality
of ancient China. But although rulers thought they were pursuing ratio-
nal purposes through wars, most lost their realms and lives. Peace and
diplomacy might have produced better outcomes, but both geopolitics
and domestic power relations blocked this path to development.
 chapter six
Imperial China

F
or most of its over two-thousand-year history, the Chinese
Empire was the leading edge of human civilization. It made war
quite frequently. Tonio Andrade says that from 800 to 1450 the
rates of war of China and Europe were similar.1 Then, between
1450 and 1550, warfare decreased somewhat in China while increasing in
Europe, but convergence resumed between 1550 and 1700. From the
1750s a “great military divergence” grew, when Chinese warfare was at its
lowest level ever. Overall Chinese figures, however, conceal large differ-
ences between macroregions. The east and southeast saw relatively few
wars, and a distinctive form of tributary diplomacy emerged instead. In
the north and west relations between China and its neighbors were far
more warlike. Realist theories cannot explain this difference. In fact, as
we shall see, it was due primarily to different ecologies generating differ-
ent internal social structures and external relations. In the north and west
an empire populated mainly by agriculturalists and city dwellers abutted
savannas and steppes populated by pastoralists. This produced different
configurations of power and far more conflict between them. But
through time and wars the steppe dwellers and the farmers merged into a
single, larger empire. Abstract theories of war cannot deal with such vari-
ation in space and time.

109
110 Imperial China

The Imperial Chinese State

The first Qin emperor, Shi Huang, crushed resistance and greatly ex-
panded his realm through war, while burning the books of those who had
opposed war. He standardized the written language, penal code, calendar,
weights and measures, and cart axle rod lengths. He built roads, canals,
and monuments with mass corvée labor. Today we marvel at his mauso-
leum near Xian, built by perhaps 700,000 workers, with 7,600 full-size,
lifelike, beautifully sculpted terra-cotta soldiers and their horses (more are
apparently not yet unearthed). After failing to reach immortal health
through imbibing the potions of magicians and sages, he seems to have
believed that this army would protect him in the afterlife. He is the first of
the great conquerors of history I shall discuss, driven onward by his sense
of destiny, subordinating all to universal domination, including megalo-
maniacal exploitation of labor. His regime became steadily harsher, more
militaristic, and less popular. He buried many Confucians alive. Massive
infrastructure projects and further conquests brought benefit to only a
few. After his death, his dynasty collapsed amid insurrections; it was re-
placed by the milder western Han dynasty (206 bce–8 ce), which rejected
severe legalism in favor of the moralistic tones of Confucianism.
The imperial state began to acquire its long-lasting forms. The royal
court was divided into an inner and an outer part, separating the per-
sonal household of the emperor from the central administration of gov-
ernment. The inner court was confined to members of the imperial
family and their concubines, eunuchs, and staffs. Membership in the
outer court was at the discretion of the emperor, yet its agencies had
some autonomy because they were strongly rooted in the provincial gen-
try class. The Han and then the Tang increased the central bureaucracy
to 153,000 officials, ten times larger than the Roman Empire’s bureau-
cracy that ruled a slightly smaller population.2 By modern standards this
is still tiny. In 2019 in the United Kingdom, which had a similar popula-
tion, there were 5.4 million public employees. Modern states pursue
many functions unknown to early states.
The Han introduced examinations for entry into the bureaucracy.
Under the Tang dynasty (618–907 ce) these became systematic, testing
candidates’ Confucian knowledge and literacy. The northern Song (960–
1127) extended the system to almost all officials, and this lasted right up
to 1905, though of less importance during the two ex-barbarian dynas-
ties, the Yuan and the Qing. Since almost all literate males came from
 Imperial China 111

gentry families or from the children of dependents educated by these

families, a national gentry-bureaucrat class with a common Confucian
culture emerged, which dominated the outer court while also anchored
in local class power. In an attempt to increase bureaucratic powers, offi-
cials could not serve in their own region. Yet this was undercut by offi-
cials’, often powers of patronage, which led to corruption contrary to
Confucian norms. Confucians also educated most emperors and their
families. This created a rooted and quite cohesive agrarian state, compa-
rable to the Roman senate and assemblies in their representing the dom-
inant classes of Roman society. Republican Rome had a representative
system, and China did not, but both had strong connections between
provinces and central government, which reinforced cohesion among the
upper classes and mobilized large, well-organized armies. Sizable ancient
empires needed comparable links between the central state and provin-
cial class power. Otherwise, they would devolve into feudalism—and
some did. But not China.
Zhao sees a balance of forces between emperors, Confucian scholars,
and bureaucratic officials in a “Confucian-Legalist State.”3 Legalism pro-
vided the law and punishment, Confucianism the morality. This “amal-
gam of political and ideological power” allowed emperors to “strengthen
state authority and . . . penetrate the society.” Military power, he says, was
required less. Political elites curbed the generals’ power and kept eco-
nomic power holders localized.4 Confucianism permeated higher educa-
tion and the bureaucracy. Allied to strong gentry identity, its advocacy of
low taxes and laissez-faire economics limited the emperor’s ability to
make war. This dual state tamed all challengers, including bandits, rebels,
barbarian conquerors, Buddhism, Daoism, and commercialization. True,
heredity or competence might fail and a dynasty collapse amid civil war,
but when its victor founded a new dynasty, essentially the same state was
reconstituted. The merger of central state and the gentry class was too
useful to rulers. Rafe de Crespigny adds that the ideology of a Zhou-
Han-Sui-Tang line of descent legitimized a single state, while it also had
an economic core.5 The central plain, crisscrossed by rivers and canals,
offered a solid base to rulers, fertile and revenue yielding.
Nonetheless, civil wars and wars between states within China lasted
for almost five hundred of a two-thousand-year history. For a quarter of its
life, the universal empire was aspirational. When Chinese dynasties were
solidly entrenched, they still had to contend with rival rulers around their
borders.6 Sometimes imperial family life became a bloodbath. Despite a
112 Imperial China

norm of inheritance by the eldest son, when emperors had multiple wives
and concubines, it was often unclear which son might inherit, and a kins-
man or ambitious general might claim the throne. In such civil wars there
was only one winner but often several losers. Only half the emperors died
in their beds or abdicated by choice; the other half died through assassina-
tion, by forced suicide, or in an uprising—and the entire royal family
might then be killed off. The second Qin emperor murdered all his sib-
lings as he ascended the throne. Thirty-one Tang dynasty family members
had been styled heirs apparent, but only nineteen of them reached the
throne, twelve being murdered. Yet, after succession crises, an established
emperor might count on fairly stable rule. Ex-barbarian dynasties were
more precarious, as their rules of succession were fuzzier and aristocratic
rivals all commanded troops.
Chinese ideologies lacked a transcendent divinity. Order was valued
above any ultimate notion of truth. The emperor was the Son of Heaven,
but if he did not keep order, he was perceived as having lost the mandate
of heaven and could be overthrown. Occasionally, rebellions generated
mass millenarian religious movements, such as the Huang Lao, the Yel-
low Turban, the Five Pecks of Grain (which demanded minimal taxes),
the Taiping, and the Muslim rebellions. Underlying them was protest
against exploitation. This was also occasionally so in medieval and early
modern Europe. But only the last two Chinese cases, both in the nine-
teenth century, had an avowedly religious goal—to establish a Christian
or Muslim state. Religious ideology was also unimportant to the nomads
and seminomads attacking China, though farther west in central Asia
some were fired up by Islam.7

War-and-Peace Decisions
Traditionally, Chinese foreign policies were seen as Confucian-
dominated, favoring peace.8 This is now regarded as exaggerated. But
there are several competing theories, mostly varieties of Realism. Yuan-
Kang Wang offers a structural Realism like that of Eckstein on Rome.9
Focusing on the Song (960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties, he
stresses geopolitical anarchy and lack of trust in other states. “Confucian
pacifism” had little role, he says, for foreign policy was geared to calcu-
lating the material capabilities of China relative to its rivals. Rulers chose
offensive war when strong, and defense, compromise, and harmony when
weak. What mattered was the relative balance of “troops, horses, grain
 Imperial China 113

production, government budget, fiscal balances, and domestic rebel-

lions.”10 Although Song and Ming officials passed through the Confucian
exam system, this had little effect on whether they launched wars. Wang
does not explain why some dynasties were more warlike than others. He
omits the Yuan and Qing dynasties from his Realist analysis on the
grounds that, as ex-barbarians, they were not Confucian. But this omits
the most aggressive regimes of all.
Zhenping Wang offers a toned-down Realism.11 In barbarian-Tang
relations rulers attempted to calculate balances of power resources;
sometimes they tried to understand the social dynamics of rival king-
doms, and sometimes they decided that they must use soft, not hard
power. They had to assess allies and enemies, opportunists lying and dis-
sembling. Thus, alternative decisions might be equally plausible and er-
rors likely. Local officials in frontier provinces had different priorities
from those of the central authorities, and outcomes were often decided
by the balance of power between factions. De Crespigny says modernists
favored military expansion and state intervention in the economy to se-
cure more revenue for wars, while reformists favored localism, less gov-
ernment, low taxes, and no costly wars.12 During the early Han and Tang
dynasties, Zhenping Wang distinguishes doves, hawks, and centrists.13
Factions were often “ins” versus “outs,” however, possessing or excluded
from the spoils of office. War-and-peace decisions were often the by-
product of domestic struggles. The temperaments of rulers also mat-
tered. Strong emotions surged, such as desire for vengeance if feeling
deceived. Finally, the fortunes of battle were uncertain. This is a more
realistic Realism. Rulers try to be rational, but often they fail.
Alistair Johnston offers an ideological version of Realism. He says le-
galism, not Confucianism, dominated Ming policy. It had a “parabellum”
model: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Security threats must be met
by force, the people must obey their rulers, foreigners are rapacious and
threatening, and violence must be the response to them. One attacks when
strong, but defends or seeks accommodation when weak. The Confucian
model was an ideal, but most practice was parabellum—not because of
geopolitical anarchy but the martial culture internalized by officials. Yet he
exaggerates the role of legalism, less important in officials’ education than
Confucianism, and he mischaracterizes Confucians as pacifists.14 As we saw
in chapter 5, Confucians offered mixed messages on war and peace.
Peter Lorge doubts whether any moral philosophy was heeded
by rulers.15 The texts offered ideals that Confucian-trained officials
114 Imperial China

endorsed in principle but considered marginal to practical politics. Mili-

tary power remained the way to hold China together. The military ab-
sorbed above 70 percent of state revenue, all dynasties were created in
war, all declined through military decay, and all fell to rebellious generals
claiming the throne. He concludes: “Chinese empires were not created
by the cultivation of virtue, a fundamental cultural orientation to politi-
cal order, or ideological pleas for ethnic unity; they were created by de-
cades of war and political strife. Organized violence was applied toward
political goals intelligently and ruthlessly, with the targets of that vio-
lence almost exclusively the power elite, the men and women who held
significant political, military, cultural or economic power.”16
This is effectively a military Realism, but applied to domestic strug-
gles as well as external wars. Lorge believes our sources are biased by li-
terati who downplayed militarism. Jonathan Skaff agrees, for the Tang
literati elite (618–907) presented “an incongruent image of a society with
a value system seemingly opposed to frontier aggression that nonetheless
implements a strategy of military expansion.”17 Beautiful poetry con-
cealed violence. Yet the frontiers required doses of both military action
and diplomacy, hard and soft power.
A military and political offshoot of this approach would help explain
why the founders of dynasties and their immediate successors generally
launched more offensive wars than later successors. They had already
demonstrated martial skills when seizing the throne, they had troops
needing employment, and their victories gave them the political power
to levy taxes and conscription for war. But gradually the Confucian gen-
try-bureaucrat class pressured successor emperors toward conservative,
low-tax, and low-conscription policies, and away from war.

Tributary Diplomacy in East and Southeast Asia

This region saw relatively few wars. China became the dominant partner
in a tributary system comprising China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam; dis-
tant polities participated more loosely. David Kang says that between
1368 and 1841 only two major wars occurred between these core states,
though two Chinese civil wars also spilled across frontiers.18 In this pe-
riod the borders between the four states were relatively uncontested. But
we should add a few more wars: a Ming occupation of Vietnam between
1406 and 1427; the Ming defeat of a Japanese invasion of Korea in
the 1590s; two Manchu Qing invasions of Korea in the 1630s against a
 Imperial China 115

Korean king who supported the rival Ming dynasty; a brief 1662 Qing
invasion of Myanmar to capture a Ming pretender to the Chinese
throne; Qing incursions into Myanmar in the 1760s; and a brief Qing in-
cursion into Vietnam in 1788.
There were also naval engagements against pirates, as well as Admiral
Zheng He’s famed five voyages around South Asia to Africa in the early
fifteenth century, which intimidated coastal peoples into paying tribute to
the emperor. His fleets were large, carrying about 27,000 persons, half of
them soldiers, about the same overall numbers as in the Spanish Armada
150 years later. They were deployed in three brief wars, one against pi-
rates, one to defend a Sumatran tributary ruler against rebels, and one of
retaliation against a Sri Lankan kingdom that had opposed his presence
during an earlier voyage. But the admiral died in 1433 during his fifth ex-
pedition, and the voyages were abruptly ended by the imperial court after
a struggle between the eunuchs who had backed him and Confucian offi-
cials concerned with the cost. The “Treasure Fleets” had come back with
little treasure. The Yongle emperor had spent lavishly, leaving large debts.
The voyages had been for glory as much as economic profit. His succes-
sor, Xuande, stopped them, more on grounds of economy than of military
weakness. He also feared that far-flung trade would give merchants too
much power. The reduced Chinese fleet could still achieve victories in
naval engagements against pirates, the Portuguese in 1512, and the
Dutch in the 1620s.
Thus, China in this region fought only about a dozen land wars, in
addition to smaller naval engagements, which lasted in total about forty
years over a six-hundred-year period, a very small proportion. Two-thirds
of the land wars were undertaken by ex-barbarian dynasties, and two
were the spillover of Ming versus Qing civil wars. So this was broadly a
defensive, diplomatic imperialism, mostly at peace, especially under Han
Chinese dynasties. Kang notes that between 1368 and 1841, under
twenty interstate wars were dwarfed by wars elsewhere with northern and
western barbarians (252 cases), by defense against pirates (60 cases), and
by conflicts among other states and unruly border tribes with occasional
Chinese intervention (number unspecified). In this region state and inter-
state institutions favored diplomacy far more than war.
Was this due to China’s weakness, its inability to overcome its rivals,
as Realists suggest? Feng Zhang’s population and GDP estimates suggest
not.19 China had ten times the resources of any single rival and over
twice the resources of all the regional rivals combined. Kang says China
116 Imperial China

had “the military and technological capability to wage war on a massive

scale,” potentially defeating all rivals.20 That meant those rivals could not
threaten China, which we will see was not the case in the north and west.
Moreover, the main foreign actors involved were established states with
agrarian economies similar to China’s: known, predictable actors. Under-
lying this was the fact that China did not have expansionist goals in this
region and was very rarely provoked into military action by others. Here
was a satiated power. Of course, there were lesser economic and political
factors involved. Bigger wars required higher taxes, flouting Confucian
(and Daoist) laissez-faire economics, and were opposed by much of the
gentry-bureaucrat class. The court’s fear of its generals also reduced mil-
itary budgets as a coup-proofing strategy. Overall, however, foreign states
in this region were not powerful enough to threaten China, so why
bother? I examine first the exceptions, when it did bother.
There were four Sui dynasty attempts between 598 and 614 ce to
subjugate the main Korean kingdom. Their failure led to the fall of the
dynasty. There were two Tang invasions between 645 and 668 in support
of the Korean Silla kingdom, the second one being largely successful, al-
though Silla kept its independence. David Graff says these were the only
wars against foreign states during the period 300–900 ce.21 After another
three hundred years came the period of Mongol expansion and establish-
ment of the Yuan dynasty in China itself. Between 1231 and 1257 came
eight invasions of Korea, with varying outcomes, and then two failed in-
vasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 by Kublai Khan. Hurricanes destroyed
his fleets as they arrived at Japanese shores. Like many mighty warriors,
he found nature mightier still. These invasions were a part of the almost
continuous wars of aggression the Mongols waged to extend domination
over much of Asia. They were neither Han Chinese nor Confucian.
After three hundred more years came a successful 1592 Han Chinese
intervention in Korea by a Ming dynasty army of 50,000, equipped with
heavy cannon and flanked by substantial naval forces. This was to aid
Korean forces against an invasion by a Japanese 160,000-strong army
launched by Hideyoshi, who had just reunified Japan by force and be-
lieved his battle-hardened army could beat anyone. He also needed to
find employment for it. Chinese intervention was an activation of the
tributary system, but it was also self-defense, since Hideyoshi had sworn
to move straight through Korea and conquer China, installing himself as
regent. After heavy losses in his first campaign, Hideyoshi tried again in
1597 with an army of 150,000. In response the Ming raised their forces
 Imperial China 117

to almost 100,000. The China-Korea alliance won again, the Ming can-
non destroying the Japanese arquebus-equipped infantry (this was a war
of guns), while the Chinese and Korean navies controlled the seas. Total
Japanese casualties were reported as 80,000, the Ming as 38,000, the
Koreans as 200,000 militia plus several hundred thousand civilians.22 The
war devastated Korea and involved atrocities against civilians and captive
soldiers. No one gained except Tokugawa Ieyasu in Japan, and he gained
by not fighting. Defeat weakened his Japanese rivals, enabling him to
found the Tokugawa dynasty (see chapter 7).
This war revealed the formidable military power of the Ming, but
there was no attempt to take over Korea. Ji-Young Lee says the court
considered annexation but preferred “coercive diplomacy through trib-
ute practices to extract Korean compliance.”23 Japan itself was protected
by its seas and was now isolationist. It did not return to Korea until the
1890s and to China until the 1930s. China never again contemplated an
invasion of Japan. The bias of China in this region was toward peaceful
tribute, while Japan remained insular.
Chinese dominance over Vietnam had lasted a thousand years. Kang
and his colleagues have a data set of wars and lesser disputes from 1365
to 1789.24 This reveals a broadly tributary system as Vietnamese rulers
ritually recognized their lesser status—with one major exception. In
1400 Ho rebels massacred the ruling Tran clan and seized the Vietnam-
ese throne. The Tran heir (or perhaps a pretender) fled to the Chinese
court and asked for help. After a long pause, during which the Chinese
investigated what had happened, the Ming Emperor Yongle agreed. He
was experienced in wars against northern barbarians and was known for
aggressive policies. He sent the Tran prince back to Vietnam with armed
Chinese guards. Once over the border, the small force was ambushed
and all were killed. Yongle saw this as an outrageous violation of tribu-
tary relations mandated by heaven. Confucian principles demanded re-
venge, bolstered by righteous outrage at the killing of the Chinese.
An invasion force of 200,000 entered Vietnam in 1406. The lure of
loot was important among the soldiers, but the court’s motives were
honor and revenge. Yongle ordered that after the war was won and a Tran
installed on the throne, the army would leave—just regime change. But
though victory came swiftly, the army stayed for twenty years. Heaven’s
mandate turned into naked imperialism and mass looting.25 This pro-
voked fierce Vietnamese resistance. It was a question of survival for Viet-
namese elites, not so crucial and then not so profitable for the Chinese
118 Imperial China

after most of the loot had been taken. After several rebellions, in 1427 an
overextended Chinese army of occupation was defeated. There had been
debates at court between factions urging leaving or staying. Now they
left. Profit had been submerged by the costs of repeated wars for a not
very desirable target. Beijing later recognized the son of the victorious
rebel as the legitimate ruler and regular tribute missions resumed, bor-
ders were settled, and peace endured. Vietnamese elites had no ambition
to attack China, and they could now turn southward to destroy their
long-term rival, the Champa kingdom. The Vietnamese accepted a
largely notional tributary status and peace endured.
The Pacific island of Taiwan, not hitherto Chinese, was occupied in
1662 by Ming forces seeking a secure base after their defeat in China by
the Qing. In 1683 the Qing invaded, defeated the Ming remnants, and an-
nexed the island—a Chinese civil war spilling out abroad. They stayed
there to prevent the Portuguese from using it as a naval base. But China
never tried to annex the Ryukyu island archipelago kingdom (which was
wealthy through trade), the Philippines, Borneo, or other lands occupied
by militarily weaker peoples. The Moluccas had supplied spices for centu-
ries and were formally tributary states, but they were left alone. Tributary
trade was preferred to conquest as the mode of economic acquisition.
Between 1370 and 1500, 288 tribute missions came from seven lesser
Asian states to the Ming court—more than two per year. The system was
termed “all under heaven” or “harmonious world.” The emperor’s duty
was to maintain cosmic harmony through the performance of ancient re-
ligious rites cultivating popular obedience and moral virtue.26 He also
had to impose rites of homage and tribute on other peoples. Foreign rul-
ers should “observe the subordinate integrity of loyalty, obedience, and
trust-worthiness for serving China,” while China should show “moral ex-
cellence, humaneness, and grace for loving smaller and inferior” peo-
ples.27 China could legitimately launch punitive expeditions against a
state defying the Confucian diplomatic system, and the threat rarely led
to war. This was not the Confucian triumph of pacifism described by
John Fairbank, nor was it governed by Realist principles, as Yuan-Kang
Wang suggests.28 His model applies better in other regions of the em-
pire, as we will see. The elaborate rituals also served to dampen emo-
tions, though doubtless those performing them might have felt
humiliations that they had to try to repress.
But in any case lesser states often benefited from ritual submission.
They did not have to worry about war with China and could deploy their
 Imperial China 119

forces elsewhere. The legitimacy of foreign rulers was bolstered by an in-

vestiture ceremony performed by the emperor. The Chinese court de-
rived domestic prestige and legitimacy from the repeated presence of
foreign ambassadors doing homage at the feet of the emperor, strength-
ening factions favoring diplomacy over those favoring war. Once a state
did homage, it could participate more in the world’s biggest trading net-
work. Tribute trade was only a small part of all trade, but it played a key
role. Typically, ambassadors would do homage at court while merchants
did business in ports. If you did not pay tribute, this opportunity was not
available.29
For the Chinese the main reward was peace, for China usually gave
more valuable gifts to foreign states than it received. Exchange of hos-
tages and marriages of Chinese princesses to foreign rulers furthered re-
lations.30 “Kowtowing” to the emperor, forehead on the ground, was the
most expressive ritual. In the mission of British Ambassador Macartney to
China in 1792–94, he bowed but refused to kowtow, and his mission was
a failure. Emperor Qianlong wrote to King George III: “Our Celestial
Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product
within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures
of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.”
The system was a formal hierarchy with China at the top, yet it per-
mitted much informal equality.31 Subordinate states were free to choose
their own domestic policies. In this region after the Yuan dynasty, China
sought direct imperial rule abroad only once in Vietnam (described above)
and once in Myanmar. The Chinese never sought to export Confucian-
ism, though some neighbors did embrace it.
Tributary diplomacy was built to avoid war. Chinese rulers mediated
conflicts between other powers, while never submitting to mediation
themselves. They said they were bringing civilization to Asia, and neigh-
bors sometimes appeared to accept this. But despite the submissive ritu-
als, these neighbors rarely viewed the system in Confucian terms, except
Korea, a Confucian country. In dual-language agreements, the duties of
foreign rulers appear more stringent in the Chinese text than in the other
language—mutual complicity to evade clarity for peace and honor. Lee
says the contrast between Korean acceptance and Japanese rejection of
Chinese hegemony was due not only to the sea, but also to Korea’s being
Confucian.32 In contrast, Japanese political legitimacy rested on tradi-
tional reverence for the Japanese emperor and for Japan as “the country
of the gods,” with no reference to China.
120 Imperial China

IR specialists see hegemony as the principal means of countering

geopolitical anarchy. A state possessing it enjoys preponderant military
and economic power over all others and leadership that includes some
consent and legitimacy—dominance and authority. China had both. Re-
alist hegemonic theory focuses on domination, as does Yuan-Kang Wang,
whereas other IR theories emphasize authority. Liberal theory stresses
acceptance of some constitutionalism and a rule of law that constrains
the hegemon as well as the lesser states. Power is embedded amid a sys-
tem of rules and institutions that restrains its exercise, and the states bind
themselves to consent and agreed-on rules and institutions.33 For
Gramscians hegemony is broader, “based on a coherent conjunction or
fit between a configuration of material power, the prevalent collective
image of world order (including certain norms) and a set of institutions
which administer the order with a certain semblance of universality.”
Thus, it is seen “as the necessary order of nature,” spanning economic
production and class exploitation as well.34 Both Gramscians and con-
structivists stress the diffusion of legitimacy among the population as a
whole.
All these conceptions bear the marks of modernity and do not quite
fit imperial China. The model cases are American power over much of
the world since 1945 and British nineteenth-century liberal imperialism.
In military power the United States has been far more dominant than
China was, and Britain ruled the waves. Both spread liberal capitalism
globally, and their economic power included possession of the world’s re-
serve currencies. In contrast, China did not try to influence the econo-
mies of other states. Nor did hegemony extend downward to the peoples,
who were of no concern to the court. Tribute involved relations between
rulers, extending downward only as far as aristocracies and major mer-
chants. Chinese hegemony was narrower, more conservative, and less
ambitious than modern examples: it was oriented to peace. The relation-
ship with Korea was the most spectacular success. It saw over two hun-
dred years of peace and virtual political independence in exchange for
occasional trips to perform rituals of submission at the Chinese court.
This was hegemony for peace.
Yet peace also brought stability and economic development. Its dip-
lomatic rituals fit liberal better than Realist theory. The answer here to
“who benefited?” was almost everyone. The Chinese Empire was largely
satisfied in this region. The potential gains from further expansion
seemed minimal and its costs unacceptable, as Kublai Khan’s failed Japa-
 Imperial China 121

nese and Vietnamese forays had revealed. All the power sources rein-
forced the same geopolitical logic, and ideological power relations
provided the rituals by which this could be achieved honorably. But this
could not be replicated in other regions.

The North: Barbarians and Civilization

In China, empire emanated almost exclusively from the northern
frontier. Over the course of 3,600 years, all but one of a dozen
unification events originated in the north. Seven of them were
rooted in the northwest, especially the Wei River valley: Western
Zhou (twelfth century bce), Qin and Han (third century bce), Sui
(sixth century ce), Tang (seventh century ce), Yuan (thirteenth
century ce), and the communist takeover out of Shaanxi (twenti-
eth century ce). The Manchu Qing came from the northeast (sev-
enteenth century ce), and the Shang (sixteenth [?] century bce),
Western Jin (third century ce), and Northern Song (tenth century
ce) from the north-central area. Two further unifications merely
of northern China—Northern Wei (fourth century ce) and Jin
(twelfth century ce)—originated from the northwest and north-
east, respectively. The Ming regime (fourteenth century ce), cen-
tered on the Yangzi basin, was the sole outlier.35

Northern China exemplified the Eurasian economic divide between

predominantly nomadic pastoralists to the north and predominantly set-
tled agriculturalists to their south. On the agriculturalists’ Middle East-
ern southern flank lay pastoral Arabs. Pastoralists had horses or camels,
but the agriculturalists had the wealth and then the iron to equip chari-
ots and infantry. Then, with the advent of stirrups and saddles, mounted
archers required only horses and the recursive bow with iron-tipped ar-
rows to become highly effective soldiers. Pastoral aristocracies began
their expansion. Ibn Khaldun said the military difference was that the
pastoralists developed the technique of swift attack and withdrawal,
whereas the agriculturalists advanced steadily in closed, massed infantry
formations, retreating if necessary inside fortifications organized by bu-
reaucratic states.36 The Chinese called the pastoralists “uncivilized,” nor-
mally translated as “barbarian.” Larger nomadic and seminomadic
confederations often had a political center, yet that center was mobile.
The khans moved around their domains, the better to control them.37
122 Imperial China

Note that the horse and iron were unknown in the Americas before the
Spanish arrived, and so American wars lacked this contrast and the dy-
namic that flowed from it.
Marcher lords who learned to combine the two military forms could
become conquerors, emerging from the fringes of Chinese civilization in
more mixed pastoral-agricultural surrounds, learning the military skills
of both sides—early practitioners of “combined arms warfare.” Nowhere
was this clearer than in north China. That list of conquerors given by
Scheidel, quoted above, contained only two barbarian dynasties, the Yuan
and the Manchu, but almost all the dynasties were to some degree de-
scended from barbarians who had become ex-barbarians.
War was much more frequent here than in the southeast, and the re-
gion absorbed the vast bulk of Chinese military expenditure. The Chi-
nese had to deal with the consequence of their own success. Agrarian
productivity and wealthy cities attracted the cupidity of their pastoral
neighbors who could trade, raid, or exact tribute payments for not raid-
ing. Most of the time they chose trade, tribute, and diplomacy, but their
striking speed and range led to raiding by small war bands owing loyalty
to their leader, taking back loot, women, and slaves at low cost but some
risk, especially when it brought large-scale Chinese retribution. From
childhood, nomadic pastoralists were skilled horsemen, and in hunting
they became skilled archers—natural horse archers experienced in skir-
mishing between clans and tribes. Di Cosmo says the image of the “natu-
ral warrior” can be taken too far, and nomads and seminomads were not
fighting most of the time, yet the contrast with China is valid.38 They did
not really “choose” war; it was part of their way of life. Chinese armies
consisted of massed peasant infantry, many armed with crossbows, as well
as mercenary cavalry drawn from barbarian peoples. But agriculture does
not teach military skills, and Chinese society was normally more peace-
ful. The peasant had to be trained to fight, which required permanent
conscripted forces and taxes, and states. Criminals were often recruited
as soldiers. Though the Chinese population was much greater, the bar-
barians could raise tribal hosts of up to one-quarter of a total population,
and the cost to their khans was minimal.39 War was costlier for Chinese
states, and they usually had low taxes.
Different ecologies made for inequality between the two economies,
yet their relatively equal military power enabled acquisition by force.
Chinese armies often defeated tribal confederations in fixed battles, but
the nomads then might retreat into endless steppes where the Chinese
 Imperial China 123

had not the logistical ability to follow because they were dependent on
provisioning by supply trains, whereas the nomads could live off pasture-
land. Since cavalry horses had become the crucial weapon, Chinese
armies needed more horses than their own ecology could provide. They
traded many products with the barbarians, but the main Chinese demand
was for horses (camels were second). They could trade with some barbar-
ians to acquire horses to defeat other barbarians; they could get horses
by seizing and ruling pastureland; or they could use barbarian soldiers to
attack other barbarians. Chinese forays into the steppes often relied on
recruits from the very peoples they were combating. But horse archers
might need ten mounts, and their price was high and the quality of those
offered for sale was often quite low.40 Since trade was insufficient for
Chinese military needs, it was not clearly preferable to go to war. Such
dilemmas maintained the rough equality of military power between the
two sides and kept their relations simmering for two millennia.
When China fell into disorder, the pastoralists were less threatened,
and tribal confederations might then weaken. Chinese aggression consis-
tently enhanced the power of khans leading tribal federations. Barbarian
factionalism was endemic—anarchy within as well as between. It also al-
lowed lesser chieftains to flout treaties negotiated by their leaders. Before
the tenth century, cycles of raiding that invited punitive retaliation pre-
dominated. Barbarians did not initially seek the conquest of agrarian
China, but growing military power enabled some of them to move from
the steppes into terrains mixing pastoralism and agriculture—and to cap-
ture iron mines and foundries to make weapons, for Chinese states often
banned weapons exports. Thus began conquests by multitribal barbarian
armies. But victorious khans grew keen to acquire the institutions and cul-
ture of “civilization,” which the khans blended into their own practices.
Many had served as officials or soldiers in China (like the barbarians at-
tacking the Roman Empire). The most successful khans founded perma-
nent administrations, extracted taxes from sedentary populations, acquired
literacy, and claimed the title of emperor.41 They were “ex-barbarians.”
There seem to be no examples of states emerging spontaneously within
pastoral societies. They all came from interaction with sedentary states.
Around imperial borders, raiding and retaliation were frequent, wars
and conquest occasional. Scheidel estimates over five hundred nomad in-
cursions over the two thousand years from 220 bce and almost four
hundred in the opposite direction by China.42 According to an eleventh-
century calculation, between 599 and 755 ce, Turks in Mongolia
124 Imperial China

accounted for 55 percent of the 205 recorded attacks on Sui and Tang
China, or 0.72 per year. But pastoral nomadism “was characterized by per-
manent instability. It was based on dynamic balance between three vari-
ables: the availability of natural resources, such as vegetation and water;
the number of livestock; and the size of the population. All of these were
constantly oscillating. . . . The situation was further complicated because
these oscillations were not synchronic, as each of the variables was deter-
mined by many factors, temporary and permanent, regular and irregular.
Thus, even annual productivity of pastures varied significantly because it
was connected to microclimatic and ecological conditions.”43
Chinese warfare was often reactive, sometimes defensive, sometimes
punitive expeditions to deter further raids, sometimes conquest and in-
corporation of enemy territories. Conquest was seen by the Chinese as
an exasperated final step to eradicate raids. They sometimes erected de-
fensive walls around recently conquered territories—like the Great Wall.
This was a reaction against barbarian pressure, but it was also defense of
lands acquired through conquest. But borders were not very stable.
Sometimes sections of the Great Wall were inside Chinese territory,
sometimes not. But geopolitics was not entirely anarchic, for it had a
rough cyclical logic.
Dealing with the seminomadic Xiongnu was unfinished business from
Qin unification. The western Han dynasty launched wars against them in
the north and in Central Asia, aimed at cutting the links between these re-
gions. The wars eventually succeeded, though the cost in lives and money
was tremendous.44 Incursions deep into Xiongnu territory led their khans
into adapting agriculture, permanent states, literacy, even siege engines
and navies. Some styled themselves as rival “empires” to China. The Chi-
nese court might trade, appease, or marry Chinese princesses to barbarian
princes. It might divide and rule, defend, aggress, found military colonies,
or resettle difficult populations. None would work indefinitely, and this
meant shifting flexibly between diplomacy and war. Sometimes the Chi-
nese made shrewd choices, sometimes disastrous ones—usually because of
overconfidence or emotions overriding pragmatism.
On both sides war-and-peace decisions involved debate. In China
the inner court (the emperor, eunuch officials, and dependents) tended to
be more warlike than the Confucian gentry-official stratum of the outer
court, who sought to keep taxes down, yet under the Tang dynasty eu-
nuch factions warred with each other. Chinese rulers found decisions dif-
ficult given nomad volatility. They divided over whether to believe a
 Imperial China 125

khan’s promises, or whether he could control tribes under his nominal

command. Tribal leaders had to engage in diplomatic negotiations or
minor wars with tribal rivals, and only the skilled or lucky ones rose to
the top. How long they or their successors could stay there remained un-
certain.45 Emotions of anger, hubris, fear, and vengeance inflected ratio-
nality, while preserving honor was important for all.
Ethnic stereotypes sometimes intensified hostility. The Chinese told
tribal rulers that their “cultural inferiority” meant they should submit. A
Song high official called the Khitans “insects, reptiles, snakes, and liz-
ards,” adding, “How could we receive them with courtesy and defer-
ence?” Ming officials said the Mongols had “the faces of humans but the
hearts of wild beasts”; they were “dogs and sheep whose insatiable appe-
tites and wild natures made them unenculturable.” Han China was the
head of a person, barbarians the feet. When they refused to submit, it
was like a person hanging upside down. Racism made calculative deci-
sions more difficult.46 When the Chinese had to negotiate because of
weakness, however, they usually showed pragmatism in hiding their rac-
ism.47 Barbarians regarded the Chinese as herds of sheep to be pushed
around at will.48
Confucianism was alien to the barbarians, and tribute was simply
given to the stronger. When China was strong, it exacted tribute from
barbarians; when weak, it paid tribute (in all but name). Tribute encour-
aged trade, which within limits was mutually useful. But tribute was also
sometimes paid by China even when strong, since bribes for peace were
much cheaper than war. The Xiongnu and later Turkic groups swore
fealty to the emperor in return for cash. Ying-shih Yu calculates that be-
tween 50 and 100 ce the value of goods received by barbarians from the
Chinese was equal to 7 percent of imperial revenue, or 30 percent of the
imperial payroll.49 Song and Ming paid lesser indemnities.50 Critics at
court insisted that this dishonored China, and the payments consolidated
the power of tribal rulers.51 When the Chinese demanded tributary sub-
mission, barbarians and ex-barbarians balanced a loss of honor against the
gains it brought. Some pragmatically submitted, others proudly refused.

Testing Realism: The Song and the Barbarians, 960–1279 ce

Song dynasty wars were usually fought against ex-barbarian peoples who
had adopted Chinese practices. Can their wars be explained by structural
Realist theory, as Yuan-Kang Wang argues?52 He says the northern Song
126 Imperial China

state was weak, especially compared to the first century of the Ming dy-
nasty (1368–1449). Thus, he says, the Song fought mainly defensive wars
or sought accommodation with the barbarians, whereas the stronger
Ming fought largely offensive wars.
The Tang dynasty had fought aggressive wars against barbarians up to
about 760 ce, but it paid a price for territorial expansion. The gap be-
tween the central officials and those in frontier districts grew into political
incoherence.53 Military governors far from the capital acquired autonomy,
which resulted in rebellions. The biggest was launched by general An
Lushan, who commanded over 100,000 troops along the northern fron-
tier. He rebelled in 763, and it took fourteen years and millions of deaths
for Tang forces to finish off his forces (see table 10.1). Meanwhile, the
Tang lost most of their western lands as neighbors seized on Chinese dis-
unity to grab territory. A reduced tax base and smaller armies weakened
the dynasty. A partial revival occurred in the early ninth century, but then
an uprising was suppressed by a general who killed the entire royal family
and declared himself Emperor Taizu of the Later Liang dynasty. After his
death, his domains disintegrated as warlords founded their own states in
the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.
One warlord took control of the central plain in 960, styling himself
the first of the Song dynasty. He remained threatened by the ex-barbarian
Khitan Liao, ruling formerly Tang lands on both sides of the Great Wall.
The Khitan ruled over a mainly Han Chinese agricultural population and
blocked Song access to horses. The Khitan north was ruled according to
tribal principles, while its south had a Han Chinese administration.54
Geopolitics was not entirely anarchic. Most rulers preferred peace to
war, and embassies, audiences, and gift exchanges proliferated. When war
broke out, “The basic rule,” says Edmund Worthy, was “cease aggression
before annihilating an actor.”55 Rather, the goal of war was to compel alle-
giance and homage, expressed in honorific titles conferred on subordi-
nated rulers.56 These were ways of defusing conflict while mutually
preserving honor and status.
Yuan-Kang Wang says that the Song mounted aggressive war when
strong, and defended or accommodated to the enemy when weak—and
the latter situation predominated.57 Some Song advisers did urge this.58
But most Song endorsed the Confucian orthodoxy that a war was just if a
foreign ruler refused to pay homage to the Son of Heaven or if the goal
of war was to retake formerly Chinese domains. Previously Han lands in
the north were ruled by the Khitan Liao, the Tangut Xi Xia, and later the
 Imperial China 127

Jurchen Jin, all ex-barbarian empires. In the south lay ten small Han
Chinese states. The Song intended eventually to reunify all China, but
they knew this was beyond their powers at the time. They focused on re-
claiming the southern states and, in the north, the state of the northern
Han and the region known as the Sixteen Prefectures, which was fertile
and strategic but had been lost by the Tang dynasty to the Liao. The
Song felt entitled to these “lost territories.”
Taizu, the first Song emperor, calculated carefully. Seeing that he
lacked the power to retake the Prefectures, he attacked the small Chinese
states to the south, mopping them up one by one. Lorge says there was
no advance plan.59 The court was divided, and Taizu was tentative. Yet he
was a proven general and politician, flexible and opportunistic. He had
first focused on stopping northern Han raids, but victory eluded him
since the Liao supported the northern Han. When it became clear that
the southern Han rulers could not unite against him, he went instead for
the weakest of them, and conquest of the others followed. Strengthened
by the resources of these regions, he then turned northward, carefully
built up his forces, but then unexpectedly died. Taizu fits the Realist
model, an unusually talented ruler and general who was in command of
his court. Not so his successors. His younger brother, Taizong, succeeded
Taizu. He knew that many at court thought Taizu’s son should have been
made emperor. Taizong was weak, unpopular, and incompetent. He
chose to attack the northern Han, says Lorge, mainly because he thought
victory would firm up his domestic political position. He would show
that he really was the Son of Heaven. Personally leading the Song forces,
he destroyed the northern Han state in 979 and achieved a victory over
Liao forces in a narrow pass unsuited to Liao cavalry strength.
The court knew, however, that victory had really come from Taizu’s
careful military buildup, so Taizong felt he had to win his own war. “His
clear political motivations for invading overrode his military judgment,”
observes Lorge.60 Emboldened by his recent victory, and despite the mis-
givings of his generals, Taizong ordered an invasion of the Prefectures.
But his troops were tired and unpaid, and supplies were sparse. They
were routed in badly chosen flat terrain that benefited the Liao horse ar-
chers. Taizong then turned inward to secure his political position by al-
ternative means, murdering all royal rivals, removing most generals, and
expanding the Confucian bureaucracy. Yet he still craved legitimacy and
pressed for a new offensive. In 986 an opportunity seemed to come with
the accession to the Liao throne of an eleven-year-old. His mother, the
128 Imperial China

dowager empress, became regent, which Taizong thought signaled weak-

ness. So he ordered an invasion. The swiftness with which his forces ad-
vanced threw off the prepared campaign plan and led to confusion among
his generals. The Liao launched a crushing counterattack ably led by the
dowager empress herself. Taizong had not known she was an experienced
general. Lorge says Song and Liao military strengths were fairly equal,
and the main reason the Liao generally won was better leadership, more
consensus at court, and a more consistent policy of border defense.
Taizong died in 997 and was succeeded by his third son, Emperor
Zhenzong. Neither he nor any subsequent Song emperor commanded
armies in the field. Yet he had not abandoned recovery of the Prefec-
tures. In the year 1000 Song armies launched an offensive against their
other northern neighbor, the Xi Xia, believing that victory there could
lead to a Prefecture offensive. Again, they were overconfident. The Xi
Xia cavalry repulsed them, and a stalemate resulted. Song policy in the
north had been unrealistically aggressive. A series of inconclusive wars
followed, and the Song constructed a network of canals, which Lorge
calls “The Great Ditch of China,” intended to foster economic develop-
ment but also to strengthen defenses against marauding cavalry.61 In
1004 came a major Liao attack that captured much Song territory before
the Liao’s inability to storm Song cities forced a halt. This series of wars
gave the Liao gains but was costly in lives and damage to the country-
side. Even so, the Liao had succeeded in stabilizing the frontier and re-
taining the Prefectures.
It seemed like a stalemate, and both sides agreed to end the war in the
Chanyuan Covenant of 1005, a treaty ensuring 120 years of peace. It al-
lowed both parties to take back small amounts of territory. The Song
made large annual payments of silver and silk to the Liao and removed as-
sertions of civilizational superiority from their public discourse. The Liao
did better since the Prefectures remained in their hands. But the payments
were not crippling, only 1–2 percent of the cost of the last war. Paying for
peace was a sensible way of using the greater resources of China.62 This
reflected less a Chinese weakness than it did a preference for a cheaper
policy than war, one that appealed to the tax-averse gentry class. Most at
court recognized that bribes and walls were better than wars.
Peace brought mutual benefit. The Liao used the payments to build
a new capital and buy needed Song goods. Unequal trade then enabled
the Song to recover 60 percent of the value of the payments.63 Peace also
enabled the Song to focus on reforms that touched off a remarkable pe-
 Imperial China 129

riod of technological innovation, population growth, economic develop-

ment, and cultural flowering. The Song almost achieved a breakthrough
into an industrial revolution—seven centuries before Europe managed it.
The Song capital, Kaifeng, grew to over a million people. Reforms of ed-
ucation and administration enhanced state infrastructural powers and en-
abled the literate gentry-bureaucrat class to share an imperial identity
that, notes de Weerdt, survived all subsequent dynastic upheavals in
China.64 Thus, the Song boosted the chances that future upheavals
would end up restoring the Chinese imperial state.
Its domestic achievements eased succession problems, and peace
made possible reforms cementing civilian control of the military,
through the removal of generals from foreign policy decisions.65 A su-
preme military council was headed by a chancellor who had no actual
control over the army. The army was divided among three marshals, each
reporting separately to the emperor, so he (and his advisers) provided the
only unity of command. Generals were limited to a single-term posting,
and the emperors protected themselves with large bodyguard armies sta-
tioned in and around the capital. All this was coup-proofing, to prevent
generals from accumulating enough power to threaten the emperor. Just
to be on the safe side, the emperor had some generals executed. The
constant change in generals weakened the army, yet the measures
worked in increasing political cohesion. There were eight more emper-
ors during the 167 years of the northern Song and only three brief failed
attempts at usurpation. During the 252 years of the successor southern
Song dynasty, there were only two short-lived periods of rival claimants.
Combined, the two Song dynasties were the longest-lived dynasty of
China. Whatever the Song failures in interstate wars, they had success in
domestic growth, stability, coup-proofing, and avoiding civil war.
A war party emerged, however, urging war against the supposedly
less powerful Xi Xia tribes. Yet in 1040 the Xi Xia inflicted two more
battlefield defeats on the Song. The Liao now debated whether to join in
the war and finally eliminate the Song, who would have to fight on two
fronts. The Liao emperor contented himself with increasing Song trib-
ute payments, preferring subsidized peace and balance to the cost and
risk of war. Wang says balance-of-power logic suggests that Song and Xi
Xia should have allied together against Liao, but Song Confucians saw
the Xi Xia as rebel vassals and refused to recognize their legitimacy. “In
this case,” Wang concedes, “cultural variable supplements structural real-
ism by explaining behaviors contrary to structural logic.”66
130 Imperial China

But the Prefectures retained their allure. The accession of Emperor

Shenzong in 1067 brought another revisionist. He began with a cam-
paign against the Xi Xia, as a prelude to moving into the Prefectures. His
1081 campaign was not decisive, so he ordered an attack again the next
year. The Song army was routed. Losses in the two campaigns were re-
ported as 600,000. Shenzong died in 1085. His successor was a boy, and
the dowager empress abandoned the offensive and ceded territory to the
Xi Xia. When the boy came of age, he ordered war against the Xi Xia.
The 1097 offensive was a success, recovering territory until stopped by
Liao threats of intervention. Most of the newly captured territory was
soon returned to the Xi Xia.
The region was then transformed by the rise of another northern ex-
barbarian dynasty, the Jin, originally a Jurchen people. In alliance with
the Song, they destroyed the Liao in 1125. Again the Song chose
the wrong ally, for they should have formed a balancing alliance with the
Liao to contain the more powerful Jin. In the event of their victory, the
Jin had promised the Song the Prefectures. Yet while Jin forces had won
their battles, Song forces were twice defeated by the Liao—overconfi-
dence again. The Song military weakness revealed, the Jin granted them
only six lesser Prefectures in return for large Song subsidies. Two years
later, the northern Song were finally finished off by Jin armies.
Since their early offensives against the southern states and the north-
ern Han, the Song had repeatedly gone on the offensive but lost, through
desire to show strength subverted by rash overconfidence. They did then
move to defense out of weakness, as Realism suggests, but it was largely
self-induced, owing to their failed offensives and coup-proofing to weaken
their generals. After a last offensive failed, the Song retreated southward to
form a southern Song dynasty, still economically strong and technologi-
cally creative. In the military sphere they developed the first effective gun-
powder weapons and a navy able to suppress coastal piracy.67
The Jin rulers to the north embraced Confucian institutions and cul-
ture but faced rising Mongol power to their north.68 The southern Song
launched two campaigns northward, in 1206–8 and 1234, in attempts to
reconquer the lost provinces. The first one was against the Jin, who the
Song believed were in a state of collapse. Not so—the Song armies came
fleeing home. But obsessed with finishing off the old Jin enemy, Song
rulers failed to see the greater threat of the Mongols. A Jin-Song alliance
would have been Realist balancing, but instead the Song launched an in-
vasion of Jin in alliance with Mongol forces. This finished off the Jin. In
 Imperial China 131

1234 the Song launched a campaign to win back Honan, then occupied
by Mongols. Officials advised against this war, citing army weakness and
logistical difficulties of campaigning in devastated Honan, but an impul-
sive, revisionist emperor, egged on by hand-picked advisers, overruled
them. The army was destroyed. The Song continued to irritate the Mon-
gols with revisionist claims yet held on stubbornly for forty more years.
The Mongol forces overthrew them in 1279.69
So the Song offer only limited support for Wang’s structural Realism.
The initial problem comes from seeing the Song as weak. The Song did
not believe they were weak; in fact, they were resolved to show strength,
and I have chronicled seven offensive wars by them. The founder of the
dynasty, Taizu, behaved like a Realist, assessing the odds, carefully prepar-
ing his forces, and achieving successes. Yet his successors launched six of-
fensive campaigns, lost four, and achieved only one victory; one was a
draw. They were more effective in defense and in peace, which permitted
economic and political development—indeed, they almost broke through
into industrialism—the “Song Miracle.” Technological advancements in-
cluded improvements in agriculture, creation of movable type, develop-
ment of various weapons from gunpowder, invention of the mechanical
clock, devising of compass navigation, improved shipbuilding and a per-
manent fleet, issuance of paper money by the government, and porcelain
production. All this produced a population explosion and improved living
standards. The Song did not dig as deeply into the economy for military
resources as some other dynasties, which was probably a mistake, given
their environment, their defeat, and the subsequent economic stagnation
of China. But it was partly a choice, a coup-proofing strategy to weaken
the generals—a contradiction between political and military power.
Peace, not war, brought benefit for most Chinese.
The northern and southern Song did strengthen military defenses,
deterring enemy attacks and stalling invasions, giving the dynasties long
life during a period of increased barbarian pressure. Wang views this as a
sign of weakness, but it was a recognition of military realities given eco-
logical conditions. Campaigns typically pitched infantry-dominated Song
armies against horse archers. So Song forces were better in terrains that
were rough, forested, or crisscrossed by rivers or canals. The ex-barbar-
ians were better on open plains but weak in siegecraft. The Song carried
supply trains, the ex-barbarians preferred to live off the land, but different
ecologies shifted logistical possibilities. In this zone of varied landscapes,
when one ruler aggressed, he or she usually moved out of favorable
132 Imperial China

terrain into terrain favoring the enemy. This slowed down offense or
brought defeat. The more the Song advanced northward, the greater the
terrain aided cavalry; the more the ex-barbarians advanced southward, the
more their cavalry got bogged down by canals and cities. Defensive war-
fare triumphed on both sides and was responsible for the longevity of
Song rule. So reliance on defense was due partially to coup-proofing,
which produced military weakness, and partially to different forms of mil-
itary power aided or hindered by the terrain.
There were also two Song strategic failures. Their Achilles’ heel re-
mained a yearning to rebuild the imperial unity of China, specifically to
restore the Sixteen Prefectures, reinforced by Confucianism, which was
not pacifist on this issue. Ambitious, overconfident emperors and advisers
embarked on offensive campaigns against the ex-barbarians, emboldened
by the perceived righteousness of their claims. Second, in the decisive
campaigns, when the northern Song attacked the Jin and the southern
Song allied with the Mongols, they made the strategic mistake of reject-
ing balancing alliances with the enemy of their most powerful enemy.
Sometimes Realism works, but with the Song it mostly does not.
The Chinese and ex-barbarians alike were ruled by despotic monarchs
with varying preferences, abilities, and characters. Being despots, they
had the power to choose their advisers and execute critics, subordinating
careful calculation of foreign realities to a desire to show strength at
home. Debates over war and peace, however, were often secondary to
domestic issues. “Reform” factions tended toward revisionism, “anti-
reform” factions were conservatives who favored the status quo, low
taxes, and defense or cash payments to the enemy. If the Song military
underperformed, that was due mostly to a combination of overconfi-
dence and coup-proofing. War-and-peace decisions and campaign per-
formance might be the indirect outcome of domestic political struggles.70
Campaigns were usually carefully planned, but the plans rarely survived
contact with the enemy or the terrain. Peace also had its own virtues, for
it led to economic development and greater political stability.
Coup-proofing, deliberately weakening their militaries to safeguard
their political power, was commonly also practiced in the Han, Sui, Tang,
and Ming dynasties.71 “A proven general by his very nature was a political
hazard.” China was too big to be stably ruled by a single monarchical
state. Succession crises were inevitable, and rival generals could chal-
lenge the state. The most a ruler could do was enforce obedience on lo-
calities too small to challenge him and to divide the military into units
 Imperial China 133

too small to allow generals regional power bases.72 This might mean a
less effective military, but it also lessened the chances of civil wars—
much like the coup-proofing by authoritarian rulers in the postwar Mid-
dle East and North Africa (see chapter 14).

The First Khan Emperors: The Yuan Dynasty

The Mongols overthrew the Song and seized the imperial throne. For
several centuries “barbarians” had been acquiring Chinese characteristics,
but now steppe and field came under a single yoke. Through repeated
wars Chinggis (Genghis) became the Khan of Khans of the Mongols in
1206. Major khans had long believed that their rule in the steppes was
sanctioned by heaven. Then they had extended this blessing to sedentary
realms as well. From the tenth century their victories had led them
deeper into China. The Khitan Liao and the Jurchen had accepted the
Song emperor as an equal. Not so Chinggis, who claimed a heavenly
mandate to conquer the whole of China as both Son of Heaven and Khan
of Khans. He claimed he was predestined to rule the whole known world,
hence his choice of title. “Chinggis Khan” means “Oceanic Khan,” im-
plicitly ruler of all lands between the Pacific and the Atlantic. He did not
“choose” war; it was his destiny. All must pay homage. “Insults against the
Mongol nation and the imperial family were as pitilessly avenged as per-
sonal slights. . . . When an Onggirat prince voluntarily submitted to
Genghis Khan, the latter decided to reward him with one of his daugh-
ters in marriage. The daughter did not appeal to the prince: ‘Your daugh-
ter looks like a frog and a tortoise. How can I accept her?’ commented
the Onggirat . . . an impudent answer for which he paid with his life.”73
Chinggis rose ruthlessly to the top. He himself fought in battle,
though not particularly bravely. But his campaigns were carefully pre-
pared with the help of a council of generals, and Chinggis was an effec-
tive commander, trusted by his officers, who were therefore loyal to him.
Despite his anger, he was rarely rash or impulsive, and his diplomatic
skills, especially his ability to exploit differences among his enemies, was
exceptional. He lost some battles but, like the Romans, he and his men
kept on fighting, to found through conquest the biggest land empire the
world has ever seen. During his reign, fewer than one million Mongols
with an army of just over 100,000 ruled half of Asia.
How could so few rule so many? Precariously. Like many of the em-
pires of history, but unlike Rome or Han China, this empire was not one
134 Imperial China

of direct rule. Chinggis ruled over barbarians more indirectly, through

subordinate khans and other rulers, extracting tribute and troops from
them. These could come to resemble regular taxes, however, and Ching-
gis also used the existing imperial bureaucracy to rule over his Chinese
subjects, especially the taxation system. He moved masses of skilled per-
sons, including soldiers, away from their home areas; this was the Mon-
gol policy of ruling through strangers in order to compensate for their
small numbers and avoid local resistance.74 On top of that were various
devices designed to increase his powers of surveillance—moving his capi-
tal and court around the empire and devising a postal system with stag-
ing posts that provided an efficient means of communication between
the court and country and enabled troop movement and long-distance
trade. These were not paved roads, however, unlike Rome’s or the Incas’.
These techniques increased the emperors’ control of their territories,
yet military power directed from the center was always the principal tool.
The core of Chinggis’s army was long-service loyalists on whom he could
rely, drawn like himself from relatively lowly origins, who had become an
aristocracy enriched with the spoils of war. This was a meritocracy, for
neither heredity nor ethnicity counted for much. Aristocratic status was
achieved through performance in war. Chinggis led a small but quite co-
hesive state as long as he lived because of his reputation, yet constant of-
fensive warfare was necessary to keep the spoils flowing. Otherwise,
Mongols would fragment into their component peoples and clans, squab-
bling and skirmishing. Chinggis was enabled but also trapped in almost
perpetual conquest by the ambition of an aristocratic elite whom he
needed to keep on rewarding, and the members of that elite similarly
needed to reward their dependents. The same lure of tribute, which
trapped rulers into perpetual war to reward their followers, has been
noted among the Aztec rulers of Meso-America.75 There, too, offensive
warfare was baked in to the culture and institutions of Aztec society (not
so much the tyranny of history, but the tyranny of their own histories!).
The illiterate Chinggis issued written laws, focused heavily on the
military. One declares, “Every man, except in rare cases, must join the
army.” If he could not afford a horse and weapons, “every man who does
not go to war must work for the empire without reward for a certain
time” as a laborer in military logistics. Every Yuan household with young
men had to supply at least one to the army. Their main material reward
was loot, including slaves, for another law stated that Mongol households
were forbidden to have Mongols as slaves or servants. Looting had rules:
 Imperial China 135

“It is forbidden, under death penalty, to pillage the enemy before the
general commanding gives permission, but after that permission is given,
the soldier must have the same opportunity as the officer and must be al-
lowed to keep what he has carried off if he has paid his share to the re-
ceiver for the emperor.” Han Chinese regimes with conscription
required that one in seven to fifteen households (according to dynasty
and period) provide a soldier. Chinese households could also pay a sub-
stitution fee so that a waged soldier could be hired instead. Yuan society
was much more mobilized for war than the Han.76
At first Mongol military strength rested on horse archers, who com-
bined the mobility of light cavalry with the lethality of the recurved com-
posite bow. Chinggis, however, was quick to adopt the skills of his enemies.
He developed a more hierarchical, permanent, and centralized army com-
mand structure, and he recruited Chinese infantry, siege engineers, ships,
and sailors. Though Mongol conquests involved mass atrocities against
those who resisted (detailed in chapter 10), quick submission brought be-
nign consequences, including religious toleration (absent in Europe), mul-
ticultural creativity, and increased long-distance trade helped by the postal
system stretching across Eurasia. Mongol civilization left many positive
legacies for Eurasia even after its empires collapsed. Whether these bene-
fits were worth the death of around 10 million people is another matter.
Much depended on the ruler, and succession was often disputed. Shortly
after the death of Chinggis, civil wars split up the empire into four khanates,
although the sense that this was a single imperial civilization endured.77
Chinggis’s grandson Kublai Khan inherited the Chinese khanate, and he
overthrew the southern Song in 1271, claimed the Chinese throne, and
founded the Yuan dynasty. He took the titles of both emperor of China and
Khan of Khans, which also trapped him in wars to exact homage to maintain
his grandeur, distribute loot to his followers, and exact tribute and taxes for
himself and his clan. This entwining of ideological and material incentives
resulted in almost continual war, for not all neighboring rulers would yield.
Homage was primarily a problem of honor and autonomy, for it did not
carry very burdensome obligations. The first sedentary people joining the
Mongol camp, the Uyghurs, set the precedent: their khan paid homage to
the Mongol khan in person, sent relatives as hostages, paid light taxes, sent
military recruits, and participated in the Mongol postal system. This allowed
him to carry on ruling his lands, in the khan’s name.
Kublai Khan had great early success. The cost almost bankrupted
the state, but economic was subordinated to military power. Calculative
136 Imperial China

military-economic trade-offs were rare since he just kept aggressing,

fearing the supposed “humiliation” and tribal grumbling if a ruler defied
him. Pursuing honor and grandeur, he was pushed on by earlier success
and materialistic followers. Sometimes those refusing submission ex-
pressed defiant insults, sometimes they murdered his envoys.78 If so, Yuan
wars were brutal: resisting city populations were massacred to persuade
others to surrender. But if they swore loyalty, they kept their positions
and provided the khan with troops.79
Yuan ambition clashed eventually with Mother Earth. In Japan, Java,
Annam, and Champa (in Vietnam), the Yuan withdrew after repeated re-
verses revealed that Mongol troops were unsuited to either jungle or open-
sea naval warfare. Tropical diseases devastated these steppe dwellers. This
affected Kublai deeply, and he declined to his death. The dynasty fell less
than seventy-five years later. Disputed successions were the bane of barbar-
ian states, since there were no clear rules of inheritance, all prominent
Mongols commanded troops, and Han Chinese rulers might interfere.
Civil wars weakened the dynasty, and it fell to the Ming Chinese dynasty.
The first two Ming emperors destroyed the last Yuan resistance.
Their successors had very varying capacities. The third emperor, the bel-
licose Yongle, expanded the empire back to the old Tang borders through
five strenuous campaigns in Mongolia. The Xuande emperor strength-
ened the empire’s administration. But he was followed by the hapless
Zhengtong emperor, who in 1449 personally commanded his forces at
the Battle of Tumu Fortress. His army of half a million was destroyed by
a Mongol force of supposedly only 20,000, and he was imprisoned.
Thereafter, administrative power usually lay with the Confucian scholar-
bureaucrats, rather than with the emperors.80
Wang shows that the Ming in the period 1368–1449 initiated most
of the wars with the barbarians.81 Then war became rarer. In the period
1450–1540 wars were closer to police actions.82 Ming policies of accom-
modation revealed a desire for peace based mainly on what Zhang calls
“expressive rationality”: they wanted peace with honor, as a moral value
that elicited deference.83 The Mongols were more instrumental. When
feeling strong, they attacked; when accommodating, they performed def-
erence to benefit materially from tributary payments, but they were not
interested in acquiring Ming culture.
Wang says that from 1449 up to its fall in the 1640s, a weak Ming
state sought peace. It was certainly corrupt, but if it were weak, it would
not have survived so long.84 Until the 1550s this was peace through
 Imperial China 137

strength. Then came a faltering, but a revival arose in the 1590s, when
the Wanli emperor won multiple wars. The Ming decline came suddenly,
in the 1640s, when its policy was neither defensive nor accommodating.
Disastrous offensives posed a bigger problem; these were caused by
court factionalism and an irresolute emperor, Chongzhen, seeking to
exude strength.85 Beset by contrary advice, he repeatedly dithered before
finally heeding the advice of civilian officials ignorant of warfare; he ig-
nored the views of seasoned generals whose power frightened him, and
he had the best of them executed. Coup-proofing continued to weaken
military power. In a monarchical system the ruler’s capacity, bellicosity,
and choice of advisers all matter. The fall of two great Han Chinese dy-
nasties, the Song and the Ming, goes against Realism. They were undone
by overconfident aggression aimed at manifesting strength internation-
ally and domestically, rather like the Habsburg and Romanov monar-
chies in 1914, striking out precipitously.
Han Chinese wars were sometimes defensive, sometimes they launched
punitive expeditions to deter further raids, sometimes they sought to con-
quer and incorporate enemy territories in order to provide extra depth to
defense. This third option was obviously imperialistic, but the Han saw it as
an exasperated final step in eradicating barbarian raids. Some aggressive
wars aimed to reunify Han China through the recovery of lost territories.
All were justified by Confucian precepts, on the grounds that they would
bring peace. But the barbarians and especially the ex-barbarians really were
a threat. This was a clash of “civilizations,” as occurred repeatedly across
northern Eurasia, intensified by a security dilemma as both Han China and
its enemies enhanced their militaries in fear of the other, but where on both
sides, especially among barbarian leaders, there was also a security dilemma
within. To refrain from war might invite rivals to challenge their rule. Thus,
wars were much more frequent in the north than in the south and south-
east, where neither a clash of civilizations nor international and domestic
security dilemmas ruled.

More Khan Emperors: The Qing Dynasty

Conflict between settled agriculturalists and pastoralists also permeated
Inner and Central Asia. The Mongols, Tibetans, and Uyghurs there were
physically and culturally non-Han. Han dynasties sometimes attacked them
but rarely stayed for long. Ming armies had campaigned there after 1368,
gaining nominal overlordship in Yunnan, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang,
138 Imperial China

but Ming influence then waned. In the northeast the Qing Manchu dynasty
(formerly Jurchens) overthrew the Ming and seized the Chinese throne in
1644. They viewed other Mongol-descended tribes not as “aliens,” difficult
to integrate culturally into the empire, as the Han had, but as ethnic rela-
tives who could be integrated if they swore homage to the Qing ruler as
lord of all the Mongols. Under three emperors, Kiangxi, Yongzheng, and
Qianlong, the Qing secured control over Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia,
taking the Chinese Empire to its largest size since Chinggis.
Kiangxi launched several attacks eastward. He commanded his
armies personally and mobilized different supply trains for several armies
operating together in wars of encirclement. Peter Perdue emphasizes his
ambitious goals, his scorning defense, his overruling the more cautious
strategies of his main advisers, whether Han or Manchu, convinced that
only personal victory in battle could justify his claim to be the Son of
Heaven.86 The Yongzheng emperor was more cautious and economical
with Qing resources, but when provoked into aggression he rashly out-
ran his supply lines and suffered a major defeat.
The greatest Qing conqueror was Qianlong. To achieve and uphold
the integrity of the greater empire represented for him the ultimate politi-
cal goal. It showed that the Manchu claim to power was part of the zheng-
tong, or “true line of rule,” and that the Qing “occupied a legitimate place
in the historic transmission of Heaven’s mandate,” says Mark Elliott.87
They differed from Han Chinese predecessors in that martial achievement
dominated their rituals, artworks, and monuments. Yet they were also cal-
culative in their military and political methods. A dual state structure sepa-
rated the Han bureaucratic administration of China proper from the Qing
banner system created for the Manchu homeland and the Inner Asian
frontier. Manchu soldiers, called bannermen, dominated the inner court,
and eunuchs were replaced by bond servants. Military decisions were
made by a secretive Grand Council of Manchu aristocrats, who spoke a
language that the Han Chinese could not understand. The armed forces
were divided into an elite force of Manchu bannermen and a Green Stan-
dard militia composed mainly of Han Chinese. Despite Zhao’s notion that
the barbarians were incorporated into the Confucian-legalist state, they
respected Han ways only when it assisted their rule, just as Buddhism was
used in Buddhist areas.88 Yet although Confucian bureaucracy was subor-
dinated to the Manchu ruling class, it was essential to their stability, for it
enabled control of their domains in a way much closer to direct territorial
imperialism than their ex-barbarian predecessors had managed.
 Imperial China 139

Qing wars were driven, like the Yuan wars, by the need to compel
homage toward a ruler who was both the emperor of China and the Khan
of Khans. The Qing normally preferred trade through “tea-horse frontier
markets” as opposed to war, provided the steppe peoples formally submit-
ted. Honor was the usual sticking point. While careful to sign treaties with
a Russian Empire also expanding into Central Asia, Qianlong launched
his armies against “mere barbarian chiefs” who had “humiliated” and
“wounded” the vanity of a universal sovereign.89 Against the Zunghars, the
last adversary, in a daunting logistical environment of savannas and moun-
tains, it “was the first time that a logistic system had been created that
allowed a Chinese empire to fight a sustained war far into the steppe and
bring the enormous material wealth of China to bear in a devastating
way.”90 Perdue says it was possible only because of the commercialization
of the eighteenth-century Chinese economy.91 The Qing armies pene-
trated deep into the Zunghar heartland, where Manchu bannerman cav-
alry pinned down the enemy and the Han Chinese Green Standard forces’
cannon and muskets finished them off. The Qing did not attack only when
they were strong. Their militarism could create whatever military strength
was needed, whatever the cost—as had Rome’s.
In the campaign of 1761, an army of 100,000 killed almost all Zunghar
males, and women and children became bonded labor for Chinese families.
The number of Zunghar dead or missing totaled half a million. A later
Chinese estimate was that a smallpox epidemic contributed 40 percent of
these deaths and the genocide of males about 30 percent, whereas about
20 percent escaped abroad. Normally, if a steppe people surrendered, its
aristocrats and soldiers were incorporated into the victor’s clan, while oth-
ers became slaves or bondservants. Women, children, and older men were
rarely killed. This genocide was exceptional, and due to Qianlong himself.
He urged: “Show no mercy at all to these rebels. Only the old and weak
should be saved. Our previous military campaigns were too lenient. If we
act as before, our troops will withdraw, and further trouble will occur. If a
rebel is captured and his followers wish to surrender, he must personally
come to the garrison, prostrate himself before the commander, and request
surrender. If he only sends someone to request submission, it is undoubt-
edly a trick. . . . Massacre these crafty Zunghars.”92
Some historians regard Qianlong’s reign as a Chinese Age of En-
lightenment because he was a great patron of the arts (and a mediocre
poet). There was nothing enlightened about his campaigns, although
they did expand Qing territory by over 1.5 million square kilometers.
140 Imperial China

The Zunghar khanate was renamed Xinjiang province, as it is known

today.93 What today’s Chinese rulers are doing there is but a pale shadow
of their predecessor’s deeds.
This did not end Qianlong’s ambition. Wars were also fought against
the Jinchuan Tibetans in 1747–49 and 1771–76. These campaigns were
unexpectedly difficult, for the Jinchuan had adapted their warfare to
mountain terrain. The first war achieved little. The second cost 62 mil-
lion taels (a weight of silver), compared to 23 million in the Zunghar
wars, and 50,000 Manchu died. Eighty percent of expenses went to logis-
tics to supply the armies with food, uniforms, tents, handguns, gunpow-
der, and, above all, the horses, oxen, and carts to carry them over long
distances. The campaign mobilized 200,000 soldiers and 400,000 civilian
laborers: “The Qing dynasty was able to effectually mobilize the whole
government structure and a large part of the population in order to fulfill
its ambitious imperial projects in spite of a narrow financial base and a
thin bureaucratic network.”94 This was total war, involving infrastructural
power superior to anything Western states had yet mustered.
These wars were motivated more by vengeance, glory, and grandeur
than by a cost-benefit calculus of profit. The conquered regions were al-
ways a drain on the treasury. For Qianlong conquest of the new territo-
ries was a glorious enterprise, worthy of the ages, adding luster to his
rule. He boasted of his campaigns in his “Record of the Ten Perfects,”
stating: “The ten instances of military merit include the two pacifications
of the Dzungars [Zunghars], the quelling of the Muslim tribes, the two
annihilations of the Jinchuan, the restoring of peace to Taiwan, and the
subjugations of Burma and Vietnam; adding the recent twin capitulations
of the Gurkhas makes ten in all. Why is there any need to [add] . . . trivial
rebellions in the inner provinces?”
Expansion was spurred on by anger at insults, such as a usurper to a
local throne failing to seek his blessing. He responded with outrage: “The
majestic Great Qing holds unified sway over center and periphery alike,
and now this renegade tribal usurper dares to see himself as our equal?!”
Qianlong extracted whatever resources were needed. He felt he must keep
his Manchu soldiers fighting, for he wanted to be able to continually re-
ward them and did not want them to soften into Chinese ways. Elliott com-
ments, “The second half of Qianlong’s reign was a veritable orgy of martial
revelry. Some of his dynastic chest-pounding took poetic form. Qianlong
composed more than 1,500 pieces on themes of war and battle relating to
his ten campaigns.” Giant triumphant stelae dotted the landscape.95
 Imperial China 141

As usual among the Mongols, subsequent rule was not cruel if a people
did not rebel, as the Qing drew together agriculturalists and pastoralists.
The conquered peoples’ ethnic cultures, descent myths, and lineage histo-
ries were all officially recognized.96 Whereas the Ministry of Rites dealt
with tributary foreign states in the east, the Court of Colonial Affairs dealt
with the Inner and Central Asian peoples.97 The Colonial Court made
Inner Asian peoples Qing subjects without making them Han Chinese, and
local chiefs became officials of the Qing Empire. Tibetans ruled Tibetans,
Uyghurs ruled Uyghurs, and Mongols ruled Mongols, each allocated to ad-
ministrative districts, banners, and “tribes,” subject to fixed taxes, conscrip-
tion, and rituals—somewhere between direct and indirect imperialism.98
Along the Burma-Myanmar borderlands in the south, frontiers were
unclear, straddled by warlords, some of whom owed fealty to China, some
to Burma, others to no one. Conflict and banditry were endemic. The
Ming dynasty fought small defensive frontier operations there, while
Qing arrival brought border incursions in pursuit of Ming rebels. After a
century of relative calm, Qianlong responded with his military forces to
requests for help from his vassals in the Shan border states. His economic
motives were not as important as the grandeur that he believed arose
from defending vassals, teaching upstarts lessons, and securing battle
glory. Borderland provinces rarely paid their way, subsidies went from
center to periphery, and there was no state mercantilism, which was not
the case with Western imperialism. Borderlands were expected to pay for
some of their defense, so that taxes on the local economy, such as salt ex-
traction and agriculture, were important but did not dominate policy.99
The Manchu knew little of Burma’s jungle terrain or of its rulers’ re-
solve. Three wars were fought between 1765 and 1769, each deploying
larger forces that contained increasing numbers of elite bannermen. These
were defeats due to ignorance of the terrain, tropical diseases, and overex-
tended supply lines cut by guerillas—the same problems suffered here by
the Yuan. Manchu casualties in all three totaled 70,000. Eventually a peace
treaty was signed that was favorable to Burma. Qianlong perversely boasted
he had acquired a new tributary state, adding these campaigns to his list of
“Ten Perfects.” But in a private letter he confessed bitterly: “Myanmar has
awful conditions. Human beings cannot compete with Nature. It is very
pitiful to see that our crack soldiers and elite generals died of deadly diseases
for nothing. So [I am] determined never to have a war again [there].”100
In southwest Yunnan, whose peoples owed the Qing nominal alle-
giance, the Qing aimed at political centralization, imposing “civilization”
142 Imperial China

on “barbarians,” “soothing,” “pacifying,” and “instructing” “bandits” who

threatened China’s unity.101 Qianlong also wisely accommodated local re-
ligions, ruling through the Dalai Lama and “Yellow Hat” Buddhists, in-
vesting himself with Buddhist titles while delegating powers to Buddhist
or Dao institutions.102 He achieved a small increase in political control.
In Qianlong’s old age, the Chinese Empire became a satisfied hege-
mon. Small Manchu numbers and the power of the Confucian education
system ensured that some were sinicized. But long-lasting peace saw
armies decay and leaders skimming off taxes. The combination sparked
rebellions and fragmented warlord rule. After 1600 European military
power had begun growing, as it refined guns originally invented in
China. Qing dynasty forces were still able to launch a successful com-
bined land and naval assault in the Sino-Russian Border War of 1652–89,
however, driving the Russians out of this disputed northern territory. But
an “Age of Parity” after 1700 swung military power from China to Eu-
rope. Andrade sees “mild” Chinese military stagnation in 1450–1550 be-
coming “significant” in 1760–1839, when China had fewer wars than in
any prior period.103 By the nineteenth century the Europeans were far
stronger. The Qing had fought less well-developed enemies, expanding
techniques for fighting tribes in savannas and mountains—not relevant
for fighting Europeans. Then they made barely any wars at all. Like the
Japanese, they had become sitting ducks. Unlike the Japanese, they were
not spared the time to respond. The virtues of peace came at a cost.

Conclusion
The Chinese Empire was created and expanded through conquest, like
the other imperial civilizations of history. But distinctive here was its lon-
gevity, its vitality, and its relative stability. Over two millennia this was the
most technologically inventive, educated, and culturally creative civiliza-
tion on earth, one that almost broke through to an industrial society six to
seven hundred years before Europe did. The combination of centralized
monarchy and an empire-wide gentry-bureaucrat class stabilized state
power, providing social order and a dominant class–state alliance that
could survive and reemerge after periods of instability caused by external
and civil wars. The Confucian dynamic of the empire leaned more toward
peace than war, but the empire’s size coupled with the normal problems
of hereditary monarchy—court intrigues and disputed successions—
produced intermittent bloodbaths and civil wars before stability re-
 Imperial China 143

emerged. Rulers wanted to show strength, if necessary through war, to

bolster their domestic positions and to reveal themselves as the true Sons
of Heaven, but most of the early rulers of dynasties were more warlike
than their successors. They already had capable armies and needed to find
them employment. Yet in the long run the gentry-bureaucrats pressured
emperors against raising taxes, and this made wars more difficult. Peace
was preferred by most, and peace generated most of the flourishing of this
remarkable civilization.
As the state stabilized, however, there emerged large regional differ-
ences. In East and Southeast Asia peace resulted largely from Chinese
tributary diplomacy. Han Chinese rulers could have chosen further im-
perialism, but they settled for rituals of homage paid by foreign rulers.
This increased trade and was cheaper than war. This was not an anarchic
region, for Chinese rulers did not fear their weaker neighbors, and vice
versa, for diplomacy lessened Chinese threats to them, increased their
domestic legitimacy, and enabled them to focus on problems elsewhere.
This was hegemony for peace, minimalist compared to modern hegemo-
nies but effective in preserving relative peace over long periods. There
was no parallel region in the Roman domains. Rome kept on fighting of-
fensive wars across all its frontiers—as did the two non-Han Mongol and
Manchu dynasties of China.
The frontiers of the north and west differed, seeing at first perpetual
conflicts between steppe and field dwellers. Han farmers and urban
dwellers waged war against nomadic and seminomadic peoples whose
horse archers enabled low-cost raiding. Chinese insecurity led to wars
with a larger defensive component than Roman wars, although what was
originally self-defense sometimes escalated into imperial conquest and
rule—by either side. The diplomacy of the east and southeast did not
work here. The barbarians could be bought off, but even trade was per-
meated by militarism, since the scarcest commodity for China was war-
horses and for the barbarians iron weapons, each found in the other’s
territories. War decisions across this Eurasian fault line balanced eco-
nomic goals and military means as Realists suggest, but amid an ecology
unusually conducive to war.
Most Chinese wars were reactive to barbarian pressure, whereas war,
tribute, and trade were all viable means of economic acquisition. Given
such dilemmas, the motives and abilities of emperors and khans made a
big difference. Confucianism provided mixed messages, a pacific bias un-
dercut by demands for homage and territorial revisionism. Choices were
144 Imperial China

inflected slightly by racism and substantially by emotions like pride, hu-

miliation, hatred, and, above all, honor. Sun Tzu and Sun Bin both regret-
ted that war was so common. Sun Bin said that “a distaste for war is the
kingly military instrument,” and “you must go to war only when there
is no other alternative.”104 The notion of geopolitical “anarchy” made
some sense in the north and west, but it was enhanced by the ecological-
sociological context, and barbarian society itself contained anarchic
tendencies. Moreover, successful rulers waged wars without much calcula-
tion, digging deeper into resources to achieve victory at whatever the cost.
They made reality more than conformed to it.
Domestic politics greatly influenced war decisions. Strong rulers
made wars, but so too did weak ones striving to prove their fitness. Fac-
tionalism often pitted a more warlike inner court against the low-tax,
Confucian gentry-bureaucratic class of the outer court. Barbarian confed-
erations appeared, conquered, split, and disappeared. The fault line be-
tween the two was increasingly muddied by Chinese dividing and ruling,
and by barbarians shifting from mere raiding to territorial conquest—and
acquiring Chinese civilization. Two ex-barbarian dynasties conquered the
entire empire, and the second one, the Manchu Qing, destroyed the re-
maining barbarians, abolished the agricultural-pastoral gulf, and instituted
a single multiethnic China, satisfied, conservative, relatively peaceful, with
a gradually decaying military. China was then hegemonic all around its
borders for just over a century, before being assaulted by foreign imperial-
ists, though a twentieth-century counteroffensive has come from Chinese
nationalists and then more strongly from communists.
Realist explanations of Chinese wars are based on anarchic geopoli-
tics and military-economic calculation. Sometimes this model works—
but sometimes not. It downplays important causes of war from ecologies,
class and ethnicity, domestic politics, ideologies, emotions, the blessings
of peace, and variable human competences and desires. The main ex-
barbarian fallibilities were political factionalism and overconfidence in
war; the main Han fallibility was a contradiction between wars necessary
to strengthen their political power and the need to preserve their politi-
cal power by coup-proofing, which weakened the military. The main
macro-determinant of war was the level of objective threat to China,
stronger in the north and west than in the south and southeast. But all
four sources of social power, in addition to the ecological environment,
help explain imperial China’s war-and-peace decisions.
 chapter seven
Medieval and Modern Japan

T
he frequency and intensity of war fluctuated greatly
through Japanese history. The civil wars of the sixteenth cen-
tury and the interstate wars of the twentieth century are
well-documented and together frame a long period of peace.
In the sixteenth century there were many “vanishing kingdoms”; more
than seventy political lordships, or daimyo, were reduced, mainly
through war, to just one ruling the whole of Japan. In the twentieth cen-
tury the intensification of Japanese imperialism in Asia culminated in the
Great Pacific War and the downfall of Japan.

Medieval Warfare
As we saw in chapter 2, war arrived late within Japan. The two-hundred-
kilometer sea crossing between Japan and the Asian mainland deterred in-
terstate war until the nineteenth century. Yet civil wars racked Japan, and
in medieval times there were also wars of “deflection,” whereby weaker
indigenous peoples were conquered. During the Heian period (794–1192
ce) a war defined by the CoW standard of one thousand battlefield
deaths occurred about once every ten years and rarely lasted longer than a
season. There were more small-scale clashes (MIDs) between clan fami-
lies, warrior bands, and peripheral peoples. The next centuries saw
power decentralization. The divine emperor and the imperial aristocratic
court represented ideological power, but they yielded military power to a

145
146 Medieval and Modern Japan

shogun and his allies. The army “moved from a conscripted, publicly
trained military force to one composed of privately trained, privately
equipped professional mercenaries.”1 These professionals became known
as samurai, at first mounted bowmen, then also armed with spears and
swords, commanding part-time peasant infantry.
Although the samurai were of lower social status than the imperial
aristocracy, they became the main bearers of military power. From the
Genpei War (1180–85) onward they dominated the aristocracy. Law and
order, day-to-day governance, and tax collection were in practice dele-
gated to local lords, the daimyo. Yet the land formally belonged to the
imperial and shogun authorities, which had in theory assigned it to each
clan. Once peripheral territories were occupied, the ecology of conflict
on these confined islands became unlike that in China. Only rarely could
war now be deflected on to less powerful peoples, and so wars between
the clan alliances of the major daimyo lords were largely zero-sum wars.
The Kamakura dynasty (1192–1603 ce) saw intense civil wars, but
there were also two attempted Yuan Chinese invasions of Japan at the
end of the thirteenth century. The invaders were already having diffi-
culty storming entrenched Japanese coastal positions before their fleets
were devastated by storms. They retreated, leaving trapped Yuan forces
to be massacred. China and Japan then left each other alone until the
1590s. Armed struggle was confined within the archipelago but grew.
Armies expanded from a hundred or so to fifty thousand in the 1550s,
and prolonged warfare prevented economic growth. The daimyo had not
solved the problem of how to feed a growing population while provision-
ing a military without harming the peasantry. They found it difficult to
finance armies and keep peasants productive.2
Civil wars mobilized armies composed of the daimyo’s kin, vassal
samurai, and retainer foot soldiers. The vassals swore fealty to the lord
and paid him taxes extorted by credible threat of force from the peasants
beneath, recognizably feudal elements. Vassal loyalty was often calcula-
tive, and shifts of allegiance resulted from bribes or loss of confidence in
a daimyo’s military capacities. The famed samurai honor code did not
much constrain behavior. Warriors rendered service and expected proper
reward. “Fourteenth-century warfare transcended all contemporary
boundaries and subverted political, intellectual, and social norms.”3 Karl
Friday debunks literary traditions of speeches before battle, agreements
to fix time and place of battle, dueling between champions, and respect-
ful treatment of prisoners of war and civilians.4 Instead, he says, warfare
 Medieval and Modern Japan 147

was more ferocious than in medieval Europe because of distinctive fea-

tures of Japanese feudalism. Land was formally owned by the state, but
the possessing clan had the right to control and draw taxes from it. Polit-
ically, a clan’s influence at the imperial and shogunate centers protected
its rights. Yet if it wiped out an enemy clan, it could claim possession of
its lands, which the central authorities then ratified. Prisoners were de-
capitated, their heads displayed in victory parades. Stephen Morillo
thinks this explains why ritual suicide was prevalent among losing samu-
rai, while unknown in Europe.5
Ideological power could not regulate wars. In contrast to the mono-
lithic dominion of the Church in Europe, religious authority was divided
between numerous schools and sects. None was powerful enough to im-
pose ethics on warriors—indeed, armies of Buddhist monks joined in.6 As
imperial and shogun power declined, the state could not restrain war. As in
China and Europe, this decline meant autonomy for local lords and ensu-
ing small wars. Lowborn warriors were promised land and loot, lowborn
monks were mobilized for revolutionary war, and the samurai dominated
the aristocrats. Wars were described as “the lower ranking overthrow the
higher ranking.” This was material conflict over control of land and its
population and taxes, but it also invoked issues of status and honor.7

The Warring States Period and the

Triumph of the Triumvirs
In the Sengoku (Warring States) period (1467–1590, though exact dates
are debated) civil wars intensified, involving perhaps 250 small, indepen-
dent daimyo domains mobilizing limited forces in countless skirmishes.
Before the development of firearms, the leading daimyo were often in
the thick of the action. If they were killed, their forces usually submitted.
In the sixteenth century more powerful daimyo were able to impose
more control over the fighting men and material resources of their do-
mains. They began to swallow up lesser lords. Mary Berry says the main
precipitants of war were loose rules of dynastic succession and vassalage
in a society where central power was still declining.8 A strong lord could
choose his successor without a contest; otherwise, succession could be
disputed between sons or nephews, each supported by vassals. Outside
daimyo might also intervene. A century of often savage warfare was trig-
gered by succession crises in four major military households. Unlike
those in Europe, some issues in medieval Japanese society, says Berry,
148 Medieval and Modern Japan

“stood outside the universe of statute, precedent, contract, and executive

right—outside, that is, the universe of conventional expectation and du-
ress that make the rule of law intelligible. By their very nature, succes-
sion decisions resisted the workings of law . . . for no review of evidence,
no consultation of statutes, no invocation of past practice, no exploration
of the natural order could settle them unequivocally.”9
Only warfare could settle disputes not confined to material issues. It
involved

feelings of pride and anger that spawned mortal grudges in a so-

ciety preoccupied with honor. . . . Jurists sometimes condoned
the grudge; chroniclers and diarists made it a narrative frame to
interpret conflict; and warlords and soldiers did battle in its ser-
vice. Sanctioned or not, the grudge satisfactorily organized ideas
and actions that required no translation into other terms—of law
or religion, of ideology or economics.
Elite families turned recklessly to violence to avenge insult,
enhance prestige, secure their stakes in land, and sate the appe-
tites of opportunistic retainers. None intended to remake the
world or even to fight very long; all were after marginal gains that
would eventually cost most of them everything. . . . Violence was a
perfectly normal extension of political fights. . . . The final years
of the Warring States brought an unparalleled escalation in vio-
lence, the ravaging of cities and monasteries, and a geometrical
increase in casualties as muskets and mass conscription made the
gentleman’s war obsolete. Hundreds of thousands of troops, rep-
resenting a majority of able adult males, were brought to arms . . .
fired by losses, by the seeming need to avenge mounting numbers
of dead and legitimate the purposes of their leaders. . . . Some-
thing that started as an elite contest over prestige ended by oblit-
erating an old world and forging a new one none of the players
could have forecast.”10

This vivid account suggests that calculation of material goals and mili-
tary means was highly inflected by grudges, vengeance, and savagery, all
of which ended in mutual self-destruction, for wars destroyed most of
the daimyo. Only for a few winners was there rationality of ends. All rul-
ers attempted rational calculation of means, but most did not succeed.
War was not at all rational for civilians, especially peasant farmers, whose
 Medieval and Modern Japan 149

homes and crops were looted and burned, inducing famine and disease.
William Farris adds laconically, “Violence, pillage, arson, kidnapping,
and forced conscription are not conducive to demographic, agricultural,
or commercial expansion.”11 Winnowing of states, as in China and Eu-
rope, was at the expense of lesser daimyo and major ones made overcon-
fident by past victories.12 After 1550 wars were fought by daimyo seeking
regional, then national, hegemony. Hundreds were eliminated, down to
only the triumvirs, and then only one, who ruled all Japan—a process
that resembled (though more rapidly) the development of China.
John Bender calculates the numbers of the vanished among seventy-
eight daimyo on whom he found data in the period 1467–1600. Of these,
60 percent were eliminated by force.13 The remaining 40 percent sur-
vived by submitting to the winners under threat of war, able to keep
some or all of their estates. Survival rates were higher in more isolated
and poorer regions. Lack of economic resources prevented the losers
from assembling armies and did not arouse cupidity in others. The low-
est survival rates were in the richest region around the capital, Kyoto. In
this region of small daimyo, all were vulnerable. Bender says that sixteen
of the seventeen daimyo around Kyoto were eliminated by war.
Eastern Honshu, quite near Kyoto, was the ideal launching pad for
attacks on the capital. The clan of Oda Nobunaga, the first of the trium-
virs, came from here. After successful campaigns against rival daimyo in
his own region, Nobunaga seized the capital in 1568 with an army of
60,000. He eliminated or accepted homage from the local daimyo and
installed an ally as shogun. The shogun and the court were largely sym-
bolic figures, but they brought legitimacy to his rule, and so they had
enough power to jockey for advantage with him. Nobunaga then used
the wealth of the Kyoto region to finance more wars, bringing thirty of
Japan’s sixty-six provinces under his sway, and he pressured the shogun
into “voluntary” exile, becoming shogun himself.14
A successful daimyo needed an economic power base, given mostly
by fertile soil and trade. Poor daimyo were unlikely to dominate. But
where economic growth occurred without military improvement, this
merely aroused the cupidity of neighbors. The competitive pressures of
war stimulated some into economic reforms designed to increase mili-
tary power. Since daimyo needed fortifications, weapons, uniforms, and
supplies, some encouraged traders and artisans into their service, and a
few even took measures to encourage peasant productivity, sponsoring
irrigation and other projects.15 Berry emphasizes the introduction of
150 Medieval and Modern Japan

cadastral surveys of the land, which enabled clearer, more equitable con-
scription and tax obligations that were geared to land productivity.16
Defeat loomed for those who did not reform, as was the case in China in
the late Warring States. Cadastral reforms also required political skills in
handling the different interests of the various classes involved.
The elimination of daimyo came mainly from defeat in battle or ca-
pitulation to threats. During the sixteenth century, armies got much big-
ger, their organization more complex, their drilling more intense. Paid
professional soldiers replaced conscripts. Firearms had been imported
from China in the twelfth century but saw little use. But when Portu-
guese firearms were imported in 1543, they quickly went into mass pro-
duction. The guns forced the daimyo back, to command from the rear.
Siege warfare involved sophisticated engineering. Most campaigns aimed
at devastating enemy territory, living off the land while destroying the
enemy’s subsistence; but killing the enemy clan was more important than
seizing territory. The coup de grâce was the storming of the enemy’s for-
tress. The defeated daimyo would be abandoned by his vassals, which
made retreat into guerilla warfare impossible, except as bandits.
Nobunaga achieved his many victories aided by an elite core of
skilled, upwardly mobile captains, mostly from his own province, who
had flocked to him early because of his military reputation and who were
well rewarded for victory. His armies then increased through victories. If
a daimyo defected to him before battle, he could lead his troops along-
side Nobunaga’s, and he might receive new estates after victories. If he
capitulated early in a campaign, he and his troops might be absorbed into
Nobunaga’s vassal bands, but under the command of the core captains,
and he might lose some estates. A fully defeated daimyo would die, and
his estates were given to Nobunaga’s vassals and allies.
Although the resource base and army size mattered, in some battles
smaller forces triumphed. At Okehazama in 1560 an invading Imagawa
force of 25,000 to 40,000 was defeated by Nobunaga’s 2,000–3,000 in a
surprise attack on forces sheltering from driving rain, unprepared for
battle. Nobunaga possessed military skills in abundance, while the
Imagawa demonstrated folly, failing to post scouts and pickets in enemy
territory. Their daimyo was killed, and many of his vassals changed sides,
foiling the succession of his heir. After 230 years dominating their re-
gion, they vanished. Comparable fates awaited most clans.
Yet most battles were fought by armies of fairly equal strength. Thus,
advance intelligence, tactical skill, fatigue, the terrain, and the weather
 Medieval and Modern Japan 151

could all tilt the balance one way or the other. At Nagashino in 1575,
Nobunaga quietly moved his forces into close range of the enemy, into a
position flanked by a river on one side and mountains on the other. This
meant the enemy could not effectively use his superiority in cavalry on
the flanks. If he joined battle (which he should not have done), he had to
charge headlong into Nobunaga’s firearmed infantry. They did, and they
were decimated. Skill triumphed over folly. Nobunaga did suffer re-
verses, but he had such self-confidence and relentless drive, backed up by
the loyalty of his captains, that he triumphed. In war, leadership skills
matter.
There was much diplomatic maneuvering around promises and
threats. If threatened, a daimyo might be weakened by a factional dispute
over the best course of action, and the enemy might bribe or threaten
one faction. Military leadership involved knowing when to retreat, com-
promise, or fight. Fighting on one’s own, without allies, was unwise, for it
invited enemy alliances smelling victory and spoils. Isolating one’s rival
was all-important. If one attacked him, one should first secure promises
from others of alliance or neutrality. There was much changing of sides
by subordinate daimyo, even during battle. Alliances involved treaties,
hostage exchanging, and intermarriage, but alliances lasted only as long
as they brought gains. Loyalty was not to be relied on. Some daimyo
were better than others at such scheming—none better than the trium-
virs. Nobunaga and his captains managed to overcome several larger
hostile leagues of daimyo and warrior monks. The tactic was to pick on
one of them and prevent others from arriving to offer help. This was fer-
tile ground for rational calculation, yet most daimyo ultimately failed.
The sources portray Nobunaga not as an exemplar of calm calcula-
tion, but as ruthless, intemperate, impetuous, and unpredictable, prefer-
ring terrorizing over negotiations. Emotions often dominated his
actions. He reacted to a difficult year in 1571 by killing the entire popu-
lation of a temple fortress. “Nobunaga dispelled years of accumulated
rancour,” noted a chronicler. He distributed the temple domains to his
soldiers and hoisted enemy heads on pikes, saying, “You cannot imagine
my happiness that I have slain them all, for I hated them deeply.” The
next year he destroyed a confederation of religious sects, slaughtering
40,000 people, making no distinction between enemy soldiers and civil-
ians, men and women. He had declared beforehand, “The confederates
make all kinds of entreaties, but as I want to exterminate them root
and branch this time, I shall not forgive their crimes.” He said he “gave
152 Medieval and Modern Japan

orders to slaughter men and women alike.” “This kind of bloodthirsty

language occurs frequently in reports from campaigns,” observes Jeroen
Lamers.17 All three triumvirs were driven more by skill inflected with
strong emotions. Geopolitics was fairly anarchic, perhaps more so than
in any other case in this book. Underreported peripheral areas where
most daimyo survived probably saw fewer wars, but elsewhere there were
few normative constraints. Fear and ambition led to aggression, for it
was better to fight on other peoples’ lands than on one’s own. It was dif-
ficult to calculate the odds of victory, since economic, military, political,
and geopolitical strategies all figured. But, as is true of most of my cases,
fighting was seen less as a choice and more as what a leader did. If ag-
gressing, one chose only when to attack. If defending, honor compelled
resistance. More ideological warfare was fought by warrior monks.
Power was pursued through militarism baked in to culture and insti-
tutions by the normalcy of war. Path dependence meant that daimyo
who gained territories and people sought more victories, which eventu-
ally led to their own defeat and the disappearance of their domain. The
vanished kingdoms far outnumbered the victors. This was rationality of
ends for only a few. Although the primary goal was acquisition of land
and people, domination for its own sake was also evident. Violence was
the great intoxication of rulers, as Berry has already confirmed. All this
resembles war in other cases. Scheming culminated in wars in which
recklessness might help, for unpredictability was a useful asset in anar-
chic geopolitics.
In 1571 Nobunaga, his lieutenant Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and the
Tokugawa clan, the triumvirs, began an ambitious joint strategy to domi-
nate Japan. Under Nobunaga terror tactics dominated, but they pro-
voked hostile reactions that might have derailed further ambitions. But
contingent events intervened. Nobunaga and his heir died suddenly in
1583 in a surprise coup launched by a dissatisfied general. Hideyoshi
avenged his death, becoming head of the Oda clan and shogun. He had
begun life as a simple farmer, then become a soldier. He rose rapidly
through the ranks, possessing a combination of charm, charisma, and
acuity in political and military strategies and tactics that had induced
Nobunaga to place great trust in him. “Arrogance, ambition, and dar-
ing—not prudence—led Hideyoshi to leadership.”18 His policies were
less tyrannical than Nobunaga’s, for he sought to conciliate neutrals and
those who defected from his enemies, allowing them some autonomy
under a “federal” style of rule, confirming their rights over their own
 Medieval and Modern Japan 153

vassals, often offering them lands in return for ruling in his name. One
letter from him read, “Because of your assistance to me, I bestow upon
you all rights to Shisō in the province of Harima. This area shall be your
domain in full.” He also pursued at least twenty acts of attainder for trea-
son, however, confiscating daimyo estates, and achieving many partial
confiscations and transfers of land. Only a daimyo who remained faithful
had no need to fear punishment.19 There was continuity in religious
policy, however: the “religious policies of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and
Ieyasu were all predicated on the primacy of secular authority”; “in
early-modern Japan there would be no independent, religious sphere
operating outside of state control.”20
But Hideyoshi self-destructed in the 1590s, dying near the end of his
two failed invasions of Korea (see chapter 6). With bad timing, he had
recently killed his nephew, the heir-apparent, for his own son was only a
child. He was quickly deposed by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who seized the sho-
gunate and showed no mercy to defeated clans. Hideyoshi could be ei-
ther cruel or conciliatory, according to his perception of the needs of the
moment. He himself claimed to value patience: “The strong manly ones
in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience. Pa-
tience means restraining one’s inclinations. There are seven emotions:
joy, anger, anxiety, adoration, grief, fear, and hate, and if a man does not
give way to these he can be called patient. I am not as strong as I might
be, but I have long known and practiced patience.” A model Realist!
Japan was finally unified through violence and two contingent deaths,
and the Tokugawa dynasty was declared in Edo (Tokyo) in 1603. The tri-
umvirs unified Japan, where so many warlords had failed, first because of
the ruthless aggression of Nobunaga, then because of a timely switch
from terror to milder politics under Hideyoshi, and finally because of
Ieyasu’s patience when he stayed out of the invasion of Korea, which
sapped the strength of his main rivals. The sequence seems important—
and contingent.
The reforms of Hideyoshi and Ieyasu focused on reducing violence.
They did not establish national taxation, regulate banking or commerce,
establish a national police force, organize public works or engineering
projects, or have education or welfare policies. Revenue came from the
shogun’s own domains, vast from his having seized defeated lords’ lands.
Daimyo rights to tax their own domains were confirmed. The unifiers
banned Christianity, regulated temples, shrines, and monasteries, and re-
stricted foreign trade—all of which they believed had brought conflicting
154 Medieval and Modern Japan

ideologies into Japan. They repressed pirates, and Dutch traders were
confined to a few port enclaves. There was minimal contact with the out-
side world. Local rule remained with the daimyo, but pacification be-
longed to the shogun. The daimyo’s right to war in pursuit of his interests
was abolished. The shogun assumed the right to transfer and redistribute
daimyo landholding, removing dissident daimyos to peripheral areas and
positioning reliable allies around them. Daimyo castles were destroyed by
decree. Samurai were denied tenure rights in land and forced to live by
their lords’ castles, severed from both villagers and their own subvassals.
Commoners were banned from bearing arms, while migration, political
mobilization, and unregistered travel were also prohibited. Supreme judi-
cial authority was vested in the shogun’s court.21 The traditional rights
and privileges of classes and status groups were confirmed providing
they refrained from violence—daimyo, samurai, monks, priests, mer-
chants, artisans, and peasants. Daimyo increased control over their do-
mains, retaining control over local levies and administering local justice,
commerce, agrarian affairs, and religion.22 Samurai and radical clerics
were the biggest losers, as the samurai were subordinated to their lords,
and the monks were defeated.
These unification policies were popular because there was a reaction
against the Sengoku period, whose last battles had seen armies of over
100,000. Ieyasu collected 35,000 enemy heads after the final battle of
Sekigahara in 1600. Many battles were decided by daimyo changing sides
just before or during the battle, which resulted in the massacre of aban-
doned daimyo. Use of arms had pervaded villages, cities, and monaster-
ies, aiding sectarian religious warfare, peasant rebellions, banditry, and
myriad violent quarrels over property lines, water and forest rights,
debts, commercial privileges, inheritances, taxes, runaways, and wives.
The unifiers feared violence might engulf them too, so they focused on
policies against violence, popular among most classes, who were desper-
ate for peace and aware that Japan had once been united.23
The contributors to John Ferejohn and Frances Rosenbluth’s vol-
ume stress war weariness and yearnings for unification, especially among
peasants oppressed by taxes and military service.24 Farris adds class rela-
tions.25 On the one hand, the daimyo were caught in a race to integrate
military and economic power in forms analogous to legalist reforms in
China. They encouraged commerce in order to tax it, lessened the tax
burden on peasants, and banned armies living off the land, which also
safeguarded peasant livelihoods. There was demographic and economic
 Medieval and Modern Japan 155

growth after 1550 as improved irrigation, cultivation, and trade raised

production above subsistence. They had made steps toward resolving the
paradox of efficiently provisioning the military without unduly damaging
the economy. Second, peasants for their part pressured their daimyo by
using “weapons of the weak”—“striking, absconding, hiding, bribing, ne-
gotiating, and in the last resort fighting.”26
Demilitarizing reforms contributed to success. In the 1587 “Sword
Hunt” ordered by Hideyoshi, troops entered villages and temples and
confiscated swords, spears, and guns. Peasants, townsmen, and priests
were forbidden to bear arms. The Separation Edict of 1591 decreed that
armies would consist only of professionals. Conversely, the samurai were
denied the right to farm. Farmers and soldiers were now kept apart.27
The reforms were aimed at curbing lawlessness in the countryside; they
enabled peasants, artisans, and merchants to focus on being productive,
and under Hideyoshi cadastral surveys were greatly improved.28 The tri-
umvirs had created a military organization that brought less harm to
peasants and townspeople and integrated economic and military power.

Tokugawa Peace, 1603–1868

Unification produced a spectacular reversal of history: almost no wars
over 250 years. The only ones occurred at the beginning of that span,
when Ieyasu was still fighting to establish his rule. There were three
thousand local incidents of violent peasant protest, mainly over taxes,
mostly at the beginning and the end of the Tokugawa period, and they
were quickly suppressed. Barrington Moore says Japanese peasants in
this period played a passive role in historical change, unlike their Chi-
nese or Russian counterparts.29
From peace, not war, came growth in commerce and cities and a rela-
tively advanced agrarian society containing protocapitalist tendencies. The
military decayed as soldiers were scattered in small units across the coun-
try. Non-samurai forces were disbanded, and the samurai wore but rarely
unsheathed their swords.30 There was almost no military training, and sol-
diers exercised only police functions. Those accorded the highest social
rank were samurai wielding swords, then bowmen and pikemen, and the
lowest were those bearing guns. Military prestige was thus inversely re-
lated to the ability to kill. Toy soldiers ruled. The system preserved “the
façade of a military government. But it was not a machine fit to fight a war.
. . . The strength of the Edo government lay not in its capacity to fight but
156 Medieval and Modern Japan

in its capacity to prevent a fight from starting.”31 A precondition was the

absence of foreign threat. When in the 1850s foreign navies confronted
Japan with serious intent, its military could not resist.

Meiji and Taisho Informal Imperialism, 1868–1904

The Tokugawa peace ended in the violence preceding and accompanying
the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s. Subsequently interstate wars became
more frequent than in any other period of Japanese history, occurring on
average once every 2.5 years. This was a second remarkable transforma-
tion. Our evidence suddenly improves, and we can see clearly the influ-
ence of domestic politics on decisions of war and peace.
After 1854 Japan was forced by American and British naval powers
into signing “unequal” trade treaties, opening up trading ports to foreign
ships and merchant houses. They were unequal in two senses. First, they
gave rights of extraterritoriality to foreigners residing in these entrepôts,
who were subject not to Japanese law but to the laws of their home coun-
tries. They could not be indicted by Japanese courts even for murder. Sec-
ond, the treaties specified Japanese tariff levels for imported and exported
goods, whereas the colonial powers were free to fix their own tariffs. These
inequalities were deeply resented, as they had been in China, but enforce-
ment was by foreign warships, against whom resistance was fruitless.
Some realized that foreign pressure would only mount. Westerners
were encroaching on Chinese sovereignty, carving out territorial en-
claves outside Chinese jurisdiction. Japan might be the next victim.
Hence the reform movement of 1866–68, which deposed the shogun,
put down consequent rebellions, and inaugurated the reforms known as
the Meiji Restoration, adapting a mixture of Western models of modern-
ization under the rubric “strong military equals strong nation.” Milita-
rism was at first self-defense.
Japan benefited from its island ecology, and the Western imperialists
were focused on China. For three decades Japanese elites were left alone
to reform, an essential breathing space that China and India had lacked.
Japan already had a commercial economy, and the reforms accelerated
economic growth. Yet the country was hindered by a lack of natural re-
sources and export markets, as well as overpopulation. This pushed to-
ward coveting the resources of Korea, Manchuria, and northeastern
China and sending Japanese settlers to all of them. This made Japanese
imperialism more likely, although the main motive remained self-
 Medieval and Modern Japan 157

defense. Military reforms modeled on French and British examples cou-

pled with the communications revolution enabled the Japanese to join
the overseas imperial powers.
Japanese elites expected to expand outward as Western nations
had. Up until the 1890s, the dominant Japanese policy was informal
imperialism—opening up markets, if necessary with threats, to give
Japan the same unequal rights that the Western powers enjoyed. Britain,
France, and the Netherlands had substantial Asian colonies. Russia was
moving into north China and Korea, building railroads connected to its
far eastern provinces. The United States, France, Germany, and Britain
were moving beyond Chinese treaty ports into “spheres of influence” in
the interior, building railroads, mines, and factories, and leasing lands
complete with extraterritorial rights. Many Asians believed this was a
step toward partitioning coastal China into colonies. In this world, com-
mented one Japanese statesman, “the strong ate the meat of the weak.”
This geopolitics was not anarchic, since the imperial predators collabo-
rated with each other—the strong in league against the weak. A re-
source-poor country like Japan might be later forced into similar
submission. Japan wanted to join the imperial age, and China was the ob-
vious target, for as the Japanese resident minister there remarked,
“When there is a fire in the jeweller’s shop, the neighbours cannot be ex-
pected to refrain from helping themselves.”32 China’s tributary states
could be picked off. Korea was weak; Taiwan was almost stateless.
The first escalation came in 1876 as gunboat diplomacy forced an
unequal treaty on Korea, which ended Korea’s status as a Chinese tribu-
tary, opened three ports to Japanese trade, and granted extraterritorial
rights to Japanese in Korea. The second move came in 1894, when the
Korean monarchy failed to cope with a rebellion. China sent in an army
to restore order, so Japan invaded, too. Japan easily won its short war, for
its officers were better trained and acted cohesively, unlike the squab-
bling Chinese generals—a reflection of broader structural differences be-
tween the two sets of elites. The Chinese mobilized 600,000 men, the
Japanese 300,000; but about 35,000 Chinese were killed or wounded,
and Japan lost only half that. Japan showed restraint elsewhere so as not
to alienate Westerners. Britain was willing to use Japan to “balance”
against Russia, and it largely repealed its unequal treaties with Japan that
same year. Other powers followed by 1899. Japan now had a freer hand
in Korea without colonizing it, and Japan received an indemnity from
China, joined its unequal treaties, and annexed Taiwan.
158 Medieval and Modern Japan

These were the fruits of a cheap victory. Japan was moving from fear
of other imperialisms to seizing its own. As the world filled up with em-
pires, it was best to take advantage of the window of opportunity before
it was too late, and that involved participation in global capitalism. Japan
paid for its wars by borrowing on the London market, and its Chinese
indemnity was invested there. British financiers were investing in Japa-
nese imperialism.33 Self-defense had been the original motive, but capi-
talist greed and national status came to replace that motive in what was
becoming a normal imperial state.
But there are different forms of imperialism. In explaining which
form triumphed, we must delve into the sources of power within Japan,
where Realism cannot take us. Japanese historians distinguish “liberals”
from “nationalists” or “militarists” in debates over foreign policy. Almost
no one was liberal in the Western sense of favoring only open markets—
nor was the West itself. In Japan those favoring informal empire con-
fronted those favoring colonies or protectorates. Should expansion in
Korea and Manchuria be achieved by negotiating concessions or by con-
quest; should Japan pause at the Great Wall or go beyond it? The foreign
service favored the first set of options, and the army the second. They
battled for influence in the Diet (parliament) until that mattered no more
and at the emperor’s court. Within the cabinet the posts of war and navy
ministers could be held only by a general and an admiral on the active
list. They had direct access to the emperor without having to go through
the prime minister, while the army or the navy could prevent the forma-
tion of any cabinet by refusing to fill these positions.34 At that point, this
power made little difference to Japanese policy, which was still cautious.
The Japanese government first tried indirect rule in Korea, through
the Korean monarchy and local elites. Yet they could not find reliable
Korean clients, and conflict with Russia was growing. In 1898 Japan had
been forced by the other powers to cede to Russia the Kwantung Penin-
sula in Manchuria, taken from China in 1895. Japan and Russia now had
competing railroad-building projects in Manchuria. Britain remained
more concerned about Russia, and it signed a naval treaty with Japan in
1902. Since the United States and France took their lead in the region
from Britain, Japan would not face interference from them. Japan was
now the strongest foreign power in Korea, but its rulers were frustrated
at Russian meddling in a country claimed as “the keystone of national
defense.”35 Japanese expansionism had obvious economic and strategic
motives.
 Medieval and Modern Japan 159

Escalating Imperialism, 1905–1936

The military saw that once Russia finished its projected railroads and
ports in its far east, the balance of power would shift toward it. So Japan’s
second escalation was a preemptive strike in 1905 on Russian forces in
Siberia and Manchuria, taking advantage of a window of geopolitical op-
portunity. This was intended to ease national security fears by replacing
Russian with Japanese domination there. No one else intervened.36 The
West did not expect a decisive outcome, but Japan triumphed. The main
Russian fleet sailed thousands of kilometers from the Black Sea to the
Sea of Japan. At Tsushima it sailed overconfidently too close to Japanese
coastal batteries and underestimated Japanese naval skills, suffering
“an annihilation with scarcely a parallel in the history of modern sea-
warfare.”37 The Russian army did better in Siberia and Manchuria,
though Japan gradually prevailed in a war in which machine guns and
barbed wire apparently made defense superior to offense; Japanese gen-
erals were prepared to take extremely high losses in their assaults on
Russian positions. Both powers mobilized over a million men, and they
put over half a million men into battle. Japan probably lost about 80,000
dead, Russia about 70,000. About 20,000 civilians also died. This was a
terrible war.
Japanese soldiers’ diaries and letters reveal conscripts who found
battle gut-wrenching and longed for their villages and loved ones. They
fought determinedly so that the war would end and they could return
home to restore the family farm. Discipline was fierce, and the ideal of
“fighting to the last man” was pressed, but Japan had signed the Geneva
Conventions, and soldiers obeyed orders to treat prisoners well. Military
service made many realize that they were “Japanese,” rather than having
only a local identity.38 But this was not ideological war. For the Japanese
leaders it was calmly rational, although the experience for the soldiers in
battle was not remotely that. But beset by the 1905 revolution, the Rus-
sian government wanted the war ended and made concessions that gave
Japan unchallenged, indirect rule in Korea and the Kwantung Peninsula.
The rest of Chinese Manchuria would be run by deals between the Japa-
nese military and local warlords. It was the first victory inflicted by non-
Europeans over a major European power, and many oppressed peoples
celebrated. This war had been preemptive, but so had been Prussia’s
nineteenth-century wars and the U.S. war against Spain of 1898. In
Japan it was proof war might work if carefully chosen.
160 Medieval and Modern Japan

There remained no serious threat to Japanese national security. The

powers all had implicitly agreed-on imperial spheres of influence—Russia
in Siberia and northern Manchuria, Japan in southern Manchuria, Korea,
and Taiwan, the United States in the Philippines, France in Indochina,
Britain in the Yangtze Valley, south China, and South Asia, Germany in
the Shantung Peninsula and scattered Pacific Islands. They collaborated
in China, together fighting off Chinese resistance. Might this be an ac-
ceptable balance of power? Could Japan settle for what it had, plus a
gradual expansion of informal imperialism and increasing participation in
international markets? After 1905 Japan’s rulers doubted the wisdom of
using force to expand the Japanese sphere of influence. A less risky alter-
native was to guarantee the neutrality of the region through international
agreements giving market access to all foreigners. This would avoid Rus-
sia’s seeking revenge and lessen military expenditures.
A third escalation came in 1910. Japan increased troop strength in
Korea and quietly annexed it. This step was unprovoked but easy, and the
main Japanese political parties supported it. Liberals had hoped to
achieve regime change through client Korean reformers, but these had
failed to overcome local monarchists and nationalists. The Japanese
claimed to have been sucked from regime change to direct rule to estab-
lish order. The 170,000 Japanese settlers in Korea also demanded protec-
tion. For Japan’s peasant-farmers, the lure of settler colonies was strong,
and so imperialism acquired a social base. The Western powers pro-
tested, but Japan ignored them. Annexation was meant to decrease Japa-
nese insecurities, but it alarmed the other powers. In response, the
Japanese High Command demanded and got higher military budgets. A
security dilemma was ratcheting Japanese militarism upward.39 So far, a
Realist explanation of its modern wars works quite well.
Japan added on a typical imperial mission, however: Koreans were
“uncivilized” and “backward,” living in “filth, squalor, and indolence,”
their politics dominated by “passivity, corruption, and toadyism.” There
was enough shared ethnic heritage and cultural affinity to make their
“uplift” possible. Japanese colonialism was not yet as racist as European
and American.40 Japan could transport a large army across the sea to re-
press resistance, and settlers then followed, given conqueror’s privileges,
purchasing farms at knockdown prices and dominating profitable sectors.
The main colonial actors “were not powerful metropolitan business in-
terests but restless, ambitious, frugal elements from the middle and lower
strata of Japanese society.” Although trade with Korea was not enormous,
 Medieval and Modern Japan 161

the Japanese handling it made big profits.41 Settlers and some business
interests encouraged imperialism.
The Korean economy flourished under the Japanese. Manufacturing
rose from 6 percent of GDP in 1911 to an astonishing 28 percent in
1940—far outstripping China or India or anywhere else in Asia apart from
Japan itself. Annual GDP growth rate between 1911 and 1939 was around
4 percent, as it was in Taiwan and Japan itself in the same period, double
Western rates of growth.42 Some of this must have filtered down to the
local population since average Korean life expectancy is said to have risen
from twenty-six to forty-two years over the life of the colony. The Taiwan-
ese became taller, also a sign of improving health. Japanese rulers saw that
colonial empire worked. In 1912 the government claimed that “countries
. . . turn toward Japan as the sunflower toward the sun.”43 The cultivation
of geopolitical status had become an important motive; human societies
tend to keep on repeating practices that work—as Japanese colonies
clearly did. Resources gained through war had been cumulative.
World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution then dislocated Asian geo-
politics. Germany was removed by defeat, Russia was weakened, and
France and Britain needed time to recover. The Japanese government had
wisely chosen the Allied side in the war and was rewarded with the small
German colonies of Shantung, Tsingtao, and the Micronesian islands.
Shantung was a possible jumping-off place for expansion in Manchuria or
north China. In 1915 the Japanese government made “Twenty-one De-
mands” on China, which to Chinese nationalists and other powers pre-
saged more Japanese expansion. By the 1920s Japan had a colonial empire
in Taiwan and Korea; an informal empire in Manchuria and parts of north
China; and substantially free trade with the rest of Asia, the British Em-
pire, and the United States. Its expansion had involved threats and short
wars in an unbroken run of success. There was consensus in Japan that it
must defend its “line of sovereignty”—Japan plus its colonies—while pro-
tecting a broader but unclear “line of interest.” Expansion might extend
participation in international markets, by expanding its “line of interest”
in Manchuria, north China, and Fukien (the Chinese province opposite
Taiwan), or by extending the “line of sovereignty”—colonies.
The 1920s favored liberal informal empire. World War I saw the tri-
umph of the liberal powers, followed by the League of Nations, and the
Washington Naval Treaties of 1922.44 The Naval Treaties limited the
size of navies, thereby ending British dominance in Asia and allowing
Japan to play the United States against Britain. The United States was at
162 Medieval and Modern Japan

this point Japan’s largest trading partner and supplier of foreign capital,
and most Japanese politicians favored a policy of market expansion in ad-
dition to informal empire in China, not more colonies. Shidehara Kijuro,
the dominant foreign minister of the 1920s, favored cooperation with
other powers. Expansion would be at the expense of China, but he hoped
for Chinese consent in an Asian revival led by Japan. Growing Chinese
nationalism made this delusory. Japan was expanding too late in world-
historical time. This was still the age of empires, but the more advanced
colonies were being confronted by nationalism—as the British were find-
ing in India.
The nationalist government in China sought to cancel its unequal
treaties. Shidehara, supported by Japanese consular officials and most big
businesses, said he would bend to British and American pressure to rene-
gotiate them, provided China pay its debts to Japan. Other Japanese pol-
iticians, supported by Japanese business interests in China, resisted
renegotiation, while conservatives feared a republican virus spreading
from China to Japan.45 But liberal politicians had popular support to re-
duce the military budget since this meant lower taxes. And the more
Japan industrialized, the more dependent it became on the international
market. Economists counseled conformity to its rules, and since Japan
depended most on the markets of the British Empire and the United
States, it would be unwise to alienate them.
So economic debate shifted toward classical economics, open mar-
kets, the gold standard, and deflationary policies. Japan was not on the
gold standard in the 1920s, and liberals urged its reinstatement, which
was opposed by those favoring a statist path of development. Empire,
arms, and authoritarianism were advocated by “German” conservatives,
whereas liberal admirers of Anglo-Saxon civilization favored parliamen-
tary politics and informal empire. The “Germans” were drawn more
from oligarchs, the army officer corps, and state bureaucrats, the “Anglo-
Saxons” were more influential among the political parties and the civilian
middle class.
The middling levels of the officer corps were the most extreme, and
those in the Kwantung Field Army in Manchuria became imbued with
self-confidence and ambition from its military victories. They saw Japan
leading pan-Asian resistance to the West, through “total war,” advocated
by Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, a military theorist who saw his-
tory as cycles of short, sharp, decisive battlefield encounters followed by
“wars by annihilation or exhaustion” fought by whole peoples to the
 Medieval and Modern Japan 163

death. Japan’s previous wars had been short and decisive, requiring at-
tacking élan and high morale. But the modern industrial state was mak-
ing such war obsolete. A period of wars of annihilation would now
follow, leading to a final encounter between the United States and Japan,
the leader of Asia. Ishiwara’s vision of a final war matured through the
late 1920s to the early 1930s. He wrote: “The last war in human history
is approaching. . . . ‘Titanic world conflict, unprecedented in human his-
tory’ . . . the gateway to a golden age of human culture, a synthesis of
East and West, the last and highest stage of human civilization.”46 In
readiness for this final triumph, Japan had to expand in Manchuria and
China to build a self-sufficient industrial base on the Asian mainland,
preferably with Chinese cooperation. Japan could be a great power, “har-
moniously joining Japan’s financial power and China’s natural resources,
Japan’s industrial abilities and China’s labor power.”47 Ishiwara proposed
that the Japanese run high-tech Manchurian industry, the Chinese run
small business, and Koreans do the farming!48 Economic policy, he ex-
plained, should be aimed at long-term military buildup, not at yielding
profit for bankers or corporations. Acquire resource-rich colonies, build
a “military-industrial complex,” and strengthen military influence in
Tokyo, preferably without alienating other powers. War might come,
but, as Tomosaburo Kato, the navy minister, said, “unless we have the
money, we cannot make war.”49
Those favoring colonies or protectorates argued that Japan could ex-
pand into the vacuum left by China’s decline. This was their neighbor-
hood, and the other powers were far away, except for Russia, which was
weakened by revolution. Corrupt Chinese warlords should be gobbled
up before Chinese nationalists did so—another supposed window of op-
portunity. An expanding Japanese sphere of influence in northeast China
would give breathing room and long-term resources. Japan had to grow
in Manchuria, or it would be forced out. Such arguments dominated
army planning circles.50
There were domestic pressures, too. Victories had given aggression a
popular base. The ex-servicemen’s association had 3 million members,
and “patriotic societies” recruited broadly. Conservative oligarchs and
bureaucrats favored social imperialism as a way of hanging on to power.
The Soviets were consolidating in the north, while leftists were active in
coastal China. Conservatives and the army played up the threat of Bol-
shevism.51 Settler and business interests in China promised riches for ev-
eryone, and demands to subsidize settlers were fueled by the media.52
164 Medieval and Modern Japan

This coalition proclaimed the “defence of the Asian race” against the
West.53 Media exaggerations of the welcome given to Japanese settlers in
Korea and Taiwan contrasted strongly with the U.S. Oriental Exclusion
Act of 1924, which banned all Japanese immigration. The Japanese were
shocked by the “yellow peril” scare.54 Japan had failed to get an antiracist
clause added to the League of Nations charter, since the other great
powers either had racist empires or were internally racist, as was the
United States. Western “liberalism” was hypocritical, the Japanese cor-
rectly argued.
The choice between these options was decided not by rational calcu-
lation of Japan’s “national interests,” but by the changing balance of po-
litical power between left and right within Japan. Leftists and liberals
made headway in the 1920s. A cheap food policy depressed prices for
peasant farmers, fueling rural riots. Workers agitated for greater rights,
forming labor unions boosted by the Bolshevik Revolution and by popu-
lar demands to reduce the military budget. Political parties began to
dominate the lower house of parliament during the 1920s. Universal
male suffrage was introduced in 1925, and civil citizenship rights were
increased.55 Big business mostly supported liberalism until the mid-
1930s, since it depended on Anglo-American trade. Most of these devel-
opments seemed to favor liberal geopolitics.
Yet there were conservative countertendencies. The franchise over-
represented rural areas whose politics was dominated by landed notables.
The Meiji reforms had included little land reform, and tenants were en-
meshed in conservative state-run co-ops.56 Many rural households de-
pended on military wages or were tempted by the lure of settler colonies.
The Peace Preservation Law permitted the police to repress socialist and
communist parties and unions and to interfere in elections on “public
order” grounds. The legal code did not tolerate “outsiders” (i.e., national
unions) in trade disputes, and workers had to agitate shop floor by shop
floor, which weakened their ability to maintain the membership gains
and strike levels of the early 1920s.57 Japan developed a dual economy
with a widening gulf between agricultural and manufacturing wages,
making worker-peasant collaboration difficult. Much of the middle class,
at that time enfranchised, abandoned its brief alliance with workers, fear-
ful of Bolshevism. Conservative and liberal parties, controlled by the
upper class and supported by the middle class, contended for power; left-
ists, workers, and peasants were largely excluded. All this was set amid
the emperor system of the Meiji constitution, which was biased toward
 Medieval and Modern Japan 165

ideological harmony, obedience, and patriarchy. The Japanese state be-

came more cohesive and more militarist.
Finally, the extraneous Great Depression tilted Japanese politics
rightward. With exquisitely bad timing, the liberal Minseito Party gov-
ernment began deflating the economy to return Japan to the gold stan-
dard, just as the Depression hit. This slashed demand and investment,
worsened recession, and produced a run on the yen. The 1931 British
withdrawal from the gold standard was seen as the fall of the interna-
tional liberal order. Japanese bankers began selling yen for dollars, con-
firming nationalist accusations of treason. The government raised
interest rates and abandoned reforms, including votes for women and
concessions to unions and tenant farmers. Liberalism was halted. The
government fell in December, the normal fate of governments of both
right and left engulfed by the Depression. Without it, Japan might have
avoided aggressive militarism.

Militarism Rampant, 1936–1945

The government shifted to the right, and by 1936, 62 percent of strikes
were settled by the “sabre mediation,” notes Sheldon Garon. This de-
terred worker dissent, and, faced with such violence, the unions split
and were later absorbed into the “patriotic societies.”58 Liberals shifted
rightward. By the late 1930s the economy was dominated by a military-
industrial complex that struck corporatist compromises with the govern-
ment.59 The subordination of both labor and capital to militarism boded
ill for the peace of Asia.
Street demonstrations were in the 1930s dominated by violent ultra-
nationalists led by young officers and former colonial settlers who re-
ceived covert support from inside the High Command. Minseito Prime
Minister Osachi Hamaguchi was assassinated in November 1930 and
died of his wounds nine months later. The former finance minister
Junnosuke Inoue was also killed, and other politicians and zaibatsu
(corporation) chiefs followed. Assassins, if brought to trial, were given
light sentences because of the “purity” and “sincerity” of their motives.
The leftist Social Masses Party garnered 9 percent of the vote in the
1937 elections, but to avoid assassination its leaders embraced “popular
imperialism.”60 In public almost everyone favored imperialism.
The economic policies of the new conservative government proved
effective. Korekiyo Takahashi, the finance minister, took Japan off gold,
166 Medieval and Modern Japan

lowered interest rates, introduced deficit financing, and boosted counter-

cyclical government spending, an “intuitive Keynesianism” (of the right,
not the left) that revived industry. Japan exported its way out of depres-
sion.61 This boosted conservatism, and more government spending went
to the military. In 1935 Takahashi pushed through a reduced military
budget, which earned him an assassin’s bullet.62 Military spending rose
under a government dominated by rightist bureaucrats. They introduced
more controls on industry, ending market allocation by the price mecha-
nism in iron, steel, and chemicals—state-dominated capitalism for mili-
tary purposes. These developments produced a quicker economic
recovery than liberal capitalist economies managed. As in Nazi Germany,
the economic success of an authoritarian regime made a “military
Keynesianism” popular.63 Exclusively “war parties” are rare in modern
politics. Parties usually focus more on domestic goals than war posturing,
but success or failure in them will lead to questions of war and peace. The
economic good fortunes of conservatives, and the bad fortunes of liberals,
contingently boosted the lure of war in the 1930s. Such linkages in earlier
history must have often tilted the balance between war and peace.
Market-oriented expansion presupposed low-tariff international
trade for Japan, which depended on importing equipment from the
United States, raw materials from the British Empire, and oil from the
United States and the Dutch East Indies. In return, Japan exported tex-
tile goods. But the Depression, followed by global protectionism, hit this
hard. Japanese fears grew of an “ABCD encirclement” by America, Brit-
ain, China, and the Dutch. Exports to Manchuria and north China rose
rapidly, boosting arguments for direct imperialism there. The “resource
imperialism” of Taiwan and Korea might be extended in Manchuria and
north China, which were seen as lifelines for Japan to avoid “strangula-
tion” by the liberal empires. Minerals could be better secured by occupy-
ing the territories they lay in than by uncertain markets.64 So for both
domestic and foreign reasons, the shift toward liberalism and informal
imperialism in the 1920s was reversed in the 1930s, as the state bureau-
cracy was militarized.
The Army Ministry and the Foreign Office had been fighting a turf
war over Manchuria since 1906. From 1926 Chiang Kai-shek was reviving
Kuomintang fortunes in China, egged on by nationalists to restore Chi-
nese authority over former Qing territories in Manchuria and north China.
Japanese settlers and businessmen there felt threatened and asked for more
protection. The foreign service resisted and was denounced as sympathiz-
 Medieval and Modern Japan 167

ing more with the Chinese than with its own citizens. Provocations by Jap-
anese and Chinese nationalists destabilized both governments.65
With hindsight, the escalation of Japanese military imperialism
through the 1930s might seem inexorable, but it was not. There were
long-term factors, but a more contingent role was played by Japanese
soldiers taking foreign policy into their own hands, ignoring policies for-
mulated in Tokyo. In 1928 Japanese soldiers killed the Chinese warlord
ruling Manchuria. The General Staff refused to condemn this, but in the
liberal period this was seen as a mistake and led to the demise of the con-
servative government that had failed to stop it. More important were the
incidents of 1931, 1935, and 1937, constituting a fourth wave of escala-
tion that coincided with rightward shift in Japan. The Kwantung Field
Army had attracted ambitious young officers seeking action. In Septem-
ber 1931 they faked a sabotage of the main railroad line and persuaded
the army (against the wishes of the government and their own com-
mander) to attack the larger armies of the local Chinese warlords. They
won the ensuing battles and overran Manchuria. Ishiwara was the senior
staff officer involved, though senior military and court figures were
complicit. Ishiwara saw the Manchurian invasion as a short, decisive war
building up resources for a later “total war.” He judged correctly that
other powers would not intervene. The Soviet Union was in the middle
of a Five Year Plan, and the West was preoccupied with the Depression.66
The Manchurian invasion angered some in Tokyo, including Emperor
Hirohito. The liberal Minseito government ministers opposed it, but they
had to acquiesce because the action had been successful. A series of failures
to stand up to the armed forces followed.67 The last government staffed by
party politicians fell in May 1932. Informal empire in China had involved
negotiating deals with local Chinese warlords and capitalists.68 Some co-
operation in Japanese-occupied areas of Manchuria and China occurred,
but most Chinese businessmen feared alienating Chinese nationalist senti-
ment.69 Lacking reliable allies, the Japanese attempted more direct colo-
nial rule, setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo in a further incident,
claiming they had liberated the “Manchus” from China.
Manchukuo alienated the Western imperial powers, the League of
Nations, and world opinion. But as Ishiwara predicted, they offered only
words. Japan quit the League, and the fuss subsided. But there were un-
intended consequences. Japan had left the community of states sponsor-
ing the “rules of war,” and a backlash came from China. Japanese rhetoric
to the contrary, most inhabitants of Manchuria considered themselves
168 Medieval and Modern Japan

Chinese, and they were considered as such by other Chinese—the legacy

of the Qing Empire. Whatever “anti-Manchu” sentiments might have
lingered in Chinese republicanism were swamped by anti-Japanese senti-
ments.70 Boycotts of Japanese goods by the Chinese finished off Shide-
hara’s moderate diplomacy.
Manchukuo’s new government was a partnership of Japanese military
officers and capitalists. Borrowing from German World War I and Soviet
models, they pioneered a mixed public-private economy with five-year
plans. Manufacturing production rose fivefold and GDP rose by 4 per-
cent per year between 1924 and 1941—the normal rate across Japan’s
early empire.71 With order restored and the economy vibrant, Japan
moved toward less direct rule through Manchurian elites. Manchukuo
was described as a “brother country,” a “branch house” of the Japanese
family. Back in Japan the public read sanitized accounts of colonial prog-
ress. One million Japanese settlers entering Manchukuo in the 1930s re-
inforced imperialism and provided symbols of upward mobility for
Japanese peasants. “Manchurian colonization was a social movement be-
fore it became a state initiative,” says Louise Young.72 But reality differed
from the propaganda. Settlers had to be pressed into part-time soldiering
to defend occupied areas from “bandits” (dispossessed peasants). This
proved a long way from the “paradise” proclaimed by the Japanese
media. Settlers who failed and returned to Japan turned their discontent
against those opposed to pouring more resources into the colonies.
After the initial media war frenzy subsided, Manchukuo’s contribu-
tion to the Japanese economy seemed less than promised. Support for in-
formal empire began to revive in the home ministry and Foreign Office,
and army budgets were attacked in the Diet during 1933–35.73 But when
the militarists realized that Manchukuo could not alone provide an au-
tarkic economy, they schemed for north China as well. The solution to
the problem of inadequate colonies was seen as more colonies. A purge
of “dangerous thought,” initially launched against communists, then en-
gulfed socialists, liberals, and internationalists. In 1936 an old rule was
reinstated that only serving officers could be military ministers, which
gave the High Command a veto within the cabinet and more access to
the emperor. The destruction of the Foreign Office was secured. Its dip-
lomats had been walking a tightrope between instructions from Tokyo,
the need to work with local Chinese, and conformity to the norms of the
treaty ports. As Tokyo shifted rightward, in 1937–38 the diplomatic corps
was disbanded, its roles handed to a military-dominated authority.74
 Medieval and Modern Japan 169

The military was now in control of a cohesive state seeking further

colonies. The navy favored southern advance across the Pacific, recogniz-
ing that this carried a risk of war with Britain and the United States. The
admirals supported a holding operation in the north to contain the Soviets
and Chinese. Most army officers focused on expansion in north China but
were divided. “Total war” advocates like Ishiwara sought a “national de-
fense state” to build up Asian resources to challenge the West. This in-
volved dominating China. A second “control” faction sought a deal with
the Soviets while strengthening Manchurian defenses. This view was prev-
alent among General Staff officers who believed Japan could not take on
another great power as well as China. A third, “imperial way” policy urged
war against the Soviets. It downplayed the contribution of material factors
such as production capacity or army size. Such “economistic” calculations
were despised. “Decisive battles” would be won by offensive élan. The mil-
itary knew it would be inferior in numbers and perhaps technology. But
Japanese seishin, “spiritual mobilization,” could triumph over material diffi-
culties. A study group analyzing defeats by Soviet forces in 1939–40 con-
cluded that the Japanese were only about 80 percent as effective in
technology and organization as Soviet troops, and “the only method of
making up for the missing 20% is to draw upon spiritual strength.”75 This
paralleled the Nazi worship of the national spirit. So did the harsh disci-
pline and ferocious fighting spirit that treated enemy soldiers and civilians
brutally. But whereas the Wehrmacht cultivated rather egalitarian com-
radeship between officers and men, Japanese differences of rank were pro-
found. But blitzkrieg, the sudden, overwhelming offensive, would win the
day, as it was claimed it had in 1894, 1905, and 1931, and as it had for the
Nazis between 1936 and 1940. These debates were not resolved, and pol-
icy documents typically combined references to all three strategies while
remaining vague about resources needed. But all factions wanted war and
territorial expansion in Asia, as well as more military control of the state.76
Once again, soldiers on the ground decided the issue. In 1935 Japa-
nese army units, acting without orders from above, created two new pup-
pet regimes in north China and one in Mongolia. This put an end to the
negotiations between Japan and the Chinese nationalists. A fifth escala-
tion then began after an incident in 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge near
Beijing. Though fighting between Chinese and Japanese units stationed
there may have begun accidentally, the General Staff sent in Japanese
army and naval units to escalate it, supported after the fact by Prime
Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe and the emperor.77
170 Medieval and Modern Japan

These military escalations precipitated a full-scale war with China

that then evolved into the Pacific War, which lasted until Japan’s total de-
feat in 1945. The war seemed promising in 1937. The Chinese national-
ist government lacked the infrastructural power to rule all the country,
and it had to retreat. Konoe and army staff officers hoped one swift
blow would knock China out of the war. Konoe said he would deal with
Chiang Kai-shek only on the battlefield and at the surrender table.
He saw Chiang’s regime as the obstacle to Chinese acquiescence in a
Japanese-led Asian revival, liberating Asia from Anglo-American capital-
ism and Soviet communism. The Japanese did not yet rate Chinese com-
munists as significant opponents.
Ishiwara and total war advocates opposed this war, recognizing the
mobilizing power of Chinese nationalism. Ishiwara warned it would “be
what Spain was for Napoleon, an endless bog.”78 He saw China as eating
up resources needed for Japan’s future, and the war did drain the Japa-
nese economy and manpower. So he was removed from the General
Staff. But he did not have a solution either. Like others, he had hoped for
Chinese acquiescence in a Japanese leadership of Asia, but he had been
misled by Chiang’s appearing to seek a deal—but in reality only until he
had finished off the communists. Though Chiang and the Japanese both
wanted to extirpate communism from Asia, there could be no agreement
between them. Most Chinese now saw the main imperial enemy not as
the West but as Japan. The United States increased its loans to China.79
In Japan the sources of social power had been fused under military
dominance. The remaining political choice was between military rule
and a quasi-fascist corporatist state, but neither could quite triumph. The
Japanese system had relied on the common interests, culture, and mod-
ernizing intent of oligarchs, bureaucrats, capitalists, and the educated
upper middle class to generate policies of development. But the state had
been taken over by a military favoring the anti-parliamentary corporat-
ism sweeping other states of the period, claiming more technocratic ex-
pertise and concern for the national interest than disputatious parties
had.80 A few of these were fascists. In other countries fascism was a mass
movement mobilizing from below. Japanese fascist groups lacked mass
support and did not coalesce into a single movement; Hirohito declared
that he would not accept in cabinet or court posts “any person holding
fascistic ideas.”81
After early Japanese victories in China, the army got bogged
down. Chinese forces avoided big battles and cut the supply lines of an
 Medieval and Modern Japan 171

overextended enemy. The war proved costlier and more difficult than
anticipated. Japanese forces were overconfident victims of their own ide-
ology of racial superiority, and this led them into atrocities alienating
many Chinese who might otherwise have joined them. Atrocities had
been absent in Japan’s previous wars, but ideology-infused emotions
were beginning to cloud material interest and rational strategy.
In Southeast Asia Japan had pursued a market-oriented strategy in
the early and mid-1930s to secure oil from Java and Sumatra, as well as
some informal empire in Vietnam. With a neutrality pact signed with the
Soviets in 1939, the navy’s strategy of expanding southward was em-
braced. When Hitler overran France and the Netherlands, their colonial
possessions in Vietnam and the East Indies seemed to beckon. “Seize this
golden opportunity! Don’t let anything stand in the way,” urged Army
Minister Hata Shunroku in June 1940.82 It seemed another window of
opportunity. Since leaders did not expect Britain to last long against Hit-
ler, its Asian colonies might also be acquired. An alliance with Germany
and a strike southward was pushed by much of the navy, though not by
its head, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who knew Japan could not defeat
the United States. But the army was coming around to the notion that
defense in the north and offense in the south would be the best strategy.
Japan still depended on foreign imports, especially oil. Though its
“resource imperialism” in Manchuria, north China, Korea, and Taiwan
provided 20 percent of mainland Japanese GDP, the temptation to strike
out for the oil of the Dutch East Indies grew. In 1938 the United States
began shipping military supplies and credits to nationalist China, and the
British planned a railroad from Burma to ship supplies to the national-
ists. This contributed to a stalemate in the China War and increased Jap-
anese hostility to the Anglophone powers.
In August 1940 Japan founded the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity
Sphere for developing Asia peacefully. Yet the next month it joined the
Axis alliance and invaded Vietnam—oddly, an attack on the territory of a
supposed ally, the French Vichy regime. The main intent was to cut off
supplies to the Chinese nationalists. Again, local officers on the ground
exceeded their orders and were successful. The sticking point remained
China. Since 1932 the Stimson Doctrine had declared American hostility
to Japan’s invasion of China and Manchukuo. Yet Japan received 80 per-
cent of its oil from the United States. The problem, one U.S. diplomat
complained to Roosevelt, was that “we have large emotional interests in
China, small economic interests, and no vital interests.”83 Yet the United
172 Medieval and Modern Japan

States continued to demand that Japan return to the pre-1931 status quo,
which almost all Japanese leaders saw as abandoning Manchukuo and
170,000 Japanese settlers. It would be disastrous for Japan’s economy and
politically for any government that accepted these terms.84
The U.S. administration was alarmed by Japanese aggression in
China, its alliance with Hitler, its occupation of Vietnam, and the obvi-
ous threat to British and Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia. It had pre-
pared possible war plans against Japan ever since 1906, and these were
later to provide the blueprint for its Pacific War strategy.85 But lacking
the military power to implement them, it had first fought an indirect
proxy war by subsidizing China’s resistance to Japan. Now it turned to
flexing its economic power resources more directly. Its response to a pos-
sible Japanese southward advance was not to come to terms, as the Japa-
nese had hoped. In May 1941 Roosevelt embargoed almost all exports to
Japan from the United States or the British Empire. Oil was crucial. Jap-
anese companies had already secured approval for licenses for gasoline
from the United States for another nine months and crude oil for thirty-
two months, but freezing Japanese assets in the United States would pre-
vent Japan from paying for or getting it. Roosevelt approved this perhaps
without realizing the consequences, though Assistant Secretary of State
Dean Acheson did. Roosevelt’s position remains unclear, though he had
appointed the hawkish Acheson to escalate pressure on Japan. The offi-
cial story is that Roosevelt discovered only in September that Japan had
received no oil since July.86
The effect of the embargoes was the opposite of that intended. Lib-
erals could not understand militarists for whom the embargoes were “an
assault on the nation’s very existence.”87 The embargoes precipitated a
desperate fling. Japanese planners estimated that the navy could last
without oil supplies for between six months and two years. They also saw
that the United States was expanding its Pacific fleet. Since Japan could
not win a long war, a short but devastating offense against American and
British power was needed. When Admiral Yamamoto failed to persuade
the emperor to avoid war, in May 1941 he proposed attacking Pearl Har-
bor as the best strategy. This was tested in war games in September and
adopted as policy in mid-October, the fifth and final escalation.
Civilian leaders were not informed by the High Command, and so
they did not know of the plan to attack Pearl Harbor. Prime Minister
Konoe was authorized to negotiate but not to make concessions. If he
could not negotiate a peace, Japan would attack. Both sides toyed with the
 Medieval and Modern Japan 173

possibility of compromise in late 1941, but it foundered mainly on China.

The issue of Manchukuo might have been detached from the rest of
China, allowing Japan to remain there while quitting China. Alternatively,
a withdrawal from China might occur in stages over some years. On the
Japanese side, however, the army was absolutely opposed to any with-
drawal, and its influence on the government and the emperor was increas-
ing.88 It was curious (from a Realist point of view) that the higher priority
than war against each other seemed to be, for Japan, the war against China
and, for the United States, the war against Hitler. So why did Japan con-
tinue to antagonize the United States by its southward moves? And why
did not Roosevelt compromise over China and build up his commitments
to the struggle against Hitler? This would also give the United States time
to build up its military resources so that it could later deter Japan from ag-
gression.89 But the confrontation was really between Japanese militarism
and rising American consciousness of its own imperial potential. Neither
allowed backing off. There were mutual misunderstandings. Japan and the
United States embodied different forms of imperialism and different vi-
sions of threat: where the United States feared “brutal totalitarianism,” the
Japanese saw “liberal strangulation” by global economic tentacles. Both
were only exaggerating the reality the other posed.
The initial success of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa in Russia pushed
Japanese rulers over the edge. Japan had to seize this window of oppor-
tunity. But why had Japanese militarism passed beyond the bounds of
reason? Only inordinate slices of luck could have brought a good war for
Japan, as some Japanese leaders knew. Irrationality is difficult to explain.
It is usually the residual in our explanations. But here it brought on war
across the Pacific. In October Konoe, having failed to negotiate a com-
promise, was replaced by General Hideki Tojo, an army hard-liner. On
November 25, 1941, White House officials concluded that war was inev-
itable. Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded in his diary, “The ques-
tion was how could we maneuver them into the position of firing the
first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”90 Secretary of
State Cordell Hull insisted Japanese forces be withdrawn from all of
China, including Manchuria, as a precondition for normalizing relations.
This was unacceptable. On December 1 the emperor approved the Pearl
Harbor attack. On the seventh it began, a surprise attack, simultaneously
with attacks on Australian, British, and Dutch forces in Malaya, Sarawak,
Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Thailand. Japan
would conquer an empire or go down fighting. Tojo managed both.
174 Medieval and Modern Japan

Few in the United States had expected such a reaction. This was one
example among many of diplomacy where both sides refuse to back down
while expecting that their own pressure will force the other to do so. In-
stead, the opposite happens: each ratcheting up of pressure hardens the
response of the other. The U.S. ability to read Japanese diplomatic codes
warned them an attack was coming, but no one knew where or when.
Some expected landings in the Philippines, not an attack on U.S. territory.
Pearl Harbor and its fleet were seen as the springboard toward Japan, not
a vulnerable asset. The attack destroyed all the battleships in the harbor.
For Roosevelt it was “a day of infamy.” American leaders could not believe
that Japan, a country with about 5 percent of U.S. heavy industrial capac-
ity, would attack its sovereign territory.91 Indeed, it is not easy to under-
stand this when Japan was already fighting in China. But American
economic warfare and its hard line on China had strengthened Tokyo mil-
itarists and brought the navy to agree to secure oil by force.92 Tojo saw
that the embargoes would strangle Japan and the United States would
only grow stronger. The chances of success in war were not great, he con-
ceded. But America would reduce Japan to “a third-class nation after two
or three years if we just sit tight.” Peace under American domination or
war against the odds but with honor—that was the choice.93
The Japanese could have backed down, and American leaders rea-
soned that they would. But it would have been rather like Britain backing
down in 1940. Japan had a militarist regime with a half-fascist ideology,
to which any backing down would have been dishonor, “a colossal loss of
prestige,” an insult to the memory of all who had died in China, and
long-term subordination to the United States, says Ian Kershaw.94 It had
also enjoyed a string of triumphs in war that was being continued in Hit-
ler’s sequence of military successes. So it pulverized the American fleet,
seized British, Dutch, and American colonial possessions, and established
a defensive perimeter across the Pacific to secure the oil of Borneo and
Sumatra. Japan could then negotiate to secure access to all these markets
from a position of strength, helped by Germany’s irresistible force in Eu-
rope. Japanese leaders were hopeful of victory in a short offensive war,
pessimistic about a longer war. Yet they believed the United States would
sue for peace after the first devastating blows, and then they could com-
promise. Admiral Tomioka Sadatoshi later conceded “such optimistic
predictions . . . were not really based on reliable calculations.” Overconfi-
dence also resulted from the militarists’ despising “soft” liberal democra-
cies. Caged by their own society, they exaggerated Japanese seishin and
 Medieval and Modern Japan 175

took American mouthing of Wilsonian liberalism at face value. Had they

appreciated the reality of American imperialism, they would have real-
ized that the United States had never been averse to using its military in
“wars of choice.” Yamamoto was right on both counts: the attack on
Pearl Harbor was the best strategy, but it still wouldn’t work.
A conspiracy school says Roosevelt wanted the Japanese to attack, so
that he could get American global domination after the war—a theory
that is plausible but lacking evidence, and it would require a visionary
strategy of which few politicians are capable. But the destruction of a
quarter of the American Pacific fleet in its home port, and the occupation
of a dozen countries across an American sphere of interest, caused na-
tional outrage. The Senate voted unanimously for war, and the House
had one dissenter, the pacifist Jeannette Rankin, who declared to boos
and hisses, “As a woman, I can’t go to war and I refuse to send anyone
else.” U.S. officials rejected compromise not only because it would de-
mean its reputation, but also because it had no need to. Japan could not
hurt the U.S. mainland—and that made the Pearl Harbor attack stupid.
Americans could fight a war with no danger to the homeland. The Japa-
nese could not. So Japanese rulers got a conflagration across the Pacific
and their own destruction, while Americans got an economic boom and a
global empire. Early Japanese successes contributed to eventual defeat,
for by the spring of 1942 its imperial forces were overextended, scattered
over thousands of kilometers from Burma to the southwest Pacific. This
headlong advance was a strategy infused with seishin. Many Japanese offi-
cers thought it was folly. The better strategy, they argued (an argument
endorsed by some later historians), was to stop short of this and either
merely take over the European empires or establish an imperial perime-
ter that would be defensible for a few years, by which time both sides
might want peace.95 Indeed, they might even be allies against Soviet
communism. But these officers were overruled by the leadership.
Appropriately, the last great battle of the war involved the Kwantung
Field Army, the cause of so much trouble. The Red Army, joining the war
in the east, overpowered it, killing 80,000 Japanese. Pacific War casual-
ties had been appalling. The Chinese suffered most: 3.75 million nation-
alist and communist troops were killed or went missing, and 15–20
million civilians died, mostly from war-induced famine and disease,
though Japanese atrocities accounted for several million. Indian and Bur-
mese civilian losses amounted to several million from famine and disease.
Around 800,000 Japanese civilians died, mainly in callous U.S. bombing
176 Medieval and Modern Japan

raids, about 140,000 died at Hiroshima, and 88,000 perished in the fire-
bombing of Tokyo—a maneuver chosen because Japanese homes were
built of wood. As Major General Curtis LeMay, in charge of the bomb-
ing, said, the population was “scorched and boiled and baked to death.”96
There were far more civilian than military deaths in the Pacific War.
Just over 2 million Japanese troops, about 160,000 Americans, and
120,000 British Commonwealth troops were killed in the Pacific War in-
cluding 20–30 percent death rates among allied POWs. Japanese atroci-
ties included massacres, surgical dissections of unsedated humans,
reprisals on whole villages and cities, deliberate starvation, and forced
labor unto death. The most notorious examples were the Nanjing massa-
cre of 1937 of perhaps 200,000 Chinese civilians; the “Three Alls Policy”
instructing Japanese forces to “Kill All, Burn All, and Loot All” in China,
approved by Hirohito himself; bacteriological and chemical warfare ex-
periments conducted on Chinese civilians who were invariably killed; the
use of biological and chemical weapons beginning in China in 1939; and
the “comfort stations,” where Chinese and Korean women were forced
to serve in brothels as prostitutes for the soldiers.
These atrocities occurred because Japan had withdrawn from the
rules of war, though there were no rules against bombing civilians. In no
previous wars had Japan practiced such atrocities, but in the army a cul-
ture of brutality, fanaticism, and racism had built up, including the beliefs
that the Chinese were subhuman and surrender was treason. Assassina-
tions in the 1930s had made the killing of civilians normal. Army logis-
tics became murderous. Living off the land meant extorting subject
peoples’ produce, causing starvation, disease, and death. The ideals of the
Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere were destroyed by wartime oc-
cupations. The never-surrender cult spun off into the belief that POWs
did not deserve to live. Japanese army discipline was sadistic and involved
terrible beatings. When trapped on Pacific islands, with no possibility of
retreat, Japanese soldiers chose death. On ten islands the average death
rate was an astonishing 97 percent. In Okinawa it was “only” 92 percent.
These are death rates unparalleled in any other war discussed in this
book. American death rates were under 5 percent but rose to 11 percent
in the battle for Okinawa.97 In 1945, when the Tokyo leaders knew defeat
was imminent and inevitable, they still refused to surrender until the
United States dropped what the Japanese believed were only the first
two of many atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—in reality the
Americans had only these two.98
 Medieval and Modern Japan 177

The mayhem of the Asia-Pacific War was a far cry from the calm cal-
culation of Realism or the beneficence of liberalism. Its combination of
folly and evil is difficult to comprehend. Even if the big battles had gone
better for Japan, it is difficult to see a different outcome. The Battle of
Midway in June 1942 is often seen as decisive, narrowly going against
Japan—ten accurate bombs out of thousands dropped on the Japanese
fleet made the difference. But the Americans had many thousands of
bombs to drop. Even if Japan had won this battle and seized Australia,
the United States would have regrouped, built more carriers and planes,
dropped more bombs, and pushed them back again. Between 1941 and
1945 the Japanese produced 70,000 planes, no mean feat, but at the cost
of civilian suffering. The United States produced 300,000 while its civil-
ians prospered. Ford’s Willow Run assembly lines produced a B-24
bomber every sixty-three minutes. And the United States got the atom
bomb. It had acquired the economic and military power and the ideolog-
ical will to become the world’s greatest power. From that point on it
would act accordingly, while still mouthing the ideology of a Wilsonian
charitable association.

Conclusion
We have seen great variations in war in Japan. Its distance from the Asian
mainland made foreign wars difficult for many centuries, but civil wars
increased, resulting in the sixteenth century in over a hundred vanished
kingdoms. Warring rulers thought they were making rational choices,
but they were almost all mistaken. Only the triumvirs and their vassals
survived, and then only one of them. They were the most capable mili-
tary-political rulers, helped by luck. The drive toward unification proved
popular. It came first from the most ruthless general, then from one who
combined impulsive generalship with astute diplomacy. He and the third
triumvir developed reforms aimed at peace and insulation from the
world. Japan then entered modernity after 240 years of peace in reaction
to foreign imperialism. There was long-term logic in the rise of modern
Japanese militarism. Like the early Roman Republic, the Meiji Restora-
tion began as self-defense, but repeated victories in war combined with
fear of class struggle at home developed a militaristic culture baked in to
political, economic, and ideological institutions. The short-term conse-
quence of the Restoration was remarkable economic development aided
by a militarism that was ultimately to undermine it. Foreign wars came
178 Medieval and Modern Japan

thick and fast. Abundant documentation enables a nuanced view of war

and peace since the Meiji Restoration. Had I equally rich data on earlier
societies, I might have found comparable factional struggles, contingen-
cies, and ambiguities of outcome. The annalists had told patterned evo-
lutionary tales. Abundance of data leads to a less coherent narrative.
The Japanese military was suited to direct imperialism in the neigh-
borhood until it began overreaching in China. There was support for
“social imperialism,” one of the few cases where popular pressures in
wars were substantial, though conservative oligarchs manipulated peas-
ant support for imperialism. Peasants provided soldiers and most colo-
nial settlers, boosting popular imperialism. The organized working class
weakened under repressive labor laws, and conservatives and bureaucrats
intimidated middle-class liberals into accepting authoritarian govern-
ment. Junior army officers were violent at home and abroad. The Meiji
Constitution mattered, as factions struggled over access to the emperor,
which was vital for approving policy. Victories abroad increased the pres-
tige of the armed forces in Tokyo and at court.
But the rise of the Japanese empire was not predetermined. There
were five Rubicons that might not have been crossed: against China in
1895, in Korea in 1910, in Manchuria in 1931, in China in 1937, and at
Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Great Depression that began in 1929 added an
external shock, which aided the drift rightward. Earlier aggressions had
been cautious; and the 1931 aggression in Manchuria was launched inde-
pendently by mid-level military officers, which reflected changes in the
balance of power within Japan that freed the military from civilian control.
The 1930s baked-in militarism led to the next aggression, the full-scale
invasion of China, which was again precipitated by soldiers constraining
facts on the ground. By this point the Japanese military was more than a
rational instrument calibrated to security fears at home and profit abroad.
It was the dominant power actor, with its own definition of national inter-
est and honor and with its own savage martial values. The final aggression
at Pearl Harbor was suicidal. The deadliest war in human history was gov-
erned on the Axis side more by militarist ideology and emotions than
by calm economic-military calculation. Belief in the superiority of offense
over defense and seizing windows of opportunity became baked in to mili-
tary strategy and prevented realistic assessment of the odds of victory.
Realism was now irrelevant to any explanation of Japanese militarism.
This perverted the Meiji Restoration, a “strong military” dominating
a “wealthy country.” This had long-term structural causes, but equally
 Medieval and Modern Japan 179

important were fluctuating balances of power abroad and at home, the ac-
cidents of war, and military provocations. Had power struggles in Tokyo
had a different outcome, a different “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity
Sphere” might have appeared, centered on a Japanese indirect and infor-
mal empire dominating East and Southeast Asia, but with an increasing
role for a reviving China. But within Japan itself had arisen a logic of in-
tensifying militarism, until the moment in 1941 when Japan catastrophi-
cally overreached.
After atomic bombs and unconditional surrender came another
abrupt shift. Under American direction, Japan abandoned war and em-
braced democracy, albeit one where elections produced one-party rule
for four decades. Japanese ideologies shifted substantially in the absence
of militarism and a much-reduced emperor worship, developing a capi-
talism with only limited state coordination of enterprises. Although some
virulent nationalism remains and prevents the apologies and reparations
that postwar Germany has offered, most Japanese seem content to be cit-
izens of a peaceful economic giant. Japan has increased its military
spending every year for the last nine years while keeping it just below the
1 percent of GDP agreed to in 1945. (In 2023 it is projected to slightly
exceed 1 percent for the first time.) But the size of that GDP made this
rather pacific power the world’s ninth-highest military spender in 2019.
More Chinese aggressive moves may determine much more.
The history of Japan reveals the importance of domestic power
struggles in decisions of war and peace. It also shows that those who con-
tinue to live by the sword will eventually die by it, undone by overconfi-
dence. Conversely, it also shows the pacific effect that devastating victory
around 1600 and devastating defeat in 1945 both brought.
 chapter eight
A Thousand Years of Europe

E
urope provides the most richly documented history of war-
fare. From the tenth century until 1945, Europe may have had
more interstate wars than any other region of the world, al-
though this impression could result from more available data.
These seem to raise four questions.

1. Why was war so important in Europe?

2. What was the role of war in the “vanishing kingdoms” of
Europe?
3. What were the causes of war in different phases of European
history?
4. How rational were decisions to make war rather than peace?

The Importance of Origins

As in China and Rome, origins were crucial. Europe experienced incom-
ing waves of barbarians before and after the fifth-century collapse of the
Western Roman Empire. They were not distinct ethnic groups, despite
the labels “Visigoths,” “Huns,” “Saxons,” and so on that are always pinned
on them, but loose groupings of tribes and warriors collecting thousands
of followers as they moved; these polities were “forged on the march.”1 If
raiding was successful, it turned into conquest. By war or threat of war,
they forced homage on elites and unfree labor on peasants. Desiring

180
 A Thousand Years of Europe 181

“civilization,” they Christianized and intermarried with the post-Roman

population.
The first successor states in Western Europe were large ex-barbarian
kingdoms built on Roman foundations. Under pressure from outside and
from their fissiparous succession practices, they fragmented, their taxation
powers weakened, and living standards fell.2 Goths, Franks, Burgundians, and
others had come as conquerors but then had to defend against newcomers.
War making was bred into post-Roman Europe. The Franks came the closest
to reestablishing political unity within Europe, but the division of their realm
into three parts undercut this. The ecology of Europe, with its forests, its
stone castles and its lack of pastoral plains, protected it (except for Hungary)
from barbarian horsemen, but in the seventh century the Muslims invaded
and founded enduring states. In Spain they destroyed the Visigoth kingdoms
and drove the Christian lords into the north. Later, Muslims conquered the
Balkans, from where they kept up the pressure until the seventeenth century.
So the defense of Christendom added to continental militarism.
Across Christian Europe fragmentation and defense against raiders
led in the tenth and eleventh centuries to the devolution of states to local
castles and bands of armored knights, who commanded retinues of peas-
ant infantry and archers, amid a rather Hobbesian anarchy. Brigandage
abounded. In reaction, peace movements, known as the Truce or the
Peace of God, were led by clerics asking that lords not kill clerics,
women, children, the elderly, and sometimes anyone unarmed. Numer-
ous lords did so pledge, and had they acted on their words, this would
have been a formidable peace movement. The solution to Hobbesian an-
archy eventually came through the creation of larger states operating a
Mafia-like feudalism. In the meantime, kingship was subordinate to lord-
ship. “States” had very few functions and lacked taxation powers. To
make war, kings with extensive personal estates could finance mercenar-
ies, but most relied, especially for cavalry, on the retinues of their vassals.
These men held their estates in return for providing the king with these
retinues. Thus, kings had an incentive to make war in order to acquire
new lands, which they could distribute as rewards to existing and new
vassals, who in return would provide more soldiers. This circular process
made war more likely, though it was waged by soldiers owing loyalty
more to the lords than to the king. So highly decentralized military
power dominated Europe.3
Peasants placed themselves under the protection of a lord. If they did
not, they would probably suffer the violence of that or another lord.
182 A Thousand Years of Europe

Some cities survived in leagues of city-states armed with militias and

mercenaries. Elsewhere, the castle, the domain, vassalage, the knightly
retinue, the servile conditions imposed on the peasants were the institu-
tions of what is generally called feudalism. War and unfree status were
the price the people paid for order. Thus, Jeremy Black says, “War ap-
peared natural, necessary and inevitable, part of the divine order, the
scourge of divine wrath and the counterpart of violence in the elements,
as well as the correct, honourable and right way to adjudicate disputes.”4
Militarism and the Church jointly infused culture. Transnational chi-
valric ideals coupled heroic prowess in violence with honor, piety, con-
sciousness of the duties of rank, courtoisie toward ladies, and protection of
the poor. This was only for those with noble blood, that is, of aristocratic
descent and possessing a supposed nobility of spirit.5 Courtly literature
narrated the chivalrous behavior of the knights of King Arthur, the he-
roes of Valhalla, the paladins of Charlemagne—although recent warriors
figured too, such as Otto the Great, Richard the Lionheart, Bertrand du
Guesclin, and El Cid. The culture was more religious than that of medi-
eval China or Japan. Chivalric ideology was not transcendent, since all
could distinguish between romantic myths and the reality of war, but it
played an immanent role, strengthening ruling-class solidarity. War was
also infused by aesthetic elements, at least among the upper classes.
Knights were beautifully caparisoned, their comportment dignified and
gentlemanly. Clerics often criticized the actual behavior of knights, and
the literature was normative: knights should do these things, but often
they did not, a contradiction embodied by Sir Thomas Malory, author of
Le Morte d’Arthur, who wrote his masterpiece during prison terms for vi-
olence, extortion, and rape. Malory depicts Galahad as the only knight
who can attain the Holy Grail since he is pure, completely without sin,
unlike Gawain, Lancelot, and Perceval, who fail to achieve this unattain-
able model of perfection, despite conduct that is chivalrous. Pure virtue
was not for this world.
There were three supposed sources of order: the Church, princes,
and knights. The clergy believed they embodied religion, learning, and
peace. The prince claimed a divine duty to establish order and justice,
defend the realm, and conquer enemies. But this also required knight en-
forcers who were “fiercely proud of their independence, exulting in their
right to violence and in their skill at exercising it.”6 Such institutionalized
ideology gave young men, especially younger sons and bastards, incen-
tive to join in aggressive ventures, driven by greed for land, wealth, and
 A Thousand Years of Europe 183

serfs, and by the quest for honor and glory. As in Rome, successful mili-
tarism in each generation baked it in for the next one. In any case, rulers
lived off surplus extorted by force by their retinues from the peasantry.

Medieval Warfare
By the late eleventh century, the former lands of the Frankish Empire
contained polities of varying types, around which lay a periphery of
weaker polities, tribes, and self-governing communities. Many were de-
fined as terra nullius, nobody’s land, ripe for the claiming. Rulers of the
core could conquer, enserf, and colonize their peripheries, offering land
and booty to accompanying knights, farmers, artisans, and traders, cir-
cumstances resembling the early history of China, except that here
priests were also winning wealth and souls, providing some normative
solidarity through Western Christendom. Younger sons and bastards
lacking inheritance were overrepresented. The promise of land with serfs
in a newly settled area that lacked rigid status differences was a strong
material inducement.
After Rome’s collapse, the four sources of social power became un-
coupled. Political power lay with princes, but there was not much of it.
They lost much military power to their vassals. Ideological power was
monopolized by the Church, and economic power was decentralized,
shared among feudal lords and townsfolk. By 1000, Western Europe was
what I termed in volume 1 of The Sources of Social Power “a multiple
acephalous federation” composed of these complex interactive networks.
Over the next three and a half centuries, says Robert Bartlett, the
core swallowed up the periphery, the sharks swallowed the minnows, feu-
dal states with noncontiguous domains either consolidated them into
one territorial domain or were swallowed up, and the victors developed
more central administrations.7 The Norman conquest of England is an
obvious example. After victory, Normans were installed in lordships
across the country, reinforced by the judicial and military power of the
Norman king. Turchin detects several bands of core states stretching
across Europe, each swallowing its periphery.8 Western Europe was not
yet composed simply of major states, as it would later be. For the war-
riors of the core, war was profitable and rational, but it did not usually
need much calculation, for the odds were stacked in their favor. Rulers
were also glad to get rid of wellborn, armed young men without inheri-
tance prospects causing trouble at home: war abroad to achieve peace at
184 A Thousand Years of Europe

home was a low-risk deflection strategy. Armed men could be dispatched

to conquer new lands, just as accompanying traders could acquire new
markets and priests new souls, while farmers and artisans sought upward
mobility impossible back home. Iberians were an exception since the
Muslim enemy was their equal, especially when it was reinforced from
North Africa. The Church provided legitimacy that war was moral.
There was a risk of death, but the odds were favorable against less well-
organized foes, and consolations were offered in the afterlife. Yet the pri-
mary motive for expansion was economic but feudal: wellborn men
lacking inheritance sought land and its peasants, from whom they could
extract rent and labor. Honor derived from achieving this. In this quasi-
colonial expansion, some settler groups became autonomous, founding
new states on the periphery, as Visigoths and Franks did in Spain, as
Normans did in many places, and as knightly orders did on Europe’s
eastern borders. Crusaders pillaged Constantinople and colonized the
Holy Land, but after ruling and squabbling there for almost a hundred
years, they foundered against Islamic rulers who enjoyed the logistical
advantages of proximity.
The Holy Roman Empire was distinctive, a federation of mainly
Germanic but also some Italian rulers who elected their emperor. A Diet
of rulers was intermittently called to address crises, and standing tribu-
nals heard legal disputes between members. The empire uniquely saw a
persistent three-way power struggle among the emperor, the individual
rulers, and the popes, whose powers were threatened by the emperor’s
Italian domains. This three-way struggle produced much switching
of sides and balancing to prevent any one of them from becoming
dominant—highly calculative sequences of wars that resulted in a much
higher survival rate of small states. Though shaken by religious wars in
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this federation of many
states survived until the nineteenth-century absorption by Prussia of
Germany, and by Piedmont of Italy. But elsewhere in Europe, state swal-
lowing had been a more cumulative process through the centuries.
Monarchs were anointed by God but benefited from earthly fear of
the disorder that followed the perennial weakness of monarchy: disputed
successions. Since ruling families intermarried across Europe, claimants
might include foreign princes, and civil wars were internationalized.
When Henry I of England died without a male heir, several rivals
claimed the throne. His nephew Stephen of Blois quickly crossed the
Channel and seized the throne, reigning as king 1135–54. But a civil war,
 A Thousand Years of Europe 185

“when Christ and all his saints slept,” lasted through most of his reign,
fought against the Empress Matilda, who as the daughter of Henry I had
a more direct claim to the throne but was a woman (in the highly patri-
archal society of Europe). The war finally ended in compromise. Stephen
recognized Matilda’s son as his successor, Henry II, the first Angevin
monarch, a strong, even tyrannical ruler. The barons muttered but did
not rebel, fearing more civil war. But the third Angevin, John, went too
far, importing mercenaries to help him dominate his barons. The barons
forced him to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. There were now upper-
class constitutional restraints on English monarchs.
Western Europe was a single ideological community—Christendom,
whose infrastructures penetrated every town, every village. War was
more normatively regulated than in feudal periods of Chinese and Japa-
nese history, and monarchs were normally secure in their beds, there
being few palace bloodbaths. The Church legitimized monarchs, dis-
couraging insurrections. Dissidents attacked the monarch’s “evil counsel-
lors,” not the monarch, while peasant rebels naively believed that the
monarch would listen to their grievances. The papacy also legitimized
the power of prince-bishoprics and monastic orders. European monarchs
were restrained both by the transnational power of the Church and by
the contractual element in lord-vassal relations. Royal armies were com-
posed of the largely autonomous retinues of vassals, and princes could
not be confident that if they declared war, lords would turn out to fight.
Many princes and vassals held noncontiguous lands acquired through
marriages and inheritances. Sovereignty was often ambiguous, and
in conflicts vassals might choose sides. Some did so for pragmatism—
bribery or calculations as to who would win—others for dynastic con-
nections. Before the sixteenth century there were virtually no ideological
wars within Christendom, and even in crusades against Muslims, reli-
gious zeal was often subordinated to greed. Within Christendom wars
were not usually fought to the death of many aristocrats. Defeat led
more often to ransoms and homage.
The period 1400 to almost 1600 was dominated by dynastic wars be-
tween rival princely families.9 Every child born to every prince anywhere
in Europe might change the balance of power, and every marriage was a
diplomatic triumph or disaster, observes Howard.10 Gains were twofold:
acquiring new territory and its resources and taxes, and inducing rulers
to do homage. Twice English negotiators in peace talks with the French
said they would agree to let the French king control disputed lands if he
186 A Thousand Years of Europe

would do homage for these lands to the English king. Twice the French
refused the deal—in this case honor outranked material acquisition. Mat-
ters of honor were the most frequently stated casus belli. Disputed suc-
cession caused or was the pretext for most wars, as was the case in most
monarchical systems of rule (as in China and Japan). If a prince or a
baron died without a direct male heir, or if a woman, a boy, or a seeming
weakling inherited, this gave opportunity to kin-related lords, often liv-
ing abroad, to enlarge estates, prestige, and power. Monarchical succes-
sion issues led to both civil and interstate wars, a cause of war rare in
modern republics and constitutional monarchies. Such wars were risky
ventures, but succession crises were opportunities for huge gains of lands
and serfs that might not occur again during a lord’s lifetime—a true win-
dow of opportunity, as Realists say, though the opportunity was high-
risk—and lords were trained to accept the risks of war. In any case,
claimants might first try litigation and bribery through arbitration by a
higher authority, such as the papacy. War was only the continuation of
litigation by violent means.
An example of litigation was the success of Philip the Good (not
good in the modern sense, since he had at least eighteen mistresses). This
Duke of Burgundy paid homage to the French king yet became his near-
equal in power through acquisition of territories by wars, purchases, mar-
riage alliances, and victory in a disputed succession in the 1420s against
his cousin Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault. Her disadvantage was that as
a woman without an heir, she could not herself rule her estates in Flan-
ders, nor could she find a powerful enough man to become her husband
and “protector.” She had married and then separated from the Duke of
Brabant, considered too weak and too close a relative, so this marriage
had needed a papal dispensation. This had still not been granted when
she married the powerful Duke of Gloucester, brother of Henry V of
England. This forced her to change tack and petition the pope to annul
her previous marriage. Pressured by Philip and her rivals in Flanders, the
pope refused, which annulled her marriage to Gloucester. War was
avoided, since without the English she could not muster enough military
support. Instead, a peace agreement was imposed, stating that Philip’s
claim was strong enough to grant him administration of her estates while
she lived, and inherit them when she died. Poor Jacqueline, ground down
by patriarchal norms of succession.
Through the late Middle Ages the major monarchies of western and
northern Europe became more statelike. Then came a “state-swallowing”
 A Thousand Years of Europe 187

phase whereby bigger states swallowed up the smaller. Norman Davies

has studied thirty vanished kingdoms in Europe.11 His cases are too di-
verse and sprawl over many centuries, from Visigoth Toulouse to the So-
viet Union, but he distinguishes five ways in which they disappeared:
implosion (only the USSR), conquest (ten to twelve of his cases), dynas-
tic merger (three to four cases), liquidation, which is difficult to separate
from conquest (three cases), and “infant mortality,” a very short-lived
state unable to establish roots (one case). Conquest and liquidation dom-
inated. War was the main cause of state mortality.
He identifies no fewer than twelve successive Burgundian realms,
vanishing and resurrected with differing territories between 410 and
1477. Burgundies were either destroyed in battle, partitioned by more
powerful neighbors, or subordinated to the kingdom of France or the
German Empire by marriage alliances or threats of war. There was often
a tipping point when vassals would desert the duchy and declare alle-
giance to someone else. Yet some Burgundian domains continued to exist
as part of other realms or as small independent rump states. Resurrection
occurred through the temporary weakness of the neighbors or shrewd or
fortunate marriages and vassals switching allegiances. The greatest Duke
of Burgundy was the last one, Charles le Téméraire, usually translated as
“the Bold,” but “the Reckless” would be the correct translation. He
began expansion by using the wealth of his core domains to buy up terri-
tories, but then he switched to wars to consolidate his dispersed domains
into a single territorial state. But he became reckless, alienating all his
neighbors at once. He lost a series of battles against them and was killed
in battle in 1477, leaving only his daughter as heir. The king of France
and the emperor offered their sons in marriage; the emperor won and
swallowed up Burgundy. Burgundy continues to be famous today despite
having no administrative status within France because of the swallowing
of its fine wines. In earlier centuries, swallowing had usually been more
violent.
The United Kingdom has involved a sequence of stages not yet fin-
ished. The Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England
in the eleventh century and then, as Anglo-Norman feudal lords, they
conquered much of Wales and Ireland, eliminating some chiefdoms and
persuading others that only English rule could guarantee their protec-
tion. The English built strong castles to entrench their rule, but it took
until the reign of Henry VIII to establish English-language administra-
tion and law over Wales. More fractious resistance in Ireland led to civil
188 A Thousand Years of Europe

wars. Then the sixteenth-century schism of Christendom (discussed

below) spread to the British Isles. In the 1640s on the Irish battlefields of
the Civil War, the Catholics and Royalists were destroyed by Cromwell,
which led to a “Protestant Ascendancy” over the largely Catholic Irish in
the following century. But since Catholicism was deeply implanted in the
Irish population, many Irish lords were offering only token allegiance to
the Protestant Ascendancy. The island continued to simmer.
The independent Scottish kingdom, assisted by French and Spanish
monarchs, survived repeated wars with England but became divided by
its own sixteenth-century religious schism. Yet when Elizabeth I of En­
gland died childless, the Scottish Protestant King James VI was her most
direct successor. English political leaders had anticipated this, and, fear-
ful of a disputed succession, had already negotiated his succession as
James I, the first of the Stuart dynasty. Fighting in Ulster (Northern Ire-
land) culminated in the “Flight of the (Catholic) Earls” abroad. English
domination of Ireland and Scotland strengthened with the crushing of
three Catholic Jacobite uprisings, in Ireland in 1689 and in Scotland in
1715 and 1745. The appeal of the Jacobites was limited by their Catholic
leanings, while the Scottish clan lords, like feudal lords, could choose
their allegiance. Many chose the likely winners, the English, like my
mother’s clan, the Campbells.
The “Plantation of Ulster” established settlements of English and
Scottish Protestants, which forced Catholics off their lands. An Irish up-
rising with French assistance was crushed in 1798, followed in 1800 by
the Acts of Union, which created a single United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland. Its empire came to rule a quarter of the world, with
considerable input from Scots. The Irish potato famine further lessened
the popularity of British rule in Catholic Ireland. After a period of peace-
ful Anglo-Irish struggle over home rule within the Westminster Parlia-
ment, another Irish rising, in 1916, was repressed, but subsequent
guerilla warfare forced the British government to grant Irish indepen-
dence, except for majority Protestant Ulster in the north, which re-
mained in the retitled state, the Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland. This state remains today, but rival national sentiments, divisions
over union with Europe, and the folly of English leaders—all more
peaceful causes—have generated a Disunited Kingdom, including the
looming possibility of Scottish independence. War, dynastic accidents,
and the choices of vassals had predominated earlier, before they were
trumped by religious divisions.
 A Thousand Years of Europe 189

In Europe, as elsewhere, the winners of the wars wrote history,

whereas the losers were usually absorbed into the winners’ culture. Eu-
ropeans’ collective memory of war in history was glorious and profitable,
and their institutionalized culture was bellicose, so they kept waging
war—selectively recorded path dependence. In the east, the winners were
the Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman monarchs. In the north, Danish
and Swedish expansion brought them successive regional dominance.
Peoples were swallowed up by the Spanish, French, and English empires,
as Catalans, Provençals, and the Welsh could attest. The swallowers were
states, not the earlier bands of lords.

Phase One: The Hundred Years’ War

There were three main phases of war in Europe. The first feudal phase is
exemplified by the Hundred Years’ War, fought between English and
French rulers. France was divided into many baronial domains and cities
that pledged allegiance to either or both kings, since the English dynas-
ties had originated in France and still had many French domains. During
the reign of the incompetent Edward II, England lost most of its posses-
sions in France. His son Edward III determined to strengthen his posi-
tion at home by fighting successful wars. He first fought a successful war
against the Scots. Then when Charles IV of France died in 1328 without
a direct male heir, both Edward and Philip, Count of Valois, claimed the
throne. Philip had the advantage of being in Paris and had himself
crowned king there, as Philip VI. Relations worsened and war was de-
clared in 1337. Edward invaded in 1340, focusing first on securing the
loyalty of Low Country lords. Both sides claimed a legal dynastic claim
to the Crown and expected that lords in France would help them. The
loyalty of their soldiers was dynastic, to their lord or prince, not their
country. Much of the population was indifferent about which dynasty
ruled them. When the church bells rang for victories, the crowds
cheered, but when the taxes to pay for war were raised or when their
sons were taken for soldiers, they preferred peace. But the people had
negligible power in war-and-peace decisions. Parliaments representing
the upper classes had just a little.
Campaigns were intermittent over a century. In the Crécy campaign
of 1346 Edward had about 15,000 professional soldiers, the French had a
more mixed force of mercenaries and vassals, perhaps 40,000 strong. At
Poitiers in 1356 around 6,000 English confronted about 11,000 French.
190 A Thousand Years of Europe

As a result of these battles, Edward was able to recover the domains in

France that his father had lost in return for renouncing his claim to the
French Crown. At Agincourt in 1415, 6,000 to 9,000 English under
Henry V confronted 12,000 to 30,000 French. All three battles produced
asymmetric casualties. The English won all three, thanks partly to their
Welsh longbow archers, who could fire more rapidly than French cross-
bowmen, but also partly to well-chosen defensive positions. The English
suffered fewer than 1,000 killed at Agincourt, and probably only a few
hundred at Crécy and Poitiers. The French lost several thousand each
time. At Agincourt 1,600 French knights and perhaps 8,000 infantry and
archers lost their lives. At the final battle of the war at Castillon in 1453,
both armies were under 10,000, and the casualties were again asymmet-
ric, but this time they favored the French, as they had also at the preced-
ing small battles of Orléans, Patay, and Formigny. In all seven battles
most casualties came from the killing of troops beginning to flee, in what
Randall Collins has called “forward panic.”
Yet battles were expensive and monarchs had limited resources. In
theory war would bring land and serfs, and so more taxes for the mon-
arch, but that depended on victory. In the meantime, one might borrow
from bankers. Debts to them were often defaulted, but this lowered the
chance of borrowing again. Vassals might rally around their king’s call to
arms, but if war dragged on, opposition at court and parliaments ap-
peared, and sometimes popular discontent. Struggles between war and
peace factions began, crosscut by struggles between “ins” and “outs” at
court. For the English Lords Appellant, exclusion from power was pri-
mary, and their favoring war was secondary, in their attack on Richard II’s
“false counsellors.” In contrast, the French Marmouset faction was more
focused on the war, consistently advising Charles V to refuse battle and
let the English exhaust themselves in marches and skirmishes. The conse-
quence was cyclical warfare. A campaign would be ended by financial
stress. A period of peace would ensue, during which resources were built
up again. Then might come another campaign.
Most campaigns consisted not of large battles but of sieges, am-
bushes, and chevauchées, mounted raids, by small forces. The largest was
the campaign leading up to Crécy, in which the whole English army
spread out while marching across the French countryside, stealing what-
ever they could carry, burning what they could not, raping and killing all
who objected, devastating a swathe of territory forty-three kilometers
wide over a length of a thousand kilometers. Such atrocities contrasted
 A Thousand Years of Europe 191

starkly with chivalric ideals. The English wanted to join battle, the
French wanted to avoid it. But the chevauchée, which Edward had seen
Scots raiders practice in the north of England, was designed to show that
the French king could not protect his subjects and so did not deserve to
rule. Eventually, this forced him into battle on ground that Edward had
chosen. Edward won, as did the defense in almost all the pitched battles
of the Hundred Years’ War.12
Chevauchées were useful when fighting abroad. The French king
could with some difficulty finance his army by taxation and through his
vassals. The English, like all medieval armies fighting abroad, had to live
off the land. As always, those suffering most were local civilians. The in-
frequency of campaigns also led to bands of discharged mercenaries rav-
aging areas of France, with names such as Smashing Bars and Arm of
Iron, extorting, raping, and murdering. Between 1356 and 1364 over 450
localities were forced to pay ransoms to them. There were two main mo-
tives, greed for wealth and sex, and the desire to inflict such terror on the
inhabitants that they and their supposed protectors would submit. In this
war both the English and French complained about the taxes required,
but the French also suffered whole regions of pillage, rape, famine, and
consequent disease. Neither people benefited from the war. It was not
rational in terms of their ends. Indeed, few benefited other than finally
the French king and his clients. Their state got control of the territory
we know as France.
Wars were interspersed with treaties, typically stipulating that one
side should control a disputed region in exchange for an indemnity paid
to the other. States were cash-strapped, barons and cities enjoyed auton-
omy, and defections occurred as vassals tried to judge which side would
win. Succession crises, civil wars, peasant revolts, campaigns against the
Scots and Flemish, and the Black Death intermittently disrupted the bal-
ance of power. Joan of Arc gave a brief ideological boost to the French
armies. The fortunes of war swung around, but the French had the ad-
vantage of fighting on home turf while the defection of the Duke of Bur-
gundy from the English cause in 1435 led to the final victories of the
French Crown. Six hundred years to the day after the victory at Agin-
court, English nationalism was rekindled with exhibitions and commem-
orative services in churches around the country. No one dared tell them
that the French had won the war.
This war lasted so long that it saw two military revolutions. It began
as a war of feudal levies led by mounted knights and then shifted toward
192 A Thousand Years of Europe

infantry-archer commoners, in effect professional soldiers, signing on re-

peatedly for campaigns. War became deadlier as fewer gentlemanly rules
prevailed. Since infantry and archers were cheaper than knights, they
could be recruited and expended in larger numbers. The expense of war
brought a little more power to the tax-authorizing parliaments and estate
assemblies. Finally, the war saw the start of a second revolution, when
cannons operated by specialists were introduced, which proved decisive
for the first time at Castillon. As cannon gun barrels got longer and pow-
der improved, there was more state investment in weaponry and a
greater ability to knock down the castles of the barons, and major states
became consolidated.13 The war started with princes fighting in battle.
By its end they had retreated to the rear or remained in their courts.
Decisions for war and peace were made by the prince, usually in con-
sultation with his principal barons. When taxes had to be raised, assem-
blies representing the upper classes might be consulted, though these
were often manipulated by bribery and threats. The prestige and political
skills of the prince or his principal counselors were important. Howard
says European decisions for war reveal “a superabundance of analytical
rationality” since humans are “reasoning” creatures.14 He offers no evi-
dence for this claim. Luard lists 229 wars during the period 1400–1559
and says he never found any serious attempt to calculate in advance the
chances of victory.15 The combatants had clear goals, but they were care-
less about how they achieved them, for to fight was honorable if in a just
cause, whatever the outcome. Righteousness outweighed prudence. War
was what you declared when your honor had been affronted or when you
saw an opportunity to claim long-nurtured rights. Either might bring
economic rewards. The prince hoped he could raise the necessary mon-
ies and men, and then “in hope and in faith” he sent his forces into battle
with however many turned up. Luard probably exaggerated, but the
means of war were not often carefully calculated. Overoptimism was
widespread, as we shall see in most of my cases.
War was in theory the way to wealth, but at the same time it was a
source of honor and glory, requiring courage. As in the case of Rome, it
is difficult to separate greed and glory. John Lynn comments that honor
pervaded war, interpersonal disputes, and tournaments alike: “Honor is
best interpreted as reputation, and for the knight this meant appearing as
an example of the warrior virtues. Aristocratic men of medieval and early
modern Europe valued their honor so highly that they gambled their
lives to maintain it even in what would seem to modern eyes as frivolous
 A Thousand Years of Europe 193

matters. Men could fight for no other reason than to avoid any suspicion
of cowardice. In fact, a sense of masculine honor led to the common, al-
most casual nature of violence.”16 So emotions were less idiosyncratic
and personal, more the product of monarchical and aristocratic culture.
Calculation was difficult since it was unclear how many men a prince
could turn out. If 5,000, he went with them; if 10,000, he could be more
ambitious. The cost of mercenaries could be calculated, but hiring them
might involve powers of taxation that only some rulers had. Rulers took
care to assemble specialists—miners, carpenters, blacksmiths, cooks, and
so on. Once total numbers were known, the logistics of assembling and
transporting them to the campaigning zone (which for the English in-
volved hiring ships and their crews), supplying them, and provisioning
and stabling thousands of horses were all carefully planned. Getting the
soldiers into the campaign and toward battle was the zone of calculation,
the phase of domination by the quartermasters, as was the case in all the
wars I have chronicled.
Once in battle, calculation became difficult again. The absence of
much drilling meant that orders were not easily changed and tactics
could not be flexible. Outcomes were attributed by chroniclers to com-
manders’ tactical mistakes, ill-disciplined knightly jostling for a chance at
glory, or interacting with unexpected battlefield ecology. This was a war
of movement in which commanders had difficulty controlling their lieu-
tenants and were often unsure of the enemy’s position or the local ecol-
ogy. Battles turned on failing to spot sharpened stakes concealed in
ditches, or cavalry getting bogged down in mud or marsh, or enemy
forces hidden by a wood or a hill emerging suddenly to attack flanks or
rear. Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt, Baugé, Patay, and Castillon were all ex-
amples of these contingencies. Defense was usually better than attack if
undertaken in well-chosen positions. The combination of honor, over-
confidence, impetuosity, lack of drilling, difficulties of maneuvering
troops in battle, frequent mistakes, variable élan, and unexpected terrains
limits rational choice theory’s credibility as an explanation of the conduct
of medieval war.
Warfare was not all Hobbesian anarchy, however. It was partially
regulated through kin networks and shared Christian norms, even if
these were not always respected. Anyone could aggress but only if he had
legal cause.17 There were norms of conduct in war. In 1513 the Scottish
king James IV gave the English a month’s notice of his invasion of north-
ern England, in accordance with his understanding of the rules of war.
194 A Thousand Years of Europe

We see this as irrational, for it gave the northern English lords time to
assemble their forces, at a time when Henry VIII and his army were away
fighting in France. Gentlemanly behavior proved James’s undoing. At
Flodden in Northumberland he was killed and his army routed, suppos-
edly with 10,000 dead.
Norms concerned campaigns, battles, ransoms, prisoners and civil-
ians, truces, and the division of spoils. These all appeared in Henry V’s
1415 Agincourt campaign. Henry, like Edward III before him, had de-
cided on war for basically political reasons. His father, Henry IV, had un-
easily weathered numerous rebellions, and he determined to secure a
reputation for strength with victories abroad. The English landed unop-
posed in France despite the invasion’s being well advertised, for the
French king Charles VI could not finance a large force to sit idly by
waiting for the English to show themselves somewhere along the coast.
The first action was the siege of the port city of Harfleur, necessary for
resupplies from England. Eventually the city surrendered and opened its
gates to the English, but the terms of surrender included the proviso that
if the French army arrived to lift the siege in two weeks, the surrender
would be rescinded. Henry agreed—such agreements were common in
sieges. The city gates stayed open, and Henry could have marched in.
But he waited, honoring the agreement. The French did not come, and
so he took the city and then marched north.
In the weeks following, a larger French army shadowed Henry’s sol-
diers as they advanced northeastward, ignoring opportunities to ambush
the straggling English columns. The two armies were in implicit agree-
ment to wait until they both showed readiness by drawing up in battle for-
mation, which the English did near Agincourt and the French accepted.
The legitimacy of one’s cause was demonstrated by proper military com-
portment—for this was a struggle over who was the rightful king of
France, divinely anointed. That involved agreeing implicitly to the rules of
war.18 The English won the battle and captured many prisoners. Before
the campaign had begun, English ransom norms had been announced.
Henry declared he would take a third of the receipts. Captains were enti-
tled to a share of the ransoms gained by their own troops, and prisoners of
high rank would be handed over to the Crown in return for compensation
being paid to the captor. Aristocratic honor meant that knights should
choose ransoming over killing each other. Nor should they kill prisoners.
Yet at Agincourt, on Henry’s direct command, the English massacred
their prisoners after the first French attack failed. This was in keeping
 A Thousand Years of Europe 195

with his ruthless character (Shakespeare’s portrayal of him is Tudor pro-

paganda), but the English claimed this action was the result of their see-
ing a second attack being prepared. Outnumbered, they did not want to
spare soldiers for guard duty, or risk losing control of the prisoners. The
French did marshal their troops for a second attack, then hesitated and
fled. Contemporary chroniclers seem not to have condemned Henry.
There were norms and agreed-on exceptions. Both sides spared for ran-
som the wellborn and wealthy. At least 320 French were ransomed at Ag-
incourt, with the wealthiest removed to England. When the French king
John II was captured at Poitiers, his ransom equaled the English king’s
taxes for three years. That the French paid it, rather than choose another
king (as the Chinese probably would have done), indicated the legitimacy
of monarchy. Defeated aristocrats were rarely deprived of their estates
except in civil wars. Some did get killed, but not many, so when the
major states had swallowed the minnows and turned to fighting each
other, it was still not very dangerous for the lords.
It was different for expendable foot soldiers and the poorest
knights—or nonnoble women, who were often raped. War for the lower
ranks was risky but an acceptable alternative to dire poverty. By the time
of Agincourt, the army was waged, although only for the duration of the
campaign. Most then reenlisted for the next one. It was a summer job,
the campaigning season when armies could live off the countryside. The
wage for an archer was sixpence per day, a living wage, even if only half
as much as the lowest men-at-arms. Above that, payment varied by aris-
tocratic rank. Loot offered more profit. The Duke of Gloucester op-
posed a peace treaty with France, declaring “the poor knights, squires
and archers of England, who are idle and sustain their estate by war, are
inclined to war.”19 Looting was not dishonorable and was a motive for
launching wars into others’ lands.
European armies were minimally drilled—unlike Chinese armies
since about 400 bce. Crossbows and artillery could not manage repetitive
volleys of fire; the first line would fire and retreat to reload behind the
second line, who would step forward and fire, and so on. In the seven-
teenth century most European armies finally did adopt volley fire and
were highly drilled. They then overtook the Chinese in cannon technol-
ogy. Before the seventeenth century, had they ever met, Chinese armies
would have destroyed the Europeans, and not only because they had
much bigger numbers.20 European logistical organization was minimal.
The soldiers lived off the countryside or from their pay, buying food
196 A Thousand Years of Europe

from merchants who followed the armies. Supplying large armies was
difficult.
Civilians were rarely in principle considered the enemy. Peasants
were looted and maltreated because that was the lot of peasants, but
merchants of countries at war traded with each other, and passports were
issued to travel to the enemy’s country. Massacres were inflicted on here-
tics and on stormed resisting towns, as was traditional. Wars were settled
by treaties, which were sometimes kept, sometimes not. When the En­
glish commander in France, the renowned John Talbot, Earl of Shrews-
bury, was captured at Patay, his release required that he never wear
armor in battle again. His honor compelled him to comply. At Castillon,
then in his sixties, he charged at French cannons. His horse was hit by a
cannonball, and he fell to the ground, where he was finished off by a foot
soldier with an axe to his bare head.21 This was a continent of war and
gentlemen’s agreements.

Phase Two: Religious Warfare

Violence was ratcheted upward in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries by two changes, one in ideological power, the other in eco-
nomic-ecological power. Christendom had been the guarantor of order in
Europe, although perennially riven by the contradiction between Christ’s
message of salvation for all and the worldly power, wealth, and corruption
of the Church itself. Heresies had appeared throughout medieval times
and been savagely repressed. Now perceptions of Church corruption grew.
Luther’s nailing of his Ninety-five Theses to the door of Wittenberg
Castle Church in 1517 was then the catalyst for schism, since it became
linked to broader underlying forces. Simplifying complexity for the sake
of brevity, there was an elective affinity, as Max Weber argued, between
Protestantism and emerging merchant capitalism, but there was also a
geopolitical affinity between Protestantism and the princes of northwest-
ern Europe.22 These were Protestantism’s two main constituencies of
support.
For over 150 years after Luther’s defiance, Europe saw major conflict
between the Catholic Church and Protestant sects, all possessing rival
transcendent ideologies claiming divinely inspired truth and seeking to
impose it on others. Religious toleration was rare in Europe (unlike the
Mongol Empires). Jews survived, but at risk of pogroms. Yet most states
came to contain both Protestants and Catholics. In states whose rulers
 A Thousand Years of Europe 197

adhered to Catholicism, thousands of Protestant heretics were killed

after torture on the rack or public burning at the stake. Burning could
produce up to an hour of screaming, depending on the quality of the
wood, as the victim died in front of a baying crowd. Protestant rulers
also burned Catholics, and both burned single women denounced as
witches. ISIS executions today pale by comparison. Decapitation was
then the swiftest and kindest form of execution, reserved for aristocrats
or those to whom the king granted leniency.
Doctrinal conformity mattered. Whether you lived or died might
depend on whether you would affirm that in the Eucharist the body of
Christ was actually present or merely symbolized, or whether only the
priest or the whole congregation could fully participate in the ceremony,
or whether the Eucharist should be celebrated at all. Though the people
were largely ignorant of such abstruse doctrines, they might be attached
to traditional rituals or a Marian cult or, on the Protestant side, to sim-
plicity of worship or hatred of clerical corruption. A Protestant intelli-
gentsia consisting of what Owen calls a transnational ideological network
(TIN) published pamphlets and translated the Bible into national ver-
naculars that were smuggled abroad.23 This was a version of the “two-
step” theory of communication, passed in this case from the literate to
the illiterate. The literate, defined as those who could sign their names in
parish registers, were overwhelmingly male. Male literacy rates in En­
gland and Germany doubled in the first half of the sixteenth century, to
the range of 16–20 percent. By 1650 this had increased to 33 percent,
and by 1700 to over 50 percent. That rise was a precondition for the
spread of Protestantism across Europe, but the Protestant religion also
asserted that the people should be able to read the word of God, the
Bible. Most literate men could read short pamphlets of the intelligentsia,
and communication to the masses was through sermons delivered in
churches, chapels, and public squares to literate and illiterate alike.
Though Owen suggests Catholics had their own TIN, their networks
were mainly through the Church and the holy orders, and Catholic
countries had much lower literacy rates.
Protestantism and Catholicism could mobilize mass movements. War
became inevitable when Catholic and Protestant rulers sought to forcibly
convert dissidents. This provoked neighbors to intervene to protect their
coreligionists, which led to regime-change wars. So began the first of
four waves of ideological warfare that Owen identifies over the last five
hundred years. He focuses on forcible regime change. In the period 1520
198 A Thousand Years of Europe

to 1678 he finds seventy-nine states targeted by such interventions, of

which thirty-one cases had been preceded by civil war or strife in the tar-
get country. Luard lists all eighty-nine wars waged between 1559 and
1648.24 Half were fought over religion, half were more secular. Luard
again finds little calculation beforehand of the odds of victory: “Over-
optimism distorted judgements: faith in the national destiny, or in God’s
benevolence, or in the righteousness of the cause brought persistence in
the wars which in the end brought ruin to the country.”25
Sixteenth-century flare-ups culminated in the Thirty Years’ War of
1618 to 1648. Rulers did not take to the field except for King Gustavus
Adolphus of Sweden, and the generals remained out of range of the guns.
Armies mixed conscripts and mercenaries, typically over 100,000 men,
though only up to 30,000 could be mobilized for a single battle. Though the
main direct motives were religious hatreds, it was the nature of the war that
produced most casualties. Infantry and most cavalry were armed with mus-
kets, backed by artillery batteries. Since soldiers still stood upright in battle,
casualties mounted. But civilian casualties were worse. Armies lived off the
land, pillaging vast swathes of territory to survive. As the war dragged on
and new armies entered, the land could not provision all soldiers and civil-
ians, and so civilians died. Famines and plagues as well as the sacking of vil-
lages and cities caused massive civilian deaths. Germany was the main
theater of war. Twenty percent of its total population may have died, a figure
that reached 60 percent in war zone provinces. Total casualties were around
8 million. Notorious episodes were worsened by religious hatred, such as
the massacres committed by a Catholic army at Magdeburg in 1631 and by
Cromwell’s Protestants at Drogheda in 1649. In earlier periods sporadic
outbreaks of heresy had brought occasional horrors, but this period saw per-
sistent savagery, part religious, part survival, part motivated by greed.
The second cause of the war was a geopolitical shift within the con-
tinent. Almost all Europe became involved. The war included geopoliti-
cal balancing against another perceived attempt at hegemony by the
Holy Roman Emperor, whose Habsburg dynasty at that point also ruled
Catholic Spain, much of Italy, and the Spanish Netherlands. Scheidel ar-
gues that any attempt at hegemony was doomed to fail, but that is not
how the other states saw it.26 The Habsburgs seemed to particularly
threaten German princes of the federal empire. Resistance began in
Bohemia and then spread to Protestant princes of north and western
Germany, who were then aided by the major Protestant states of Hol-
land, Denmark, Sweden, and England. These states had been empowered
 A Thousand Years of Europe 199

by two economic-ecological shifts. Agricultural technology could now

turn over the heavier, rain-watered soils of the northwest, while open-
seas navigation generated trade from the Atlantic and Baltic that rivaled
that from the Mediterranean. Protestant rulers and noble clients also
profited by the seizure of monastic estates. Geopolitical power was shift-
ing from the Mediterranean to the northwest of Europe for ecological-
economic reasons. This proved a lasting European trend.
The beliefs and dynastic problems of rulers also mattered. In
England, Henry VIII’s marriages and reproductive problems left him un-
able to produce a male successor. This forced him toward Protestantism,
since the pope would not annul his serial marriages. Henry was a waver-
ing Protestant, commanding the burning of fervent Catholics and Protes-
tants alike. The short-lived rule of his one son, the boy Edward VI,
briefly burned Catholics. His successor, Mary, burned Protestants, but
Elizabeth finished off all but secret Catholics. These were all commit-
ments to a value rationality that today would be considered unreasonable.
Geopolitical balancing crossed religious lines in only two cases. First,
Protestant Hungary allied with the Muslim Ottoman Empire to counter
Catholic Austrian and Polish attacks. Subsequently, Habsburg armies
fought for the Catholic cause, while Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and English
forces mixed geopolitical and religious reasons for intervening on the
Protestant side. The geopolitical goal of English rulers was to prevent an
alliance between the two major Catholic powers, the Habsburg Empire
and France. When this policy worked, the English need to join the wars
lessened. Since the Habsburg Empire was challenged by its Protestant
princes, it built up large armies. And since that menaced French rulers
too, the alliance dreaded by Protestants never materialized, and Catholic
France prioritized geopolitics over religion, once its internal Huguenot
(Protestant) problem was settled by compromise. To counter the power
of the emperor, the French king helped finance the Protestant armies,
and then in the 1630s French armies fought alongside them. This coali-
tion turned the tide, and Habsburg hegemony was thwarted. French rul-
ers obviously did calculate the odds of alternative options. Other rulers
were not without calculation, but they allied with coreligionists.
Thus, the war had several causes: mutually hostile religious ideolo-
gies, a shift in economic exploitation of different ecologies, geopolitical
shifts, and the domestic politics of rulers. The war was worsened by mili-
tary and ecological factors, but now Europe remained a multistate sys-
tem. Rome could not return, says Scheidel.27
200 A Thousand Years of Europe

Three treaties, signed in 1648 by 109 European state delegations,

sealed what was essentially a Protestant-French victory. The treaties,
known as the Peace of Westphalia, established a precedent for ending
wars through a diplomatic congress. In theory there was now peaceful
coexistence among sovereign states, backed by a balance of power and a
norm against interference in each other’s domestic affairs. These princi-
ples became the norms of modern international law, although they have
often been flouted in practice. The treaties confirmed the Latin tag Cuius
regio, eius religio, “whose realm, his religion”—each ruler could choose
the religion of his (or her) lands, firming up monarchical power and
boosting the more statist Lutheran and Anglican versions of Protestant-
ism. Europe remained Christian, but that no longer signified a single
faith. Most of the treaties’ clauses confirmed the sovereignty of Germa-
ny’s many tiny states. The settlement caused mass migration of minori-
ties to states controlled by their coreligionists, which increased the
homogeneity of states, thereby making it easier to raise proto-national
armies and reducing dependence on foreign mercenaries. Many extol the
“Westphalian System” as a newborn geopolitical system, but this is exag-
gerated. Nor was it a shift from a Hobbesian to a Kantian form of anar-
chy, as Wendt argues.28 It was a return to limited warfare, if between
larger armies. Indeed, the consolidation of states and their finances into
war machines continued through the centuries before and after 1648.
Kalevi Holsti and Evan Luard show that between 1648 and 1789, the
number of wars declined a little.29 Most wars were between the major
powers, typically lasted several years, and were inconclusive. The main
issues were disputed borders, followed by control of maritime trade and
strategic naval ports; dynastic issues had fallen to third place. No wars
were now fought over religion. Wars became more capital-intensive, so
states became more revenue-conscious and centralized. Mercantilism
saw the wealth of the world as finite, and more wars were conducted for
economic goals. Rulers believed that acquiring more territory would
provide more soldiers and taxes, while navigation would secure more
wealth through expansion into the world. Sovereigns and their advisers
initiated action, the people being irrelevant, except that the more pros-
perous classes represented in the English Parliament and Dutch mer-
chant elites played an important role, helping establish a “blue-water”
naval-centered policy, focusing less on European commitments. This was
to favor the island British in their global struggle against France, since
France was split into “two Frances,” one facing the continent, urging
 A Thousand Years of Europe 201

army expansion, the other facing the Atlantic, favoring naval expansion.
French rulers never quite managed both at once.
In reaction to the wars of religion, war became more regulated. The ef-
fects on civilians lessened. Army size increased as armies developed their
own depots and supply chains, no longer living off the land. Aristocratic
honor and rules of war restrained savagery. Cities were not sacked, nor their
inhabitants slaughtered. There were debates among intellectuals about the
causes and conduct of wars and numerous treaties ending wars, and inter-
national agreements over ransoming prisoners were applied to common
soldiers as well to as aristocrats. Emeric de Vattel, an early theorist of inter-
national law, claimed that “the Nations of Europe almost always carry on
war with great forbearance and generosity.” Eighteenth-century wars were
usually fought for clear and limited goals and ended with negotiated trea-
ties. Wars were planned; they rarely occurred as a result of misunderstand-
ings, confusions, or accidents. This period did resemble Realist rational
calculation of means. Yet war did not do much good for the people.
Wars were just if committed by a legitimate ruler for a legitimate
cause that could not be achieved through institutional legal recourse.
Hugo Grotius declared, “Where the power of law ceases, there war be-
gins.”30 Yet war was still considered normal, and rulers’ geopolitical ambi-
tions remained: Swedish and French monarchs attempted regional
hegemony, and major rulers conspired to partition the minor out of exis-
tence. For “Louis XIV and his court war was, in his early years at least, lit-
tle more than a seasonal variation on hunting,” notes Howard.31 Louis
himself said, “I shall not attempt to justify myself. Ambition and glory are
always pardonable in a prince.”32 Material considerations were not pri-
mary among noble officers. They raised their own regiments, and the ex-
pense normally outweighed spoils received. Noblemen and monarchs
pursued la gloire to demonstrate their honor and status. Montaigne wrote,
“The proper, sole, and essential life [for] one of the nobility of France is
the life of a soldier.” Courage was prized, but it had to be visibly demon-
strated, and so the casualty rate among officers was high.33
The soldiers were drawn from the lower classes by the pay. Officers
considered them men without honor, without aspirations for social status
or commitment to the cause, the dregs of society. They had arrived there
through conscription or poverty and rarely showed initiative in battle.
Only coercion could make them face the enemy. So intensive drilling
and harsh discipline ruled European armies in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, ending the yelling that had whipped up the spirits of
202 A Thousand Years of Europe

soldiers in earlier battles. Soldiers had to hear officers’ orders. Disci-

plined, repetitive, rhythmic collective movement reinforced regimental
cohesion through “muscular bonding,” which helped soldiers confront
death as a collective physical unit.34 Many preferred to desert.
Rulers of the major powers tried to calculate the odds of victory but,
given the rough equality of power among them, mistakes were normal.
Little could be predicted of the behavior of allies, consent to war taxes
over long periods, or the commitment of soldiers. Mediation was not
used to prevent wars, but if wars dragged on inconclusively, it became a
way to end them.35 This was limited rationality.

Phase Three: The Colonial and Bourgeois

Revolutionary Eras
After 1500 came overseas imperialism. Conflicts between the first two
imperialists, Spain and Portugal, were settled by papal intervention (see
the next chapter). Later, naval wars were fought between Spain, France,
Holland, and Britain, partly over trading rights and monopolies, partly
over colonies. Though Europe was now full of great powers and their
clients, their wars could be deflected onto weaker colonial peoples, re-
ducing their zero-sum nature. Success in war in Europe entwined with
naval technology to generate transoceanic empires. The European pow-
ers had world-historical good luck since the major Asian empires were
stagnating or declining, while those in the Americas and Africa had not
yet risen far.
Repeated wars within Europe had nurtured armed forces able to
pour intensive firepower on an enemy. Improvements to guns and drills
enabled naval batteries to deliver coordinated, continuous fire, while the
integration of infantry, cavalry, and artillery became superior to that of
non-European forces. New weapons and formations were backed up by
reorganized state finances relying more on private capital. Those who
lent money to the state could secure low-risk profit. Yet the degree of
military superiority varied greatly. It was quickly achieved along coastal
Africa and in the Americas (see the next chapter). But superiority came
slowly and unevenly in Asia, where the Europeans encountered gunpow-
der empires and kingdoms mobilizing large, quite well-drilled armies
whose rulers were quick to adapt to Western ways of war. European na-
vies, sometimes of states, sometimes of private enterprises, and some-
times privateers—pirates—dominated the seacoasts, pressuring local
 A Thousand Years of Europe 203

rulers to become their clients. Some rulers were only too pleased with
client status. For example, in India the last century of the Mughal Em-
pire saw much military violence and political chaos, as succession dis-
putes raged and Persian and Maratha warlords and bandits joined in.
This chaos made the much stabler political rule and fiscal reliability of
the British East India Company seem attractive to many Indians, espe-
cially those involved in production and trade. Indeed, says Dalrymple, its
ability to get access to unlimited reserves of credit ultimately “enabled
the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern
world into the field” and to defeat even relatively well-organized Indian
states. European forces provided their military core, but they could not
have conquered such large empires without the greater numbers pro-
vided by their levies of native soldiers.36
Kaveh Yazdani analyzes the fall of the Indian states of Mysore and
Gujarat.37 Mysore’s rulers recognized the danger the British posed and
embarked on rapid military modernization helped by European merce-
nary officers and étatist industrialization. Yet they were under continuous
British pressure and had too little time. They won the first war against
the East India Company and drew the second war, but they were de-
feated in the third, losing their independence in 1810. The British un-
dermined Mysore industries a decade later. Gujarat was in some ways the
opposite case, a strong merchant oligarchy but a weak state, and so it was
easier to militarily dominate. The Europeans tended to escalate from re-
gime change to territorial conquest, pressured, they claimed, by unreli-
able, corrupt local rulers, but fundamentally because they could, except
at the far edge of their logistical reach, when confronted by two major, if
stagnant, powers—China and Japan.
Did wars inspire economic development in Europe, increasing the
rationality of war? We can first consider the development of European
science and technology with the aid of Leonid Grinin and Andrey Koro-
tayev’s list of inventions.38 They do not discuss whether innovations co-
incided with periods of peace or war, but the nature of the innovations
can tell us something. From 1100 to 1450 came clocks, spectacles, mech-
anization of water wheels, and horse-powered drilling machines, while
free labor and autonomous capitalism enabled rational profit-seeking
first exemplified in Italian luxury manufactures, accountancy methods,
and Renaissance artistic and scientific achievements. None was related to
or caused by war. From 1450 to 1660 the pace accelerated, through
open-sea navigation, artillery improvements, more coordinated armed
204 A Thousand Years of Europe

forces, windmills, water power, and commercialized agriculture, all rest-

ing on a new mechanical view of nature—a mixture of economic and
military drivers. The seventeenth century saw constitutional political re-
gimes, mass literacy, the rationalization of state finances and banks, large
mechanized shipyards, global trading companies, and naval dominance—
responses to pressures from all four sources of power, but including sub-
stantial military elements. But from about 1760 the Industrial Revolution
centered on economic developments of machinery, factories, fossil
fuel technology, steam power, chemical processes, and revolutionized
transport—all of mainly economic inspiration. Grinin and Korotayev
and many others stress competition among European states as inspiring
innovation: first Italy, Spain, and Portugal dominated, then Holland and
England, then Britain alone. Yet much of the diffusion of technologies
was peaceful and transnational. Scientific ideas and technological prac-
tices spread transnationally across the continent, as did the inventors and
skilled artisans themselves. War had no place in this aspect of the diffu-
sion. Competition among states and capitalists brought much creativity,
but war brought creativity largely to war-related economic sectors.
Were there positive, unintended spin-offs from military develop-
ment? As Charles Tilly and I have argued, the cost of warfare in taxes
and indebtedness led to political concessions of more representative gov-
ernment, which proved beneficial to the voicing of domestic policy
grievances. That was the first silver lining of the dark clouds of war,
traded off for the second silver lining, reforms to state finances that en-
abled new relations with finance capitalism using institutionalized debt
to more reliably fund wars (the main breakthroughs were Dutch and
British). There were also lesser economic boosts. Gunnery improve-
ments imparted metallurgical and chemical knowledge useful for other
metal products, military uniforms boosted textiles, and naval develop-
ments were simultaneously boosting war and trade. Yet the first stimulus
to the European economic breakthrough—the European Miracle—came
from greater commercialization of agriculture, which was largely unre-
lated to the military or war. This boosted population, workers’ wages and
farmers’ profits, and consumer demand for metal, textile, and pottery
goods—the three major early industries. Domestic trade based on mar-
ket principles continued to grow substantially. International trade grew,
organized more on mercantilist principles, which sought to establish mo-
nopolies by force. This did bear the imprint of war and produced win-
ners, like British capitalists, and losers, like Indian textile producers.
 A Thousand Years of Europe 205

European global expansion always produced losers as well as winners.

Take the plantations and factories of sugar production, models for the
factories of the Industrial Revolution—but staffed by slaves. Imperialism
itself, although highly profitable for a few, killed, enslaved, and exploited
far more. The possibility that major investment in military sectors of the
economy “crowded out” private investment in more productive sectors is
often suggested but difficult to prove. But it did not add much benefit for
the mass of the people of the imperial nations until the end of the nine-
teenth century. Nor did wars between the major European powers bring
benefit for the people. Though there were economic spin-offs from war,
they were not the central cause of the economic breakthrough to indus-
trialization. War was rarely rational in terms of ends for most people
during this extraordinary period of growth.
Harnessing militarism to science and capitalist finance and industry
did deliver clear military superiority from the end of the eighteenth
through the nineteenth centuries, producing increasingly one-sided co-
lonial battlefields. Yet stable postconquest rule proved more difficult than
in many earlier empires of history. In temperate zones colonial settlers
could replace native peoples’ rights to land, and in a pre-nationalist era
they could persuade some native elites to desert their former ruler and
collaborate if they perceived the Europeans would win. Ideology as a
driver of war shifted from religion to race. Racist beliefs were not new
among imperialists—as we saw in China. But European imperialism in-
volved transoceanic travel and contact with peoples who looked very dif-
ferent from Europeans. The combination of supposedly inferior
civilization and different physiognomies evoked the systemic model of
racial superiority that still flourishes today. This weakened the empires
politically and ideologically, preventing the assimilation of natives that
the Roman and Chinese empires had achieved. Racism was the ideologi-
cal wild card that shortened the life of European empires. There were
also many rival European empires, an additional weakness because their
existence was conducive to war between them.
Wars between Europeans now included colonial theaters. The
Habsburgs and Romanovs struck landward to the east, while Portuguese,
Spanish, Dutch, French, and British rulers all went overseas. Prussia de-
viated, a major power through swallowing neighbors in Europe (plus
later some colonies). But there were enough colonies to go round. Even
a war’s losers might get lesser gains. The colonial deflection of war
helped the powers delay the endgame of China and Japan, war to the
206 A Thousand Years of Europe

death and only one surviving state. Instead, there was balancing, led by
Britain and Russia, against the centrally located states, successively the
Habsburgs, France, and Germany, all seeking continental hegemony.
Balancing was made easier by the geography of the two fringe powers.
Britain with its island protection had developed a formidable navy and
industrial capitalism, while Russia had its enormous landmass, popula-
tion size, and winter. Neither could be easily invaded, neither rivaled the
other in Europe (though they did in central Asia), and, if allied, they
could deter a central power from fighting a two-front war. Unlike the
last ancient Chinese states, they were not tempted into a deal with the
French. Napoleon could not overcome their alliance, nor did Hitler later
(though he chose to confront the United States as well).
France lost most of its eighteenth-century wars; its debts and weak
taxation destroyed state finances and undid the monarchy. The revolution
added a new wave of ideological wars between absolute monarchy, consti-
tutional monarchy, and republics.39 Absolute monarchies ruled in Russia,
Austria, and Prussia, constitutional monarchies controlled Great Britain
and Holland, and republics in the Americas had overthrown monarchy
but were controlled by a slave-owning upper class under constitutions
designed to protect them from monarchy or the mob. But in France the
propertied classes lost control, which deepened ideological struggle.
Between 1770 and 1850, Owen identifies sixty-two attempts at re-
gime change in Europe. Twenty-eight were preceded by civil war or
lesser strife in the target country and thirty-six, a majority, were French
interventions. Interventions shot up in the 1790s and remained high in
the 1800s before declining after 1815, although they were briefly
boosted by the 1848 revolutions. Europe was again stunned by ideologi-
cal warfare. The shock was not confined to the carnage of war, though
this amounted to between 2.5 million and 3.5 million military deaths,
and civilian deaths anywhere between 750,000 and 3 million. There was
also shock at the revolutionary and nationalist ideologies unleashed by
the French armies. The French revolutionaries had developed a republic
of universal suffrage, executed their king and all the aristocrats they
could catch, raised banners of class struggle, and organized a levée en
masse, military mobilization arousing citizen nationalism.
Napoleon Bonaparte tamed this revolution, restored slavery to the
colonies, and politically restructured France. His attempted conquest of
Europe continued realpolitik struggle between the great powers, but it
was carried to new heights by nationalist ideology. As the manifestation
 A Thousand Years of Europe 207

of one of the great conquerors of history, Napoleon’s personality mat-

tered. Harold Parker identified six main motivational elements: his de-
sire to be master of all situations; the noble officer ethic of glory,
dazzling fame, and honor; enthusiasm for historical persons personifying
masterly qualities; his own brilliant victories and achievements seen as
part of this lineage; the opportunity to match past renown in the eyes of
his own and future audiences; and a compelling belief in his own destiny.
He had declared, “I am of the race that founds empires,” and he had en-
couraged the vision of himself as “the new Charlemagne,” flaunting rep-
licas of the sword and crown of Charlemagne, and conquering Germany
and Italy as Charlemagne had done.40 He consecrated his life to glory, to
domination in itself. His ends were less instrumental than value-laden. In
contrast, in mobilizing means he was highly rational, capable of master-
ing complex and dynamic political and military situations—though he
could not master England, and he invaded Russia against the advice of
his counselors. His boundless goals and his extraordinary military record,
his Russian folly and Wellington’s comment on Waterloo as “the nearest
run thing you ever saw in your life,” did not mean that the fall of his he-
gemony was inevitable, but it lasted only about ten years. The multistate
system was restored.
The scale of warfare had skyrocketed. In 1812 Napoleon mobilized
600,000 troops for his Russian campaign, and two years later the Ger-
man states and Russia combined to mobilize a million. Napoleon con-
quered continental Europe, raising commoners to kings; he was
welcomed by liberals abroad until disillusion set in over French domina-
tion. The overturning of the Bourbons in Spain had collateral effects in
Latin America, where revolutions arose against Spanish rule, as we will
see in the next chapter. European crowned heads trembled in fear of the
guillotine. Thus, the 1815 Congress of Vienna aimed at repressing radi-
calism so that monarchy could rest safe. The participants’ calculations
were weighted by fear more of domestic class struggle than of interstate
warfare. Since war might bring revolution, peace was better. France was
stripped only of Napoleon’s conquests and otherwise restored so as to
bolster the power of the restored monarchy. Authoritarian monarchies
developed top-down versions of mass mobilization armies. A second
fright from the 1848 revolutions led to monarchies introducing limited
degrees of representative government under top-down controls. For the
second time, transcendent ideologies led by a would-be hegemon had
been countered. Europe was experiencing a cyclical sequence of wars.
208 A Thousand Years of Europe

In the 1780s Germany still contained over three hundred states,

their existence largely protected by the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire.
But Napoleon crushed the empire and abolished the ecclesiastical and
many of the secular states and the imperial free cities. Most were
absorbed into a French-dominated confederation, but the Congress of
Vienna abolished this and decreed that Germany in 1815 consist only
of thirty-eight states and four free cities, in addition to the great powers
of Prussia and Austria. Then Prussia’s victories over Denmark and Aus-
tria in the 1860s enabled it to swallow up dozens more states, more often
through military intimidation than actual battle. This culminated in the
final act, the defeat of France in 1870, when Bavaria and Württemberg
“voluntarily” joined the Prussian federation, having seen what happened
to the Hanoverian and Saxon rulers who had resisted. By then most Ger-
man elites agreed that unification was necessary since small states could
no longer protect them. In Germany war had been the main destroyer
of the vanished kingdoms. Italy too was unified by the Kingdom of
Sardinia-Piedmont and Garibaldi’s republican forces through a series of
small wars against Austria and the other states, though the final capitula-
tion of the Papal States was through intimidated negotiation. States had
continued to vanish violently.
Between 1816 and 1992, Tanisha Fazal finds that 66 of the existing
207 states “died,” in the sense of losing control of foreign policy to an-
other ruler. Only 11 died after 1945. Of the dead, 40 percent had been
buffer states, and 50 of the 66 deaths (76 percent) occurred through mili-
tary violence. About half of these were later resurrected, such as the coun-
tries conquered by German forces in World War II. But 35 (70 percent)
of the permanently disappeared states died violently, predominantly Ger-
man, Italian, and Indian. She attacks IR models like “balancing” and does
not find that rival major powers sought to preserve buffer states between
them, since these were the most likely to die. Instead, a major neighboring
ruler would preempt another neighbor to acquire a buffer state they both
desired, even when this meant the two would become direct neighbors
with no buffer between them. Major rulers were just greedy, and war was
still the primary cause of vanishing kingdoms.41
The number of wars in Europe between 1815 and 1914 declined as a
response to the revolutionary period, though only by 13 percent.42 Wars
were also shorter. The Crimean War of 1853–56 was the deadliest be-
cause it involved several powers. Several Russian-Ottoman skirmishes
occurred, and then Crimea saw intervention by Britain and France for
 A Thousand Years of Europe 209

balancing reasons, to prop up the Ottoman Empire and prevent Russian

control of the Black Sea. The war produced over 500,000 military
deaths, two-thirds of them from disease. Russian and Ottoman civilian
deaths are unknown. None of the other five European interstate wars of
the century killed many civilians. The Austro-Prussian War lasted only
seven weeks but killed over 100,000 soldiers, mostly Austrian; the two
Schleswig Wars of 1848–51 and 1864, pitting Prussia against Denmark
(and its allies), killed under 3,000 soldiers; the Franco-Prussian War of
1870–71 killed about 180,000 soldiers (three-quarters of them French);
the 1878 Austrian seizure of Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Ottomans
cost just over 3,000 Austrian soldiers’ lives, two-thirds from disease,
while Ottoman deaths are unknown; and the Balkan Wars of 1912–13
killed about 140,000. These were quite short wars with decisive victors.
Except for the Balkan Wars, they were not very ideological and are
largely explicable in Realist terms. Yet during the nineteenth century
civil wars grew in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and in
Spain. Holsti classifies wars by their most dominant issue. He says wars
of national liberation against empires were in this era the most frequent,
dominant in 37 percent of wars. Territorial issues declined from 25 to
14 percent, while commercial and navigational issues declined from 14 to
4 percent.43 British-regulated free trade combined with pragmatic use of
tariffs by other states had largely replaced protectionist wars.
Further afield, Europeans were perpetually at war, yet rarely against
each other. There was a big if uncountable rise in the number of colonial
wars fought against the natives of other continents. Owen does not men-
tion that all his three ideological rivals, authoritarian monarchies, consti-
tutional monarchies, and republics, embarked on identical wars of
conquest, all installing repressive authoritarian rule over native peoples.
He excludes regime changes in the colonies, saying, “I limit targets to
sovereign states because such cases are most relevant to IR theory.”44
This is conforming to an academic discipline rather than explaining the
nature of war. He also excludes most early interventions by the British in
India and the Dutch in Southeast Asia since these were by private com-
panies. At its height in 1803 the British East India Company had an army
of 260,000—twice the size of the British army at the time. It fought
numerous wars, including big ones against the Gurkhas, Gujarat, and
Mysore, imposing regime change on them.45 Owen does not include re-
gime change imposed by Europeans in the Americas or by Japanese. The
excluded cases were ideological wars since the colonial powers claimed
210 A Thousand Years of Europe

they would elevate the savage and decadent races by imposing civiliza-
tion and the true word of God on them. Thus, Owen misses the longest-
lived wave of ideological regime change, colonialism.
There proved to be not much economic profit in most colonies, but
the aggressors did not want to be left out of the race—just in case. The
struggle was also for imperial status, a “place in the sun.” Deflecting war
onto the native peoples avoided major conflict with other imperial pow-
ers. The “Scramble for Africa” might have threatened this, but in 1885
fourteen powers—eleven European states, and Russia, the Ottomans, and
the United States—signed the Treaty of Berlin, which allowed the signa-
tories to claim an African territory if they could effectively patrol its bor-
ders. This set off a race by powers focused on their own expansion rather
than disputing anyone else’s. Despite a few MID incidents, almost all
Africa was claimed without inter-imperial wars. At the very end of the
nineteenth century, two non-European powers joined in: Japan attacked
imperial dependencies of China, and the United States joined the attacks
on China and destroyed the remaining Spanish Empire. Imperialism was
globally triumphant, at enormous human cost, by 1910. Then it fell apart.

The Two World Wars

This period culminated in the suicide of imperialism in the two deadliest
and least rational or profitable wars in history. As Table 10.1 reveals,
World War II had the highest absolute fatality rate and the highest annual
rate of fatalities, as well as the greatest genocidal component, of any war in
history. World War I had the second-highest annual level of fatalities in
history. There was little rationality on display in either of them. I discuss
soldiers’ experience of them in chapter 12, but here I deal briefly with
causes.46
In the decades before 1914, Europe seems to have had a stable geopo-
litical order centered on two great power alliances: the central powers,
Germany and Austria-Hungary, ranged against the Triple Entente of
Britain, France, and Russia. A balance of power between them seemed to
have secured peace in Europe. The two Balkan Wars of 1912–13 enlarged
Serbian ambition, to the alarm of Austria-Hungary. But the major powers
were sharing the spoils of Africa and Asia, the Anglo-German naval race
ended in 1912, and mass armies might deter war. But the great powers
and their clients were filling the entire space of Europe so that any war
between them would be disastrous.
 A Thousand Years of Europe 211

In July 1914 the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated

in Sarajevo by a cell of Serb nationalists, who bungled the operation but al-
most by accident managed to kill him. Trouble between Austria-Hungary
and Serbia was predictable, likely to lead to a Third Balkan War. But the as-
sassination crisis escalated during the next thirty-seven days to the Great
War, which engulfed almost the whole of the continent plus colonies else-
where. The two alliances held up, but in war not peace, as Russia, France,
and then Britain joined the Serb side, and Germany joined with Austria-
Hungary. This has been viewed by Realists as a failure of balancing alliances
amid power transitions, an inability to cope with the destabilizations posed
by Serbia’s rise in the Balkans, Russia’s rising military power, the decline of
the Habsburgs, and the transformation of Prussia into a globally ambitious
Germany. German rulers have been usually blamed most for the escalation,
especially by encouraging Austria-Hungary to fight. Yet the tyranny of his-
tory meant that war remained the default mode of diplomacy for all the
powers. If negotiations broke down, war was still normal. The cult of
the offensive sweeping high commands brought further danger. Thus, once
the crisis in Serbia hit and war loomed, the trigger-happy mobilizations of
Russia, Austria, and Germany reinforced one another too quickly for the
diplomats to open effective channels of negotiation—and Britain’s ultima-
tum to Germany to deter any invasion of Belgium came too late.
Almost all rulers believed the war would be won quickly by swift of-
fense. None had made plans for the massive industrial and military mo-
bilization that proved necessary. Nor had they made a plan B for a
negotiated peace: unconditional surrender or nothing, which yielded de-
cision making to the generals.47 Of course, the war showed how wrong
they were, for in the battles of 1914–18 defense triumphed over attack
on the Western Front, producing calamitous casualties, though there was
very little movement of fronts (see chapter 12). These might be consid-
ered understandable mistakes, except that the example of the carnage of
the U.S. Civil War was before them. Those who pressed for war believed
with arrogant condescension that this had been due to Americans being
amateurs at war (see chapter 11).
In volume 2 of The Sources of Social Power I offered a half-serious
“cock-up/foul-up” theory of how European states entered this war, em-
phasizing miscalculations on all sides.48 This now seems the orthodox
view, argued in different ways by Christopher Clark and Thomas Otte.49
Clark lays much of the blame for the war on the Russian hasty military
mobilization. But he emphasizes mainly the microprocesses of diplomacy
212 A Thousand Years of Europe

by all powers. He concludes that the actors were “watchful but unseeing,
haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about
to bring into the world.” They were sleepwalkers, fallible, unimaginative,
miscalculating and misjudging situations. But additionally these were not
unitary states. Decision making in all of them was fragmented among
different agencies, ministries, and embassies. The powers of the mon-
archs were uncertain, their courts were riven by intrigue, deception was
common, and leaders gave differing official and unofficial information to
the press. All this made assessments of other states’ reactions to changing
events difficult. Should the Kaiser’s statements be regarded as German
policy, or those of the chancellor, or those of leading German ambassa-
dors or generals, since they all differed? Some decision makers did warn
of the likelihood and dire consequences of war but were outmuscled in
the political intrigue.
Otte’s blow-by-blow account of the onset of war is similar. He con-
cludes:

Abstract concepts, such as the “balance of power” or the “alliance

system” did not cause Europe’s descent into war. Nor did states
in the abstract propel the Powers along the path towards war. . . .
Individuals acting in response to external and internal stimuli,
and to perceived opportunities and threats, were central to the
developments in July 1914. Their hawkish or dovish views on
the perceived realities of international politics, and how they ma-
noeuvred in the space given to them within the existing political
arrangements in their respective countries, hold the key to un-
derstanding how and why Europe descended into world war.”50

His cast list is 160 men (no women) spread across Europe—monarchs,
presidents, prime and foreign ministers, diplomats, generals, some of
their staffs, as well as one cell of Serbian terrorists. This amounted to
quite a lot of people, but drawn from a very narrow social stratum. Otte
lays much of the blame on their failings, portraying them as men of lim-
ited vision and abilities, inadequate to the task confronting them. Some
were ditherers, others reckless. Like Clark, Otte suggests that decision
making was haphazard. As we have seen so often in the run-up to wars,
whose policy won out month by month in a fast-developing crisis de-
pended more on political power within each capital than on calculative
realpolitik. Gross errors proliferated.
 A Thousand Years of Europe 213

Austria-Hungary lacked coherent decision making, and discussion

between the two capitals, Vienna and Budapest, was slow. A war party in
Vienna triumphed with a Balkanpolitik vision focused on punishing Ser-
bia for the assassination and its claim to a Greater Serbia. By war the
honor and status of the monarchy could be saved and nationalist insur-
gents repressed, and little attention was paid to the wider consequences.
This was aggravated in Berlin by factional divisions. Prowar generals like
Helmuth von Moltke and Erich von Falkenhayn had privileged access to
the monarch, hated France, and thought war would stop the rise of both
the capitalist class and socialism in Germany. The Kaiser was ruled by a
desire to assert German and his own personal honor and prestige. The
result was that a few German leaders foolishly gave Austria carte blanche
in Serbia, promising German support whatever Austrian actions might
be. Yet Austrian aggression against Serbia would probably bring in Rus-
sia. But since others in Berlin feared Russia’s growing military strength,
they reasoned that Russia should be confronted before its current mili-
tary modernization was complete—a window of opportunity. There were
varied German motivations, domestic and foreign. These were also ap-
parent later, during the war, when the proponents of unrestricted subma-
rine warfare won out, thus bringing a reluctant President Woodrow
Wilson into the war.
Otte also blames Austria, whose court war party was hell-bent on
punishing Serbia, to preserve the prestige, even the survival, of the
Habsburg dynasty. The assassination of the archduke was a tragic blow,
for he had been a moderate in Vienna, and his death fatally weakened the
peace party whose reforms had been lowering the ethnic tensions of the
empire. Now hard-liners, especially generals, led the way to war.51 Otte
sees their actions as the first great provocation. In St. Petersburg a more
defensive mentality contended with those arguing that aiding the Serbs
could maintain the prestige of the Romanovs—and perhaps avoid revo-
lution. Some sought control of the Black Sea and the Bosphorus. There
was a disconnect between politicians and generals, and a foolish belief
that military mobilization could be kept secret. Otte sees the Russian
mobilization as a second provocation. French diplomacy was obsessed
with bolstering Russian commitment to the Franco-Russian alliance,
which might deter a German attack. In London the pacifist wing of a di-
vided Liberal cabinet threatened resignation if the government uttered
military threats. Their resignation would have brought down the Liber-
als and forced an election that they would probably lose. This domestic
214 A Thousand Years of Europe

political fear prevented Foreign Secretary Edward Grey from issuing de-
terrent threats to Germany.
Were these all just “mistakes”? Cumulatively, they surely confound
Realist theory. The balance of power had seemed rational during peace-
time, when it was not needed, but the rapid downward spiral to war was
too much for it. A combination of fear and feckless brinkmanship among
decision makers in the capitals resembled declining Chinese dynasties
launching aggressive war. No statesman would back down, for reasons of
great power status and personal honor. This meant less careful calcula-
tion of alternative policies or of the odds of victory. All the rulers were
caged within their own states and nations, exaggerating national resolve
and unity, minimizing the enemy’s, particularly one with a different po-
litical system. They believed threatening war would deter the enemy
from going to war. So they tried brinkmanship to gain leverage. That
strategy was irrational because they all followed it and so no one backed
down.52
The dominant view of the development of war-making capacity
through history sees greater and greater complexity, made manageable
by bureaucratic state control.53 True, the armed forces had rigid com-
mand structures (blurred a little by rivalry between the services), yet this
was not so of rulers’ decision making. The states contained numerous in-
stitutions. Army High Commands were coherent bureaucratic organiza-
tions, but some had autonomy from monarchs and politicians,
particularly over mobilization policy. The German chancellor seemed
not to know that the High Command’s “defensive” mobilization plan in-
volved seizing railheads in Belgium, which would probably force France
and Britain to declare war (and it did). Russian rulers were ignorant of
their High Command’s mobilization plans. Some countries had contend-
ing courts and parliaments, courtiers and politicians, while in others par-
liaments and cabinets contained bickering parties. Foreign services had
their own networks. Five great powers and several minor powers with
very varied constitutions had little understanding of each other. The 160
persons Otte identified were scattered across institutions, all trying to
shape foreign policy—only half the number of Roman senators who
made decisions for war, but these had met in a single chamber to collec-
tively and openly debate policy. The Chinese imperial court had two
principal loci of decision making, the inner and outer courts, often fac-
tionalized, but with decision making far more concentrated than in Eu-
rope in 1914. Absolute monarchs, dukes, daimyo, and dictators across
 A Thousand Years of Europe 215

Eurasia had small councils of state, perhaps containing contending views,

but able in a single room to argue directly with each other. The First
World War resulted from multiple interacting causes, structural, per-
sonal, and emotional. It was not accidental, for the escalations were
willed or structurally induced, but it was a series of feckless reactions to
fear, benefiting no one and destroying all three monarchies that had
started it—the triumph of irrationality of ends, perhaps the most ex-
treme of all my cases.
The slide to World War II differed. Decision making was more co-
herent, for this was naked aggression encountering survival defense. But
this was primarily an ideological war. German revisionist demands for
the restoration of lost territories were important, a consequence of the
first war and a necessary cause of the rise of Nazism. But Hitler and the
Nazis added to it a transcendent ideological vision of a Thousand-Year
Reich stretching right across Europe, and then the world. The period
1910 to 2003, says Owen, contained the third wave of ideological wars.54
World War I does not really fit his model since ideologies barely figured,
though nationalism was whipped up by the war. But between 1917 and
2003 Owen lists seventy-one cases of wars imposing regime change. The
United States fought twenty-five of them, the USSR nineteen, and Ger-
many six. He largely omits Japan, yet Japan forcibly changed regimes in
seven countries. From 1918 to after 1945 almost all wars were substan-
tially ideological. From the Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks to
the Soviet invasions of Poland and Iran in the 1920s, to the Japanese in-
vasions of China and Manchuria, the Spanish Civil War, and Italian in-
tervention in the Horn of Africa in the 1930s, to World War II, motives
for wars were couched within transcendent ideologies. State socialism,
fascism, Japanese militarism, and capitalist democracy all led rulers to
impose their rival forms of world order. Then the Cold War narrowed
down the conflict to state socialism versus capitalist democracy.
In the run-up to World War II, ideological power played an impor-
tant role in preventing the traditional balancing alliance among Britain,
France, and Russia, which might deter Nazi Germany. There were obsta-
cles in Eastern Europe, notably the opposition of Poland to Soviet
troops passing through its territory in case of war, and the capitalist pow-
ers were not confident of the ability of the Red Army, so soon after its di-
sastrous purges in 1937. Yet for them antisocialism proved a more
alluring ideology than antifascism, and this overwhelmed the rational
geopolitics of balancing. Britain and France did little to secure Soviet
216 A Thousand Years of Europe

support for a collective deterrence of Hitler, which led Stalin—fearing

their lack of determination to fight—into his Non-Aggression Pact with
Hitler.55 But then Stalin obstinately clung to his belief that Hitler would
not open a two-front war by invading the Soviet Union, despite the
mountain of intelligence reports of a German military buildup on the
frontier. For Hitler, the second front made sense now, before the Red
Army was restored to its former level of efficiency and before the United
States might join the war. But Stalin “remained in complete denial,” says
Kershaw. Even as the invasion began, he believed that it was launched by
German officers without authorization from Hitler. If he spoke to Hitler,
all would be sorted out, he said. Kershaw calls this “the most extraordi-
nary miscalculation of all time”—though there is a lot of competition for
that honor.56 Yet Stalin was a murderous dictator, with whom no one
dared argue—sensibly so, for he shot eight of his generals after the front
collapsed. The balancing coalition did come later, at least between Brit-
ain and the Soviets (for France had submitted), helped by the United
States. Hitler had finally knocked geopolitical sense into Stalin. In 1943
Stalin tried again to interest Hitler in a joint pact, but Hitler’s genocidal
plans prevented this.
Hitler’s state comprised a vast array of institutions, divided between
state bureaucracies, the Nazi Party, and the Nazi paramilitaries, all
spawning rival satrapies. Yet Hitler’s charismatic dominance and the
“leadership principle” meant that in practice they sought to “work to-
ward the Führer,” trying to anticipate what he would have wanted them
to do, which was always the most “radical” option.57 This produced a co-
hesive environment backing up Hitler’s prejudices and decisions. Musso-
lini and Japanese military leaders provided weaker versions of this. The
means pursued were irrational, however, dominated by fascist ideology:
war was virtuous and its new martial breed of men could overcome the
odds. Nazism also came to apply its ruthless militarism to exterminating
“lower” races—Jews, Slavs, gypsies, and others. Mussolini went along
with this and wanted imperial prestige from colonies in Africa more than
any economic benefit they would bring. Japan provided a half-fascist,
half-racist version of conquest imperialism. The Axis powers valued mar-
tial values more than did the liberals or state socialists, and this led their
leaders to underestimate the enemy’s bellicosity if attacked. Hitler
thought liberal Britain and France would not declare war if he invaded
Poland, since they had tolerated his other aggressions. He was right that
French forces could be beaten, but that victory was due to the brilliant
 A Thousand Years of Europe 217

tactics of his generals. It might have gone otherwise. After the fall of
France, he expected Britain to come to terms—indeed, some British revi-
sionist historians have argued that its leaders should have done this in
order to preserve the empire. Yet British geopolitical understandings fo-
cused on the need to defend imperial honor, and this inevitably took
British leaders into the war. In the vital cabinet meeting in 1940, before
Churchill had acquired significant authority as prime minister, even ap-
peasers like Lord Halifax came around to the view that they had to
fight.58 Preserving honor was predominant in both the autocracies and
the democracies. Of course, as Kershaw notes, this was confrontation be-
tween two political extremes, not typical of other modern wars. The four
autocracies he discusses conferred far more power on a single leader than
did the two democracies, the United Kingdom and the United States.
But one should not generalize that autocracies are more likely to go to
war than democracies.
Hitler expected the “rotten Bolshevik” regime of Stalin to collapse
once he invaded Russia, and then he could finish off Britain. Of course,
neither happened. That the obdurate resistance of Soviet and British
forces turned into victory required the entry of the United States into
the war. Although the Roosevelt administration was already assisting the
British before its formal entry into the war, this was on a small scale and
was geared to American economic interests in gaining entry to the mar-
kets of the British Empire and exhausting British gold reserves. The
American declaration of war in Europe came on December 11, 1941,
after Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States earlier that day and
four days after the Japanese attack on U.S. territory at Pearl Harbor on
December 7. As we have seen, overoptimistic ideology deluded Japanese
decision makers into believing that the United States might have the
stomach only for a brief struggle after Pearl Harbor. Here I deal with
Hitler’s reasoning.
Some historians have seen Hitler’s decision to declare war on the
United States as utterly irrational. Brendan Simms and Charlie Lader-
man say it was a calculated gamble.59 Kershaw offers a more nuanced
view. These authors agree that Hitler felt that war with the United States
was inevitable at some point in the future and that he thought it was bet-
ter to start it preemptively, specifically by unleashing all restrictions on
U-boat commanders when sighting American ships. (His unleashing
order came two days before his declaration of war.) His decision must be
seen in the context of his ideology, however. As Kershaw asserts, Hitler
218 A Thousand Years of Europe

had consistently declared that he sought world conquest. Hitler also be-
lieved that Jewish capitalism was his main global enemy, dominating U.S.
governments. So “inevitability” came not from purely geopolitical calcu-
lations, but from his ideological commitment to world conquest and the
elimination of a nonexistent Jewish world conspiracy. Nor was victory
over the United States achievable. Hitler could not hurt the continental
United States, apart from his U-boats offshore. But even their threat was
eliminated over the next two years. His declaration of war also only
made it more likely that Roosevelt would fight in Europe as well as
across the Pacific. As tensions had mounted with Japan, Roosevelt was al-
ready transferring naval units from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the
Pearl Harbor attack might have led the United States to neglect Europe,
giving Hitler time to finish off Britain and Russia, and tolerating a minor
level of American aid to them in the meantime. Hitler’s declaration also
removed all opposition in Congress, which had up till then resisted
Roosevelt’s attempts to join the war in Europe. Kershaw adds that Hit-
ler’s temperament and dictatorial status also influenced him. He made
the decision “swiftly, and without consultation”; he was “headstrong,”
“rushing into Japan’s arms,” “ecstatic about Pearl Harbor.” Joachim von
Ribbentrop, echoing Hitler, said, “A great power doesn’t let itself have
war declared on it, it declares war itself.” Hitler was impressed by Japa-
nese “audacity”; that was his kind of move. His colleagues privately criti-
cized his “dilettantism” and “his limited knowledge of foreign countries.”
They said of the declaration, “We couldn’t be more surprised,” and it was
“politically a mistake.” Kershaw concludes that from Hitler’s point of
view, his decision was “rational” but not “sensible.”60 But we don’t have
to adopt Hitler’s definition of rationality. That would also have us de-
scribing the Holocaust as rational, from his point of view. His declara-
tion of war had strong ideological, impulsive, irrational, false, and even
suicidal currents. His misperceptions were due to a caging ideology:
trapped within the worldview of his own Reich, he could not have an ac-
curate perception of the outside enemy.
World War II was an ideological war like the wars of religion. The
aggressors were irrational, and there was at first a desperate defensive ra-
tionality shown by the Allies, especially by the Soviet people. Those who
were communists or Jews could expect to be murdered after a Nazi vic-
tory, while all Slavs could expect to be enslaved. No wonder they fought
like hell. Another ideological struggle between the United States and the
Soviet Union then inherited the earth. This was not anarchic geopolitics,
 A Thousand Years of Europe 219

for only two major powers were clashing through competing ideologies
involving conflicting ways of structuring the world.
Finally, we can ask whether these wars produced much benefit.
World War I killed about 20 million people and World War II 75 mil-
lion. World War II did quash fascism, a major benefit. MacMillan also
identifies substantial spin-off benefits from these wars, arguing like Ar-
thur Marwick before her that mass-mobilization warfare, demanding
mass sacrifices by the citizens, brought rewards to them afterward.61 But
that neglects the great variety of aftermaths, and it misreads the nature
of military power. I noted that military power combines strict hierarchy
with intense comradeship. These writers focus only on the comradeship.
But mass-mobilization warfare brings both hierarchy and comradeship
to the mass of the people. Consequences varied according to whether
armed forces were victorious or defeated. One army collapsed during the
first war, the Russian. What collapsed was hierarchy, the ability of offi-
cers to coordinate action or discipline their soldiers. Indeed, many junior
officers joined together in comradeship with their soldiers to achieve a
socialist revolution—which promised much, always praised comradeship,
but delivered more pain than benefit. The other defeated powers saw
attempts at revolution, but these failed because military and political
hierarchies mostly remained in place. There was a boost to center-left
regimes after the war, and they began to deliver reforms but they were
overwhelmed by a fascist revival conjoining hierarchy and comradeship.
Army veterans were the core of all fascist movements, which also
had large paramilitaries.62 Fascists too brought much more pain than
benefit.
Things were better for the victorious countries in the first war.
There was less pain and large promises were made, but again the hierar-
chies remained in place. MacMillan argues that World War I produced a
surge in women’s suffrage. In the United States, minor participation in
the war did contribute a little to the push in a long sequence of victories
for women in a growing number of states, as they secured equal rights
amendments, though not at the federal level. Yet in Britain suffrage had
been promised by the Asquith government before the war and was de-
layed by the war. Women property owners got the vote in 1920, other
women followed in 1929. But Frenchwomen did not get the vote until
after World War II, Russian women got a delusory vote, while improve-
ments for women in Germany and Italy were undermined by fascism, a
more powerful legacy of the first war. Nor were there many new welfare
220 A Thousand Years of Europe

programs among the combatant countries. The promise of “homes fit for
heroes” after the war was kept only for a few. In Britain Labour Party
participation in the wartime government did lead to a surge in its vote,
which continued through the 1920s. But it achieved little and was badly
broken by the Great Depression. It became a major party again in the
election of 1935. Everywhere, promises of political rights to colonized
peoples made in 1914 were broken. Indeed, the victorious powers got
new colonies formerly ruled by the Germans and Ottomans, renamed
“Mandated Territories of the League of Nations.” To the victors go the
spoils.
MacMillan is on firmer ground with World War II, after which some
peoples saw full employment, some redistribution of wealth, and some
welfare reforms. Yet these gains were less likely in the combatant coun-
tries than in the neutral or occupied Scandinavian countries.63 Of the
combatants, Britain benefited because of Labour’s shrewd participation
in the wartime government. Churchill’s Tories ran the war, and Labour
managed the home front—and used their ministries to plot reforms after
the war. Labour’s massive victory in the 1945 election and its subsequent
reforms ensured the British welfare state. So this achievement was due to
political power relations as well as to the war. Most Americans did bene-
fit economically from the wartime boom, but they gained least in welfare
benefits afterward (except for veterans). The Soviet Union never recov-
ered its growth rates of the interwar period. Colonized peoples did gain
since they had enjoyed a wartime license to kill white people, and they
saw that the whites had been weakened by the war. Successful indepen-
dence movements, starting with India, grew into an unstoppable global
wave.64 Wars often have unintended silver linings for some, but these
rarely figured in the original calculations for war; the Indian nationalists
were an exception, for they had joined the British war effort on condi-
tion of getting independence afterward.
MacMillan also cites technological innovations, relying on a few
stimulated by war, ignoring those that were not, such as vaccines, antibi-
otics, X-rays, movies, and television. Even some that she does emphasize,
such as medical triage, computers, and jet engines, would have probably
been developed without the war, if at a slightly slower pace. But who
knows what alternative technologies might have flourished in peacetime?
And do these rather scattered benefits and inventions justify almost 100
million dead human beings? The benefits of war, even those originally
unintended, have been much exaggerated.
 A Thousand Years of Europe 221

Conclusion
1. Europe’s early origins paralleled those of Republican Rome
and ancient China. In all three cases the need for self-defense
in a decidedly anarchic multipolar context produced a milita-
rized ruling class exercising a Mafia-like protection racket that
forced the lower classes to provide taxes and soldiers. But
states did not fill in the whole space of the region. Endemic
small-scale wars of conquest of stateless and tribal peoples by
the core states were inevitable.
2. So war was normal, and bellicose ideologies were rooted in
the cumulative effects of past historical victories. Continued
success by the major states of Europe baked in the institutions
and culture of militarism, which, as in Rome and China, added
to motives of material gain values such as honor, status, glory,
and power in itself. There were major personality differences
among rulers—as in the contrast between Edward II and Ed-
ward III—but their emotions derived more from the general
culture of honor.
3. Christendom provided limited regulation of war in medieval
and early modern Europe. Aristocrats shared a transnational
culture and were highly intermarried. Church institutions
were as powerful as any state until the sixteenth century. For
aristocrats and other wellborn men, war was normatively reg-
ulated; it yielded a lower chance of death, which in any case
would be rewarded in heaven. War seemed rational to them.
But it was not for most of the people, especially if war was
fought over their land.
4. The core powers expanded through conquest of lesser peoples
and states, first on the western European periphery, then
across the world and in central Europe. Sharks swallowed
minnows, “deflecting” wars between each other from zero-
sum to positive-sum for rulers. The dominant classes of major
states gained through these phases of colonial expansion.
Younger sons and bastards were especially keen on war. Ex-
pansion across other continents came with good fortune at the
moment when their most powerful states were stagnant or in
decline and Europe was filling up with states. Rivalry between
the major states fueled revolutions in military organization
222 A Thousand Years of Europe

and technology, which provided the ability to control sea-

coasts and settler colonies and to secure compliant native re-
gimes. This culminated in an alliance between militarized
states, technology, and industrial capitalism that from the late
eighteenth century was able to conquer most of the world.
5. The breakthrough culminating in the Industrial Revolution—
the “European Miracle”—owed little to interstate wars. In any
case, neither brought much immediate benefit to the Euro-
pean population as a whole, though it did in the long run—
but much less for the conquered colonial peoples.
6. A sense of civilizational entitlement to eliminate, enslave, and
exploit colonial peoples was buttressed by a belief that the Eu-
ropean population possessed the one true word of God, and
by racial theories of superiority based on visible physiognomy.
This was the most enduring ideological justification of warfare
found among Europeans. But racism weakened empires un-
willing to acculturate native peoples, unlike both the Roman
and Chinese empires.
7. From the sixteenth century came three waves of transcendent
ideological warfare: wars of religion, revolutionary and na-
tionalist wars, and twentieth-century struggles, which origi-
nated in Europe but then spread to the world, among fascism,
state socialism, and capitalist democracy. The third wave con-
tinued after 1945 (see chapters 13 and 14). These wars were
particularly vicious, for transcendent ideologies claimed the
right to impose certain values on an enemy denounced as evil
or savage, though the savagery was mostly the aggressor’s
own. These produced short-lived reactions in treaties and in-
stitutions to restrain wars, which led for a time to cautious in-
terstate wars embodying more pragmatic, delayed-reaction
rational Realism—though not in the colonies. Such waves and
reactions remind us of how varied are the causes of war, even
within a single civilization. But interwave geopolitics was like
a game of chess where only the pawns can be taken off the
board, white pawns in Europe, black pawns elsewhere.
8. Wars against the pawns were rational in terms of ends for the
dominant classes and settlers of the major powers, although in
such lopsided wars calculations of means were often unneces-
sary. Luard concludes his survey of wars through six hundred
 A Thousand Years of Europe 223

years of European history by flatly rejecting rationality of

means: “It does not appear that there has been, in most peri-
ods, any serious attempt made to balance possible gains
against likely costs, or even accurately to assess the likelihood
of victory. Governments that resort to war are not usually in a
mood for calculations of this kind. They are often filled with
passion, indignation, vengefulness or greed; inspired by patri-
otic estimates of the quality of native fighting men, weapons,
and strategies; and so inflated with over-optimistic concep-
tions of the prospects of success.”65 This would seem to be ex-
aggerated, though truer of western than central Europe,
where I noted the calculative nature of the three-way strug-
gles waged over the Holy Roman Empire.
9. As in Republican Rome, ancient China, and medieval Japan, de-
feat in war multiplied vanished kingdoms, though this was much
more belated in central than western Europe. If survival is the
basic goal of rulers, as Realists say, almost all failed. Maybe their
most important goal was the survival not of their state but of
themselves. Yet they could have lived if they had freely paid
homage to the strong. Weaker states acted rationally when they
submitted to threats from the powerful, or when they volun-
tarily accepted subordination and absorption, perhaps through
marriages. Yet those choosing war overconfidently acted irratio-
nally, and Luard and van Evera say they were in the majority.
Delusions also drove states with fairly equal powers to war
against each other. In the three ideological waves, European rul-
ers were driven by ideology as well as geopolitical calculation,
though between these waves more caution and negotiation oc-
curred. Yet in general militarism was so baked in to culture and
institutions that war became what rulers did when they felt in-
sulted, wronged, entitled, or self-righteous in seizing the oppor-
tunities provided by succession crises. Most wars were not
fought after careful rational calculation of means in relation to
ends. Balancing alliances was rarely effective in the long run, as
stronger powers repeatedly swallowed weaker ones. Yet some
successful balancing occurred between the greatest powers.

In most of Europe before 1945, war was not primarily a rational instru-
ment of policy, except where sharks could easily swallow minnows—which
224 A Thousand Years of Europe

was both morally dubious and not requiring careful calculation of the
odds. Overall, the most striking feature of European wars was their varied
sequencing through time—from limited but impulsive dynastic wars to
wars within more calculative great power systems, to ideological wars, to
global colonial wars, to two of the most devastating and least rational wars
in human history. Through all these wars, few people benefited.
 chapter nine
Seven Hundred Years of South and
Central America

Precolonial Empires: Aztecs

Postcolonial Latin America has had a low rate of interstate wars and
good data sources. Yet the period of colonization had been extremely
bloody. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese and Spanish sailed to the
New World and heard credible stories of cities of fabulous wealth. Span-
ish conquistadores, driven by greed and relative poverty (being mostly
from poor regions of Spain), and militarily confident through the suc-
cessful Spanish war record in Europe, embarked on conquest—the first
major attempt at overseas empire by a European power. The goals were
material—gold, silver, and land and labor—though legitimized by Cath-
olic Christianity. There was a risk of death, but the potential gains were
great. Priests saving souls, if necessary by forced conversions, came later.
They conquered numerous indigenous communities. I focus on
the Aztecs in Mexico and the Inca, whose core lay in Peru. Earlier civili-
zations had existed in these regions—the Olmec, the classic Maya, Teoti-
huacan, Toltecs, and Zapotecs in Central America and the Chavín,
Moche, Huari, and Tiwanaku in the Andes. These had left impressive
monumental buildings, especially temples, and indications of states,
dominant classes, occupational specialization, trading and artisanal net-
works, religions with theatrical public ceremonies, and agriculture yield-
ing surpluses for quite dense populations. But Central America was

225
226 South and Central America

neither a single core region nor a single dynastic tradition, and states re-
peatedly rose and fell.
The Aztecs were descendants of the Chichimeca peoples, who en-
tered central Mexico from the north from about 1150 ce, and the Inca
inhabited the Cuzco Basin from the eleventh century. From the four-
teenth century, our information on both begins to improve, hence the
seven hundred years of this chapter title. The Aztec elite were literate,
and illustrated books were produced by professional scribes and included
maps, histories, censuses, financial accounts, calendars, ritual almanacs,
and cosmological descriptions. Almost all were destroyed after the con-
quest as “books of the Devil” by order of the Catholic Church. Some
survived, however, supplemented by codices written soon after the con-
quest either by native Nahuatl speakers or by Spaniards who had inter-
viewed Aztecs.1
Around 1325 the city of Tenochtitlán was founded as the capital of
the peoples known as the Nahua or Aztec. They had a long history of
serving as mercenaries in other states’ wars and were at this time turning
their militarism toward their own conquests. A century later, in 1428–30,
came the formation of the Aztec Triple Alliance between the city-states
of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, neighbors in the Basin of Mex-
ico. The Triple Alliance remained the core of what is generally called the
Aztec empire, ruled by nine kings of Tenochtitlán dynasties during the
ninety years up to the arrival of the Spanish in 1519. This young empire
had emerged in a region of small city-states with a typical radius of about
ten kilometers; some were probably republics with representative institu-
tions (perhaps dominated by oligarchies), but most were monarchies, the
ruler elected by four leading nobles who chose as kings men who were
close kin of the previous ruler, who were proven warriors but not too old
for campaigning, and who had daughters who could be married to other
rulers to cement alliances. Marriage alliances and tribute were sometimes
chosen in preference to war. Few successions seem to have been dis-
puted. In this respect, the political system worked. Nobility was achieved
by prowess in war. The cities warred sporadically with their neighbors,
sometimes for conquest, but more often to elicit homage from tributary
cities—a predominantly indirect form of empire. Alliances between cities
to deter more aggressive groups were also common. The Basin of Mex-
ico was unusually fertile, supporting a dense population; its great lakes
also permitted quicker communication by water than by land and made
possible both a larger heartland of empire and a larger army than the
 South and Central America 227

Triple Alliance’s rivals’.2 Numerical superiority was always their main

military weapon.
Led by the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán, the Alliance defeated many city-
states, replacing their rulers, raping their women, capturing their men,
and distributing estates and their workers to their own nobles and war-
riors. This achieved their two main aims, to seize lands and labor and to
worship the gods by sacrificing captives. But with polities lying farther
away, they relied more on exacting tribute and corvée labor from cities
that could otherwise rule themselves. The Triple Alliance fielded a for-
midable army, its core noble units well drilled, and all young men re-
ceived military training. But there was no standing army, and warriors
had to be mobilized for each campaign. All the Aztec kings engaged in
aggressive war, and all but two apparently expanded the empire. Ross
Hassig states, “Politically peace did not mean amiable coexistence, but
subordination. In essence, for the Aztecs, everyone was either a subordi-
nate or a target. Peace was achieved by hierarchy.”3 Though they suf-
fered defeats, on balance the Triple Alliance triumphed through the size
of the forces they could field. War was rational for them and highly cal-
culative, but not for the defeated. It was zero-sum. In the province of
Morelos, although war and tribute exactions had a positive effect on tex-
tile production (of uniforms), and perhaps on agricultural productivity,
they lowered general living standards. Inequality widened, given the gen-
erosity of tribute given by rulers to their warrior nobles.4
According to the norms of the region, rulers needed a casus belli to
justify mobilizing their army. They could always find one—maltreatment
of their ambassadors or merchants (often used as spies), refusal of an im-
perial request, balking at paying agreed-on tribute, maltreatment of an
Aztec bride—or, indeed, any perceived slight or insult. The Aztec ruler
would then mobilize, summon his allies, each of whom would march sep-
arately to an agreed-on spot on the enemy’s border, and they would join
together in battle, each contingent fighting separately under its own
lord, all of whom were issuing commands in their own varied languages.
The army, though very large, could not have been very well coordinated.
The Aztecs spared those who quickly surrendered, contenting them-
selves with tribute.5 They exacted it from over four hundred cities as
both regular payments and as extras destined for special needs, such as
war or monument building. Some of these cities would in turn exact trib-
ute from other cities. Rulers had to swear allegiance, pay tribute and cor-
vée labor, and provide levies for Aztec wars in their vicinity. The clients
228 South and Central America

could retain their political autonomy if loyal. If not, they would be mas-
sacred and replaced by men chosen from among the defeated ruler’s kin,
who would be married to an Aztec princess to strengthen their loyalty.
This economized on military resources, and garrisons were stationed
only in insecure areas and at the locals’ expense. In a continent lacking
the wheel and draft animals, logistical difficulties blocked more direct
rule. But the Aztecs were skilled at what they could do.
There was almost no attempt to acculturate subjugated peoples.
They did not become “Aztecs” but retained their existing identities, gods,
languages, and military levies. Exacting regular tribute and levies rein-
forced and routinized subordination, encouraging Aztec rulers to keep on
going to war. This was of course resented by client rulers. They grumbled
and were intermittently rebellious, but usually they complied, as the Az-
tecs remained strong and won their wars. Rival city-states always existed
just outside the borders of empire. To dominate the central valley re-
quired making wars elsewhere. They knew they had to extract material
rewards for their followers and clients. Polygynous marriages ensured
that royal families and their demands got bigger, and the dangers of royal
factionalism grew.6 Only victories would cement the ruler’s reputation
and his followers’ loyalty. Since men would follow a successful leader,
conquerors were trapped by their own success, compelled to continue
conquests by a mixture of Durkheim’s notion of the “malady of infinite
aspiration,” the need to keep on rewarding followers and kin rivals, and
fear that the ambitious militarism they had cultivated might produce
threatening kin rivals should their conquests end.
Power was legitimated through intense and aesthetic religious ritu-
als. The core of solidarity in each city was provided by religious ceremo-
nies in which all social classes repeatedly performed rituals. War itself
was ritualized. Aztec warriors in battle dressed and were armed according
to their noble rank, which was determined by how many prisoners they
had taken in previous battles. The Spanish soldiers had never before seen
enemies doing ritual dances as they advanced into battle, decked out in
bright colors, covered with paint, jewelry, feathers, elaborate headdresses
and hair styles, some resembling jaguars, eagles, or other creatures with
religious significance. The warriors focused not only on killing enemy
soldiers but also on wounding and capturing them, for captives were sac-
rificed to the gods, which provided spectacular ceremonial and political
proof of Aztec dominance and conferred fame and visible symbols of
achievement on the captor. In attack the aim was to seize a city’s market-
 South and Central America 229

place and destroy and burn its main temple. The defenders lost heart as
their god fell to a more powerful deity. The main symbol of conquest
was a burning temple—“victory in symbol and defeat in fact.”7
The Spanish were appalled by the savagery of one Aztec war ritual.
Aztecs had inherited from other peoples a belief that the sun god needed
to drink human blood to survive. If he died, darkness would envelop the
earth and all life would end. The only reliable source of quantities of
blood were prisoners of war. So prisoners were delivered to the gods by
having their beating hearts ripped out, their blood spilling out over the
temple steps in the presence of the people. A new ruler had to deliver
larger numbers to show he was approved by the gods. This gruesome
militarism was baked in to Aztec culture and institutions. Cases date
from at least 1199 until the ceremonies seen by the Spanish in 1519. Ca-
milla Townsend says that Nahuatl memoirs reveal ceremonies conducted
in an atmosphere of reverence, not savagery, yet this indicates just how
baked in savagery was.8 Of course, the Spanish were also appalling to-
ward native peoples who resisted them.9 These were rival ghastly forms
of rationality.
The Aztecs also fought a more limited and regulated form of war
called “flower war.”10 When conflict occurred with a city-state alliance
considered by the Aztecs to be of relatively equal power, like the Tlax-
cala, the two sides might agree to send out an equal number of warriors
drawn from their elite noble units to an agreed-on battlefield. These
warriors would engage in combat but seek to wound and capture an op-
ponent, not to kill him—rather like Roman gladiators, except that some
of the captives were later sacrificed to the sun god. It was a way of estab-
lishing relative dominance without much actual killing. It was also an op-
portunity to train men and to deploy one’s main force elsewhere, without
risking attack from this enemy. One flower war supposedly lasted eight
years, but these wars could escalate into an intermediate form of combat
that involved commoners who could be captured and sacrificed, as would
happen to captives of all ranks in full-scale wars.
In 1519–21 the Aztecs met their match. When confronted by the
conquistadores, they proved inferior in tactics and weaponry. Their open
infantry formation, permitting each soldier space to fight independently,
could be broken up by the close-order Spanish tercio formation, which
mixed together pikes, swords, crossbows, and muskets, supported by ar-
tillery and cavalry. By that time cavalry was a declining force in Euro-
pean warfare, but Spanish horses proved intimidating in open terrain in a
230 South and Central America

continent without horses. Cavalry turned Aztec retreat into carnage.

Firearms and crossbows were superior to the arrow and dart projectiles
of the Aztecs, and Spanish steel armor and weapons were superior to
Aztec thick cloth armor and wooden weapons tipped with obsidian.11 But
this was not enough to secure victory. The Aztecs adapted, focusing on
ambushes in rocky or forested terrain unsuitable for horses, developing
longer spears, and ducking and weaving when they saw that bullets came
in straight lines. The Spanish were but few, massively outnumbered.
They could break up enemy attacks and inflict heavy casualties but not
press home conquest. They could add greater unity and clarity of pur-
pose. When the Spanish arrived, the indigenous peoples argued about
what to make of them, but they thought they were too few to effect con-
quest. In contrast, the Spanish knew exactly what their purpose was: to
seize gold, silver, and land.
Yet the major Aztec weakness was political: lack of control over allies
and neutrals.12 Ironically, Moctezuma was embarking on an attempt to con-
trol captured cities through governors and garrisons when the Spanish ar-
rived.13 The Aztec system worked well as long as the Triple Alliance
remained more powerful than any local rival. But once the Spanish revealed
military superiorities, discontented clients and rivals saw their opportunity to
overthrow their oppressive overlords. This was especially true of the Tlax-
cala, long rivals of the Aztecs and still independent but impoverished. Like
some other city-states, they had more representative political institutions,
and we know that the issue of whether to fight or ally with the Spaniards was
hotly debated in them.14 The clincher was probably when Hernán Cortés
promised them an equal share of the booty. Their native allies, including
Tlaxcala’s army of 20,000, gave the Spanish equal numbers in battle and the
means to effect conquest. But the Tlaxcala had made a pact with the devil.
Moctezuma, the Aztec leader, was first puzzled by the Spanish; he
then seemed to realize his own political weakness, which might explain
his not fighting in 1519. His spies told him that more Spanish ships were
arriving at the coast, and it was now clear that his forces would suffer
massive casualties even if they managed to achieve victory. He suspected
this would destroy his reputation as a war leader, and he and perhaps the
empire would be overthrown.15 Without a show of defiance from their
absolute ruler, other Aztecs lacked the legitimacy to command prolonged
resistance. Moctezuma was reduced to offering the Spanish massive trib-
ute if they would only leave, underestimating their ambition and avarice.
Military superiority and defection of elites from native rulers became re-
 South and Central America 231

peated features of European conquests. Lacking the bonds of national-

ism, local elites would assess the strength of the Europeans compared to
their local rulers and side with whoever they thought would win. If some
rulers sided with the Europeans, victory would result.
There were also, however, contingencies evident during 1519–21.
The Spanish were almost destroyed as they tried to escape from Tenoch-
titlán on La Noche Triste, June 30, 1520, when Cortés lost over six hundred
Spaniards and several thousand of his local allies. Then in September
1520 smallpox struck the indigenous peoples who lacked the immunity
possessed by surviving adult Spaniards, which added to the locals’ sense of
the invincibility of the Spaniards.16 Epidemics of smallpox, measles, and
influenza, in addition to consequent famines, finished off Aztec morale
and resistance the next year. Among the victims of smallpox was Moctezu-
ma’s successor, Cuitláhuac, who had shown some fight. The native popu-
lation continued to decline, from perhaps 10 to 15 million in 1519 to just
1 million a century later. So if not Cortés, then another Spaniard, and if
not a Spaniard, then an Englishman or a Frenchman. From now on, the
Europeans were on a murderous roll.
The Spanish conquest of the Maya was much slower, lasting over
two centuries, because of the fragmentation of Mayan polities in this pe-
riod and their ability to retreat into terrains to which the Spanish tercio
and horses were unsuited. Native allies were found, but European dis-
eases again proved the most lethal weapon, since the Maya had no im-
munity either.

Precolonial Empires: Inca

In South America we know less of the Inca since they had no written lan-
guage, but oral traditions, sagas, and early Spanish sources provide much
information. My principal sources have been María Rostworowski de
Diez Canseco, Terence D’Altroy, Gordon McEwan, and Fernando Cer-
vantes.17 The Inca originated as a tiny kingdom in the twelfth-century
Cuzco Basin, defending themselves against the neighboring Chanca,
then turning to raiding and finally subordinating them. Then they ex-
panded. Each ruler, the Sapa Inca, was expected to expand the empire
and demonstrate success in war as evidence of his fitness to rule—a com-
mon motivation among monarchs. But a more personal motivation for
war resulted from the custom of split inheritance in royal succession.
A new Sapa Inca was elected by those with most royal blood on both
232 South and Central America

maternal and paternal lines, but he inherited only the office, titles, and
control of the army. His predecessor, although deceased, retained all the
wealth acquired during his reign, now controlled and managed by his
clan. So the new Sapa Inca was motivated and able to make war.18
From about 1438 the Sapa Inca were defeating other peoples in bat-
tle, notably the coastal kingdom of Chimor. Like the Aztecs farther
north, they were the most warlike people in their vicinity, yet they more
often intimidated opponents with a show of force that persuaded them to
pay homage without fighting. Inca generals usually gave opponents the
choice of homage or death, and sagas describe peoples succumbing with-
out pitched battle. Rostworowski says that in the early stages of expan-
sion, Inca rulers strengthened ties with allies and conquered populations
through generous gift giving—luxury and prestige items and women, ce-
mented by generous banquets.19 Rulers defeated in battle were executed,
but their children might be educated in Inca culture and then returned
home as client rulers. Rulers who paid homage remained in place. Rebel-
lion was treated severely, sometimes by extermination or deportation and
seizure of lands and property, accompanied by much raping. One man
later remembered, “When they resisted for a few days, the Incas put all
of them, large and small, to the knife, and when this was seen and under-
stood by the rest of the people, they submitted out of fear.”20 Some cap-
tives were thrown into dungeons with wild animals, and any survivors
were enslaved. At least six Inca rulers conquered new territories, the
principal conqueror being Túpac Inca Yupanqui. Opponents generally
had smaller armies, were less well-prepared for battle, and were appar-
ently unable to form balancing alliances among themselves—another
case of a core mopping up its periphery.
Elaborate religious ceremonies were held before battle. The army
was predominantly subject peoples, each serving under its own lord, fol-
lowing orders in its distinct language, although a small elite force, at first
of pure-blood Inca, was developed. Armies can have been only loosely or-
ganized, and the main tactic seems to have been to overawe the enemy
with the sheer size of a force, like the Aztecs. Scholars estimate them at
between 35,000 and 140,000, sometimes comprising several armies in the
field at once.21 Most generals were of royal Inca blood, which made rulers
wary they might challenge their own power. They did coup-proofing by
executing overly successful generals and adding supposedly more loyal
ethnic groups to the elite force. Wars of succession involved rival half
brothers intermittently claiming the throne.22
 South and Central America 233

The Inca had a somewhat indirect empire, yet there was a formal ad-
ministrative hierarchy, consisting of the Sapa Inca; his council, composed
of royal family members and a high priest at the summit; then the gover-
nors of the “four quarters” of the empire, each divided into provinces,
and then into a decimal structure of local offices. This state could collect
taxes, organize corvée labor, and conduct censuses, but it is unclear how
uniform it was, since most administration was in the hands of regional
and local nobles. But they did have a major communications advantage: a
magnificent road system covering the long spine of their empire.23 They
were built by local corvée labor, which alongside military service was the
main form of taxation. Two main roads ran north to south along an em-
pire stretching over five current Latin American countries, one down the
coast, the other along the Andean highlands. The roads stretched over a
total length of about 40,000 kilometers (today’s French autoroute system
covers only 12,000 kilometers). Roads were from one to four meters
wide, often lined with low walls. Some stretches were just tracks, but
others were paved, and there were many bridges, causeways, and stepped
sections in hilly terrains. In the absence of wheeled vehicles, steps were
fine even for load-carrying llamas and alpacas. In the empire’s core re-
gions, stone terracing and hydraulic works increased agricultural produc-
tivity. The quality of the surviving roads, terraces, and buildings around
Cuzco, constructed without cement or iron tools, remains extraordinary
even today.
The roads partially compensated for the dispersed political structure,
allowing swift movement of tribute payments, troops, and information. A
twenty-four-hour system of relay runners, each running 1.4 kilometers,
could deliver an oral message or a quipu (colored ropes knotted together
in ways that revealed information) at a rate of 240 kilometers a day.
There were lodging stations every 30 kilometers, as well as food stores
for the troops so that they did not have to live off the land (and so de-
spoil it), and a network of small fortresses. In some regions relatively few
Inca-style stone buildings have been found, suggesting an indirect em-
pire there.24 Yet there was a move toward a little more direct rule as mili-
tary policy shifted toward pacification, resettling restive peoples,
replacing them with compliant peoples, and fortifying frontier hot spots
with garrisons.25 Tamara Bray suggests the Inca used the roads “to sub-
vert pre-existing relations of exchange,” an attempt to steer local econo-
mies into the imperial model to prevent local alliances among other
peoples, while encouraging dependency on the Inca state.26 The Inca
234 South and Central America

fought fewer wars than the Aztecs, the Mongols, or the Romans once
their empire was established. D’Altroy says that in the final decades of
the empire, threats came largely from insurrections, not invasions, as is
suggested by the commitment of small forces to the perimeter and large
ones to internal garrisons and armies of pacification.27
The Spanish invaders enjoyed similar superiority in weapons as they
had in Mexico, even as their numbers were smaller. They had two great
strokes of luck, however. First, Spanish epidemics arrived before the
Spanish did (having spread from Mexico and Central America), in 1528
killing off the Inca ruler, his designated heir, and many others. It was not
clear which of two sons, the half brothers Atahualpa and Huáscar, should
succeed. It was agreed that one would take the north, the other the
south. Both then built up regionally based forces, and a civil war broke
out, which ended in Atahualpa’s victory in 1532, at the very moment
when the Spanish under Pizarro arrived—the second stroke of good
luck. The two regionally entrenched Inca factions still existed. Again,
there was a difference between the Spanish, driven by relentless avarice
focused on the seizure of gold, silver, and land, and the divisions and un-
certainties of the Inca. Both Inca factions tried to enlist Pizarro’s support,
but he double-crossed them both. Borrowing from Cortés’s tactics, he
invited Atahualpa and his elite guard to a feast in the Inca’s honor in the
main square of Cajamarca. Suddenly, armed Spanish soldiers emerged
into the square and massacred the unarmed Inca. Atahualpa was impris-
oned and later murdered. Pizarro then kept his successor hostage and
killed the remaining leaders of both parties and finally the last Sapa Inca.
He had overthrown an Inca Empire with greater administrative re-
sources than the Aztecs without having fought a single serious battle.28
Battles did come later, in 1536, when Spanish atrocities against na-
tive populations provoked uprisings. But when the last two Sapa Inca
were killed, no alternative leader possessed the religiously sanctified
prestige to coordinate a major resistance movement. Rostworowski says
the generous gift giving of the Inca came back to bite them, for “as the
state grew, so did the number of lords who had to be satisfied.”29 New
conquests generated revenues but also demands from new clients expect-
ing gifts. So Inca rulers had to increase land and labor taxes. Yet this
alienated those who were already allies, and many rebelled, making the
disastrous decision to ally with Pizarro. Spanish-borne epidemics then
finished off the resistance. Those who fought on retreated to the jungles
and mountains, but the end was now inevitable.30 The Inca were de-
 South and Central America 235

stroyed in intermittent wars over a forty-year period, their empire looted

of its gold and silver, which was melted into ingots for the conquistado-
res and the Holy Roman Emperor.
The Iberian conquest of Central and South American empires was
nearly inevitable, given their relative youth and political weakness. Span-
ish weaponry and solidarity compared to the fissiparous tendencies of
Aztec and Inca alliances, the relentless avarice of waves of colonists
against the uncertain responses of the locals, and Europe’s stealth
weapon, the epidemic, added to the power inequality. The extraordinary
monumental buildings, mainly religious, of pre-Columbian America tend
to disguise their relative political and military weakness.
Few benefited from the conquest. Perhaps half the conquistadores
survived and got booty or land, whereas half died or left disappointed.
Their leaders became immensely rich, and the king of Spain, entitled to
one-fifth of all the spoils, did best of all. Since they created no wealth, de-
stroyed much, and killed hundreds of thousands, their gains were achieved
entirely at the expense of the indigenous peoples. Today, the conquistado-
res might be charged as war criminals by international courts, but the pa-
pacy, greedy for souls, thought otherwise. Popes organized treaties
between the two Crowns of Spain and Portugal to settle their territorial
disputes, giving Brazil to Portugal while Spain received the rest. This
spared Latin America the inter-imperial wars that scarred North America
and Asia. The two sets of Catholic colonists could exterminate the re-
maining indigenous peoples in peace, although there was increasing criti-
cism of their brutality within the Church and in Spain that reached even
up to the Holy Roman Emperor himself. As elsewhere, moral qualms
were felt afterward, too late.

Postcolonialism
“God is in heaven, the king is far away, and I give the orders here,” said the
colonists. As in North America, they grew discontented with their monarch,
encouraged by new liberal republican ideology. The Spanish Empire col-
lapsed when Napoleon invaded Spain and deposed the Bourbon king. In the
ensuing power vacuum in the Americas, Creole settlers (those born there)
tried to seize the royal administrations from the ruling peninsulares (born in
Spain), which led to a flurry of civil wars. In 1815 the Bourbons were re-
stored to the Spanish throne and Ferdinand VII declared himself an abso-
lute monarch. This drove most colonists toward demanding independence,
236 South and Central America

although some royalists held out until 1833. Ten Spanish successor states
were recognized as sovereign by the Church and by the two relevant great
powers, Great Britain and the United States. Two of these states, Gran Co-
lombia and the Central American Federation, soon broke up into several
smaller ones. In contrast, Portuguese Brazil stayed whole. The Portuguese
king had fled from Napoleon and now ruled in Brazil as emperor. Excluding
tiny British, French, and Dutch colonies, there were fifteen sovereign states
in Latin America. They are my subject matter.

Explanations of War in Postcolonial Latin America

All these countries except for Costa Rica and Panama possess armies, but
their main activity has not been to make interstate war. As Stanislav An-
dreski noted: “Militarism has become introverted in the Latin American
republics: with few opportunities to fight for their countries, soldiers re-
mained preoccupied with internal politics and the search for personal
and collective advantage. Instead of inter-state wars there was military vi-
olence within states, in domestic politics.”31 He argued that militaries
were too large for police functions and too small for interstate wars.
Robert Holden says the region contained much violence: “killing, maim-
ing, and other acts of destruction committed by rival caudillos, guerilla
‘liberators,’ death squads, and state agents such as the armed forces and
police.”32 Latin Americans are not more pacific humans, but they have
rarely launched interstate wars. Correlates of War data since 1830 reveal
only a few, mostly in the nineteenth century, though these data exclude
most of the wars waged against indigenous peoples.33 By the mid-1880s
the power of the indigenous peoples had been destroyed, although the
Caste Wars of Yucatán lingered on into the twentieth century. Subse-
quent violence has been mostly provided by civil wars between political
factions, regions, and classes—and, recently, drug-related gang wars.
Comparing the region with other regions in the world between 1816
and 2007, CoW statistics provided by Douglas Lemke, Charles Goch-
man and Zeev Maoz, and Tassio Franchi and his colleagues reveal the
rate of interstate warfare in Latin America to be three to five times less
than in Europe, and rather less than in Asia.34 David Mares says that after
World War II, Latin America was only “in the middle of the pack” for
wars, since its three wars put it above Africa’s two, Northeast Asia’s one,
and North America’s zero.35 But it is absurd to say that the United States
has had no wars, and Mares also separates Northeast from Southeast
 South and Central America 237

Asia, saying they do not share similar security concerns. Not so. The
Korean and Vietnam wars were both confrontations between communist
and capitalist authoritarian regimes, both involving the United States,
the Soviet Union, China, South Korea, and France. They should be
joined into a single regional case. Correcting for these omissions leaves
only postcolonial Africa below Latin America in interstate wars—and Af-
rica has had many more civil wars. Most Latin American wars have also
been waged by small armies over short periods and at low cost, financed
more by debt than by taxes, having less effect on society. World Bank
data for 2020 put Latin American defense spending at 1.2% of GDP, half
that of the global average of 2.4%. Military spending has been on mod-
ernization, not a search for superiority over one’s neighbors.36
Latin America has barely participated in wars outside the continent.
In World War II Brazilian soldiers did fight in Italy, suffering almost one
thousand casualties. When German U-boats sank Mexican ships in 1942,
President Manuel Ávila Camacho declared war, seeing this as the solu-
tion to internal social divisions, but his attempt at conscription was met
by social unrest, and Mexico sent no soldiers. In 1944 it sent one air
force squadron to the Pacific theater. The pilots were low-cost national
heroes, for the United States supplied the planes and only five pilots
died in action.37 Finally, Colombia sent 5,100 soldiers to the Korean War,
and 163 died there. For all these reasons Latin American history is often
described as a “Long Peace.”38
Mares prefers to call it a zone of “Violent Peace,” observing that a
simple dichotomy between war and peace neglects intermediate MIDs
ranging from mere bluster to use of force in smaller combats. Using
CoW data, Gochman and Maoz suggest that from 1816 to 1976 in the
whole of the Americas, including North America, there were 183 MIDs.
But this figure was much lower than Europe’s total of over 500.39 In the
period 2002–10, only Western Europe had fewer MIDs. Western Europe
had zero, Latin America fifteen, Central Europe thirty-five, and the Mid-
dle East, South Asia, the Far East, and Africa all had forty or more.40
There were no Latin American countries among the top-ten initiators of
MIDs during the two periods where we have data, 1816–1976 and 1993–
2010.41 So I would not agree with Mares unless he was also including
civil and gang wars.
One-third of MIDs in the region have been border disputes and
have rarely been settled by one armed encounter.42 Until the 1980s, all
Latin American countries had unresolved minor border disputes, and these
238 South and Central America

sometimes triggered MIDs but rarely war.43 Most have now been settled.
Recent examples are a dispute between Nicaragua and Colombia over two
small islands, settled in 2012 by the International Court of Justice; a dispute
between Peru and Chile over maritime boundaries, settled by the ICJ in
2014; a dispute between Bolivia and Chile, settled by the ICJ in 2018; and a
dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua over the Isla Calero region, set-
tled by the ICJ in 2018. There has also been a dispute between Colombia
and Venezuela over Colombian guerillas operating from over the Venezue-
lan border. Only the disagreement between Britain and Argentina over the
Falklands (Malvinas) brought war—a small, undeclared one—and has not
been settled. Jorge Dominguez and David Mares tersely summarize this:
“Territorial, boundary, and other disputes endure. Interstate conflict over
boundaries is relatively frequent. Disputes sometimes escalate to military
conflict because states recurrently employ low levels of force to shape as-
pects of bilateral relations. Such escalation rarely reaches full-scale war. In-
terstate war is infrequent.”44 So there are two main questions: Why were
there so few wars in Latin America, and why have there been Militarized
Interstate Disputes eventually resolved through diplomacy?

Previous Explanation
The most influential explanation of why there have been relatively few
wars is Miguel Centeno’s.45 He emphasizes the weakness of Latin Ameri-
can compared to European states. He departs from the Tilly-Mann the-
ory of the development of the state in Europe. In the famous words of
Tilly, “War makes states and states make war.”46 Centeno says this barely
happened in Latin America. Since its states fought few wars, they re-
mained too feeble to fight more of them. They found it difficult to in-
crease taxes for war, and they leaked resources through corruption.
“Simply put, Latin American states did not have the organizational or
ideological capacity to go to war with each other.”47 Moreover, the domi-
nant landowning class favored a weak state unable to interfere with its
power and wealth. He acknowledges two exceptions: Chile and Paraguay
have possessed coherent states and militaries. So he stresses states’ do-
mestic politics, not their geopolitical relations, as IR theorists do.
He also perceives a lack of militarist ideology. After counting street
names, statues, memorials, and coinages, he says that, compared to
North America or Europe, their iconography “is much more focused on
cultural and scientific figures, pays less attention to political symbols, and
 South and Central America 239

lacks the mythology of a people at arms uniting through sacrifice.”48 He

adds class, ethnic, and religious restraints, too. Racial-ethnic diversity
within each country generated a weak national identity that discouraged
popular mobilization for war. Between the peninsulares and Creoles at the
top and later white immigrants, and between those immigrants and ex-
slaves, slaves, and indigenous peoples, lay enormous gulfs that involved
notions of “civilization” as well as ethnicity and class. The elites had
much more in common with each other than they did with their popu-
lace. They had Spanish or Portuguese blood, they were Catholic, and
residents of all but one state spoke Spanish. Of course, shared Catholi-
cism had not prevented states in medieval Europe from going to war.
His explanation is largely true. But does war require a strong state?
One need only consider oneself superior to the rival. Why should a weak
state with a ragtag, underequipped, undersupplied, incompetently led
army not attack another state it believed to be even feebler? Since most
states are overconfident about making war, a sense of relative weakness is
rare. A weak fiscal base did hinder lengthy war making. Any state can fi-
nance a brief war, but if the tax base cannot be increased, then rulers
must borrow to continue a war, and debt can only mount up to when
creditors doubt whether they will be repaid. Then the war maker must
negotiate. European militarism had the advantage of going through a
feudal stage of warfare, which called on vassals who were largely self-fi-
nancing. Then, when rulers perceived the military superiority of merce-
naries over vassals, they developed some state capacity and more
productive taxes, and there were plenty of mercenaries for hire. There
were neither vassals nor roving mercenaries in America. There could be
Latin American wars, but short ones.
Sebastián Mazzuca focuses on state capacity. He says the major states
of Europe were “born strong,” whereas weakness was a “birth defect” of
Latin American states. Yet the last chapter showed that European states
had also shared this birth defect, but some became much stronger, owing
to a militarism that swallowed up smaller states. In contrast, Latin Ameri-
cans did not swallow each other up. Mazzuca says that whereas European
development was “war-led,” Latin American was “trade-led.” Although
warrior rulers in Europe were able to eliminate peripheral patrimonial
power brokers, seen as rivals for the control of land and people, in trade-
led Latin America, to battle against peripheral power brokers might bring
on civil war, which would torpedo investment, production, and export-led
growth. Instead, rulers appeased the peripheries through promises of
240 South and Central America

future shares in economic expansion. There were three kinds of patrimo-

nial factions, he says, port interests, rival parties, and regional caudillos, all
favoring fiscally starved, “patronage machine” states, unable to fight wars
for long. The weakening of states was reinforced by a period of transna-
tional free trade led by external powers far more powerful than any in
Latin America. So for him the low rate of war was due to a distinctive bal-
ance of domestic class and regional forces in an era of free trade, an argu-
ment made mostly in terms of economic and political power relations.49
Geopolitical explanations are added by IR specialists. First, they say
interstate wars remained rare because Latin Americans were relatively in-
sulated from the wider international system and did not get embroiled in
wars not of their own choosing, unlike states elsewhere. Second, some
argue that interstate war became rare thanks to the deliberate creation of
balances of power in South America in the late nineteenth century. Robert
Burr gives as an example Chile, which, after defeating Peru and Bolivia in
the War of Confederation in 1841, sought to maintain a balance of power
in its region by an understanding with Argentina while also improving re-
lations with Brazil as insurance against a future conflict with Argentina.50
Chile also strengthened relations with Ecuador, which was strategically lo-
cated at the rear of its traditional enemy, Peru. Chile even tried friendship
with Colombia. The other states made their own diplomatic moves—all
insuring themselves with defensive alliances against the possibility of war
against rivals. We will indeed see balancing against rulers seeking regional
hegemony. The question remains: Why did these often fail elsewhere and
lead to war, especially in Europe, but peace mostly endured in Latin
America? Third, IR theorists argue that international regional institutions
emerged in the nineteenth century and blossomed in the twentieth, foster-
ing peace and international mediation when wars broke out. Holsti says
that during the period 1820–1970, eight South American states used such
procedures to settle their disputes no fewer than 151 times.51 We have
glimpsed the importance of the ICJ in settling recent disputes. Europe was
also multistate, but its wars rarely ended with mediation or arbitration by
outsiders. But why did this happen more in Latin America?
Mares offers a modified Realist rational-choice explanation: force is
used when its costs are less than or equal to the costs acceptable to the
leader’s principal constituencies of support.52 The cost of using force is
the sum of the political-military strategy, the strategic balance, and the
force employed. The costs that the leader’s constituencies will accept are
reduced if the leader lacks accountability to them. Politicians consider
 South and Central America 241

employing force only to meet the interests of their core constituencies.

This stress on domestic politics is uncommon among Realists. He argues
that in the twentieth century weaker states tended to precipitate wars and
MIDs, usually in response to domestic pressure. Mares also rejects several
other IR explanations.53 Neither power equality nor a preponderance of
power reduces the chances for war or serious crises. The balance of mili-
tary power was not a major factor in Latin America. U.S. hegemony or
democracy or authoritarianism cannot explain interstate war or peace
here. They have sometimes fueled war, sometimes restrained it, while
democracies have sometimes fought each other.54 Douglas Gibler says
democracy is not the underlying cause of peace. Rather, peace results
from the stabilization of borders, which also consolidates democracy.55
Many of these explanations make sense, but I will insert them into
the history and ecology of Latin America. First, the “tyranny of history”
here was that these children of two empires had inherited the entire
space of the subcontinent. This was already a multistate system. It was
not like Europe, where one or several core states could expand outward
at the expense of other peoples, in the process strengthening their states
and armed forces. In a formal sense the successor states filled up the
whole of Latin America. There was no terra nullius between them. Ex-
pansion here was possible within each state’s boundaries, however, over
jungle or mountainous or desert terrain where the settlers had not pene-
trated, or over indigenous settled peoples who after the initial conquest
phase were displaced by the settlers. Second, these states had mostly in-
herited the boundaries of either the Portuguese Empire or a former
Spanish viceroyalty, or audiencia (a law court jurisdiction), or caja (a trea-
sury district). Regina Grafe and Maria Irigoin stress the cajas, noting,
“The break-up of the empire occurred along the lines of territories
where the regional treasuries were located.”56 Thus, most of the succes-
sor states already had functioning if rudimentary administrative, judicial,
or fiscal systems over their territories, though sometimes these had fuzzy
borders. Even new republics like Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia, which
had not been distinct viceroyalties, had been distinct cajas or audiencias.
Mazucca rejects such continuity by focusing only on the level of the vice-
royalties.57 Only Central America, which fragmented into small repub-
lics, had not been a viceroyalty, caja, or audiencia.58 The others were
literally “successor states” with administrative continuity and legitimacy,
while the boundaries between the Brazilian and the Spanish empires had
been set by papal mediation centuries earlier.
242 South and Central America

Thus, states accepted in principle the legal doctrine of uti possidetis,

Latin for “as you possess”—new states should retain the same borders as
preceding ones. All rulers benefited from this, since it confirmed their sov-
ereignty over mountainous, jungle, or savanna areas in which they had no
real presence. The political ecology of the region was one of center and
periphery within each state rather than between them, and so expansion
required lesser states, taxes, and armies. David Carter and H. E. Goemans
find across the world that borders inherited from previous administrations
are less often disputed.59 From 1955 uti possidetis became a globally ac-
cepted norm.60 It could not entirely prevent border disputes here. Though
Spanish viceroyalties had been split up during the Wars of Independence,
there were occasional attempts to re-create them whole, citing a rival uti
possidetis, though these were successfully resisted by others. In sparsely
settled regions without apparent wealth, like the Amazon basin and the
Atacama Desert on the Pacific Coast, precise boundaries had seemed un-
necessary before independence, and lines drawn vaguely on a map by the
Spanish or Portuguese Crown were easily disputable. Moreover, settlers in
border zones tended to arrive from whichever country had the most acces-
sible routes there, so that in some remote areas a claim to settlement
might rival the old imperial maps. So there were border disputes.
Many studies show that territorial disputes are more difficult to re-
solve, more likely to be repeated, and more prone to incur fatalities than
other types of issues. Control over territory is the heart of political
power, and claims bring an emotional, even sacred, element of sover-
eignty. In Latin America the sovereignty of each state in its core areas was
recognized, and so the elimination of states through wars of conquest
never happened, nor was it aimed at—which was so different from Eu-
rope and China. This was why wars were limited and why even the most
decisive war defeat, suffered by Paraguay, did not result in its elimination.
The social ecology of settlement also meant that few population cen-
ters lay close to the disputed borders, and so deeply entrenched rival set-
tler communities were rare. Ecology also had military consequences. If a
region did become disputed, the rival countries would try to establish a
military presence there—a fort or a few huts with barbed wire and a flag-
pole. Each rival would send out patrols to probe the other’s installations.
Sometimes these patrols would collide, shooting and perhaps causing a
casualty or two. Such an MID incident might be exaggerated back in the
capital, perhaps escalating further, occasionally to war. On the other
hand, ecology and demography made the military logistics of most cross-
 South and Central America 243

border incursions difficult and costly. Early “imperial” projects for a

Gran Colombia and for a single Central American Republic were de-
feated more by obdurate ecology than force of arms. Wars involved small
forces operating over large, underpopulated areas—armies were like fleas
crawling over elephants, says Robert Scheina.61 A peace settlement might
confer territories on one party, but ruling there was difficult. A peace
treaty might be unraveled by new population movements, discoveries of
economic resources, or the construction of new frontier posts. This
made major wars less likely but disputes involving MIDs more likely. So-
cial ecology is important in explaining the Latin American puzzle.
New settlements by the borders were few because there was ample land
for settlers well inside borders. In medieval Europe and early Spring and
Autumn China, a small military expedition and war abroad could be imme-
diately followed by “planting” settlers among less well-developed peoples
living there. But here settlers could find new estates or trading opportuni-
ties within the country, either on virgin or on Indian land. When in the
nineteenth century the republics’ small forces got modern rifles and the
Indians did not, wars of domestic expansion yielded easy pickings for set-
tlers. Interior areas could be pacified without great cost, and states attempt-
ing the conquest of indigenous peoples were generally given a free hand by
their neighbors. External meddling was rare, and arming Indians was unde-
sirable since it might threaten all whites.62 It was different for political dis-
putes among whites, which attracted much neighborly interference since
this was much cheaper than war. It might lead to MIDs if not war.
Minnow states were not swallowed up. Though Brazil’s size dwarfed
the former Spanish republics, much of it was thinly populated jungle and
mountain. Argentina had a large population and great potential re-
sources, but it was riven by interprovincial conflicts. Chile was more
well-developed, although it was initially quite small, and both it and even
smaller Paraguay developed the most cohesive states and militaries. Mex-
ico was a giant, but Britain and the United States would not permit it to
swallow up the minnow states to its south. For reasons of trade, these
two great powers had an interest in maintaining relative peace.

The Cases of War Post-1833

With these general explanations in mind, I turn to the interstate wars
fought after 1833. I exclude defensive wars waged against American,
Spanish, and French invasions, but I do include the Falklands War. The
244 South and Central America

total number is fifteen, although four do not meet the CoW standard of
one thousand battle deaths. For lack of evidence, I do not include wars
fought by colonists against indigenous peoples, nor do I include most
civil wars, although some affected interstate wars, as we shall see. Inter-
state wars were all fought between neighbors. I begin with the two main
regions that were most strategic or resource-rich. In the Río de la Plata
system, large populations lived not far from disputed borderlands, some
containing valuable resources or straddling major communications
routes. The sparsely settled central Pacific Coast had some strategic im-
portance for international trade and was found in the mid-nineteenth
century to contain valuable mineral resources. There seemed to be op-
portunity for economic profit through conquest of border territory in
these two regions, and the biggest wars occurred there.

The Platine War, 1851–1852

This six-month conflict was fought between the Argentine Confedera-
tion and Brazil, which was supported by two dissident Argentine prov-
inces. The war had both geopolitical and economic causes. It was part
of a long-running struggle between Argentina and Brazil for influence
over Uruguay and Paraguay. It was also a struggle for control of the
Río de la Plata system, which fed into the Atlantic Ocean, with its valu-
able trade routes. Brazil had lost some territories in early postcolonial
encounters, and revisionism flourished among Brazilian elites. Uruguay
had been created by British mediation as a buffer state to help ease their
conflicts, but Uruguay had needed a joint Anglo-French naval blockade
of Buenos Aires during 1845–50 to protect it from the aggressive Argen-
tine president Juan Manuel de Rosas. This was the only substantial
British military intervention in Latin America until 1982. Rosas was
backing the Uruguayan Blanco party, while Brazil’s Emperor Pedro II
backed the rival Colorados—rival attempts at regime change or
strengthening. Rosas had strengthened the Argentine Confederation’s
central state against the peripheries, becoming an authoritarian ruler and
building up a cult of personality. It was believed he sought dominance
over most of the former Spanish viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. This
might ultimately mean claiming control over Uruguay, Paraguay, and
even bits of Bolivia and Brazil. Brazil was provoked by Argentine expan-
sion amid rival interpretations of uti possidetis, for borders were not en-
tirely clear here.
 South and Central America 245

After debates in the Brazilian cabinet and parliament, the govern-

ment decided to send its small professional army, backed by its more
powerful navy, into battle. In early 1851 it helped finance two Argentine
breakaway provinces and the opposition Colorado Party in Uruguay, and
it signed defensive alliances with Paraguay and Bolivia. Provoked, Rosas
struck out. Claiming self-defense, he declared war on Brazil. He had ac-
tually provoked the formation of the alliance against him. Valuable river-
ine territory of uncertain ownership fueled conflict, but it was fired up by
a high-risk president with ambitious goals.
A Brazilian force invaded Uruguay. After a series of short skirmishes,
there was a decisive battle with Argentine forces at Caseros between
armies of about 26,000 men on each side. Losses of about 2,000 dead or
wounded were afterward declared, two-thirds of them Argentines. Brazil
secured victory and marched its army through Buenos Aires in triumph,
which humiliation was hardly likely to secure peace in the future. Victory
had confirmed the independence of Paraguay and Uruguay, prevented a
planned Argentine invasion of Brazil, and weakened the Argentine Con-
federation. Brazil then enjoyed more internal stability and economic
growth. But Uruguay’s civil strife continued, inviting foreign interfer-
ence short of war. Paying small subsidies to a friendly faction there was
much cheaper than war. Argentina also became more united in the early
1860s, followed by a consequent growth of revisionism. Paraguay also
grew stronger along the river system, sometimes harassing Brazilian
shipping. This might not seem a stable balance of power, but peace lasted
for twelve years.

War of the Triple Alliance, 1864–1870

This was by far the longest and bloodiest war occurring in Latin Amer-
ica. It pitted an alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against Para-
guay. The Río de la Plata system continued to cause armed conflict; it
was underpopulated and inadequately mapped but a key strategic and
economic resource. Tension rose in the early 1860s, again precipitated by
civil strife in Uruguay. In 1863 Argentina aided a small invading army of
Uruguayan dissidents trying to install the opposition Colorado Party in
power, while Paraguay supported the Blanco Party government—a re-
gime-change skirmish. Paraguay protested the invasion, and Argentina
implausibly denied all knowledge. The next year Brazil joined in the
invasion, partly to protect Brazilian trade along the rivers. The Blanco
246 South and Central America

regime fell. Paraguay threatened war, but Brazil ignored this. A secret
treaty between the allies claimed that “the peace, safety, and well-being
of their respective nations is impossible while the present Government
of Paraguay exists.” News of their deal leaked out, fueling Paraguayan
fury.
Thomas Whigham identifies four principal causes of the war. First,
disputed thinly populated but strategically important borders had long
been causing MIDs. Second, the political ambitions and nationalisms of
Bartolomé Mitre of Argentina and Dom Pedro II of Brazil clashed; both
claimed territories and sought more central state powers against periph-
eral political factions demanding regional autonomy. Third, Uruguay’s
government remained unstable, presenting a security dilemma in which
escalation was not in armaments but in foreign meddling. Fourth, like
Chris Leuchars and Peter Henderson, Whigham lays most of the blame
on Paraguay’s president Francisco Solano López.63
Paraguay was ethnically quite homogeneous, and its isolationist
policies had cultivated a strong sense of nationhood, the main exception
to Centeno’s argument that ethnic diversity weakened Latin American
states and Mazzuca’s argument that peripheral factions weakened them.
The indigenous population was largely Guarani-speaking, which the re-
gime recognized as a second national language; it also treated the Gua-
rani culture sympathetically. In this sense Paraguay was enlightened. It
also had a powerful presidency. President Carlos Antonio López (1841–
62) had sponsored statist development centered on protectionism, infra-
structure projects, and conscription. He saber-rattled against Argentina
and Brazil but avoided war. But in 1862 he transferred the presidency to
his more aggressive son, Francisco Solano López.
In December 1864 Solano López declared war and invaded the Mato
Grosso region of Brazil. In March 1865, when Argentina refused his re-
quest to march through its territory in order to reach Uruguay, he in-
vaded Argentina as well. The first year of the war went well for Paraguay.
The armies of Brazil and Argentina were small and poorly organized.
Uruguay had no professional army. In contrast, Paraguay was more mili-
tarized, employing near-universal conscription. Whigham estimates that
Solano López could count on conscript armies totaling one-third of the
Paraguayan male population. He was modernizing them with British as-
sistance, and he had built a chain of forts along the river system. Para-
guay punched well above its weight in numbers. Yet it decisively lost the
war, as was predictable if the war lasted long, given the disparity in re-
 South and Central America 247

sources between the two sides. He thought this was a window of oppor-
tunity, but it soon closed. The alliance’s population of 11 million dwarfed
the 300,000 to 400,000 Paraguayans. Although Solano López could keep
on drafting new recruits without recourse to debt, finally conscripting
prepubescent boys, this eventually harmed the productivity of the labor
force. In a war of attrition Brazil could draft more, at no great loss to the
economy. Brazilian casualties as a proportion of national population were
not high because of the enormous size of its population. Argentina’s were
not high because its commitment to the war was low. But estimates of
Paraguayan casualties, though much disputed, are somewhere between
15 and 45 percent of its total prewar population. Bear Braumoeller gives
a death rate of 70 percent of the adult male population, which is at the
high end of the possible. In proportional terms, this would make it the
deadliest war in the world in the entire period since 1816, more deadly
than either world war.64
Fazal sees Paraguay as “a fairly standard instance of a buffer state”
having near-death inflicted on it.65 But Paraguay was no victim buffer
state. Its fate was self-inflicted through its ruler’s irrational level of ag-
gression. An overconfident president ordered his army and navy, initially
superior, to attack all the surrounding powers at once. Solano López
overestimated Paraguay’s military power and underestimated Brazil’s,
once mobilized. He might have won a short war, but not a long one, al-
though he could keep on fighting because of large-scale conscription. He
had reason to fear the Brazilian and Argentinian rulers, but the tradi-
tional Paraguayan diplomacy of playing one against the other could have
continued. His aggressive impulses got the better of him. He mistakenly
thought Argentina would remain neutral in a war between Paraguay and
Brazil even if Paraguayan soldiers marched into Argentine territory,
which brought unacceptable dishonor to its rulers. He also denied any
autonomy to his senior officers in the field and executed many of his own
soldiers. He was utterly reckless in fighting to the bitter end rather than
shifting to negotiations after repeated defeats made clear the writing on
the wall.
Brazil did most of the alliance’s fighting. Yet the war was unpopular
in Brazil, and its army was composed largely of ex-slaves, some bought by
the government from their owners, others promised land after the war.
Paraguayan conscripts showed tenacity, but defeat was already certain
when Solano López was tracked down and killed.66 Nationalistic theories
claiming the hand of Britain was everywhere have been discredited. The
248 South and Central America

foreign powers favored peace (for trade) and stood aside, apart from giv-
ing loans to whoever seemed likely to repay them.67 They were not inter-
ested in direct intervention, even in mere gunboat diplomacy.
Paraguay’s national output was halved, and the country had to cede
one-third of its territory and all its claims in disputed areas. That it was
not wiped off the map was due to the victors not trusting each other—a
very Realist sentiment. This was the closest the continent came to the
elimination of a state, common in European, Chinese, and Japanese his-
tory. But Paraguay was reduced to a buffer state, alongside Uruguay.
There was one sweetener. Paraguay was given the desolate Chaco Boreal
region by the arbitrator, U.S. president Rutherford Hayes. Argentina and
Brazil became indebted by the war, but merchants and planters had ben-
efited, as had Buenos Aires centralizers against those favoring provincial
autonomy. In Brazil victory enabled the first stirrings of nationalism to
emerge, and it strengthened the Brazilian military, which prepared the
way for its coup deposing the emperor in 1889, when a republic was es-
tablished. A war of this magnitude is bound to effect major changes
among the participants. Concludes Leslie Bethell:

Solano López’s reckless actions brought about the very thing

that most threatened the security, even the existence, of his
country: a union of his two powerful neighbours. . . . Neither
Brazil nor Argentina had a quarrel with Paraguay sufficient to
justify going to war. Neither wished nor planned for war with
Paraguay. There was no popular demand or support for war; in-
deed, the war proved to be generally unpopular in both coun-
tries, especially Argentina. At the same time little effort was
made to avoid war. The need to defend themselves against Para-
guayan aggression . . . offered both Brazil and Argentina not only
an opportunity to settle their differences with Paraguay over ter-
ritory and river navigation but also to punish and weaken, per-
haps destroy, a troublesome, emerging (expansionist?) power in
their region.68

Some wars, including this one, involve a human folly that confounds
rationality. Why did Solano López aggress, and why did he continue
fighting long after defeat was inevitable? I note a similarity between
cases where leaders make overaggressive moves and then keep on fight-
ing when defeat seems inevitable, as in Japan and Germany in the 1940s.
 South and Central America 249

Leaders imprisoned themselves inside an ideology and political institu-

tions that induced the belief that their soldiers would be superior in mar-
tial spirit to those of the enemy. So the leaders cannot calculate the
balance of potential goal achievement versus the economic costs and mil-
itary fortunes of war. They go recklessly to their doom, as their behavior
becomes erratic, psychologically disturbed, and pathologically destruc-
tive to self and the dwindling loyalists around them. Solano López’s
mental descent amid the desperate degeneration of his remaining few
troops accompanied by a mob of refugees is vividly and horrifically de-
picted in Whigham’s last chapters.69 The participants learned a lesson
from this terrible war: even the communications system of the Río de la
Plata was not worth fighting for again. Tensions were in future followed
by rhetoric, and sometimes MIDs, but then defused by negotiations and
eventually settlement.

The War of Confederation, 1836–1839

Parts of the central Pacific coast had unclear colonial boundaries. The
Spanish Crown had not bothered to clarify administrative boundaries in
such barren and sparsely inhabited deserts. But for the successor repub-
lics, boundary issues emerged. Separatism in the south of Peru, northern
Bolivia, and Chile made neighborly interference for regime change pos-
sible. Disputes here were initially about control of coastal maritime trade
and the tariffs that this brought. But the so-called tariff wars between
Chile and Peru did not flare up into fighting.
The Bolivian regime seized a time of civil war in Peru to intervene
and unite the two countries, claiming the legitimacy that they had both
been in the same Spanish viceroyalty. This confederation was potentially
the most powerful state on the Pacific coast, threatening the interests of
Chile and Argentina. Again, a regional hegemony threatened. Diego
Portales, the dominant figure in the Chilean government, declared: “The
Confederation must disappear forever from the American stage. We
must dominate forever in the Pacific.”70 So he threatened military action,
and, as intended, this produced negotiations, mediated by Mexico.
Agreement on trade and tariffs emerged, but Portales’s demand that the
confederation be dissolved was unacceptable to Bolivia. Agreement was
then thwarted by a military revolt in Chile in which Portales was mur-
dered. Though the rebels were defeated, many believed Peru had fi-
nanced them. A Chilean war party strengthened. Interstate war in Latin
250 South and Central America

America again involved attempted regime change in a neighbor’s domes-

tic politics. This was the pretext for Chile to declare war.
The Bolivian-Peruvian Confederation had been recognized by Britain,
France, and the United States, but they were ignored. Argentina and Ecua-
dor initially remained neutral. But when the confederation interfered in
Argentine internal politics, Argentina declared war as well. The confedera-
tion defeated the small Argentine army sent against it, but after fluctuating
fortunes, Chilean forces were victorious at the Battle of Yungay in 1839,
and the confederation was dissolved. There were about 8,000 total casual-
ties in this war; the final decisive battle, between forces each about 6,000
strong, contributed almost 3,000 casualties, mostly Bolivian and Peruvian.
This was not massive warfare, and it did not attract much popular
support, although when confederation forces supposedly committed
atrocities in Chile, Chileans rallied ’round the flag. But the people were
mostly absent from Chilean politics, excluded by an oligarchy that con-
trolled elections.71 From the 1830s expanding foreign trade was blending
Chilean merchants and mine and land owners into a ruling class that
agreed on the interests of the country and themselves. Family connec-
tions strengthened elite cohesion in a small country, which, given greater
resolve and commitment of resources, was an advantage in war. Chile was
the second exceptional case noted by Centeno and Mazzuca, where at
least at the level of dominant classes there was some sense of “national”
homogeneity. This was the only war in Latin America in which a state—a
new, fragile confederation—was dismantled by war.

The War of the Pacific, 1879–1883

The second world war was bigger, causing nearly 12,000 military deaths.
Geopolitics was here dominated by economic interests.72 In 1842 valuable
deposits of guano fertilizer were found along the border area disputed by
Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. MID disputes dragged on for some time without
escalating to war, but the rivalry became more intense with the discovery
in the early 1860s of nitrate deposits, and then of silver. But in 1864–66 a
Spanish fleet bombarded coastal towns in Peru, Chile, and Bolivia. The
Spanish fortuitously produced an alliance among the three. In two small
naval battles two hundred to four hundred sailors were killed before the
Spanish withdrew. Bolivia and Chile signed a treaty in 1866, each re-
nouncing some of its territorial and mining claims. They agreed to split
the proceeds from guano deposits and taxes on mineral resources.
 South and Central America 251

Chile developed the more effective government and capitalist econ-

omy, centered on a mining-industrial complex. Its revenue enabled devel-
opment programs and military expenses. In response to mining pressure,
the Chilean government sought to reinterpret the treaty to justify territo-
rial expansion. In 1873 Peru and Bolivia formed a countering alliance, but
a Chile-Bolivia treaty appeared to settle their differences. MID incidents
arose and then dissipated. But in 1878 Bolivian authorities tried to extract
more taxes from foreign mining companies, while Peru’s impoverished
government nationalized Chilean-owned mines. These provocations
caused Chilean hawks to demand war to protect mining interests, and
mutual miscalculations made war probable. Bolivia’s dictator thought
Chile was focused on possible Argentine aggression and so would not
fight, while Peru’s president decided to honor his country’s not-so-secret
military alliance with Bolivia, blundering into war ill-prepared. Army
sizes grew to about 25,000 on each side, but those mobilized into battle
were much fewer. They had modern weapons but obsolete tactics of mass
infantry assaults, and they lacked logistical support. The Chileans had
better-trained officers and NCOs, but their victory resulted mostly from
superior civil infrastructures and political instability in Peru and Bolivia.73
The peace treaty of 1883 was dictated by Chile, and it allowed Chile
to annex one Bolivian and three Peruvian provinces—and their nitrate
deposits. Nine of the fourteen articles in the treaty referred to either
guano or nitrates. Chile’s acquisition of the deposits became the central
source of income for the state, strengthening its armed forces and its po-
litical oligarchy—just as defeat weakened the Peruvian and Bolivian
states. Chile was now the dominant Pacific power. Since the other pow-
ers were beset by internal disorder, they mounted no threat, and Chilean
leaders relaxed into cultivating its balance-of-power system.74
The peace treaty stipulated that Chile organize a plebiscite after
ten years in two of the provinces taken. Chile failed to do this, but
subsequent MID episodes brought in mediation by the United States in
1929, which awarded one province to Peru, the other to Chile, and fixed
all land border disputes. Maritime boundaries were not settled, and there
were two further MID incidents followed by negotiations. In the Santi-
ago Declaration of 1952, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru agreed to a maritime
boundary limit of 320 kilometers offshore, but only in 2014 did the ICJ
finalize a maritime settlement. Another group of Latin Americans
learned through experience of unproductive wars that disputes are better
settled through negotiation.
252 South and Central America

Ecuadoran-Colombian War (War of the Cauca), 1863

Both Ecuador and Colombia had been part of the Spanish viceroyalty of
New Granada and the early successor Gran Colombia state. Border dis-
putes thrived on vague Spanish maps in sparsely populated areas. In 1861
the conservative Gabriel García Moreno became an activist president of
Ecuador, seeking to lessen class, regional, and language disputes by con-
ferring more power on the Catholic Church. This alienated liberals, who
saw the Church as an obstacle to liberty and progress. Similar conflicts
had riven Colombia, and after a civil war there, the liberal Tomás Cipri-
ano de Mosquera became president and immediately declared he would
restore Gran Colombia and annex Venezuela and Ecuador. Venezuela’s
well-armed president ignored this, but weaker Ecuador was threatened
as Mosquera urged Ecuadoran liberals to overthrow García Moreno and
join the Gran Colombia project. When nothing happened, Mosquera or-
dered his army to the frontier. García Moreno responded by ordering his
army to invade Colombia. This sequence of provocative actions by two
aggressive presidents revealed systematic miscalculation of one another’s
likely response. The war was swiftly ended at the Battle of Cuaspad when
about 4,000 Colombians routed 6,000 Ecuadoran invaders, killing or
wounding about 1,500 of them. Colombian losses are unknown.
Colombian forces then invaded Ecuador, but international pressure
brought an armistice welcomed by the two tired sides. International ne-
gotiations led to an agreement to return to the prewar status quo. Med-
dling in each other’s internal conflicts—regime change—had been the
major cause. This was the last war between the countries. Border disputes
also involving Peru eventually resulted in a treaty of 1922 that deprived
Ecuador of access to the Amazon. Ecuador was a resentful loser but,
being weak, could not resist. A historian lamented that Ecuador was like
Christ at Calvary, crucified between two thieves.75 From 1950 Colombia
was embroiled in civil wars and had no interest in external conflict.

Central American Wars, 1876, 1885, 1906–1907

These brief, connected episodes were provoked by attempts to reestablish
the early Central American Federation, which were countered by balanc-
ing alliances among the other states. Once again, factional disputes within
a country sparked military action for regime change. In 1876 Guatemala
invaded Honduras in support of liberal rebels there, seeking to overthrow
 South and Central America 253

a conservative regime. El Salvador joined with the Hondurans to prevent

Guatemalan hegemony. The war lasted a month. Guatemala triumphed.
A new liberal regime was installed in Honduras, but there was not Guate-
malan hegemony. Armies numbered 2,500 or less, while total losses were
4,000 killed or dead from disease. In 1885 Guatemala made another at-
tempt at federation, Honduras acting as an ally. Their forces invaded El
Salvador, which was aided by Costa Rica and Nicaragua. After a war of
little more than two weeks, the Guatemalans were defeated and Central
America remained divided. Army sizes were well under 10,000, and there
were about 1,000 casualties, mostly Guatemalan.
A third, two-month war occurred in 1906 between Guatemala and
El Salvador, aided by Honduras, each trying to install its clients, liberals
or conservatives, in power in the enemy country. The largest army size
was 7,000, and there was a total of 1,000 deaths. The war was inconclu-
sive and ended with Mexican and American mediation. The next year
war flared again as Nicaraguan forces attacked Honduras and El Salva-
dor in yet another attempt to re-create a federation. Army sizes were
about 4,500 and total casualties after two months of inconclusive fighting
were about 1,000. A U.S.-sponsored peace conference agreed to submit
claims to binding arbitration by a judge from each country, although this
proved a failure. None of these short, small wars succeeded in changing
the balance of power, but, although dictators kept on meddling in the in-
ternal politics of neighbors, they did not again go to war—until the 1969
Soccer War, which had quite different causes. Here rulers learned
through failure that war did not pay.

The Chaco War, 1932–1935

This much bigger war was fought between Bolivia and Paraguay over
borderlands in the Gran Chaco region, arid and thinly populated, but
thought to be potentially oil-rich. Braumoeller says this was the second
deadliest war of the modern era in terms of the proportion of national
populations killed (higher than either world war).76 The Paraguay River
running through Chaco provided access to the Atlantic Ocean, impor-
tant to Bolivia, which was landlocked, having lost its Pacific coast to
Chile in the War of the Pacific. Since Paraguay had lost half its territory
in the War of the Triple Alliance, both were self-righteous revisionist
powers disputing access to the Atlantic. Their rulers were under eco-
nomic pressure from foreign debts and stalled modernization, and under
254 South and Central America

political pressure from nationalist newspapers and student demonstra-

tors. So the war was partly diversionary as presidents sought to shift at-
tention from their domestic failures. Their fears were of rival elites, not
of class struggle. Because Bolivian literacy was just over 10 percent, and
under 5 percent of its people were enfranchised, politics did not involve
the masses. Miners pressed for workers’ rights, but they were sectorally
confined.77
Paraguay claimed its right by virtue of occupying the Chaco since
the Spanish left, but this consisted only of a few government outposts
dwarfed by large estates that a cash-strapped government had sold to Ar-
gentinian, British, and American investors. Its main economic motive
was to continue receiving this income. Most of the Guarani people of the
region identified with Paraguay. The glorification of Paraguay’s mestizo
identity, personified in the notion of the patriotic Guarani-speaking
peasant soldier, enabled scientists, missionaries, and anthropologists to
write about the indigenous populations without racial slurs, a situation
unique in Latin America.78 Bolivia claimed uti possidetis, arguing that in
Spanish times the Gran Chaco had been part of its audiencia. Since Para-
guay’s defeat in the War of the Triple Alliance, Bolivia had been the more
active in the Chaco region, provoking MIDs between them. Foreign
powers attempted mediation, but agreements proved contentious back
home, and none was implemented. As diplomacy failed, military prepara-
tions began.
Both had small military outposts along the frontiers, and 1927 saw a
collision between rival patrols. A Paraguayan lieutenant was killed and
his men taken prisoner by Bolivian soldiers. Rhetoric escalated in the
two capitals, then subsided, as the liberal government in Paraguay re-
sisted pressure for retaliation. A bigger MID clash occurred in 1928,
when a Paraguayan battalion seized a Bolivian post. Two successive Bo-
livian presidents decided that war would divert national attention from
internal disputes with a hostile congress, radical students, and a weak
economy. Believing that Bolivia’s greater resources, larger population,
and German-trained army would bring swift victory, Bolivia’s President
Daniel Salamanca ordered the army to take three more Paraguayan out-
posts.79 In 1929 the Pan-American Union brokered a settlement. The
two sides signed a peace accord, withdrew their forces, and exchanged
prisoners. The border dispute was not settled, but war was avoided, since
neither side felt ready to wage it. Instead, they engaged in an arms-
importing race.
 South and Central America 255

In 1931 Paraguayan surveyors found a freshwater lake in the parched

Chaco region. Irrigation agriculture might be possible. The Paraguayans
constructed a fort to consolidate their presence, which the Bolivians seized
in June 1932, provoking a counterattack that drove the Bolivians away.
There was pressure in Bolivia for retaliation, and a force of 10,000 men
seized the biggest town in the Chaco. This produced a Paraguayan army
response, and from May 1933 the Bolivians were forced to retreat. This
humiliation brought down President Salamanca in a military coup in 1934.
By that time, Paraguay’s soldiers held far more ground than their country
had claimed. Paraguay’s soldiers, though outnumbered, again proved more
cohesive and better led, possessing the logistical advantage of rivers and
rail lines leading into the remote region. It seemed to be winning the war.
Yet it had also incurred heavy losses, faced supply difficulties as it ad-
vanced, and exhausted its loans from Argentina. Both sides sought peace
and agreed to a cease-fire in 1935. The peace settlement of 1938, assisted
by Argentina and the United States, awarded Paraguay three-quarters of
the Chaco Boreal and left Bolivia with the swampy northwest, not the de-
sired river port. Diplomatic and strategic blunders and political infighting
had left Bolivia with far less land than it had had before the war. In medi-
ated settlements victors usually made some gains and negotiators some-
times favored claims based on occupation rather than ancient maps.
Paraguay lost almost 40,000 men and Bolivia almost 60,000, al-
though mostly from disease. Bolivia mobilized about 10 percent of its
population during the war, Paraguay about 16 percent. The loss rates,
Bolivia 3 percent and Paraguay 4 percent of total population, were
slightly higher than European losses in World War I; the recruitment
rate was similar to that in the U.S. Civil War (about 10 percent). This
had been a devastating war for both countries. Bolivian mobilization was
a remarkable if disastrous achievement in a thinly populated country
with a supposedly weak state.80 At first, recruitment had been easy, espe-
cially in cities where a rally ’round the flag sentiment briefly raged, but it
got more difficult the longer war lasted and the defeats piled up. Con-
scription required enforcement, desertions grew, and officers had to put
rifles in deserters’ hands and push them back into the lines, for if they
had shot them, their regiments would have been denuded. Eventually, in
2012, commercially viable oil was found in the area awarded to Paraguay,
and natural gas was discovered in Bolivia’s. It had proved a pointless war.
It lived on in Bolivian resentment and occasional MID incidents, but it
was not repeated.
256 South and Central America

The Leticia War, 1932–1933

This eight-month conflict was fought between Colombia and Peru over
disputed border territory in the Amazon rainforest. It began with Peru-
vian occupation of the small river port of Leticia, connected by the Ama-
zon to the Atlantic, 4,000 kilometers away. The attack was by armed
Peruvian soldiers and civilians, perhaps without authority from above. A
reluctant Colombian government was forced by urban popular pressure
to prepare to retake the port. Similarly, the Peruvian government was
pressured to defend it. When Colombian forces eventually reached this
remote area, 1,100 kilometers from Bogotá, they retook the port. The
forces involved were each about 1,000 strong. The number of persons
killed is not known, but it is unlikely to have been more than two hun-
dred deaths on each side, partly to jungle diseases, a motive for them to
end the war alongside mounting debt. With the assistance of League of
Nations mediation, Leticia was restored to Colombia, but the two gov-
ernments divided the rest of the disputed zone. This conflict had casual-
ties well short of the CoW minimum, and it is not normally included in
lists of Latin American wars.

Ecuador-Peru Wars
From the 1830s to the 1990s a large but sparsely populated Amazonian
border zone between Ecuador and Peru saw repeated skirmishes.81 In
1857 Ecuador attempted to repay its debt to Britain by issuing bonds for
this disputed territory. Peru objected, and military skirmishes followed,
which went in Peru’s favor. The Treaty of Mapasingue in 1860 included
considerable Ecuadoran concessions. The treaty was ratified by neither
government, however, and the next decade saw thirty-four MIDs be-
tween them, all short of war. This was the longest-lived territorial sore in
the Americas, arising from border ambiguities in forests and mountains.
Peru claimed the border was along the ridge of the Cordillera del Cóndor
mountain range. Ecuador insisted that its territory extended eastward
over the top of the sierras to the Cenepa River, which feeds through the
Marañón river to the Amazon and thence to the Atlantic, the access to
which Ecuador claimed a sovereign right. Thus, this remote region has
strategic significance, especially for Ecuador. Three brief conflicts en-
sued in the twentieth century, interspersing small MIDs or wars with
diplomatic wrangling and mediation.82
 South and Central America 257

The War of ’41, or the Zarumilla War, began when a large Peruvian
force invaded Ecuador, seeing a window of opportunity, a political crisis
that brought the main Ecuadoran army into the capital. The Peruvians
overwhelmed the much smaller Ecuadoran forces opposing them. About
five hundred soldiers died, including only one hundred Peruvians. An ar-
mistice was soon signed, followed by the Rio Protocol, brokered by the
United States, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. They threatened Ecuador
with ending the talks if it did not sign, which would leave Ecuador to
face menacing Peruvian forces. Ecuador had to give up two-thirds of the
disputed territory, comprising 220,000 square kilometers, thereby losing
any outlet to the Amazon River. So Ecuadoran governments became
bitterly revisionist. David Mares and David Palmer say that in all the
Ecuador-Peru confrontations, politicians on both sides were pushed by
“public opinion” into aggressive stances.83 The urban classes were more
ignorant of the horrors of war than were the politicians, and few of them
fought in these mostly peasant armies. Only the financial cost of war
might harm them, if it lasted long.
Seventy-eight kilometers of the border remained unclear, however.
The actual course of the Cenepa River differed from that shown on the
maps. Seizing on this, Ecuador rejected the protocol, which brought fur-
ther diplomatic wrangling. After 1969 relations between them improved.
Both joined the Andean Pact, and they signed economic pacts with each
other. Peruvian leaders, democratic and authoritarian, hoped this would
settle the dispute. But Ecuadoran political movements, seething with in-
justice, did not let go of the issue, and military outposts were erected in
the disputed area in 1977. The Peruvians responded with threats but not
much action, and the two sides backed off without war. But Peru’s mild
reaction emboldened the Ecuadoran government into repeating its infil-
tration. There were two more flare-ups into violence.
The Paquisha War of 1981 was triggered by Ecuadoran forces estab-
lishing three military outposts on the Cenepa River. It lasted only a
week, and there were fewer than two hundred deaths. The Peruvians
won because of greater military power. Yet in the 1980s Peru experienced
economic crisis and near-bankruptcy, political turmoil, a border dispute
with Chile in the south, and a civil war against Shining Path guerillas. So
Ecuadoran leaders opportunistically upped their territorial claims and
prepared for war. This provoked Peruvian forces to strengthen border
defenses. Undaunted, in 1995 Ecuadorans constructed stronger forts in-
side contested territory. Both regimes were egged on by nationalism
258 South and Central America

among the literate classes demanding to preserve or recapture sacred

homeland. Ecuadoran governments, whichever political faction was in
control, would not let go of the issue because of a sense of injustice.
Mares and Palmer observe, “The external threat posed by Peruvian
claims to territory in the Amazon . . . [was] the glue that held the nation
together.”84 They mean the middle-class nation.
This led to the monthlong Cenepa War, for which 40,000 soldiers
were mobilized, of whom 500–1,000 were killed.85 The Peruvian air force
bombed and strafed. Nine of its planes and helicopters were downed. Ec-
uadoran forces performed better, the fighting was inconclusive, and both
governments tired of the financial costs. Revisionism in Ecuador was as-
suaged by pride in the army’s achievements, which gave the government
space to negotiate a compromise. International pressures brought back
four international mediators who ruled that the border was the line of the
Cordillera, as Peru claimed. There were sweeteners: Ecuador was guaran-
teed shipping access to the Amazon and the Atlantic, received $3 billion
in development aid from international financial institutions, and was
granted perpetual ownership of one square kilometer of land in the dis-
puted territory to build a memorial to its fallen!
This settlement has endured partly because it allowed economic de-
velopment of both border regions and increased trade between them.
The countries finally learned that negotiation is preferable to military
aggression. Mares and Palmer say that “we should not believe that Latin
America has reached a state in which the use of force as an instrument of
statecraft has been rendered illegitimate or null.”86 I am more optimistic,
perceiving that each region of Latin America in turn has learned that in-
terstate war does not pay.

The Soccer War, 1969

This war of 1969 was fought between Honduras and El Salvador. The vi-
olence began in riots during a football World Cup qualifying match be-
tween them, but the roots of conflict lay mainly in mass immigration.
Around 300,000 Salvadoran immigrants had streamed into Honduras
seeking a better economic life. William Durham and Thomas Anderson
show that this resulted from growing inequality of landholding in El Sal-
vador because of the government’s encouragement of export-oriented
agriculture, which favored larger landowners and squeezed peasants,
many of whom were forced by debts off the land.87 They migrated to
 South and Central America 259

Honduras, believing they could get land there. Some succeeded. But
Honduras also had growing inequalities of land that were squeezing out
its small farmers. The two pressures of immigration and landlessness,
both a consequence of class struggle between capitalist landlords, who
controlled the state, and peasant owners and tenants was diverted into
struggle between the two national communities. This was one of the few
wars analyzable in Marxist terms as the diversion by state elites of class
struggle—and the resulting nationalism was popular, mobilizing much of
the population.
This war occurred during the Cold War, as fear of communism
fanned the flames. Large landowners and American agribusiness pres-
sured the Honduran government into a land reform that expropriated
Salvadoran immigrants who owned or tenanted their land, forcing
130,000 out of the country. This infuriated El Salvador’s leaders, terrified
by returning angry peasants whom they saw as potential communists.
The nationalism that flared up was manipulated by Salvadoran leaders
and gave popular backing to an invasion of Honduras. The Salvadoran
army advanced and quickly neared the Honduran capital. The Organiza-
tion of American States and the United States then pressured the Salva-
dorans to halt, as they may have anticipated, and the OAS negotiated a
truce. After contentious negotiations, the immigration dispute was set-
tled in 1980. In the four-day air-and-land war El Salvador suffered an es-
timated 900 dead, mostly civilians, while Honduras is estimated to have
lost 250 soldiers and 2,000 civilians—significant numbers in tiny coun-
tries. The war strengthened the powers of both countries’ militaries and
made the border dispute more difficult to solve. Several peace deals later,
there has been no further violence.

Falklands (Malvinas) and the Beagle Channel, 1982–1983

The Falklands (Malvinas) War began when Argentine forces invaded
these British-owned islands, desolate and of little economic value, long
claimed by both sides, long occupied only by British settlers—there were
1,820 settlers and their 400,000 sheep in 1982. War was started to bolster
the sagging popularity of the Argentine military regime, while the British
response was dictated by a mixture of the sagging popularity of Margaret
Thatcher and her strong Churchillian sense of national honor. Losing
the war destroyed the Argentine regime; winning bolstered Thatcher.
The total casualties (dead plus wounded) of about nine hundred did not
260 South and Central America

meet the CoW project’s requirements of one thousand deaths, but it was
clearly a war.
Yet it was part of broader conflicts in this desolate region. Border
disputes between Chilean and Argentine rulers had mounted in Patago-
nia in the later nineteenth century as Argentina had expanded southward,
conquering indigenous peoples backed by Chile. Uti possidetis offered no
solution since the Spanish had not settled this far south, but a treaty of
1881 had set the border at the line of the highest mountains dividing the
Atlantic and Pacific watersheds. Yet in Patagonia, drainage basins confus-
ingly crossed the Andes. Should the Andean peaks constitute the border,
as the Argentines claimed, or should the drainage basins, as the Chileans
claimed? There were some naval MIDs, but both feared that any war
might be costly. War had been avoided when the parties agreed in 1902
to binding British mediation, which solved the crisis by dividing the lakes
along the disputed line into two equal parts, Chilean and Argentine. In
celebration the two countries shared the expense of a giant statue of
Christ the Redeemer, erected under the shadow of the highest mountain,
marking the restoration of friendship.88
There was one remaining issue. Chile possessed four small islands at
the southern edge of Tierra del Fuego in the Beagle Channel, which
connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Possession had implications for
navigation through the channel, and steamships had greatly increased
traffic. From 1904 Argentine governments had claimed the four islands.
The dispute had festered on through MID incidents, attempts at direct
negotiations, and supposedly “binding” international tribunals, all of
which awarded the islands to Chile. In 1978 a plan by the Argentine mil-
itary government to invade the islands had been aborted because of divi-
sions within the military. It was perhaps surprising that the generals then
made the decision to fight not there against the weaker enemy, but
against the British, a major military power traditionally friendly to Ar-
gentina. This choice was made because in the intervening four years the
military regime had become unpopular and the war was a desperate at-
tempt at survival.89 Political goals triumphed, backed, as so often, by an
overoptimistic military calculation of odds.
The Argentine war plan of 1982 was to invade the disputed Beagle
Islands after success in the Falklands. President Leopoldo Galtieri de-
clared that Chileans “have to know . . . what we are doing now, because
they will be the next in turn.” Indeed, he deployed his better troops on
the Chilean border, while lesser units had to deal with the highly profes-
 South and Central America 261

sional British forces. He made the not unreasonable decision that the
13,000-kilometer distance between Britain and the islands made any
retaliation logistically impossible, while the fait accompli of a bloodless
invasion of the islands would persuade the British to negotiate. He be-
lieved that international public opinion, and the United States, would re-
gard this as a war of resistance against colonialism. Mares regards this as
a “rational policy decision” and blames the British and American govern-
ments for not taking the Argentines seriously and failing to credibly
signal deterrence.90 The problem in Britain was that war could not be
threatened before the invasion, since almost no one in Britain even knew
of the existence of the islands or of British sovereignty over them. But
once the invasion happened, the government could count on a rally
’round the flag.
Galtieri had misjudged. He had brought forward the date of the in-
vasion because the British government was growing suspicious of the Ar-
gentine military buildup, but this gave the British time to retaliate before
winter set in. President Reagan had warned Galtieri that Thatcher was
determined to fight. She also had political goals, being unpopular at
home before the war. Had Galtieri possessed any understanding of the
enemy, he would have realized two things about British conservatism.
First, it views sovereignty as sacred, not to be renounced in the face of
foreign aggression. In 2020 British conservatives supposedly “reclaimed
British sovereignty” from the European Union. Second, conservatism
was still in the grip of imperial nostalgia. Britannia could still rule the
waves—indeed it could against a third-rate military power. Moreover,
the weakness of the colonial analogy was that the entire population of
the islands declared themselves to be British. International opinion did
not turn against Britain, nor did the U.S. government. Being convinced
of the justice of the Argentine case and the dominance of anticolonial
sentiments around the world, Galtieri had assumed that the Americans
would side with him. But once the British fleet reached the South Atlan-
tic (with refueling and communications help from the United States), Ar-
gentina’s defeat was predictable. Once landed on the Falklands, the
British infantry’s superiority was marked.
Galtieri’s consequent fall resulted in a democratic government anx-
ious to solve the Beagle dispute. It set up a referendum in 1984 in which
82.6 percent of Argentines voted to implement a papal peace proposal.
Argentina and Chile signed the agreement, which awarded the islands to
Chile but maritime rights to Argentina, the obvious solution. There has
262 South and Central America

been no challenge to this. Indeed, that 82.6 percent shows how far these
Latin Americans have moved away from war and even from MIDs. The
Falklands are another matter. The rival claims endure there.

Latin American Conclusions

I have analyzed fifteen interstate conflicts since the 1830s, but my total
includes four that did not reach the CoW minimum of one thousand
deaths. Even including them means there was a war somewhere in Latin
America for one in five years—and only a little more frequently, one in
four years, in the period 1834 to 1899. This has not been a warlike re-
gion of the world, except for its massacres of indigenous peoples. Three
countries never went to war with another Latin American state: Venezu-
ela, Mexico, and Panama. After the War of the Triple Alliance, Brazil
solved all its border disputes through diplomacy. Among the thirteen
countries experiencing war, there were no serial repeaters—unlike Re-
publican Rome, Greek city-states, early Chinese states, Mongol peoples,
medieval and modern European states, Japan from the 1890s to 1945,
and the United States more recently. Argentina and Peru fought three
wars, five countries had two wars, and five only one. No single “front”
had more than two wars. The notion that “states made wars and wars
made states” involves an iterative sequence: wars must be made repeat-
edly if war is to be baked in to the culture and institutions of a country.
In Latin America wars were few and generally short, for governments
lacked an expandable tax base. The two most serious wars were so dam-
aging that they deterred these governments from making war again.
Governments dealt with erratic domestic pressures for war or peace;
they protested their grievances; they made threats that quite often led to
MIDs, but they generally avoided war. Since 1982 there have been no in-
terstate wars, and that last one involved Britain, an outside power.
All the wars were between neighbors, but there was virtually no raid-
ing over borders in the continent. Nor were there successful imperial
conquests, though a few attempts at regional hegemony failed. There
were three main substantive causes, each present in six cases. First, some
wars attempted Realist geopolitical balancing: an alliance of neighbors to
counter what they perceived as one state’s drive for regional hegemony—
as in the Platine War, the War of the Confederation, the War of the Tri-
ple Alliance, the Peru-Bolivian War, the Ecuadoran-Colombian War,
and the Central American Wars. These aimed at restoring former Span-
 South and Central America 263

ish viceroyalties. Yet none was successful—balancing worked. No state

was swallowed up by the victor in war, as happened in other continents,
although some lost territory. Balancing was made easier by the conserva-
tism of uti possidetis, by ecological and fiscal limits on would-be
hegemons, and by the common culture of rulers. Balancing was largely a
rational response, but as a consequence rulers learned to love peace.
Second, six wars involved rival claims to sparsely settled border
regions—the Platine War, the War of the Triple Alliance, the War of the
Pacific, the Chaco War, the Leticia War, and the Ecuador-Peru Wars—
sparked mostly by a disjunction between uti possidetis and newer patterns
of settlement on the ground, and exacerbated by fuzzy historic maps.
Both sides considered their claims to these slivers of territory morally
justified, and disputes were exacerbated if major economic or strategic
resources lay there. Nitrates and oil were the main economic interests
activated in border wars; strategic interests principally meant access to
the Río de la Plata and Amazon River systems and to the oceans, which
also brought economic opportunities. So economic power interests pre-
dominated in this group of wars. But territorial gains were mostly lim-
ited. Little was at stake in most border disputes to justify big sacrifices,
and conflict was much more limited than in Roman, European, or early
Chinese experience, where states were often fighting for their survival.
This was an unintended benefit of European imperialism—it roughly
stabilized the borders of the successor countries, with the exception of
what we might call the “Horn” of Latin America, the former British col-
onies of Guyana and Belize, whose borders with their neighbors, Vene-
zuela and Guatemala, remain disputed and whose case is currently before
the ICJ in 2022. Of course, no benefit had resulted for the indigenous
peoples anywhere in Latin America.
Third, six wars were precipitated by interfering in neighbors’ inter-
nal politics for regime change or regime preservation—the Platine
War, the War of the Triple Alliance, the War of Confederation, the Ec-
uadoran-Colombian War, the Central American Wars, and, in a rather
different way, the Soccer War. This involved a distinctive security di-
lemma. If state B did not interfere in the factional disputes of its neigh-
bor A, then rival state C might do so, increasing its power in the region.
So state B sometimes did intervene first, causing state C to do so as well.
This was intended as a cheap way of increasing regional influence, al-
though in these cases it escalated into war. This group of wars had a
large unintentional component. But security dilemmas involving arms
264 South and Central America

races were rare because states had low tax bases and so were cost-
conscious. Interventions were boosted by the ideological similarity of
internal disputes across Latin America, between republicans and monar-
chists, peninsulares and Creoles, regional autonomists and central statists,
liberals and conservatives, and finally capitalists and socialists. Shared
ideologies led to alliance with neighboring like-minded groups, and so
domestic political power relations helped drive wars.
The Soccer War was distinctive, the only case in which class struggle
was diverted by a government into interstate war, as Marxists suggest.
Other forms of conflict diversion were more common, however, and
these motivated the Argentine and Thatcher regimes in the Falklands
War, two Bolivian presidents during the Chaco War, and the Mexican
president in World War II. All sought to gain popularity through a suc-
cessful war, but it worked only for Thatcher. This was a second way in
which domestic political power relations drove wars.
These causes of war overlapped. Some wars can be partially ex-
plained by rational choice theory of calculations of the chances of strate-
gic or economic gains balanced against likely military and fiscal costs and
the chances of victory. There was calculative brinkmanship, establishing
frontier posts, financing foreign factions, taxing foreign businesses, and
general saber rattling to bolster a domestic image of strength, but then
drawing back by accepting a truce or mediation. Such gambits often did
not play out as calculated, however, since the rival’s moves were not easy
to predict. And as usual in my cases, overconfidence was rife, the product
of rulers trapped inside nationally compartmentalized societies, unable to
fully comprehend the opponent’s motivations, options, and strengths. Six
times the initiator of war clearly lost, and only two initiators won. In five
cases there was mutual provocations into war, and five wars ended in a
costly stalemate, rational for neither side. This is not a rational balance
sheet in favor of war.
Rulers mattered. They varied in aggressiveness, and there were four
cases in which aggression was rather irrational and military judgment
was distorted by reckless ambition, righteousness, and domestic political
needs—the cases of Argentine president Rosas in the Platine War, of all
three of the principal leaders in the War of the Triple Alliance, but espe-
cially Paraguayan president Solano López, in the Ecuadoran-Colombian
War by Colombian president Cipriano de Mosquera, and in the Falk-
lands War by Argentine president Galtieri. Moreover, all the regimes
that initiated war were overthrown either during or immediately after
 South and Central America 265

the war.91 That was a salutary lesson. There was in the long run a learn-
ing process: movement from war to MID rituals posturing strength and
resolve to satisfy domestic pressures or leadership pride and sense of
honor—but also to avoid war, for almost all states had experienced bad
wars. Indeed, Latin American history does reassure liberal theory that in
the right circumstances human beings can calculate that war is bad and
to be avoided—an example of delayed-reaction Realism, the belated real-
ization that war does not pay.
The mass of the population rarely concerned themselves with foreign
policy, and nationalism did not penetrate deeply. As Centeno observes,
dominant classes in different countries shared more culture with each
other than they did with their own popular classes. Two cases deviated
somewhat. Paraguay was more homogeneous, even “proto-nationalist,”
whereas Chile had a more cohesive capitalist ruling class, and so both
punched in war above their weight of numbers. Otherwise, nationalism
was sometimes mobilized among the urban middle classes, especially stu-
dents, particularly when an incident like a lethal attack on a border post
might be claimed as a national humiliation requiring vengeance. Strong
revisionist emotions could push the rulers of countries that had lost a
previous war into rash aggression, as they did Paraguayan and Bolivian
rulers. They saw themselves as embodying the nation, so that their emo-
tions and ideologies were both personal and national. Galtieri and
Thatcher both embodied this during the Falklands War. Sometimes mass
media amplified such sentiments. Henderson argues that border disputes
strengthened nationalism throughout the world.92 Not here. Nationalism
in Latin America has mostly been of the harmless variety—World Cup
not war fever.
I have again emphasized distinctive social and political ecology, but
here as causes of the low incidence of wars. Expansion by stronger states
over weaker neighbors elsewhere in the world brought many wars of de-
flection, increasing the apparent rationality of war, as we saw in ancient
China and medieval Europe. But in Latin America the deflection of war
was mostly within states and against indigenous peoples. Most Latin
American states were less concerned with expanding borders than with
gaining effective control of their own territories. There were sparsely
populated regions with little political authority, but unlike early Europe
and China, they lay within states wrested from indigenous peoples. A
second ecological effect made interstate wars logistically difficult. Wars
required mobilizing and deploying forces over long distances in border
266 South and Central America

areas, often in deserts, jungles, or swamps, far from the capital, barely
habitable and disease-ridden. The potential gains were rarely worth the
cost. MIDs were far cheaper and let off steam, a mixture of rationality
and emotionality. Such difficult logistics also meant that regional guerilla
insurrections—which I have not discussed—became easier to sustain and
more difficult to crush, increasing the number and duration of civil wars
in parts of Latin America.
Unlike their counterparts in Europe, the officers and men had had
little experience of war and so did not fight very competently—a good
thing perhaps. Yet this was not in itself much of a deterrent to war since
to win one had to be only a little less incompetent than the enemy. Wars
happened when state elites perceived that the enemy state was even
weaker than they were, but as in my other case studies, they were often
wrong. One difficulty in predicting relative strengths was the combina-
tion of very inexperienced soldiers and the foreign British, German, or
French officers brought in to advise them. Rulers tended to place unwar-
ranted faith in these men’s ability to transform soldiers’ behavior, for
in battle the soldiers tended to revert to old ways—as we see today in
Afghanistan and Iraq in armies trained by Americans.
Another deterrent was the fact that their low tax base was insufficient
to finance long wars or big armies. As Mazzuca argues, rulers could rarely
overcome the fiscal resistance of peripheral power brokers exploiting an
economy of free trade. War involved debt, crippling after a quite short
period. As Centeno contends, debt was probably the main state weakness
that made for few wars, and it was the main reason that the wars were
short, that after a year or two the combatant states were willing to accept
mediation, and that there were no repeating war-mongering states. Thus,
the institutions and culture of militarism never really got going. Milita-
rism pervaded the officer caste, not the whole society, and conceptions of
military honor and virtue were too weak to sustain warfare in the absence
of profit. The rank-and-file soldiers fought for pay, and most civilians
stood aside. Losing a war was a disaster, but the winners rarely found that
wars paid for themselves. Only the War of the Pacific brought immediate
profit for Chile, although the Río de la Plata wars brought long-term
trading benefits for the victors. Otherwise, victory was a costly invest-
ment in limited territorial gains of dubious worth and uncertain future
payoff. Defeats resonated more than victories in popular emotions. Pres-
sure from urban classes could push rulers into saber rattling to show their
strength, but few wanted a crisis to escalate into war.
 South and Central America 267

There was little armed intervention by external powers—an Anglo-

French naval blockade, minor British gunboat diplomacy to protect its
colonies Guyana and Belize, a failed Spanish naval attack, a failed French
attack on Mexico, a successful British invasion of the Falklands, and
more significant Mexican-American wars. With this last exception, more
salient for the external powers was the maintenance of free trade, and for
this they had much support among Latin American power brokers who
wanted to keep central states weak and starved of funds. Thus, free trade
was in this case an indirect cause of relative peace.
Most nineteenth-century wars ended by agreement between the bel-
ligerents, but all the twentieth-century wars were mediated or arbitrated
by other states or outside organizations. This indicates gradual lessening
of conflict, which allowed the parties to recognize the liberal virtues of
diplomacy. Clear-cut military victories and significant territorial gains
became less likely. Some aggression was launched on the assumption that
outside negotiators would soon call a halt, and a swift invasion might
change facts on the ground to influence the diplomats. Some argue that
the global prevalence of mediated and arbitrated ends of wars and MIDs
leads to geopolitical instability by preserving weak states and revisionist
aggression.93 This has not been so in Latin America. Interstate wars have
yielded to MIDs, which have also become smaller and milder. Mares and
Palmer reveal that the years 2005–9 saw ten MIDs in the region, but
eight of them involved only threats or shows of force.94 Two produced
shooting and a few deaths, but not war. The usefulness of the category of
MID is clear in Latin America.
The Cold War saw a major change in the late 1940s as U.S. adminis-
trations went wholesale for regime change or strengthening through vio-
lent repressions of leftists. In 1948, at the end of a civil war, the Costa
Rican army was abolished. Since then the country has had no military at
all, just police forces. Honduran rulers then debated whether to follow
this pacific example. Unfortunately, this was bad timing. The United
States was entering Latin America more forcefully, offering military
training and better weaponry to combat the supposed threat of commu-
nism. Though the real communist threat was negligible, the United
States sponsored suppressing all other leftists, too, sometimes out of ide-
ological ignorance, sometimes to protect the interests of American busi-
ness.95 Latin American militaries loved this, for it gave them better status,
training, and weapons. Conservatives also welcomed it for reasons of
perceived class interest. In 1947 the United States had given more bite to
268 South and Central America

the Monroe Doctrine with the Rio Treaty. This laid down “hemispheric
defense” doctrine over Latin America. The treaty obliged its nations to
help against any aggressive actions by one state against another. Yet this
was diverted into anticommunism in the U.S. Mutual Security Programs
of 1949 and 1951. So Honduras did not follow the example of Costa
Rico. Along with most other states, it remilitarized. The threat was civil
wars, left against right, not interstate wars.96 Although Marxian argu-
ments had relatively little explanatory power in interstate wars in Latin
America, they are essential in analyzing such civil wars.
In the post–Cold War period, U.S. hegemony is weakening in Latin
America. The United States failed to overthrow leftist President Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela, and it vacillated when the conservative opposition
appealed for help against his leftist successor. Americans’ demand for drugs
has also undermined Latin American police powers. This happened first in
Colombia, where struggles between leftist guerillas and paramilitaries
hired by landlords and backed by rightist governments also became drug
wars. These spread to other countries, notably Mexico, where over 100,000
people have been killed since 2006, about 70 percent of deaths inflicted by
illegally imported U.S. guns. In 2018 the Mexican total of just over 33,000
drug war–related deaths was the second-highest civil war death rate in the
world, greater than either Afghanistan or Iraq, exceeded only by Syria. By
2022 there had been a total of 360,000 drug-related killings in Mexico
since 2006. The region’s cities also have the highest homicide rates in the
world. Privatized wars have replaced civil wars as the main form of Latin
American violence. Weak government has protected Latin America from
interstate wars, but in some contexts it has intensified civil strife.
But this period has also seen a healthier countertrend: two common
market pacts, MERCOSUR and the Andean Community, are moves to-
ward greater regional economic integration. In 1998 all the countries
(except Venezuela) signed a framework agreement toward integrating the
two customs zones in a single South American Free Trade Area, with
thirteen member states. This represents a further step away from war as
a means of economic acquisition. Yoram Haftel analyzes Regional Inte-
gration Arrangements (RIAs) across the world, including MERCOSUR
and the Andean Community.97 He showed that a broad scope of RIA
economic activity and regular meetings of high-level officials helped the
peaceful resolution of disputes by reducing uncertainty regarding states’
interests, motivations, and resolve. They are effective instruments of in-
terstate bargaining in times of conflict, one more factor in explaining
 South and Central America 269

why Latin American war is almost obsolete and why even MIDs are
much less frequent. I expect such trends to continue—mafias, not massed
armies, will predominate in the near future. Latin America represents an
example to the rest of the world. Perhaps Kant’s perpetual peace is out of
reach, but letting off steam with MIDs that lead to diplomacy represents
an achievable goal for the world.

An African Addendum
Although wars in postcolonial Africa are not part of my remit, I briefly
note similarities between its wars and those of Latin America. For post-
colonial Africa we have data for only fifty to seventy years, compared to
two hundred years for Latin America. Both experienced anticolonial wars
of independence, followed by few interstate wars. Also shared has been
the unintended border benefit of posthumous imperialism. The bound-
aries of the European colonies were accepted by the newly independent
states, so there were few border disputes. Ruling regimes had a shared
interest in maintaining peaceful borders, while they dealt with the
greater problems of imposing rule inside their borders. The colonial
powers had generally pacified a zone around a capital, normally a port,
and along communications routes to valuable mining and settler zones,
but their authority elsewhere was feeble. The postcolonial states inher-
ited this unevenness and have struggled to expand their zones of control.
About half of them have seen civil wars, usually between center and pe-
ripheries, which is a higher proportion than in any other region of the
world. States have prioritized domestic rather than international order.
The Organization of African Unity (OAU), established in 1963, pledged
to respect state sovereignty and to avoid intervention in each other’s in-
ternal affairs. Its Cairo Declaration of 1964 accepted the principle of uti
possidetis, going further than Latin America. As we see in the next chapter,
however, the African Union has been recently intervening in wars against
non–state actors.
On border issues, the Horn of Africa has been the main exception,
again for colonial-era reasons, since territory had been shuffled between
the Abyssinian-Ethiopian Empire and the British, French, and Italian
empires. Rival borders could be claimed by the Horn’s emerging states,
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somaliland, Somalia, and Djibouti, especially where
ethnic differed from political borders, as in the Ogaden region of Ethio-
pia. The Cold War aggravated these conflicts since the United States and
270 South and Central America

the USSR backed different sides, while the growth of nonstate Islamic
terrorism has more recently introduced further armed struggles. The
total fatalities in the five or six wars of the region have been at least
100,000 so far. They were the only interstate wars in the continent
in which disputed borders were the principal casus belli. Unusually for
Africa, these states were also repeat war makers, and the disputes are not
over, as the war of 2021 that pitted Ethiopia and Eritrea against Tigray
revealed. In 2022 a repeat war seems likely.
The Congo War, most severe during 1996 to 2003, but still simmer-
ing, has been by far the deadliest in Africa. This was initially a series of
civil wars of regional resistance against Congo’s central regimes. Yet they
have been exacerbated by intervention by neighboring states supporting
local clients who would let them share in Congolese mineral wealth—the
main violation of the OAU pledge of nonintervention. Conflict between
Hutu and Tutsi groups in the country were also exacerbated by armed
Hutu militias fleeing from Rwanda after defeat following the genocide
there, pursued by vengeful Tutsi government forces. Nine African coun-
tries and many more armed groups have contributed to between 2.5
and 5.4 million deaths, mainly through disease and starvation among
civilians.
There have been only six to twelve wars in postcolonial Africa, de-
pending on how you count, half in the Horn of Africa, and the worst in
the Congo. Over half of these cases also contained substantial civil war
elements. Of the fifty-three African countries, at least nineteen have ex-
perienced one or more civil wars, often accompanied by quite high civil-
ian casualties, while another eleven have experienced more minor
insurgencies. That leaves twenty-three broadly pacific states, though
some of these have experienced coups d’état. Like Latin America, Africa
has experienced civil wars, but more and deadlier ones. The elimination
of states, common in Eurasia, is unknown. If war between states did
threaten, the ecology usually made for difficult military logistics. Gov-
ernments were even weaker in African than Latin American countries,
making civil wars likelier. We cannot attribute the low rate of interstate
warfare in these two regions to unusually pacific populations. Rather,
they specialized in other forms of violence.
 chapter ten
The Decline of War?

Western Views after the Enlightenment

Has there been either a long-term increase or a long-term decrease in
wars in history up to today? My answer is broadly neither. Instead, varia-
tion has characterized each epoch. Almost every literate source before the
late eighteenth century saw war as an inevitable and sometimes desirable
feature of the human condition. In contrast, most European writers since
the Enlightenment have claimed that war was declining or was about to
decline. Kant started this, saying absolute monarchs made war whereas
republics and constitutional monarchies might make peace. Provided the
latter expanded at the expense of the former, peace might spread. This
began a “republican” theory of peace based on the spread of representa-
tive government and the rule of law. He added tongue-in-cheek that uni-
versal hospitality to foreigners and a federation of free states would also
be necessary for peace, and he admitted that occasional wars might be
necessary so that the virtues of peace would not be forgotten.1
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars interrupted such
hopes. Yet nineteenth-century Europe seemed quite peaceful. Europeans
fought colonial wars in other continents, but most social theorists ig-
nored these and advanced optimistic dichotomies distinguishing histori-
cal from modern societies—throughout history, warfare and militarism
had dominated societies; now peace owing to capitalism or industrialism
and free trade would rule. War had brought profit in the past, but it was

271
272 The Decline of War?

now superseded by the superior profits of trade. Such arguments were

made by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Auguste Comte,
Henri de Saint-Simon, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer. Writers like
Joseph Schumpeter and Thorstein Veblen, at the turn of the twentieth
century, aware of the rise of militarism in Germany and Japan, treated
this as the last vestige of feudalism. Four main reasons for optimism were
generally advanced: republicanism, free trade, socialism, and industrial
society.2 These arguments are still heard today.
Some British liberals were conscious of their country’s colonial wars
but embraced “liberal imperialism.” Led by John Stuart Mill, who worked
for the East India Company for thirty-five years, they defended colonial
wars as bringing civilization to the benighted races (including the Irish,
said Mill). Like virtually all imperialists, they said war was necessary to
bring peace. French writers endorsed an imperial civilizing vision advo-
cating rather more assimilation of native peoples. Late nineteenth-
century Americans said it was the duty of the Anglo-Saxon race to bring
civilization and peace to other races. The sociologist Lester Ward, bor-
rowing from Spencer, said war had been responsible for human progress.3
Through violence hominids had gained dominance over animals, and
through war technologically advanced races had gained dominance over
the less civilized and had a duty to spread civilization among them. Yet he
said war would eventually decline as race differences were overcome by
assimilation and miscegenation.4 William Sumner said war came from a
“competition for life” between “in-groups” and “out-groups.”5 But he was
a pessimist: not only had war always existed, but it always would. “It is ev-
ident that men love war,” he concluded ruefully during the 1898 U.S. war
with Spain, which he stridently opposed.
Much Germanic theory reflected the fact that Germans were win-
ning wars and had not yet achieved empire but wanted one, while Austri-
ans had an empire and were fighting to keep it. For both, war remained
necessary, even virtuous. General Helmuth von Moltke the Elder de-
clared, “Everlasting peace is a dream, and not even a pleasant one; and
war is a necessary part of God’s arrangement of the world.” Clausewitz
was more measured, writing: “The fact that slaughter is a horrifying
spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an ex-
cuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner
or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our
arms.”6 That remains the dominant justification for being militarily pre-
pared for war—just in case, as President Putin has recently reminded us.
 The Decline of War? 273

Ludwig Gumplowicz said modernity would not bring peace since

conflicts between dominators and dominated were endemic to human
society.7 Heinrich von Treitschke, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Werner
Sombart, and Max Scheler saw no end of wars. Treitschke approved of
warfare; he attacked liberal theories of peace, which he associated with
the hypocritical British. The “slaughter” of enemies was part of the “sub-
limity” of war, he declaimed.8
Weber was a liberal imperialist. Although disliking militarism, he saw
imperialism and war as necessary to modernity and to German develop-
ment. As World War I erupted, he embraced it. His support for the war,
expressed in August 1914, was ideological. “Responsibility before the bar
of history” meant that Germany had to resist a division of the world be-
tween “Russian officials” and “the conventions of Anglo-Saxon society,”
with perhaps a dash of “Latin reason” thrown in. “We have to be a world
power, and in order to have a say in the future of the world we had to
risk the war.”9 Once Germany achieved its rightful place in the sun, this
would bring more civilization to the world and wars would decline—as
the British liberal imperialists had argued and as their American counter-
parts do today. Weber was not alone. Thomas Mann wrote, “Germany is
warlike out of morality.” German enthusiasm, however, was a temporary
rally ’round the flag phenomenon. A year later Weber had shifted to call
for a diplomatic end to the war, and by 1922 Mann was defending the
Weimar Republic against militarism.
Scheler saw war as inevitable and desirable. The “genius” of war repre-
sented the dynamic principle of history, while peace was the static principle.
War exposes the banal rationality and materialism of modern culture. It
gives people a higher plane of existence, conferring an existential sense of
security inside the national community. Like Weber, he saw war as a battle
of cultures. Whereas France and especially England embodied pragmatic,
empiricist philosophy, Germany embodied the true philosophy of meta-
physical idealism. War awakens a nation to the need to preserve its own cul-
ture and is justified when its culture is attacked. England was seeking to
impose its mercantile, utilitarian philosophy on Europe.10 Like Weber,
however, Scheler shifted as the horrors of this war became revealed. Sim-
mel saw war and peace “so interwoven that in every peaceful situation the
conditions for future conflict, and in every struggle the conditions for fu-
ture peace, are developing. If we follow the stages of social development
backward under these categories, we can find no stopping-place.” He called
for armed struggle against materialistic Anglo-American “Mammonism.”11
274 The Decline of War?

Sombart saw World War I as ranging the German “hero” against the Brit-
ish “merchant.” Merchants were morally inferior, greedy for profit, money,
and physical comfort. Heroes were superior in historical significance, moti-
vated by ideals of the great deed and of sacrifice for a noble calling. Since
Entente rhetoric claimed this was a war of liberty and democracy against
authoritarian aggression, the war was seen as a struggle for civilization on
both sides.
So most prominent Germanic intellectuals of this period did not be-
lieve war was declining, some approved of it, and others were horrified
by its excesses. Though many people today would endorse Clausewitz’s
view that war is sometimes necessary—and military defense is always
necessary—almost no one today celebrates war as intrinsically virtuous.
That is undoubtedly progress. Marxists have offered a more optimistic
theory. Rudolf Hilferding and Vladimir Lenin perceived a close relation
among capitalism, imperialism, and war and believed that overthrowing
capitalism would bring peace. Most theorists in Britain and France were
in between: they deplored war but conceived of their own wars as purely
defensive.
World War I made Russians, Americans, British, and French hope
this had been the war to end all wars. The Soviets used military meta-
phors for their domestic policies—shock troops, work brigades, and the
like—but after the failed invasion of Poland in 1920, they believed that a
socialist society would bring peace. After the war most British and
French writers opposed war but preferred to think about other things.
Leonard Hobhouse, the first professor of sociology in Britain, had pre-
dicted that the future belonged to higher ethical and peaceful standards,
and he had been shattered by the Great War. His response was to turn
away from sociology to philosophy. Americans experienced revulsion
against World War I, which they saw as essentially European. American
sociology also preferred to think of activities other than war.
Germany and Italy had experienced unfavorable wars generating
conflicting strands of theory. One militarist strand evolved into fascism,
which celebrated war, sometimes in mystical terms, always seeing it as
crucial to human progress. Socialists in Germany and Italy deplored war
and hoped to abolish it, but they nonetheless felt they needed to form
defensive paramilitaries. The Italian social scientist Vilfredo Pareto ar-
gued that rights would always derive from might, whereas his country-
man Gaetano Mosca said that those who held the lance and the musket
would always rule over those who handled the spade or the shuttle. In
 The Decline of War? 275

France, the critic and philosopher Roger Caillois adapted Durkheim’s

sociology of religion into romantic nationalism whose celebrations had
replaced religious festivals in dragging people out of their mundane lives
and giving them a sense of the sacred.12 He saw war as revealing the in-
adequacies of modernity, expressed in yearnings for national spirituality.
World War II then saw the victory of a Marxian-liberal alliance com-
bining optimism with moral revulsion against war. It was better not to
think about war in Britain, America, France, and Germany alike. Func-
tionalism and modernization theory dominated social theory and ignored
war. Political scientists, handmaidens to power in Washington, differed.
Most supported American liberal imperialism and offered Realist theories
of war as a rational instrument of power. Western Marxists emphasized
class “struggle,” but the metaphor did not mean actual killing. “Third-
world” Marxism did turn toward revolutionary violence, exemplified by
China’s Mao Zedong and the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The war had
produced the excellent studies of American soldiers to which I refer in
chapter 12, but their legacy in America was to reduce the sociology
of war to studies of the military profession. With some exceptions—Stan-
islav Andreski in England, Raymond Aron in France, Hannah Arendt and
C. Wright Mills in the United States—the social sciences outside political
science neglected war during the Cold War, and this seemed justified by
a decline in interstate wars. Today almost no one in the Global North
glorifies war. Nor do many believe that human nature or human society
inevitably generates war (or peace).

The Return of Liberal Optimism

The twenty-first century has seen a revival of interest in war in the field
of sociology.13 Yet these scholars’ suitably nuanced views have been
swamped by a revival of liberal optimism expressed by John Mueller,
Azar Gat, Steven Pinker, and Joshua Goldstein.14 Their books have been
well received in a Washington satisfied with the notion of a Pax Ameri-
cana. Goldstein focuses on the post-1945 period. Mueller sees the de-
cline of war as long-term and still continuing. World War II might seem
to create a problem for him, but he shrugs this off, saying that one man,
Adolf Hitler, was responsible for it. Mueller emphasizes cultural shifts
occurring during the twentieth century that made war “rationally un-
thinkable” as ever more countries were “dropping out” of the war sys-
tem. He dismisses the rise of Islamic terrorism as criminal activity
276 The Decline of War?

responded to by “police action,” rather than constituting “war.”15 Gat

sees war in nineteenth-century utilitarian terms: war is now inferior to
trade in securing scarce resources. He also points to attributes of West-
ern society that strengthen the attractions of peace—mature democracy,
the growth of metropolitan life, the sexual revolution and feminism, and
nuclear deterrence. All differ from nineteenth-century scholars in identi-
fying a long-term decline of war. Dichotomous views of war in history
before and after the nineteenth century no longer exist.
Pinker draws on modern studies of human nature, offering a meta-
phor of “angels” and “demons” struggling within us, capable of steering
us either to peace or to war. He also draws on Norbert Elias, who, in The
Process of Civilisation, argues that a civilizing process involving self-
restraint and impulse management had intensified over past centuries in
Europe. Europeans had inhibited their impulses, anticipated the conse-
quences of their actions, and empathized more with others. A culture of
honor, embodying the ideal of revenge, had given way to a culture of
dignity, embodying control of one’s emotions. The book was originally
published in German in 1939—bad timing! Pinker seems not to know
that Elias came to revise his view. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, and
then as a wartime British intelligence officer interviewing hard-line
Nazis, Elias thought a “decivilizing process” had begun in the twentieth
century, when nuclear war was a distinct possibility.16 He died in 1990, at
the end of the Cold War, too soon to regain optimism.
Liberal theories have been heard before. The contribution of recent
writers has been to add empirical data. Gat and Pinker give knowledge-
able narratives of violence and warfare through the ages. Goldstein offers
data on post-1945 trends in wars and civil wars. Pinker presents a six-
phase periodization of decline through the ages. Since he presents the
fullest historical statistical data on the frequency of wars and the number
of casualties they inflict, which are the simplest measures of whether war
has declined, I focus on his data.

Pinker on Early History and the Mongols

Pinker begins with prehistoric warfare that I discussed in chapter 2. In it, he
says, war deaths averaged 15 percent and amounted to “up to” 60 percent of
the total population, whereas in modern nation-states war deaths have been
5 percent or less. His 15 percent average figure is too high. His maximum of
60 percent is much lower than the maximum in modern cases of genocide—
 The Decline of War? 277

over 95 percent of the natives in North America and Australia, while in the
twentieth century the Nazis disposed of about 70 percent of Jews, the Otto-
man Turks and Kurds about 70 percent of Armenians, and the Hutus about
60 percent of Tutsis. So war was not more intense in prehistoric times.
Pinker also exaggerates the worst early historical cases. He puts the
total death toll of the An Lushan civil war in eighth-century China at
36 million. This is derived from comparing Chinese censuses before and
after the war. Sinologists accept that this was a devastating war, but they
add that it also devastated the Tang census administration, which led to
severe undercounting of the postwar population. They regard 13 million
as a more reasonable total for deaths due to the war, which is bad
enough.17 Pinker also accepts as truth the boasts of rulers of ancient em-
pires like the Assyrians that they had wiped out entire populations in
their millions. But these were boasts with the strategic purpose of cow-
ing future opposition. Faced with a city refusing to surrender, the Assyri-
ans might massacre the inhabitants after taking the city, but this was to
encourage other cities to submit. Given such a terrible demonstration of
Assyrian power, they usually did so. The Assyrians wanted to rule over
other peoples, not exterminate them.
Gat adds brief data on Greece and Rome. On Greece he focuses on
the Peloponnesian War and derives very high totals of Greek war losses
from the military historian Victor Hanson, who follows Thucydides.18
He concludes that a staggering one-third of the whole Athenian popula-
tion (not just citizens) died in this war. Yet the classicist Stewart Flory
shows that all Hanson’s estimates are much too high and observes that
Greek historians, especially Thucydides, wrote for literary effect, not sta-
tistical accuracy.19 Regarding Rome, Gat focuses on Roman losses in the
first three years of the Second Punic War. He follows Peter Brunt’s 1971
estimate of Roman legionary losses in those years as 50,000, which he
says was 25 percent of the adult male citizenry.20 Actually, it was the pro-
portion of those citizens called assidui, liable for military service. The
Roman response was to lower the property requirement for military ser-
vice, which immediately enabled them to raise more legions. Brunt also
inadvertently doubles the likely proportion of Roman citizens slain by
assuming that all the soldiers were drawn from its citizen body. Yet the
auxilia, foreign allies who were not fully Roman citizens, formed at least
half of the Roman armies, sometimes more, as I showed in chapter 4.
These wars had high death tolls, but probably not higher than the worst
wars of most historical periods. What does support Pinker’s argument
278 The Decline of War?

here is the sheer frequency of wars in ancient Rome, also evidenced in

chapter 4, although this was not typical of the whole ancient world.
The Mongols are crucial for Pinker. He claims they were far deadlier
than any other human group. He estimates that in their conquests they
killed 40 million persons in total. Indeed, estimates of between 30 and 60
million dominate web entries on the Mongols, though these give no evi-
dence and are in fact an internet myth. Scholars of the Mongols—Jack
Weatherford, David Morgan, and Peter Frankopan—declare such figures
to be preposterous.21 The real total is unknowable, but much lower, they
say. Pinker relies heavily on two massacres in the cities of Merv and
Baghdad, which fiercely resisted the Mongols but were finally stormed.
At Merv he says that the total killed after surrender was 1.3 million, but
this is six times more than its probable population at that time. Pinker’s
estimate of Baghdad’s fatalities is 800,000. Again, this is higher than its
total population, which was somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000.
Even if we conjecture that refugees from the surrounding countryside
flooded into the cities, swelling their populations, there would not have
been room in the cities for such numbers. The Baghdad caliph’s defiance
did the inhabitants no good, particularly his reply to Chinggis’s order to
knock down his walls: “When you remove all your horses’ hooves, we
shall destroy our fortifications.”22 Michal Biran concludes that though
Baghdad did suffer a terrible massacre, the number of deaths was less
than previously supposed.23 Many escaped death by bribes or through
negotiations. One scholar comments that 80,000 (removing a zero) is a
much likelier estimate of the casualties in Baghdad.24 True, higher figures
for the two cities were given by contemporary sources, but just as these
greatly exaggerated the size of Mongol armies, so they exaggerated their
slaughter.25 The Mongols themselves inflated numbers to terrify others
into submission. In a letter to Louis XI of France, Khan Hulagu boasted
he had killed over 2 million in Baghdad, an utterly incredible figure. The
worst massacres occurred where cities that had surrendered then re-
belled again, where the khan’s envoys or kin had been killed, or in re-
gions of persistent guerilla resistance, which is consistent with the policy
of vengeful calculation I described in chapter 6. This was motivated by
great anger yet also calculation, for a massacre might persuade the next
city or region to surrender.26 Compare President Harry Truman’s drop-
ping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to persuade Japan to
surrender. Both were justified by the perpetrators as saving further lives
among their own troops. We find the Mongols worse because their kill-
 The Decline of War? 279

ing was ferocious body hacking, whereas Truman’s was long-distance cal-
lous killing, to which we have grown accustomed. Both policies did
induce surrender—a ghastly rational calculation.
The Persian chronicler Joveyni described the varied policies used in
the conquest of the cities of Bukhara by Chinggis (Genghis) Khan in 1219,
which had been provoked by the defiance there of Sultan Muhammad. The
sultan’s armies were much larger than the Mongols’, but fear of his own
generals had led him to disperse his armies, a disastrous case of coup-
proofing that weakened his war-fighting ability. The cities and their armies
were overpowered one by one. Chinggis first reached the city of Zarnuq
and sent an emissary to offer the usual alternatives to the city: surrender or
death. The citizens of Zarnuq sensibly chose the former and were spared,
losing only some sons to Mongol conscription. The next city was Nur. Its
gates were shut while divided counsels reigned in the city. The decision
was eventually to surrender. Chinggis accepted this but with one condition.
All the citizens were led out of the city; none was killed, but the empty city
was looted by his soldiers. Then in Bukhara, the defiant sultan sent out an
army to resist. It was overwhelmed. The citizens opened the gates, but the
sultan’s soldiers in the citadel, fearing the worst, continued fighting. They
were slaughtered, as were many citizens, in the general mayhem. The rest
were driven out into the fields. Chinggis gave a speech to them, declaring:
“O people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great
ones among you have committed those sins. If you ask me what proof I
have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God.” So
the city’s notables were all killed, while the young men were conscripted
into the Mongol army. The rest of the population were spared. Joveyni
mentioned twelve cities taken after fighting by Chinggis in 1220–1221. In
one city “all were killed,” three cities were “destroyed” (casualties not
stated), in one the people were driven out and the city looted, and in the
other seven there was only limited killing.27 Ratchnevsky’s account uses
many sources and differs in details, but not in the overall policy.28
Useful anger endured. In 1273 Kublai Khan began his final assault on
Song dynasty rule over China by besieging twin cities. Fancheng bravely
endured a long siege, which caused massive Mongol casualties, but it was
eventually stormed. The population was put to the sword. Ten thousand
bodies were supposedly stacked in view of the nearby city of Xiangyang.
Its defenders were terror-stricken, and the commander, Lu Wenhuan,
promptly surrendered. Not only was the city spared, but Lu and his troops
were incorporated into the Mongol army, Lu becoming a prominent
280 The Decline of War?

Mongol general. In 1276 the end of the Song dynasty came as its capital,
Hangzhou, perhaps the biggest city in the world at that time, capitulated
without a siege after negotiations. The city was spared killing or looting.29
Mongol practice after resistance was to divide the population. Elites
who had resisted were almost always killed, but artisans and merchants
were spared, alongside farmers, for the Mongols wanted to rule a rich
land, not a depopulated desert. Nor were women and children usually
killed—they might be enslaved, while young males were conscripted into
their armies. Much of the remaining male urban population might then
be killed.30 Chinggis was reputed to be skilled at winning over allies and
was certainly an active diplomat.31 Empire builders need war and diplo-
macy. Indeed, the Mongols were not always seen as oppressors, since they
offered a higher level of civilization and order to many regions, as well as
religious toleration, and they often poured resources into cities after they
had occupied them.32 Some cities and regions were devastated, but most
appear not to have suffered at all. Resistance or submission was the key.33
Thus, we should reduce the total deaths inflicted by the Mongols by
more than half from the internet myth figure. Though most scholars
conclude that it is impossible to estimate the total number of the Mon-
gols’ victims, one gives a detailed estimate that takes into account known
regional variations and yields a probable death total of about 11.5 mil-
lion, less than one-third of Pinker’s 40 million.34 A figure of 11.5 million
is bad enough, of course—worse in total than the atrocities of any other
group of that period. I doubt that this was a price worth paying by hu-
manity for the undoubted benefits of Mongol rule. Yet Mongol killings
were not out of proportion to other terrible historical cases, including
those in the twentieth century.

Pinker’s Worst List

Pinker relies most on a list of the twenty-one cases in history with the
highest absolute death tolls in war.35 These death tolls include civilian as
well as battle deaths, in addition to state-induced famines. Table 10.1
shows his list, which he arranges in column 1 in order of the absolute
number of deaths: World War II had the most, and the French Wars of
Religion had the least. All figures in the table are in millions of deaths. A
word of caution: modern figures are more likely to be accurate, whereas
in ancient sources inflation of deaths is likelier. Lacking alternative
sources, however, we have to go with these.
 Table 10.1. Pinker Revised: Highest Fatality Cases (my revisions in parentheses)

Absolute Relative Relative Duration Annual Annual

Cases Century deaths deaths rank in years deaths rank

1. WW II 20th 55 55 9 8 6.9 1
2. Mao 20th 40 40 11 15 2.7 5
3. Mongols 13th 40 (11.5) 178 (52) 2 (10) 100 0.4 (0.1) 13 (16)
4. An Lushan 8th 36 (13) 429 (126) 1 (1) 8 4.5 (2.0) 2 (8)
5. Ming Fall 17th 25 112 4 46 2.4 6
6. T aiping 19th 20 40 10 14 2.9 3
Rebellion
7. A
 merican 15–19th 20 92 7 408 0.2 17=
Indians
8. Stalin 20th 20 20 15 15 1.3 9
9. M
 iddle 7–19th 19 132 3 1200 0.1 21
Eastern Slaves
10. Atlantic Slaves 15–19th 18 83 8 408 0.2 19
11. Tamerlane 14–15th 17 100 6 37 2.7 4
12. Brit. India 19th 17 35 12 100 0.4 14=
Famines
13. WW I 20th 15 15 16 4 3.8 2
14. Russia 20th 9 9 20 5 1.8 7
Civil War
15. Fall of Rome 3–5th 8 105 5 200 0.5 12
16. Congo Free 19–20th 8 12 18 40 0.3 16
State
17. 30 Years’ War 17th 7 32 13 30 1.1 10
18. Russian 16–17th 5 23 14 100 0.2 17=
Troubles
19. Napoleonic 19th 4 11 19 23 0.5 11
Wars
20. China 20th 3 3 21 22 0.1 20
Civil War
21. France 16th 3 14 17 40 0.4 14=
Religious
Wars

Notes: Absolute death toll = recorded actual number of deaths, in millions.

Relative deaths = absolute deaths, in millions, as proportion of world population at that time,
standardized by the 20th-century population total.
Annual deaths = relative deaths, in millions, figure divided by number of years each case lasted.
= Indicates a two-way tie.
282 The Decline of War?

His cases are drawn from all ages of human history, though columns
1–3 show that seven of them occurred during the first half of the twenti-
eth century, including the two deadliest of all, World War II and the kill-
ings and famine deaths during Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China. My
amendments of the death toll from An Lushan and the Mongols (dis-
cussed above) are given in parentheses in the table. The “Absolute
deaths” column reveals no overall decline in fatalities, and Pinker accepts
that. But he prefers to use not the absolute but the “relative” death
rate—deaths as a proportion of the total world population at the time,
standardized by the twentieth-century population total. Thus, the abso-
lute and relative death rates for the twentieth-century cases are identical,
while absolute deaths in the earlier cases are all increased by multiplying
them by the twentieth-century global population, divided by estimated
global population at that time. Columns 4 and 5 present his results.
This changes the picture since most wars with the highest relative
death rates were in the distant past, when global population was far lower.
With this adjustment, the deadliest wars in Pinker’s list are no longer
World War II and Maoism but the An Lushan rebellion in eighth-
century China and the Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century,
although if my downward revision of the Mongol-induced losses is ac-
cepted, the Middle Eastern slave trade rises up to the second spot. In-
deed, all of the top eight cases are now from earlier centuries, in line with
Pinker’s theory. This switch from absolute to relative deaths makes sense,
yet the decrease in the relative death rates in the twentieth century was
due not to growing pacifism but to an explosion in global population and
a large increase in workers in war industries who are not counted as com-
batants. This does suggest not a decline in warfare but a transformation
in the nature of war—as I argue later. Braumoeller adds that controlling
only for the population of those countries at war would be a better mea-
sure of relative rates, though this is not a perfect measure since countries
with larger populations tend to have smaller armies relative to population
size and so they kill fewer enemies relative to that size.36
Should we not also take into account the duration of each case?
World War II inflicted fewer deaths as a proportion of the global popula-
tion at that time than had the Mongol conquests, the Atlantic slave trade,
or the annihilation of Native Americans and Australian aborigines. Yet
World War II lasted only eight years (including the Japan-China war),
whereas the Mongol conquests lasted one hundred years, and the slaugh-
ter of the Atlantic slave trade and of the Native Americans took centu-
 The Decline of War? 283

ries. Pinker says the slave trade lasted twelve centuries in the Middle
East and five centuries in the West. The Middle Eastern slave trade
lasted so long that in annual terms its death rate plummets to the bottom
of the table. True, there is something horrible about an atrocity that en-
dured for centuries versus one that was far briefer but killed more peo-
ple, but the latter may be a better measure of how much a society is
involved in killing. So I have calculated average annual killing rates based
on Pinker’s relative figures. On this measure World War II goes back up
to the top of the list with a much higher annual relative rate of killing
than any other case. The runner-up would be An Lushan if we accepted
Pinker’s inflated estimate of fatalities. If we use the revised figure of 13
million, this drops it back to eighth position. Similarly, the Mongols drop
down to sixteenth on my corrected figures. World War I is then the run-
ner-up, after World War II (even though the count does not include the
50+ million Spanish flu casualties diffused to the world by troop move-
ments at the war’s end). These revised figures cast doubt on any general
decline of war in the period up to 1945. You can take your pick of which
measure to prefer, but the combination would suggest no overall decline
in casualties induced by war.
Pinker is also inconsistent. While he combines long-lived but spo-
radic bouts of killings into a single case, like the Mongol conquests or
the two slave trades, he separates six cases in the first half of the twenti-
eth century: the two world wars, the Russian and Chinese civil wars, and
the Stalinist and Maoist famines. Yet these all occurred within a fifty-year
period, they were all connected, and each one led directly or indirectly to
the next. These might make them a single case, or rather a single se-
quence of cases. So the first half of the twentieth century would contain
easily the bloodiest “event” in human history, in both absolute and rela-
tive terms, without even taking annual rates into consideration. These
data refute any notion that warfare declined through human history.
They might also suggest that none of these mass killing bouts of from 3
to 55 million fatalities could be regarded as rational or justified, whatever
the positive contributions made by the perpetrators to their civilizations.

Have Wars Increased?

Do such figures actually support the opposite view, that wars have been
rising through the centuries? Eckhardt saw an “increase in war deaths
and deaths per war during the last five centuries. Not only has the total
284 The Decline of War?

violence of war increased over these centuries, but the average war has
also increased in violence.”37 Malešević says war deaths have been contin-
ually growing over no fewer than one thousand years.38 He explains this
in terms of the growth of the infrastructural power of state bureaucra-
cies, backed up by the resources of modern capitalism and of science.
States have become military precision killing machines, he says. Yet we
need to remember Pinker’s distinction between absolute and relative fa-
tality levels. Overall, armies have been bigger and casualties higher in
modern times than earlier in the millennium, as Malešević and Eckhardt
say, but primarily because world population has grown so enormously—
from perhaps 450 million in 1300 to 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in
2020. When the death-rate figures are adjusted by Pinker’s relative
method, the growth in army size and war deaths disappears, except as we
saw for the first half of the twentieth century. When subtler measures are
introduced, the pattern becomes more complex, as we will see.

Modern and Premodern Wars

Eckhardt and Malešević return us to a dichotomous premodern-modern
theory of war, concerning not the frequency of war but the growing or-
ganizational efficiency of warfare. They base this on European history
during the last five hundred years (for Eckhardt) and one thousand years
(for Malešević). One thousand years covers the transition from feudal
agrarian to capitalist industrial and postindustrial societies, from small
polities with feeble infrastructural powers, mobilizing tiny armies, to
the states with the greatest infrastructural powers in history, capable of
mobilizing armies of millions. Eckhardt covers the “modernization” pe-
riod of this millennium. Obviously, their stark contrasts are correct
for Europe during these periods. Malešević very briefly discusses two
earlier exceptions, Rome and China, with their large, well-drilled armed
forces, despite their tiny state bureaucracies. Yet he stresses the “weak-
ness” of China—a bizarre judgment given the Chinese history I chroni-
cled in chapter 6. Even in the nineteenth century, when the lack of naval
forces had made China vulnerable to foreign navies, in land warfare
against Russia the Qing were still fighting successful campaigns.
Malešević says that the Roman exception was due to the unusually well-
developed bureaucratic and professional structure of the legions them-
selves: not the state but the legions had considerable centralized
infrastructural power.
 The Decline of War? 285

Yet infrastructural power does not merely flow from the central
state. It is a two-way relationship between the state and civil society. In
this book I reveal several types of such relations. In chapter 13 we will
see mass mobilizing communist parties that have thoroughly penetrated
the armed forces of the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam, reinforced by
communist rituals and ideology. This enabled them to inflict defeat on
higher-tech armies. In chapter 4 I showed that Roman citizenship was
the main source of infrastructural power, conferring rights on citizen-
soldiers, while the hierarchy of citizen census classes translated directly
into army ranks. The state and its legions actually were the senatorial,
equestrian, and heavy and medium infantry census classes. They shared a
common ideology, they were politically dominant through the senate
and popular assemblies, and they were economically organized by ca-
reers that tied together army command and political office. That class
structure provided the state’s core, not the few “civil servants” (who were
often slaves) or the legions themselves. In chapter 6 I found a different
form of this two-way relationship in imperial China. Han Chinese
armies up to a million strong were the product not of a centralized bu-
reaucracy (again tiny by modern standards), but of a close relationship
between a centralized monarchy and a Confucian gentry-bureaucrat
class whose powers stretched from the localities into the “outer court-
yard” of the palace. Rome and China had polities that structurally
“represented” dominant classes, enabling them to levy the taxes and con-
scription necessary to support large standing armies and to inflict mass
slaughter on the enemy—Caesar killing nearly a million Gauls, the Chi-
nese emperor Yongle mobilizing over 200,000 men to destroy several
Mongol peoples, the Manchu emperor Qianlong killing several hundred
thousand Zunghars and mobilizing 200,000 soldiers in the field, as well
as 400,000 logistical support staff (the Chinese armies bearing firearms).
These are glaring exceptions to the premodernity-modernity dichotomy
of warfare.
I have also noted some intermediate examples of large, drilled, orga-
nized, and effective historical armies, as mobilized by the Aztecs, the Inca,
the Mongols, and the early Chinese and later Japanese warring states pe-
riods. They had quite weak states, but close relations between the ruler
and dominant classes, which enabled their forces to begin conquests; and
a ruler’s feeling forced to continue distributing tribute and spoils to his
soldiers also increased the likelihood of further aggression. The Chinese
also had a deal with their peasantry, offering economic reforms in return
286 The Decline of War?

for military service. The Inca developed their extraordinary paved road
system, providing more central control as well as trade. The power of
that great engine of destruction, the Mongol army, rested on the two-way
relationship between the horsemen of its pastoral economy and the tribal
political federations—generating forces that were not large but extremely
lethal. The Mongols had their weaknesses, especially their small numbers
and the factional disputes of tribal leaders, but I noted their techniques
for increasing their infrastructural power, like their postal and staging
system, their use of Chinese taxes, and an army-centered set of laws. Yet
only when they appropriated the entire Chinese administration system, as
did the Yuan and Manchu dynasties, were they able to sustain massive
armies for long campaigns (Qianlong’s being the prime example). Other-
wise, wars had to be shorter while disputed successions still brought them
down.
Earlier organization of warfare in Europe and Asia thus deviated
from the dichotomous model. Two were the equal of the modern West,
others were not so well developed but were well beyond the primitive.
The West does not provide the only model for an infrastructurally pow-
erful society effective at large-scale, bloody warfare. Of course, many so-
cieties in history did have less well-organized armed forces, and these
were much smaller. But history is not a divide between modern and pre-
modern states and armies.

Nineteenth-Century Peace? Europe and Its Colonies

Has there been a medium-term trend toward fewer or less intensive wars?
Lars-Erik Cederman and his colleagues show that in the years 1770–1810
the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars produced a jump in army
size and battle fatalities.39 Reworking Levy’s data on wars between 1475
and 1975, they say the emergence of nationalism at the end of the eigh-
teenth century enabled a large increase in states’ ability to inculcate loyalty
within mass armies, generating deep tensions between the principles of
territorial and popular sovereignty that have driven patterns of interstate
warfare ever since. They rule out alternative explanations of increasing
war intensity, such as increasing population and changes in weapons tech-
nology. Thus, they say, we can trace the roots of the twentieth-century
world wars back to 1789. They have no actual data on nationalism, how-
ever, and the motivation on the French side was revolutionary rather than
nationalist, although this did develop into the notion of the nation in arms.
 The Decline of War? 287

For France’s monarchical enemies, the motivation throughout was coun-

terrevolutionary, which involved rejecting the nationalism espoused by
those who at first saw the French armies as their liberators. The settle-
ment of 1815 was clearly counterrevolutionary.
Counterrevolutionary fears did then reduce war in Europe. Pinker
sees the period 1815–1914 as a “Long Peace.” Blainey agrees: “Histori-
ans’ explanations of peace in modern times are centered on the nine-
teenth century. Two long periods in that century were remarkably
peaceful. One ran from the Battle of Waterloo to the short wars of
1848. . . . The other . . . ran from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in
1871 to . . . 1914.”40 Gat uses CoW data to identify two subperiods of
peace, in 1815–54 and 1871–1914.41 The interim period of 1854–71 was
bloody, containing the Crimean War, three Prussian wars with Austria,
Denmark, and France, the Indian Mutiny, the American Civil War, the
Taiping Rebellion in China, and the disastrous Paraguayan War. But the
before-and-after periods are key to Gat’s assertion of a long-term decline
of war. Braumoeller, using CoW data, notes the hiccup in the middle but
concludes that “the trend in the data is very consistent with the main-
stream historical record, which portrays the nineteenth century as a re-
markably peaceful one.”42
Yet all these authors are wrong. The nineteenth century did not con-
tain one long or two shorter periods of peace. Gat counted only “wars
between the great powers,” the major states of Europe, because these
were “the most crucial and most destructive inter-state wars.” This also
limited Levy’s data on earlier periods, which showed that the number of
large interstate wars had declined steadily in every decade from the six-
teenth to the nineteenth century. Their Eurocentrism excludes the most
common form of war fought by early modern Europeans—colonial wars
fought against natives of other continents. The nineteenth century cul-
minated this process, for the British, French, and Dutch empires now ex-
panded over virtually the whole world, while the American, Belgian,
German, and Japanese empires began their relatively brief ascents—all
killing very large numbers of indigenous peoples. These studies have two
further biases. First, they include only wars in which over one thousand
soldiers were killed in battle in a year, and this understates colonial war-
fare, which usually consists of sequences of much smaller campaigns. Re-
cent CoW data have been extended to cover MIDs as well, but only for
conflicts between states, not for “extrastate” conflicts like most colonial
struggles. I have every sympathy for the CoW researchers. It is hard
288 The Decline of War?

enough to get reliable data on soldiers in the battles of major wars. It

would be impossible to get comparable statistics on civilian deaths or on
smaller colonial wars and skirmishes. Nonetheless, no analysis based on
CoW data alone, however statistically sophisticated, can make claims
about the totality of war in the nineteenth century.
CoW data on the period 1816–1997 do include some colonial wars.
They reveal 79 interstate wars, 214 civil wars, and 108 colonial wars. Of
the 53 million combat deaths these produced over the whole period, in-
terstate wars contributed 32 million, thanks mainly to the two world
wars. Without them, civil wars produced more deaths, 18 million, mostly
in the period after 1945, and colonial wars contributed almost 3 million,
mostly in the period 1870–99. The 1890s saw the most wars in one de-
cade until the 1970s outdid them. Controlled for the size of the popula-
tion, battle deaths had three big peaks, in the 1860s, the 1910s (World
War I), and the 1940s (World War II). With these three exceptions, there
was a basically flat rate of deaths as a proportion of population, which
Meredith Sarkees and her colleagues say suggests “something discourag-
ing about the constancy of warfare in human affairs.”43 They acknowl-
edge that the first quarter century after 1816 was quite peaceful, but there
was no further nineteenth-century decline in warfare. They ask rhetori-
cally, “Was this supposedly, civilized, peaceful century just a time when
Europeans stopped fighting each other to conquer and slaughter militar-
ily weaker Asians and Africans?” Their answer is yes, and they are right.
The second bias is that CoW figures are of deaths in battle, excluding
the many civilian deaths in colonial wars. Many of these wars killed more
civilians than soldiers. In Europe the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had
killed about 8 million people, of which battle deaths represented “only”
several hundred thousand. Most colonial wars were also lopsided. Yet esti-
mating deaths is difficult since many resulted from starvation and disease
resulting from the colonists’ mistreatment of natives—troops burning
crops and villages and imposing slave labor conditions with brutal punish-
ment and inadequate nutrition. Those were war-generated deaths. But
much death also resulted from mere contact with Europeans through dis-
eases to which the natives had no immunity. Such diseases might have
spread anyway without war, as a result of peaceful trading or freer labor
relations, although the herding of natives together in slave ships, mines,
plantations, and armies worsened the spread of diseases. Separating out
deaths consequent on war from mere contact deaths cannot be exact. We
cannot put precise numbers on fatalities resulting from colonization.
 The Decline of War? 289

Most colonizing campaigns also consisted of many small encounters, none

individually reaching a thousand deaths; native casualties often went un-
counted since they were of little interest to the colonial authorities. So I
will quickly review the relatively well-evidenced colonial cases. Deaths are
usually estimates of whole campaigns involving small encounters rarely
recorded individually. I stress that such estimates are less reliable than
CoW data and can indicate only rough orders of magnitude.
In the United States the Native American population in 1500 was
somewhere between 4 and 9 million. Only about 600,000 were left in 1800,
and only 237,000 appeared in the census of 1900, a population loss above
95 percent since 1500 and 60 percent since 1800. In the Indian Wars last-
ing through the nineteenth century, Native American losses in battle were
around 60,000 inflicted by soldiers and settler militias, though in massacres
like that at Sand Creek (described in the next chapter), soldiers killed entire
populations, not just braves. Many deaths also resulted from the famine
and diseases caused by forced deportations onto barren lands. Native
North Americans are absent from CoW data. In South America the great-
est early casualties had been inflicted by the Spanish and Portuguese, but
we lack evidence on numbers. There were massacres through most of the
nineteenth century. The last big ones are known. In Cuba’s “Great War” of
1868–78, about 240,000 died. CoW counted only 50,000 battle deaths. In
Argentina’s “Conquest of the Desert” in Patagonia in the 1870s to 1884,
over 30,000 died, but this does not appear in CoW data.
In Africa killing rates of indigenous soldiers escalated through the
nineteenth century as the Europeans acquired more lethal guns. Since na-
tives learned not to attempt pitched battles, warfare became hit-and-run
guerilla campaigns in terrain posing logistical and climatic challenges, and
troop ratios to area and population size were low. Intermittent campaigns
were more common than pitched battles during the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries.44 Yet in western Kenya alone between 1894 and 1914 the
British fought twenty-two battles, one per year.45 Soldiers and administra-
tors would arrive in the colonies already fearful of supposedly “savage” na-
tives, holding nervous fingers on the trigger. Their fears were exacerbated
by unpredictable violence amid hostile environments. To them, this legiti-
mized massacres, punitive campaigns that destroyed villages, and killing of
inhabitants who might be sustaining the rebels. There was, says Bouda
Etemad, a “conquest-resistance-repression cycle.”46
The protracted French conquest of Algeria (1829–47) killed between
300,000 and 825,000 Algerians in many small-scale antiguerilla campaigns
290 The Decline of War?

and punitive attacks on villages. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting Algeria, said

he had a “distressing notion that at this moment we are waging war far
more barbarously than the Arabs themselves.”47 French armies did not re-
spect the difference between soldiers and civilians. CoW data include only
two campaigns that total 23,000 Algerian deaths. Worse in relative num-
bers was the German army’s genocide of the Herrero and Nama peoples
in today’s Namibia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Herrero
were reduced from 60,000–80,000 to only 16,000 in eight years (only
2,000 of the survivors being men), and the Nama loss rate was 50 percent
of a total population of 20,000.48 CoW data total only 11,000 battle deaths
among the two peoples. In present-day Tanzania in the Maji-Maji War of
1905–7, the official German report presented to the Reichstag stated that
75,000 Africans died. Other estimates double that, others go up to 250,000
to 300,000—a huge number for such a small region. Some tribes lost over
90 percent of their members.49 CoW native battle deaths there total only
5,400. In the Belgian Congo during 1885–1908, perhaps 10 million died,
mainly through diseases brought about by dire forced labor conditions and
repression. CoW native battle deaths in the Congo are only 13,000.
Russian colonial expansion into Asia continued through the nine-
teenth century. Although not as bloody as earlier campaigns in Siberia,
expansion into Central Asia produced Turkmen losses of around 20,000
spread over many smaller campaigns. CoW data include three wars
against Kokand and Bukhara with total battle deaths of 7,300. The peo-
ples of the Caucasus suffered many more fatalities from the 1860s to
century’s end. The Russian census of 1897 recorded only 150,000 Circas-
sians left in their homeland, one-tenth of their original number, mainly
reduced by deportations ruthlessly enforced by the Russian army. The
Russian government acknowledged that the wars and deportations
caused 300,000 deaths. Circassian survivors claimed over 3 million.50
Circassians do not figure in CoW data.
In India between 1850 and 1914, millions were killed in famines
caused by coercive colonial policies. This case figures in Pinker’s list of
the worst death tolls in conflicts in human history. In Java in 1825–30,
the Dutch conquest included devastation of the countryside and over
200,000 deaths.51 CoW data on battle deaths in this case are the same,
the only instance of agreement we will find. In the Bali invasion of 1849,
about 10,000 died. This does not appear in the CoW list of wars. In Aceh
wars between 1873 and 1914, about 100,000 indigenous people died in
battle, through disease, and in terrible conditions in labor camps. CoW
 The Decline of War? 291

data total 22,200 native battle deaths. There were another thirty-one
Dutch smaller military expeditions in this period, says Henk Wesseling.
The Tahitian population collapsed by 90 percent between 1770, when
white men arrived, and the 1840s. This does not appear in CoW data.
The Kanaks of New Caledonia lost 70 percent of their original popula-
tion of about 70,000, mainly in the nineteenth century, when French set-
tlers seized their land and imposed forced labor on them. A rebellion in
1878 killed 1,000, and many more were deported abroad. They do not
appear in the CoW list. In New Zealand the Maoris were driven from
their lands, exterminated when they resisted, and contracted diseases.
Their numbers fell from 150,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury to 42,000 in 1896.52 The Maoris appear only in CoW data for the
war of 1863–66 against the British; 2,000 battle deaths were recorded.
Australian aborigine and Torres Straits peoples do not appear in
CoW data. Yet after the first contact in 1788 there were many small mas-
sacres committed by settlers and armed police, often in explicit “hunting
expeditions.” The University of Newcastle, New South Wales, is map-
ping all such cases. It defines a massacre as the killing of at least six unde-
fended people, since if the typical indigenous group was about twenty
strong, the loss of six, 30 percent of the population, was likely to threaten
the group’s survival. The project has so far uncovered almost five hun-
dred massacres. Most were committed in the second half of the nine-
teenth century, but they began as the nineteenth century dawned and
continued into the 1930s. Wikipedia’s “List of massacres of indigenous
Australians” details over ninety of Newcastle’s cases. They involve casu-
alty rates of between six and several hundred. None entails over one
thousand. R. G. Kimber concludes, “The numbers shot were undoubt-
edly so great as to cause total or near-total local group extinctions . . . so
poorly recorded that accurate pre-contact populations in the region can
never be known.”53 The indigenous population of Tasmania, numbering
20,000, was completely exterminated. Raymond Evans and Robert
Ørsted-Jensen have gone through the records of Queensland. They esti-
mate 65,000 to 67,000 indigenous Queenslanders shot by police and set-
tlers, an overall death rate of 22–26 percent.54 In 1887 the ethnographer
Edward Curr estimated that “fifteen to twenty-five per cent fall from the
rifle.” If the rate in Queensland was typical of other states and territories,
then total killings across Australia must have been about 200,000, about
the same as the battle deaths in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian
Wars combined.
292 The Decline of War?

This is not systematic coverage of colonial wars. Wesseling estimates

that the British, French, and Dutch fought about one hundred cam-
paigns against native peoples in the period 1870 to 1914, and I have
mentioned only some of these.55 Paul Bairoch estimates that between
1750 and 1913 the lives of 300,000 European and 100,000 native colo-
nial soldiers were lost in African and Asian territories, mostly due to dis-
ease.56 He says the total native lives lost in battle was somewhere
between 800,000 and 1,000,000. He adds, however, that the total deaths
resulting from the wars and subsequent forced migrations and famines
might have reached 25 million. Etemad estimates civilian losses at 50–60
million, mostly from diseases spread by the destructiveness of war.57 Be-
cause of the mixed causes of death, the total killed directly by wars is un-
known, but by any count there were both many more deaths in battle
than recorded in CoW data, and a hugely larger number of civilian
deaths induced by war.
So we cannot deduce a Long Peace or two Short Peaces in the world
in the nineteenth century. Within Europe that may have been so, but it
was Europeans who were inflicting almost all the massacres and geno-
cides elsewhere. Combining all the deaths caused by the wars of Europe-
ans might exceed the death toll inflicted by any single civilization in any
previous hundred-year period. The rise of Enlightenment civilization in
the West did not bring peace. And then came the two world wars. The
paradox of the first half of the twentieth century was that it saw both the
most devastating wars in human history and the greatest growth in world
peace movements—though of course the former dwarfed the latter. But
there was no overall decline in warfare through history, or in the nine-
teenth century, or obviously in the first half of the twentieth century.

Global War Trends since 1945

Most writers have been optimistic about peace in this period, compared
especially with the first half of the twentieth century. This comparison is
irrefutable. They are encouraged by the postwar settlement, the end of
colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization. In 1945 the Axis powers
were forced into unconditional surrender and occupied. Top Axis leaders
were charged with war crimes and convicted, except for the Japanese em-
peror, whom U.S. leaders believed would be a symbol of stability for the
country. A blind eye was generally turned to lower-level administrators,
and to capitalist and political collaborators. Japanese and German mili-
 The Decline of War? 293

tary spending was at the time kept at very low levels. Parliamentary de-
mocracy in West Germany and Japan, and state socialism in Eastern
Europe, were devised as shields against fascist revival. Welfare states
compromised class conflicts. The United States gave substantial eco-
nomic aid to Japan and Germany and other Europeans. The Japanese
Empire was abolished, and the war had greatly weakened the European
empires. Anticolonial movements finished them off in the 1950s and
1960s. All encouraging news.
The main war threat became hostility between democratic capitalism
and state socialism, and both sides soon were brandishing nuclear weap-
ons. With a few scares along the way, mutual deterrence ruled. Raymond
Aron expressed the Cold War paradox as “peace impossible, war improba-
ble”; although the Soviet Union and the West had incompatible visions of
the world, they were unlikely to risk nuclear war.58 The Cold War also
added new security arrangements. In the Far East, the American military
presence turned from the pacification of Japan to its protection from state
socialism. NATO also transformed the United States into the protector of
Western Europe against any Soviet offensive. The Warsaw Pact had a
parallel goal in Eastern Europe. Mutual economic cooperation in Europe
strengthened into the Common Market and then the European Union, its
initial purpose to keep Germany in and the Soviet Union out. These in-
stitutions did secure stability, peace, and massive economic development
in Europe and (after wars) in East Asia. The continent of Europe, the
most warlike continent for a millennium, was now a zone of peace.
When the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and 1991, this owed
less to American military power than to the breadth of it alliances and its
economic and technological superiority. But that was soon forgotten, as
the United States turned more to military interventions to secure its in-
terests abroad. This was to prove much less successful—because war is
rarely a rational instrument of policy.
Liberal optimists note correctly that the period has seen a declining
number of interstate wars. They have suggested that a relative peace, en-
during for over seventy years, might be headed at last toward Kant’s vi-
sion of perpetual peace. Optimism is understandable within recent
Western Europe, from which war was virtually abolished after 1945, but
only by excluding the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine from that zone.
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 blasted apart such
European complacency (see chapter 15). It is also odd that the four opti-
mistic liberals are three American citizens (Mueller, Goldstein, and
294 The Decline of War?

Pinker), and one Israeli (Gat, an army major), given that their countries
are among the few states still waging war. Mueller’s optimism concerned
forty years after 1945 in the advanced countries, adding that the negative
memory of the “two great exceptions,” the world wars, acted as a deter-
rent to further major wars.59 Gat calls this the Long Peace.60 He is opti-
mistic about the future but sensibly refrains from predicting perpetual
peace by listing some ways that humans might descend again into war.
Goldstein says the decline in interstate wars is deep-rooted, derived from
eight causes unlikely to be reversed: the end of the Cold War; U.S. dom-
inance; a global economy; the spread of human rights; the spread of de-
mocracy; increased participation of women in politics; the proliferation
of NGOs; and growing conflict resolution, including UN peacekeeping
operations, which he says have made the biggest contribution to the re-
cent decline.61 Two of these eight, the global economy and democracy,
are repeating nineteenth-century theories, but most of the rest are more
recent growths in international and transnational institutions. Goldstein
believes that international diplomacy spearheaded by the UN and the
United States is gradually bringing peace to the world. He sees U.S.
forces as being like UN blue helmets (peacekeepers), putting themselves
“in harm’s way to maintain peace, to establish conditions for political and
economic progress, to be diplomats and educators rather than just
‘grunts.’ ”62 Washington optimists see this as achievable policy, as do sol-
diers struggling bravely to implement it. While appreciative of their ef-
forts, I am skeptical about their success, and sometimes about the goals
of their rulers.

Data on Post-1945 Wars

For this recent period there is no longer a problem of unrecorded small
campaigns, although data on civilian deaths remain problematic. The
main data sources up to 2015 are usefully summarized on the web by
Max Roser.63 The number of interstate and extrastate (mostly colonial)
wars declined greatly. Colonial wars dropped almost to a vanishing point
as wars of liberation converted colonies into independent states. We
might suppose that this would lead to more interstate wars, since the
number of UN member states increased from 51 in 1945 to 193 in 2020,
but the reverse has happened—fewer interstate wars, a very positive sign.
Indeed, kingdoms did not vanish, and some were resurrected. Thus, Joel
Migdal posed the opposite question: “Why Do So Many States Stay In-
 The Decline of War? 295

tact?” despite their frequent inability to deliver the goods.64 Fazal identi-
fies just nine vanished kingdoms since 1945, only one resulting from
war.65 The others were cases like the German Democratic Republic, the
Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The exception was Saddam Hussein’s in-
vasion of Kuwait and even that proved temporary. Fazal attributes the
end of state mortality to the global strengthening of a norm against con-
quest, which the exception proved, for Saddam was countered by an in-
vasion under United Nations auspices restoring Kuwait’s independence.
The United States has often invaded states, but absorption was never the
aim—regime change or strengthening was the goal. Except for the
United States and Russia, there have been few wars between states with
grossly unequal powers, traditionally the main killers of kingdoms. The
most positive aspect of the post-1945 period was that one of my four
types of war, wars of conquest followed by direct imperial rule, seemed
obsolete—at least until Vladimir Putin aimed at that in his Ukraine inva-
sion of 2022. And this also revealed a weakness of nuclear deterrence,
which is powerless to stop a major conventional war if the aggressor
chooses to threaten the nuclear option.
Nonetheless, there have been a few big wars. The modern war with
the highest death rate of soldiers as a proportion of national population
was Paraguay’s 1860s war. Number two, however, was in the 1950s: Para-
guay (again) versus Bolivia in the Chaco War (both wars were discussed
in chapter 9). Number three was the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–88, in which
Iran lost about a million casualties, and Iraq up to a half of that, in a war
of trenches and barbed-wire, like World War I. Numbers four and five
were the two world wars, although if we include civilian casualties, the
wars in the Eastern Congo in 1988–2008 would figure. Additionally, the
wars in Korea and Vietnam killed a million or more in battle, and several
million if we include civilians. The ongoing war in Ukraine might join
this group of big wars. There were also many small wars, especially dur-
ing the Cold War. The overall number of battle deaths, both in absolute
numbers and especially as a proportion of world population, however,
declined between 1945 and 2013 but then began fluctuating quite
sharply. There were in 2020 more wars but fewer casualties than in re-
cent years, but casualties must have risen sharply in 2022 because of the
wars in the Horn of Africa and Ukraine. CoW data on the initiation of
MIDs show that during the Cold War they reached the highest level in
over two centuries, but they then declined with the collapse of the Soviet
Union. This was the only decrease in two centuries of increases in MIDs,
296 The Decline of War?

and they rose again in the period 2012–20.66 Overall, says Braumoeller of
CoW data, the post-1945 period has been neither more nor less deadly
than the previous 130 years after 1816. But, he warns, “Given how deadly
the first half of the 20th century turned out to be, that conclusion is
nothing short of horrifying”—referring obliquely to what might happen
next. His second overall conclusion is that the two centuries since 1816
have not seen either a consistent rise or decline of war. There have been
short-term rises and declines as well as short periods of no variation.67
Other studies have lowered the bar for war. Monty Marshall defines
war as armed conflict producing five hundred or more deaths, including
an annual death rate of at least one hundred.68 He also measures “war
magnitude” on the basis of a combination of casualties, geographical
scope, intensity, and displacement of civilians. There were large fluctua-
tions in magnitude without any overall trend between 1946 and 1985.
Then came a sharp decline until 1995, when it leveled off before declin-
ing again in 2010. The first known year with no interstate wars was 2015.
His data end there. They imply not a seventy-year Long Peace but a
thirty-five-year Short Peace, since 1985—and more wars have started
since 2015. Yet even a seventy-year period of peace would not be unusual
in world history, says Aaron Clauset.69 Focusing on battle deaths from
1823 to 2003, he concludes that both the recent period of relative peace
and the half century of great violence that preceded it are not statistically
uncommon patterns in time-series data. The postwar pattern of peace
would need to endure for over one hundred more years to become a sta-
tistically significant trend. Steven Beard controls for the large rise in
world population over the period, and this reduces the proportion killed,
but again only from the mid-1980s—which is consistent with a Short,
not a Long, Peace.70 It is too soon to conclude that this represents a
long-term decline of war, unless one can plausibly project forward de-
cline in the underlying causes of war.
Civil wars show different trends. If we use the CoW cutoff point of
one thousand battle deaths, we find that they rose in the 1930s and grew
until the 1990s, when they were the large majority of wars. There was
then a slight decline from the early 1990s until 2008. Marshall finds that
civil wars increased until 1992–93 and then sharply declined, before rising
again from about 2009. The last few years have seen a rise in civil wars,
from only four in 2012 to twelve in 2016, to ten in 2019—and I count
eight in 2020 and twelve also in 2021.71 Wars involving non–state actors
(extrastate wars), such as ISIS, have recently dominated. Paul Hensel gives
 The Decline of War? 297

data for every two-decade period from 1816 to 2000. Excepting the two
periods of the world wars, civil wars plus extrastate wars were always more
frequent than interstate wars. But wars relocated. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, most interstate and civil wars were in Europe, and there were far
fewer in the Middle East and Asia. Since most independent states in the
nineteenth century were in Europe, this is not surprising. But since 1945
the large majority have been in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. Europe
has seen only two interstate wars since 1950.72 Wars now seem confined
to the developing world, though I show later that this partially misleads.
The world is now full of states whose spatial configuration is largely guar-
anteed by international law and institutions. The internal space within
more recent and divided or weaker states is now contested.
The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Uppsala Conflict
Data Program (UCDP) have data that use only twenty-five battle deaths
as defining war. These increased from 1955 to 1994, almost entirely be-
cause of civil wars, followed by a decline until 2003, although this level
was higher than almost every year from 1950 to 1975. Between 2003 and
2018 trends fluctuated. The total number of fatalities reached its peak of
over 100,000 in 2014, and then declined to 53,000 in 2018, but that is
still higher than any other year since 1991.73 Mark Harrison and Niko-
laus Wolf go even lower, counting MIDs with fewer than twenty-five
deaths, and even counting some amounting to no more than saber rat-
tling.74 In contrast to actual wars, these have been increasing, and they
now far outnumber actual wars. Indeed, saber rattling has increased in
recent years among the greatest powers, Russia, China, the United
States, and NATO (which I discuss in chapter 15). Goertz and his col-
leagues suggest that movement toward milder MIDs is the core of in-
creasing peace in the world.75 Perhaps rulers are warier of war but
bluster and bluff more—a modern equivalent of early tribal societies
hurling abuse and brandishing spears and bows, but cautious about actu-
ally fighting. That would not be quite perpetual peace, but it might be
promising. As we saw in chapter 9, this pattern has increasingly charac-
terized Latin America. On the other hand, blustering has also spread to
the great powers, capable of the greatest damage to the world.
These figures reveal more fluctuations than long-term trends, with
two main exceptions: a trend toward smaller wars and MIDs, which of-
fers support to liberal theorists; and a trend toward more civil wars,
which offers no such hope for the Global South. At a global level there
has been no overall decline or increase in war since 1945, although there
298 The Decline of War?

was a decline between about 1985 and 2014, ended by a recent flurry of
wars, mostly in Muslim countries (which I analyze in chapter 14).
Braumoeller explains the post-1816 results geopolitically, in terms of
“International Orders”—such as the Concert of Europe after the Con-
gress of Vienna, the Bismarckian period in Germany, and the American-
dominated world order after the Cold War.76 These, he says, brought
relative peace, whereas contested orders, such as those seen in the Napo-
leonic period, around the two world wars, and in the Cold War, gener-
ated more wars. This geopolitical explanation neglects economic and
political power relations and the transnational waves of ideological
power I noted in chapter 8. The Napoleonic Wars involved the transna-
tional spread of revolution, which made war deadlier and longer-lasting.
The Concert of Europe of 1815 was counterrevolutionary as well as geo-
political. It withstood a smaller revolutionary wave in 1848. It was then
shaken in Europe by Italian aspirations for nationhood, and by the rise of
Prussia, owing to its militaristic society and state. Bismarck’s main later
goal was domestic, to use a period of peace in Europe to consolidate the
transformation of Prussia into Germany. He hosted the 1884 Berlin
Conference on Africa, which did ensure peace between the great powers,
but it encouraged them to partition Africa and Asia by force. World War
I did break up this order, though this again requires consideration of do-
mestic sources of social power as well as diplomatic factors (as outlined
in chapter 8). The war ended with a wave of revolutions, followed by sev-
enty years of bitter struggle among rulers seeking to impose on the
world their own transnational ideologies—state socialist, fascist, or capi-
talist-democratic—as in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, as well as
countless small wars pitting class against class and leftists against right-
ists. The Iran-Iraq war and the more recent wars in the Middle East have
involved both religious ideology and American imperialism (see chapter
14). The main patterns of recent wars have been due to domestic power
relations and transnational ideologies as well as to geopolitics.

Civilian versus Military Fatalities

Civilian casualties were high in many historical cases, caused by “exem-
plary repression” of peoples who resisted as well as by armies “living
off the land” of their enemies. In chapter 8 I discussed the seventeenth-
century Thirty Years’ War and its massive civilian casualties. How many
Russian civilians died as a result of Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 is un-
 The Decline of War? 299

known, but the number must be large. In general, though, civilian casual-
ties increased during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, first
in interstate wars, then in civil wars. Air forces bomb civilian areas, and
most civil wars are “asymmetric,” pitting the heavy weapons of state
armies and air forces against guerillas wielding light weapons but hiding
among the people (sometimes using them as human shields) or fighting
in regions with difficult ecologies. Bombing them has increased civilian
casualties. Marshall says the proportion of civilian fatalities has steadily
increased since 1954, preponderating from about 1990.77
Ratios of military to civilian casualties in recent wars have also
varied. In the 2003 war in Iraq, official Iraqi estimates put deaths at up
to 460,000, whereas unofficial estimates are higher still. Official esti-
mates undercount because of difficulties in conducting surveys in war-
time conditions, morgue officials saying they receive more bodies than
the authorities record, and Muslim families often burying their dead im-
mediately, without notifying the authorities. The most plausible range of
fatalities in Iraq seems 500,000–600,000, civilians contributing 80 per-
cent of them—a ratio of four civilian to one military death. Yet which
deaths do we count? Studies finding civilian-military death ratios of
less than one or even one to one, as in Bosnia in the 1990s, are of direct
combat deaths only.78 According to the Watson Institute, as of January
2015 about 92,000 people had been killed in the Afghan War, of which
only just over 26,000 were civilians. This yields a civilian-to-combatant
ratio of only 0.4:1, but this is a count of those killed directly by enemy
action. Crawford adds deaths through indirect causes related to the war,
such as famine and disease outbreaks.79 These add another 360,000
Afghans, pushing up the ratio enormously to about 8:1.
African civilian casualties through civil wars have been much worse.
Most of these ten civil wars occurred in poor states with few records, so
fatality figures cannot be exact. Guesses have to be made of prewar mor-
tality rates and these compared with the postwar rates. In the deadliest
case, in the Eastern Congo between 1988 and 2008, two very different es-
timates have been given by international organizations, one of 5.4 million
killed, the other just under half that figure. The higher figure seems bi-
ased by an underestimate of prewar mortality rates.80 So I have preferred
2.5 million, following Bethany Lacina and Nils Gleditsch, who estimate
that over 90 percent of them were civilians, as also in the conflicts in
Sudan and Ethiopia.81 Civilian casualties in Mozambique, Somalia, and
Ethiopia-Eritrea were probably in excess of 75 percent, a ratio of 3–4:1,
300 The Decline of War?

Table 10.2. Estimated Deaths in Major Wars in Africa, 1963–2008

% of Deaths
Occurring in
Country Years Total War Deaths Battle Deaths Battle
Sudan/Anya Nya 1963–73 250,000–750,000 20,000 3–8
Nigeria/Biafra 1967–70 500,000– 75,000 4–15
2 million
Angola 1975–2002 1.5 million 160,475 11
Ethiopia 1976–91 1–2 million 16,000 1–2
(excl. Eritrea)
Mozambique 1976–92 500,000– 145,400 15–29
1 million
Somalia 1981–96 250,000–350,000 66,750 19–27
Sudan 1983–2002 2 million 55,500 3
Liberia 1989–96 150,000–200,000 23,500 12–16
Dem. Rep. of 1998–2008 2.5 million 145,000 6
Congo
Ethiopia/Eritrea 1998–2000 300,000 43,000 14

Source: Perlo-Freeman et al., 2015.

and this may also be so of the 2021 war in Tigray province of Ethiopia.
Being a civilian in a civil war zone is dangerous across large swathes of
Africa. A few small wars have more military than civilian casualties—for
example, the 1982 Falklands War and Nagorno-Karabagh in 2020—but
the reverse is far more common, provided we count civil as well as inter-
state wars and include war-induced famines and disease.
Wars also force refugee flight. Statistics have been collected by the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) since 1965.
The number displaced by persecution or conflict and fleeing abroad
reached 19 million in 1989. It then declined to 9 million in 2005, in the
period of hope. But then came a decade of increases, culminating in the
highest-ever figures, 29.5 million in 2018, 34 million in 2020, and 35 mil-
lion in 2021. By the end of June 2022, 6.5 million Ukrainians had fled
their country in only four months of war. An additional 8 million were
internally displaced. Combined, these figures add up to one-third of the
Ukrainian population, an incredible proportion. The total number of ref-
ugees in the world, if we add those fleeing within their own countries, is
 The Decline of War? 301

much higher. The highest numbers, 82.4 million in 2020 and 94.7 million
in 2021, were again the last ones. The biggest numbers were from
Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar.82 Of course,
instead of remaining in fear of death in a war zone, refugees flee to camps
offering basic subsistence, thanks to the UNHCR, other international
agencies, and neighboring governments. This offers a little support to
Goldstein’s optimism regarding international organizations. But when
refugees more numerous than the population of the United Kingdom or
France are forcibly displaced, this can offer only a tiny smidgen of hope.
Goldstein says UN peacekeeping troops encourage peace. In January
2020 there were 110,000 blue helmets stationed in fourteen countries,
the second-largest military intervention force in the world after the
United States, which had about 165,000 troops stationed abroad. UN
troops are brought in only when both sides to a conflict wish to be sepa-
rated, so they have no effect on wars until the endgame. Within this
limitation, the UN brings some successes, some failures. About half its
brokered peace settlements endure longer than twelve years, but half
break down sooner. Unfortunately, peace achieved through negotiated
settlement does not last as long as peace achieved by the victory of one
side.83 Border disputes settled by the International Court of Justice have
been increasing, as we saw in Latin America. A world without border dis-
putes might be halfway to a world without wars. But we are not there
yet, for there are well over one hundred current border disputes. Though
most are now fairly dormant, some are not. In 2020–22 border disputes
continued in Ukraine before exploding into Russian imperial conquest,
and they flared up again between China and India, China and other
Pacific nations, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and
Ethiopia, Tigray, and Eritrea. We have seen various indications of a re-
cent uptick in the number and intensity of wars. We must be cautious
about projecting this into the future, but the signs are ominous in some
places, especially around Russia’s borders and in Taiwan.

Pacific Tendencies in Western Societies

Yet internally the West has become fairly pacific, as Pinker, Gat, Mueller,
Goldstein, and MacMillan all observe. Take homicide rates. The average
in forty local studies in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England was
twenty-four murders per 100,000.84 Today in England and Wales it is less
than one, in the United States it is five, and the global average is just
302 The Decline of War?

under seven. Yet fifty cities in the world have homicide rates of over
thirty per 100,000, higher than in medieval England. Most are in Latin
America, three are in South Africa, but four are U.S. cities (led by De-
troit and New Orleans). No European city comes anywhere near this
level of violence. Pinker says that U.S. violence is a problem only in
southern states and among African Americans. Northern white homicide
rates are only double those of modern European countries, he says, not
ten times as high. Of course, we could reduce the rates of all the world’s
cities by excluding the groups committing the most homicides.
Police homicides are also relevant. In the United Kingdom between
2010 and 2019, on average 2.4 persons per year were killed by police-
men. Few U.K. police carry guns, but in Germany and France most do.
In 2018 French police forces killed twenty-six persons and German po-
lice forces nine. In most of the French cases, the victims were unarmed,
but the police had feared they were terrorists.85 American official figures
of police killings are unreliable, but the Washington Post published a sur-
vey of all known cases in 2015 that revealed a shocking total of just
under 1,000 killings that year.86 The annual toll was slightly reduced in a
2021 study, which estimated 30,800 deaths from police violence between
1980 and 2018, an average of 820 per annum.87 These figures are about
double officially recorded rates. Around 80 percent of victims are
claimed in police reports to have been armed, though we might be skep-
tical about this claim, and we don’t know whether victims were brandish-
ing a gun when shot dead. In any case, shooting a suspect repeatedly in
the back when he or she is fleeing because of reasonable fear of the po-
lice is an extremely violent act.
The rise of extremist militias in the United States is also worrying,
especially their persistent presence on the fringes of the Republican
Party and in the Trump movement, seemingly encouraged by the former
president. There are also persistent mass school shootings. Despite all
this, the prospects of significant gun control are politically very dim.
This is exclusively a domestic problem, for gun toters, even those dressed
in quasi uniforms, seem uninterested in foreign wars. The potential for
civil war is more threatening, should the deterioration of the U.S. politi-
cal system continue. America North and South does not support liberal
theories of a decline in interpersonal violence, but Europe, Japan, some
of East Asia, and Australasia do.
Like Helmut Thome, I stress the role of the state in the decline of
violence.88 Infrastructural power is the capacity of states to actually pene-
 The Decline of War? 303

trate civil society and logistically implement its decisions through the
realm. Most premodern rulers lacked the infrastructural power to insti-
tutionalize procedures for maintaining order. Nor could they disarm the
population (though we saw that Tokugawa Japan managed it). Rulers re-
lied on repression, including killing. In contrast, modern rulers have in-
frastructural power whose institutions routinely preserve order without
inflicting lethal violence—except in some authoritarian regimes. In most
countries the population has been disarmed—the United States is the ex-
ception. In the West most people live peaceful lives. The West does have
extremely violent video games, and Hollywood movies are obsessed with
guns and violence. There is debate about whether this is simply cathartic
fantasyland or a direct expression of a repressed desire to kill. But with-
out conscription, real war has been removed from the everyday experi-
ence of young men in the most developed parts of the world. To
traditional sports like male boxing and wrestling have been added cage
fighting and female fighting. Violence in the ring is real enough, though
rarely lethal, and the audience merely shouts. Violence in political and
racial demonstrations has increased in recent years. Yet overall, there has
been a decline in militarism in the principal institutions of society.
Chapter 1 defined militarism as combining the dominance of mili-
tary elites in society, the ideological exaltation of military virtues above
those of peace, and extensive and aggressive military preparedness. In
earlier periods I have found cases of militaristic societies in which we can
find all three. This is not so in today’s liberal democracies. Nonetheless,
military spending in both liberal and illiberal countries has been grow-
ing, the United States, Europe, India, China, and Russia taking the lead.
World military spending grew every year since the year 2000, except for
a slight dip between 2010 and 2014. These figures were adjusted to con-
trol for inflation. In 2021 it topped $2 trillion for the first time. Doubt-
less the 2022 figures will be even higher. The United States alone
accounts for 38 percent of the world’s expenditures. Yet military spend-
ing does not dominate the major economies. Their dollar figures never
top 4.1 percent of GDP. Only two of the Arab Gulf state figures are
higher than this.89 Military elites do not dominate even American society,
and while its gun culture, violent videos and movies, and the elevation of
soldiers into “heroes” are expressions of cultural militarism, this is not
institutionally dominant. European countries’ cultures are more pacific.
But the United States possesses the third element of militarism in spades.
Never has a single country had such military overpreparedness, its bases
304 The Decline of War?

spread over the globe, prepared for and launching military interventions
across the world. This combination makes for an uneven and narrow
form of militarism, a “regime militarism” rather than the societal milita-
rism of Rome and ex-barbarian dynasties of Asia. And it has required
new ways of making war.

From Ferocious to Callous Killing

Following Randall Collins, I distinguish “ferocious” from “callous” ways
of killing and note a partial shift in the modern period from the former to
the latter, from body hacking to killing from a distance.90 Ferocity is today
found mainly in civil wars in poorer countries, from machete hacking in
Rwanda to decapitating prisoners in the Middle East, to bayonet stabbing
and raping of Rohingya in Myanmar. Civil wars are often called “low in-
tensity,” but even paramilitary bands can terrorize large populations, while
the states fighting them are often just as ferocious. There is less long-
range killing in civil wars and virtually none by insurgent groups lacking
airplanes, tanks, and artillery. But all sides commit atrocities.
Wars in the Global South have been called “new wars” involving
asymmetry between states and rebels, military privatization, states losing
the monopoly of the means of violence, drugs or precious metals sold to
finance arms buying, and seizing resources from unarmed aid agencies.
All these are said to be reinforced by economic globalization, and all
weaken state sovereignty, offering further opportunities for rebels to in-
tensify violence.91 Of course, some of these were often present in earlier
wars, too, while the link of “new wars” to economic globalization is dubi-
ous.92 Yet asymmetry is real: government forces armed with tanks, air-
planes, artillery, intensive professional training and discipline battle
against insurgents armed with Kalashnikovs, handheld rocket launchers,
improvised explosive devices, off-road pickup trucks, suicide belts, gue-
rilla cells, and morale conferred by populist ideologies. Asymmetry had
first allowed Westerners to conquer most of the world. But in the post-
1945 period, “weapons of the weak” have allowed poorer political move-
ments to fight back and sometimes outlast much more heavily armed and
richer opponents. Thus, in a study on conflicts between strong and weak
states measured by their material resources, during the nineteenth cen-
tury the strong ones won over 80 percent of the wars, but after 1945, the
weaker actors have won over 51 percent.93 This came in two waves, first
in anti-colonial liberation struggles, second in post-colonial struggles
 The Decline of War? 305

against the Soviet Union and the United States and allies, in which reli-
gious ideologies have sometimes loomed large.
Ivan Arreguín-Toft says the colonial powers often tried “barbarism”
to repress enemies they considered “less civilized”—for example, massa-
cres and torture by the French in Algeria and by the British in Kenya.94
Today some Western special forces do fight ferociously, and torture is not
unknown, but in general “they” fight ferocious warfare, while “we” do
more callous warfare, an aspect of asymmetric warfare. Swords and spears
enabled hacking at the body of another. This requires ferocity, which was
valued as a social trait. Tournaments, jousting, archery, and quarterstaff
combat trained medieval men for physical combat. Calmness and techni-
cal ability have supplanted ferocity as the most important military skill.
The deadliest weapons are now wielded by people who never see the
enemy they kill, which creates indifference to distant death. This espe-
cially characterized World War II, in which the firebombing of Dresden
and Tokyo, deliberately targeting civilians, was not seen by the Allies as
atrocities. We see our enemies’ atrocities, not ours. Our attitude was epit-
omized in 1945 by the mundane words of William Sterling Parsons, the
commander of the Enola Gay immediately after he had dropped the first
atomic bomb on Hiroshima: “Results clear cut successful in all respects.
Visible effects greater than any test. Conditions normal in airplane fol-
lowing delivery.”95 There is no emotion expressed in this log entry, only
satisfaction with performance. Parsons’s navigator, Ted van Kirk, claimed
to have “come off the mission, had a bite and a few beers, and hit the
sack, and had not lost a night’s sleep over the bomb in 40 years.”96 Today’s
drones even take the travel out of bombing.
As Pinker, Mueller, Goldstein, and Gat observe, Westerners shudder
at torture, rape, and hacking of body parts. We shudder at body-on-body
ferocity—but not at our own long-range killings. We try not to see them.
We prefer not to go into an abattoir and see the mangling of animals.
We prefer not to see torture, and we may turn a blind eye if our side
does it. We do not have to see any of these sights. But we still eat meat,
and we still make war with missiles and drones; America may still co-
vertly torture perceived enemies, and some of its allies certainly do. We
are horrified at the decapitation of civilians inflicted by the Islamic State,
but not at the callous killing of civilians by our air forces. Among drone
“pilots,” the enemy is seen only through satellite images on computer
screens. Drone personnel follow carefully scripted procedures concern-
ing the adequacy of their information. Only if satisfied with this do they
306 The Decline of War?

release their drones’ weapons. They show no passion, and ideology is not
driving their decision other than the belief that those labeled as terrorists
can be legitimately killed. ISIS deliberately targets individuals and
groups, civilians as well as combatants, and is proud to show videos of
prisoners being decapitated. The United States and its allies do not de-
liberately target civilians, but accurate bombing depends on intelligence
gathering on the ground, and its quality varies. Bombing cannot be al-
ways aimed at the right target. Rockets and bombs dropped by planes
and drones inevitably kill civilians: they are mistaken for terrorists, they
are in proximity to terrorists, or they are part of a wedding party or a
hospital or a school that intelligence erroneously sees as an assembly of
terrorists. The U.S. military admits to killing very few civilians because
to admit to more might alienate Americans, a healthy sign of Americans
finding the excesses of war unacceptable. But it is no comfort to those ci-
vilians caught up in the crosshairs of U.S. or Russian targeting, and it
leads to serious undercounting of the civilian victims of recent wars.

Civil Wars Internationalized

So is this now a polarized world, a civilized, pacific North (the United
States and Russia serving as partial outliers) and an uncivilized, warlike
South? This is deceptive, for two reasons. First, the profit motives of
northern arms companies and governments have led to massive arms
transfers from the rich countries to the regimes and rebels of poorer
countries. Businessmen and “good union jobs” (as U.S. liberals like to
say) are causing death in far-off countries. The total dollar value of arms
transfers is unknown since much shady arms dealing exists, but SIPRI es-
timates it as over $40 billion at the height of the Cold War in the early
1980s. Then it fell to just over $30 billion in 2002–6. Then it rose again
to about $35 billion in the period 2007–16, before falling to just over
$30 billion in 2021. It must have risen again in 2022. But all these figures
are very substantial. The biggest exporter in recent years has been the
United States, at 35–39 percent of the world’s total, followed by the
combined European Union countries at 26 percent (France and Ger-
many led the way), and Russia at 21 percent.97 Numerous additional
countries, such as Britain, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Israel
have important arms industries, and manufacturers usually negotiate
major arms sales in collaboration with their government. These deals are
important to their economies, and so no government wishes to reduce
 The Decline of War? 307

arms sales. Most countries with military expenditure of 5 percent or

more of GNP are poor. They are arming against both domestic and for-
eign enemies, yet they also view a modern military as conferring geopo-
litical status, just as do the major powers. They all want to flex military
muscles in public. Addiction to militarism by southern warlords is fueled
by northern arms lords in a symbiotic relationship.
Second, the northern powers do fight, but mostly through proxies.
“Civil war” needs qualifying, for most of these wars are also international-
ized. The year 2018 saw fourteen conflicts (six wars and eight MIDs) in-
ternationalized, where local war was intensified by foreign intervention,
especially by the United States. These conflicts provided over half of all
battle-related casualties that year. Internationalized conflicts last longer,
and political solutions are harder to find. Foreign interventions usually in-
volve regime strengthening, supporting the government side in a conflict,
although this was not true of the United States in its wars against Muslim
states, and Russia supports regime change separatists in Ukraine.98 During
the Cold War, NATO troops were not sent into war zones. The first in-
tervention came in 1992 in Bosnia. They have since intervened in Kosovo,
Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya, and the seas off Somalia and Yemen. After a
period in which African countries had a policy of mutual noninterference,
the African Union agreed to a multinational intervention force in 2002.
Its gestation was lengthy, but from about 2013 it became a reality.
Recent foreign states’ interventions were or are in eastern Congo (by
nine other African countries), Mali (by France, Chad, and contingents
from many African Union countries, with U.S. logistical support), Soma-
lia (by the United States, NATO, and various African Union countries),
Colombia (by the United States), Afghanistan and northern Pakistan (by
the United States and thirty-eight other NATO and partner countries),
Libya (by seventeen NATO members, including the United States, Brit-
ain, France, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Russia, and Turkey), Syria (by the United States, much of NATO, Iraq,
Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and Hezbollah), Yemen (by the United States, Brit-
ain, France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, several Gulf states, Iran, and Hezbol-
lah), and eastern Ukraine (by Russia, with the United States and NATO
providing massive arms supplies to Ukraine). In 2020 Turkey was heavily
involved in the fighting in Nagorno-Karabagh, and in 2021 Horn of Af-
rica countries were involved in the struggle between Tigray rebels and
the Ethiopian government. UN and NATO forces are active in numer-
ous countries, but few of them are involved in ground fighting, although
308 The Decline of War?

they do provide logistical and training aid. This is internationalization of

local disputes.
Syria has been by far the deadliest civil war raging over the last few
years, and the United States, Russia, and NATO countries have been
fighting there, either directly or through proxies, as are Iranian soldiers,
Saudi pilots, and Hezbollah militias. Without the foreigners, the death
toll and the refugee flow would be much lower. Libya also remains the
site of a confused war between numerous militias, all of whom receive
foreign assistance. Access to Libya’s oil is an important motive for the
foreigners. The war then simplified into one main conflict, between a
government in Tripoli, backed by the UN, Turkey, Qatar, and Italy, and a
rebel general based in Benghazi, backed by Russia, the UAE, Egypt, Jor-
dan, and France. Russia sent unmarked planes and mercenaries working
for the Wagner Group, a private Russian organization (with close Krem-
lin links), and the Turkish government has introduced ground troops,
mostly allied Syrian militias, while U.S. planes and drones bomb jihadists
wherever they can find them. According to UN officials, Libyan deaths
since 2014 in what is called the Second Civil War have risen to 9,000;
another 20,000 have been wounded. Turkey assisted the attack in 2020
by Azerbaijan on disputed territory held by Armenia, while Russia sup-
plied Armenia with antidrone defenses that did not work. The death toll
here was over 6,000. Across the world, foreign intervention is also com-
mon against non–state actors, especially armed religious groups like Al
Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and the Lord’s Resis-
tance Army, and these movements operate across borders.
The U.S. government sends military advisory teams to many coun-
tries and bombs a few; NATO assists. Because the action is far away, the
North seems pacific. But the United States, followed by France and the
United Kingdom, followed by other NATO members, is not pacific.
Their foreign entanglements are distant, and their citizens are rarely
conscripted and rarely risk death. American leaders have kept the body
bags few through risk transfer militarism. Often peoples do not know
where their soldiers are engaged. How many Americans knew that U.S.
soldiers were in Niger, until suddenly in October 2017, when four
of them were found killed? How many French knew of Operation
Barkhane, in which 5,600 French troops have been quartered across five
West African countries to counter Islamist insurgents across the Sahel
region since 2014 (as well as to protect France’s uranium mines)? The
total number of French killed is so far about fifty; over 600 jihadists have
 The Decline of War? 309

been killed or captured; and the annual cost is one billion euros. In 2021
President Emmanuel Macron announced plans for withdrawing the
French troops. Although U.K. military interventions in the Middle East
have become controversial, less publicity is given to small African inter-
ventions, to U.K. bases in Kenya and Sierra Leone, and to its Indian
Ocean island of Diego Garcia, leased to the United States for its Middle
Eastern and Afghan bombing ventures. These military adventures are
discrete and far away.

Conclusion
I have questioned rival theories of diminishing or increasing wars
through history. I found variation across the world and through time.99
Intergroup conflict was uncommon in early human communities, but it
grew as hunter-gatherers settled into fixed communities and grew again
as states and empires emerged. Thereafter war remained ubiquitous but
erratic. The Roman Republic was continuously at war. In China I found
that war varied greatly by region. In Japan it varied greatly through time.
Post-Roman Europe was highly war-prone, but at first wars were small-
scale and somewhat rule-governed. Smaller kingdoms were swallowed up
by major powers with more formidable militaries, which were later di-
verted into religious and revolutionary wars. These powers conquered
much of the world, annihilating or exploiting its peoples. Neither the
Enlightenment nor industrial capitalism brought peace to the nineteenth
century, as is commonly believed, for Europeans were exporting war to
their colonies. Finally, they precipitated world wars that destroyed their
own military power. The nineteenth century was not peaceful, nor was
the first half of the twentieth century.
Wars changed after 1945. There were fewer big wars but more small
ones and MIDs, mostly beginning as civil wars. The total number of
wars and their casualties fluctuated, but through all of the twentieth cen-
tury civilian fatalities grew. At the beginning of the twenty-first century
liberal theorists perceived a trend away from war, but this has subse-
quently wavered. The two main axes of the recent wave of wars in the
Muslim world—conservatives-secularists against jihadists and Sunni ver-
sus Shi’a—are worsening currently (see chapter 14). In contrast, wars in
Western Europe and Latin America have almost disappeared. Warfare is
gone from the relations between the rich countries, just as Mueller ar-
gues. Whatever the level of economic conflict among the United States,
310 The Decline of War?

Japan, and E.U. countries, it is unlikely they would wage war against
each other. If the north of the world were hermetically sealed, optimistic
liberal theory would have much traction, although the United States
lags, with guns galore, a massive state arsenal, and callous militarism. Yet
one type of war, territorial conquest imperialism, seems dead.
Many poor countries remain beset by wars, especially civil wars,
however, which show little sign of decline. Rich countries still contribute
unhelpfully to these with arms sales, proxy wars, and bombing. That
these are deployed far away obscures the militarism and seems to give
liberal optimism more support than it deserves. Rich countries have ex-
ported militarism far from the attention span and the well-being of their
citizens. Terrorism in their backyards, partly caused by their own aggres-
sion, should have given them pause, but instead it escalated an emotional
“war on terror.” Irrationality rules. Gat is wrong to assert that in the
post-Enlightenment era, “war has become incomprehensible to the point
of absurdity.”100 Much of the world knows of its absurdity only too
well—and we are partly responsible.
 chapter eleven
Fear and Loathing on the
Battlefield I
From Ancient Times to the
American Civil War

S
o far i have discussed wars at the level of rulers’ decision
making, without the presence of ordinary soldiers who had no
role in such decisions. We have seen rulers backing farther
and farther away from the battlefield as the range of lethal weap-
ons broadened, enabling them to play war games at the expense of
other peoples’ lives. They no longer see—and so far you the reader have
not seen—mutilated corpses, torn flesh, or gushing blood. I must remedy
this neglect and focus on those who have been the greatest sufferers
from war, the soldiers, both officers and men. But there is one great
methodological obstacle. On earlier wars we lack evidence from soldiers
themselves, and this changed only with the advent of mass literacy in
the nineteenth century. So after a brief introduction, I offer a short
section on the limited amount we do know of soldiers in battle before
mass literacy, and then I will discuss soldiers’ experience of battle
during the American Civil War, the first war in which most soldiers were
literate and wrote letters, diaries, and memoirs about their experiences.
Then, in the next two chapters, I discuss soldiers in battle in more
recent wars.

311
312 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

The dominant image of soldiers in modern culture is of courage and

triumph, heroes over cowards, good guys over bad guys. In war movies
the heroes with whom we identify almost never die. Supporting actors
are expendable, but they usually die cleanly, with good grace. These are
“good deaths.” Today American soldiers are routinely called heroes by
politicians, but soldiers themselves are uncomfortable with hero versus
coward dichotomy. They often declare that only those who have experi-
enced battle can understand its reality, and they know that their own
deeds fall short of heroic. General Sherman spoke for most during the
American Civil War: “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moon-
shine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks
and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for
desolation. War is hell.”
Of course, soldiers’ experiences in battle have varied. A few seem to
actually like battle because they are sadists or because they crave danger
and are exhilarated by surges of adrenaline coursing through their bodies.
They may hate and fear battle, as I think you or I would. They may fight
because they are paid to fight and it is their job, because they believe in
the cause, because they want the status of a warrior, because they have
obedience drilled into them, or out of loyalty to comrades. Soldiers nor-
mally embody complex mixtures of such motives and emotions. The bat-
tlefield is emotional struggle par excellence. Obviously, the prospect of
being killed or maimed is not something that anyone could relish. Fear of
this is the dominant emotion on battlefields. Yet fear can be coped with,
even utilized to kill others. A loathing for battle may derive from revul-
sion at the specter of mangled, bloodied bodies, from moral repugnance
at killing or maiming others, or from fear of being killed or maimed one-
self. Skulking (keeping one’s head down and pretending to fight), nonfir-
ing, mutiny, and desertion are all expressions of repugnance. Yet reactions
are affected by the perception of risk: What level of risk of death or
maiming do soldiers perceive and accept? Is the degree of risk controlla-
ble by them? I explore these issues over the next three chapters.
It is unlikely the same answers apply across all forms of arms, all his-
torical periods, all geographical regions, and all phases of campaigns. I
will not discuss the very earliest “battles” of prehistoric humans, which
(as we saw in chapter 2) are conjectured to have contained more ritual
shouting than bodily combat. Later, when warfare became more orga-
nized, we can distinguish a very long stretch of time during which infan-
try and cavalry combat consisted of direct body-on-body slashing and
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 313

clubbing—what Collins calls ferocious warfare. This was followed by a

comparatively short period from the eighteenth century onward in which
most killing has been at a distance, often by unseen enemies. This is emo-
tionless, callous warfare, since the killer is not present at the death, and so
he can kill dispassionately. In World War II over 95 percent of British
military casualties were inflicted from a distance, and 85 percent of fatali-
ties came from aerial bombing, artillery shells, mortars and grenades,
antitank shells, and bullets.1 Of course, archers inflicted bodily damage
from a distance throughout history, as did sling and javelin throwers over
a few meters away. An interim period lay between the two eras, in which
arquebus and musket were fired over short distances against an enemy
seen but only rarely confronted bodily. Naval warfare does not fit so
neatly into such a periodization, and airplanes did not appear until the
twentieth century. Also modern infantries, though firing over distances,
do not usually do so coldly. They are themselves simultaneously threat-
ened from a distance. This involves a distinctive terror caused by the
seeming randomness of death.
The first phase in a campaign is recruitment. In modern wars we
know that the prospect of death seems abstract and distant to new re-
cruits. Recruits think more often of the guaranteed pay, food, and cloth-
ing, inducements laced with some degree of pride and status (especially,
they think, in the eyes of women) in fighting for one’s country, and a de-
sire for adventure influenced by the manly heroism depicted in stories.
The notion of adventure includes fighting but not one’s own death.
None of this prepares them for the terror of battle.
So after recruitment must follow a second phase of drilling and dis-
ciplining intended to prepare the soldier to cope with battle by convert-
ing him into an automaton, subordinating himself without question to
officers’ commands, sublimating his sense of self into a collective identity
with comrades or a regiment, felt most directly through the “muscular
bonding” that I noted in chapter 8 was a consequence of drilling. Subor-
dination and coercion are the heart of military power; the simplest an-
swer to the question “Why do men fight?” is that once recruited, they
are coerced to do so, sometimes rather brutally. The Duke of Wellington
marveled at the power of drilling in 1813 when describing his own sol-
diers: “The very scum of the earth. People talk of their enlisting from
their fine military feeling—all stuff—no such thing. Some of our men
enlist from having got bastard children—some for minor offences—
many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought
314 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

together, and it really is wonderful that we should have made them the
fine fellows they are.”2
Finally, the soldier enters into the third phase, battle—skirmishes,
ambushes, guerilla attacks, and set-piece battles, all generating different
kinds of fear.

The Long History of Ferocious Warfare

From early history until well into the nineteenth century, restricted
literacy means our evidence does not come from rank-and-file soldiers.
The armies of Greece, Rome, Byzantium, imperial China, Islamic king-
doms, ancient Israel, and the Incan and Aztec empires have left records
that suggest that warrior ideals dominated armies, but we lack the view of
the soldiers themselves.3 The Roman Republic is our best-sourced early
case. There we rarely read of resistance to the draft. Its legions were usu-
ally successful, which helped commitment, as we saw in chapter 4. The
Roman military writer Vegetius said, “Few men are born brave, many be-
come so through training and force of discipline,” and extensive drilling
enabled Roman armies to show battle-winning maneuverability. Re-
peated success gave them confidence, partly overcoming their fear of
death. Their discipline must have also intimidated the enemy. They were
not perfectly tuned warriors, however. Sometimes, as in all armies, amid
the confusion of battle they would panic and run, while harsh campaign
conditions, brutal discipline, and fear led to much desertion.4 There were
many defeats—but usually on the road to ultimate victory. Aislinn Mel-
chior poses the question whether Roman soldiers suffered from some-
thing like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Of course, she lacks the
evidence to answer, but she identifies the three main triggers of PTSD
today as witnessing horrific events, being in mortal danger, and killing at
close quarters. The legionaries routinely experienced all three. Yet Ro-
mans were also habituated to the sight of death. Half their children died
very young, criminals were executed in public, sometimes torn apart by
wild animals in arenas for sport, and disobedient soldiers might be
flogged or stoned to death, sometimes by their comrades. Such inure-
ment might make them stoic, less likely to suffer from psychological
maladies, Melchior suggests.5 But no psychological problems would have
been recognized by the Roman authorities.
There were material incentives for armies. They were paid. They
could ransom rich prisoners, plunder from the dead and wounded, and
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 315

plunder and rape in cities they had stormed. Soldiers would carry in their
pockets whatever coins or jewels they needed to finance themselves dur-
ing a campaign because this was the least likely place to get robbed. But
after death or when wounded, helpless on the ground, they were easy
pickings. From Rome to Gettysburg, soldiers stripped the bodies of
fallen foes and in Ukraine they still do so. Rome and China expropriated
farms from the defeated and gave them to veterans. In Europe when
looting and ransoming died out, “prize money,” pensions, or public em-
ployment could be allocated to veterans. These were common in China,
too. Soldiers also fought for social status. Roman soldiers were given
dona, medals for bravery, prized badges of honor: they are boasted of on
tombstones. Roman auxiliaries were granted some of the privileges of
citizenship. Upper-class warriors might receive land or offices or better
marriage prospects. War was an avenue of upward social mobility for
younger sons, and the risk of death came only occasionally. The domi-
nant experience was boredom, since nothing happened most of the time.
That is why battles are so suddenly shocking and disorienting.
The culture of most historic societies viewed interpersonal violence
as normal. It demonstrated manhood, which men wish to demonstrate,
or cowardice, which they wish to avoid. War was the intensification of
brawling, as war today is not. Soldiers had disincentives in the form of
flogging or execution if they ran away. Yet peasants obeyed their lords in
war as in peacetime; their villages had to fulfill quotas of conscripts; and
even in modern societies orders are obeyed because the lower classes are
used to obeying.
After recruitment, the second phase was drill and discipline—though
not, of course, for guerillas whose looser style of warfare has been an
intermittent presence through human history. At the other extreme,
Roman soldiers underwent intensive drilling in rhythmic movement, al-
ways taught to remain tight with the men on either side of them for mu-
tual protection. Theirs was muscular-bonded ferocity. They described
the Gauls and the Germans as fighting in a mass, but each man fighting
as an individual, with more spontaneous ferocity than Romans. Alcohol
and other drugs were handed out in many armies and navies to still fear
and instill confidence.
And so they went into battle, usually fought over a small area for not
more than a day. Infantry advanced wielding sling, spear, javelin, axe, or
sword, cavalry on horseback. Both may have had bad feelings in stomach
or bowels, but it was only within range of enemy archers, against whom
316 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

they were unable yet to defend themselves, did fear of death dominate.
Untrained men (and women) would have mostly turned and fled at this
point, but in the rhythm of battle, this was when disciplined soldiers
quickened their pace, physically trapped within their military formation,
shouting, grimly hunching shoulders, advancing under the partial pro-
tection of shields. Those advancing were full of hatred and tension,
wanting very much to kill the source of their fear.
When soldiers reached the enemy, the motivation of “kill or be killed”
took over for those in the opposed front lines. If a soldier hesitated for a
moment, the enemy probably would not, and so death or maiming would
come. There is no time for complex emotions—just get your blow in first!
Thrust into, don’t slash across, the Roman drill sergeants urged. Archers
fired from a distance, sling and javelin throwers from close by, but all
needed protection. Mounted archers were fearsome, for they could wheel
out of range after firing. But most infantry were not engaging the enemy
at any one point in time. John Keegan imagined the battle of Agincourt in
1415. Most soldiers were lined up in ranks behind the men in the front
line. In an advance they would just be pushing those in front forward, in
defense they would be stationary, engaging the enemy only if the front
rank began to sustain casualties or became exhausted and faltered. Then
the next rank had to move forward and strike.6
In this type of fighting, dominant through history, battle was an ag-
gregate of individual or small group combats, men welded together by
being physically trapped as a mass, not only by the enemy in front, but
also by their comrades behind and on each side. They were trapped into
fighting by the coercion of army organization and the ecological envi-
ronment of the battlefield. The trap was tightest in the Greek phalanx,
somewhat less so in the Roman legion, and much less so among barbar-
ians and in medieval battles. Cavalrymen were free until they charged.
Then they too became trapped by their momentum toward hand-to-
hand fighting. If they faced a solid line of enemy, their horses might re-
fuse to charge into it, and cavalrymen often then dismounted to fight like
infantrymen. Their advantage in mobility was used mainly to arrive
quickly at the chosen point of attack or to assault open or dispersed
enemy formations.
Only as victory or defeat seemed to loom did some freedom of
movement come to the surviving infantry. If soldiers saw their comrades
being felled and felt themselves being pushed back, or especially when
they were pushed sideways by an unexpected flanking movement, fear
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 317

mounted and might overcome training and discipline. Fear paralyzed

military action, as many soldiers became incapable of fighting with or
shooting at the enemy. Colonel Charles Ardant du Picq in the 1860s rec-
ommended how to combat fear: “Man has a horror of death. . . . Disci-
pline is for the purpose of dominating that horror by a still greater
horror, that of punishment or disgrace.” But he added, “Self-esteem is
unquestionably one of the most powerful motives which moves our men.
They do not wish to pass for cowards in the eyes of their comrades.” He
noted that it was paradoxically those in the rear ranks, the least threat-
ened, who panicked first under this pressure simply because they could
turn and run, whereas the front lines were trapped front and back by the
enemy and their comrades.7 If flight became contagious, the army degen-
erated from being a coherent body of men to a “crowd,” “a human as-
sembly animated,” says Keegan, “not by discipline but by mood, by the
play of inconstant and potentially infectious emotion, which, if it spreads,
is fatal to an army’s subordination.”8
These were the common features of well-organized enemies through-
out history. Yet all battles had peculiarities. At Agincourt the English army
was mainly archers, protected by concealed sharpened stakes dug into the
ground. The French had not reconnoitered these, and the charging
French cavalrymen were surprised, their horses terrified, many of them
throwing off their riders. The English archers and men-at-arms then
rushed forward with knives and axes to capture (for ransom) or kill and
strip the wounded or unhorsed knights and men-at-arms pinned down by
their armor or horses. French archers and reserve cavalry at Agincourt,
witnessing the collapse of this first charge, had a choice. They hesitated
and then fled. The English victors surged forward in what Collins calls a
“forward panic.”9 The French had lost their order and, engulfed by panic,
were easy targets. The pursuing English had neither fear of the enemy
nor loathing of battle to hold them back. A rush of adrenaline induced a
killing spree as, released from their own fears, they struck or shot arrows
at the backs of the fleeing enemy. By far the greatest volume of killing oc-
curred in flight, as we look from Muye, China, in 1046 bce to Cannae,
Italy, in 216 bce, to Agincourt, France, in 1415 ce.
In battles fear may have been ever-present, but it was managed by
the need for violent self-defense and the physical constraint of the battle-
field, until the prospect of defeat induced demoralization. Repugnance at
killing in battle was unlikely. Slaughter of old men, women, children, and
prisoners did evoke disapproval, but it happened. In siege warfare moral
318 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

qualms were usually suppressed if city leaders had refused an offer to ne-
gotiate or surrender. This made the city population vulnerable to massa-
cre after the city was stormed, according to the norms of warfare. The
larger the casualties suffered by the besiegers, the angrier and more piti-
less they were when they stormed into the city. Their commanders knew
that loot and rape were rewards their soldiers expected, and they turned
a blind eye to atrocities. The Jewish historian Josephus describes Roman
soldiers sacking Jerusalem in 73 ce:

When they went in numbers into the lanes of the city, with their
swords drawn, they slew those whom they overtook, without
mercy, and set fire to the houses whither the Jews were fled, and
burnt every soul in them, and laid waste a great many of the rest;
and when they were come to the houses to plunder them, they
found in them entire families of dead men, and the upper rooms
full of dead corpses, that is of such as died by the famine; they
then stood in a horror at this sight, and went out without touch-
ing anything. But although they had this commiseration for such
as were destroyed in that manner, yet had they not the same for
those that were still alive, but they ran through every one whom
they met with, and obstructed the very lanes with their dead
bodies, and made the whole city run down with blood, to such a
degree indeed that the fire of many of the houses was quenched
with these men’s blood.10

The sacking of cities brought death and horror to civilians as well as

soldiers.
Not much more than this can be deduced without testimony from
the soldiers. But we can probably assume that moral qualms were rare,
while fear was uneven, exploding in routs.

The Early Modern Period in Europe

Clausewitz in On War dealt with wars in continental Europe from about
1740 to 1830, focusing on the transition from what he called ancien ré-
gime warfare conducted by kings and military aristocracies to the revolu-
tionary warfare introduced by the French and Napoleon. As a
long-serving Prussian soldier, from cadet to general, he had personal ex-
perience of wars in this period. The transition began with the levée en
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 319

masse of 1792, when the revolutionaries raised a mass volunteer force to

defend France against invading aristocratic forces. Their defense suc-
ceeded, and it introduced the notion of “the nation in arms,” which led
to Napoleon’s enormous citizen armies, which he deployed in much
looser formations, able to act on their own initiative, as ideological fervor
supplanted much drilling. This forced other regimes to respond with
their own quasi-citizen forces, while Spanish peasants reacted with gue-
rilla nationalism. As Clausewitz noted, the tendency was toward whole
nations and entire states mobilizing for war. Patriotic more than aristo-
cratic honor now drove war forward.
Nineteenth-century technological development made weapons much
more lethal. Organized combat centered on lines and columns of soldiers,
overseen by junior officers leading them onward. Drilling was reinforced
by a deployment trapping them on the battlefield. The famous squares
deployed by Wellington at Waterloo consisted of a hollow square or rect-
angle, each side composed of two or more ranks of infantry. The colors
and officers were positioned in the center, alongside reserves who could
reinforce any weakening side of the square. The wounded could retreat
inside the square without disorganizing the ranks. An enemy attack on
the square then trapped the soldiers into fighting rather than running
away. It was very effective against cavalry and infantry, but its density
made it vulnerable to cannon fire.
Rulers no longer fought. The last English and Prussian kings to
command on the battlefield did so in the mid-eighteenth century, but
they stayed out of range of enemy guns, as did the two Napoleons, the
only nineteenth-century heads of state in the field. Modern heads of
state have been desk killers, ordering the deaths of far-off soldiers, in-
cluding their own. Junior officers and NCOs have been in the thick of
the action, setting an example. Wavering would be conspicuous and in-
vite demotion and the charge of cowardice. Many have feared that label
more than death.
In this period most soldiers were firing muskets. Bayonet charges
brought some hand-to-hand fighting, though this inflicted far fewer deaths
than guns. The biggest killers were artillery batteries, whose barrages could
last for hours. Tolstoy, who had personally experienced battle, gives us a
terrifying portrait in War and Peace of an artillery barrage at the battle of
Borodino suffered by a Russian infantry regiment waiting for orders to
move that never come. The soldiers are stationary in a field, under French
cannon fire, and death comes from the air, intermittently, randomly, and
320 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

suddenly. The regiment loses over one-third of its men, killed or wounded,
without being able to fire a shot back. Enforced passivity under fire induces
not only terror at the randomness of death but also a petrified sense of loss
of personal control. The regimental commander, Prince Andrei, with
whom we have identified through the novel so far, sets an example by re-
maining standing. He sees a shell drop with little noise two paces away.
“Lie down!” cries his adjutant, throwing himself flat on the ground. Andrei
hesitates. “Can this be death?” he thinks. “I cannot, I do not wish to die. I
love life—I love this grass, this earth, this air . . . ” His thoughts are inter-
rupted by the explosion, a whistle of splinters as from a breaking window
frame, and a suffocating smell of powder. It flings him into the air and he
lands in a pool of his own blood.11
This is fiction of course, although a brilliant, imaginative reconstruc-
tion. Andrei’s wounds prove fatal, and we lose our hero. But what was he
or his men to do? They were too well trained or cowed by coercion to
flee, but they were also trapped within the battlefield, unable to fight
back. Where could they safely flee? They were in the middle of a very
large army. Cossacks patrolled the rear, killing deserters. Bodies contin-
ued to fall, fear persisted, but they did not run. They lay silently on the
ground, pretending to ignore the carnage around them. What could be
more terrifying than this unpredictable threat to life? Desertion usually
occurred between battles, when men could slip off or lag behind unno-
ticed. Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud suggested that for every French
Napoleonic army of 100,000 men, there were 25,000 skulkers trailing in
the rear, dropping away.12 He exaggerated for effect.

The American Civil War

The first war of the industrial age produced more casualties than all
America’s other wars combined. But 90 percent of Union soldiers and
80 percent of Confederates were literate, and many of them wrote let-
ters, diaries, and memoirs. Since there was then no military censorship,
we have a mountain of written evidence from the soldiers, mined by
Gerald Linderman, Earl Hess, James McPherson, Chandra Manning,
Michael Adams, and Jonathan Steplyk.13 For the first time we get good
information on the battle experience of soldiers, and this is why I have
included this single war in a book about sequences of wars.
This was a society experiencing immigration and territorial expan-
sion amid differences between two regional ways of life. The North and
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 321

Midwest hosted industrial capitalism, mining, and commercial farming,

all using free wage labor. The South, whose population was also expand-
ing westward, was dominated by agrarian plantations cultivating tobacco,
cotton, sugar, indigo, and rice, using mainly slave labor. The cotton
gin had made slavery very profitable, and a rich plantation-based slave-
owning upper class dominated the South. Even though fewer than one-
third of southern white households possessed slaves, almost all whites
depended on the slaveholders for wages, produce, and credit. The legiti-
macy of slavery was barely disputed, which was not so in the North,
where slaves were rare.
The two zones had complementary, not rival, economies. Labor was
the only economic issue at stake: slavery versus free labor, but as ex-
pressed also in terms of ideological and political power. Southerners saw
their civilization as different from that of the North, and South and
North interpreted in opposed ways their two sacred scripts, the Bible
and the Constitution. But war was precipitated by politics in the new
western states. The question was not merely whether each would allow
slavery. The issue also affected the balance of power in the House and es-
pecially in the Senate. If new states embraced free labor, a Senate major-
ity might in the future interfere with, and even abolish, slavery in the
South. Since there was more migration westward from the North than
from the South, Southerners felt the pressure of growing abolitionism.
As a minority in much of the South, many whites feared emancipation
might bring race war and their own annihilation.
It was difficult to solve this clash of politicized ideologies. Most
Southerners regarded expansion on northern terms as an existential
threat; most Northerners would yield nothing in preserving the Union.
Attempts at compromise faltered, and the alternative for the South was
secession, which was easy enough to declare. In November 1860 the Re-
publican candidate Abraham Lincoln, known to favor abolition, won the
presidency without even being on the ballot in ten southern states. This
degree of polarization between North and South, the North being politi-
cally dominant, seemed ominous for the South, and it was the touch-
stone for South Carolinian radicals to declare secession the next month.
Yet neither Lincoln nor the Republican Party had proposed abolition,
half the Republican Party opposed drastic action, and the Democrats, if
they could resolve their factional disputes, still had enough power in the
Senate to obstruct any such attempt. Nothing much would have hap-
pened quickly. Was secession necessary at this point? Was it not better
322 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

for the South to wait for emancipation proposals to be put on the table
so that it could claim to be the victim of northern aggression, instead of
being the aggressor?
The United States was only in patches a militaristic society. West-
ward expansion had required a small army used mercilessly against
Native Americans and Mexicans. Its units were stationed in small forts
around the country. One was Fort Sumter, commanding Charleston
Harbor in South Carolina. It was a tiny Union garrison in secessionist
surrounds, and South Carolina’s governor demanded its capitulation.
Neither side would yield, yet neither wanted to fire the first shot and
be blamed for a war that might follow. Eventually the governor gave
the order to fire, and an artillery duel ensued. Its supplies running low,
the garrison surrendered. The only loss of life had been accidental,
but the damage had been done. Six more states seceded. Four others
came later. Neither side doubted that war would come or that it would
win it. It was expected to be short, especially by Southerners who domi-
nated the army’s officer corps and were convinced of their superior mar-
tial spirit. Overconfidence ruled. Large volunteer armies were quickly
mobilized, composed overwhelmingly of men who had never fought be-
fore: lambs to the slaughter.
Why did the soldiers fight? Initially, they were volunteers, and Hess
and McPherson, analyzing their letters and memoirs, say that most en-
dorsed the declared casus belli of their side. McPherson finds two main
motives for enlistment: a sense of adventure and a patriotic ideology.
This included commitment to duty and honor as part of the rite of pas-
sage to manhood. He says that duty backed by conscience was more im-
portant among the Union troops, whereas honor backed by public
reputation dominated among Confederates. Both sides believed they up-
held the ideals of the American Revolution. Confederates fought for in-
dependence from tyrannical, centralized government; Unionists fought
for the liberties of the Constitution. Few Confederates mentioned the
defense of slavery (only one-third of Confederate soldiers’ families had
any slaves), but during the war more Union soldiers came to extend the
concept of freedom to the abolition of slavery. This was a war between
transcendent ideologies deriving from the key American contradiction, a
country of white male democracy and mass slavery.
This contradiction had been visible for decades as each new territory
and state was added to the Union. Rarely would soldiers be so well-
informed but so ideologically polarized. Linderman, whose sample was
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 323

mainly officers, observes: “Manliness, godliness, duty, honor, and knightli-

ness constituted in varying degrees the values that Union and Confeder-
ate volunteers were determined to express through their actions on the
battlefield. But each, as an impulse to war, remained subordinate to cour-
age,” which was “heroic action undertaken without fear,” virtuous, favored
by a just God, so that “the brave would live and the cowardly would die.”14
Religion conferred legitimacy on both sides. Some thought that a “good
death” would be rewarded with eternal life. One man wrote that death
was just “the destruction of a gross, material body. . . . A soldier’s death is
not a fate to be avoided, but rather almost to be gloried in.” Another saw
“something solemn, mysterious, sublime at the thought of entering into
eternity.”15 Linderman agrees that deep conviction characterized the vol-
unteers of 1861–62, but then the war brought disillusionment. Courage
was then often described as “futile.” Manning emphasizes slavery: “The
problem, as soldiers on both sides saw it, was that . . . the opposing side
threatened self-government. It threatened liberty and equality. It threat-
ened the virtue necessary to sustain a republic. It threatened the proper
balance between God, government, society, the family, and the individual.
And no matter which side of the divide a Civil War soldier stood on, he
knew that the heart of the threat, and the reason that the war came, was
the other side’s stance on slavery. From first to last, slavery defined the
soldiers’ war among both Union and Confederate troops.” “Shared belief
in the dangers of abolition powerfully united Confederate soldiers and
motivated them to fight, even when they shared little else.”16
Economic motives, she says, were subordinated to the need to main-
tain southern ideologies of race and sex that upheld the privileges of
white men and their obligations toward their families. The racially level-
ing Republicans would destroy slavery, thereby threatening their fami-
lies’ safety. Even as their discontents with the Confederate government
mounted and defeat loomed, they fought on, believing defeat might lead
to a race war. Manning says Union soldiers championed the end of slav-
ery a year ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, be-
fore most civilians or politicians. They had been stirred by welcoming
slaves in Confederate areas and by black comrades fighting bravely. Al-
most 80 percent of them voted for Lincoln in the 1864 election. Being
antislavery did not mean that white Union soldiers favored racial equal-
ity. But common soldiers believed in the casus belli proclaimed by their
rulers. Thus, the soldiers, though inexperienced and poorly trained, had
high morale and fought determinedly.
324 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

Yet two influential soldier-scholars have claimed that many or even

most American soldiers have not been able to fire their weapons because
of moral qualms. I discuss U.S. Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall’s
widely cited study of American World War II infantry soldiers in the next
chapter.17 But U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, much influenced
by Marshall, focuses on this war.18 He says most Civil War soldiers could
not bring themselves to fire at the enemy out of moral qualms over kill-
ing. This is surprising given the ideological fervor we have just glimpsed.
The first proof he offers is that war casualties were relatively few despite
infantry firing at quite short range at each other. But this had been nor-
mal in musket battles for two centuries. Muskets were not very accurate,
and few of these soldiers had been properly trained in firing them, and
that typically resulted in firing too high. Grossman suggests this was be-
cause of repugnance at killing, but he produces no direct evidence of this.
Instead, he relies on a curious piece of indirect evidence: a brief descrip-
tion of abandoned muskets found on the field of Gettysburg after the
battle of July 1863, as described by a Major Laidley of the Union Ord-
nance Department. I quote Major Laidley in full:

The examination of the muskets, picked up on the battlefield of

Gettysburg, reveals a fact that few would be prepared to admit,
and speaks in terms which should not pass unheeded, as to the
inherent defects of the muzzle-loading system. Of the twenty-
seven thousand five hundred and seventy-four muskets collected
after the battle, it was found that twenty-four thousand were
loaded: twelve thousand contained each two loads, and six thou-
sand (over twenty per cent) were charged with from three to ten
loads each. One musket had in it twenty-three loads, each charge
being put down in regular order. Oftentimes the cartridge was
loaded without being first broken, and in many instances it was
inserted, the ball down first. What an exhibit of useless guns
does this present!—useless for that day’s work, and from causes
peculiar to the system of loading.19

Grossman says the soldiers’ overloaded muskets reveal nonfiring

because they found killing repugnant: man is not a natural killer, he says.
Malešević agrees: “Killing is, in fact, terribly difficult, messy, guilt-ridden,
and for most people, an abhorrent activity,” although he hedges his bets,
observing that some soldiers become “paralyzed by fear” alongside a “con-
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 325

scious inability to kill other human beings.”20 But Laidley does not men-
tion repugnance or moral qualms. He says nonfiring demonstrates the
failings of muzzle-loading muskets compounded by drilling deficiencies of
soldiers—“causes peculiar to the system of loading,” says Laidley. The
main cause of nonfiring was soldiers’ failure to properly load the trio of
powder, bullet, and wadding. Gordon Rottman adds percussion cap prob-
lems.21 The drill manual for the smoothbore musket listed seventeen dis-
tinct physical movements for each round fired, quite complicated for
nonprofessional soldiers. Given the noise, the dense smoke coming from
the black powder used, and the chaos of the battle, as well as soldiers’ ten-
sion and fear, these men might have omitted any step. The fear and tension
of battle bring rushes of adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone. The
heart rate accelerates. All this brings distortion of vision and shaking of
the hands. Soldiers fire wildly and find it difficult to reload. Emotions have
physiological consequences. If a soldier botched his first or second shot, he
might discard the weapon and pick up another from a fallen comrade. If he
did not notice, he might load a third. If and when he did notice, he might
still be deterred from cleaning the charges out of the barrel, for this proce-
dure required a corkscrew-shaped bullet extractor attached to his ramrod.
This operation was time-consuming, and the soldier in battle felt disarmed
and helpless while thus engaged. Adams says that “at least 18,000 men, in a
highly distracted mental state, loaded and over-loaded their weapons,
oblivious of never having fired them.”22 Probably some were pretending to
fire, as Grossman suggests, but there is no evidence the cause was moral
qualms. Anyway, why would they not fire deliberately high rather than not
fire at all, which would catch the attention of their comrades?
Paddy Griffith thinks the muskets had been discarded as faulty, often
because of bad handling.23 They amounted to 9 percent of all muskets
used at Gettysburg, normal for misfiring muskets in Civil War battles.
The soldiers had never been trained in live firing, to economize on am-
munition and to avoid alarming nearby regiments by creating the appar-
ent sounds of battle. When battle started, smoke enveloped the men,
who could not clearly see the enemy.24 Soldiers recounted in letters and
diaries shooting blindly in the general direction of the enemy, hence the
low casualty rate and the high ratio of shots fired to casualties. Since they
could not see if their shots hit anyone, they could not correct their aim.
High ratios of shots to casualties had also characterized the Napoleonic
Wars.25 Later, deadlier weapons paradoxically increased the ratio of shots
to kills.
326 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

The soldiers were told to fire only when well under a hundred me-
ters from the enemy. Some officers preferred thirty meters. On average
soldiers began firing at 116 meters, as they came under artillery fire.26 If
they obeyed orders, many would die without having fired. It is intolera-
ble to soldiers to be inactive when under fire. They fire in order to re-
lieve this and so the enemy does, too. Griffith says that as firing drills
broke down, lines became ragged, and soldiers were out of control,
blazing away into the fog, usually too high, until their ammunition was
exhausted.27 Experienced forces, like Wellington’s British squares at Wa-
terloo, might wait for the order to fire, but some rawer Belgian and Ger-
man regiments had not, nor did most Civil War soldiers. The
commanders had never marshaled large armies and so did it badly. They
ignored the “mixed order” possibilities of column and line attack of the
Napoleonic Wars in favor of simpler long lines. This made shock action
impossible and lateral coordination difficult, as officers struggled to keep
their sprawling battle lines from disintegrating if they attempted maneu-
vers. They believed attack was superior to defense, but the reverse
proved true. These two errors brought carnage.28 Neither side was well-
drilled or well-coordinated, but Union forces were twice as numerous
and better supplied—so they won.
In 1868 Colonel Ardant du Picq distributed a questionnaire to
French officers, asking about the conduct of their soldiers in recent bat-
tles. He was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, before he could write a
report of his survey. A book collecting his manuscripts was published
posthumously in 1880 and is now a classic of military theory. The appen-
dix presenting his questionnaire survey is widely cited by scholars but
contains only seven cases. Presumably other responses have been lost.
Two officers complained of wild overfiring in the air, and two com-
plained of skulkers in the rear, but none complained of nonfiring.29 All
soldiers experienced fear, said Ardant du Picq. The army that mastered it
longer would win, while the one for whom normal fear turned into ter-
ror would lose. As a regiment advanced and came under fire, the choices,
he said, were not dictated by instrumental reason. Instead, there were
two highly adrenalized reactions, “charge” or “flee.” One of the seven of-
ficers who responded to his survey describes a single chasseur rescuing his
regiment by shouting, “Charge,” and rushing madly forward. His charge
was contagious to his comrades. He also comments: “Modern weapons
have a terrible effect and are almost unbearable by the nervous system.
Who can say that he has not been frightened in battle? Discipline in
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 327

battle becomes the more necessary as the ranks become more open, and
the material cohesion of the ranks not giving confidence, it must spring
from a knowledge of comrades, and a trust in officers, who must always
be present and seen. What man to-day advances with the confidence that
rigid discipline and pride in himself gave the Roman soldier?”30 He says
overfiring had occurred ever since muskets and rifles had first appeared;
it was produced by the soldier’s anxiety to relieve his fear by firing when
under artillery fire or before the enemy infantry fired at him. He cites
Cromwell’s famous order—“Put your trust in God and aim at their shoe
laces!”—to avoid firing too high.31
So at Gettysburg incompetence and fear were more important in
producing mischarged muskets than moral qualms. Almost all soldiers
fought roughly as they were ordered to. The fighting was often severe,
there were no mass flights or desertions during the battle, and the final
retreat of the Confederate Army was orderly. Even when final Confeder-
ate defeat loomed in the war, there was little surrendering until Lee
signed the articles of surrender.
The Union and Confederate armies recruited 3 million soldiers, as
well as many black slave laborers for Confederate forces. Between 620,000
and 750,000 died, more Southerners than Northerners. In the three days
at Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee lost 28,000 men, 40 percent of his force,
whereas Union forces lost 23,000, or 25 percent. The disproportion was
the result of Confederates’ attacking entrenched Union positions on the
crest of low hills. Casualties were as high among the upper ranks, closely
accompanying their troops. Lee lost one-third of his generals in the bat­
tle. The ratio of shots fired to casualties was about 180:1 in the Union
Army. Confederate figures were probably just as high. Attrition rates in
battle as well as desertions in camp and on the march forced the addition
of raw, untrained troops, and in early 1863 the militaries introduced con-
scripts and “bounty jumpers” (paid substitutes for conscripted men), who
were less ideologically committed. The soldiers were recruited by the in­
dividual states. The monuments encircling the battlefield of Gettysburg
all commemorate the exploits of state regiments, Union or Confederate,
and generals had to tolerate autonomous action from them. Ardant du
Picq commented patronizingly on these amateurs: “The Americans have
shown us what happens in modern battle to large armies without cohe­
sion. With them the lack of discipline and organization has had the inevi-
table result. Battle has been between hidden skirmishers, at long
distance, and has lasted for days, until some faulty movement, perhaps a
328 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

moral exhaustion, has caused one or the other of the opposing forces to
give way.”32
Griffith shares his low view.33 Hastily recruited volunteers and con-
scripts lacked military experience. The stereotype was that Confederate
recruits were farm boys and Union recruits bank clerks. Only a few from
the western frontier were likely to have fired a gun. The recruits were
drilled for a month and then thrown into battle.
How did they respond? McPherson discusses Marshall and moral
qualms.34 The Sixth Commandment, handed down by God to Moses,
bothered many, he says. Hess concurs and says soldiers tried to avoid
hand-to-hand encounters and aimed fire at groups, not individuals.35
Neither suggests that this translated into nonfiring, which was not men-
tioned in any letters or diaries. McPherson says overfiring was a much
bigger problem. It was common for soldiers to say they found killing ob-
noxious the first time. They might hesitate a moment, but then they
shot. There was less of a problem the second time, and none the third
time. In face-to-face encounters there might be a momentary pause, but
then they fired. At very close quarters they stabbed fast with their bayo-
nets, since to pause might be fatal. Soldiers fired because they found rea-
sons to ignore the commandment, most commonly self-defense. This
drove out feelings of immorality. One Confederate said that when he saw
the pale face of the Union soldier he had just killed, “I felt strange but
cannot say that I am sorry any. When I know he would have killed me if
he could.” Another commented that despite the scriptures, “My nerve
seemed to be as steady as if I was shooting at a beast.”
A few confessed enjoying it: “I never thought I would like to shoot at
a man,” wrote one Union soldier, “but I do like to shoot a secesh” (seces-
sionist). A Confederate artilleryman wrote, “I feel a perfect delight when
I see my shell crash among them.” A new recruit wrote, “I am heart &
soul in the war & its success,” and so would be “duty bound” to kill if
“such a Cup is however presented to me.” McPherson says both sides be-
lieved God wanted them to kill a godless enemy. A Union soldier wrote
that in one battle he must have fired two hundred rounds: “I was up and
firing almost incessantly until the enemy was repulsed. . . . Thank God,
that in his strength we drove back the enemy. . . . To God our blessed Fa-
ther in Heaven be all the glory.” Sharpshooters who aimed at inactive
soldiers, however, were disliked in both armies.36
Naturally, men writing diaries and memoirs rarely admit to skulking.
One man admitted to having lain low in a wood through a battle, while a
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 329

few refused promotion into more dangerous posts. Far more complained
of other cowards. One man wrote that on battle day “the usual number
of cowards got sick and asked to be excused.” Another names nine cow-
ards in his regiment. A Union private watched his colonel rubbing gun-
powder on his face to appear combat blackened: “Instantly he was
transformed from a trembling coward who lurked behind a tree into an
exhausted brave taking a well-earned repose.” No one suggested that
skulkers might have moral objections to the war—they acted from fear.37
But the term skulking was used broadly. Some described rear soldiers
thus, partly from envy, as have frontline soldiers in most wars. This
would not be fair to the staff of quartermasters, hospitals, prisons, re-
cruitment offices, or those supporting the General Staff and all the other
necessary functions in the rear. These men may have breathed a sigh of
relief when allocated to the rear, but their courage or cowardice was not
tested. Volunteers also despised conscripts, especially bounty jumpers,
and probably exaggerated their cowardice. Skulkers disappeared just be-
fore battle, lagged behind, lay low, persistently helped fallen comrades on
the ground, faked sickness, and so on. They may have totaled 10 percent
of the army, but that is just a guess.
The sense of adventure, a major reason for enlisting, rarely survived
the first shock of battle, which was more frightening than they had imag-
ined. Hess gives vivid soldier accounts of random death; bodies torn
apart by shells; blood, brains, and other body parts spattered over them;
streams and pools of blood; the horrors of the hospital; the burying of
mutilated bodies; the Minié ball’s grating sound when it hit bone, and
the heavy thud when it hit flesh. How did they manage to keep on fight-
ing? Hess stresses that a large majority of Union soldiers were working-
class men (poor farmers, laborers, and skilled workers) who came to view
war as just another job to be done. Often during battle, a soldier became
so involved with the tools and tasks of his trade—loading a musket, car-
rying out maneuvers—that he had no time to think about the horrors.
Moreover, after surviving his first battle, the soldier believed that his
chances of survival were good. And “it was a source of wonderment to
many men that so much lead could be expended to kill so comparatively
few soldiers.”38
McPherson adds more elevated reasons. Their sense of the cause,
honor, and duty endured, he says, enabling killing with little sense of im-
morality, and motivated half of them to reenlist once their three-year
term was up. Linderman is more skeptical about reenlistment, seeing the
330 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

offer of thirty days’ leave back home during the campaigning season as an
important sweetener—thirty days of heaven before three years of hell.39
Yet soldiers’ ideological commitment waned, becoming weary cynicism
and disillusion. Many felt they had been duped. Hess divides fifty-eight
Union soldiers’ postwar memoirs into four fairly equal groups. The first
stressed ideology and remained committed to preserving the Union. The
second he calls “lost soldiers,” who “could find no self-assurances of any
kind about the war,” disillusioned and embittered. The third group con-
sisted of “pragmatists,” who rejected the cause but viewed the war as a
personal process of self-discovery, and the fourth group were “silent wit-
nesses,” who “recalled comradeship, camp life, and other common experi-
ences, but repressed memories of battle.”40 This is a very mixed picture.
New recruits were enthusiastic but low in skills. The survivors im-
proved to peak efficiency in their third or fourth battle. Then enthusiasm
and energy began to fade. Such cycles were typical in modern wars. A
woman watching new Union recruits marching to war said they displayed
“boyish enthusiasm,” in contrast to the more experienced, who marched “in
a grim silence that was most oppressive.”41 Experienced soldiers knew the
dangers, kept their heads down, and did the minimum.42 Hess says that the
relentless pressure of war ensured that almost all would occasionally shirk
combat duties without being labeled a coward.43 Everyone needed a rest.
One man said 10 percent of Union soldiers were always brave, matched by
10 percent “arrant cowards,” while 80 percent lay between, functioning
“within the safe margins of acceptability.” Since morale was similar on both
sides, it did not much affect the outcome of the war. But the constant jump-
ing from calm to chaos brought rapid mood changes. Hess notes that many
soldiers distinguished between moral courage, the conscious desire to do
one’s duty and preserve one’s honor despite the dangers, and physical cour-
age, usually the product of adrenaline and the emotional and physiological
stimulation of combat.44 Battle remained gut-wrenching and gut-spilling.
Adams presents a horrific litany of actual deaths:

Corporal James Quick stumble[s] back as a bullet enters behind

his left jaw and exits through the nose. He is just twenty-two.
Next to him, Lieutenant William Taylor has been hit in the neck
by a bullet that missed the arteries but severed his windpipe. He
clasps his hands to his neck, trying to stanch the flow of blood
and air hissing through the wound. Private Keils runs past,
“breathing at his throat and the blood spattering” from a neck
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 331

wound. . . . We avoid Private George Walker because his right

arm is off, severing the artery, and blood “on certain movements
of the arm, gushed out higher than his head.” Blood spurts, too,
from a Federal officer shot behind the bridge of the nose; he
wanders about, continuing to blink even though both eyes are
gone, “opening and closing the sightless sockets, the blood leap-
ing out in spouts.45

These were not what defenders of wars call “good deaths,” but they were
probably typical of battles through the ages. McPherson quotes a Vir-
ginia private: “I have seen enough of the glory of war. . . . I am sick of
seeing dead men and men’s limbs torn from their bodies.” A sergeant
from Minnesota wrote: “I don’t know any individual soldier who is at all
anxious to be led, or driven, for that matter to another battle.” They were
volunteers, but their actions were no longer voluntary.
McPherson says that in the heat and fear of battle, many soldiers’
bodies pumped out a “super-adrenalized fury” that provided a “combat
narcosis” that “acts almost like a hallucinogenic drug,” generating an ex-
citement so strong that it overwhelmed thought of morality, fear, or cow-
ardice. We know now that a rush from the adrenal glands generates
sudden energy and strength, a racing pulse or pounding heart, and in-
creased respiration. This may induce soldiers to flight, which in the en-
trapment of battle was difficult, or to fury, which led men to charge
forward yelling. The diarists say this meant “behaving like wild men.”
“Our men became insane, howled and rushed forward.” An Indiana ser-
geant wrote to his fiancée, “A man can & will become so infuriated by the
din & dangers of a bloody fight, that if he ever did have a tender heart, it
will [be] turned to stone & his evry desire [be] for blood.” The “rebel
yell” became feared by Union soldiers. Adrenaline came only in short
bursts. But for technical jobs such as artillery teams, the mind was occu-
pied with the sequence of loading, firing, repositioning, reloading, and re-
firing, a process that relegated fear to the back burners. “My mind was
wholly absorbed,” one wrote.46
Fury was fueled by the desire to avenge the deaths of comrades, and so
atrocities resulted. A Union soldier wrote: “We captured about a hundred
prisoners and killed about thirty of them. It was fun for us to see them
Skip out.” Confederates shot black Union soldiers they captured, in addi-
tion to their white officers. Rapes were common. Union generals advanc-
ing in Confederate territory pursued scorched-earth tactics. Sherman
332 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

declared: “To secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi I would
slay millions. On that point I am not only insane, but mad.”47 War is “the
most dangerous of all excitements” said Lee, and he remarked, “It is well
that war is so terrible—otherwise we would grow too fond of it.” But once
combat or charging forward ended, the men collapsed in exhaustion, and
fear returned.
An incident during the Civil War, though not a part of it, however,
puts Civil War atrocities in perspective. On November 29, 1864, hun-
dreds of Arapaho and Cheyenne Native Americans were massacred at
Sand Creek, Colorado, by Union cavalry led by a Colonel John Chiving-
ton, who declared: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! . . . I
have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any
means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. . . . Kill and scalp all, big and
little; nits make lice.” The soldiers’ attack degenerated into frenzy. They
took scalps and other grisly trophies from the dead bodies, adorning
themselves with scalps, human fetuses, and male and female genitalia.
Two-thirds of the dead were women and children. Civil War battles
never sank so low. Yet two cavalry officers at Sand Creek were horrified.
Captain Silas Soule wrote to his mother: “I was present at a Massacre of
three hundred Indians mostly women and children. . . . It was a horrable
scene and I would not let my Company fire.” Lieutenant Joseph Cramer
also ordered his men not to shoot. In the Civil War soldiers could not
treat white men this cruelly.48
After Gettysburg more permanent combat exhaustion set in. Soldiers
were weakened, says McPherson, from “the marching, loss of sleep, poor
food or no food, bad water, lack of shelter, and exposure to extremes of
heat, and cold, dust and mud, and the torments of insects.” Contami-
nated water presented them with the dilemma of choosing death through
thirst or disease. “Malnutrition and diarrhea gravely impaired the effi-
ciency of armies, causing depression, lethargy, night blindness, muscular
debility, neuralgia, and susceptibility to major diseases. Finally, emaciated
men could not march or fight and died.”49 A Virginia captain confessed
to his wife: “This has broken me down completely. . . . [I am] in a state of
exhaustion. . . . I never saw the Brigade so completely broken down and
unfitted for service.” Occasionally a unit would not fight. A Massachu-
setts captain reported, “We, our brigade, have made fourteen charges
upon our enemy’s breastworks, although at last no amount of urging, no
heroic examples, no threats, or anything else, could get the line to stir one
peg.”50 This was neither reluctance to kill nor cowardice, since the sol-
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 333

diers knew that further charges would be pointless, and they were ex-
hausted. Ideology was now irrelevant—they would have gladly gone
home. Freer peoples, like Native Americans, would have gone home if
their battles were only half as threatening as this.
Some soldiers also had political discontents. They objected to con-
scription, seeing this as a “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight,” and
Confederates took a dim view of Lee’s decision to take the war north
into Union territory. Most Confederate soldiers thought they had signed
up to defend their own state. Mark Weitz says soldiers on both sides saw
enlistment as contractual.51 If they perceived the government as not liv-
ing up to its side of the contract, they deemed their departure justified.
Unswerving ideological commitment was over. The Gettysburg defeat
brought a crisis for the Confederacy, which had to grant amnesty to de-
serters to replenish the army’s depleted ranks. Short-term leaves were
also authorized by regimental officers if they deemed it necessary to pre-
vent longer-term departure.
McPherson rejects the argument that nineteenth-century Americans
were more violent or accepted death more easily than Americans today.
He also downplays training, discipline, and leadership in motivating sol-
diers to fight, declaring, “Civil War volunteer regiments were notoriously
deficient in the first, weak in the second, and initially shaky in the third.”
“American white males were the most individualistic, democratic people
on the face of the earth in 1861. They did not take kindly to authority,
discipline, obedience.”52 I view such American cultural tropes skeptically,
and the army responded by intensifying coercion. Cowards were occa-
sionally shot, but more often they were court-martialed and shamed. A
Union private wrote, “There are few cowards here and those that are, are
drummed Before the Regt on dress Parade.” A Confederate general
threatened “to blow the brains out of the first man who left ranks.” A
Confederate private wrote that his brigade had to watch a captured de-
serter, “a wretched creature,” getting thirty-nine lashes on his bare back, a
punishment that they knew was normally reserved for slaves.53
Yet the most common coercion came from comrades. As the first bat-
tle approached, so did fear, but it included fear of failing to be worthy of
manhood, a coward in full view of one’s comrades. It was followed by a
sense of relief and even joy when a soldier felt he had surmounted his fears
and shot boldly at the enemy. Fear of battle was undercut by fear of being
labeled a coward by one’s comrades and officers. Hess says Union soldiers
thought of the “line . . . all in touch, elbow to elbow.” “Men fight in
334 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

masses,” a Union officer explained. “To be brave they must be inspired by

the feeling of fellowship. Shoulder must touch shoulder.” Hess concludes,
“If it were possible to pinpoint one factor as most important in enabling
the soldier to endure battle, it would be the security of comradeship.”54
McPherson quotes a Union colonel writing of Shiloh: “Those who had
stood shoulder to shoulder during the two terrible days of that bloody bat-
tle were hooped with steel, with bands stronger than steel.”55 Bonded by
shared danger, they were “a band of brothers” whose mutual dependence
enabled them to maintain self-respect and function as a fighting unit. If
one man became petrified with fear, he endangered the survival of all and
drew contempt and ostracism, and he lost self-respect as a man.
Peer-group coercion was more effective than coercion by officers,
though soldiers stressed that officers who led from the front challenged
their men forward. But the reputation of a coward would follow the sol-
dier and his family even in peacetime, given the recruitment of units
from single localities. “Death before dishonor” was a constant refrain in
letters. An Ohio soldier wrote that he shook like a leaf before his first en-
gagement, but he resolved to “stand up to my duties like a man, let the
consequences be as they might. I had rather die like a brave man, than
have a coward’s ignominy cling around my name.” A New York veteran
of two years’ fighting responded to his sister: “You ask me if the thought
of death does not alarm me. I will say I do not wish to die . . . but have
too much honor to hold back while others are going forward. I myself
am as big a coward as any could be, but give me the ball [bullet] before
the coward when all my friends and companions are going forward.”
These were not the forces of intimate primary groups of the dispersed
battlefields of the twentieth century but pressures from larger groups in
one of the last wars to be fought in long, dense lines.56
Gettysburg was a large battlefield of over 11,000 acres. The Confed-
erate lines of attack stretched eight kilometers in a great arc over fields,
woods, low hills, and bluffs. A regiment fought in two or three lines, be-
hind which were reserves. Flight from battle was risky, since military
police in the rear shot deserters, while reserve units stiffening a disinte-
grating line gathered up stragglers and stemmed routs. But in camp and
on the march, surveillance was difficult and home not far away. By late
January 1863 there had been 185,000 desertions from the Union army—
who had not so much run as drifted away.57 There was “straggling”
on the march, “French leave” (returning home without permission for a
few days), and long-term desertion. Many Confederate soldiers lacked
 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War 335

adequate shoes, clothing, and food and could not keep up with the pun-
ishing schedule of marching that Lee’s strategy demanded. Others
responded to heartrending appeals from their families to return home.
Lee estimated that one-third of his force was absent at the Battle of
Antietam. Official estimates of desertion were 10 to 15 percent among
the Confederates and 9 to 12 percent among Union soldiers, but these
figures are considered too low. Very few deserters had moral qualms, far
more were driven by fear and discontent with the rigors of army life.
Given opportunity, many deserted. Given more opportunity, many more
would have.

Conclusion
Chaos and fear, not heroism or moral qualms, pervaded Civil War
armies. Ideologically, the Sixth Commandment was nullified by the belief
that this was a just, even a divinely sanctioned war. Ideological commit-
ment to a transcendent cause had been the most important reason for
volunteering, and it endured as a motive, though it weakened into a
sense of duty focused on dogged determination to get the job done.
Conscripts were less strongly committed. Almost all were disillusioned as
the war dragged on. That they fought on was due to coercion: army
discipline and punishment, moral coercion by one’s close comrades, and
the physical entrapment of the battlefield. A predilection for violence en-
couraged a few, but more were boosted by rushes of anger-fueled adrena-
line. The combination produced much bravery, pushing fear to the back
burners. Soldiers could kill relatively easily when being fired at, when or-
dered to do so by routinized, coercive authority, when under moral pres-
sure from comrades, or when committed to the cause. Their willingness
to kill, at considerable risk, was produced not by human nature but by
social pressures, social authority, and social and political ideologies.
Emotional exhaustion was the universal aftereffect among survivors. Yet
most soldiers on both sides were courageous in their grim determination
to keep on fighting and get the job done.
Was the war worth almost three-quarters of a million dead, more
wounded, and 3 million surviving soldiers experiencing intermittent terror—
without including abused civilians or the veterans who later suffered break-
downs? The war formally abolished slavery, and the consequent Thirteenth
to Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments made clearer the meaning of free-
dom, citizenship, and equality. But a better solution would have been two
336 From Ancient Times to the American Civil War

American countries. Secession would have spared almost a million lives, it

would have led to mass flight northward by slaves, and it would have spared
Washington from the enduring racist input of southern politicians. Even
better would have been decades-long political struggle in the House and
Senate over cumulative emancipation proposals. Not even a step on the road
to the liberty of African Americans was worth such a price in death, given the
southern reaction that was soon to undermine emancipation. Slavery would
have collapsed anyway near the end of the century, as soil erosion and boll-
weevil infestation destroyed the cotton industry and the profitability of slav-
ery. We have the advantage of hindsight, of course, but that enables us to say
that this was a tragedy, unhappily hard to avoid but made inevitable by the
overconfidence in war among rulers that we repeatedly find in the history
of war.
 chapter twelve
Fear and Loathing on the
Battlefield II
The World Wars

World War I
Infantry soldiers on the Western Front were almost all literate, and many
wrote diaries, letters, autobiographies, and novels. Unfortunately, their
letters were censored by army authorities, although we can add psychol-
ogists’ reports on morale. In 1914 professional armies were enlarged by
reservists and lightly trained volunteers, a product of initial enthusiasm
for the war. But from 1915 or 1916, ever-larger numbers were supplied
by conscription. An astonishing 90 percent of young French men and
53 percent of young British men were conscripted.1 Why did the volun-
teers sign up? Why did the conscripts not resist? There were four main
reasons.

1. Young men had imbibed a culture depicting war as an honor-

able and heroic duty of masculinity.2 In the books and comics
read by schoolboys, the heroes in combat with whom they
identified always survived, to be garlanded with glory. Beauti-
ful women swooned over them. There was a desire for adven-
ture and escape from the drudgery of mundane life. War was
not envisaged as bringing death. It did not do so to the heroes
in the adventure stories.
337
338 The World Wars

2. This was portrayed as a legitimate war of self-defense by the

warring governments, local notables, and mass media, and few
soldiers had alternative sources of information. The intensifi-
cation of national “cages” that I charted in volume 2 of
The Sources of Social Power meant that soldiers, whatever their
regional identities, had a “banal” sense of identity as British,
German, or French, believing that they shared distinct
national ways of life. The authorities had to convert this into
a patriotism prepared to defend what they defined as the
interests of the nation. This then escalated to the defense of
civilization against barbarism, helped by exaggerated stories
of enemy atrocities and later by the desire to avenge slaugh-
tered comrades. Such escalation was generally achieved de-
spite the reality that British people had little objective interest
in defending the global British Empire, while Germans had
little objective interest in Germany’s “place in the sun.” Still
less did British or French colonial troops have an objective in-
terest in fighting for their imperial masters (save for the pay).
It was different for Russians and French and others whose
homelands were invaded.
3. Volunteers signed on in local units, and their commitment was
to people they knew and to local notables to whom they de-
ferred. They were honored and sometimes financed by their
local community, while its women pressured them to “Be a
Man” and sign up. It was very easy to do and it brought
praise—it satisfied desire for the social and sexual status of a
warrior. Indeed, many women in Britain collaborated in this
by handing out white feathers, a symbol of cowardice, to men
who had not signed up.
4. Steady, guaranteed pay was a desired factor at first, because of
high unemployment, and it continued to be among the poor.

Hew Strachan suggests four ways in which soldiers were made to

continue fighting: through pressure from soldiers’ primary groups, from
ideological commitment and duty to a cause, from drilling and training,
and from punishment for those who deviated.3 I add three more mun-
dane factors: the battlefield as a trap, task absorption, and a claim of self-
defense. All seven had influence, applying to different extents in different
contexts.
 The World Wars 339

The soldiers were not initially afraid, for they expected to win
quickly, bolstered by their belief in the justice of the cause. Since they
were right, they “should” win, in the normal double sense of both moral
right and probability. But they had not been prepared for battle, which
was not remotely an adventure story. Death came raining down, but not
after heroic combat. Seventy percent of deaths came from artillery fired
from a distance, killing randomly, not aimed at anyone in particular. It
was almost insupportable to cower, unable to influence whether one
lived or died. A Bavarian lieutenant described battle as a witches’ Sab-
bath, blown by “a hurricane of fire,” “like a crushing machine, mechani-
cal, without feelings, snuffing out the last resistance, with a thousand
hammers. It is totally inappropriate to play such a game with fellow men.
We are all human beings made in the image of the Lord God. But what
account does the Devil take of mankind, or God, when he feels himself
to be Lord of the Elements; when chaos celebrates his omnipotence.”4
This soldier shared a sense of common humanity with the enemy, but
cosmic forces beyond his power or understanding, conveyed here
through Christian metaphors, obliterated this.
Most rulers believed the war would be short, the nineteenth-century
norm in Europe. The U.S. Civil War had been long and devastating, but
they put that down to the incompetence of the Americans. Field Marshal
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder had engineered the Prussian victory over
France in 1870. He spat out contemptuously and foolishly of the U.S.
Civil War that it was “armed mobs chasing each other round the country,
from which nothing can be learned.”5 In the recent Russo-Japanese War,
the combination of barbed wire and machine guns had produced high
casualties, but Japanese mass offensives had proved successful. European
General Staffs drew the lesson that offense would triumph over defense.
Yet marked technological improvement in weaponry during the Second
Industrial Revolution meant artillery batteries had become massive, rifles
were more lethal, and the machine gun could spray death around the
battle front. All could be mass-produced in existing factories.
When the war began, soldiers no longer stood up to fight. They dug
trenches protected by barbed wire to slow down attackers. Peering up
over the edge, they fired from a leaning, mostly concealed position. In
this war blazing away in the general direction of the enemy was done
from holes in the ground. Offense came with the order “Charge!” The
infantry ran bent over or crawled across no-man’s-land, exposing them-
selves to fire, especially from machine guns. They were aided by surging
340 The World Wars

adrenaline, whipped up by collective yelling, alcohol, the example of

junior officers, and a sergeant at the rear posted to shoot laggards. It was
suicidal. The accounts of British and German soldiers during the battle
of the Somme convey a sense of hell on earth as the bodies of friend and
foe were torn apart around them. Soldiers said that when they charged,
they were “out of their minds,” reverting to the “primitive man lurking
inside all of us.”6 Benjamin Ziemann says their violence was “overstep-
ping boundaries, a process in which protagonists can lose control of
themselves, leaving rational consideration behind. . . . Soldiers in combat
can become enraged, act out their anger and enter into a state of
frenzy.”7 The killing of prisoners was normal.
As defense proved superior on a static Western Front, the capture of
a single field cost many lives. Eastern Fronts differed, since the Russians
overmatched the Austrians and the Germans overmatched the Russians.
Here routs caused “forward panics” involving mass slaughter or surren-
der. But both fronts produced awful casualties. A French soldier wrote to
his parents: “It is shameful, awful; it’s impossible to convey the image of
such a carnage. We will never be able to escape from such a hell. The
dead cover the ground. Boches and French are piled on top of each
other, in the mud. . . . We attacked twice, gained a little ground—which
was completely soaked with blood. . . . But one must not despair, one can
be wounded. As for death, if it comes, it will be a deliverance.”8 Note the
preferred ending, to be wounded or even killed and so removed from the
battlefield.
Mass slaughter consists of many single deaths. Here is a man dying
from a gas attack, depicted by the British war poet Wilfred Owen:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. [It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country]
 The World Wars 341

This poem was published posthumously. Lieutenant Owen was killed

just after being awarded the Military Cross for bravery, one week before
the Armistice, at the age of twenty-five.
The chances of being killed were about one in five for French sol-
diers, one in seven for the British. The chances of being killed, wounded,
missing, or made POWs were much higher: 76 percent of men mobi-
lized in Russia, 73 percent for France, 65 percent for Germany, 36 per-
cent for Britain and its empire, only 8 percent for the United States (in
its seventeen months of fighting). Why did the soldiers accept such
odds? As we saw in the last chapter, morale does not turn on whether
soldiers experience fear. They all do. Fear, says Holmes, “is the common
bond between fighting men. The overwhelming majority of soldiers’ ex-
perience fear during or before battle.”9 Especially feared were wounds to
the abdomen, eyes, brain, and genitals, which soldiers believed made
them unfit for life. Fear has physiological consequences, adrenaline and
cortisol rushes, accelerating heartbeat, and even involuntary pissing or
shitting in one’s pants, common just before battle. Soldiers were caught
short, ashamed of shitting in the trench in front of their comrades,
climbing out, lowering their pants, and having their heads blown off.10
In battle itself, continuous mind-filling action tended to banish fear
to the back burners but afterwards was replaced by loathing for the hor-
rors of mutilated, decomposing, stinking corpses, body parts hanging
from bushes, and dying cries for “Mum, Mum,” “Maman, Maman” or
“Mutter, Mutter.” Such repeated sights, smells, and sounds deadened sen-
sibilities. As a French corporal put it, “Our repugnance became dulled,
forced to live in the filth, we became worse than the beasts.”11 Most were
emotionally damaged. As Malešević says:

Although wars are often conceptualised in instrumentalist and

rationalist terms, the actual lived experience of the combat zone is
principally defined by variety of emotional reactions. All soldiers ex-
perience intense emotional reactions in the combat zone. Although
fear is by far the most common emotion, the combatants tend to dis-
play a wide range of complex and changing emotional responses in-
cluding both negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, rage, panic,
horror, shame, guilt, and sadness as well as some positive emotions
including happiness, joy, pride, elation, and exhilaration. Living in an
exceptional situation of life and death, the individual actions and
responses of soldiers are profoundly shaped by emotions.12
342 The World Wars

Alcohol and tobacco helped deaden the sensibilities, but psychiatric

medicine and diagnosis were rudimentary. The British recognized “shell-
shock,” the French commotion (concussion) or obusite (“shellitis”), but
most higher officers assumed these were covers for shirking. There were
ways of not coping—self-wounding to get a discharge or claiming trench
foot, which restricted mobility. Soldiers felt envious of those whose
minor wounds sent them home. Psychiatric hospital admissions grew as
physical casualties increased.13 After prolonged exposure to battle, the
major goal was survival: focusing on self-protection and fighting while
trying not to expose oneself to unnecessary danger.
Debate about why they kept on fighting has been liveliest in France.
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker stress soldiers’ consent—
early ideological enthusiasm for war and the complicity of religion in
war fever, boosted by soldiers’ increasing religiosity in the face of death.
In France the war was a “crusade” maintained by a “culture of war” that
involved “the expectation of a rapid victory,” “the heroism of the sol-
diers,” and the “demonized perception of atrocities committed by the
enemy.”14 Letters home, they say, show that most French soldiers be-
lieved they fought in a just, patriotic cause, that they were sacrificing in
defense of the homeland against a foreign invader.15 Their findings imply
a nationalist religiosity, not religion in itself. After all, half the Germans
trying to kill them were also Catholics. But their conclusion is that sol-
diers freely gave consent to the war, for self-defense is the strongest jus-
tification, intensified into a defense of civilization against barbarism. This
claim was ideologically reciprocated by Germans, who alleged atrocities
by “savage” African and Asian troops deployed by the French and British.
Yet other historians doubt that such transcendent ideology figured
in most ordinary soldiers’ experiences once they were locked in the
trenches. Leonard Smith and his colleagues emphasize a less ideological,
more grounded sense of patriotism among French infantrymen who felt
they had to expel the Boches (Germans) from France.16 Being mostly
peasants (as all armies except the British were), they knew this required
digging trenches every meter of the way. For them defense of the soil of
France was not an abstract concept. This view also emphasizes consent,
but ideology had become institutionalized in everyday activities.
Frédéric Rousseau has a different view, based on letters, memoirs, and
fictional works written by more than sixty soldiers.17 He accepts that the
initial rally ’round the flag response brought enthusiastic enlistment amid
patriotic rhetoric. But once soldiers experienced the gruesome realities of
 The World Wars 343

trench warfare, patriotism vanished: “The so-called consent of the soldiers

was expressed within a space of extreme dependence, constant surveil-
lance, and heightened coercion.” Several of his soldiers flatly said, “There
is no patriotism in the trenches,” and Rousseau asks rhetorically, “What is
a soldier if not a man oppressed, bullied, dehumanized, terrorized and
threatened with death by his own army[?]”18 He says combatants obeyed
more from constraint than consent. As I have emphasized, that is the
general nature of military power. Jules Maurin also downplays consent,
since by 1916, he says, the infantry, the poilus (literally, “hairy ones”), had
forgotten why they were fighting. They fought because they were told to
by the disciplining hierarchies to which they had been accustomed in
their communities. The key was unanimity among the three main author-
ity figures in French villages, priest, mayor, and schoolteacher, from polit-
ical right to left.19 François Cochet and André Loez bridge consent
and constraint.20 Coercion did not dominate the poilus’s everyday experi-
ence, they say. Rather, the military set boundaries, and the culture and
patriotism of the soldier became irrelevant under the perpetual pressures
of the war.21 Action outside of obedience was risky. Soldiers could only
hang on, grimly fighting with an immanent ideology emphasizing com-
rades, families, homeland, and their own sense of honor—perhaps in that
order.
For British troops defense was not so direct, for they were fighting
abroad. Their sense of being British extended to a degree of imperial
identity, but more important was that they were used to obeying their
social superiors—as Maurin argued for the French. They believed what
their rulers said about the necessity of the war since their own knowl-
edge of foreign affairs was almost zero. In the war they maintained defer-
ence to officers, provided the officers treated their own authority as
normal and did not condescend to them.22
The rural Bavarians studied by Ziemann and the Saxons described
by Tony Ashworth’s British soldiers seem more reluctant warriors who
found their Prussian officers abusive and arrogant.23 They were indiffer-
ent to German war aims but were held in place by a commitment to fin-
ish a job that had been started, by religious commitment to fight a
righteous war, by commitment to their comrades, alive and dead, and by
harsh discipline, made bearable by generous leave arrangements attuned
to an army of peasants trying to keep their small plots of land viable. It is
generally assumed that the German fighting soldier was more effective
than those of the Entente, though they collapsed at the very end.
344 The World Wars

Social pressures enabled armies to hang on once patriotic sentiments

had subsided. The fear of letting down one’s comrades, copains, pals, Ka­
meraden, was almost universal, buttressed by the need to assert masculin-
ity.24 Fear was acceptable, everybody in all armies experienced it, says
Rousseau. But cowardice was effeminate, unacceptable to a real man.
These were still patriarchal and hierarchical societies. Austro-Hungarians
drawn from minority nations had probably the least commitment to their
regime. By 1917 many believed they would be better off in defeat,
through which they could get their own state. Yet most fought on almost
to the end. It was difficult to do otherwise. All the hierarchies were in
place, and people did what they were told in a spirit of pragmatic accep-
tance, because that was how the world worked.
Yet the soldiers were not passive recipients of orders. Ashworth
found in British soldiers’ letters and memoirs independence of action
partially undermining higher authorities’ commands.25 He identified a
“live-and-let-live” system involving tacit truces between German and
British non-elite infantry along quieter front sectors. Elite units identi-
fied with their regiment, honored its traditions, and wanted action, but
others preferred a quieter life. The system was helped by the ecology of
trench warfare. The distance between enemy front lines was from one to
three hundred meters. Sentry and listening posts were closer. The lines
stretched over many kilometers. The battlefield of the Somme was ten
times the length of Waterloo or Gettysburg, where soldiers had been
close to the enemy only when under fire. This had prevented communi-
cation between armies. Now armies were encamped close to one another,
and at quiet times they could communicate. Each trench heard noises as-
sociated with everyday living. “Tommy” and “Jerry” (or “Fritz”) could
hear each other at breakfast, laughing, singing. In quieter sectors the op-
posed units remained the same over time, so soldiers could shout each
other’s names. The men were spread out in fives along the front line,
away from close surveillance by officers, each of whom was responsible
for soldiers over several hundred meters. Battlefield ecology did not
merely entrap, it brought a little autonomy.
Live-and-let-live was a mutual strategy to subvert orders and to avoid
getting killed, more a utilitarian exchange than the result of moral qualms
at killing—though the famous 1914 Christmas Day truce and football
game between German and British troops was inflected with Christian
notions of fellowship. Ashworth says the system embodied the sociologi-
cal “norm of reciprocity”—“do unto me as I do unto you.” This required
 The World Wars 345

trust that the enemy would honor the implied pact; it involved empathy
and “a consciousness of kind.” After all, they shared the same trench ex-
perience, the same will to live, and the same conflicts with a hierarchy
that wanted them to kill and be killed. They also shared a hatred of artil-
lery, for if our artillery launches a massive cannonade, theirs will respond
in kind—and get us killed. It would be preferable if neither fired. Both in-
fantries hated “fire-eaters,” “heroes” whose aggression would bring fire
back onto them. Ashworth describes verbal contracts, mutual inertia, and
rituals such as not shelling when food was being consumed, deliberately
shelling into no-man’s-land, or helping the enemy to predict when the
next bombardment would come. Patrols might quietly pass each other in
the night and soldiers might shoot to miss. On the basis of the letters and
diaries of a few regiments, and allowing for the proportion of quiet fronts
and non-elite regiments, Ashworth gives a minimum of 13 percent and a
maximum of 33 percent of soldiers involved at least once in the system.26
The live-and-let-live approach also occurred on other fronts. Zie-
mann’s study of Bavarians fighting on a quiet front in the Vosges reveals
similar practices between German and French troops.27 Rousseau quotes
several French soldiers detailing friendly contacts with the enemy when
front conditions permitted.28 Sheldon tells of a German lance corporal
captured in no-man’s-land by an Australian patrol. The Australians gave
him cigarettes and offered not to take him prisoner if he would return
and give them a German steel helmet. He agreed and kept his word, re-
turning with a helmet. They shook hands and returned to their lines.29
This was the life most soldiers would have wanted.
But on unquiet sectors there was carnage. At Verdun it lasted ten
months, consuming 550,000 French lives and 430,000 German lives. The
Somme offensive lasted five months. On its first day, 60,000 British sol-
diers were casualties, 20,000 of them killed. The carnage at Verdun was
due to Falkenhayn drawing as many French soldiers within range of his
artillery as he could. The French generals supplied the corpses, but the
troops did not waver. Over the whole war, on average, 900 Frenchmen,
1,300 Germans, and over 1,450 Russians died every day. The British lost
“only” 457 men per day. About 40 percent of all soldiers in the war were
wounded at least once. Medical improvements since the Napoleonic
Wars were canceled out by the graver wounds inflicted by new weapons,
so more soldiers died of their wounds than in Napoleon’s time.30 But
30 percent of soldiers operated in the less dangerous rear, which means
that overall casualty rates underestimate those of front soldiers.
346 The World Wars

Nonetheless, both the live-and-let-live tactic and mass slaughter

alarmed commanders into changes. From 1916 the German army
developed a more fluid strategy of “defense in depth,” and they and the
Austrians developed “storm troopers,” small commando attack forces.31
The British also turned toward using more snipers, trench mortars, ma-
chine guns, and mines, as well as launching more commando raids.
These raids were generally ineffective, but they undermined the live-
and-let-live approach, since they could not be ritualized or predicted.
Army tactics had countered soldiers’ agency. But from 1918 such changes
were integrated into a more general use of cover and concealment, free-
dom of subunits to maneuver, and combined-arms integration, all
deployed more flexibly to break the stalemate.
Ashworth comments on Marshall’s theory of nonfiring by World
War II soldiers because of moral qualms, which I discuss later. He notes
that live-and-let-live fits Marshall’s claim that soldiers failed to fire their
guns, but this was not due to moral qualms. He finds no evidence that
“the tension between humane impulses and orders to kill caused paraly-
sis.”32 He quotes several soldiers describing killing in matter-of-fact
terms. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker give examples of soldiers reporting
enjoying killing in hand-to-hand combat.33 But noting that many veter-
ans had become pacifists by the 1930s, they suggest moral qualms
plagued many after the war, as I noted regarding the aftermath of the
American Civil War. Ashworth says that only a “small proportion of sol-
diers hospitalised with battle fatigue had a fear of killing.”34 This last
point is confirmed by Alexander Watson’s study of psychologists’ reports.
Fear for oneself was much more important than moral qualms.35
Smith complains that, since Clausewitz, armies have been seen as
overcentralized, and soldiers’ responses as mere “friction” in the sys-
tem.36 Clausewitz did not see that his “apolitical” army was different
from citizen soldiers questioning and negotiating authority. Soldiers
were not passive victims, brutalized and slaughtered by the modern war
machine. In his study of the 5th French Infantry Division, Smith says
soldiers were committed to the war effort. They wanted France to win
and were willing to fight to achieve this. But they also believed in the
“proportionality” of commands. The risks asked of them had to be pro-
portional to their chances of achieving success. When commands are
seen as disproportional, soldiers resist with lassitude, reluctance to follow
orders of attack, and grousing. There is a degree of rational calculation
in this. The troops decided what was possible on their battlefield, and
 The World Wars 347

sometimes they imposed their own solutions of retreat, tacit refusal to

advance, or even surrender. Their immediate officers might sympathize
and lessen their demands, conveying grousing up the hierarchy and sug-
gesting tactical changes. Tacit negotiations between ranks concerned ac-
ceptable responses to combat environments.
Emmanuel Saint-Fuscien shows that a sense of proportionality grew
in the French military justice system.37 This began as repressive but then
eased, as executions for cowardice or desertion became rarer (with the ex-
ception noted below), and fewer sentences were carried out. At the front,
the exigencies of battle weakened hierarchy. Junior officers, NCOs, and
men faced the same challenges, and examples of initiative and courage by
any of them could inspire the others. Authority became more responsive,
more flexible. Military justice moved away from an aloof and authoritar-
ian system to a more interpersonal system suited to the needs of a skilled,
democratic army. What a tragedy that this occurred only amid mass
slaughter!
And as the war ground on, discontent grew. By 1917 this was fueled
in France by hopes of peace induced by the Russian Revolution, the
entry of U.S. forces, German retreat behind the Hindenburg Line, polit-
ical struggle in Paris, and the disaster of Robert Nivelle’s Chemin des
Dames offensive. This produced a psychological threshold above which
soldiers would not engage in offensives, which exploded in the French
mutinies of April–May 1917. About 45,000 soldiers refused to obey the
order to advance in a rippling motion across a broad front. They were
prepared to defend their positions but rejected Nivelle’s policy of inces-
sant attacks: he had breached their implicit contract to defend France
without being cannon fodder. The soldiers’ demands ranged from better
food and more leave to immediate peace. In sending their demands to
their deputies in Paris, soldiers were recognizing the legitimacy of
the republic and their own power as citizens. They were also trying to
protect themselves from execution. Smith weakens his argument by con-
trasting French “citizen soldiers” with stereotypes of the supposed
“subject soldiers” of Britain (like France, a male democracy), and Ger-
many, half-democratic, many of whose soldiers had become socialists to-
ward war’s end. More to the point is that British and German soldiers
were serving abroad, trapped within their military deployments, while
the mutinous French troops were at home, under one hundred kilome-
ters from Paris. Many had spent their leaves in Paris witnessing strikes
and demonstrations.
348 The World Wars

The crisis was solved by Philippe Pétain’s carrot-and-stick strategy:

on the one hand, the inevitable execution of “ringleaders,” and on the
other, the promise of “tanks and the Americans,” improvements in living
conditions and fewer mass attacks.38 But all the armies had reached the
end of their tethers by mid-1918, except for the recently arrived Ameri-
cans.39 Those in the front line, with direct experience of battle, were
more likely to suffer psychological trauma.40 This is also what analyses of
PTSD in recent wars reveal (see the next chapter).
Surrendering was risky. Many were killed by captors consumed with
rage at the deaths of their comrades, or fearful that visibly escorting pris-
oners back was too dangerous.41 Desertion was risky. One had to make
one’s way through numerous lines and, if one was caught, punishment
included possible execution. The rate of British, French, and German
desertions was only 1 percent, though higher among ethnic minorities.42
Because of lesser national solidarity, desertion was greater in Austrian,
Italian, Russian, and Ottoman forces.43 Yet survival chances were per-
versely seen as better if one stayed, for the army command supplied food,
alcohol, tobacco, and better medical help than civilians got. The military
unit remained a protective environment, enveloping the soldier.44
Watson analyzes British and German soldiers’ censored letters home
and diaries, in addition to psychologists’ and army reports. He says most
soldiers coped quite well with appalling front conditions. Endurance was
the norm—most men adapted to the war. Resilience, not mental collapse,
was commoner, because of a combination of fear of the enemy, military
obedience, camaraderie, overoptimism concerning the likelihood of
death or injury, religious faith, patriotism, rotation systems enabling rest,
and adequate food and munitions. Religion, superstitions, talismans, and
incessant black humor gave men the illusion of control of their destinies.
As long as men believed in survival and final victory, fear was manage-
able. This required faith in officers, unit loyalty, and junior officers lead-
ing from the front (they had the highest casualty rates). Letters from
loved ones added moral and emotional support and reminded the sol-
diers that they were fighting for hearth and homeland.45
The front experience did not intensify moral qualms at killing. We
can find in soldiers’ accounts occasional respect for enemy soldiers, and
appreciation when they withheld fire while medics were picking up the
wounded or the dead. There was German gratitude to a British prisoner
who, after a sudden change of fortune at the front, found himself
protecting his German captors from the wrath of his comrades. But in
 The World Wars 349

Rousseau’s and Sheldon’s lengthy quotations from French and German

soldiers, no one expressed moral qualms about killing. On the contrary,
battle intensified aggression. One British lieutenant said of his soldiers,
“You only have an impartial interest in strangers even though they are
Englishmen, . . . [but] your own men downed, sets you cursing and
throbbing with rage and hate.” Comments Watson, “Casualties, far from
sapping combat motivation, actually strengthened survivors’ obligation
to keep fighting.”46 Nationalist hatreds declined, replaced by primitive
hatred. Adrenaline rushes could convert fear into fury. In their letters,
when soldiers describe killing an enemy, he is depersonalized, never
described as a human being.47
This now seems a pointless war, fought neither for genuine national
interests nor for high ideals, but for “reasons of state” mediated by the
survival interests of dynastic monarchies and the diplomatic incompe-
tence and cult of “honor” (not backing down) of upper-class leaders who
did not themselves fight. This suggests that soldiers’ sacrifices were
senseless, and that is why we should rage at the rulers, politicians, cour­
tiers, journalists, and generals who urged them on. Never were peoples
so betrayed as in World War I, but Europe remained a class-bound con-
tinent. Soldiers obeyed their upper-class masters, just as they had done in
peacetime. Heavy-industry workers and miners were the most likely to
rebel, but most were in reserved occupations. Obedience plus national
identity were translated by constant drilling and the enemy’s murderous
attacks into a belief that national interests were at stake. After all, “they”
were trying to kill “us.” If they had doubts as cynics or class warriors,
they were still trapped within the coercive space that is an army in a
battlefield.
Obedience required the belief that the war was winnable, and this
collapsed near the war’s end, temporarily for the French in their great
mutiny and for Italians at their great defeat at Caporetto, permanently
for Russian soldiers in the east and then German troops in the west, as
they lost the sense of their own empowerment, their trust in the compe-
tence of their officers, and their confidence in victory.48 Joshua Sanborn
challenges the old assumption that coercion was the only reason Russian
peasant-soldiers fought, arguing that they possessed a motivating sense
of patriotism.49 Yet the loss of any realistic hope of victory against the su-
perior German army and the increasing sense of being used as cannon
fodder turned at the beginning of 1917 into class rage and revolution.50
This was the only revolution that occurred during the war.
350 The World Wars

But by September 1918 German soldiers were exhausted. The failure

of their last offensive had shown them how outmatched they were in ma-
terial resources. Ironically, this was so during their last advances, for they
captured such plentiful Entente supplies of food, wine, and ammunition
as to cause despair at their own resources. Now the soldiers complained
of “Prussian” officers and denounced war profiteers back home.51 They
had become republicans, often socialists. As the Americans piled into the
front, they no longer believed they could win, while the British and
French and the fresh Americans knew they would win. The German
army did not disintegrate as the Russian army had, and some units car-
ried on fighting even in defeat, but many whole units of soldiers and offi-
cers came forward in surrender. Watson argues that the soldiers
remained in the line until there was an “ordered surrender” from above.
Ziemann’s view seems better evidenced, that soldiers led the surrenders
while many others simply went home.52 Fear had been contained for four
long years, but as the Germans neared defeat, containment collapsed,
while for their enemies, nearing victory seemed to make sense of the war
again. There was no clear relationship between morale and regime type,
contrary to the democratic “triumphalism” to which I referred in chapter
3. Until the end, the Wehrmacht soldier fighting for a semi-authoritarian
regime was probably superior to the soldier of the Entente male democ-
racies, but the Austrians commanded by a semi-authoritarian regime and
Russians fighting for a fully authoritarian regime performed worse. The
losing rulers got what they deserved for starting the war, while the win-
ners botched the peace and made promises about a better society that
they did not keep.
The war brought on another bout of slaughter, the Spanish flu pan-
demic, which lasted three years from January 1918. Its origins are un-
known but were not in Spain. Spain had been neutral in the war and
lacked wartime censorship, so this was the first country where the flu was
freely reported—the grave illness of the king making world headlines.
This pandemic infected perhaps 500 million people, a quarter of the
world’s population, and killed between 20 and 50 million. The pandemic
had two mostly military causes. First, military encampments contained
soldiers living intimately together in very unhygienic conditions and
under severe stress—perfect germ pools carrying off innumerable sol-
diers before spreading to civilians through global movement of troops
home as the war ended. We might call this the “Kansas flu,” for it was
probably in a military camp there that the flu started. The second cause
 The World Wars 351

was military censorship, which successfully concealed the scale of the

problem until it was too late to take effective preventive action. Nature
was striking back, but the ferocity of the blow was social, the idiocy of
war and specifically of military authority.

World War II: Ideological Warfare

World War II was very different, as we saw in chapter 8. It was not a war
caused by confusion and miscalculation, like the first war, but by ideology.
It was a war of aggression created by the militaristic ideologies of Nazi
Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy. The French, British, Russians,
and Chinese fought largely in self-defense, whereas Americans had more
mixed motives. Allied soldiers were not cannon fodder in the power ploys
of rulers, although there were imperial goals sought by British, American,
and Soviet elites that were of little interest to the masses. And this time,
British colonial soldiers, especially those of the Indian Army, were fight-
ing for their probable national independence after the war.
We should also blame the leaders of Britain and France for their ide-
ological anti-Bolshevism, however, which prevented them from allying
with the Soviets to deter Hitler in 1938 and 1939—ideology triumphing
over Realist balancing. Although this would have left Hitler in place, it
might have avoided a world war and the Holocaust. We can also blame
the Roosevelt administration for its provocative sanctions against Japan.
Yet these are mere peccadillos compared to the atrocities of the Axis
powers from the Nanjing Massacre to the Holocaust. Allied soldiers
viewed this as a legitimate war, and it was.
For the first time we have interview surveys of soldiers, mainly
American, but Russian too. The first survey concerned the Spanish Civil
War of 1936 to 1939. The pioneering sociologist John Dollard distrib-
uted a forty-four-page questionnaire to three hundred American volun-
teers who had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on the Republican
side. Of the respondents, 74 percent said they had felt fearful when first
going into action. Fear was greatest just before battle started. Fear of
being thought a coward by comrades and officers was dominant at this
stage, but when soldiers realized fear was shared by all their comrades,
this offered comfort. Ninety-one percent of them said they either always
or sometimes felt afraid going into actions. Fear generated strong physi-
ological symptoms. A pounding heart or rapid pulse was felt by 69 per-
cent, extreme muscular tension or a sinking feeling in the stomach by
352 The World Wars

45 percent, and severe trembling by 25 percent. Involuntary urination or

defecation was experienced by 11 percent.53 I noted this happening in
World War I, though I lacked figures there. Probably it had happened in
earlier wars. Surveys of American soldiers in World War II produced
similar numbers, as we shall see. In battle some soldiers lose control over
their urinary or bowel function because the sphincter relaxes as fear
takes over the brain, causing a loss in the brain’s regulatory function. It
happens automatically, without one’s knowledge, an example of the fight-
or-flight response to a stimulus. Here flight prevailed. The opposite re-
sponse is the increase in adrenaline that enables fight.
Inactivity fueled fear. The vast majority, 84 percent, said that active
task concentration during battle filled the mind and dispelled fear. The
second-most cited factor in overcoming fear, at 77 percent, was belief in
the war aims. Forty-nine percent stressed good leadership, 45 percent
military training, and 42 percent good materiel. These last three re-
sponses reveal the importance of feeling oneself a member of a well-or-
ganized army with a good chance of winning. Hatred of the enemy was
admitted by only 21 percent. Discussion of war aims helped 93 percent,
whereas 91 percent said being given knowledge of the whole front made
them fight better, even if the news was fairly bad. Dollard did not ask
them about moral qualms, and they did not volunteer them. This was a
volunteer brigade composed of leftists who had crossed the Atlantic to
fight in a distant country for an antifascist cause they believed in—which
led to high immanent morale. But Dollard adds: “The soldier in battle is
not forever whispering “My cause, my cause. He is too busy for that. Ide-
ology functions before battle, to get the man in; and after battle, by block-
ing thoughts of escape. Identification with cause is like a joker in a pack
of cards. It can substitute for any other card. The man who has it can
better bear inferior materiel, temporary defeat, weariness or fear.”
The Lincoln Brigade fought hard, yet in a losing cause, as retreat
and defeat increasingly dominated its experience. Of the 3,015 Ameri-
cans in the brigade, about one-quarter died, but ideological commitment
and tight comradeship enabled the survivors to take heavy losses and
continue fighting. Immanent ideological power, strengthening solidarity,
helped master fear.
World War II was highly ideological. The vast majority of leaders
believed their cause was just, whether that meant securing national or ra-
cial rights and power in the world (Germany, Italy, and Japan) or defeat-
ing fascism (China, Soviet Union, France, Britain, United States). Such
 The World Wars 353

beliefs played a significant role in soldiers’ conduct, increasing their

commitment. There were, however, two different types of ideology in
the war. Among the Western Allies we see a fairly “latent” form of “im-
manent ideology,” the belief by the troops that they were fighting a just
war in defense of their way of life, but these beliefs were implicit rather
than explicit, there being little propagandizing by military authorities. In
contrast, the German army, especially on the Eastern Front, the Japa-
nese, and above all the Red Army had explicit “transcendent ideologies”
that leaders sought to implant in their soldiers to produce higher, even
self-sacrificing morale as they scorned the risk of death. In the subse-
quent development of the twentieth century, ideologies became “weap-
ons of the weak,” which allowed technologically inferior armies to level
the battlefield by virtue of superior morale. We will see a direct commu-
nist chain of descent in the methods used and results produced from the
Soviet Red Army to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to the
North Korean People’s Army (NKPA), to the Vietnamese People’s Lib-
eration Front (PLF). I will contrast their way of fighting to that of their
enemies in the next chapter. In this chapter I deal with the Wehrmacht
and the Red Army, and then turn to the Western Allies.

Wehrmacht Soldiers on the Eastern Front

The Wehrmacht’s will to fight right up to the gates of Berlin and the
death of Hitler gives the impression of a highly ideological army. But
Kershaw insists we see this within the context of German society, for ci-
vilian will did not waver. He emphasizes that fighting “down to almost
total devastation and complete enemy occupation” is very rare in war. In
the last ten months of this war, July 1944 to May 1945, far more German
civilians died than in the previous five years; half the military deaths oc-
curred in the same period—2.6 million out of 5.3 million. Even as the
Reich was collapsing, the Nazi leadership also intensified the murder of
millions of Jews and other Untermenschen. Kershaw stresses four reasons
for fighting to the death. Above all, “the structures and mentalities of
Hitler’s charismatic rule” combined the charismatic hold Hitler had
over Germans with his personal preference to die rather than surrender.
Second, the generals found it impossible to suggest negotiations or
surrender after the failure of the Stauffenberg plot. Third, repressive
control over German society was delegated to Himmler, Goebbels, Bor-
mann, and Speer, and carried to the local level by the long-term Nazi
354 The World Wars

regional gauleiters. Fourth was the fear of Soviet vengeance for

German atrocities against Soviet citizens. Goebbels was already broad-
casting that vengeance was happening in East Prussia as the Red Army
advanced.54
The sociologists Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz offer a different
explanation of Wehrmacht dedication: the primary group of close com-
rades was the main force driving the soldiers to continue fighting even
when defeat seemed inevitable.55 Attachments to anything broader are
not nearly as salient to them, nor is general ideology. They present
rather thin data to support this application of “buddy theory,” and most
scholars emphasize the ideological commitment of German soldiers, es-
pecially on the Eastern Front.56 Of Wehrmacht frontline officers, 30 per-
cent were members of the Nazi Party, more than twice as many as
among all Germans, while the soldiers’ diaries reveal deep racism and
a personal commitment to the Führer, as Kershaw suggests. The Wehr­
macht, like the Red Army, had political “commissars” repetitively in-
structing soldiers in Nazi theory in weekly political sessions at company
level.57 This helped soldiers fight to the bitter end and to commit terrible
crimes, motivated by demonization of Jews and Slavs and the Führer
cult. Robert Cintino stresses Führer worship and the vision of the East-
ern Front as a struggle to stem a Jewish-Bolshevik-Asiatic flood menac-
ing Western civilization.58 Soldiers participated willingly in genocide to
help this. Harsh discipline was coupled with licensed brutality toward the
enemy. An NCO described Russians as “no longer human beings, but
wild hordes and beasts, who have been bred by Bolshevism during the
last 20 years.” Another wrote, “The great task given us in the struggle
against Bolshevism lies in the destruction of eternal Jewry.”59 All this
came back to haunt the Wehrmacht in Soviet vengeance.
The conditions of battle on the Eastern Front became awful. The
Germans were badly clothed, ill-fed, disease-prone, fighting in mud and
snow that made high-tech weapons like tanks repeatedly break down.
This produced what Omer Bartov calls a radical “demodernization,”
which forced the Wehrmacht to compensate for numerical and some-
times technological inferiority with a more brutal fighting spirit. The
traumas they experienced led to the belief that “not only was war hell,
one also had to be a beast if one wished to survive it.” The soldiers ac-
quired a “new concept of heroism, a new self-perception of the combat
soldier. . . . There was an anarchic element in this celebration of death
and return to savagery among the frontline troops.”60
 The World Wars 355

Stephen Fritz agrees: the extraordinary staying power of the infan-

tryman, the Landser, was essentially ideological.61 The National Socialist
state had “redeemed the failures of World War I and had restored, both
individually and collectively, a uniquely German sense of identity.”62
Nazi ideas resonated: “Many Landsers, previously skeptical of Nazi pro-
paganda, confronted what they accepted as the reality of the Jewish-
Bolshevik destruction of a whole nation.” They had invaded Russia in
1941 with forebodings but overcame them with values centered on de-
fending the Fatherland against an international Jewish-Bolshevik con-
spiracy. They believed their Aryan racial superiority over Jews and
Slavs justified murder. No qualms there. Fritz says they also internalized
a distinctive Wehrmacht ideology of pride in an elite German institution
that instilled discipline and solidarity. The combination of Nazi and
Wehrmacht ideals led them to believe they could transform Germany
into a more classless society, already prefigured in an army in which all
ranks shared equally in rigorous training, harsh discipline, and the bur-
dens of the Eastern Front, and where officers and NCOs led from the
front.63
Bartov says discipline became “perverted,” so that atrocities against
civilians and enemy soldiers went unpunished, whereas slight infractions
against military regulations might bring execution. At least 15,000 Ger-
man soldiers were executed, and more were shot on the spot for deser-
tion or skulking—much higher numbers than in most armies of the time.
Fritz says the common Landser, unable to mitigate his suffering in any
other way, lashed out in anger and frustration against the only targets
within range, enemy soldiers and civilians, transforming the war on the
Eastern Front into a horrific bloodbath. One recalls his “almost drunken
exhilaration” in battle. Their letters and diaries express thrill in killing
and a sense of freedom from restraint.64 Battle intoxication was much
rarer among Allied troops.
German soldiers in the east also feared for their lives if they surren-
dered, given their own massacres of Soviet civilians and POWs. The final
days saw units flee into the arms of the Americans, who they correctly
believed would treat them better.65 The Wehrmacht fought a much
more savage war in the east than on other fronts, always excepting the
uniform massacres of Jews. Some German soldiers and airmen could not
understand why the Western Allies were not fighting with them, against
communism. But in the east they had helped create an even more ideo-
logically determined opponent.
356 The World Wars

The Red Army at Stalingrad

I will not dwell on the hastily created Red Army during the Russian Civil
War. Its aspirations were revolutionary, but its performance was only
marginally less chaotic than that of the White foe. In the end it won the
war because peasants hated the Reds less than they did the Whites. Nor
will I deal with the professionalization of the Red Army during the inter-
war period, then disrupted by Stalin’s purges. But this had not made the
Red Army into a particularly cohesive force. Stalin worsened its predica-
ment by trusting Hitler’s word and so was completely surprised by Hit-
ler’s invasion in June 1941. Initially, the Red Army was routed. Stalin’s
forced industrialization, however, created a large modern force capable
of slowing the advance into Russia of the Wehrmacht. I focus on the mo-
ment when it stopped that advance, at Stalingrad in 1942–43.
Our best evidence comes from interviews conducted in January and
February 1943 by historians working for the Soviet Commission on the
History of the Great Patriotic War. They interviewed soldiers, political
officials, and civilians involved in the recent battle of Stalingrad. Obvi-
ously, no one in Stalinist times felt able to criticize Stalin or the overall
Soviet conduct of battle, but otherwise the transcripts of these interviews
seem honest reports of personal experience, not propaganda. Indeed, the
absence of references to “the heroic leadership of Stalin,” the dominant
trope in official Soviet accounts, was probably the reason the transcripts
languished forgotten in dusty archives until after the collapse of the So-
viet Union. Then they were unearthed by Russian historians. They al-
lowed access to the German historian Jochen Hellbeck.66
The transcripts are stunning in their depiction of the horrors of the
five-month battle raging from August 1942 to February 1943 and of the
sufferings unto starvation of soldiers and civilians. At first the Wehr­
macht pressed forward in massive attacks and took almost all the city
after savage fighting for every street, open space, factory, apartment, cel-
lar, and staircase. Virtually all the city’s buildings were destroyed either
by bombing or by street fighting. All seemed lost as casualties mounted
in a Red Army trapped between the Germans and the Volga River. Sol-
diers talked of death or wounding likely to come within ten days of their
joining the fight. But fierce resistance slowed the German advance,
which allowed Soviet reinforcements to arrive across the river. Tied
down in street fighting, the Wehrmacht lost its superiority in mobility,
maneuver, and precise artillery barrage. Then fierce Soviet counterat-
tacks in the city and to both the north and the south of the city drove the
 The World Wars 357

Germans back and finally encircled them. Hitler refused his generals’
pleas to attempt a breakout and ordered them to fight to the last man.
They did fight to the point where they were starving and lacked the fuel
necessary to effect any breakout at all. Germany’s General Friedrich
Paulus then surrendered his 220,000 remaining men. The Wehrmacht
and its Axis allies suffered 647,300 casualties in the city—killed,
wounded, or captured. It was the most decisive battle of the war, the
turning point after which the Red Army, and also the British and Ameri-
can armies, could advance rather than retreat. But at a terrible cost: the
Red Army, according to official figures, suffered 1,129,619 total casual-
ties in the Stalingrad battles, of which 478,741 were killed or missing,
and 650,878 wounded or sick, a casualty rate of over half the total force.
It was worse among tank crews trapped inside their burning infernos.
Through the whole war, three-quarters of the 403,272 Soviet tank sol-
diers were killed. Why did the soldiers nonetheless continue fighting
through a period when all hope seemed gone?
The combination of harsh discipline and the penal culture of the
army was one reason, traditionally emphasized in the West (and in Ger-
many at the time). Anthony Beevor supports this argument, but most of
his sources were German and deeply anticommunist.67 Catherine Merri-
dale, who interviewed two hundred Red Army veterans, also emphasizes
the fear of punishment pervading the army, outmatched only by its ha-
tred of the Germans, whose atrocities were widely publicized.68 Yet Hell-
beck shows this is much exaggerated.69 Beevor’s frequently quoted figure
of 13,500 soldiers executed during the battle is wildly inflated. Hellbeck
calculates that from August 1, 1942, to January 31, 1943, 447 Soviet sol-
diers were executed on the Stalingrad Front, which would be no higher
than the Italian rate of executions in this war. Roger Reese uses oral his-
tories, memoirs, diaries, and letters, as well as archival military and polit-
ical reports, to undermine the myth of the “blocking detachments,”
supposedly executing stragglers in the rear.70 These detachments did not
fire machine guns at retreating soldiers. Armed only with rifles, they
rounded up stragglers and fleers and returned them to the front, as oc-
curred in most armies. They arrested a mere 3.7 percent of the soldiers
they detained, and 1.5 percent received death sentences.
The High Command and Stalin knew that coercion might be coun-
terproductive, producing disaffection and weakening morale. Because the
Red Army was so large, the absolute number of executions was greater
than in the other armies. But as a proportion of the army, it was only a
358 The World Wars

little more than the rate in the Wehrmacht. More were punished by ser-
vice in the “penal battalions” at the front, which often took heavy casual-
ties. But sometimes their penal service lasted only several days before the
survivors were returned to their original units and ranks. Many fighting
in the penal battalions saw them as no more dangerous than the rest
of the front. Even a few months fighting there was better than years in
the gulag.
Reese stresses the importance of leadership for morale. He says that
before Stalingrad the High Command’s failure to adapt to the German
blitzkrieg strategy had led to disorganization, forcing Red Army units to
choose resistance, surrender, or flight. Soviet soldiers were captured
when leadership disintegrated, or were killed when small, cohesive units
fought to the end. Soviet soldiers were willing to fight, but like all sol-
diers, they had to be well led. At Stalingrad there was more effective
leadership, and the soldiers responded with intense commitment. The
High Command cultivated its own version of the buddy system from late
1942 onward, ensuring that units needing new blood because of high ca-
sualties were withdrawn from the line and trained together with the new
replacements for some weeks before going back into battle. Merridale
says that the U.S. Army did not introduce such practices until after
1945.71
Reese says most soldiers believed they were fighting for the nation,
socialism, and Stalin, who was usually described reverentially. Even those
who had suffered prewar repression did not perceive “evil intent on the
part of Stalin or see [repression] as inherent to the economic and social
systems.”72 Injustices were blamed on Stalin’s underlings (as happened in
medieval monarchies). They fought mainly in defense of Mother Russia
against truly barbarous invaders. It seemed an obviously just war. Intense
hatred was directed against the Nazis, whose atrocities were confirmed
by the letters soldiers received from home and later by the devastation
wreaked by the retreating Germans. Finally, self-interest often kicked in:
they fought to improve their career chances. All this enabled a righteous
fury to be directed against Germans. Influenced by communism, the sol-
diers’ nationalism became populist and class-conscious. Socialist ideol-
ogy came from above and from the commissars accompanying every
military unit, but this was met from below by proletarian nationalism. So
the army was prepared to fight to the death. This sentiment was matched
by some SS battalions, but not by the Wehrmacht as a whole. SS General
Max Simon said, “The Russian worker usually is a convinced communist,
 The World Wars 359

who . . . will fight fanatically as a class-conscious proletarian. Just as the

Red infantryman is ready to die in his foxhole, the Soviet tank soldier
will die in his tank, firing at the enemy to the last, even if he is alone in
or behind enemy lines.”73 Bolshevik gender equality as well as the need
to mobilize everyone produced 800,000 women in uniform. A few thou-
sand became frontline troops, unlike women in other armies.
Hellbeck claims that discipline was not just coercion. Its aim was also
“to teach self-control” and “transform [the soldier] into a self-sacrificing
warrior.”74 It had a “didactic element.”75 He adds, “The interviews also
reveal an element at odds with most western depictions: the Communist
party’s enormous effort to condition the troops. The party was an ever-
present institutional force in the form of political officers and ideological
messages. . . . Together with the secret police, the party placed the army
in an iron yoke. But even when party officials doled out punishment, the
intentions were corrective, seeking to instruct, motivate, and remake the
troops. . . . The pervasiveness and effectiveness of political involvement
in military units set the Red Army apart from other modern armies.”76
Merridale sees the political commissars as mainly instilling disci-
pline.77 Hellbeck sees them as instructing and motivating through inces-
sant discussions, lectures, reports, in addition to history lessons on
Stalin’s supposedly brilliant defense of Tsaritsyn (the former name of
Stalingrad) in the civil war.78 A commissar recalled: “What we did was
talk to the men in person and then lead by example, showing them how
to fight. And in absolutely every battle the party members were the first
ones to throw themselves into the fight.”79 A party bureau secretary in a
rifle regiment noted: “We introduced a new idea: every soldier had to
start a personal account of how many Germans he’d killed. This was es-
sentially a stimulus for socialist competition: to see who could kill the
most Germans. We would check these accounts, and if a comrade didn’t
have any dead Fritzes, we’d have a talk with him, make him feel the
shame.”80 Peacetime shock-work tallies were replaced by lists of enemy
soldiers killed and medals earned: “The party changed its criteria for ad-
mission. Earlier the litmus test had been knowledge of Marxist theory
and a working-class background, but now it was military achievement.
The party opened its doors to anyone who could demonstrate having
killed Germans in battle. . . . The party assumed more of a military qual-
ity and became closer to the people.”81
The more enemy one killed, the better one’s chances of obtaining
party membership, together with the privileges this conferred on oneself
360 The World Wars

and one’s family. Party membership in the army grew during the war
from 650,000 to almost 3 million, and most of the newcomers were in-
ducted on the battlefield after demonstrating killing prowess. One man
declared that over three days in October, “I killed 25 Fritzes myself. I
was given the Order of the Red Banner. . . . After the battle on October
29, I submitted my application to the party and now I’m a member.”
Hellbeck (unlike Reese) says that attachment to the primary group of
close comrades was relatively low in the Red Army, partly because of the
tremendous losses occurring every day at Stalingrad, but partly because
the authorities discouraged it as divisive. “The cement that the Red
Army command used to bind together diverse soldiers and motivate
them to fight was ideology. Preached incessantly and targeting every re-
cruit, it was made up of accessible concepts with an enormous emotional
charge: love for the homeland and hatred of the enemy.”82
Although this came framed in simple Marxism, nationalist vengeance
was its core and its strength. Propaganda also came with much informa-
tion about the progress of the war, especially in the form of newspapers
handed out to soldiers, but also trench tours by commissars. The soldiers
were told why they were fighting until minutes before battle, and the
flow of information resumed when it ended.83 In the Spanish Civil War
soldiers had said how important information was to morale, but most
armies do not provide it. But months-long battles made regular lectures
and assemblies difficult. Instead came propaganda through example. A
commissar says that when a special assault group was formed, two or
three party members were assigned to it to provide leadership.
Morale was high. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs
(NKVD) read millions of soldiers’ letters. They found some voiced com-
plaints about exhaustion and the hardship of military service. Some letters
reflected defeatist sentiments. During the period from June to August 1942,
of 30,237,000 letters examined, 15,469 contained defeatist statements. Sol-
diers knew their letters were being censored, but defeatism evident in 0.05
percent of cases still seems very low.84 In fact, the extraordinary dedication
of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army makes a mockery of the demo-
cratic “triumphalism” in battle to which I referred in chapter 3.
Many soldiers admitted to intense fear in battle, at first of relentless
German attacks, their seemingly countless tanks and planes, and contin-
uous artillery barrages. But they explained how they mastered fear. Hell-
beck reports an infantryman in his first battle experiencing “the
paralyzing fear he felt when German fire forced him to the ground. But
 The World Wars 361

he also noted that the fear evaporated the moment he realized that he
had to stand up if he wanted to avoid a senseless death: ‘I realized that we
might die for nothing. It wasn’t bravery or courage (which I had none
of). I simply realized that I was going to die unless I did something. And
the only chance I had to save myself and others was to advance.’ ” He
“picked himself off the ground and was surprised by the galvanizing ef-
fect of the battle cry that reflexively crossed his lips: ‘I couldn’t say any-
thing other than what anyone would have said in my place. “For the
motherland! For Stalin!” ’ ”85
The intense ideological power of populist Marxism made this a dis-
tinctive army, most resembling the Wehrmacht in its permeation by ide-
ology, yet surpassing it in the extent of political education, of party
membership determined by killing rates, boosted by defense of the
homeland (which the Wehrmacht lacked). The Red Army was a terrible
war machine, but this was self-defense against a foe who its members
knew had massacred millions and who would enslave the survivors if it
triumphed. The army’s transcendent ideology enabled it to withstand
enormous losses and keep on fighting with an intensity surpassing other
armies’. Its technology was not much inferior to the Wehrmacht’s, and
its numbers were greater, but its edge was given by its superior morale.
The Germans believed this came from mindless Asiatic racial obedience.
Yet obedience was mindful, full of ideas.

The Western Allies: The Lonely Battlefield and Nonfiring

This war involved more widely dispersed battlefields. Its air forces
brought aerial firepower, forcing ground forces to scatter, enabling
strikes against far-off targets, and substantially increasing civilian casual-
ties. Despite the initial success of tank blitzkriegs, tanks proved rather
vulnerable, and artillery batteries and infantry slogging remained the
heart of ground warfare. Infantry units often enjoyed autonomy from
their officers, and soldiers talked of an “empty” battlefield, where the
enemy was rarely glimpsed. General Sir William Slim, who led the
Burma campaign, declared, “In the end every important battle develops
to a point where there is no real control by senior commanders. . . . The
dominant feel of the battlefield is loneliness.”86
In such fighting soldiers could decide their level of commitment. They
might choose not to fire their guns. Nonfiring has figured importantly
in discussions of soldiers’ motivations because of U.S. Brigadier General
362 The World Wars

S. L. A. Marshall’s wartime reports on the rate of fire of American infantry in

the Pacific and European theaters. Though doubts have been raised about
his methods, most scholars repeat his conclusions as facts.87 Marshall’s re-
search was based on collective discussions with assemblies of infantry battal-
ions, not interviews with individuals. The virtue of this method was his
ability to construct a blow-by-blow account of particular engagements, piec-
ing together each man’s experience into a vivid overall narrative of battle
seen from the ground up. Marshall published over a dozen narratives of indi-
vidual encounters stretching from World War II to Korea to Vietnam.88
They are vivid accounts of engagements that rarely went as planned, giving a
graphic sense of battle. They are almost unknown today. Curiously, they do
not mention nonfiring, except when units were pinned down by enemy fire.
Yet Marshall also wrote broader reports that give statistics on the rate
of firing or nonfiring, which are still quoted. Marshall posed open-ended
questions to each battalion and listened to their freewheeling responses.
He concluded from this that the percentage of men firing at the enemy
“did not rise above 20–25%”—a stunningly low figure. We should in-
crease it a little since he says only about 80 percent of the soldiers had the
opportunity to fire. Among these, 25–30 percent would fire, still a very
low proportion. He said qualms over killing others prevented firing:
“The average and healthy individual . . . has such an inner and usually un-
realized resistance to killing a fellow man that he will not of his own voli-
tion take life if it is possible for him to turn away from that possibility. . . .
At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector, unknowing.”89
Marshall gave no evidence for this conclusion but added that weap-
ons serviced by crews—artillery, machine guns, weapons fired from
helicopters—were almost always fired because the individual was closely
watched by comrades. This particular finding has been repeatedly con-
firmed by later research. But in the late 1940s and 1950s, Marshall’s con-
clusions made a sensation among military authorities who had worried
since the First World War about what they called “passive combat per-
sonnel.” They didn’t want a repeat of the live-and-let-live system. The
authorities accepted the veracity of his findings, and they introduced new
and rather sensible training methods simulating actual battle conditions,
as he had recommended.
Yet Marshall’s statistics cannot be accepted. He appears to have
plucked them out of thin air. His reports give no details of how he ar-
rived at his statistics. His field notes proved sparse and gave no hint of
any quantitative calculations at all. His assistant, Captain John Westover,
 The World Wars 363

quotes Marshall as saying statistics were only “an adornment of belief.”

He adds that Marshall had taken only occasional notes, and, most dam-
agingly, that he never actually asked soldiers about firing! Marshall’s own
statements about the number of his interviews were also varied and exag-
gerated.90 Perhaps soldiers might have given him the general impression
of nonfiring, but even this is not remembered by his assistant. Marshall’s
“statistics” were pure invention.
Yet Malešević repeats Marshall’s conclusions as facts and cites six au-
thors who he says confirm Marshall.91 In fact, three simply repeat Mar-
shall’s conclusions. Three, Randall Collins, Dave Grossman, and Joanna
Bourke, do produce new information, but this fails to convince. I criti-
cized Grossman already when discussing the American Civil War, and I
deal with Bourke’s equivocal support later. Collins refers mainly to the
pioneering sociological research of Stouffer and his colleagues using
large-scale interview surveys of American World War II soldiers and air-
crews. Yet they offered almost no findings on nonfiring.
Instead, Stouffer and his colleagues emphasized fear. In one U.S. in-
fantry regiment whose soldiers were individually interviewed in France
in 1944, 65 percent admitted that they had failed to do their job properly
on at least one occasion because of extreme fear. Stouffer’s large surveys
of four infantry divisions in the Pacific theater revealed physiological re-
sponses of fear very similar to those Dollard observed in Spain. They
found 76 percent of soldiers saying they had often or sometimes felt a vi-
olent pounding of the heart; 52 percent said they had experienced un-
controllable trembling; about 50 percent admitted to feeling faint,
breaking out in a cold sweat, and feeling sick to their stomach; 19 per-
cent said they had vomited; and 12 percent said they had lost control of
their bowels.92 The military psychologist Ralph Kaufman also reported a
high incidence of such ailments among Pacific infantry.93 He saw their
fears as a rational response to threat; physiological consequences in-
cluded damage to the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and respiratory
systems. Bourke agrees and attacks what she sees as the overly rationalis-
tic theories of social scientists that ignore emotions, somatic surges, fury,
petrification, and other destructive emotional responses in battle.94 As a
social scientist, I agree.
Stouffer and his colleagues asked another large sample of soldiers
what were the most common errors committed by new replacements and
more seasoned soldiers. Blazing away, shooting too much—not too little—
before they were able to see the target, was the third-most common error
364 The World Wars

for both groups, after the sins of bunching up when on patrol and making
too much noise at night. These are all sins of hyperactivity. “Freezing,” an
indicator of nonfiring (for whatever reason), came only ninth.95 Captured
Japanese soldiers’ diaries tried to make sense of what they perceived as
American overfiring by saying the Americans were paid according to the
number of times they fired!96 In modern warfare, blazing away is like non-
firing in the sense that both are fear-induced risk avoidance, the point
being not to reveal the location of one’s body to the enemy. And who can
blame a soldier for either tactic, given the range and lethality of modern
weapons? This was reasonably fearful behavior, not the result of moral
qualms.
Joseph Blake adds the autobiographies of thirty-three ground
troops.97 The first horror they usually experienced was the sight of a mu-
tilated corpse, friend or foe. This came before their own first action, and
the sight was often a deliberate softening-up strategy used by officers. As
a consequence, “most men, after exposure to violence, are able to commit
violence with no after-shock. Men report their first kill (after exposure)
casually, as part of an ongoing action, or if they say anything about it,
talk in terms of killing as a ‘natural function,’ ‘instinctive’ etc.” Blake
quotes the initial ambivalence of the American war hero Audie Murphy:
“It is not easy to shed the idea that human life is sacred. . . . If there was
any doubt in my mind, it began to vanish in the shell explosion that
killed Griffin, and it disappeared altogether when I saw the two men
crumple by the railroad track. Now I have shed my first blood, I feel no
qualms; no pride; no remorse. There is only a weary indifference. ”98
Bourke draws on psychiatric reports and the diaries and letters of
twenty-eight British, American, and Australian soldiers in the two world
wars and Vietnam.99 This is a small and rather varied sample, and she
does not quantify, but her discussion is acute. In her first pages, she says
that war gave some the sense of awesome power, the “initiation into the
power of life and death.” One U.S. veteran says killing was thrilling, call-
ing the bazooka and machine gun a “magic sword” or a “grunt’s Excali-
bur” because “all you do is move that finger so imperceptibly, just a wish
flashing across your mind like a shadow, not even a full brain synapse,
and poof! in a blast of sound and energy and light a truck or a house or
even people disappear, everything flying and settling back into dust.”100
Bourke adds: “This book contains innumerable examples of men like
the shy and sensitive First World War soldier who recounted that the
first time he stuck a German with his bayonet was ‘gorgeously satisfying
 The World Wars 365

. . . exultant satisfaction.’ ” A lieutenant found that bayoneting Prussians

was “beautiful work.” “Sickening yet exhilarating butchery” was reported
to be “joy unspeakable” by a New Zealand sapper.101 Ferguson agreed,
asserting (though without presenting any evidence) that combat was
often seen as exciting, adventurous, even fun, because of the danger:
“Many men simply took pleasure in killing”; “Men kept fighting because
they wanted to.”102
Bourke then approvingly presents Marshall’s work on nonfiring, al-
though it emphasizes the exact opposite sentiments to those she has just
detailed. She recounts just two instances of “passive combat personnel.”
One was World War I soldiers practicing live-and-let-live. We have seen
that this was a rational response to fear, not an expression of moral
qualms. Her second case is of World War II American paratroopers
caught in a defile by a causeway in Normandy in June 1944. Anthony
King gives us more details. This battalion had repeatedly distinguished
itself in action. Yet although now receiving incoming fire inflicting casu-
alties, the paratroopers did not return fire, despite urging by their com-
mander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole. The official report said they
were pinned down, but Cole was more critical. He said they would fire
only if he or another officer was standing right behind them, yelling.
“Not one man in twenty-five voluntarily used his weapon,” he emphasized.
But Cole saved the situation by brandishing his bayonet and shouting
“Charge!” As he charged forward, a quarter of the battalion immediately
followed him, and more joined in as the charge gathered momentum.
The German positions were taken, though with heavy American casual-
ties.103 Cole won the Medal of Honor for that charge, and in the end his
men were not as passive as he suggested. Sadly, Cole was killed before he
could receive the medal. He did not suggest that moral qualms caused
his soldiers to fail to fire.
In the third and most penetrating section of Bourke’s book, she
never again mentions Marshall or passivity or nonfiring. Nor are there
the promised “innumerable examples” of men enjoying killing. Soldiers
had more complex feelings about the enemy. Said one: “Face to face with
them you couldn’t feel a personal hatred, they were like ourselves, ma-
nipulated by statesmen and generals and war-mongers. We were—they
were—cannon fodder.”104 But this did not stop them from killing. Dur-
ing Allied bombardments they could feel pity for enemy soldiers, while
also declaring that they would kill as many of them as they could. Bourke
adds: “With occasional exceptions most servicemen killed the enemy
366 The World Wars

with a sense that they were performing a slightly distasteful but neces-
sary job.”105 She says war allows men to commit legitimate killing that in
peacetime they would view with horror. They often felt they should feel
guilty for killing, but this feeling made them feel their humanity was re-
stored, and this helped them return to civilian life. “Men who did not
feel guilt were somehow less than human, or were insane: guiltless killers
were immoral.”106
Thus, moral qualms among Allied soldiers were felt but were mas-
saged into willingness to kill, although rarely with enthusiasm. Reports
of German or Japanese atrocities also helped reduce remorse, as did rac-
ism among the soldiers in Asian but not European theaters. But Bourke
also emphasizes Allied atrocities against prisoners and civilians in all
three wars. Most soldiers disapproved of them in principle, for military
norms had created a clear distinction between legitimate and illegitimate
killing. This “maintained men’s sanity throughout the war and helped
insulate them against agonizing guilt and numbing brutality.”107 But
practices differed. Among Blake’s cases, half mention between them
twenty-five cases of killing prisoners, and five more speak of it as a gen-
eral practice. Even when such killing was stopped by an officer, no action
was taken against the perpetrators.108 The issue presented genuine dilem-
mas for soldiers. Should prisoners be killed if guarding them would re-
move soldiers from battle, or if they might escape and rejoin their army?
Yes, of course, said most—as they had at Agincourt in 1415. They could
sympathize with the killers, aware that if ordered to commit atrocities
themselves, they might have also complied.
Yet sadism was rare and few frontline soldiers were motivated by
deep hatred for the enemy. Bourke sees more hatred in the rear. Women
were no less aggressive than men, she says, in a blow to feminist essen-
tialism. A large body of research shows that those firing from a distance
had more hateful views of the enemy than those firing at short range;
that rear troops expressed greater hatred of the enemy; that frontline
troops treated prisoners better than did rear troops; that U.S. civilians
hated the enemy more than did U.S. troops; that troops still in the
United States hated the enemy more than those in war theaters; and that
hatred for the Japanese was stronger among Americans fighting in Eu-
rope than among those fighting in the Pacific theater.109 “Anger comes
out,” says Collins, “where there is little or no confrontational fear.”110
Finally, contradicting her earlier remarks, Bourke says extreme ag-
gression was rare. Soldiers described this as men losing self-control: “He
 The World Wars 367

lost his head completely,” “His blood was up,” he was acting out of his
real character, they said—just as American Civil War soldiers had said.
That murderous aggression was an aberration comforted them. But “sur-
vivor’s guilt,” remorse for having lived while one’s comrades died, far
outweighed “killer’s guilt.”111
King suggests that Marshall’s conclusions had come from his inter-
view with Lieutenant Colonel Cole and a collective discussion with an
infantry battalion that had withstood a Japanese assault on the tiny
Makin Islands of the Pacific.112 Marshall reported that only the thirty-six
machine gunners of a battalion of over two hundred men fired at the
enemy, and dead Japanese were found only in front of these machine gun
positions.113 The battalion had mistakenly thought that the Japanese had
already been defeated and had prepared only weak defensive positions on
landing on the island. When the Japanese unexpectedly attacked, there
was panic and most of them went to ground. The official history offers
an excuse for their passivity in terms of the layout of the battlefield, but
King doubts this, for the battalion’s performance had been inadequate
on the previous day when panic had generated massive overfiring. He
adds that a subsequent assault on Kwajalein Island saw minimal firing
from another battalion in which machine gunners and one active ser-
geant saved the day. Obviously, there were fallible battalions in the
American army. But in Marshall’s own account there is no hint of moral
qualms, and in his other portrayals of engagements, American soldiers
performed quite well—with no cases of moral qualms.
King emphasizes passivity among American troops in Europe.114 Of-
ficers complained of units pinned down by fire, unwilling to reveal their
positions by firing back, overreliant on artillery, conceding field fire supe-
riority to the Germans. King lambastes British, Canadian, and American
troops in Normandy, blaming poor officer quality and inadequate infan-
try training. He, Francis Steckel, and Martin van Creveld say that Allied
soldiers were inferior to the German enemy, being overly dependent on
air and artillery superiority.115 This was probably true for most of the war,
contrary to the democratic triumphalism of Reiter and Stam.116 Of
course, by then the Germans were scraping the bottom of the manpower
barrel and facing defeat. But none of these authors makes any reference
to moral qualms.
Robert Engen details a survey of Canadian officers in Normandy
immediately after a battle. The officers complained about many things,
but not nonfiring. Two-thirds thought the rate of fire was adequate,
368 The World Wars

one-third complained of far too much firing. Most officers envied their
German counterparts’ ability to achieve a limited, controlled, and accu-
rate rate of fire.117 Craig Cameron’s study of U.S. Marines in the Pacific
theater finds no evidence of nonfiring or passivity. On the contrary, the
Guadalcanal campaign was full of wounded or sick men who should have
been hospitalized. A marine would not “crap out” if that would put a
heavier burden on his buddies. Marines were an elite force, of course. He
says that on Okinawa, a terrible encounter forced more men to leave the
lines for the hospital, but without any suggestion of skulking. Cameron
concludes that Marshall’s “is a specious argument to assuage moral sensi-
bilities among civilians.” In reality, he says, “the killer exists in men all
along and has simply to be brought out and encouraged. Americans
proved as adept and ruthless in the exercise of violence as their totalitar-
ian enemies.”118 Performance and firing rates obviously varied between
military units, although moral qualms seem to have been absent.
Ben Shalit, a military psychologist, thought he might corroborate
Marshall’s nonfiring with Israeli soldiers in Middle Eastern wars. But he
failed. Nearly 100 percent of ordinary infantry and elite commandos
fired when ordered or when circumstances demanded. He also finds
overfiring, which is effective in relieving fear, since the drumming and
thudding of the weapon covers up the throbbing of fear within the sol-
dier. Shalit describes the commander of an Israeli commando raid count-
ing the bullet holes in enemy bodies and reprimanding his soldiers: “Is it
necessary to drill a man with 25 bullets when 2 would do?”119
Finally comes an oft-cited study by the British Defense Operational
Analysis Establishment’s field studies division, which in 1986 is said to
have examined the killing effectiveness of military units in over one hun-
dred nineteenth- and twentieth-century battles. The research compared
real data from these battles with hit rates by test subjects in simulated bat-
tles using pulsed laser weapons that could neither inflict nor receive harm
from a virtual “enemy.” The test subjects killed far more of the simulated
enemy than the number reflected in the real historical casualty rates. Yet
the subjects could experience neither fear nor loathing in this experimen-
tal setting, nor the noise, blindness, chaos, and ducking and weaving of ac-
tual battle. It was a tension-free game of skill, a demonstration of the
superiority of rationality in contexts far removed from reality. Moreover, I
have failed to find the original report of this experiment and note that all
who have cited it use virtually identical words. It may not exist except as
an internet myth, but if it does, we should probably ignore it.
 The World Wars 369

None of these studies mentions moral qualms as a reason for passiv-

ity under fire, except for Bourke’s account of how qualms are overcome.
Fear was the problem, though soldiers could manage it. The generals
recognized this was the most they could expect. U.S. General George
Patton reputedly said, “Courage is fear holding on a minute longer,” and
U.S. General Omar Bradley allegedly said, “Bravery is the capacity to
perform properly even when scared half to death.”

Surveys of American Soldiers: Buddies, Latent Ideology,

and Task Completion
The surveys by Stouffer and his colleagues found that American soldiers’
primary sense of solidarity and loyalty was not to country, army, or regi-
ment, but to the small group of comrades with whom they shared their
life in and out of battle. They fought not to let their buddies down, thus
enforcing group norms and supporting the individual under battle
stress.120 “Buddy theory” has been repeatedly endorsed; many soldiers
have said how much of their lives they shared with comrades, and how
intimate were their relations. Sebastian Junger has vividly expressed this
among U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan: “The Army might screw you and
your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the
shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable
and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is
a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of
it changes a person profoundly.”121 Of course, Islamist terrorists also
experience this.
Soldiers sometimes feared being called a coward by their buddies
more than they feared death. Social fear mitigated existential fear, as we
saw in the U.S. Civil War. Doubts have arisen in high-casualty warfare,
in which primary groups are broken up with the arrival of unknown re-
cruits, as in the Civil War and among U.S. Marines in Okinawa. It was
especially so in the German army on the Eastern Front in World War II.
Yet these Germans carried on fighting and dying right to the end, driven
back even to the gates of Berlin. Bartov thinks this runs contrary to
buddy theory, doubly so because the Wehrmacht had been originally
recruited on a local basis, which at first intensified buddy relations.122
Yet for Stouffer and his colleagues, long-term friendships did not much
matter. It was their mutual interdependence in battle that generated inti-
macy. Charles Moskos observes: “The intensity of primary-group ties so
370 The World Wars

often reported in combat units are best viewed as mandatory necessities

arising from immediate life-and-death exigencies.”123 The guy next to
you covered your back, eased tensions with black humor, cursed enter-
tainingly, lied for you if you disobeyed an order or killed a civilian, cared
for you if you were wounded, and if you died he would send your per-
sonal possessions to your family. Mutuality in life and death generated
intense intimacy, which some described as love. New recruits quickly be-
came buddies. They had to, or they died. The soldier, whatever his com-
mitment to the cause or his obedience to orders, had as his primary goal
staying alive. This could not be done without his primary group.
Stouffer and his colleagues also tried to establish how important
buddies were. In 1944 they asked combat infantry in Europe what kept
them going. The most common response was a drive to end the task or
to get the war done (44 percent). Not letting your buddies down came a
distant second (14 percent), followed by thoughts of home and loved
ones (10 percent), and a sense of duty and self-respect (9 percent). Ideo-
logical reasons like overt patriotism totaled only 5 percent. Task comple-
tion, duty, and self-respect could be combined into an implicitly patriotic
sense of institutionalized moral obligation, a latent ideology among two-
thirds of the soldiers. Edward Shils said morale in small groups presup-
posed “a set of generalized moral predispositions or sense of obligation
. . . some measure of identification with the collectivity and some sense of
generalized obligation and readiness to acknowledge the legitimacy of its
demands in numerous particular situations. . . . The soldiers who thought
first of getting the job done must, in some way, have accepted the legiti-
macy of the ‘job’ and felt some sense of obligation to carry it out.”124
This sense of getting the job done enabled focus on each task con-
fronting the soldier, each piece of ground to cover, each set of move-
ments, each sequence of firing, each minutia of ritual. Together they
could partially blot out the chaos and terror all around. For the majority
of the war, most German soldiers probably performed better than most
American soldiers, but this was to change. Peter Mansoor and Robert
Rush studied high-casualty U.S. infantry battles in Belgium in Novem-
ber 1944.125 The casualties in Rush’s regiment amounted to 87 percent of
its original strength. Both agree with Bartov that such casualties pro-
duced the collapse of the buddy system, but they say that nevertheless
the GIs grimly held on, focused on task completion each hour of each
day, helped by the knowledge that they were advancing into Germany
and would win the war soon and go home. The Germans, used to offen-
 The World Wars 371

sive successes, lacked comparable confidence in retreating defense, and

ultimately they, not the Americans, collapsed. Battle context matters.
American soldiers shared a taboo against flag-waving patriotism.
They declared that such “bullshit” was what civilians spouted, ignorant of
the realities of war.126 They were uncomfortable with civilian notions of
“heroism,” knowing their own imperfect behavior. They disliked having
“heroes” as comrades, since their conspicuous bravery drew enemy fire
like a magnet to the whole group. Most American soldiers had a “tacit
and a fairly deep conviction that we were on the right side, and that the
war, once we were in it, was necessary.” This institutionalized ideology
was important to Allied troops, as it was early in the Vietnam War.127 Sol-
diers were not so committed if they thought the war was either unjust or
unwinnable, as was common in the later phases of the Vietnam War.
Morale could not be maintained forever. There was a learning curve.
Many novices found it difficult at first to kill a clearly visible enemy, but
they almost always did fire, and then they got used to it. They became
“battle-wise,” effective task-completing soldiers doing their duty, after
about ten days of battle, at peak efficiency after around twenty-five days.
But combat went on and on. Though historical battles had often brought
as many casualties as modern ones, they occurred over much less time—
hours or a day or two at most. There was then a long period until the
next battle. Soldiers had to gear themselves up for one single traumatic
event at a time. In contrast, modern battles have ground on and the out-
come remained inconclusive. Beset by constant stress, soldiers declined
in fighting spirit. After about forty days of battle, they were emotionally
shattered, kept their heads down, and did the minimum. Patrols lay
down somewhere safe, imaginary ambushes were claimed, sickness and
self-wounding rates increased. Campaign cycle effectiveness was main-
tained for up to 140 or 180 or 200 days, say different authorities, but
then the soldier felt acute incapacitating neurosis, becoming so hyper-
sensitive to shell fire, overtly cautious, and jittery that he was ineffective.
Of British World War II casualties, 10–20 percent were said by the
authorities to be psychiatric. Many soldiers exposed to continuous com-
bat virtually broke down.128 U.S. military psychiatrists said of the soldier:
“Mental defects became so extreme that he could not be counted on to
relay a verbal order. He remained in or near his slit trench, and during
acute actions took little or no part, trembling constantly.”129 Yet most sol-
diers reduced their commitment, took fewer risks, and suffered. A more
extreme indicator of unwillingness to fight is desertion, though it is
372 The World Wars

greatly affected by whether the soldier is near or far from home. Deser-
tion rates in World War II were mostly around 5–6 percent, at the low
end for most wars—and lower than in peacetime because soldiers were
abroad. German army desertions rapidly increased through 1944 to 21
percent—end-of-war demoralization in addition to soldiers on leave sim-
ply failing to return.
The lethality of weapons meant soldiers were no longer standing in
massed columns and lines. They would be instantly massacred if they
did. They were dispersed in cover over the battlefield. “Where the effec-
tive soldier on the linear battlefield had to be an automaton, the effective
soldier on the dispersed battlefield had to be autonomous.”130 Military
training involved less drilling and more emphasis on task completion, as
both Marshall and Stouffer had recommended. Each unit is set a task,
each soldier is trained to accomplish a subtask within that. He is taught
that to survive, the men of a unit need each other to perform their tasks,
which officially encouraged the buddy system. It is hammered into sol-
diers that if they stay focused on task achievement, they are most likely
to survive. Soldiers are comforted if they feel they can control their sur-
vival. After long exposure to combat, however, the soldier may perceive
that he cannot. Then he loses focus on task accomplishment and his mo-
rale sinks.

Fighter Pilots: World War II and Korea

More evidence comes from fighter pilots in World War II. I add pilots in
Korea because their experience was similar, and many had also flown in
World War II. Fighter pilots are interesting because, unlike the infantry,
they are autonomous, up alone in the sky. Even in their standard four-
plane formations, the four pilots had to make their own split-second de-
cisions in dogfights.131 In the Korean War dogfights were even faster, for
this was the first war involving jet planes, American F-86 Sabres against
MiG-15s.
There was great inequality in killing. Only a few pilots shot down
most of the enemy. Aces, those who shot down five or more enemy
planes, formed only 5 percent of all U.S. fighter pilots, yet they downed
37–68 percent of enemy planes, a number that varied according to the-
ater. Seventy-five percent of pilots had no kills at all.132 The British fig-
ures for the Battle of Britain are not quite so skewed: 39 percent of pilots
shot down at least one enemy plane, 15 percent more than one, and
 The World Wars 373

8 percent qualified as aces, having shot down five or more. Collins sug-
gests this supports Marshall’s arguments about nonfiring and perhaps
moral qualms.133
I disagree. There were four reasons for the uneven distribution of
kills.

1. Flying was an extraordinarily taxing job. High accident rates

not due to combat killed 6,000 RAF personnel in World War II
(including bomber crews).134 Combat was much more difficult.
Making split-second decisions at high speed in a juddering
plane was needed to outmaneuver an enemy pilot and to get
inside the potential kill zone in his rear, when both planes were
traveling at 560 kilometers per hour, and over 725 in Korea.
The skill and strength to fire steadily while maneuvering were
required to counter the enemy’s evasive response and to avoid
threats from other enemy planes. The crucial decision-making
periods lasted two seconds. “Situational awareness” and the
ability to perceive and analyze rapidly moving objects in a
three-dimensional environment were rare skills.135 Pilots rap-
idly trained and thrust into battle failed to shoot down enemy
planes because this skill level was beyond them. One American
flyer in Europe estimated that “there were probably 20 per
cent or so of our Group pilots on a mission who would aggres-
sively seek combat. Another large block—60 per cent—would,
when conditions were right, prove to be moderately effective.
Then there were those that were of little use in air-to-air com-
bat no matter what the conditions of encounter happened to
be.”136 Similar figures were given for Korea.137 So skill levels
helped produce different firing and killing rates.
2. This produced a statistical artifact. Many novices, especially if
low-skilled, were quickly casualties, and so they never fired
before they died or were transferred out for poor perfor-
mance. A continuous flow of short-termers increased the total
number of pilots but barely increased the number of kills. A
few barely competent pilots did survive long-term, capable of
keeping in formation and little else, protected by luck and by
comrades.
3. Most World War II missions, especially American ones, were
flown in the last two years of the war, when the Luftwaffe and
374 The World Wars

the Japanese Air Force were largely destroyed. There were

now more Allied fighters, which increased the number of
pilots who never made kills. Most of their later missions were
to escort the bombers over Germany and Japan, to deter the
enemy from sending up their last fighters to attack the bomb-
ers. Ground flak fire also concentrated on bombers, not fight-
ers. Most fighter missions never encountered an enemy
fighter. In their four-year war even the American aces fired in
only about one third of missions.138 In the last two years of
the war, the average American fighter pilot could expect to
meet a German fighter once in twenty-five missions. This also
increased the number of nonfirers and nonkillers.
4. There were selection biases. The best planes were assigned to
the best pilots, and the best of the best were given the leader
role. The standard American flight pattern (RAF patterns dif-
fered slightly) consisted of four planes, a first “element” of the
leader and his wingman, plus the leader of a second element
and his wingman. The first leader’s role was to shoot down
enemy planes, and his wingman’s role was to protect his back.
The second element leader might join in if the opportunity
arose, but both wingmen were explicitly forbidden to fire un-
less an emergency arose. Thus, the best pilots were entrusted
with the leader positions, and in Korea the leaders got 82 per-
cent of the claimed kills. On rare occasions wingmen got kills
too, but over half the pilots on missions almost never got a
chance of downing the enemy.139 So it was fully intended
that only a few pilots would get a disproportionate number of
the kills.

A further study is often quoted claiming that half the F-86 pilots
never fired their guns, and of those who had fired, only 10 percent had
ever hit anything—astonishing figures. This claim was made in an article
by two military psychologists, Blair Sparks and Oliver Neiss.140 But they
give no evidence for the assertion, instead proceeding to the policy pro-
posals that dominate their article—more understanding of pilots’ psy-
chology (and more employment for psychologists!). It clearly serves the
authors’ purpose if they can claim such failure. Such a finding would
surely be widely discussed, but I found no such evidence or discussion.
Until a real study is found, I am skeptical.
 The World Wars 375

A further possible indicator of pilot frailty is the aborted sortie, a

pilot turning back from the mission before combat. In World War II the
U.S. Eighth Air Force calculated this for bombers. In January 1944, 70
percent of the 6,770 bombers completed their operational missions. Of
the 30 that did not, 61 percent turned back for weather-related prob-
lems, and 29 percent for mechanical reasons. That means 3 percent of
the total number of pilots might have been faking it. The RAF total rate
of abortions among fighters was about 10 percent.141 On landing, the
aborting RAF plane was examined and the pilot had to defend himself
before a panel of officers. If pilots repeated abortions, alarm bells went
off about possible “Low Moral Fibre” and the pilot might be transferred.
The social pressures on pilots to perform their duty was intense in segre-
gated airbase communities. This forced some who should have turned
back because of plane problems to continue with the mission, and with
defective speed or maneuverability they might be shot down.
No study suggests that failure to shoot came from moral qualms.
Pilots respected enemy pilots, but during fast maneuvering they rarely
saw them clearly. Werrell gives us Korean combat stories for over thirty
pilots. Only one says he felt bad after shooting up a MiG. He saw the
pilot was in agony, trapped in a burning cockpit. His response was to put
him out of his agony by killing him. Yet one norm was shared by both
sides: once a pilot ejected, he would not be shot at. Kills meant planes,
not pilots. Blake says U.S. World War II pilots describe the plane, not
the pilot, as the enemy and even refer to it as “he” and “him.”142
So it was mainly technical, selection, and mission reasons that made
kills so imbalanced, although perhaps around 10 percent of pilots were
prevented from engaging in effective combat by fear and tension. They
had every reason to be fearful, given the death rate. But once in a dog-
fight, pilots had no time for fear. Total task absorption brought exhilara-
tion and thrust fear onto the back burners. It was not so for the more
passive bomber crews who feared death more, although they were only
half as likely to be killed. Mark Wells says that British bomber crews had
“occasional reservations” about the civilian casualties they were inflict-
ing, but he does not mention anyone failing to bomb.143
A Korean War ace said after his first kills: “I was so excited that the
thought of having killed two human beings didn’t enter my mind. In the
first place, I had been spurred to action out of anger; in the second place,
the planes I had just shot down were objects, not people.” Sherwood
says pilots in Korea enjoyed pleasure and pride in their kills.144 That all
376 The World Wars

countries’ aces were feted as national heroes gave them an incentive to kill.
“It’s love of the sport rather than sense of duty that makes you go on with-
out minding how much you are shot up,” said one.145 In Korea pilots volun-
teered to extend their tours and fly on holidays. Casualties in Korea were
low, for this was a short war fought with more pilots, many with World War
II experience. Deaths were about 10 percent, though a little higher among
pilots with kills, and higher still among aces.146 The pilots in slower fighter-
bombers faced ground fire. Sherwood notes that 147 fighters were lost in
air combat, but 816 planes of all types were shot down by ground fire.147
In World War II, pilot casualties were enormous. RAF Bomber Com-
mand (which included fighters) calculated that 51 percent of all aircrew
were killed or missing as a result of combat operations, 12 percent were
killed in accidents, and 12 percent were shot down and became prisoners
of war. Only 24 percent came away unscathed, a very low figure. Casual-
ties in the U.S. Eighth Air Force in Europe were similar: 57 percent killed
or missing, 17 percent lost through wounds or accidents, only 25 percent
unscathed.148 German and Japanese pilot casualties were even higher once
they began losing the air war. Their courage in carrying on was suicidal.
Despite the greater probability of death, the morale of American air
crews was higher than it was among infantry, and fighter pilots’ morale
was higher than other air crews’.149 This was due to pride in their skill; the
autonomy and freedom they enjoyed in the sky; the ability to fight back
against all attacks; their high status as “heroes” during the war; and the
segregated, comradely, and controlling community in which they lived. In
the caste system of air forces, the aces enjoyed the highest status and had
every incentive to keep on claiming more kills.150 Ideology didn’t come
into it. In Korea, pilots developed what Sherwood calls “flight suit atti-
tude”: “a sense of self-confidence and pride that verged on arrogance. . . .
The aircraft of preference was the high-performance, single-seat fighter.
. . . This culture placed a premium on cockiness and informality. A fighter
pilot spent more time in a flight suit than in a uniform. In his world, status
was based upon flying ability, not degrees, rank, or ‘officer’ skills. . . . Mili-
tary ancestry and institutional traditions were irrelevant to him; instead,
elitism in the Air Force was defined by skill, courage, and plane type.”151
Drilling and discipline were largely replaced by a teacher-pupil rela-
tionship during training. Higher officers then ordered their subordinates
to perform the missions, but in the sky they were autonomous. Their
high morale gave them that extraordinary courage which has impressed
all commentators. They went into battle facing a high risk of death,
 The World Wars 377

under great emotional stress, but without flinching. This was the peak of
courage, not the sudden adrenaline-charged act of the infantry hero, but
a two- to three-hour feat of endurance, repeated many times, without the
descending rhythm of commitment of long-serving infantrymen.

Conclusion
This half century contained the two deadliest wars in history, fought by
millions of soldiers. There were a few “heroes,” adrenaline-fueled sol-
diers rushing headlong at the enemy, while the other extreme of moral
qualms at killing was also rare. Alas, qualms usually came after the war,
too late to save lives but disturbing the mental balance of veterans. Sol-
diers usually believed that this was a just war. In the second war “tran-
scendent ideology” was important in the Wehrmacht and in imperial
Japanese forces (as we saw in chapter 7), and was absolutely crucial in the
Red Army. Among the Western Allies such overt ideology was rare in ei-
ther war. Dominant instead was a combination of immanent and institu-
tionalized ideology providing latent patriotic morale, which was linked
to a sense of duty in completing a necessary task. Then add buddy pres-
sures and a sense that eventual victory was coming. They were enough to
keep fear manageable and restrict shirking to keeping one’s head down.
In long campaigns the pressure ground the soldier down, often ending in
psychological degradation. Since the enemy was experiencing the same
decline, the war effort was not threatened. Fighter pilots differed, since
for them task completion was enjoyable and kills brought them high sta-
tus as warriors. These rewards made them genuinely courageous, willing
to accept the higher level of risk their role entailed.
This tells us little about human nature, except how malleable it is.
But it does tell us how mighty social power relations are, capable of dis-
ciplining men into behavior that would be unthinkable to them in peace-
time: repeatedly trying to kill others while exposing themselves to risk of
death or mutilation. Women had a different war experience. Those in the
forces were sometimes exposed to danger, though not in the front lines,
except in the Red Army, but most women were required only to offer
support to their men and to move into their jobs. But for most men who
fought, experiencing war from the ground up was a socially induced hell.
The second world war was a rare just war, rational for the defenders and
reinforced by a just peace settlement and a balance of power that ensured
fewer interstate wars thereafter.
 chapter thirteen
Fear and Loathing on the
Battlefield III
Communist Wars

T
he main postwar struggle was between the United States
and the Soviet Union, which had taken over from fascism as
a rival for world domination. Despite a scare or two, the
Cold War saw mutually pragmatic behavior, scaling down the
threat of nuclear war, agreeing, often implicitly, to understandings that
deflected conflict to confrontation between proxies within each super-
power’s zone of interest. Overall, American and Soviet foreign policy was
bad news for many individual countries of the south, but it was good
news in diminishing the chances of nuclear war. Fear of another major
war was the main deterrent. Yet there were many smaller, often covert
armed interventions by both sides. Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan
found 215 cases between 1946 and 1975 when U.S. administrations used
armed force short of actual war—that is, MIDs—to achieve their politi-
cal objectives around the world. They were successful at attaining their
objectives in 73 percent of cases after six months, though the success rate
declined to 44 percent after three years, a rather mixed record.1 Kaplan
found 190 Soviet interventions between 1944 and 1979.2 Only in Eastern
Europe and Afghanistan were these major interventions; otherwise the
Soviets were rather cautious. Again there were rather mixed outcomes.
But attaining American or Soviet objectives did not necessarily benefit
the peoples at the receiving end.

378
 Communist Wars 379

Chapter 5 of volume 4 of The Sources of Social Power analyzed Ameri-

can foreign policy during the Cold War, concluding that in some regions
it was irrational, blinded by an anticommunist ideology that saw foreign
left-of-center movements as demons or dupes, their activities encouraging
communism or anarchy. U.S. administration policy was to undermine
them, covertly or openly, by financing, arming, and supplying logistical aid
to rightist states and armed groups. Occasionally U.S. forces intervened
directly. Such policies perversely pushed liberals and social democrats in
these countries further to the left, occasionally into the embrace of the
Soviet Union, weakening the chances of implementing much-needed re-
forms that would have brought the United States more allies and a better
business environment for American firms.
There were two major hot wars in the Cold War period, in Korea
and Vietnam. Although they embodied a traditional geopolitical struggle
between great powers, they were also struggles between rival transcen-
dent ideologies, one seeking an eventually communist world, the other a
world of capitalist democracy—although in reality the Soviets did not re-
semble socialist ideals, nor did their allies, while the United States was
not cultivating regimes resembling democracy. The United States was
fully engaged in these two wars, as was China in one of them. Soviet par-
ticipation was less direct, primarily through proxies, covert actions,
and sending supplies. The United States treated its enemies in both
wars as proxies for a Soviet-led world order. The ideologies were trans-
mitted to their armed forces but to greatly differing degrees, as we will
now see.

The Korean War

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was highly experienced,
first from its long war against the Japanese and then in the Chinese Civil
War, ended in 1949. Many soldiers in the final Manchurian campaign of
these wars had been Koreans fighting against Japanese subjugation of
their homeland. After World War II, the Korean peninsula was divided at
the thirty-eighth parallel in a truce between North and South Korean
dictatorships, communist and capitalist. Americans advising the South
missed an opportunity to pressure for land reform, which would have
eroded communist support in the South, perhaps deterring the North’s
invasion. The United States remedied this error after the Korean War.
But two Koreas could have continued to exist without war.
380 Communist Wars

From 1946 to 1950 insurrections swept the South, causing perhaps

100,000 casualties, mainly through massive government repression. So in
June 1950 North Korean forces invaded the South to assist the rebels
and create a single communist state over the whole peninsula. The
North’s ruler, Kim Il Sung, perceived that the southern government, led
by Syngman Rhee, was weakened by faction fighting and had a corrupt
and mutinous army. He was also encouraged by the fact that U.S. Secre-
tary of State Dean Acheson had not included Korea in what was called
the U.S defense perimeter. Maybe the United States would stay out of
Korea. Kim Il Sung had actually waited too long (for the insurrection
was almost over) for the go-ahead from an initially hesitant Stalin, but
Kim confidently told him that he could ignite an “internal explosion” in
the South. Mao was not involved. Kim’s preparations were secretive, thus
giving the United States no chance to warn that it might retaliate. Kim
assumed a lightning strike would force the Americans, who had a small
force in the South, into a conciliatory response. If it did not, he believed
Stalin would help him fight. Yet Stalin had no intention of committing
himself to war. His idea was to fight through his North Korean proxy.
He saw gain in either inflicting a humiliating withdrawal on the United
States or in embroiling that nation in a costly war. The latter was the
outcome.
The core of North Korea’s army, the NKPA, had fought against the
Japanese in China and Manchuria. On June 25, 1950, 75,000 NKPA
troops swept down the peninsula and captured Seoul after three days.
U.S. troops supported the South Koreans from July, but the North Ko-
reans drove U.S. and South Korean forces southward. U.S. forces found
themselves embroiled in a civil war far from home under the aegis of the
United Nations. When the Soviets, who had earlier walked out of the
UN, reappeared and vetoed the war in the Security Council, the United
States took the decision to the UN General Assembly, then dominated
by U.S. allies. The United States acted in support of an ally, as it would
repeatedly do over the next decades, in the hope of stopping the spread
of communism and maintaining U.S. power across the world. Vital na-
tional interests were not at stake. Anticommunists led by Senator Joseph
McCarthy had denounced President Truman as soft on communism, so
Truman had to show his toughness for reasons of domestic policy. The
Korean invasion came just after a successful Soviet atomic bomb test, the
communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, and the Sino-Soviet mutual
defense pact. The “who lost China” recriminations roiling Washington
 Communist Wars 381

could not be allowed to transition into “who lost Korea,” although many
in Washington knew Syngman Rhee was no democrat. American leaders
would not describe their country as “imperial,” but they were seeking
global domination and like leaders of all empires could not stomach the
“humiliation” inflicted by communists on retreating U.S. forces. The
global stature of the United States was threatened. So factors both politi-
cal and reputational, both personal and national, made American inter-
vention inevitable. Kim was on his own.
The NKPA was initially superior. Its core was experienced in moun-
tain warfare, ideologically committed, and faced by a poorly organized
South Korean army (ROK) that featured a corrupt officer class and low
morale. The NKPA adapted the political practices of the Chinese PLA,
which I will detail later—cell organization, collective political meetings,
and much ideological instruction, although this was somewhat undercut
by its harsh discipline and inequalities of rank. General Douglas MacAr-
thur, commanding U.S. troops in Korea, underestimated it, boasting, “I
can handle it with one arm tied behind my back.”3 Yet, keeping to the
hills, the NKPA infiltrated between enemy forces, bypassing the roads
dominated by American communications and control systems, and
forced a series of retreats. Only around the Pusan enclave in the far
south were the Americans and the ROK finally able to form a defensive
line. The United States was now pouring in forces, followed by other
UN contingents, and the NKPA had to frontally attack them. Its losses
of men and materiel mounted, but its attacks kept coming, reflecting sol-
diers capable of great sacrifice. By this time the Americans had shifted
their initial disdain for the NKPA and rated them highly as opponents.
Defeat for America was unthinkable—but possible.
But in September 1950 General MacArthur launched an amphibious
landing farther north behind enemy lines, at Inchon, forcing the NKPA
into a two-front war for which it was ill-equipped. Outnumbered as well
as outgunned, exposed to massive American bombing, it retreated. The
National Security Council recommended that American forces stop at
the thirty-eighth parallel, which would be mission accomplished. But
Truman listened to the bellicose MacArthur, and the U.S. and UN forces
pressed on northward. The North Korean retreat became a rout. Kim
told Chinese General Peng Dehuai that his army was collapsing and that
he could communicate with fewer than 50,000 of his troops.4 Advance
parties of Americans reached the Yalu River on the Chinese border.
MacArthur had favored hot pursuit to prevent the NKPA from having
382 Communist Wars

time to regroup. But this also meant that the goal had shifted from re-
storing the prewar status quo to “liberating” North Korea from commu-
nism. A compliant United Nations passed the necessary supporting
resolution. It was folly.
MacArthur was on China’s doorstep, menacing Manchuria, which
contained much of China’s heavy industry. Mao was faced with U.S.
domination right up to his border. Chinese pride was infuriated that U.S.
soldiers were openly urinating into the Yalu River on the border. Few in
Washington believed the Chinese would fight, a belief that was the prod-
uct of American contempt for an underdeveloped country with a suppos-
edly third-rate army that was allegedly controlled by the Soviets—and
Stalin clearly did not want to fight. Some Americans who knew China
and Mao cautioned against aggression, but they were purged in the “who
lost China?” power struggle. Domestic political factionalism obstructed
rational thinking.
Mao was steeped in the “parabellum” tradition of Chinese strategic
thought discussed in chapter 6, but with the Marxist twist that armed
struggle would solve both class and international contradictions.5 His
foreign policy had been to restore Taiwan by force, but the U.S. fleet had
moved to protect it and China lacked an effective navy. Mao had to back
down and was transferring troops from south to north before the Korean
War loomed. Thus, he had the troops available locally to aid Kim. He
thought this was the moment to show Chinese power to the world, sur-
prising Stalin and stunning Truman and MacArthur. His covert prepara-
tions began just in case force was needed. A Chinese People’s Volunteer
Force had been formed, supposedly an autonomous army of volunteers, a
pure fiction enabling China to avoid declaring war on the United States.
The initial plan was to invade and stop near the thirty-eighth parallel.
But MacArthur’s push northward had been too rapid for this. In accor-
dance with parabellum doctrines of flexibility and deception, Mao shifted
to an invasion while concealing force size in order to lure U.S. troops
into action against what they would believe was only a small Chinese
force. Then the Americans would be enveloped and hurled back south-
ward, perhaps out of Korea altogether.
In late September and early October 1950, Mao made only vague
threats to the United States, and after October 13 he fell silent, feigning
weakness. This had the desired effect of luring MacArthur even more rap-
idly northward, leaving big gaps between his forward units and his commu-
nications and supply center. American forces were now stretched out over
 Communist Wars 383

large areas along both coasts. In late October, Mao ordered large PLA
forces quietly across the border. They moved secretively down the moun-
tain chain, their orders to continue disguising the army’s true size. A small
Chinese force engaged the Americans and then retreated, giving the im-
pression of weakness. Some Chinese soldiers were sent out to be captured
and give false information to the enemy. The idea was to bypass Mac­
Arthur’s advance units and envelop his force from the flanks and the rear.
The surprise mass attack of November 26 proved highly successful,
disorienting the Americans. It led to a defeat at the Chosin Reservoir
(Lake Changjin to the Chinese), unprecedented in the history of Ameri-
can forces—the consequence of American overconfidence. There was a
hasty U.S.-UN retreat southward, and the Chinese briefly took Seoul,
the South’s capital. But a counterattack brought the front lines back to
around the thirty-eighth and thirty-seventh parallels. The United States
by this point had abandoned hopes of seizing the whole of the peninsula
and shifted back to the original goal of restoring the antebellum status
quo. This was now also the PLA’s goal, aware that it did not have the
firepower to take more territory. Both limited their aspirations and sig-
naled willingness to negotiate. It took another two years of stalemated
fighting to secure a truce.

UN Forces
The contrast between the UN and Chinese armies was marked. The
South Korean ROK was the largest component of the allied forces. Its
troops began the war in poor shape, their morale low. They gradually
improved to the point where they could sometimes handle North Ko-
rean forces, though they remained inferior to Chinese forces. Of the
foreign UN forces, over 80 percent were American, mostly draftees.
Most did not know why they were fighting, nor were they told why.6 The
others were drawn from forty-one countries, mixing professional and
conscripted troops. Nearly 60,000 British soldiers constituted the sec-
ond-largest foreign force. Almost no one in the UN force believed
deeply in their cause in the way that soldiers in the American Civil War
and World War II had. Indeed, they reacted without much thought of
ideology in terms of survival on the battlefield. As one American recalled:

I didn’t feel I was defending the port of Pusan, or the rights of

the South Koreans, or the interests of the United States. I was
384 Communist Wars

simply trying to stay alive. To survive from one moment to the

next, to survive the day, to survive the next day. Some people are
exhilarated by combat. They love it. They seem to thrive on it. I
knew people like that. Most people though, ninety-nine percent
of them, are scared to death. Including myself. It’s only after it’s
all over that the grand design falls into place, and you begin to
see what you had a hand in doing.

The war hero Lewis Millett was among the 1 percent. He described a
bayonet charge in terms we have already encountered, overwhelmed by
emotions and adrenaline, completely without ideology:

I know I went berserk. When you hit someone in the throat with
a bayonet, another one in the head, you got blood spraying up all
over you, nobody’s going to stay rational. In a bayonet charge,
you’re not rational in the first place. . . . You can do things that
would normally be impossible. The adrenaline gets in there, and
you do things that are just physically not possible. During that
attack I stuck a Chinaman and threw him out of the foxhole on
my bayonet and stuck him again on the way down. Well, you
can’t do that normally. Then afterward I was so weak. You could
have touched me with your finger and I’d have fallen down.
After it was all over I sat down and couldn’t get up. I’d used up
all this tremendous energy doing all these things, and I was com-
pletely drained.7

King is scathing about the battle performance of this army, inade-

quately trained and unmotivated.8 Once the Chinese arrived on the bat-
tlefield, UN soldiers had a tendency to “bug out.” They ran away when
under attack, and they often went to ground in attack rather than press
on to Chinese positions, which would have provided them more cover.
Rudy Tomedi confirms this from interviews with U.S. veterans, and so
does Brent Watson for Canadian troops.9 None attributes poor perfor-
mance to moral qualms, though Watson mentions one Canadian who be-
came distressed after the war: “I knew I killed people, and sometimes I
have trouble about that. That’s the hard part about remembering. . . .
Knowing that I did that and my country didn’t really give a shit.”10 Fear
made these soldiers passive. The Chinese were scathing about the Amer-
ican infantry. But U.S. forces did not need high morale. They had enor-
 Communist Wars 385

mous technological superiority, and the generals used it ruthlessly in the

daytime. At night, when the planes, artillery, and tanks were blind, the
Chinese were in control and the Americans hunkered down.
S. L. A. Marshall wrote a report on American infantry morale in this
war. His methods seem to have been the same as before. He concluded
that the rate of fire by American troops in the Korean War was much
higher than in World War II, “well in excess of 50 percent of troops ac-
tually committed to ground where fire may be exchanged directly with
the enemy will make use of one weapon or another in the course of an
engagement.” He elaborated: “In the average infantry company in Korea,
between 12 and 20 percent of the men not only participate actively in
the firing, but exercise varying degrees of initiative in on-the-spot lead-
ing and taking personal action of a type that betters the unit position and
induces cohesion. In addition to this control force, there are between 25
and 35 percent of the men who take some part in the fire action, with
varying degrees of consistency, but without otherwise giving marked im-
pulse to the course of events. . . . This showing is a substantial improve-
ment over the participation averages among World War II troops.” He
added that most of the reasons for not firing were acceptable:

The infantry soldier, so commonly met with in World War II,

who made the stock answer: “I saw the enemy; I didn’t fire; I
don’t know why,” is strangely missing from the Korean scene. In
fact, this reply was not returned by a single man among the non-
firers. Among the reasons given by the non-firers were: “I didn’t
see an enemy target at any time and I thought it best to hold fire
until I did.” “Grenades were coming in at such a rate I couldn’t
get my head up.” “There was a rise of earth in front of me which
hid their people to view.” “I was captured from behind before I
saw anyone come against me.” “I was helping the sergeant get
the machine gun back into operation.” “There were so many of
them that I held fire, thinking they might pass us by.” “My gun
was frozen and I couldn’t find another.” And so on. All of these
explanations made sense in the situation.11

These are some of the legitimate reasons to not fire in modern

wars. Russell Glenn gives an overlapping list of reasons given by soldiers
in the Vietnam War.12 Such lists reduce substantially the residual number
of nonfirers driven by either fear or conscience. Marshall pronounced
386 Communist Wars

himself satisfied with the U.S. rate of infantry fire in Korea, which is
ironic given their poor overall performance, much worse than in World
War II.
The buddy system was again much in evidence, especially in defense,
but also in exerting some moral pressure against shirking. In one small
study, two-thirds of a sample of thirty American soldiers had paired with
a close buddy.13 Most had formed a friendship before electing to fight
regularly alongside each other. Raw replacements were usually taken care
of by an experienced veteran. A few disliked soldiers were excluded from
the buddy system, either because they were “duds,” shirkers who could
not be relied on for cover, or “heroes,” exposing soldiers around them-
selves to more risk. Both were regarded as selfish and dangerous—as in
earlier wars. The Western troops in Korea performed not with great dis-
tinction but with adequacy conferred by superiority in weaponry. Ironi-
cally, the Turkish contingent in the UN force, which lacked this
superiority, was said to have fought the hardest.

The Chinese PLA

The Chinese “volunteers” were overwhelmingly illiterate peasants. Even
most officers could not read or write. Their tactics and battle order are
well described by Xiaobing Li.14 We also have evidence from U.S. and
UN sources, from Kevin Mahoney, from the recollections of Chinese
generals, and from Alexander George’s interviews in 1951 with three
hundred Chinese POWs, of whom eighty-four were interviewed at
length.15 These sources reveal that the PLA had high morale when it en-
tered Korea. It had won China’s Civil War only two years before, having
defeated Japanese and nationalist armies wielding superior weapons. The
soldiers had received extensive political training telling them that this
would be a just war fought with their Korean brothers against American
aggression. If they did not fight, the Americans would turn on China
next—a plausible communist domino theory. The soldiers thought they
were fighting in defense of their homeland. The director of the political
department said that after the training, 50 percent of the soldiers were
ready “with a positive attitude” toward fighting in the war, 30 percent
were “intermediate elements who would fight as ordered, but did not
care if there was a war or not,” and 20 percent were “in an unsettled state
of mind,” afraid of fighting the Americans and calling the Yalu River
bridge the “gate of hell.”16 As was true in the Soviet Red Army, party
 Communist Wars 387

members formed much of the first group, and they would play an impor-
tant role in leading and disciplining the others.
The UN soldiers had been sent to Korea without a clear mission,
which produced inferior morale, said General Du Ping, the head of the
political department of the invasion. Chinese soldiers were also more ex-
perienced in the mountain warfare likely to be necessary in Korea. They
believed they would prevail if they could pour superior numbers into any
single point of attack.17 There were many women in both communist
armies, but not in combat roles.
The PLA had a cohesion based on relative equality between the
ranks, and all its members wore the same uniforms. The PLA had an ide-
ological variant of the buddy system. Soldiers were assigned to a cell of
three or four men led by one experienced, politically reliable soldier,
usually a party member. The cell held a daily mutual criticism session
discussing their experience that day. Three threes (or fours) plus a politi-
cal officer constituted a squad, which held self-criticism sessions once a
week, lasting at least one hour. Companies held such sessions less fre-
quently. In actual battle conditions, meetings were less frequent. Explicit
ideology and moral pressure exerted through everyday political rituals
are not the norm in modern armies, but they help still fear. The Chinese
model “was imbued with an ethical and missionary flavor” different from
those of Western armies that had no political or ideological training.
They relied on latent patriotism and tried to nurture good professional
soldiers, whereas the PLA wanted good communist soldiers.18 Chinese
soldiers found these meetings stressful. Being criticized for military or
political failures and having to expose one’s vulnerabilities, some said, felt
worse than physical punishment. There was moral pressure to be an
“ideal communist.” George adds that many learned how to cover up and
conform rather than truly eradicate “evil thoughts.”19 But this mattered
less than that their actions be those of a good communist soldier.
Western media were full of stories that North Korean or Chinese
soldiers showing reluctance to attack would be immediately shot, but this
was not true. Mao declared that his army “must have discipline that is es-
tablished on a limited democratic basis. . . . With guerillas, a discipline of
compulsion is ineffective. . . . [It] must be self-imposed, because only
when it is, is the soldier able to understand completely why he fights and
how he must obey. This type of discipline becomes a tower of strength
within the army, and it is the only type that can truly harmonize the rela-
tionship that exists between officers and men.”20
388 Communist Wars

Mahoney shows that neither communist army in Korea had violent

discipline.21 Beatings and abuses were strictly forbidden. Although execu-
tions were laid down for the worst offenses, they were rarely carried out
(as was the norm in most armies by now, and as had long been traditional
in China). Public shaming, as described above, and political indoctrina-
tion camps were preferred methods of dealing with deserters. Afterward
the offender would be returned to frontline duty with the same unit.
Party members expected to be punished more severely than non-party
soldiers for the same offense. Political officers were in charge of the
morale of the troops; they had welfare tasks to perform, and they were
expected to be role models in combat.
This military wielded an immanent ideological power unknown to
the U.S. and UN armies; it combined extensive teaching of Marxism, pa-
triotic self-defense, and moral pressure, all reinforced by everyday collec-
tive rituals and party leadership in battle. Its members believed they were
tougher than the cosseted Americans. They were told they would have a
quick and easy victory, and they enjoyed surging down the peninsula,
scornful of American difficulties with the terrain, darkness, and weather.
Chinese infantrymen had the psychological edge, and their more confi-
dent self-reliance enabled them to fight on against increasingly unfavor-
able odds and lengthening supply chains. They relied on weapons of
the weak.
The relative size of the armies is disputed. To many Western observ-
ers it seemed that sheer weight of numbers was the main factor in Chi-
nese success. Yet Paul Edwards and T. R. Fehrenbach say that after the
first few months, the UN and South Korean forces outnumbered the
enemy, sometimes by two to one.22 This superiority was reduced in prac-
tice by a lower proportion of fighting troops in U.S. forces. But better
discipline gave the Chinese an advantage. Fehrenbach and Watson agree
that they were superior in combat in the hills, especially at night. The
United States controlled the roads in the daytime, especially through its
air force. But in the hills of this mountainous country, and at night, when
pilots could not see, the PLA was in control. The U.S. Eighth Army
rated the Chinese battle efficiency as good to excellent, but the NKPA
only as poor to good—but there was much variation in performance
within all armies.23
UN and U.S. soldiers repeatedly described Chinese attacks as “human
waves,” mass frontal attacks by unsupported infantry aiming to overwhelm
technologically superior defenders by sheer weight of numbers. A collec-
 Communist Wars 389

tion of Korean War memoirs by U.S. veterans contains several sensational

accounts of what they perceived to be a human wave attack. Here are two
of them:

They kept coming in waves, and I kept firing. I fired my machine

gun all night long. Everybody else was firing. And the artillery
was dropping all around us. The artillery did a good job keeping
them off us. And all night long I’m thinking. These people are
crazy. They’re dying in droves, and they just keep coming on.
It was a typical Chinese infantry attack. No covering fire. No
effort to use the terrain. Just a headlong charge by an enormous
mass of men. There must have been five or six hundred of them,
screaming and yelling and blowing bugles. But they didn’t seem
to have enough weapons. Maybe the first row would have had
weapons, and the next two or three wouldn’t. The second row
would grab the weapons from the dead as they came on. . . . I
think the only thing that saved us was the artillery we called in.
. . . Another thing that stopped them was their own dead. We
killed so many that they had to climb over stacks of bodies, and
it definitely slowed the attack.24

Yet none of the soldiers quoted by Mahoney depicts bodies piled on

top of each other.25 The Chinese “did not throw away their lives in un-
planned, chaotic banzai charges, as the Japanese did during World War II,
but rather gave up their lives in attempting to stop, and destroy, the
advancing enemy.”26 If five hundred or more Chinese attacked them,
these UN and U.S. soldiers must have been caught in the eye of the
storm, in the narrow sector of the front line chosen for the attack, which
was the normal Chinese tactic.27 Most UN and U.S. soldiers would have
experienced such an attack only rarely.
The Chinese never referred to waves. The aim was not to strike
headlong at entire enemy lines. Each Chinese regiment had a specialist
reconnaissance platoon sent forward to penetrate enemy lines. It would
deliberately draw fire to reveal UN positions, especially the weak-point
boundaries between different U.S. and UN units. Then light forces
would use stealth to get close and suddenly attack at these boundary sec-
tors. The tactic was always to outnumber the enemy at a narrow point of
attack, as in classical Chinese military theory. Chinese generals were con-
scious of their inferiority in weaponry and accepted that they would
390 Communist Wars

incur heavy casualties.28 A Chinese battle manual suggested a superiority

of between three and five attackers to each American defender, and a
lesser superiority if attacking the less well-equipped ROK.29 Such attacks
created the impression of “waves” of larger numbers than they actually
had.
The PLA mounted their infantry assaults at night. Relatively small
PLA units would break through, flow around high ground positions held
by the Americans, go behind them, and interdict their supply roads. Lack
of radio communication created problems, but the PLA forces coped as
best they could with a medley of bugle, whistle, and animal noise codes.
They also gave detailed information down to the lowest ranks before a
battle, and low-level officers could react flexibly to battle conditions.
Lower ranks shared more in decision making than they did in the more
hierarchical U.S. and UN forces. The memoirs of Chinese generals give
insight into campaign strategy.30 Marshal Peng Dehuai, the head of the
PLA invasion force, was mindful of what his soldiers could and could not
do. He saw that American command of the seas made Inchon-style land-
ings behind his lines possible. Thus, he had to station troops down both
coasts as well as on the front. Peng understood the limits imposed by in-
ferior equipment and by logistical difficulties that mounted as they ad-
vanced farther away from their supply bases in China. Eventually trucks
had to travel four hundred kilometers to the front. General Hong
Xuezhi, responsible for logistics, remembers U.S. airpower as the decisive
force slowing down supplies and sometimes stopping the Chinese
advance.
Chinese soldiers gradually realized the full extent of their military
disadvantages. Their morale declined somewhat, but they remained an
obstinate foe prepared to take heavy casualties. Mao and his generals
now questioned whether their tactic of “man overcoming weapons”
could overcome such gross inequality of firepower. In February 1951
Mao lowered the ultimate goal from throwing U.S. and UN forces out of
the peninsula to destroying as many enemy units as possible.31 When
General Matthew Ridgway took over after MacArthur’s sacking in April
1951, American forces likewise shifted to “Operation Killer,” inflicting
maximum casualties rather than holding or taking territory. Ridgway be-
lieved he might retake the whole peninsula, but only with casualties un-
acceptable to the American people—and this has remained an American
weakness, a healthy sign of declining militarism in American society, as
emphasized by liberal theorists.
 Communist Wars 391

After April 1951 some POW interviewees said Chinese soldiers knew
they could not win. But the army did not break, which is remarkable
given that only one to two years before, the communist PLA had incor-
porated defeated Chinese nationalist soldiers into its ranks. Of George’s
seventy POWs who were junior officers or NCOs, two-thirds were for-
mer nationalist soldiers. Their commitment might have been doubted,
and maybe this was why they had been taken prisoner, but there were
few desertions. Yet under growing strain, combat cadres and party mem-
bers had to take a more active role at the front, taking heavier losses.32
Squad and company meetings remained active. These sent many com-
plaints up the hierarchy, for better rifles and for air and artillery support.
They did get better Soviet rifles, but only promises of airplanes and artil-
lery. Soviet MiG fighter jets did arrive, with the pretense that the pilots
were Koreans, but they were fully engaged in combat in “MiG Alley”
farther north and could offer the infantry little support.
As battle lines were consolidated, PLA units lacking a modern com-
mand and control system could not exploit breakthroughs. U.S. and UN
forces learned to retreat after breakthroughs, so that the Chinese intent
to cut off whole divisions and destroy them could not be achieved. In a
single night only small units could be surrounded in this way. Then in the
daytime U.S. and UN forces would counterattack with massive firepower,
recapture the land abandoned during the night, and cause large numbers
of Chinese casualties. The South Koreans called it “the sea of men” con-
fronting “the sea of fire.” The Chinese spring offensive of 1951 stalled
amid massive casualties, and in July Mao opened peace negotiations.33
They dragged on for two years. Meanwhile, combat continued, but
both sides’ morale dipped. Generals Peng and Yang Dezhi, in charge of
combat operations, mixed attack with a defense more geared to protect
the lives of their troops. Defense rested in deep trenches and tunnels
protecting soldiers from bombers and artillery. Yang says the trenches
stretched 6,240 kilometers, roughly the length of the Great Wall of
China, while the tunnels covered about 1,250 kilometers. Li gives
slightly smaller numbers.34 Peng believed trenches and especially tunnels
were key in reducing the casualty rate to acceptable levels. Attack re-
mained the same: massed, narrow assaults at night on weak points, with
breakthroughs focused on killing enemy soldiers, and then retreating
back to safety.35 Stalemate dominated the final two years, bad for the mo-
rale of both sides.36 Given its technological superiority in conventional
weaponry, the United States did not need to deploy nuclear weapons.
392 Communist Wars

Truman had considered it, and Eisenhower rejected a request for them
by his generals. There was a stalemate between American weaponry and
Chinese morale, and the war ended with a cease-fire in July 1953, with
the de facto border between the two Koreas exactly as before the war, at
the thirty-eighth parallel. There was no peace treaty and there still is not.
Total casualties were enormous, and the proportion of civilian casu-
alties was higher than in World War II. Total Korean casualties reached 3
million of a total peninsular population of 30 million. Most of the dead
were North Koreans—somewhere around 215,000 soldiers and 2 million
civilians, the latter due mostly to horrendous U.S. bombing that de-
stroyed all their cities. There were no moral qualms among America’s
leaders when it came to killing communists. Almost a million South Ko-
rean civilians died. U.S. estimates put PLA losses at 600,000 killed or
missing and 750,000 wounded, out of a total army size of 3 million, an
extraordinary rate of casualties. This is also a high proportion of killed to
wounded, reflecting the effect of deadlier weapons and poorer medical
facilities. Yet these figures were probably exaggerated. Armies know their
own casualties more accurately than the enemy’s, and propaganda may
get in the way. The Chinese estimated their own total casualties at 1 mil-
lion, but including only 183,000 killed in action, too low a figure.37 On
the U.S. and UN side, military deaths included almost 46,000 South Ko-
reans, 37,000 Americans, and 7,000 of other UN nations. The Chinese
estimate of U.S. and UN total casualties was 390,000, too high a figure.38
The war ended in a draw, but death had come lopsidedly, claiming far
more of those fighting for communism.
The last phase of the truce negotiations involved the repatriation
of POWs. It was agreed that they could be repatriated to the country
of their choice. This revealed a large imbalance. Among U.S. and UN
POWs, 347 chose to be repatriated to China or North Korea. In con-
trast, almost 22,000 of the North Korean and Chinese POWs chose not
to be repatriated to their home countries. Instead, they chose to live in
South Korea or Taiwan (ruled by nationalist Chinese). Additionally, al-
most 25,000 North Korean POWs had been earlier freed to live in the
South.39 All together, 46,000 soldiers in communist armies had in effect
“deserted.” Of course, they did have the option of living among their
own ethnic or racial group, which the American “deserters” did not. But
the remarkable morale of the communist troops had required everyday
rituals and discipline. Once soldiers were languishing in a POW camp as
a prisoner, that cultivation of commitment was much weaker.
 Communist Wars 393

So this was an ideological war in two senses: it originated in an ideo-

logical civil war within Korea, and it was aggravated by an ideological
great power confrontation. On the communist but not the capitalist side
the soldiers were led to perceive the war as an ideological struggle
through repetitive education and everyday rituals. The combination
brought together a rather general Marxian-nationalist ideology, but it
was grounded in unit solidarity. This brought high morale. The war
came as the North Koreans, then the Americans, and finally the Chinese
each seized what it thought in Realist terms was a window of opportu-
nity to launch a surprise attack, without sufficient thought about what
response it might provoke from the enemy. Each first strike was success-
ful in the short term, but each brought a response. This was a war of mu-
tual overconfidence, misperceptions, and miscalculations, in which the
major decisions seemed to the actors to come from rational assessment
of costs and benefits of alternatives, but which proved so inaccurate that
they generated a devastating war that served no rational purpose and
produced neither result nor peace settlement.

The Vietnam War: American Forces

For U.S. forces the Vietnam War was again intervention in a civil war in
a far-off land, a “war of choice” involving no self-defense and no authori-
zation by the United Nations. There was no growing groundswell of do-
mestic support, but after the Johnson administration invented North
Vietnamese aggressive actions in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Tonkin War
Resolution passed in the House of Representatives by 416 votes to zero,
and in the Senate by 88 votes to 2. The goal was to preserve American
imperial interests in Asia, more specifically to curb communism and sup-
posedly to bring democracy to Vietnam, although the government of
South Vietnam was far from democratic. But despite the anticommunism
still roiling the United States, the depth of ideological commitment to
the war among U.S. civilians or troops was shallow.
Between 1965 and 1973, 2.6 million U.S. military personnel served
within the borders of South Vietnam. Of those, 40–60 percent either
fought in combat, provided close support, or were fairly regularly ex-
posed to enemy attack. About 7,500 of them were women, mostly nurses.
Peak strength in Vietnam of 543,000 was reached in April 1968. Addi-
tionally, about 500,000 sailors and airmen in total were based offshore or
in Thailand. It was a young force: the average age of enlisted men was
394 Communist Wars

twenty-two, of officers twenty-eight. Approximately 58,000 were killed

and 304,000 were wounded, about half of them needing hospitalization.
This was a major commitment of American resources.
The battlefield environment differed from that in Korea. American
forces had even greater control of the skies, but jungle terrain made
enemy units difficult to spot, and in open agricultural regions the enemy
hid as guerillas among the people, without uniforms, difficult to identify.
There were many small engagements, but only occasionally did the
enemy People’s Liberation Front (PLF) launch massed attacks. These
were rarely successful, although the failure of their Tet Offensive proved a
Pyrrhic victory for the Americans. The PLF fought mostly small guerilla
engagements. Initially, the Americans were all-volunteer professionals,
committed to their tasks, if not in any ideological cause, but believing that
a soldier must carry out his mission. This belief was also the best predic-
tor of volunteering for foreign service missions among a 1976 sample of
U.S. professional paratroopers.40
For the infantrymen in Vietnam, combat was mostly defense against
sudden attacks on their bases in addition to patrols and offensive at-
tempts to flush out guerillas into combat. Search-and-destroy missions
predominated: “The infantry finds the enemy, the air and artillery de-
stroys them,” said one general. This was meant to reduce U.S. casualty
rates, but for the infantry it was quite passive combat, and firefights were
generally initiated by the enemy. The buddy system was essential for
such small unit combat, though officers and men complained that the ro-
tation of individuals rather than whole units (the traditional policy) after
a twelve-month service weakened it by continually bringing replace-
ments into the unit. Danger was not continuous. Most patrols never en-
countered the enemy, although land mines and booby traps were a
perennial hazard. When the enemy was encountered, often in ambushes,
short chaotic battles ensued and casualties could be high. By 1967, 65
percent 0f U.S. casualties had come during patrols.41 The unpredictabil-
ity of each day proved hard to take.
Moskos interviewed thirty-four U.S. soldiers and talked to many
more in field trips during 1965 and 1967, before disillusion set in. He
found a rhythm to the level of commitment. As in other wars, the first
engagement shattered the soldier’s enthusiasm and spirit of adventure. It
brought respect for the enemy but in this case enduring contempt for
the South Vietnamese ally. U.S. soldiers served in Vietnam for one year.
From the third to the eighth month of service, the soldier occupied a
 Communist Wars 395

plateau of moderate commitment to the combat role. In the ninth and

tenth months he was most combat-effective. Then he became reluctant
to engage in offensive operations, keeping his head down, sometimes
“freezing,” while officers with similar tours of duty turned a blind eye.
At this point personal safety overrode commitment to buddies. Moskos
emphasized that buddies were seen instrumentally, entailing less friend-
ship in the affective sense than mutual self-interest to remain alive. Sol-
diers eschewed patriotic rhetoric. Nineteen of the thirty-four men said
they were fighting to stop communism, but they were hazy about what
that was. Moskos says they had a “latent” ideology, seeing the United
States as simply the best country in the world, worth fighting for, but
when compared to the commitment of the enemy, that was not much of
an ideology.42
Marshall, with the assistance of Lieutenant Colonel David Hack-
worth, wrote a brief report on an American infantry division in Vietnam
during six months of heavy fighting in 1967 before demoralization
began.43 Using the same methods as before, he came to the opposite con-
clusion of his World War II report. He says the division needs “no stimu-
lation whatever to its employment of . . . weapons when engaged.”
During prolonged engagements, he notes, 80–100 percent of soldiers
typically fired their weapons, and most of the nonfirers were in noncom-
bat roles. It wasn’t unusual, he says, for one man to use three or more
weapons if the fight lasted two hours. The main problem was too much
firing. He considers self-control quite good but accepts the inevitability
of firing too high, mostly missing. He says, “An outright kill is most un-
usual.” That had not changed for over a hundred years, except that late
twentieth-century soldiers were blazing away from cover.
Glenn interviewed infantry veterans, most of whom had been con-
scripted.44 In other wars fear had been worse when soldiers were inactive
while receiving fire. They relieved fear by firing, even if wildly, thus be-
coming active. Glenn finds this too. He quotes one soldier: “Courage
cannot be separated from the fear that has aroused it. It is, in fact, a pow-
erful urge not to be afraid anymore, to rid himself of fear by eliminating
the source of it. And the only way of eliminating it is through the use of
fire-power.”45
Many soldiers reported that once in action, the mind was wholly
absorbed. Fear disappeared because one did not have time for it. Of
Glenn’s 258 veterans, 97 percent said they had fired when required.
Since a man might not admit his own shortcomings, Glenn asked them to
396 Communist Wars

estimate the proportion of comrades who fired during engagements. The

average answer fell to 83 percent. Eighty percent gave fear as the main
reason, 15 percent mentioned soldiers’ moral qualms. One-third of these
were conscientious objectors given tasks not requiring firearms. Most sol-
diers had occasionally not fired when they might have done, though this
was a judgment call—for example, does one fire, revealing one’s position,
if one glimpses a larger enemy force close by? Not firing was found
mostly among raw recruits. More shooters were found, as Marshall had
suggested, in small teams firing weapons together, like machine gunners
and helicopter crews. Teamwork generated more mutual control.46
An additional moral dilemma was prominent in Vietnam. Soldiers
again made the distinction between legitimately killing enemy soldiers
and killing civilians or prisoners, which was almost universally con-
demned. But in guerilla warfare, when the enemy does not wear uniform
and when women and children sometimes hurl grenades, it was difficult
to put that distinction into practice. But it sometimes led to atrocities by
rampaging adrenalized soldiers, as in the My Lai massacre in March 1968.
Lieutenant William Calley, the commander of Charley Company,
had been told that the village was home to a VC battalion, but he already
had a reputation as a vicious killer. American morale was already plung-
ing. This unit was inexperienced in combat, but three weeks earlier had
been trapped in a minefield, with two deaths and thirteen wounded, and
only two days earlier, a booby trap had killed a sergeant and wounded
three others. They had not even seen the enemy. Thus, they saw this op-
eration as revenge but were apprehensive and fearful. Calley and Charley
Company rampaged through the village. About half the company appar-
ently perpetrated the atrocities, the other half stood aside watching. Al-
most the whole village was killed, about five hundred people—the
elderly, women, children, and babies. No adult males were found there,
or any weapons. Women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated af-
terward. Some killing began immediately, but it then mounted as rising
aggressive confidence, absolute domination of the scene, and racism
combined in the massacres of several crowds of villagers herded together
by the soldiers. These horrors were revealed only because they were wit-
nessed from above by a helicopter pilot with a conscience who landed
between the soldiers and retreating villagers and threatened to shoot the
soldiers unless they stopped. The army at first attempted a cover-up, but
major publicity launched first by one determined private soldier forced
courts-martial. Yet, outrageously, Calley was the only perpetrator to be
 Communist Wars 397

found guilty, of personally killing twenty-two villagers. He initially re-

ceived a life sentence, but served only three and a half years house arrest
before being pardoned.
A similar massacre of ninety, at the nearby village of My Khe 4, on
the same day is shrouded in mystery, since the soldiers refused to testify.
No one involved was ever charged. Operation Speedy Express killed
thousands of Vietnamese civilians in the Mekong Delta, earning its com-
mander the title “the Butcher of the Delta.” There were presumably
other massacres, though probably not on the scale of My Lai. Nothing
has changed since Cicero observed, “Law is silent in times of war.” The
nature of the war—stressed soldiers of falling morale, fighting a largely
unseen enemy hiding among the people, taking casualties but often un-
able to take normal military revenge in open firefight—was likely to have
caused atrocities.
The savagery of this war brought incapacitating anxieties later. The
U.S. Civil War had brought on the maladies described as “nostalgia” and
“melancholia.” World War I armies were stalked by “shell shock,” World
War II by “battle fatigue,” and from 1980 onward the diagnosis was
“posttraumatic stress disorder,” or PTSD, in which the soldier has terri-
ble flashbacks, upsetting memories, and incapacitating anxiety caused by
the trauma of battle. Estimates based on diagnoses and interview surveys
of veterans have been available since Vietnam. Of its veterans, 31 percent
are estimated to have suffered from PTSD, and this has often proven
long-lasting. “Roughly 11 percent of Vietnam veterans, over a 40-year
period, continue to suffer from clinically important PTSD symptoms,
either having the full diagnosis or very strong features of the diagnosis
that interfere with function.” Twice as many had been recently getting
worse rather than better.47
Fear figured in PTSD, but Vietnam veterans’ feelings of guilt for
their own actions or inaction worsened their condition. Said a helicopter
machine gunner: “Sometimes I think that now I’m being paid back for all
the men I killed and I killed a lot of them. If there is a judge, I figure I’m
going to hell in a hand-basket.” One doctor treating veterans said some
refused to take medication because they felt they deserved to suffer pain.
“We see a lot of feelings of guilt over what they’ve seen and done during
their experience in Vietnam,” he says, “and they don’t want to blunt
that.”48 One study of one hundred veterans found nineteen had attempted
suicide, and fifteen more had often considered it. Significantly related
to their suicide attempts were guilt about combat actions, survivor guilt,
398 Communist Wars

depression, anxiety, and severe fear-based PTSD. Logistic regression

analysis showed that combat guilt was the most significant predictor of
preoccupation with suicide and actual suicide attempts. Many veterans
reported that disturbing combat behavior like the killing of women, chil-
dren, and prisoners occurred while they were emotionally out of control
because of fear or rage.49
In another study of 603 male combat veterans seeking help at a vet-
erans’ PTSD clinic, an astonishing 91 percent reported witnessing war-
time atrocities, 76 percent said they had themselves participated directly
in killing, and 31 percent said they had participated in the mutilation of
bodies. These figures cannot be taken as representative of all Vietnam
veterans, only of those seeking help from the PTSD clinic. Behavior they
defined as immoral was coming back to haunt them. The researchers
found that involvement in wartime atrocities, as perpetrator or merely as
witness, caused PTSD and severe depression symptoms independent of
degree of exposure to combat. A sense of guilt was also associated with
suicidal thoughts and with greater postwar hostility and aggression, even
after controlling for PTSD severity. This would suggest that there is
something about participating in or witnessing wartime atrocities that is
not captured by the fear-dominated definition of PTSD.50 The 30 per-
cent of veterans who did suffer from PTSD included many experiencing
extreme guilt. “Moral injury” rather than “guilt” has become the pre-
ferred label among researchers for the enduring psychological, biologi-
cal, spiritual, behavioral, and social effects of perpetrating, failing to
prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral be-
liefs and expectations. A further study of 1,106 Vietnam veterans found
35 percent who reported killing one or more enemy soldiers, 7 percent
reported killing civilians, and 5 percent reported killing prisoners of war.
After the war all three groups had higher symptoms on most mental
health and functional impairment measures—PTSD symptoms, peri-
traumatic dissociation, functional impairment, and violent behavior.51
Killing anyone brought on a sense of moral injury later.
So in Vietnam moral qualms did figure in soldiers’ response to kill-
ing and participation in atrocities, but, tragically, well after these had oc-
curred, usually after the war was over. Moral qualms did not prevent or
mitigate the killing or atrocities. They offered no relief to the dead and
mutilated Vietnamese, and they brought postwar suffering to many
American perpetrators. Such psychological responses had probably
emerged after previous wars—but they were rarely admitted by either
 Communist Wars 399

the authorities or the soldiers themselves, and they were never medically
diagnosed. Veterans had suffered in silence. But war is hell, and then you
go to hell, said these veterans.
In December 1969, as the war ground on, the United States needed
reinforcements, conscription was escalated by the introduction of the
draft lottery, and morale fell. It did not help that U.S. troops were find-
ing American arms on the PLF dead. They believed South Korean sol-
diers were selling them to the PLF. Since many educated whites evaded
the draft (like Presidents Clinton and Trump) or managed to wangle safe
stateside posts (like President Bush the Younger), new recruits were pre-
dominantly working-class men, and African Americans were overrepre-
sented. Their class and racial resentments were enhanced by Nixon’s
attempts from 1969 to negotiate peace. Why continue risking your life if
the war was about to end? Opinion back home also turned against the
war. Desertion rates rose, reaching just over 7 percent by 1971, but
backed by another 18 percent defined as AWOL, absent without leave. In
contrast, in the twenty-first century the U.S. desertion rate has not yet
risen above 5 percent. The main motives for deserting were not fear and
loathing for battle but the attractions of home and the inability to fit into
army life, especially its discipline, which weighed heavily on conscripted
soldiers.52 But desertion inside Vietnam was rare. Where would you de­
sert to? Most demoralized soldiers stayed in the danger zone but took
fewer risks. When this was by mutual consent among comrades, it was a
passive form of buddy resistance.
The most spectacular consequence of American demoralization was
“fragging,” soldiers attempting to kill a superior officer, usually with a
fragmentation grenade, hence the term fragging. After the Tet Offensive
and as Nixon was seeking to make peace, between 1968 and 1972, almost
one thousand incidents in Vietnam involved the army or marines; hun-
dreds of officers and NCOs were injured, and at least fifty-seven killed.
George Lepre analyzed seventy-one cases in which a soldier was con-
victed, and he found most were younger than average, many came from
“broken homes,” and two-thirds of them had not completed high
school.53 Their psychiatric reports said the offenders lacked maturity, had
low self-esteem, and were rated as poor soldiers. Drugs were often the
cause. Either the soldier was under the influence when he committed the
offense or he had been disciplined by the officer for taking drugs. Also
the growth in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s and the assassi-
nation of Martin Luther King in 1968 exacerbated racial tensions, which
400 Communist Wars

resulted in more racially motivated fragging incidents. They more often

occurred in the rear than at the front line, where the buddy system often
worked across racial lines.54 Demoralization was setting in as no progress
was being made. But peace was made before the army might collapse.
Once the Americans left, the PLF bided its time and then quickly rolled
over the South Vietnamese army to victory. For America the war had
been a disaster. If America had been true to the anti-imperialist values it
proclaimed, then it would have supported Ho Chi Minh and his move-
ment in the 1950s when it had been an anticolonial nationalist move-
ment fighting against French imperialism.

The Vietnam War: The Communist PLF

Communist warfare was brought to its most effective level in Vietnam.
Long-lasting morale was demonstrated by the PLF, taking up Chinese
PLA practices, but also enjoying, like the Red Army, the advantages of
fighting in its homeland amid a broadly sympathetic local population.
“Vietcong,” the commonly used term in the West, was a propaganda
term used by the South Vietnamese government to suggest that the
movement was really communist Chinese. We have considerable evi-
dence on the PLF. The Rand Corporation was commissioned to do hun-
dreds of interviews of PLF POWs and defectors between 1964 and 1971,
and a handful more up until 1974. These were not scientific samples, for
the South Vietnamese government (the GVN) decided who would be in-
terviewed. Some probably told the Vietnamese interviewers what they
thought they wanted to hear.55 They are a rich data source, however.
The first official Rand report, by John Donnell and his colleagues,
was based on 145 interviews in 1964.56 The interviewees said that almost
all the PLF believed strongly in the justice of their cause. The movement
had already defeated the French Empire and Vietnamese feudal land-
lords. It blended nationalist and socialist goals, the two most popular
mid-twentieth-century global ideologies. When American forces arrived
in 1965, the PLF saw them as yet more foreign imperialists propping up
the corrupt and reactionary GVN. The justice of the PLF cause seemed
self-evident. Their land redistribution policies were popular, especially
among poor peasants. At this stage communist forces were mainly south-
erners, although receiving help from the North Vietnamese military.
The interviewees revealed the “three-three” system borrowed from
the Chinese PLA. Rank-and-file soldiers were grouped into threes, going
 Communist Wars 401

everywhere together, covering each other, sharing the hardships of gue-

rilla warfare. They held kiem-thao self-criticism sessions almost daily.
Three threes plus an officer formed a squad of ten who also held kiem-
thao sessions two or more times a month. A whole company might have a
session about once a month. All sessions aired recent experiences, what
had worked, what had not worked, and everyone was urged to contribute
to the discussion. As in the PLA, rank differences were slight. These ritu-
als amplified the egalitarianism of guerilla forces, but they also caged sol-
diers, relying less on the coerced discipline of most armies than on an
ideology combining values and norms, institutionalized as rituals per-
formed by individual units and led into battle by party members. The
value of struggle toward a just communist society, the norm of commit-
ment to the movement and one’s comrades, and the rituals of three
threes and kiem-thao put considerable moral pressure on the soldiers.
The PLF was supported by much of the rural and small-town popu-
lation. Violence against civilians was rare, except for captured GVN offi-
cials, in contrast to the harsh practices of the GVN and its army, the
Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN). Desertions were mostly not
for political disaffection but for personal reasons—the desire to return
home and end the physical hardship of war. These interviews revealed
high morale, belief in the cause, and confidence in victory. When John T.
McNaughton, assistant to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, was
briefed on the report, he had already developed a healthy respect for the
PLF and not for the GVN. He declared: “If what you say in that briefing
is true, we’re fighting on the wrong side.”57 He was right. Before Ameri-
can troops entered in 1965, the PLF had been nearing victory, as Mc-
Naughton knew.58
Two books discuss the Mekong Delta province of My Tho on the
basis of the Rand interviews. David Hunt analyzed 285 interviews under-
taken during 1965–68.59 He confirms that PLF morale was high in the
“golden years” of the early 1960s, when the PLF organized village meet-
ings with an educational mission, lively discussion, and festive spirit,
which villagers enjoyed. David Elliott, using 400 Rand interviews, con-
firms this picture of PLF-organized village enthusiasm in the early
1960s, noting the party’s reach downward through village farmers’, wom-
en’s, and youths’ associations whose leaders were given extensive political
training.60 Most armies avoid political education and explicit ideology,
preferring to rely on the soldiers’ latent ideologies of national identity,
supplemented by extensive drilling, whose goal is to convert them into
402 Communist Wars

automatons. In the PLF, political education, reinforced by the political

officers, substituted ideology and educational rituals for extensive drill-
ing.
The party was selective in admitting members, but it then gave them
political training, stressing that they were members of an elite with supe-
rior objective knowledge of the interests of workers and peasants, whom
they must both serve and lead. In this period their policies received
much support. One unsympathetic defector observed: “The people
thought they were then enjoying ‘real democracy’ because the cadres be-
haved nicely toward them. Before, the villagers bent their heads and
were scared when they met GVN officials.” Elliott reveals the impor-
tance of PLF land reform in bringing peasant support.61 Military recruits
were all volunteers. The policy of “upgrading troops” from village gue-
rillas to district troops to main force regulars was also an effective form
of military training through experience.62
William Henderson, a former U.S. officer in Vietnam, focuses on
fifty-three men interviewed between 1965 and 1968. He emphasizes their
resilience in absorbing American firepower in the air and on the ground.
He also stresses the three-three buddy system, the kiem-thao sessions, and
the fusion of political and military structures. Each threesome was super-
vised by a political cadre, a hardened party militant who reported every
three days on the men’s conformity with party goals.63 Said Ho Chi
Minh: “With good cadres, everything can be done.” Henderson notes,
“The soldier was never permitted to be an individual; rather, he was con-
stantly reminded of his duties to his two comrades in the three-man cell,
to the squad and platoon, to the people, and to the party.”64 This was a
daily dose of moral obligation, although allied to some direct democracy.
PLF soldiers had the right to discuss and criticize battle plans.
After the entry of the United States, the PLF had to adapt to its su-
perior firepower. It introduced conscription, but from the militias. After
brief military and political training, they were assigned to three-man
units alongside two experienced soldiers, one of whom was usually a
party member. Mostly young, the newcomers were also inducted into the
Party Youth Group, a further instrument of solidarity and control. Any
soldier identified as lazy or lacking commitment or who harbored “right-
ist thoughts” was subject to self-criticism sessions, techniques “designed
to bring anxiety to the PLF soldier, who was culturally dependent for se-
curity upon his relationship with a group.”65 Such moral pressure en-
twined military and political ideology and organization. This was “the
 Communist Wars 403

most sophisticated leadership techniques in use by any army in the world

today,” says Henderson.66 It prevented “disintegration, collapse or signifi-
cant loss of military effectiveness” despite American firepower.67 This
was a version of the “man over weapons” strategy of the Chinese PLA in
Korea. Increasing casualties and campaign hardship produced more indi-
vidual but not collective desertions.
Another official Rand report, by Leon Gouré and his colleagues, dif-
fered from this consensus. It was based on 450 interviews conducted in
1965. It is dismissive of the PLF. Interviewees said that intensified U.S.
air and artillery power was demoralizing it. B-52 bombs penetrated the
shallow bunkers and tunnels of PLF camps, and guerilla ability to hide
among the people was reduced as villagers fled from the bombing. The
introduction by the PLF of taxation and the draft forced less ideologi-
cally committed men into the military, and this also reduced popular
support.68 These arguments were partially confirmed by Elliott, but
Gouré uniquely added that PLF cadres were now pessimistic about their
chances of winning.69 Their power within the movement was now based
on coercion, not persuasion, he claimed. His report makes no reference
to the three threes or the kiem-thao sessions. It recommends intensifying
American bombing. No qualms about civilians here.
Rand colleagues charged that Gouré was biased. His appointment as
head of the project had followed a shift inside the corporation to hard-
line Cold War policies.70 He had advocated airpower as a weapon of
counterinsurgency long before his assignment to Vietnam, and upon ar-
rival he immediately penned a report favoring more bombing. The air
force, delighted, ensured he got command of the next Rand survey.
Gouré released interim results after each batch of interviews, and his
briefings all had the same message: bombing was sapping the will of the
enemy, so bomb more. The air force loved it, though reporters were
skeptical, doubting especially his view that villagers whose homes were
bombed would blame the PLF rather than the Americans. Another Rand
analysis of seven hundred interviews concluded that bombed villagers
blamed the GVN.71 But the blame game was actually complicated.
Hunt’s interviewees said that at first villagers blamed the PLF for bring-
ing retaliation bombing, defoliation, plowing up of crops, forced reloca-
tion of villagers, and the shooting down of anyone running.72 But they
soon switched to blaming the actual perpetrators, the GVN, the ARVN,
and the Americans. Many added that the government did not have the
support of the people, whereas the PLF did.
404 Communist Wars

The fullest analysis of My Tho province is David Elliott’s.73 This was

a heartland of the revolution. But its relatively flat and open ecology
made it vulnerable to bombing. Elliott says that to understand the devel-
opment of the PLF, we must grasp the interaction between the two sides’
strategies. Class alliances shifted during the struggle. The PLF land pro-
gram finished off the landlord class, and their lands were redistributed
mainly to poor peasants. This upgraded many of them into the middle
peasant stratum. The core of the PLF now became the remaining poor
peasants while the support of many middle peasants waned, especially
when agricultural taxes were imposed by the PLF. Some went over to
the GVN. But the PLF was initially more cohesive, more politically
moral, and more popular than the GVN, for the reasons given by Don-
nell and his colleagues and Henderson above. In early 1965, despite the
aid given by the United States to the GVN, the PLF seemed on its way
to victory.
So the U.S. military intervened directly, in the belief that another
country must not be lost to communism. Ground troops arrived, sup-
ported by intensifying bombing of the South and then the North, too.
American bombing and defoliation from the air and from artillery on the
ground devastated PLF core regions. There were supposedly restrictions
placed on bombing civilian areas, but the rules were confused, change-
able, disputed, and often ignored. The United States sent in 550,000
ground forces and dropped 7.7 million tons of explosives, dwarfing the
2.2 million tons dropped during the entire World War II (and the
635,000 dropped in Korea). Mao’s famous dictum that guerillas swam
among the people as fish swam in the sea was countered by General Wil-
liam Westmoreland: “It is necessary to eliminate the ‘fish’ from the
‘water,’ or to dry up the ‘water’ so that the ‘fish’ cannot survive.”74
Draining the water had two main thrusts: destroy the economy of
any pro-PLF locality, and physically remove the population to “strategic
hamlets” in areas controlled by Americans and the GVN. This inflicted
appalling suffering on the rural population. It could not “win hearts and
minds” (proclaimed as the U.S. strategy), but it worked in the sense that
the PLF was deprived of its “water,” especially in open agrarian areas
like the Mekong Delta. Peasants who were not forcibly relocated fled
from the devastation. If they stayed, they were defined by the United
States as Viet Cong, to be killed, including women and children. Women,
the “long-haired warriors,” made a significant contribution to the PLF as
soldiers, spies, tunnel builders, and porters.75 American bombing left the
 Communist Wars 405

PLF with fewer fighters, fewer recruits, fewer resources for provisioning
them, and fewer social and educational programs. In My Tho the PLF
was reduced to a hard core of predominantly poor peasants and their
families, living in fear while slowly losing ground, moving and hiding,
with little time for assemblies or festive occasions. Most interviews reveal
fear, especially of the random death inflicted by unseen B-52s and long-
range ground artillery. Casualties mounted. It should have been the end
of them.
Three things saved them. One was the support of reinforcements of
professionally trained soldiers and munitions from North Vietnam. As
the war continued, the northern presence in the PLF grew. The failure
of the Tet Offensive had devastated PLF forces, and they required an
infusion of Northerners. Exact figures are disputed, but it is likely that
toward the end Northerners represented almost half the main force
numbers, not including local or guerilla forces. There was also help
from the Soviets and China. The Chinese PLA rotated 320,000 troops
through North Vietnam to man air defenses against American planes,
and PLA and Soviet military advisers raced each other to get to crashed
American aircraft to steal their advanced avionics. One Chinese veteran
noted that in Vietnam there were two enemies, “the American imperial-
ists in the sky, and the Soviet revisionists on the ground.”76
Second, the PLF party cadres did not waver. Their casualty rate is
unknown. The minimum estimate is 444,000, the maximum over a mil-
lion. The higher figures may also include civilian victims, although the
militia system blurred the distinction. The PLA casualty rate was cer-
tainly much higher than those of most armies at war, and given rudimen-
tary medical services, far more of the wounded died than in the U.S.
Army. The death rate among cadres was higher still. Given the odds
against them, the PLA cadres were foolhardily brave, trapped by com-
mitment to an ideology reinforced by everyday ritual wielding consider-
able moral pressure. There were always replacements, and the movement
just kept going. Given taxation, conscription, and tightening military-
political discipline, the PLF was using more coercion, yet Elliott notes
that POWs and defectors openly expressed disagreements with cadres’
directives, without suffering reprisals.77
Third, they retained the sympathy of poorer peasants and others
who preferred the revolution to a GVN regime that they still viewed as
corrupt and benefiting the rich. They preferred socialist ideology even if
their understanding of it was rudimentary. Virtually all viewed Vietnam
406 Communist Wars

as a single country, whereas the GVN wanted its division to continue

and fought as a stooge of foreign imperialism. It is rare among the Rand
interviews to find positive views of the government or its army, in con-
trast to their nuanced views of the PLF. When PLF armed forces weak-
ened, it was rational for peasants to flee to safer areas or to withdraw into
everyday life. This happened in late 1968 after the Tet Offensive, when
even the PLF’s official history admits “rightist thoughts, pessimism,
and hesitancy” appeared. It happened again in 1970–71 when U.S. troops
invaded Cambodia and destroyed PLF camps there. In these periods
supply lines were badly hit and the soldiers became half-starved.
But at the slightest signs of hope, new PLF recruits appeared, men
and women alike, often unexpectedly, willing to fight or provide civilian
support. This happened in 1963, in 1967–68 in preparation for the Tet
Offensive, and in the 1972 Easter Offensive. Back in the United States,
the war required an unpopular draft. Its cost had already aborted Presi-
dent Johnson’s Great Society reforms, and it was now weakening the
dollar. There was a major antiwar movement led by young men anxious
to avoid the draft. Morale was sagging among the troops, many had lost
faith in the cause, were contemptuous of the South Vietnamese allies,
and no longer thought the war winnable. The Sino-Soviet split had re-
vealed to some in Washington that communism was no longer as cohe-
sive as had been believed. Why bother fighting such a costly war for the
corrupt government of a nonstrategic poor country? Although the PLF’s
Tet Offensive failed, its shock convinced American leaders that the war
was unwinnable. The ideological commitment and staying power of the
PLF were greater than those of the United States and the GVN. This
was indeed a triumph of men and women over weapons. Their weapons
of the weak had triumphed.
U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor had in late 1964 expressed puzzle-
ment at PLA persistence: “We still find no plausible explanation of the
continued strength of the Viet-Cong if our data on Viet-Cong losses
are even approximately correct. Not only do the Viet-Cong units have
the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability
to maintain morale. Only in rare cases have we found evidences of bad
morale among Viet-Cong prisoners or recorded in captured Viet-Cong
documents.”78
But the explanation was simple: the United States was underestimat-
ing PLF numbers and support. Its estimates of total PLF strength at this
time were around 285,000. Their monthly estimates of PLF casualties
 Communist Wars 407

indicated that this total number could not possibly be maintained. Yet
others realized that these estimates were only of PLF main and local reg-
ular forces and did not include guerilla militias organized by villages and
hamlets. Village militias had rifles and hand grenades. The grenades in-
flicted 20 percent of all American casualties. Total PLF armed strength
was over 600,000, and the entire PLF infrastructure of helpers, including
youth auxiliaries and civilian laborers and porters, often women, num-
bered well over a million. When the Nixon administration finally realized
this, optimism collapsed: the PLF could replace their casualties from
village militias and northern regiments and fight on indefinitely. The
United States could not.79 As Henry Kissinger remarked in 1968, “The
guerilla wins if he does not lose.” Yes, but provided he and she believe in
the cause.
We don’t know exactly how many people were killed in the Vietnam
War. The Americans suffered about 58,000 deaths; their allies, the South
Vietnamese Army, lost about 250,000. Estimates of PLF casualties vary
considerably, but in 2012 the united Vietnamese government said there
were about 850,000 PLF combat or noncombat deaths. Even if that fig-
ure was exaggerated, the disproportion is evident. The sufferings of the
PLF and sympathizers, technologically overmatched, were extraordinary.
Yet they kept on fighting, because of high morale and the support of the
rural population, whose sympathy was buttressed by organizations that
blurred the boundaries between the political and the military, and civil-
ian and the military—a communist version of the French revolutionary
nation in arms. It represented the terrible human costs of a thoroughly
militarized society.
A postscript: the Chinese PLA invaded Vietnam in 1979, in response
to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to overthrow the genocidal Pol Pot
regime. Two communist armies were now at each other’s throats. The
PLA had been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and struggled
against the battle-hardened North Vietnamese Army (NVA), which re-
lied mostly on its border regional and militia forces. The Chinese had
expected an easy victory, but, confronted by large Vietnamese forces
blocking the way to Hanoi, they soon retreated. Though both sides
claimed victory, the NVA had the better of it, and they stayed in Cambo-
dia.80 After revolutionary forces achieve their revolution, they settle
down into being more conventional armies, with a decline in their ideo-
logical fervor and structural rigor. This had happened to the Chinese
PLA, and now it was beginning to happen in Vietnam, too—as it
408 Communist Wars

happened also in the postwar Soviet Red Army. The ideological army
cannot endure long-term in peacetime.
The Wehrmacht, the Red Army at Stalingrad, the PLA, and the PLF
are all cases of a one-party state or movement wielding a transcendent
ideology grounded in practice at the unit level, generating morale and
leadership that can compensate, up to a point, for technological or nu-
merical inferiority. These are the bravest soldiers, the ones who look
death in the face and fight on, whether one approves of their ideology.
From their own perspectives they are heroes. They refute democratic tri-
umphalist theorists of soldier morale introduced in chapter 3. The sol-
diers of the democracies performed worse, not better. When they
triumphed, this was due to advanced technology and firepower available
to wealthy countries. But this simple contrast between democratic and
authoritarian regimes is misplaced. Except for the Wehrmacht, authori-
tarian armies actually were more complex, since at the level of soldier
they had more participatory rituals than did the armies of the democra-
cies, and this led to their higher morale.
Such practices are rare, however. There are many one-party states in
the world, but almost none wants to change the world. They merely desire
to stay in power, distributing benefits to their supporters, repressing oppo-
sition. They use their armed forces more for domestic repression than for
war. Since they also live in fear of army coups, they promote officers for
perceived loyalty, not military competence. They bribe them, too, for offi-
cers can participate in state corruption. To be on the safe side, these re-
gimes add their own supposedly loyal praetorian guards, security police,
and militias to counterbalance the army. None of these practices is likely
to create military efficiency or high morale. A one-party state without a
transcendent ideology may be coup-proof, but it is unlikely to win wars.
American military involvement in Vietnam was a defeat. It might be
callously said in its favor that the United States had so devastated Viet-
nam that it would deter movements in other countries from embracing
communism, a very nasty form of deterrence. The Vietnam veteran Tim
O’Brien gives an even harsher American epitaph on the war: “A true war
story is never moral. . . . If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if
you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the
larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terri-
ble lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first
rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and
uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”81
 Communist Wars 409

Long-Term Trends in Battle Experience

Over the last three chapters we have seen one universal feature of wars.
They inflict a massive number of deaths and mutilations. There have
been few “good deaths,” heroic, clean, and purposeful. In modern wars
death has mainly come suddenly, unexpectedly, as randomly inflicted ex-
plosions coming from the skies, bursting apart the human body, blood
and gore gushing and body parts flying everywhere. The sounds of battle
are men screaming and howling in their death throes or at the horror of
lying helplessly on the ground, confronting their own ghastly disfigure-
ments, while the survivors around them are shocked to the core, and po-
tentially suffering the long-term effects of what we call posttraumatic
stress disorder. To the soldiers this cannot have seemed like the rational
fulfillment of useful goals. Nor was it, as I will make perfectly clear in my
last chapter. Of the wars discussed in these three chapters, only World
War II had to be fought, and only by one side. We have no reason to be-
lieve that earlier wars were any more heroic or cleaner or more neces-
sary. Death had come less often from the skies and only from nearby, but
it compensated with more battering and slashing of the body, with the
same ghastly results. How different from the environment of the deci-
sion makers and the weapons manufacturers pursuing normal, peaceful
political and economic life. They are full of hope, achieving their goals,
and that is all that matters. It is the soldiers, not the working class, who,
aside from their own atrocities, are the most truly exploited persons on
the planet.
We have, however, also seen four secular trends through the soldiers’
experience of modern battles. First, the ratio of casualties inflicted to
rounds fired reveals declining efficiency, despite the weapons’ becoming
much more lethal. In the musket era contemporary estimates of the ratio
of shots fired to casualties varied from one hit per 500 rounds to one hit
per 2,000–3,000 rounds fired.82 I earlier quoted the somewhat lower ra-
tios suggested for the U.S. Civil War. These numbers indicate low ability
to inflict casualties, probably due to the inaccuracy of the weapons and
the difficulties of firing them. Yet the coming of breech-loading rifles in
the late nineteenth century increased the frequency of shots fired, but
not the casualty rate, and this trend continued throughout the revolution
in firepower that characterized the twentieth century. More and more
shots were needed on average to inflict one casualty—10,000 in World
War I, 20,000 in World War II, and 50,000 in the Vietnam War. But in
410 Communist Wars

early twenty-first-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces fired

an astonishing 250,000 shots for every enemy killed!83 Equipped with
automatic weapons, armies have not become more efficient killing
machines—quite the reverse. Overfiring enables soldiers to relieve their
fear by activity, spraying bullets in all directions, while prudently retain-
ing concealed positions—as the enemy does, too—not because they are
cowards, but because they are reasonably fearful of these lethal weapons.
Even the simple Kalashnikov wielded by guerillas and terrorists is a far
deadlier weapon than the musket. Expose yourself to enemy fire and you
die, unlike most U.S. Civil War soldiers.
Second, Ardant du Picq had observed in the 1860s the increasing
dispersion of the battlefield. This continued right into the twenty-first
century, reducing officers’ direct control over their soldiers. Drilling and
discipline no longer have the same influence as in the past, and milder
forms of skulking, such as keeping one’s head down and doing the mini-
mum, may have increased. Strengthening the buddy system has been one
response. Another has been an emphasis on task completion to increase
the pride in skills and the sense of duty of soldiers—most notable in the
case of pilots.
Third was a very large increase in recorded psychological wounds,
probably created by more diagnosis in modern societies. But I have not
found evidence that moral qualms have prevented soldiers or airmen
from shooting at or killing the enemy. Doubtless civilians like you or me
might experience some difficulty unless we were cast into the “kill or be
killed” hand-to-hand warfare of earlier times. But trained soldiers rarely
do more than hesitate momentarily before killing. Unfortunately, human
beings are not inherently pacific, not even in today’s relatively pacific ci-
vilian societies. Men and probably women too can kill easily if ordered to
by institutionalized, legitimate political and military authorities. The
norm that civilians should not be killed is acknowledged by most sol-
diers. If they nonetheless kill civilians deliberately or by accident, they
may feel a little remorse for their actions, but rarely enough to deter
them from doing it again. They rationalize killings in terms of military
necessity and explain the worst atrocities in terms of men “losing
self-control” in fearful contexts. Moral qualms tragically come after the
war, morally destabilizing former killers.
Fourth was the killing of more civilians. There have been no signifi-
cant attempts to curb this by introducing tighter rules of war. The eu-
phemistic term “collateral damage” is a callous attempt to sanitize
 Communist Wars 411

and normalize the killing of innocents (alongside the bizarre expression

“friendly fire”). Underlying this is a separation between wartime and
peacetime norms. The morality of the latter does not apply to the
former.
But if pacifist-leaning soldiers are rare, so are sadists or heroes. I
have found two contributions made by human nature in battle. First, the
rush of energy coming from the adrenal glands produced by extreme fear
or anxiety in battle commonly generates suddenly greater strength, a rac-
ing pulse and pounding heart, increased respiration, bodily trembling,
and distorted vision. This may induce soldiers to a fighting fury, charging
forward, yelling and slaughtering anyone in the way. Alternatively, ex-
treme fear may induce loss of control of bodily functions or terrified
flight. Human physiology, like human psychology, is ambivalent about
killing—fight or flight.
One human emotion dominates the battlefield—fear. The prospect
of death or mutilation terrifies virtually all soldiers. What Durkheim
called “altruistic suicide,” deliberately sacrificing one’s life for others
or for a cause, is rare. Islamist terrorists are often exceptions because of
their commitment to a transcendent ideology, absent from today’s pro-
fessional armies. But fear of death or mutilation is prevalent in almost all
wars. The generals know this yet believe fear can be managed. Although
fear can incapacitate the soldier mentally or physiologically, or compel
him to flee, most soldiers do stay and fight, at first with rising, then di-
minishing vigor, keeping heads down and blazing away from cover. Since
the enemy is likewise fearful and cautious, battle remains inefficiently
balanced.
In modern times numerous factors may overwhelm qualms and man-
age fear: desire for adventure inflected by patriotism and manly honor,
drills and discipline, professional commitment to and absorption in mili-
tary tasks, confidence in army organization and ultimate victory, commit-
ment to one’s buddies, commitment to an ideology, and the perceived
virtue of self-defense. Their precise mixture varies among circumstances.
Modern Western armies have not been very ideological, although they
are permeated by a latent sense of national identity and patriotism. Tran-
scendent ideology has figured more in communist forces, as we have just
seen, and among religious forces, as we see in the next chapter. Malešević
says of small military and paramilitary forces that soldiers were receptive
to ideologies “only when they were successfully couched in the language
of comradeship, kinship, neighbourhood, and friendship.”84 Ideologies
412 Communist Wars

need more concrete grounding if they are to move soldiers to a high

level of commitment. But dealing with large armies fighting over broad
fronts, concrete is also provided by patriotic identity, hatred, and repeti-
tive collective and educational rituals. We pin derogatory labels on such
fighters, such as “fanatics,” “zealots,” or “pathological.” We do not care to
admit that they believe more strongly in their cause and are braver than
our own soldiers. Thus, they have greater staying power, withstanding
enormous technological inferiority. Among the combatants I have dis-
cussed, they are matched in banishment of fear and acceptance of high
risk of death only by fighter pilots, who are totally absorbed in a difficult,
dangerous, and highly skilled task that yields very high social status. But
confidence in the army’s ability to achieve ultimate victory is more
widely important. If confidence in victory crumbles, so does the army.
Monarchs, dictators, presidents, and parliamentary leaders initiate
war, but they do not experience battle. They are callous desk killers, in-
flicting fear, death, and mutilation from afar on those they define as the
enemy, on their own soldiers, and on nearby civilians. This is perhaps the
greatest inequality in life chances in the world today. Killing in battle oc-
curs when rulers proclaim it as legitimate, and where their militaries cre-
ate institutions and culture that enable this to be accomplished in an
orderly way so that victory seems possible. Intense military power rela-
tions, the combination of disciplined obedience to hierarchy and close
comradeship, can overcome human repugnance to killing and the fear of
being killed. Military power triumphant can do this; military power en-
feebled cannot. I prefer the latter.
 chapter fourteen
Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

M
ost recent wars have been fought in the Greater Middle
East. To explain them, we must understand the relations
between two main sets of actors: on the one hand, the
Muslim peoples and states of the region, and on the other,
the interventions of empires from outside the region. Up to World War
II these empires had been mostly British, French, and Russian, and they
had destroyed the last indigenous empires of the region, the Persian and
Ottoman empires. Then the Europeans were displaced by the United
States and the Soviet Union. Their interventions during the Cold War
had nothing to do with religion. Instead, the misfortunes of the region
were the possession of oil fields and a strategic position between capital-
ist and communist areas. After the Soviet collapse, the United States was
left as the major imperial intervener. From the eighteenth to the early
twentieth century, direct or indirect colonial rule in the region by the
British and French empires had inspired much resistance. When the im-
perial torch passed to the Soviets and the United States, they sought only
informal empire, not territorial control, using military interventions to
strengthen or replace local regimes. They sought global grandeur and
oil, though they both claimed their missions were defensive, countering
the aggression of the other.
The Soviets tended to help self-described leftist states, whereas the
United States helped conservatives and monarchists. Both formally de-
nounced imperialism while pursuing it. Yet even before the collapse of

413
414 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

the Soviet Union, the region’s leftist regimes, Nasserite or Ba’athist,

were degenerating into corrupt authoritarianism, failing to sustain the
economic development they had promised. That was also true of other
regimes in the region, however, unless they had an abundance of oil, in
which case they had development for the powerful, and some crumbs for
the masses. The United States, the Soviets, and their clients had failed to
bring democratic capitalism or socialism to the region. Increasingly, local
opposition movements attacked their rulers as stooges of the imperialists
promoting decadent Western secular culture. This led opposition move-
ments to draw on the power resource that they alone possessed—Islam.
“Islam is the solution” became the dominant slogan of “Islamism.” The
West calls this “fundamentalism,” a return to the supposedly divinely re-
vealed truths of the seventh century. This increasingly became the main
opposition force to unpopular secular regimes.1
Islamism is popularly rooted in the everyday practices of the people.
It is helped by Islam’s independence from the state and lack of an institu-
tionalized church hierarchy, though this is truer of Sunni than of Shi’a
sects. Although the imams generally oppose Islamism, they lack much in-
fluence.2 There have been important Islamist intellectuals, and simplified
versions of their teachings have resonated widely. Although violent jihad-
ists constitute only a tiny minority of all Islamists, they can elicit enough
sympathy among the masses to provide persistent recruitment of young
men and women as shock troops.
The Islamist offensive was dual, Shi’a and Sunni. In 1979 the Shi’a
Islamic Revolution in Iran overthrew the shah, widely seen in the coun-
try as a corrupt and repressive puppet of the United States. A brief strug-
gle for power ensued between a more secular coalition and Islamists,
who managed to mobilize the mosques and bazaars to seize power. Their
leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, proclaimed an expansive goal: “We ex-
port our revolution to the four corners of the world because our revolu-
tion is Islamic; and the struggle will continue until the cry of ‘There is
no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ prevails
throughout the world.”
Such rhetoric is far removed from reality. Shi’a Islam is dominant in
Iran, but Shi’a constitute only about 15 percent of Muslims in the world.
Shi’a rule could not possibly extend to “the four corners of the world,”
and the main focus was national. Khomeini’s regime imposed a repres-
sive theocracy on the country, though with democratic trimmings such as
elections. Islamist rule at home and some export in the region were
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 415

spearheaded by the development of the 200,000-strong Islamic Revolu-

tionary Guard Corps, independent of the armed forces, commanding
its own separate air force and navy, and in command of Iranian missile
development—the biggest “praetorian guard” in history, established by
an autocratic regime distrustful of the regular armed forces, in this case
considered insufficiently ideological.
Among Sunnis, the Saudi monarchy had embraced Wahhābı̄ doctrine,
the most traditional reversion to seventh-century ideals. The Saudi re-
gime used its oil wealth to finance Wahhābı̄ networks of schools, universi-
ties, and communications media across the Middle East. From these and
other transnational networks emerged small Sunni movements espousing
jihad, or holy war, to spread the faith transnationally to Sunni Muslims
almost everywhere. The most important movement initially was the
World Islamic Front, dominated by Saudis and led by Osama bin Laden,
who declaimed in 1998, “Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, con-
trols the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: ‘But when the
forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye
find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every
stratagem (of war)’; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-
’Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands
to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped.”3
Thus jihadists, holy warriors, had penetrated both of Islam’s main
sects. The beliefs they sought to impose were sharia law and the hadith,
the divine revelations of the Prophet Muhammad, in the Shi’a case but-
tressed by the authority of the ayatollahs. Jihadists advocated spreading
truth through holy war. The declared enemies of jihadi movements like
Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Daesh (or ISIS) are not only secular Muslim
regimes but also Western regimes, especially the United States and Great
Britain, who were persistently intervening in Muslim countries, and
whose supposedly degenerate secular culture was said to corrupt Muslim
society. It is common in Western societies, and especially in the United
States, to blame Middle Eastern wars on these jihadists, and some West-
erners go further and identify Islam itself as a violent religion.
Two political scientists have offered Islam-centered theories of recent
wars. The first, Samuel Huntington, announced the coming of a global
“clash of civilizations,” some defined by their religion, others by culture
and language. He analyzed nine such civilizations but gave primacy to
what he saw as an unusually aggressive Islam embarking on clashes with
neighboring religions, principally Christianity and Hinduism. He was
416 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

right to emphasize a tense “fault line” between these religions stretching

across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.4 Yet this fault line
has produced more communal rioting and MIDs than full-fledged wars.
In fact, more armed conflict has occurred within Islam than between it
and outsiders, while most wars with outsiders resulted from or were ag-
gravated by Western military aggression, which Huntington ignores.
The second, John Owen, suggests recent wars have formed a single
wave of ideological warfare sweeping across the greater Middle East, anal-
ogous to the three previous waves of ideological wars in Europe discussed
in chapter 8. He counts nine cases between 1958 and 2009, although he
included only regime-change interstate wars.5 This excludes nonstate ji-
hadists like Al Qaeda, and ISIS had barely surfaced at the time he wrote.
In reality, most of Owen’s nine wars did not significantly involve reli-
gion. Three were initiated by American interventions against relatively
secular regimes of the region. The targets were Muslim countries, but
religious motives were not evident. Owen erroneously labels two more
cases as Islamist: the foreign invasions of Jordan in 1958 and of north
Yemen in 1962. Here the intervening states were offering help in civil
wars between monarchists and leftist republicans, neither of these being
Islamist and each supported by other Muslim states. Britain aided the
monarchists, the Soviets the republicans. They also occurred too early to
be influenced by the rise of jihadism. In two further cases of civil war in
Afghanistan, one side was Islamist, but the other was more secular and
was aided by the Soviets in 1979 and the United States in 2001. Islam
was important here, but only on one side. The 1980 war between Sunni
Iraq and Shi’a Iran did have religious coloration on both sides. An Israeli
incursion into Lebanon in 1982 obviously had Jewish versus Muslim
aspects—as did several Israeli-Arab wars not seeking regime change—
though these primarily involved a material struggle over land. So only
three of nine cases had a substantial religious input; four involved U.S.
troops, and one involved Soviet troops. They are too disparate to be con-
sidered a single wave, and foreign, especially American, imperialism was
important. Perhaps Owen was perspicacious, for greater religious input
became evident after he wrote—but alongside the return of imperialism.
Consider this list of American military interventions, large and small,
in Muslim countries since 1986, excluding operations designed only to
secure the evacuation or rescue of Americans from war zones: the 1986
bombing of Libya, 1987–88 attacks on various Iranian targets, 1991 Op-
eration Desert Storm invasion of Iraq, 1992–2003 no-fly zones and
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 417

bombings of Iraq, 1993 Somali fiasco, 1998 cruise missile attacks on Af-
ghanistan and Sudan, 2001 onward invasion and occupation of Afghani-
stan, 2003 onward invasion and occupation of Iraq, 2004 onward drone
strikes on at least six Muslim countries, 2011 bombing of Libya, 2014
onward military intervention on the ground and air in Syria. These ac-
tions were not unprovoked, and I am not here concerned with how legit-
imate they were. But they reveal that the major player in “Muslim wars”
has been the United States.
Robert Pape analyzes suicide bombings and finds they are more
likely when people feel their homeland is occupied (especially when the
occupier is of a different religion), and when the occupier has far supe-
rior military power yet is seen as lacking stomach for the fight, as they
suppose democracies to be. He concludes that suicide terrorism is a stra-
tegic weapon of the weak, wielded by young men and women seeing
themselves as altruists for their group. During the period he studied, sui-
cide bombings were committed by a variety of religious and nationalist
groups.6 Since then, almost all bombers have been Muslims, and their
targets have often been nondemocratic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia.
But his model does seem particularly appropriate for struggles between
Muslim jihadists and the United States.
So there were four types of war fought in the region: Muslim states
fighting non-Muslim but nonimperial states; Islamic sects fighting against
each other; jihadists fighting against more secular Muslims; and foreign
imperialists initiating wars against both Islamic jihadists and unfriendly
states. I start with Muslim/non-Muslim wars between neighbors not in-
volving Western imperial intervention.

Muslim against Non-Muslim Neighbors: (1)

Arab-Israeli Wars
This was a unique series of wars, the only ones fought between Jews and
Muslims and the only ones involving a people fleeing pogroms—indeed,
a Holocaust—and founding a new state whose rule involved settler colo-
nialism imposed on an indigenous people.
The state of Israel was founded in May 1948. Up to 2014 there were
twelve conflicts between it and surrounding Arab states and movements,
each one of which met the CoW standard for a war of over one thousand
battlefield deaths. There were also several lesser MIDs in that period.
War occurred in about half the years, a very high proportion. Almost all
418 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

ended in Israeli victories. Because of their defeats, the Arab states were
forced into lopsided peace deals with Israel at the expense of the Palestin-
ians. The periods of peace have enabled Israelis to establish more and
more settlements over land and houses formerly owned by Palestinians,
many of whom were forced into refugee camps. Since 1967, every Israeli
government has expanded Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories.
Over 400,000 Jewish citizens now live in the West Bank settlements, in-
cluding urban East Jerusalem, where Arab residents cannot get building
permits to confirm their residence there. In consequence, they are forci-
bly evicted. There are also lesser Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.
In 2022 landgrabbing still continued. A protest over the eviction of
Arab property owners from East Jerusalem grew into a riot, and then into
armed conflict as the Palestinian Hamas militia lobbed rockets into Israel,
and the Israeli military responded with air and artillery strikes on the
Gaza Strip. As usual, the casualty ratio was lopsided. Above 230 Palestin-
ians were killed, including 60 children, a sign that most casualties were
probably civilians. The Israelis lost twelve dead, including one child.
Twenty Palestinians were killed for every Israeli victim. The United
States was at first supportive of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” repeatedly
vetoing a UN resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. President
Joe Biden had several private conversations with Prime Minister Benja-
min Netanyahu, but he would not speak to Hamas leaders, whom the
U.S. government defines as terrorists. But in the Middle East, state ter-
rorism is far more deadly than paramilitary terrorism. Biden may have
privately put some pressure on Netanyahu since he faced dissent inside
the Democratic Party, but Egyptian leaders appear to have been the ne-
gotiators of the eventual cease-fire.
Religious differences are central drivers of these conflicts. The com-
batants do not try to impose their religion on each other, but both be-
lieve they have a divine right to the same land. The Hebrew Bible claims
that God promised the land of Israel to the children of Israel, and this is
now inscribed in the platforms of several Jewish political parties. To the
contrary, say Arabs, the Land of Canaan was promised to Ishmael, the
elder son of Abraham, from whom they claim descent. Muslims and Jews
also revere holy sites in the same places, such as the Cave of the Patri-
archs and the Temple Mount. Since Muslims controlled these sites for
1,400 years, they constructed holy buildings such as the Dome of the
Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Jerusalem is thus the epicenter of con-
flict. Neither the initial political elite of Israel nor the Palestinian people
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 419

were renowned for their religiosity, but in an age of nationalism, their

ethnic identity as Jews and Arabs has greatly reinforced the struggle.
On the Jewish side, extremism has been boosted by relatively poor im-
migrant Jews coming from Arab countries, Eastern Europe, and Russia.
They seek land and housing and are prepared to seize them from the Arab
occupants. Their increasing numbers have improved the electoral fortunes
of Israeli conservative and religious parties pressuring for more landgrabs.
Many Israeli Jews have also learned a lesson from the Holocaust that dif-
fers from the lesson liberals had expected, that this appalling experience
would make them more tolerant of minorities. To the contrary, most Jew-
ish Israelis seem to believe that to survive as a people, they must use to the
full whatever coercive powers they have—and of course the rhetoric of
some Palestinians is to “throw them into the sea.” Since Israeli Jews have
the military and political power to seize Arab lands, most of them believe
they have the right to do so, in the name of ethnic survival. Their ambition
is boosted by access to international capital, which has enabled them to
build a modern state, a modern military, and modern capitalism—to make
the desert bloom. Do we not deserve it? they ask rhetorically.
Palestinians are predominantly poor, desperately dependent in their
two enclaves on the Israelis for essential services, abandoned by foreign
powers, subjected to continuing ethnic cleansing. Their politicians are
deeply divided and have achieved little for them. Many young men and
women look in desperation for protection from terrorist militias. When
they throw rocks at Israeli police and soldiers, the Israeli response is state
terrorism, bringing in return more militia attacks. The resulting twenty-
fold disparity in fatalities alienates Palestinians further from Israel and
seems to some to confirm the Hamas claim that only armed struggle can
bring satisfaction, if not actual gains. So despite the two communities’
fierce hatred of each other, Israeli politicians such as former Prime Min-
ister Netanyahu and the Hamas paramilitaries are in effect conspiring
together, living off each other’s aggression, one to win elections, the
other to find new militia recruits, each maintaining power among their
own people by prolonging the struggle.
Of course, they have not been the only players. Yet the Arab states
found that involvement burned them, while British and French power de-
clined and the Soviet Union collapsed. During the 1950s and early 1960s,
France was the main collaborator in the Israeli nuclear program, while the
United States tried to restrain that program. But then pro-Israeli American
Jews’ ability to organize the electoral defeat of U.S. politicians critical of
420 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

Israel, the decline of American anti-Semitism, and the growing pro-Israeli

sentiments among Evangelicals made Israel the most favored U.S. ally,
rewarded with massive economic and military patronage. Until the Afghan
and Iraq wars brought temporary U.S. aid there, Israel was for three de-
cades the leading recipient of its aid, amounting to between $3 and $4
billion per year, while aid to the Palestinian authority was only between
$130 million and $1 billion. Initially, aid to Israel included much economic
assistance, but almost all aid is now military. In 2019 the United States
gave $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel, in addition to $8 billion in loan
guarantees. But these figures exclude Department of Defense “missile de-
fense” aid, which added another 40 percent to this total.7 The explicit
promise is to give Israel a “qualitative military edge” over all its neighbors.
And just as war with the Palestinians broke out again in 2021 came a fur-
ther $735 million in high-tech weaponry offered by the United States to
Israel.
This is unique among U.S. policy failures in the Middle East, the
one case where the United States potentially had the power to put pres-
sure on both sides by threatening to withdraw assistance to them both
unless they came to the negotiating table. But American presidents have
shown less and less inclination to attempt this. In 1981 U.S. aid
amounted to nearly 10 percent of the Israeli economy. But the decline in
economic aid means that total current economic aid is only about 1.5
percent of all aid. As for Israelis, most leaders have lost interest in any
peace process; instead, they have done pragmatic economic deals with
some Arab states, and they seem willing to take a few intermittent casual-
ties in Palestine for increases in territory. Peace and genuine settlement
of the dispute is now a glimmer on the far horizon. Both sides and the
United States could in collaboration bring it closer.

Muslim against Non-Muslim Neighbors:

(2) Nagorno-Karabagh
These wars ranged a Muslim against a neighboring Christian country,
with no significant imperial intervention. The somewhat secularized
Shi’a Muslim regime of Azerbaijan and an Armenia adhering to the
Christian Apostolic Church dispute the territories between them known
as Nagorno-Karabagh. These territories have been recognized interna-
tionally since Soviet times as part of Azerbaijan, although about 75 per-
cent of the population was then Armenian Christian. The Soviets had
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 421

damped down disputes between the communities, but in 1988, just be-
fore the Soviet collapse, and provoked by a pogrom of Armenians in the
city of Sumgait, a large Armenian movement in the region declared inde-
pendence from Azerbaijan, aided by the rulers of Armenia, which, al-
though formally a secular state, has a 90 percent Christian population.
The ensuing war lasted until 1994, killing perhaps 30,000 people; around
a million refugees fled from the fighting. Religious artifacts and build-
ings were targeted and destroyed in that war, but religion was less impor-
tant than ethnicity in the war. Armenian forces won and gained control
over all of Nagorno-Karabagh as well as some connecting Azeri territo-
ries depopulated through ethnic cleansing of Azeris. Christians were now
the vast majority of the people remaining in Nagorno-Karabagh, and
two successive referenda there produced more than 90 percent of votes
(on high turnouts) endorsing separation from Azerbaijan and union with
Armenia. A Russian-brokered cease-fire uneasily held for twenty-two
years from 1994 as Russia, the United States, and France chaired fruitless
mediation efforts. A brief MID flare-up in 2016 claimed one hundred
lives, but no territorial changes resulted.
The Azerbaijan regime remained revisionist, however, and modern-
ized its armed forces. Azeri forces probed briefly in 2016, but in October
2020 they invaded Nagorno-Karabagh en masse. Superior military tech-
nology overcame fierce Armenian resistance, especially through drones
supplied by Israeli-Turkish collaboration. Military operations were prob-
ably directed by Turkish officers.8 President Recep Erdogan was aiding a
fellow Turkic people while advancing his own regional power. Armenian
forces had neither drones nor the weapons to shoot them down. Syrian
mercenaries were also recruited by Turkey, some experienced fighters,
some raw recruits. They were cannon fodder for Azeri forces on the
bloody southern front to reduce Azeri casualties—“risk transfer milita-
rism.” After forty-four days Russia threatened intervention, and so Azeri
forces stopped. Negotiations chaired by Russia resulted in the cession of
territory, mostly outside Nagorno-Karabagh, which Armenia had held.
This makes communication between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabagh
problematic, since the connecting roads now pass through Azeri-held
territory. Two thousand Russian peacekeepers were deployed for five
years to keep them open. This was a clear-cut Azeri victory costing at
least four thousand Armenian and nearly three thousand Azeri casualties.
A few hundred civilians were also killed. Another bout of ethnic cleans-
ing and destruction of religious monuments saw Armenians fleeing from
422 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

the ceded territories, often burning down their houses as they left. Azeris
came in to replace them, some reclaiming property their families had
once owned. Further MIDs in which a few troops were killed occurred
in May and November 2021, Azeris seemingly the aggressors, as they
were again in 2022 when about 300 troops, mostly Armenian, were
killed. By then the Russian presence was weakening because of the war
in Ukraine. What will happen when the Russian troops leave?
The conflict had not primarily concerned religion in the sense
of doctrinal or ritual disputes, nor did either state seek to impose its
religion on the other community. These were primarily ethnic conflicts,
Azeris against Armenians, both now governed by radical nationalist intelli-
gentsia, to decide who would dominate these territories.9 Nonetheless,
since religion is the core of their ethnicity, some religious hatreds were
stirred up, as revealed in the destruction of churches and mosques. Azeris
were also bolstered ideologically by the righteousness normally possessed
by revisionists: this region had belonged to us and was taken from us ille-
gitimately by force. Armenians were bolstered by democratic righteous-
ness, the right of a population to choose its government, as revealed in the
referenda. Some also feared a second genocide. Memories of the genocide
at the hands of the Turks in 1915 is an important part of Armenian identity
and had been stirred up by the Sumgait pogrom perpetrated by Azeris,
whom most Armenians call “Turks.” The United States was not involved in
this war, and though Russia had provided arms to both combatants, it was
directly involved only in settling the war. Turkey was heavily implicated,
and for very mixed motives. This revisionist struggle may not be over.

Islamic Sectarian Wars

For over a millennium Islam has contained rival Sunni and Shi’a sects,
ultimately deriving from a seventh-century succession dispute over who
should succeed Muhammad. For most of this long stretch of history,
Sunni and Shi’a uneasily coexisted, arguing about historical legitimacy
and religious ritual, occasionally fighting each other. The Shi’a, being
minorities almost everywhere except in Persia (now Iran), tended of ne-
cessity to adopt quietist doctrines, while in Persia Shi’a clergy were usu-
ally subordinated to a secular state. Wars broke out when sectarian
conflict legitimated geopolitical struggle, as in the many wars during
1559 to 1648 between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shi’a Persian
Empire. These wars intermittently continued until 1823. Yet these wars
had reflected geopolitical more than religious motives.
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 423

Shi’a and Sunni tend to dominate different states. Shi’a predominate

in Iran, Azerbaijan, and less substantially in Iraq and Bahrain. The rest of
the Muslim world is majority Sunni, who amount to over 80 percent of
all Muslims. Thus, in most countries significant internal conflict will pit
Sunnis against Sunnis, for the simple reason that there aren’t enough
Shi’a to form a major movement.10 The converse is true in Iran (90 per-
cent Shi’a) and Azerbaijan (85 percent Shi’a). There have been two major
cases, however, in which a geopolitical struggle between states was am-
plified by a sectarian divide between them, the Iran-Iraq War of the
1980s, and the simmering Iran–Saudi Arabian confrontation enduring
today.
In 1980 Iraqi forces launched an invasion of Iran. For the Iranian re-
gime, this was a war of self-defense, defending especially its recent Is-
lamist revolution. The Islamic Republican Guard provided its vanguard
force, advancing in human waves, suffering heavy losses, who were glori-
fied as martyrs. Iran’s only ally was the Alawite Shi’a ruling (but minor-
ity) community of Syria. On the Iraqi side, help came from many Sunni
states and from the United States. Though the government of Saddam
Hussein was predominantly Sunni, it was also rather secular. Saddam had
launched his surprise attack on Iran believing that this was a window of
opportunity, that recent revolutionary chaos had weakened the Iranian
military. But there was also a sectarian motive, for he feared the Shi’a
revolution in Iran might spark off a revolt in Iraq by the majority Shi’a
population whom he kept in a subordinate role. He also hoped to annex
an oil-rich province. So the war was both a geopolitical and an ideologi-
cal sectarian struggle with material goals added. After eight years of
slaughter, the war ended in stalemate back at the preexisting boundaries.
Superior Iraqi weapons had been countered by superior Iranian morale;
a million Iranians and half a million Iraqis were dead—the third deadli-
est war in modern times in terms of deaths as a proportion of combatant
country populations. Iran was then put on the defensive by American
hostility but semicovertly aided Shi’a movements elsewhere.
The second major sectarian confrontation came after the 2003 defeat
of Saddam and the collapse of Iraq. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia
were left as the dominant regional powers, both major oil powers. Their
struggle had intensified as Islamist hard-liners took over in both coun-
tries, the ayatollahs in Iran, and Wahhābı̄s in Saudi Arabia. Both had
propaganda and educational networks aimed at coreligionists abroad.
They are now the core adversaries in a geopolitical-ideological struggle
424 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

increasingly involving the United States and three other countries, Bah-
rain, Syria, and Yemen. The main motive of the two powers has been
geopolitical grandeur in the region. Sectarianism, however, clearly domi-
nated their choice of allies and clients. No alliance among any of these
states crossed sectarian lines.
The Arab Spring protests in March 2011 had direct sectarian reper-
cussions in Bahrain, where a popular protest movement based mainly in
the oppressed 60 percent Shi’a population was crushed by Bahrain’s mi-
nority Sunni government’s armed forces, which included many foreign
mercenaries, supplemented by one thousand Saudi and five hundred
UAE soldiers. All these forces were Sunni. The regime then destroyed
about forty Shi’a mosques, a clear gesture of sectarian repression. This
had been a brief civil war between rival Islamic religious communities in
which the Sunni government triumphed over a popular insurrection that
was largely though not entirely Shi’a.
There were bigger repercussions in Syria, where Arab Spring peace-
ful protests were met by repression by President Bashar al-Assad. This
turned protest into armed rebellion aimed at removing him. The core of
his regime was the Alawite Shi’a sect. The resistance was an amalgam of
largely Sunni groups, some quite secular, such as the Free Syrian Army
and the Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and some jihad-
ists, like the al-Nusra Front and ISIS. This war saw the largest recruit-
ment of jihadists, and they increasingly dominated the rebel forces.
Samar Yazbek quotes anti-Assad militia leaders she interviewed who
voiced murderous sentiments toward Alawites, whom they called “apos-
tates.”11 She managed with some difficulty to conceal the fact that she
was an Alawite. Although there was an underlying conflict between most
Alawites and many Sunnis, the civil war itself amplified murderous ha-
treds, exacerbated also by an influx of over ten thousand foreign Sunnis
to fight the apostate Alawite regime.
Their factional animosities greatly weakened the rebels, as did their
inferior weaponry. Lacking antiaircraft guns, they were helpless against
bombing from planes and from helicopters dropping barrels loaded with
explosives. The Saudis and Qatar supplied them with simple arms up to
2017. Shi’a Iran and Hezbollah have supported Assad, whose air force
was aided by Russian planes from 2015 onward. The secular rebels were
helped by an international coalition led by the United States from 2014,
but the coalition provided much less aid than Russia did to Assad. The
Americans also focused on attacking ISIS, not Assad. Turkish ground
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 425

forces attacked both Assad and ISIS forces, but they focused most on the
Kurdish SDF militia since President Erdogan feared Kurdish resistance
movements inside Turkey. Israeli governments have also attacked Iranian
and Hezbollah forces. Amid such confusion, the Shi’a-Sunni axis has
been only one strand of the conflict. Exploiting the chaos, the Assad re-
gime has been able with Russian help and American distraction to sur-
vive, the ostensible winner of a destroyed country. The United States and
Saudi Arabia were on the losing side, but the real losers were half a mil-
lion Syrian dead, as well as the shattered survivors of areas devastated by
bombing targeted deliberately at civilians, and at least 7 million fleeing
as refugees abroad. The most perverse legacy of this internationalized
civil war was the creation of Syrian mercenary forces, young men with or
without military experience but with no job prospects in Syria, organized
by the Turkish military to fight for pay in Libya and Nagorno-Karabagh,
a strategy of “risk-transfer militarism” to protect Libyan and Azeri forces.
The third case of sectarian civil war is Yemen. The Sunni former gov-
ernment of the country controls much of the predominantly Sunni south,
although Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates and regional separatists are also active
there. In the north the Houthis, a Shi’a Zaydi sect, from 2004 fought re-
peated wars against the Sunni government with support from a Shi’a popu-
lation feeling exploited by the central government. A string of victories
culminated in their seizing the capital, Sanaa, in 2014. Because the Houthis
had overthrown a supposedly legitimate government, the UN authorized
sanctions against them, but not military operations. But war escalated in
2016 when Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Gulf sheikdoms began bombing
and blockading the Houthis, who receive help only from Shi’a Iran. The
Saudis are backed up by Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Bahrain, and the United
Arab Emirates, all Sunni states, in addition to the United States and Britain,
who until 2021 defined the Houthis as a terrorist organization. ISIS also at-
tacks the Houthis as apostates, just as ISIS in Afghanistan now bombs Shi’a
mosques. By the end of 2021 the UN estimated that the war had killed
370,000, mostly civilians. Oxfam and the UN estimated that 15 or 20 mil-
lion Yemenis would not have enough food by the end of 2021. Deaths are
resulting from lack of food, inadequate health services, and infrastructure
destroyed by Saudi-led aerial bombing and blockades and Houthi artillery
shelling. The UNHCR also noted that during 2015–20 over 4 million
Yemenis had become refugees. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—
Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death—gallop together across Syria and
Yemen.
426 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

Two more countries saw sectarian violence between Shi’a and Sunnis.
In Iraq before 2003, Saddam’s regime rested mainly on Sunnis, 35 per-
cent of the population, repressing the 65 percent Shi’a (these figures in-
clude Kurds of both sects). Control was reversed after the U.S. invasion,
but this sparked a civil war that still simmers. In Lebanon Shi’a represent
60 percent of Muslims, Sunnis 35 percent, but each sect dominates its
own regions, and Lebanese Christians outnumber each of the Muslim
sects. After a period of broadly successful power sharing, Lebanon de-
scended into chaos, but Muslim sectarianism was not a major cause. Hez-
bollah is a large Shi’a paramilitary force in Lebanon, pursuing violence
there and against Israel. It is not fundamentally sectarian, however, for it
cooperates with the Palestinian Hamas paramilitary, which is Sunni. The
war in Lebanon is only marginally sectarian. Additionally, atrocities have
intermittently occurred against Shi’a minorities in Afghanistan, Egypt,
India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
All these cases reveal that sectarian Islamic aspects of civil and inter-
state wars have been growing. Iran-Saudi confrontations might be con-
sidered a more geopolitical than sectarian ideological struggle. Yet since
each side allies only with cosectarians, this suggests more religious input,
not so much doctrinal as a question of which community will dominate.
This has increasingly involved the United States on the Sunni side, as I
discuss later.

Transnational Jihadi Wars: Islamic State

Jihadi wars have received considerable attention because the jihadists
have attacked Western as well as Muslim countries. Hezbollah, Al Qaeda
and its affiliates, and Islamic State movements variously called Daesh,
ISIL, and ISIS (the collective term I will use) have spawned affiliates
across most of the Muslim world—in the Middle East, North Africa, and
Central and South Asia. Hezbollah is the only Shi’a organization, and it
has a legitimate political presence in Lebanon. It is much less radical, its
goals limited to Lebanon and Israel. In Syria it is halfway to being a reg-
ular army with Iranian state support. The main movements are Sunni,
like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and their affiliates. They are nonstate and much
more radical. Al Qaeda arose among various jihadi groups who in the
1990s had been repressed by regimes in the region. Al Qaeda then fo-
cused on small-scale attacks on the “far enemy,” the United States, while
seeking to rally local Muslim populations in pursuit of its jihadi goals.
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 427

But after 9/11, the initial defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the death
of bin Laden, and major counterterrorist security measures, Al Qaeda
lost much of its capacity to strike at the far enemy and focused on local
struggles. The revival of the Taliban, however, may increase its activism.
Here I focus on the Islamic State, which has a broader striking range and
is better-documented.
ISIS militants are ideological warriors driven by an aggressive read-
ing of the Quran, calling for a jihad, holy war, against the unbelievers.
The Quran says that it is for Christians to choose conversion to Islam,
payment of an extra poll tax, or death; Ibn Khaldun repeated this in
1377, and it has again risen to prominence.12 But this holy war is shorn
of the two qualifications expressed in the Quran, that jihad might refer
only to wars of defense against unbelievers, and the “escape clauses”
whereby those ignorant of the true faith might be given time to repent.13
ISIS militants seek to force conversions of Christians and Jews and to kill
those who refuse or who are “apostates,” like Shi’a, Alawites, Yazidi and
Druze monotheists, and Kurds, a mostly Sunni ethnic group who are
more mystical and tolerant. They also attack Sunni Muslims who have
flirted with Western influences. ISIS sees apostates everywhere—selling
or consuming cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs, with Western clothes, clean-
shaven men, uncovered women, “abnormal” sexual behavior, and voting
in an election.
At its peak in 2014, ISIS had taken over about 40 percent of Iraq and
60 percent of Syria, founding a short-lived ISIS caliphate. In it, if Muslims
outwardly conformed, they were not in peril. In the capital, Raqqa,
“Samer” wrote a diary of daily life. He says public attendance at execu-
tions was compulsory. Spectators had to mask their thoughts. “It’s very
dangerous to let your true feelings show because Daesh is eyeing the
crowd; we are utterly in their grip.” There were daily floggings. Teenage
girls were forcibly married to fighters, and women were harassed by the
“modesty police.” Arbitrary taxes were levied on shopkeepers.14 A mixture
of coercion, indoctrination, and effective governance meant that locals did
not resist a regime that was simultaneously a “mafia adept at exploiting
decades-old transnational gray markets for oil and arms trafficking . . . a
conventional military . . . a sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus
. . . a slick propaganda machine.”15
ISIS denounces Shi’a ritual innovations, such as worship at the
graves of imams and processional self-flagellation, which it says have no
basis in the Quran or the sayings of the Prophet. Two hundred million
428 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

Shi’a are in principle condemned to death or forced conversion, though

there are too many of them for this to be practical. Muslim heads of state
are targets, for they have elevated man-made law above the sharia law of
God. ISIS even persuaded many that the final war between Muslims and
infidels had started, in which Muslims would eventually triumph, and the
end of days would come.16 This is a transcendent ideology glorifying
atrocious religious war.
ISIS kills men, women, and children and tortures and kills prisoners.
Killing allegedly adulterous women and homosexual men, and entire or-
ganized sex slave markets, are legitimized by its readings of Quranic
texts. Like some customs relating to the Judeo-Christian Old Testament,
these reflected practices of ancient societies that are considered horrific
today. Its deeds put ISIS in the same atrocity league as the Nazis, while
adding the religious incentive that atrocities will be rewarded in heaven.
The militants do not feel moral qualms but proudly proclaim their bru-
tality in horrific videos. Their text, The Management of Savagery, declares
that “the most abominable of the levels of savagery” are better than “sta-
bility under the order of unbelief.” Their atrocities have a dual rational-
ity, however. They are aimed at intimidating the enemy and at showing
those who join the movement they must go to any lengths to achieve the
Islamic paradise. There is no turning back.
ISIS appeals especially to Sunnis living under Shi’a rule in Iraq and
Syria.17 It first expanded in Iraq after the American defeat of Saddam
Hussein in 2003 handed over a previously Sunni government to Shi’a
leaders. Sunni tribal paramilitaries, the Sons of Iraq, were also sidelined
by the new government. Some top ISIS leaders had previously served in
Saddam’s military or security services, and so Ba’athism had returned as
jihadism. The ISIS appeal to Syrian Sunnis grew as Assad intensified re-
pression and as the fractious Syrian rebel groups produced chaos. These
crises, as well as the collapse of the Arab Spring revolts, made some Mus-
lims speculate on the apocalyptic possibility that the great military
leader, the Mahdi, might soon come to bring about the end of days.18 Ibn
Khaldun had poured ridicule on those who in the fourteenth century be-
lieved this to be imminent.19 Some delusions never die.
In Syria the United States gave limited help to the anti-Assad rebels
while Assad used his airpower, later reinforced by Russia’s, to pour indis-
criminate devastation on rebel-held regions.20 Between them, they unin-
tentionally gave ISIS space to expand in a power vacuum across
Syrian-Iraqi borderlands. Their fanaticism yielded superior morale,
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 429

which enabled them to rout much larger Iraqi government forces. It

seems appropriate to describe this with the Arabic term asabiyya, greater
normative solidarity. But the subventions provided by wealthy Sunnis
abroad also enabled them to dominate the poorly equipped secular Syrian
rebels. In the ISIS caliphate foreign donations were supplemented by
bank theft; selling oil, wheat, water, and antiquities; human trafficking;
extracting ransoms for kidnapped foreigners; and imposing taxes on local
economic activity.21 Rukmini Callimachi says that ISIS files in Mosul re-
veal that “the tax revenue the Islamic State earned far outstripped income
from oil sales. It was daily commerce and agriculture—not petroleum—
that powered the economy of the caliphate.” ISIS at one point had a daily
income of U.S. $3 million and an annual revenue of $2.9 billion.22 In
some areas ISIS provided effective police, courts, and city services. It me-
diated tribal disputes, and its justice was swift. Kidnapping, robberies, and
extortion declined, and municipal workers were forced back to work.
Some had formerly received their salaries while doing nothing. It also
imposed price controls on commodities such as oil byproducts.23
Though hated by virtually all Muslim regimes, the jihadists have
enough popular support to survive state persecution. Several studies re-
veal the background of ISIS militants. These are based on three sources:
government estimates, captured ISIS records, and in-depth interviews
with detained, defecting, or captured militants.24 Obviously, these are not
random samples of ISIS fighters, and the various samples may be pre-
sumed to have biases, but they are the best we have.
They were virtually all Sunni Muslims; there were just a handful of
Shi’a and Christian converts. About half came from Syria or Iraq and half
were from foreign countries—perhaps forty thousand of them, all told.
Most foreigners were from Arab countries, but at the peak the largest
group came from Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian republics,
then from Arab countries, then from Europe, with a sprinkling from
much farther afield. Tunisia contributed the largest number of Arabs, and
France contributed the largest number of Europeans. So they were a ver-
itable international brigade.
The studies find that they were mainly middle-class and quite well-
educated, except for the group who had been detained before they could
reach Syria or Iraq, who were mainly working-class and poorly educated.
But data obtained from ISIS records indicate that this was truer of the
foreigners than of the locals. Yet majorities in all groups had experienced
unemployment (most believed this was through discrimination). About
430 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

one-quarter had a petty criminal past or had spent time in prison—rarely

for terrorist offenses, mostly for drug offenses. These, together with
other “vulnerabilities” like unemployment, poverty, and family troubles
(especially evident among women), made them susceptible to making a
major change in their life, and friends and the internet were the main
persuaders into leaving. Their internet propaganda depends on video
games (the popular war game “Call of Duty” was transformed into “Call
of Jihad”), Twitter, and Facebook, as well as short films showing idealized
life in the caliphate.
They were overwhelmingly young, in their twenties, and around 80
percent were male. Most had been single when they joined the struggle,
but half the men were married by the time they were captured, having
been found wives by ISIS. Three-quarters of the women were foreigners
and were middle-class. Most of the women became brides thanks to ISIS,
and their role was the traditional one of bearing and rearing children and
caring for their menfolk. Only a few women fought, while at least two-
thirds of the men were fighters.
Scott Atran and his colleagues interviewed seventy young men in
Iraqi refugee camps.25 Most reported that they and most Sunnis had wel-
comed ISIS as leading a “glorious revolution,” implementing divine rule
through sharia law. Ninety-three percent commended the Islamic State’s
provision of effective defense, commitment to religion, and implementa-
tion of sharia, which resulted in security, stability, and everyday travel
freedom because they abolished checkpoints. ISIS brutality and corrup-
tion had then undermined this support. Disillusionment was common in
all the interview surveys. Yet most still favored sharia law and opposed de-
mocracy, which they said brought only conflict—as it had in Iraq. A desire
for public order overpowered desire for liberty and democracy. Ninety-
four percent believed that Iran and America conspired to “eliminate our
[Sunni] religion.” They would support another jihadi regime, should one
arise. In Dagestan young people were recruited by an online campaign fo-
cused on Muslim humiliation and victimhood, an idealized Islamist life,
and the duty of jihad.26 Farhad Khosrokhavar sees young Muslims radical-
izing from a sense of personal humiliation and victimization in line with
an Ummah community similarly suffering. Speckhard and Ellenberg re-
port that their interviewees privileged their Islamic identity. Their ideo-
logical attachments were not so much religious as political—jihadist,
caliphate, anti-Western sentiments, and Sunni rights. But unemployment,
poverty, and just “helping” also figured.27 ISIS recruits had heard of the
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 431

military failure of Arab nationalism from the Six-Day War of 1967 on-
ward, and the unraveling of incipient welfare states by neoliberal Arab re-
gimes. Lydia Wilson agrees that the ideological core was not Islamic
doctrine but “a visceral feeling of oneness with the group.”28 Life in the
caliphate was depicted as idealized camaraderie between fighters and civil-
ians, bonded by the fight for true Islam and the threat of death. She inter-
viewed Iraqi ISIS fighters in a Kirkuk jail. They were poor, illiterate, often
unemployed, and from big families. She added:

They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers

at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting
in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their
own [Shi’a] government. They are not fueled by the idea of an
Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group
since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and en-
raged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe.
This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise
of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise
of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a reli-
gious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.29

All these studies downplay doctrinal motivations. The main attraction

was the defense of an idealized Islamic community.
Brian Dodwell and his colleagues analyzed over 4,600 Islamic State
personnel records for foreign fighters in 2013 and 2014.30 Of these, 10
percent had experience in jihadi movements. Four hundred were under
eighteen, considered well-suited to suicide bombing. As in the other
studies, few claimed much knowledge of the Quran. Notes made on their
files by ISIS officials indicated searches for specialized professional skills.
This was in many ways a normal business organization. When asked
whether they wanted a fighting or a suicide role in ISIS, 12 percent
chose suicide, and those were mostly from the Middle East and North
Africa. This contrasted with the 56 percent of recruits who had preferred
suicide, as recorded for six hundred Al Qaeda foreign fighters in Iraq in
2007. These were all from Arab countries, mainly Saudi Arabia, Libya
coming in second.31 But these are both astonishing totals, proof of
extreme commitment.
ISIS fighters numbered between 30,000 and 80,000 during 2014–16.
Between 2015 and 2017 jihadists operating in Europe killed nearly 350
432 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

people.32 Using big data on the online behavior of thousands of ISIS

sympathizers in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium,
Tamar Mitts found that pro-ISIS tweets were significantly correlated
with local anti-Muslim hostility, as were descriptions of an idealized life
in ISIS territories and favorable views of foreign fighters. Muslim and
anti-Muslim extremists are locked together in an escalating spiral of ha-
tred.33
In general, recruits could choose to fight as an individual nonmem-
ber, usually for tribal allies, or pledge total allegiance to the group, which
brought more pay and status but was a commitment for life. Anyone
pledging allegiance and then seeking to leave was denounced as an apos-
tate and killed. All fighters had a two- to three-month course on the
Quran on top of their military training and then were sent in roughly
equal numbers either to the front or to border patrols.
Outside the short-lived caliphate, jihadi guerillas have shifted the
battlefield from jungles and mountains to cities, hiding among civilian
populations whom regimes and Americans would prefer not to target,
since that might alienate the local population. They use the weapons of
the weak, such as Kalashnikovs, machine guns, IEDs, the suicide belt,
grenades for street fighting, shoulder-held rocket grenades, and pickup
trucks. They are beginning to use drones. The IED involves a spotter
looking for oncoming vehicles, and a second person who remotely oper-
ates the bomb’s trigger. But both are directly communicating through
cellphones with a controller far away, perhaps in an internet café.. They
were outnumbered and technologically overmatched, especially vulnera-
ble to airpower. Yet high commitment and morale enabled a stream of
victories over regular and conscript Syrian and Iraqi forces from 2014 to
2016. ISIS militants provided at least seventy-two suicide bombers be-
tween January 2013 and March 2018, and well over one hundred who
knew they were likely to die in their attacks. These assassins were vener-
ated as martyrs. High morale was evident in the siege of Mosul, where
few ISIS soldiers surrendered. One reason, says Khosrokhavar, is that
radicalized Islamists believe that if they engage in jihadist action, God
will intervene to establish a universal theocracy.34 Democratic triumpha-
list theory is rebuffed. ISIS, an authoritarian movement, generates higher
morale.
But American airpower ground them down. Mosul was devastated by
bombing and fell in July 2017. More surrenders came in early October
2017, five hundred after eleven days of fighting at Tal Afar, and over one
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 433

thousand after three days at Hawija. Finally, Raqqa, the ISIS capital, fell
on October 21. Foreign recruitment had slowed as the defeats came.
Some foreign fighters now vanished in a “meltaway” strategy, others lan-
guished in detention centers, often refused reentry to their home coun-
try. Michael Knights and Alex Almeida report that in January 2020,
14,000 to 18,000 ISIS fighters and helpers remained in Iraq and Syria.35
ISIS attacks fell sharply but rebounded in 2019 and 2020, scattered
mostly across rural areas, relying on small-scale IED and nighttime at-
tacks on villages and police stations. As the United States and its allies
pulled out troops, Iraqi forces proved less effective at coping with them.
ISIS is hurt but not finished. Its attempt at a territorial caliphate failed
because it played into American strength at fixed-position warfare. Its
role in Western countries has declined as state intelligence agencies have
intensified their surveillance, and almost all attacks are committed by
loners armed only with knives, guns, and vehicles.36 But the digital ca-
liphate remains vigorous, and the U.S. military in 2020 counted 600 ISIS
attacks in Syria and 1,400 in Iraq. Its staying power is greater than that
of the United States, although U.S. policy has shifted toward drone war-
fare, which is less costly and provokes less opposition at home. Khos-
rokhavar says the “salient trait of jihadism is its flexibility and its capacity
to adapt to extreme situations through reorganization. Al-Qaeda and
the jihadist movements are the first truly global and transnational type
of terrorism to perpetuate itself over time, transform itself in the face of
international and national repression . . . and continue its struggle in
multiple forms, varying them as circumstances change and constantly
constructing new ones.”37
There are other Islamist militias. ISIS-K is the long-surviving Af-
ghan offshoot, with whom the Taliban government has to deal. But ji-
hadism has grown across the north of Africa. Al-Shabaab operates in and
around Somalia, stretching as far as northern Mozambique—though
here it seems like a local movement protesting government mistreatment
of the region and lacking much Islamist coloration. Originally formed as
the armed branch of an opposition movement in Somalia, al-Shabaab de-
clared allegiance to Al Qaeda in 2004. It had success during 2005–12,
minimally administering much of Somalia. Its defeat of Ethiopian forces
that had invaded to assist government forces brought it nationalist cre-
dentials. It expanded activities with atrocities committed in neighboring
countries, whose retaliatory crackdowns on their Muslim populations in-
creased the flow of young recruits. Al-Shabaab has been fractious and
434 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

suffered defections to ISIS, but it still has militants and commits bomb-
ings and assaults. It remains stronger in rural areas, where it levies taxes
and administers justice.38 African jihadi networks are also intermingling
with other guerilla groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo,
whose government has invited in the Ugandan army to help combat
them. U.S. advisers have been active in combat against militant groups,
as have French forces in Francophone Africa, although President Ma-
cron announced in mid-2021 that the French troops would soon be re-
moved. But the Taliban victory in Afghanistan is likely to encourage
jihadi activity in many places.

American Interventions
One cannot discuss jihadi wars without mentioning the United States.
After 1945 the Middle East saw American-Soviet rivalry, fighting indi-
rectly through proxies, with competing ideologies of global domination.
The Soviet collapse in 1991 encouraged the United States into new of-
fensives, fighting “wars of choice” when the nation was not itself threat-
ened. Thus, it became the most aggressive military power in the world.
The financial cost is no problem for the United States. As the holder
of the world’s reserve currency, it can just print more money and take
on debt to finance war. The cost of war in lives, however, proved more
problematic.
Most recent enemies identified by the United States have been Mus-
lim dictators, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad,
and the jihadi movements Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS. Unlike
the Soviet Union, these are hardly contenders for world domination.
The “Axis of Evil”—Iran, Iraq, North Korea—denounced by Bush the
Younger involved three lesser states, termed “terrorist” to amplify their
threat. The “greatness” of America as the arbiter of world conflict, “the
leader of the free world,” remains the core secular ideology justifying in-
terventions. American power will bring free market (that is, neoliberal)
capitalism, higher living standards, and democracy to benighted peoples.
Women’s equality has been recently added to the mission statement. The
ideology is sincerely believed by American administrations of both par-
ties, the one remaining bipartisan policy in a factionalized polity.
The results of American interventions, usually for regime change,
have been poor. Since 1945 U.S. goals have rarely been achieved through
war. Korea was a stalemate, leaving the peninsula exactly where it was
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 435

before the war, and adding great loss of life. Vietnam was a defeat. Most
of the East Asian region was won for capitalism not by war but by gener-
ous trade agreements: economic power proved superior to military
power. Defeat in Vietnam then taught Americans caution for a decade,
until they credited Reagan with winning the Cold War, which restored
American confidence. Invasions of Panama and Grenada were easy victo-
ries over minnows, while Serbia was a victory for NATO bombing allied
to Croat and Bosnian forces on the ground, bringing Serbia to the nego-
tiating table. None of these wars was authorized by the United Nations,
and as wars of aggression they could be considered war crimes, though
there is no authority that could impose a criminal trial on the United
States.
The First Gulf War of 1990–91 was a full-scale invasion of Iraq in
response to the invasion by Saddam Hussein’s forces of Kuwait. So the
American-led response had the UN seal of approval, which by 1990 (un-
like 1950 in Korea) brought genuine global legitimacy. And it was not
anti-Islamic since Kuwait and other U.S. allies were Muslim states. Pres-
ident Bush the Elder brought the war to a halt when he had regained
Kuwait and taught Saddam a lesson, for he knew he lacked the political
power to form a stable alternative government in Iraq. He had hoped
Saddam’s defeat would lead to indirect regime change, through an army
coup, but none came. There were insurrections against Saddam in the
Shi’a south and the Kurdish north, but nothing stirred in Baghdad or the
heartland, and Saddam savagely crushed the risings. Over a further de-
cade intermittent bombing by American and British planes failed to stop
Saddam from breathing defiance. The hoped-for military coup never
materialized.
In 1998 Congress and the Clinton administration increased the pres-
sure by almost unanimously passing the Iraq Liberation Act, committing
the United States to work for regime change in Iraq, though the means
were not clarified. Seventy-two military coups in Arab states had been at-
tempted between 1950 and 2009, and half had succeeded. This spurred au-
thoritarian rulers to curtail the autonomy of the armed forces—just as
Chinese emperors had. Rulers appointed generals on the basis of kinship,
ethnicity, and sect; built up alternative armed forces or security police to
monitor the military; split up tribes and clans in different regiments; re-
warded loyalty through grants from oil revenues or import licenses or milk-
ing nationalized companies—all to cultivate the notion that “whatever they
have is a gift from the regime.” There were also purges. Coup-proofing has
436 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

generally worked, but at the cost—as in imperial China—of making the

army ineffective in battle, a cost that authoritarian rulers in Iraq, Saudi Ara-
bia, Iran, Syria, and Egypt were willing to pay.39 Saddam could not be over-
thrown from within, but his armed forces were enfeebled. They and the
ruling Ba’ath Party were plagued with corruption, the narrowing of the so-
cial base of support, and hostilities between the various forces created by
Saddam as counterweights to the army. There was corruption, evasion of
conscription, desertion, low morale, and poor performance. It was all effec-
tive at keeping Saddam in power, but the record of his armed forces was
poor.40
The 2000 election victory of Bush the Younger inaugurated a presi-
dent who lacked foreign policy experience and relied on Vice President
Cheney, a hawk who appointed neoconservatives recruited from right-
wing think tanks to most of the top foreign and defense posts. The atroc-
ity of 9/11 then further empowered them. That the Taliban government
in Afghanistan was sheltering Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda master-
mind, gave a quasi-legitimate motive of self-defense for intervention
shared by both major political parties. Only one representative and not
one senator voted against the invasion. In theory, international law
would have required the United States first to try negotiations with the
Taliban and Pakistan to bring bin Laden to an international court of jus-
tice. The Bush administration gave the Taliban government only two
weeks to hand over bin Laden, an absurdly short period for realistic ne-
gotiations to take place. Yet since the United States does not accept in-
ternational judiciaries, this is pie in the sky. The Taliban were also
provincials, unaware of neocon determination to destroy those who de-
fied the United States. American and British forces invaded Afghanistan
at the end of 2001, and then it became the common enterprise of NATO,
although Afghanistan was 11,000 kilometers from the North Atlantic.
The hawks then also used 9/11 to claim that Saddam Hussein, the
Iraqi leader, supported Al Qaeda and possessed chemical weapons, claims
that most experts knew were false. Saddam actually hated Al Qaeda, which
had denounced him as an apostate, and he was a fairly secular ruler. But
he was foolish, believing that the United States would not invade, not ap-
preciating the effect of his own defiance on the new administration.
It is not clear whether a Democratic administration would have in-
vaded Iraq in 2003. The Democrats in both House and Senate were split.
Yet the hawks believed strongly in the mission of American military inter-
ventions, and the flawed intelligence they presented on Saddam’s alleged
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 437

weapons persuaded almost all Republicans and some Democrats to sup-

port the war. Some hawks (like Cheney) seemed to be pursuing American
oil and economic interests, though it was difficult to see what these might
be. Unlike the 1990–91 invasion, this one was not about oil. Others put
U.S. grandeur first. Yet they all shared the belief that they could bring
human rights, free markets, and democracy to the world, no longer de-
terred by Soviet retaliation. They tried to calculate the war’s costs and
benefits but they grossly overestimated U.S. power—not military power,
which they saw would be overwhelming, but the political and ideological
power to establish stable rule after victory. They thought it would be a
swift in-and-out operation, never imagining having an army of occupa-
tion there for years. Some claimed intervention would pay for itself
through oil and other trade deals. But they were ideologically blinded by
the perceived virtue of their cause, assuming that the allure of their ver-
sion of freedom and democracy was so strong that Afghans and Iraqis
would welcome U.S. forces as liberators. Cheney declared just before the
invasion: “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve
talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to
the White House. . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no
question but what they want is to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they
will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.”41
This was mind-boggling given that for ten years the United States
had been imposing economic sanctions on Iraq that were backed by
bombing, which caused civilian suffering and children’s deaths, much
publicized by Saddam. How could that have led to massive Iraqi sup-
port? But calculations were unnecessary: the flow of history toward de-
mocracy would bring swift victory. They were wrong, for public order is
a precondition for democracy, as Francis Fukuyama argued.42 Those
young Arab refugees whom I quoted earlier valued public order over de-
mocracy. Yet the United States produced disorder.
Robert Draper, working from interviews with administration insiders
and newly released documents, emphasizes Bush’s own role in the rush to
war in Iraq. He says Bush experienced a conversion in 2002, conjoining
ideology and emotion to evoke a “piercing clarity of purpose” and an “un-
checked self-confidence” “to liberate a tormented people,” and “to end a ty-
rant’s regime.” Meeting with the reluctant Jordanian king, he snapped:
“Saddam is a bad guy. . . . My opinion of him hasn’t changed. We need to
take him down.” Bush’s voice rose as he declaimed: “History has called us.”
Bush kept repeating that Saddam hated America because he hated freedom,
438 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

and freedom was the sacred heart of America. Draper opines, “His increas-
ingly bellicose rhetoric reflected a wartime president who was no longer
tethered to anything other than his own convictions.” While speaking to
Asian journalists in the Oval Office, Bush pointed to portraits of Churchill,
Lincoln, and Washington and said that he was, like them, “a leader who
knew who he was and who knew what was right.” He was “a good versus evil
guy,” the one “decider,” and he used the power of the presidency to sideline
contrary opinions within the administration. Of course, most officials around
him were hawks who agreed with him. Bush’s rigid naïveté and lack of inter-
est in the costs and consequences of war appalled a few staffers, but they
dared not object for fear of losing influence or jobs. George Tenet believed
his CIA’s role was to serve his “First Customer,” the president, so dissenters
within the agency were not allowed to express criticism—or concluded it
was wiser not to. Secretary of State Colin Powell, the likeliest dissenter,
caved in with a speech at the UN declaring that Iraqi trucks using balloons
for weather forecasting were in fact mobile chemical weapons labs.43 UN
delegates laughed at him. In retirement, he alone has been contrite. But the
ability of an ideological-emotional ruler armed with presidential powers,
surrounded by a clique of like-minded advisers, to take the country to war
reinforces my belief that democracy is irrelevant to war-and-peace decisions.
The United States invaded Iraq in early 2003. It had failed to get Secu-
rity Council approval, so this invasion was in principle a war crime. Both
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq brought swift battlefield victories and the
fall of the Kabul and Baghdad regimes. But neither brought the desired re-
sults, as critics, including myself, had predicted.44 The wars had little popu-
lar resonance in the United States, although most Americans initially
believed what their leaders said about the connections between bin Laden
and Saddam Hussein and chemical weapons. The British less so. But popu-
lar interest was skin-deep and faded in the messy aftermaths. By 2011 most
Americans saw the Afghan and Iraq wars as having not been worth fight-
ing, and they repeated this sentiment in 2016.45 They were right, though
this is very hard to say to the Americans and allies who fought there.

American and Allied Troops

Over 2.5 million U.S. troops have done tours of duty in the ironically
named operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. The United
States and its allies—Britain, Australia, France, and most NATO nations—
now field professional armed forces. Their training and commitment have
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 439

provided greater battle endurance than the American conscript army had
showed in Vietnam. Yet allied troops have failed to overcome guerillas
wielding weapons of the weak (including cyberweapons). They became an
occupation force besieged by guerilla warfare for which they were ill-
suited. Apart from the doomed attempt at a territorial state by ISIS, which
was playing into the skills of the U.S. military, there was no front and
no rear in these wars, little sight of an enemy, and less opportunity to
get emotional relief by firing back. Defusing bombs was more time-
consuming than engaging the enemy. For the U.S. infantry this is not cal-
lous warfare, as it is for its air force and drone operators, and they are
liable to fire wildly when danger erupts unpredictably, when explosions
come from anywhere and fear-reducing retaliation is rarely possible. Local
populations have offered little cooperation out of a mixture of hostility
and fear, which adds further stress to the troops.
Junger vividly depicts the extreme. He lived with a platoon of U.S. in-
fantry in one of the most isolated and dangerous valleys in Afghanistan,
which was reachable only by helicopter. In this Taliban-controlled area,
they suffered firefights almost every day, and suffered four dozen deaths.
But these were men who had volunteered for the assignment, who thrived
on the excitement of battle, and who felt fear only between battles. The
men lusted to kill, some claiming they lived for the firefights, which they
found “insanely exciting.” Some took pride in the word “infidel” tattooed
on their chests. They cheered when a scout described a wounded insur-
gent crawling along a mountain path toward his own blown-off leg. They
admit they are terrible garrison soldiers: ill-disciplined, violent, contemp-
tuous of noncombatants. Fueled by testosterone and adrenaline, disturbed
by sexual deprivation, they joke about killing and raping (even their own
mothers and sisters). Their good qualities are killing efficiency, courage
amounting to heroism, and bonding amounting to love. They will sacri-
fice their lives for each other. Back home after the war, however, they ex-
perience difficulty in readjusting to normal life. Reveling in killing has
degraded their psyches, from sadist heroes to victims.46
In these wars deaths of allied troops have been few but unpredict-
able. Unexpected explosives inflicted over three-fourths of the injuries to
U.S. and British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Explosions cause atmo-
spheric overpressure followed by a vacuum that can penetrate solid ob-
jects, so that soldiers may avoid blunt-force trauma but receive an
invisible brain injury. Over half the three thousand American soldiers
wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq have suffered brain damage of varying
440 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

degrees. Since their average age at the time was only twenty-three, the
trauma will affect their memory, mood, and ability to think for as many
as sixty years, perhaps more. Many who might have died of such wounds
in earlier wars are now treated but left with enduring physical, psycho-
logical, and cognitive injuries. While the Vietnam War had a 2.6:1
wounded-to-killed ratio, the Afghan and Iraqi wars had ratios of about
15:1 because of improved medical treatment. Amid the exhaustion of
longer deployments in the war zone, random exposure to harm worsens
the fear factor. This is the suffering we impose on our troops.
Modern weapons force soldiers to keep their heads down and fire
fairly blindly, forcing the enemy to keep his head down and also fire
wildly. In recent wars the vast majority of enemy deaths have been in-
flicted by pilots from above and by rockets and drones fired from afar.
Since the United States dominates the skies, Americans need not fear
death from above, unlike the enemy or adjacent civilians.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, guerilla tactics and an enemy lurking among
civilians create morally ambiguous situations, as they had in Vietnam. In
the First Gulf War, Charles Sheehan-Miles remembers engaging two
Iraqi trucks that caught fire. As one of the occupants ran ablaze from the
truck, Miles fired his machine gun and instantly killed him. His immedi-
ate response was “a sense of exhilaration, of joy,” but a split second later
he felt “a tremendous feeling of guilt and remorse.” The image of the
man on fire, running and dying, stayed with him “for years and years and
years.” His unit returned home, and he was awarded a medal, yet he felt
“probably the worst person alive.” He told the chaplain that he wouldn’t
be able to kill again. “It’s not that I couldn’t, it’s that I knew I could. Be-
cause it was . . . it was so easy to pull the trigger and kill people. Yes, I
was afraid of what would happen. I was afraid of what it would do to me.
What kind of person I would become.” He later added:

In my life, I’ve only seriously considered suicide once. That was

just a few nights after the first time I killed someone. . . . But I
didn’t return home to the United States in one piece either. I
was obsessed with guilt. I dreamed about the night when the
trucks blew through our position and we killed everyone in
them. I closed my eyes and I could see it, the 24th Infantry Divi-
sion in Iraq, the biggest mechanized firing squad in history. I was
. . . angry with myself, for that moment of unbridled bloodlust
when I killed for the first time.47
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 441

Timothy Kudo, a Marine captain in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote: “War

makes us killers. We must confront this horror directly if we’re honest
about the true costs of war. . . . I’m no longer the ‘good’ person I once
thought I was. There’s nothing that can change that; it’s impossible to for-
get what happened, and the only people who can forgive me are dead.”48
The worst known case of allied atrocities in Afghanistan involved Aus-
tralian troops. To its credit, the Australian military exposed it. Its Brereton
Report found “credible information to substantiate 23 incidents of alleged
unlawful killing of 39 people by 25 Australian special forces personnel.”
The victims were civilians and prisoners, and the killings occurred amid a
“warrior culture” where “blood lust” and “competition killings” were the
norm. Junior soldiers were often required by their superiors to murder
prisoners to get their first kill, a practice known as “blooding.” They would
then plant weapons on the dead to “prove” they had been combatants.49
But in 2022 similar practices perpetrated in Afghanistan by British special
forces, the SAS, were exposed. Killing prisoners was widespread, the fre-
quency alarming some higher officers. Weapons were planted on victims
who had been unarmed, and squads competed with each other for the
most kills.50 Special forces induce special techniques.
Serial atrocities like this were otherwise rare, but single incidents
were common. All the parties in Afghanistan—the Afghan government,
the United States and allied forces, the Taliban and ISIS-K (an affiliate of
ISIS)—committed atrocities. Probably U.S. and NATO forces killed
fewer civilians than the two Afghan sides—if we exclude bombings. In
Iraq, the worst known allied atrocity was the massacre of twenty-four
civilians—men, women, the elderly, and children—by U.S. Marines at
Haditha. The deaths were first claimed by the military to be inflicted by a
terrorist roadside bomb that also killed a marine. But evidence showed
that the civilians were innocent victims of indiscriminate fire from ma-
rines out of control, believing they were avenging the death of a comrade.
They were highly stressed, on their third deployment to Iraq in two and a
half years. During their previous deployment, they had fought in the Bat-
tle of Fallujah, in which thirty members of their battalion had been killed.
Stress and revenge made their evildoing in Haditha more explicable but
not excusable.
In 2003 over 60 percent of a large sample of soldiers and marines
who had fought in Afghanistan or Iraq said they had killed an enemy
combatant, and 20 percent said they had killed a noncombatant, the ma-
rines being twice as likely to report this. Most civilians were probably
442 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

killed not by deliberate targeting, however, but by the practice of

spraying around fire in the general direction of where the enemy was
supposed to be. Battle experience in the two theaters differed. Only
31 percent of soldiers deployed to Afghanistan reported having engaged
in a firefight, compared with 71–86 percent of soldiers and marines who
had been deployed to Iraq. Consequently, those who had served in Iraq
were significantly more likely to experience PTSD. In both theaters
PTSD was positively correlated with the number of firefights a soldier
had been in.51
Brett Litz and his colleagues have added to PTSD the concept of
“moral injury,” defined as “the lasting psychological, biological, spiritual,
behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bear-
ing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expecta-
tions.”52 They say that moral injury and PTSD are based on different
emotions. The main emotion in PTSD is fear, and in moral injury it is
shame and guilt; they cause different chemical reactions in the brain.53
Moral injury is much more likely to lead to suicide than is PTSD be-
cause it is self-hate: “I don’t deserve to live.” Studies listed by Litz and
his colleagues show that PTSD and moral injury often overlap, however.
David Finkel estimates PTSD sufferers as 20–30 percent of soldiers in
Iraq. The sources of their stress, manifested in erratic, often violent be-
havior and terrible nightmares, usually involved multiple memories of
death or mutilation of comrades and of Afghans or Iraqis, especially
women and children. A significant thread permeating veterans’ group-
therapy sessions was postwar remorse at their own behavior. They re-
counted throwing women across rooms and kicking elderly men
downstairs during house-to-house fighting in which the enemy might be
lurking around the next corner, which inspired tension, fear, and sudden
violence. There was a common practice of posing for photos with muti-
lated corpses or skulls. “We never had any remorse for anybody we saw
dead. Because fuck it,” one said. “I guess I’m trying to learn compassion
all over again,” replied another. A third recounted how the Iraqi police
would bring dead bodies into their post: “They’d throw ’em in the back
of a truck . . . we’d all run down there and go take pictures. You know?
And one guy—his head was chopped off, his body was all bloated and
shit, because it had been sitting in raw sewage, you know? And now I
can’t get those images out of my mind. At the time, though, it was ‘Yeah,
this is so cool. This is so cool.’ I mean, what were we thinking? Why did
we even want to go look at that shit?”54
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 443

Another soldier picked up a piece of bone from a body. “The femur,

or something like that. I got pictures of me looking like I’m taking a bite
out of it,” he says. “What the fuck was I thinking?” “Exactly,” said another.
“I had a hard drive that I destroyed. Pictures and stuff like that, next to
dead bodies, shit like that. Horrible, horrible stuff. Horrible stuff. Us
hanging out with dead bodies. At the time, I mean we were rockin’ and
rollin’, we were mean, mean killing machines. Now I look back and I’m,
like, God, what were we doing? What were we thinking?”55 These are
heartrending memories. Yet for others remorse can be bypassed by “psy-
chosocial maneuvers” involving mechanisms of moral disengagement,
moral justification, such as “they were terrorists,” or “we were preserving
world peace,” or “the enemy is doing worse”: euphemistic labeling, mini-
mizing negative consequences, dehumanizing the victim, and displacing
or diffusing responsibility.56
A few atrocities led to courts-martial. Where men were found guilty,
this was usually because comrades came forward to testify against their
comrade, which revealed that many soldiers have a sense of moral limits.
Yet President Trump in November 2019 pardoned two officers found
guilty of war crimes by military courts, and then invited them onstage as
heroes at his fund-raising events. One was awaiting trial, the other had
been found guilty and sentenced to nineteen years’ imprisonment for di-
recting his soldiers to shoot unarmed villagers, killing two of them. Said
Trump, “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them
when they kill!” Only a subsequent storm of protest prevented him from
pardoning more perpetrators. A navy petty officer was convicted of shar-
ing a photograph of himself and a corpse with the message: “I have got a
cool story for you when I get back. I have got my knife skills on.” This
was in breach of the navy code of conduct, and he was demoted and
stripped of his navy SEAL pin, but Trump reinstated him. The petty offi-
cer said he regretted nothing and clearly enjoyed being one of Trump’s
“heroes,” trotted out at his campaign rallies.57 And yet this president
wanted to pull all U.S. forces out of both countries.
Few who committed atrocities had felt moral qualms at the time. But in
peacetime the memories of their behavior sometimes tore at their psyches
through a remorse that destroyed their mental well-being. The tragedy of
moral qualms is that they come too late to reduce the carnage inflicted on
the local peoples, civilian as well as military. But afterward American perpe-
trators suffer as well. PTSD occurs in other armies, too. Simon Hatten-
stone and Eric Allison interviewed eight British Iraq veterans suffering
444 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

from severe PTSD that led to violent and irrational behavior after they left
the army. They talk with horror of the things they had seen in Iraq, of their
own near-deaths, of the gruesome deaths of their comrades or of Iraqis.
Only one says he suffers moral qualms over his own actions. He says he no
longer acts like a rational man. He frequently gets into fights. “I don’t like
no one. I don’t even like myself. I’m disgusted with some of the things I’ve
done. You take someone’s life away, no matter if he’s going to kill you, and
you don’t ever get over it.” He talks about his nightmares: the screaming,
the shaking, the sweating.58
There are no stories of U.S. soldiers failing to fire in Afghanistan or
Iraq, nor was there much shirking—only isolated rumors of soldiers
parking their Humvees safely for the day while radioing in details of
a fictitious patrol, and a few soldiers deserting their posts in combat
zones. But desertions have been below 5 percent per annum, overwhelm-
ingly when on leave back in the United States. Surveys of U.S. soldiers
have shown morale fluctuating according to their current perception of
the success or failure of the mission. The British Armed Forces Continu-
ous Attitudes Survey, conducted annually, reveals declining morale in re-
cent years, but British morale is not helped by widespread public
disapproval of its wars. In the United States, opposition to wars seems
based less on growing pacific sentiments than on perception of mission
failure.
American authorities respond to the dangers confronting their sol-
diers by three forms of what Martin Shaw called “risk-transfer milita-
rism,” transferring elsewhere the risk to its own forces.59 First it focused
on bombing, leaving ground fighting to local forces given U.S. equip-
ment and training. From 2014 to 2019, 39,000 airstrikes were made by
U.S.-led coalition forces (including French and British airstrikes). The
coalition claimed in its anti-ISIS operations in Iraq that only one civilian
had been killed in every 157 airstrikes, a very rare event. But after inten-
sive research across northern Iraq, New York Times reporters estimated
that the real rate was one civilian death for every five airstrikes, thirty-
one times higher than the United States admits.60 In April 2019 Airwars
and Amnesty International estimated that the final assaults on the ISIS
capital of Raqqa in mid-2017 killed over 1,600 civilians by bombing and
artillery fire. The United States admitted to 180 civilian fatalities. Esti-
mates of ISIS militant fatalities are in the range 1,200 to 1,400, fewer
than the number of civilians killed. During their three-year reign in
Raqqa, ISIS murdered at least 4,000 civilians in cold blood. They were
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 445

worse in ferocious killing, but the United States topped them in callous
killing. ISIS deliberately kills civilians, and the Taliban kills civilians it
suspects have any connections with the enemy. In contrast, the United
States does try to avoid hitting civilians, and since the 1990s lawyers spe-
cializing in international law have been part of the bombing teams. Yet,
predictably, this often fails to prevent civilian deaths.
Second, U.S. administrations outsourced military tasks to private
contractors. Blackwater is one of several corporations providing merce-
nary soldiers for guard units. Four of its men, former U.S. Army soldiers,
achieved notoriety in 2007 when they suddenly opened fire and killed
fourteen to eighteen Iraqi civilians, including women and children; the
men were apparently panicked by a car that would not stop. They re-
ceived prison sentences for murder or manslaughter, but President
Trump pardoned them. These corporations hire labor mainly from poor
countries, and these recruits are paid far less than American soldiers or
laborers and work for much longer periods. In 2008 U.S. Central Com-
mand (CENTCOM) counted over 266,000 foreign workers supporting
military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan—about the same
as the number of U.S. troops deployed there. In World War II, 14 per-
cent of all personnel working for the U.S. military had been civilians;
now they were half, almost all foreigners. The total stayed above 200,000
until late 2012 and then declined as the United States withdrew most of
its troops in the region. In 2008 only 15 percent were U.S. citizens, 47
percent were host nation nationals, and the remaining 38 percent were
third-country nationals, especially Indians and Filipinos. Eight percent
were armed guards, and the rest were unarmed and in logistics, but still
at risk. Over 3,300 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan died between
September 2001 and August 2017, compared with about 6,900 U.S. mili-
tary casualties.61 This is another product of risk transfer militarism—let
private contractors and foreigners take more of the risk.
The third way to reduce U.S. casualties is through the terrestrial
robots and aerial drones of the early twenty-first century. Robots are sent
to war zones just as fast as the U.S. military can get its hands on them. By
2010 there were more than two thousand deployed in Afghanistan. Two-
thirds of them were used for investigating and detonating IEDs, for
which the infantrymen who had previously done this manually are pro-
foundly grateful. The remaining one-third were used for reconnaissance
and surveillance, such as handheld robots that enable soldiers to see
around corners, again considerably reducing the danger for them. It is
446 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

often predicted that the battlefield of the future might be dominated by

robots, though others believe that cyberwars disabling enemy computer
systems will take over from actual fighting.
Aerial drones are far cheaper than piloted planes, and their operators
are never killed. More than forty countries as well as several guerilla
movements (including Hamas and the Houthis) now use armed drones,
supplied mostly by the United States, China, Israel, and Iran. Though
these are new weapons, their technology is relatively simple. So far high-
tech defense against them, such as Israel’s “Iron Dome” system, has been
effective at intercepting them, perpetuating the advantage to the more
advanced states, but this advantage might not last for new generations of
drones. They are another potential weapon of the weak. At present the
United States has by far the biggest drone force. It was greatly expanded
under Barack Obama, and then expanded again under Trump. Its “pilots”
are about 10 percent of all U.S. pilots. American and British operators
guide the drones over the Middle East from Kansas, Nevada, Virginia,
and Lincolnshire. This is the aerial warfare of the future, an extreme
form of risk transfer militarism. We can no longer accuse political and
military leaders of sacrificing many American lives; 69 percent of Ameri-
cans approve of the use of drones, only 19 percent disapprove, and 86
percent of veterans approve.62 Drone operators are unique warriors, in
no danger at all. True, they can fall off their chairs in excitement or get
carpal tunnel syndrome from endlessly tapping the keys. Robot weapons
might presage an age where few soldiers are at risk on the battlefield,
though their operating bases would remain targets. But if only one side
can afford them, carnage ensues, as happened among the targets of
American wrath and among Armenians in 2020.
The pilots glimpse through satellite video the everyday lives of vic-
tims, and they often study them for some time before the decision is
made to launch. They see the terrible effects of their own missiles. Psy-
chological studies revealed that in 2010, 11 percent of U.S. drone pilots
reported high levels of stress, and 5 percent suffered from PTSD—far
less than returning infantrymen from Iraq and Afghanistan. A repeat sur-
vey in 2014 also found 11 percent of the pilots reporting high levels of
distress, but this time only 1.6 percent had PTSD. The biggest stressors
were not related to combat or moral qualms, however, but were “opera-
tional,” resulting from understaffing, rotating shift work, extra adminis-
trative tasks, long hours, and career blockage—stressful perhaps, like
many other work-related hardships, but not raising moral difficulties.63
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 447

Yet their quit rate was three times that of other pilots. There is a shortage
of trained drone operators, despite the fact that the task has been opened
to women, and the shortage puts more pressure on the operators. They
have to work “incessantly,” says an RAF drone operator. For fighter pi-
lots, the pressure had been intense but sporadic, whereas drone operating
involves tiring concentration for most of an eight-hour shift. Chris Cole
says many colleagues could not handle the disconnect between the drone
shift and family life at home.64 U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel had
proposed a special medal for the best drone operators, but a storm of
criticism from the military forced him to withdraw it: those who do not
face danger should not get medals. The RAF began to award medals to
drone operators in 2019, though without the clasp that certifies danger
experienced.
Corey Mead watched U.S. drone pilots train and was impressed by
their skills in identifying legitimate targets, deciding when to attack, and
precision targeting. He did detect “tension between what members of
the military feel is right and what their work requires. I observed this in
the discord between trainers’ rhetoric about how much they disliked kill-
ing people—they repeated this to me frequently—and their unabashed
excitement, also expressed frequently, about the times they were able to
launch strikes and kill ‘bad guys.’ Hating killing, but enjoying the chance
to kill. The competing impulses may have seemed irreconcilable, but
they were everywhere.” Mead also notes the contrast between the bore-
dom of 97 percent of the work—long hours of intelligence, surveillance,
and reconnaissance—and the remaining 3 percent, which the instructor
called the “cool” or “exciting” part, dropping bombs and firing missiles.
“This is the job that drone operators wait for, and that wakes them up no
matter how sleepy or dulled they are from the surveillance work on their
shift.”65 When the crunch came, like “real” pilots before them, it ab-
sorbed their minds. Killing was not quite callous indifference, but they
had help from desensitizing mechanisms like the expression always used
for the victims, “bad guys,” and the resemblance of their work to video
gaming, a harmless but addictive activity. They knew that sometimes
they might hit not just the “bad guys” but also their wives, children, or
neighboring civilians. Yet the U.S. Air Force and the RAF have reassured
them and the general public by issuing civilian casualty rates that are ab-
surdly low, helping assuage qualms. Yet an internal U.S. military report
concluded that civilian casualties in Afghanistan inflicted by drones were
higher than those inflicted by manned aircraft.66
448 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

The Consequences of Interventions

By June 2020 total U.S. fatalities were 52,000, 60 percent of them in the
Iraq theater. U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan have cost
American taxpayers well over $3 trillion since 2001. But this is an under-
estimate. The U.S. war in Korea had been financed largely by raising
taxes on the rich. This was also the case with the war in Vietnam. But
America’s Islamic wars were not financed this way. Indeed, under Bush
the Younger and Trump, taxes on the rich were reduced. Instead, these
wars were financed by debt, and by the time the debts are paid off in
2050, the cost of the two wars will have been $6.5 trillion, plus $2 trillion
more for all the veteran fighters’ health care, disability, and burial bene-
fits. But that is only money, not lives.
Afghanistan provided local allies on the ground for the initial inva-
sion, and the government managed, with NATO help, to hold on to
Kabul and half the country for twenty years, although the Taliban re-
vived to control the other half. The United States joined a fifty-year-old
civil war and over the next twenty years exacerbated it. In 2020 U.S.
forces estimated that the Taliban still had in excess of 50,000 fighters, in
addition to several thousand part-timers. The Afghans claimed to kill
one thousand Taliban every month, mostly through U.S. bombing. Just
as they had in Vietnam, American leaders calculated that such a loss rate
would finish off the enemy. They probably exaggerated the kill rate, but,
as it had in Vietnam, the enemy kept on replenishing its forces. If an el-
dest son died, the next one would step in. And the enemy received help
from neighbors. The Pakistani intelligence agency provided safe havens
for Taliban leaders in Pakistan, and the movement recruited frontline
fighters from among the 2 million Afghan refugees and seminary stu-
dents in Pakistan.67
On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was killed by American special forces,
perhaps aided by Pakistani officials. The Taliban have shown some hos-
tility to ISIS, and Al Qaeda now has a marginal presence in the country,
so the original goal of the invasion was largely achieved. Yet fighting
dragged on under Obama because the Afghan government was not
strong enough to stand on its own. President Trump’s policies zigzagged,
but in 2020 negotiations began. Trump said U.S. forces would be with-
drawn by May 1, 2021, if the Taliban consented to a peace deal. The Af-
ghan government was excluded from the negotiations and ignored, while
it was unlikely that the Taliban would keep their word. But Trump
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 449

wanted out and he upended the negotiations by withdrawing troops any-

way, removing his major bargaining chip. The Biden administration in-
herited this no-win situation and swiftly withdrew in July and August
2021. The Taliban now triumphed with a speed that surprised almost ev-
eryone. But Afghan forces always depended on U.S. airpower and special
forces, calling in U.S. airpower when in difficulties. Now they suddenly
could not. Rural areas had been the main battlegrounds of the war, and
most villagers there had experienced terrible U.S. bombing and drone
strikes as well as brutal counterterrorism operations in which the Ameri-
cans turned a blind eye to (and sometimes joined in) the many atrocities
committed by Afghan special forces. Much of the countryside welcomed
the Taliban victory.68 Taliban morale and belief in their cause far ex-
ceeded those of the government soldiers, who were also aware of the
massive corruption in their officer corps. These were the major factors in
the ten-day collapse. Though the pictures of Afghans clinging to the U.S.
planes leaving Kabul airport eerily resembled the photos of Vietnamese
clinging to U.S. helicopters as they left the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in
1975, the Taliban, unlike the NVA/PLF, did not even wait for the last
American soldier to leave before they seized Kabul. Both these victors
were successful ideological armies.
Withdrawal from Afghanistan was a betrayal that led to the murder
of many Afghans who had collaborated with the NATO coalition or the
Afghan government. It might also be a terrible step backward for Afghan
women and Afghan education in the cities, though in this respect the
Taliban are reflecting the traditional values and practices of the country-
side. If the Taliban can maintain order and peace, that would probably be
preferable for most Afghans to a continuation of a bloody war with many
civilian casualties. Peace is better than war. But the Taliban seem unable
to repress ISIS-affiliated terrorists, and the economic outlook for the
country is dire. The Taliban do not inspire confidence in their ability to
manage the economy. Yet U.S. troops were achieving neither victory nor
a negotiated deal, and they were unlikely to even if their numbers had
been doubled. There was no rational alternative, no point in dragging
failure on longer.
I had predicted that outcomes would be worse for these countries
than their sufferings under their earlier dictators and that interventions
would fuel more terrorism.69 I predicted that in Iraq the United States
would have to rule through the Shi’a and the Kurds, who could win elec-
tions because they form a majority of the population—an ethnocracy
450 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

rather than a democracy. This would fuel sectarian war among Shi’a,
Sunni, and Kurds. In Iraq the United States initially had no local allies,
for it had relied on a small group of Iraqi Shi’a exiles, among whom
Ahmed Chalabi was the most prominent. They had not been in Iraq for
thirty years or more and so were quite unknown there. They could not
form an effective government, as the U.S. military swiftly realized. But
they had just enough influence in Washington to persuade the head of
the Coalition Provisional Authority, Jerry Bremer, to dissolve the twin
pillars of Iraqi government, the Ba’ath Party and the army, both of which
the exiles hate.70 That had the effect of dissolving all government. As a
committed neoliberal, like most of the Bush administration, he also
grandly declared that Iraqi industry would be privatized. Regime change
would be both political and economic. Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala
list a catalogue of American errors: privileging exiles over domestic
elites; de-Ba’athification; indiscriminate use of force; little interaction
between Iraqi and U.S. officials; inability to provide water, electricity,
and employment; privileging American corporations; high turnover of
Coalition Provisional Authority staff; torture; and promoting divisions
between local and national actors to prevent them from challenging the
occupation.71 Sectarian identities intensified after the occupation began.
But the error from which all these flowed lay deeper: to invade Iraq
at all, since substantial local allies on the ground were not available. This
meets the standard of irrationality I laid down in chapter 1: the objective
observer would judge that the goal of the war could not be met whatever
the circumstance. U.S. forces had to fall back on the Shi’a parties, sup-
ported by their militias and ironically by Shi’a Iran, which led to ethnoc-
racy, not democracy, and to civil war, Shi’a against Sunni, while Kurds
were able to establish their own autonomous administrations in the dis-
tricts they controlled. Nor could much industry be privatized, for there
was enough opposition to this to produce economic disorder. Disorder
encouraged jihadists, which culminated in ISIS—an irrational policy
from beginning to end. ISIS was crushed, for the moment, however, and
the ethnic-religious tensions are currently simmering rather than ex-
ploding. Iraq was only a mild disaster. Its governments tottered but sur-
vived. ISIS and Shi’a militias are still biting, but these are mostly gnat
bites.
In March 2011 came a military intervention for regime change in
Libya against Gaddafi’s idiosyncratic dictatorship. A rebellion had begun
in the east, and Gaddafi’s forces were getting the better of the fighting.
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 451

He was a repressive dictator, but he had oil and he was neither of the
right nor the left, but persisted in defiance of the United States. A UN
resolution was passed authorizing member states to enforce a no-fly zone
and use “all necessary measures” to prevent attacks on civilians. In prac-
tice this became a NATO bombing campaign of government infrastruc-
tures, perhaps killing around a thousand civilians—although casualty
estimates vary wildly. The Gaddafi government then announced a cease-
fire, rejected by the rebels. This was a regional, not a sectarian war. They
were all Sunni.
Burned by Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration “led
from behind,” contributing not ground forces but naval bombardment of
coastal cities, aerial bombarding of a hundred targets, and a drone strike
destroying Gaddafi’s personal convoy moments before his death. Bomb-
ing was aided by the French, British, and Canadian air forces. Gaddafi
was killed in October, and NATO forces then withdrew. The predictable
consequence of this short war was the disintegration of the Libyan state
and civil wars between several militias, still ongoing, backed by numer-
ous foreign powers. Without the repressive hand of Gaddafi, the country
descended into disorder, civil strife, terrorism, and even slave markets.
Thousands of jihadists poured into the country. These outcomes were
due mainly to the locals themselves, yet the destruction inflicted by the
Western powers made things much worse. In Afghanistan, Syria, Libya,
and Yemen, foreign interventions have exacerbated existing civil wars; in
Iraq the intervention created civil war. These ventures did not benefit
these countries or democracy. They were irrational.
American commitment to rebuild them after the war has been mini-
mal. Between 2001 and 2019 the United States spent $1.5 trillion dollars
in Afghanistan. Of this, less than 9 percent went to “reconstruction” pro-
grams, and even much of this went to training the Afghan army and po-
lice forces. Only 4 percent of the total budget went to civilian projects. “If
you look at the overall amount of money spent in Afghanistan, you see a
tiny percentage of it went to help the people of the country,” Robert
Finn, former ambassador to Afghanistan, told U.S. government investiga-
tors. “It almost all went to the military and even most of that money went
for local militia and police training.” The Watson Institute’s “Cost of
War” concurred: “The majority of U.S. international assistance spending
related to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan is for military or security pur-
poses rather than economic and social development.” The institute esti-
mates that between 2001 and 2022, U.S. military and security spending
452 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

due to such wars was $8 trillion. Development program funds there to-
taled $189 billion.72 The institute also estimates that these wars have
killed over 900,000 people.
Of course, in two of these countries U.S. invasions had destroyed
local military and police capabilities. European Union countries spent
mostly on humanitarian and infrastructural projects. Since Afghans knew
the United States would sooner or later go home, corrupt elites felt they
should distribute benefits to their patronage networks while they could.
Especially profitable was inventing “ghost soldiers,” men for whom pay
and supplies arrived but who did not actually exist. A senior State De-
partment adviser reported to the investigators: “Afghans knew we were
there temporarily, and that affected what we could do. . . . An elder in
Helmand [said], ‘Your Marines live in tents. That’s how I know you won’t
be here long.’ ”73 The Taliban adage was “You have the watches. We have
the time.” And so it proved.
Somalia is a miniature Afghanistan. The United States remains in-
volved against al-Shabaab, with only about one hundred troops left there
after Trump withdrew another five hundred, but with CIA operatives as
well, paying mercenaries, drone bombing (sometimes hitting civilians),
and subsidizing a deeply corrupt, unpopular government. This is doing
no good. It is supposedly preventing an al-Shabaab attack on the United
States, for which al-Shabaab has no capability.
U.S. forces were more than twice as powerful as those of any other
state in the world but they had two enduring domestic weaknesses. First,
Americans are squeamish about the cost—not apparently in money but
in the number of U.S. casualties. In the Iraq War of 2003 only 4,000
Americans were killed—compared to 500,000–600,000 Iraqis. In previ-
ous wars Koreans, Vietnamese, and Afghans had taken much heavier
losses than U.S. troops. I noted the rise of risk-transfer militarism earlier.
American leaders have managed to keep a low military profile by keeping
the body bags few and unpublicized. Yet this has a military downside.
Enemies believe they can outlast U.S. forces since Americans cannot en-
dure casualties. From Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria,
they have been proved right.
The second weakness is fragile popular support for wars. When
Americans learn of interventions involving ground troops, they get ex-
cited on the sidelines. They cheer on their team playing away from
home, but they make no sacrifices themselves. I called this in Britain dur-
ing the Falklands War “spectator sport militarism.”74 They wait with
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 453

bated breath in the early stages, cheering on their side in a rally ’round
the flag. But this is only skin-deep. Political rhetoric treats U.S. soldiers
as sacred, lauds them as “heroes” uniquely “serving their country.” Politi-
cians who avoided active military service themselves, like Bush the
Younger and Trump, like to bathe in the reflected glory of photo ops sur-
rounded by soldiers displaying medals. But, except in cases that can be
plausibly claimed by rulers to threaten national survival, as for Americans
after Pearl Harbor and during the period from 9/11 to initial victory in
Afghanistan, the troops cannot rely on adoration for long. If things did
not go well, we turned our backs. Who wants to support a losing team?
The public lost interest and returning soldiers were not greeted as he-
roes, which they might have been had these ventures been short or suc-
cessful. Our recent wars have not been driven by deep emotions,
insecurities, and ideologies, unlike those of the jihadists. Ours are the
ideologies not of the masses but of the elites who decide foreign policy.
The Obama administration revealed lessening resolve, though with-
out major policy changes. Trump, despite his blustering style, and apart
from Iran, retreated a little, though impulsively. In 2019 he twice ordered
all American troops out of Syria—only to reverse himself after aides im-
plored him to reconsider. He then did suddenly withdraw U.S. troops
from the Syrian-Turkish border, abandoning his Kurdish SDF allies to
Turkish attacks, forcing them into Russian and Syrian arms, weakening
their ability to guard thousands of captured ISIS soldiers and their fami-
lies. His abrupt and unilateral force reductions in Afghanistan were ill-
timed, given his ongoing negotiations with the Taliban. And while he cut
back troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to 2,500 each and reduced U.S.
forces in Europe by one-third, he steadily increased the military budget:
from $767 billion under Obama to $818 billion in 2017 and $935 billion
in 2020. This included a 50 percent increase in spending on nuclear war-
heads. The combination of withdrawal and more military spending makes
sense only for domestic politics—drum-beating rhetoric without risk to
American lives. It also drains U.S. budgets of an ability to deal with the
severe equity problems besetting American society and of flourishing
U.S. economic power abroad. The total U.S. development aid budget for
2020 was $19 billion, only 2 percent of the military budget. Under Biden
military spending remained flat, and though he removed U.S. forces from
Afghanistan, over 40,000 American troops were still stationed around the
Middle East in late 2021, including 2,500 active in Iraq and 900 in Syria.
Drone operations continued, mainly aimed at Islamist groups.
454 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

Three American Blind Spots

American geopolitical choices might appear calculative and instrumen-
tally rational. They are proclaimed as such, since Realist theory’s home-
town is Washington, D.C. Careful calculation of the resources and likely
decisions of allies and enemies, and frequent use of war-gaming and dip-
lomatic-gaming scenarios makes it all seem rational. Yet for seventy
years, American policy has had three blind spots stymieing its foreign in-
terventions, refuting any notion that this is rational policy in terms of ei-
ther means or ends.
First, most American politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike,
still believe in an imperial civilizing mission, a responsibility and capacity
to bring order, democracy, free enterprise, and general beneficence to
the world. Most sincerely believe this, yet it is unachievable and it natu-
rally gets a little corrupted by American interests along the way. Since U.S.
allies outside Europe and East Asia are more authoritarian than demo-
cratic, U.S. policy is in practice more committed to the capitalist than
the democratic mission, and it often uses force rather than inducements.
The problem is that in an age of rising nationalist and religious resistance,
imperial goals, however beneficently expressed, cannot be attained. The
United States can no longer install indigenous client regimes, let alone de-
mocracies, that can keep order as effectively as most of the overthrown
dictators—or as effectively as other empires in previous centuries. Nor can
Americans, amid ensuing disorder, mobilize their economic power to
bring the promised vibrant economy. The combination of military vio-
lence, political disorder, and economic stagnation undermines American
ideological power, exposing it as hypocrisy. Interventionism exaggerates
America’s powers, and actual military intervention weakens them. Its per-
sistence despite repeated failures can be understood only in terms of the
lack of any real military rival. No one can withstand U.S. forces in fixed
battle. It is otherwise in the case of low-intensity warfare and the political
aftermath.
The second blind spot is failure to understand the laws of cause and
effect, not just in the Middle East. U.S. governments have identified
North Korea as an enemy since the late 1940s. U.S. forces killed 2 mil-
lion North Koreans—20 percent of the total population—in three years
of carpet bombing during the Korean War (as we saw in chapter 13).
Whatever their hatred of their own regime, North Koreans hate America
with good reason. In the seventy years since the beginning of the Korean
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 455

War, the United States has never made a sustained effort to negotiate a
permanent peace treaty, hoping that the communist North Korean re-
gime would simply collapse. Is it any surprise that in response North
Korean regimes have made a sustained drive to acquire nuclear weapons?
They are seen as necessary self-defense—though this is delusional. A
U.S. offer of friendship and economic assistance would do better for
both sides, as it would have at almost any point during the previous half
century.
Similarly, jihadi and other threats have been exacerbated by American
actions. Iranian meddling in Lebanon resulted from the failed
Israeli-U.S. war against Syria in the early 1980s. In Iraq Iranian meddling
followed the U.S. wars against Saddam. In Yemen Iranian meddling re-
sulted from Saudi and UAE attacks on the Houthis, backed by the United
States. The main causes of the new jihadi movements obviously lie within
Muslim countries. But the main reason terrorists attack Americans and
the British is their military interventions (the second reason is perceived
discrimination against Muslims in the West, more important in Europe
than in the United States). Bin Laden himself gave three reasons for at-
tacking the United States: the presence of its forces in Saudi Arabia, its
support for expansionist Israel, and its 1991 invasion of Iraq and the sub-
sequent bombing and starving of children there. He later added the inva-
sions of Afghanistan and (again) Iraq—as, of course, did ISIS.
The effects of bombing and drones are almost invisible to Americans
but devastating for the locals. Basra, Raqqa, and other cities are liberated
from ISIS but destroyed, having suffered many civilian deaths and lost
even more who fled as refugees. The young men from Mosul I quoted
earlier hate America for what they say it has done to their country. Mil-
lions of Muslims who suffer from these policies will not view the United
States as liberators, although many realize that ISIS is worse. Among
those millions are thousands who will fight, and hundreds who will ac-
cept suicide missions. They lack the resources to conquer or hold a state,
but they use the weapons of the weak to sustain long-term asymmetric
warfare. If they suffer reverses at home, they encourage Muslims in the
West to take up terrorism, which a few are willing to do. The 2019 de-
feat of the ISIS caliphate reduced the number of new recruits—but not
the number of sympathizers, from whom new militants emerge. Ameri-
can drones kill ISIS and Al Qaeda leaders, but new leaders arise. Extreme
Islamism is a hydra, the mythological nine-headed water snake. We cut
off its most visible head, but other heads rise to menace us. In the Greek
456 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

myth one is immortal. The solution is not war. It is to moderate U.S.

policies in the region.
The third blind spot, especially visible in the Middle East, is
conservatism—not conservative in the party political sense, since Demo-
crats support it as well, but in its attachment to tradition, which I have
found so important in war making across the centuries. Conservatism
represents past, not present, visions of American power. U.S. policy mak-
ers act as if this were 1942, when the United States charged in with mili-
tary power to rescue the world from evil. Subsequent rebuffs in Korea
and Vietnam should have cast some doubt on such confidence, but it was
boosted again by the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet throughout, definitions
of friend and foe inherited from the past are unchanged, even though
reality has changed.
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Israel are still seen as the most
dependable allies despite alternative ways of getting oil and other energy
sources, and when Israel is now the dominant and the only nuclear mili-
tary power in its neighborhood. Unswerving support for Israel is coun-
terproductive to peace, alienating Arabs across the region, perpetually
creating a few Islamic terrorists. Domestic politics helps determine this
foreign policy, as we have seen in most other wars. In this case, both U.S.
parties fear the electoral consequences of antagonizing pro-Israeli lob-
bies, and across the Bible Belt there are fervent Evangelical Christians
who believe that the Jews must be in possession of the Temple Mount
before the “Rapture,” the Second Coming of Christ. Shades of the return
of the Mahdi! Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo hinted that he
shares this ridiculous view. There is on the Palestinian side no compara-
ble political lobby.
Of course, the United States must guarantee Israel’s right to exist.
But behind much Arab hatred lies American support for Israel’s continu-
ing aggression, its seizure of lands that have been Arab for a millennium.
In the past, a slap on Israel’s wrist was delivered for such incursions.
President Trump instead endorsed Israeli landgrabs in his so-called
Peace Plan of January 2020. Indeed, in order to get Arab states to sign
accords with Israel, he gave concessions to them all—high-tech military
planes to the UAE, switching to support Morocco’s claims to the western
Sahara, dropping Sudan from the State Department’s list of terrorist
states. But approving Israeli expansions makes unviable the Palestinian
state to which American foreign policy is theoretically committed.
President Biden might return to the slap-on-the-wrist days, but not to
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 457

genuine peace brokering. There is some shift among younger Americans

toward more sympathy for the Palestinians, yet Israelis offer steadily
increasing support to settlements in Palestinian lands for which the
grinding down of Palestinian society is a precondition. It is difficult to
see the end of this ghastly cycle: Israeli expansionism blessed by the
United States creates more terrorism, which leads to more repressive
Israeli policy, which creates more terrorism, and so on and so on.
Conservatism also ensured that the United States has joined in the
sectarian war, on the Sunni side, with the exception of its war with ISIS
and its presently faltering alliance with the majority Shi’a Iraqi govern-
ment. Administrations and Congress would vehemently deny this bias. But
consider the evidence. In Iraq it had offered no help to the Shi’a commu-
nity in the 1990s, though this had presented the most credible opposition
to Saddam Hussein. U.S. administrations further support the Saudis and
the Gulf sheikdoms—which are Sunni—and oppose Iran and Hezbollah—
which are Shi’a—in their struggle for regional dominance. The United
States supplies 85 percent of Bahrain’s military equipment and from 2002
declared Bahrain to be a “major non-NATO ally.” In the 2011 uprising the
Americans’ “major concern is that a fall of the Al Khalifa regime and as-
cension of a Shiite-led government could increase Iran’s influence and lead
to a loss of the use of Bahrain’s military facilities.” Bahrain is the base of
the U.S. Fifth Fleet, whose main purpose, says the Department of De-
fense, is to counter Iranian military power in the Gulf. The British were
also major military suppliers, and in 2012 they supplied to the Bahrain re-
gime a large consignment of weapons suitable for police and paramilitary
repression. The Obama administration tried to talk the king into more
conciliatory policies, but it did nothing, not prepared to risk the anti-Iran
alliance for the sake of human rights. Then the Trump administration re-
moved all human rights issues from its support for Bahrain.
Sunni Saudi Arabia has been an ally since 1945, receiving massive
military aid. Since then, it has changed from a weak tribal confederation
sitting on massive oil reserves, anticommunist, and needing protection,
to a modern repressive state and aggressive military power. Communism
is gone and Saudi oil reserves are of less importance for the United
States. Iran has been defined as an enemy since 1979, although Iranians
take the hostility back to the 1953 CIA- and British-backed coup that
overthrew an elected government and installed the shah. In 1980, after
the fall of the shah, when Saddam attacked Iran, the United States pro-
vided him with billions of dollars in credits to buy arms, coordinated his
458 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

arms buying in the West, and provided intelligence support. Britain,

France, the Soviet Union, and other Sunni states assisted Iraq. Iran was
alone, without allies.
In 2015 President Obama supported the Saudi-led offensive against
the Shi’a Houthis in Yemen, a much lesser American contribution than
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Libya and Syria, for it merely involved co-
ordinated U.S. military and intelligence support from CENTCOM and
U.S. midair refueling of coalition aircraft. The refueling ended amid
congressional alarm at civilian casualties in 2018, but U.S. naval ships
still aid the Saudi blockade. Britain and France also help the Saudis. The
Trump administration’s “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran in-
cluded U.S. naval forces intercepting vessels carrying arms to the
Houthis. In 2019 Trump also handed the Saudis a Patriot air defense
battery, and the State Department declared: “We stand firmly with our
Saudi partners in defending their borders against these continued threats
by the Houthis, who rely on Iranian-made weapons and technology to
carry out such attacks.” The Houthis say that they are merely defending
themselves, though they have begun to extend self-defense into lobbing
missiles into Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They usually deny that they are
receiving weapons from Iran, but they have occasionally said that only
Iran will supply them with weapons. True, since 2015 American adminis-
trations have provided over $2.4 billion in emergency humanitarian aid
for Yemen, mostly to repair the damage done by allied bombing and
blockading.
U.S. policy makers have repeatedly argued that the Houthis are only
a pawn in the regional power game of Iran.75 But the Saudis are playing
the same game, and U.S. administrations help them. Growing humani-
tarian outrage produced an easing of support under Obama and Trump.
The Biden administration then announced three further significant
steps, declaring in February 2021 that U.S. offensive operations in
Yemen would cease, as would export of precision-guided munitions to
the Saudis or the UAE (but other arms sales would continue), and a State
Department negotiator would go to Yemen to attempt to bring the war-
ring sides together—a welcome breach of the State Department’s formal
ban on negotiating with “terrorists.” But the State Department asserts
that its shift has been purely on humanitarian grounds and still regards
the Houthis as terrorists. They are defined as terrorists because they are
the enemies of our Saudi allies, not because their behavior is any worse
than theirs. We should have neither enemies nor allies in this civil war.
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 459

We should merely offer humanitarian aid and help for the Yemenis to re-
solve their differences.
President Trump had intensified hostility toward Iran in 2019 by ar-
bitrarily withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal framework agreement
among Iran, the UN Security Council, and the European Union. All
other signatories declared that UN weapons inspectors’ reports showed
the agreement was working. But Trump instead intensified U.S. sanc-
tions on Iran and authorized a missile strike on the Baghdad airport that
killed General Qassim Suleimani, commander of the elite Iranian Quds
Force, a branch of the Revolutionary Guards. This enraged the Iraqi
government, which was revealed not to be sovereign in its own land.
This series of responses had a negative effect, isolating Iranian reformists
and increasing the power of hard-liners, especially those committed to
developing nuclear weapons. After all, Israel, its main enemy, already has
nuclear weapons. The Biden administration hopes to return to the nu-
clear agreement, though at the moment both sides insist that the other
move first. To move first would be regarded as “backing down,” a sign of
cowardice! That is how World War I started. Agreement to move simul-
taneously is the way to solve this and avert possible war.
The United States does not need to choose sides between Sunni and
Shi’a. Americans are equally indifferent to Sunni and Shi’a dogma, and Saudi
Arabia is even less democratic than Iran. It is an absolute monarchy with no
freedom of assembly or speech. Iran has elections to a parliament, though
the candidates are vetted for their loyalty to the regime. Yet public demon-
strations are frequent in Iran but not in Saudi Arabia. During 2020–21 there
were repeated mass demonstrations in the streets of Iran on economic issues,
especially by retirees, workers, and farmers. The security forces often re-
sponded harshly, but the demonstrations kept on coming. Saudi citizens, still
less the foreign workers often held in slavelike conditions, rarely dare to do
so. Nor does Iran carve up its dissidents into little pieces. Neither of these
regimes could be termed benevolent, but the Saudis are worse.
Externally there are differences, too. U.S. administrations constantly
denounce Iranian “terrorism” abroad. The hand of Iran can be detected in
two types of intervention. One is helping Shi’a communities—in Syria,
Yemen, and Lebanon. Iran is helping coreligionists, just as the Saudis are.
The second type of intervention is against the United States and its prox-
ies, in the Persian Gulf and in Afghanistan (if the rumors of Iran paying
the Taliban for killing American soldiers are true). But they are, after
all, attacking Iranian interests. The United States and China are inevitably
460 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

rivals, but there is no necessary reason for the United States and Iran to
be rivals. And in one respect, Iranian interests are the same as America’s.
This Shi’a regime is deeply opposed to Sunni jihadists. Its Quds Force has
helped combat Al Qaeda and ISIS in Afghanistan and the Middle East. In
contrast, the Saudis supply more jihadists than any other country, often
recruited through the Wahhābı̄ schools they finance abroad. The eco-
nomic issues involved are declining in importance. The Saudis have 25
percent more oil reserves than Iran, but these are 30 percent less than
U.S. reserves, following shale oil and gas finds. In any case, market ex-
change is cheaper than war in securing oil, as the Japanese, Chinese, and
Europeans know. The Saudis are economic allies, providing profits for
Western arms producers and investing their oil profits in the West. There
is now a very large joint Saudi and American business lobby in Washing-
ton. But the Saudis will continue to invest their oil profits in Western
economies. An alternative American policy of mediating between Iran and
Saudi Arabia would pay a large peace dividend in the Middle East. The
main stumbling blocks to a new policy on the Iranian side are its calls to
destroy Israel and its sponsoring of Hezbollah. But if the incentive was
there to change tack on Israel, Iran might take it—as Egypt and Jordan
had earlier done. There is no good reason against trying it, only the blink-
ers of tradition and the short-term horizons of powerful interest groups.
The nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea are worrying but
have been mainly caused by U.S. policy identifying them as state terror-
ists. They think the Gaddafi example shows what happens to an enemy
of the United States who gives up nuclear weapons. Trump’s withdrawal
from the nuclear deal and crippling sanctions brought poverty for many
Iranians. These measures were supposed to bring Iran to the conference
table to accept more stringent American demands. Predictably, the re-
verse happened, as in most conflicts we have seen. Iranian leaders, their
personal, religious, and national honor at stake, refused to “back down.”
Quite the reverse: they launched attacks on oil tankers docked off the
Emirati coast, and more tentatively on a U.S. base in Iraq. In September
2019 the Iranian Air Force launched twenty drones and precision-guided
cruise missiles on Abqaiq, an important Saudi oil field and processing
center, causing serious damage. Mutual provocation is under way. Iran
has recommenced work on its nuclear program, and it says it will re-
nounce the nuclear deal. Trump’s main motive for the anti-Iran policy
was probably domestic: talking tough was popular among his base—
domestic politics interfering with rational geopolitical calculation.
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 461

For these three reasons, American foreign policy in the region is not
rational. We have seen that this is not unique to the United States. I have
shown that many rulers’ grasps of reality have been feeble. But American
militarism is unreal, bad for Americans, worse for the Middle East, the tri-
umph of bipartisan conservatism that is wedded to the past, not present re-
alities or needs. Asked to do the impossible by politicians, U.S. forces coped
as best they could, but they could not win. Ultimate failure forced major
withdrawal from both Iraq and Afghanistan, and minor withdrawals from
Libya, Syria, and Yemen. As I grow older, my behavior comes to resemble
American imperialism. I march into a room and then forget why I am there.
Yet U.S. leaders could learn from past failure. They have begun to
sidestep their formal ban on negotiating with “terrorist” states and
movements, engaging in secretive back-channel communication with the
enemy. They could learn lessons from imperial China: paying tribute to
barbarians not to attack them was far cheaper than fighting wars against
them. American wealth can afford it. Tribute was a Chinese development
program for barbarians. The United States should use the economic
powers it has, not the military-political powers it lacks. Remember that
impoverished Iran cannot offer much economic aid to its allies abroad,
and the United States can easily outspend Iran. I am advocating not iso-
lationism but peaceful interventionism.
American leadership can achieve more through “soft power” than
war, as Joseph Nye has long argued.76 U.S. power has often been hege-
monic, seen as legitimate by other countries. U.S. diplomats and politi-
cians have repeatedly acted as conflict mediators—as in the Camp David
and Dayton accords. U.S. development programs give grants and loans
to poorer countries, although it helps to be an ally like Israel, the biggest
recipient. In a country as rich as the United States, cash can usually buy
off the chances of war. After all, the United States bought the Louisiana
territory from France and Alaska from Russia. Development programs
offered to North Korea and Iran with strings attached could stop their
nuclear programs and make them friendlier. The precedent is that be-
tween 1980 and 2018 the United States provided Egypt with over $40
billion in military aid and $30 billion in economic aid so that Egypt
would make peace with Israel. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have so
far cost $3.5 trillion. I am not suggesting ending development programs
for friendly countries. That would be only rewarding villainy!
It is a major obstacle to peace that U.S. citizens have suffered so
little from recent wars. Wars are far away, casualties have been low in a
462 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

professional army in which subcontractors and foreign workers also take

losses, and drones are the key attack force. This reduces publicity back
home, except when jihadists attack on American soil, but this is much
rarer than in a Europe that contains discontented Muslim communities,
and much rarer than homegrown American militia bombings and school
shootings. So counterproductive conservatism endures in Middle East-
ern policy, provoking little public interest. This gives free rein to Wall
Street and business lobbies involved in Saudi Arabia and to pro-Israeli
lobbies. Policy stuck in the past does not work. It is grounded not in Re-
alism but in irrationality. This is not an anti-American rant. It is normal
in wars, most of which are irrational.

Conclusion
In its history, Islam has been neither more nor less war-prone than other
faiths. The Quran contains brutal passages, just as does the Old Testa-
ment. The early Islamic waves of conquest were in contrast to the pacific
tendencies of early Christianity.77 Thereafter Islam may have fought al-
most as many wars as did Christendom, but it was more tolerant of other
religions at home. Most recent wars have been in the Muslim Middle
East, although the region has been also beset by Western (secular) impe-
rialism. Religion mattered, for it was a primary marker of community
identity, yet these were not religious wars like the Crusades or the Thirty
Years’ War, in which both antagonists were defined by their religion. Just
one side, the jihadists, declared itself favored by divine power and
cherry-picked the most brutal passages in the Quran to justify its atroci-
ties. Underlying these wars were three causes:

1. the failure of Muslim rulers, influenced by Western develop-

mental ideologies, to tackle the poverty and corruption of
the region, which led neither to liberal democracy nor to
socialism but to corrupt authoritarian regimes provoking pop-
ular resistance and repression;
2. the rise of distinctively Islamic solutions offered for those
problems, generating at the extreme small, murderous jihadi
movements brandishing texts from the Quran;
3. imperial interventions, in the Cold War by the United States
and the Soviets, then by the United States and Russia, assum-
ing that military intervention could overthrow unfriendly
 Recent Wars in Muslim Countries 463

regimes and bring capitalist democracy (capitalist autocracy

in Russia) to Muslims. Instead, it increased disorder, which
increased the influence of jihadists as perverted forms of anti-
imperialism.

U.S. attempts at regime-change wars since 1990 mostly achieved

battlefield victory but failed to establish order, let alone democracy, thus
intensifying jihadism. Iraq had few jihadists before U.S. intervention be-
cause most Sunnis were satisfied with Saddam’s rule and most Shi’a were
cowed. In Afghanistan the Taliban had seized power with U.S. help since
their more secular enemy had been backed by the Soviets. Before the
U.S. invasion, Taliban killings of civilians had been relatively few, but af-
terward civilian casualties inflicted by all sides rose. Other wars occurred
without U.S. ground troops, but only in the two small wars in Nagorno-
Karabagh was there no U.S. participation. In other cases, the United
States, with British and sometimes NATO support, offered military help
to one side in a war. This might have been decisive in the Israeli-Arab
wars, but probably not elsewhere—in the Iran-Iraq War and civil wars in
Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. U.S. military aid helped destabilize the
region, making jihadism more attractive to a small minority of Muslims.
Better the United States had acted as a neutral referee, helping settle
these disputes through conciliation laced with incentives.
American policy in the region had three blind spots: exaggerating the
powers of the U.S. military, failing to distinguish cause and effect in enemy
hostility, and inability to adjust policy to cope with regional changes. The
United States has sleepwalked its way into aggravating conflicts between
Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, and between Muslims and Jews, revealing the ir-
rationality of American policy. Failure is not unique to America, for I have
stressed the role of irrational policy making through history. But remedy is
at hand: rely more on American economic and diplomatic power, less on
military power. That would yield more order and less war in the Middle
East, enhance U.S. influence in the region, and lessen jihadi attacks on the
West. This would not solve the problems confronting Muslim societies,
but it would help.
 chapter fifteen
Possible Futures

N
o one can predict the future accurately, yet bleak prospects
for war are often suggested: war between the United States
and China, nuclear war leading to a “nuclear winter” that
will destroy human civilization, the unleashing of biological
or chemical weapons, climate change wars, or induced disease pandemics.
Since all these dire scenarios might bring utter disaster for humankind, a
large degree of Realist rationality is obviously needed in the future.
Danger intensifies with proliferating weapons of mass destruction.
Several minor powers might be on the way to acquiring nuclear weap-
ons. Iranians currently see their nuclear program as a potent symbol of
their country’s status and a necessary form of self-defense against Israel,
Saudi Arabia, and the United States. This is already drawing Israeli cyber
and bomb attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities (with the complicity of
U.S. intelligence agencies). If these drive Iranian nuclear facilities farther
underground, Israelis might be tempted into a preemptive nuclear strike.
The Turkish president has announced that he is contemplating acquiring
nuclear weapons, and Saudi rulers are also rumored to be considering it.
Recent Chinese assertiveness may be perceived as a potential nuclear
threat in East Asia, which might induce Japan and South Korea to ac-
quire nuclear weapons.
The danger of a conflagration worsens with more nuclear states. The
nuclear age has so far contained two main pairs of face-to-face rivals—the
United States and the USSR or Russia (for British and French weapons

464
 Possible Futures 465

would not be launched independently of the United States), and India

and Pakistan. They have stared each other in the face, saber rattling, but
deterred by the horrendous specter of nuclear war. Yet with many nuclear
powers the balance becomes more fragile, since states—especially those
of different types—cannot easily predict the actions of all the others.
That is how World War I started. International terrorists present a fur-
ther threat if they can capture a weapon of mass destruction—more prob-
ably biological or chemical than nuclear—which is especially worrying if
militants believe that heaven awaits those who kill heretics. It seems sci-
entifically possible for a pandemic to be introduced into an enemy coun-
try, though keeping control of its spread might be difficult, even
impossible. On a more cheerful note, cyberwars might disarm the enemy
without casualties. Nuclear, chemical, and biological deterrence might
work, in which case peace will predominate globally; or they will not
work, in which case human civilization might end. But given the persis-
tent irrationality of humans starting wars, one cannot be too hopeful.
What if Russia or China and the United States backed by NATO
square off against each other? They would all claim legitimacy for their
actions. Established powers claim the legitimacy of a defensive posture
while revisionists claim they are righting a past wrong. Revisionism of
borders is currently the major threat to world peace as self-righteousness
envelops the world’s three greatest military powers, one hitherto domi-
nant, the other two rising and revisionist.

Putin’s Revisionist War in Ukraine

The war of 2022 in Ukraine may have shocked many, but it was fairly pre-
dictable and it revealed many traditional features of warfare—mainly the
negative ones. Russian revisionism—the demand for “lost territories”—
had intensified in recent years, revealed in successive military interven-
tions in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine, all formerly tsarist
Russian and Soviet territories. Success in earlier ventures under Putin’s
leadership had led to increasing confidence in the Kremlin that desired
ends could be attained by military means. As I have emphasized, the best
predictor of new aggression is success in previous aggressions. Hitler had
launched an escalating series of aggressions: the Rhineland, Sudetenland,
the rest of Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and
the United States, though the combination of the last three proved his
undoing. Will Putin’s endgame be similar?
466 Possible Futures

Armed conflict in Ukraine erupted in 2014 when the elected presi-

dent, who had become unpopular when he bowed to Russian pressure
and abandoned talks to enter the European Union, was overthrown by
massive pro-Western street demonstrations. In response, Russian sol-
diers in disguise, the “little green men,” met with scant resistance as they
swiftly occupied largely Russian-speaking Crimea. The West denounced
this but did little, apart from limited economic sanctions. It was difficult
to see what more they could do, short of full-scale war. In eastern
Ukraine armed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, the two mainly
Russian-speaking provinces of the Donbas region, declared indepen-
dence. Their militias were aided by more little green men from Russia.
Yet they faced determined resistance, and this soon forced Putin into
sending in regular Russian forces. Even so, they could not prevail and
stalemate resulted. By 2021, 14,000 people had already been killed in a
mixture of regular and irregular warfare.
Yet Putin’s rhetoric was already going much further. He proclaimed
that an independent Ukraine should not exist at all. It is part of Russia,
he claimed—as indeed it had been for most of its history before 1991.
Many Russians agreed with him. In the buildup to his full-scale invasion
of 2022, the normal blend of fear and overconfidence fueled Putin’s ac-
tions. The understandable part of Russian fears derived from the east-
ward expansion of NATO, begun in 1999 as Poland, Hungary, and the
Czech Republic joined it. Further expansion came as seven more coun-
tries joined in the early 2000s: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ro-
mania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. All these countries wanted to join NATO
because they feared Russia, and, except for Slovenia, they had been part
of the tsarist empire or the Soviet Union. During this period NATO and
the United States took full advantage of Russian inability to mount more
than verbal protests. The Kremlin noted that NATO expansion was con-
trary to American assurances given by Secretary of State James Baker to
Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward (in return for Rus-
sia’s accepting the unification of Germany). By late 2021 there were
NATO missile sites in Romania and Poland, NATO exercises in the Bal-
tic states, and American military aid to former Soviet states in Central
Asia. Russian leaders felt encircled. Alongside the economic policy disas-
ters inflicted on Russia by Western neoliberals, this had weakened the in-
fluence of both the West and Russian liberals and it enhanced the
popularity of Russian and Slavic nationalists. The NATO expansion
was peaceful, since it was at the invitation of Russia’s neighbors. But also
 Possible Futures 467

provocative in Russian eyes was the November 2021 signing of a “char-

ter on strategic partnership” between Ukraine and the United States that
called for Ukraine to join NATO; the United States also promised “un-
wavering commitment” to the reintegration of Crimea into Ukraine.
NATO’s expansion produced much self-satisfaction in Washington and
Brussels: they were cutting Russia down to size.
Some warned that such provocations would be counterproductive
once Russian power revived. Backed by nationalist and Slavophile fac-
tions, Putin used his popularity as the man who had brought social order
to Russia, and he used his authoritarian powers to repress dissent and in-
crease military spending at the expense of living standards. The grim
irony of this NATO expansion is that its forces have remained irrelevant
to the war in Ukraine, insufficient to deter Putin. In fact, they enraged
him. Most Americans had also had enough of war after recent military
disasters, and the Western Europeans had even less appetite for war. So
U.S. and NATO encirclement could not actually restrain Russia. But this
also meant that Russian fears were exaggerated.
In February 2022 blowback came when Russian troops massed along
Ukrainian borders and invaded Ukraine across three fronts. This was far
more than border revisionism. It was attempted imperial reconquest. Pu-
tin’s initial plan seems to have been to subjugate the whole of Ukraine.
He thought that Kyiv, the capital, would swiftly fall, that he could take
over the whole of the Donbas, create a land bridge through southern
Ukrainian territory between the Crimea and Russia, and seize the whole
of the south of Ukraine, making the country landlocked. Politically, this
might result in either incorporating Ukraine into Russia or leaving a
puppet Ukrainian state in Kyiv and the west of the country.
Military weakness on the ground in Europe meant that NATO could
not send forces into Ukraine. Nor did NATO members wish to use air
power to establish a no-fly zone (as they had done in Iraq), since they
feared escalation, and Putin hinted that this might force him to turn to
the nuclear option. Instead, NATO relied on the economic power of its
members and their willingness to supply arms to the Ukrainians. Initially,
Putin was not much discomforted by this. His conception of Russian
“greatness” was grounded more on military than on economic power, and
he believed anyway that he could compensate economically through
greater cooperation with China and India. Chinese leaders are conscious
of the similarities of Russian claims in Ukraine to their own revisionist
claims to Taiwan. They are now also willing to push the envelope against
468 Possible Futures

the United States, and so, like Indian rulers, they willingly buy Russian
oil at discounted prices.
Russian fears of NATO partly explain Putin’s warmongering. Four
more factors played important roles. The first was ideological. This was
not a war driven strongly by economic motives, though Putin obviously
hoped victory would bring economic benefit. His starting point was the
ideological identification of himself with the Russian state and people—a
common delusion among rulers. Here it came with a primarily military
sense of “grandeur” and “honor,” emotionally supercharged by shame
and humiliation over the decline of Russian power after the Soviet col-
lapse, which he described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the
twentieth century, a “genuine tragedy” for the Russian people. Russia
must erase that tragedy, ruthlessly, brutally. He added that the ongoing
collapse of Western hegemony is irreversible: things will never be the
same. The battlefield to which destiny and history have called us is a bat-
tlefield for our people. Putin believed he could do it and become Russia’s
new historic savior, honored forever. During the invasion he compared
himself to Peter the Great and his western wars—which had lasted
twenty-one years! Comparable delusions have been common among dic-
tators insulated from reality by like-minded or yes- men around them.
Putin was a throwback to the time of would-be great conquerors of ear-
lier chapters.
Second, in terms of military power, Russian forces and Putin himself
had become overconfident because of earlier successes, though these had
all been against rather puny powers with no significant airforces.
Ukraine had a significant airforce and indeed Russia has never been able
to dominate the Ukrainian skies. Russians had become inured to killing
civilians as well as soldiers through campaigns in Chechnya, Georgia,
and Syria. But the Ukrainians constituted a much more significant mili-
tary power that had been receiving American arms and training over sev-
eral years. The flattening of the cities of Grozny and Aleppo were
Putin-ordered atrocities reminiscent of earlier conquerors’ destruction,
as well as of all sides in World War II. Putin and his generals had already
shown that in war they did not count the cost in lives.
Third came Putin’s personal political motive, his belief—correct if
he could achieve victory—that war could bolster his popularity at home,
which was just beginning to falter. Playing the nationalism card and
demonstrating strength was popular, helped by control of the Russian
media. Combined, they generated a strong rally ’round the flag response.
 Possible Futures 469

As we have seen, perceived political advantage has been a common cause

of war, though it can rebound on the ruler if the war is not a success.
Fourth came generalized political contempt for Ukrainians. Putin was
shrewd and instrumentally rational in calculating some of the relative costs
and benefits of war. Yet his hatred of and contempt for Ukrainians had
been intensified by growing differences between the two political regimes.
Since 2004 Ukraine had been moving closer to Western democracy,
whereas Putin had intensified autocracy. He also manipulated Russian his-
torical memories of the “Great Patriotic War,” calling the Ukrainian gov-
ernment fascist and genocidal, drawing on the fact that some Ukrainian
nationalists had thrown in their lot with the Nazis in order to be free of the
Soviets. Yet over a million Ukrainians had died fighting in the Red Army,
and President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish, making him an unlikely can-
didate for fascism. There are some neo-Nazis among Ukrainian paramili-
taries, as in the Azov Battalion. Yet the Ukrainian government had been
trying to squeeze them out, while there are also fascists in the separatist
militias. There is no evidence whatsoever of genocide by Ukrainians, and
the Ukrainian regime is less corrupt and more democratic than Putin’s.
Putin, like many aggressors before him, despised his enemies and dis-
paraged their powers. Russian military superiority seemed assured: a shark
swallowing a minnow. Had Kyiv fallen within three days, as some Washing-
ton military pundits predicted, or within six days, as the Russian generals ap-
parently expected, Putin might have got away with his invasion. The West
would have huffed and puffed but done little. But Ukrainians, with modern
weapons, fired up by nationalism, fueled by the emotional power derived
from defending their homeland, fought tenaciously, with bravery, skill, and
solidarity and displayed more tactical agility in the field by granting local
commanders autonomy. The hierarchy-bound, arrogant Russians thought
the invasion would be easy and so could not adapt to local battlefield condi-
tions. Their folly was clear when they attacked with tanks without infantry
support. Initial Russian defeats lasted long enough for anger abroad to grow
against Russia, sparking an economic and weapons-supplying counterattack.
Putin had unintentionally strengthened the solidarity of his foes. He had ex-
pected that declining American will power, revealed during the period of
Trump’s fawning, divisions among the Europeans, and an inexperienced
German chancellor would produce divided responses.
Yet the West’s response, led by the United States, was stronger and
more united than he had expected. This should not have surprised him
after the Ukrainians showed initial resistance, for the Americans and
470 Possible Futures

NATO could now seize the opportunity of cutting Russia down to size
without committing any troops of their own. They were able to fight a
proxy war, he was not. Western sanctions greatly harmed the Russian
economy, even though Western leaders knew sanctions would also hurt
their own economies. Supplies of weapons to the Ukrainians also esca-
lated. For the first time since World War II, the German government,
dominated by socialists and greens, sent arms abroad and announced an
increase of 100 billion euros in German military spending. The whole of
Europe joined in the sanctions. Sweden, Finland, and Ukraine announced
they would apply to join NATO, while Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia
applied to join the EU. Even those rulers whom Putin had considered his
friends, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Recep Erdogan in Turkey,
were equivocal. Only China and India offered him a measure of economic
support.
All this was of his own making. It had not helped Putin that he and
his diplomats had spent weeks lying that Russia would not invade. Diplo-
mats are used to being economical with the truth, but they hate being
taken for complete fools. Their anger intensified ideological commit-
ment to the principle of self-determination, to which Ukrainians were
believed to have a sacred right. Both NATO and Putin had unwittingly
strengthened the very threats they had feared. Caught in the middle of
their irrational struggle were mangled Ukrainian bodies, devastated cit-
ies, and tattered refugee columns—the normal horrors of wars, especially
horrifying Westerners as the wartime sufferings of nonwhite peoples in
Africa, Asia, and the Middle East had not.
There had been ways to avoid this war, although they were now unac-
ceptable to the parties. It had been reasonable for Russia to desire greater
security. Ukraine might have taken the Finnish or Austrian post–World
War II routes and been accorded neutrality between NATO and Russia.
Since NATO had not originally wanted Ukraine as a member, agreed
neutrality might have been part of a good solution. Now, of course, no se-
curity guarantees made by Putin are believable. Declaring Ukrainian neu-
trality would simply be an invitation for a later Russian attack.
Principles, not pragmatism, ruled. Putin’s vision of grandeur and
NATO’s principle of sovereignty: the Ukrainian government must have the
absolute right to regain sovereignty over its former territories. Strong prin-
ciples often lead to war, but they can be compromised by geopolitical prag-
matism, motivated by the need to avoid war. There must be negotiations at
some point. The only alternative would be a clear-cut victory. Putin was
 Possible Futures 471

still confident of eventual victory, and he still did hold enough Ukrainian
territory to be able to claim a lesser victory, and so was uninterested in ne-
gotiations. Paradoxically, the only viable path toward negotiations for the
West was to up the weapon supplies to produce either stalemate or recap-
ture of territory by Ukrainian forces, either of which might bring Putin to
the negotiating table. In the meantime, mutual mass slaughter ruled.
In the Donbas, with its majority of Russian speakers, the Minsk
Accords of 2014, never implemented, could have given it significant au-
tonomy within Ukraine. Events had also gone too far for this solution.
Alternatively, plebiscites might have been held whereby regional popula-
tions decide for themselves which state they wish to live in, as happened
in Europe in the interwar period. Putin opposed these alternatives be-
cause he believed he could conquer the Donbas (and indeed the whole
country) by force, and then administer his own phony plebiscites. Many
locals would probably have voted for union with Russia, but Putin’s brutal
invasion has probably reduced their number below majority level. Ideally,
the main principle involved should have been neither commitment to na-
tional honor and grandeur (Russia) nor inviolable sovereignty (the United
States and its allies), but the right of peoples to self-determination. But
Putin was not interested in that. It may be necessary for Ukraine to give
up Crimea and the territories of the former separatist “republics” in order
to gain back remaining Russian-occupied areas. Russia would have to
agree to Ukraine’s joining NATO, for that would be Ukraine’s only pro-
tection against a further Russian invasion. Yet it is hard to imagine Putin
agreeing to that, either. But how much is given up by each side will de-
pend on the fortunes of war.
War is the worst option not only because it is an efficient killing
machine, but also because its outcome is unpredictable. Starting a war is
extremely risky. Realist theory assumes that rulers’ decisions usually have
a rational basis. True, Putin carefully planned his course of action over
several years. He cautiously assembled his forces for Ukraine over at
least several months. He chose what he thought was the right moment to
strike, given recent Belarusian dependence on him, European disunity, a
new, inexperienced German government, and a soft-spoken U.S. presi-
dent. Perhaps he waited until after the end of the winter Olympics to
avoid discomforting China. These were all indications of instrumental
rationality. Yet though Putin is undoubtedly a clever and calculating man,
his reasoning had become subverted by emotions, by ideology, by his
need for personal political survival, by his need to please nationalist and
472 Possible Futures

Slavophile factions, and by his blinkered contempt for those he defined

as his enemies—like many other aggressors of history.
The risk soon became glaring, as Ukrainian forces held on, repelling
Russian attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv, forcing Russian retreat with heavy
losses. When this first wave failed, attack was redoubled in the Donbas, re-
serve forces were moved in, and tactics honed in Chechnya and Syria were
resumed. Eastern and southern cities were devastated, not by tanks, but
by long-range artillery, missiles, carpet bombing, and cluster munitions.
These were overwhelmingly unguided because Russian stocks of precision
weapons were diminishing, and so soldiers and civilians were being killed
fairly indiscriminately. Cities were razed before Russian forces advanced on
the ground—a strategy not likely to win hearts and minds, but effective in
death-dealing: a ghastly form of rationality. The performance of the Rus-
sian armed forces has been quite dismal, and so far Putin’s escalations—a
partial mobilization and the lobbing of rockets and drones against Ukrai-
nian cities and civilians—seem signs of weakness rather than strength.
Much of this falls within the category of a war crime, although such brutal
tactics—including deliberate targeting of civilians—had also been the tradi-
tional warfare of industrial societies and was used by all sides in World War
II. Yet the Russian advance was very slow, and then it stopped. It is unclear
how long either of them can continue. It is impossible to give even approx-
imate casualty figures, but fatalities so far have probably exceeded 50,000.
I have stressed the unpredictability of battle, and I cannot predict the
outcome of this one (I write in late 2022). The war will probably drag on
a while yet, since neither side looks as though it will achieve a rapid vic-
tory (provided the West does not falter in its weapons supplies and sanc-
tions), and neither side is interested in negotiating. Perhaps Russian
numerical superiority and the indifference of Russian leaders to their
large casualty rate will eventually succeed in devastating and conquering
the whole of the Donbas. Perhaps Putin might declare victory at this
point—or he might not stop. Even if Russian forces were to secure battle-
field victory in the east, guerilla resistance and political turbulence would
probably ensue there. Of course, most locals may care more about the war
ending than who wins it. Kremlin leaders might face years of quagmire in
Ukraine, inducing gradual economic and military decay: a Pyrrhic victory.
This might eventually affect Putin’s ability to continue ruling. A coup
against him remains the hope of many for a negotiated solution, though
his authoritarian rule seems very solidly rooted. On the other hand, the
recent initiative has lain with the Ukrainians, who have made considerable
 Possible Futures 473

gains in the east and south. But if their momentum continues, this in-
creases the chances that Putin might escalate to a nuclear response,
perhaps at first only of battlefield nuclear weapons but still devastating
not just for soldiers but also for the surrounding civilian population. The
American response to this is unclear. Threats of retaliation have been
made, but they have remained vague. But Putin’s absence of rationality so
far does not inspire confidence in the rationality of his future actions. Yet
further Russian expansion is unlikely given the blowback among neigh-
bors seeking NATO and EU membership. They reason correctly that
otherwise a Russian victory would lead to more invasions. Rarely does
anyone gain from a major war—except the armaments industries. That
this has been so irrational a war should not induce surprise. That is a
quality shared by most wars. We should not portray Putin as a madman,
for his folly is not uncommon among rulers.

Chinese Revisionism
Chinese revisionism has more fronts but as yet has not involved as much
militarism. It might, however, be aggravated by the Russian example or
if the United States refuses to accept its rise. The current U.S. defense
strategy is to be the “preeminent military power in the world,” accompa-
nied by “favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe,
the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.” Though widely accepted
in the past, this now seems provocative to a far more powerful China, es-
pecially when intensified by Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” aimed at China, and
Trump’s grotesque insults. China’s defense strategy proclaims, “China will
never follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony,” and
“As economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversifi-
cation develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development,
and win-win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times.”
While we should doubt such modesty, China is potentially dominant in its
region, though not the world, as the United States has been.
There are still great military disparities between these two powers.
Current U.S. military spending is probably more than twice that of China
(although Chinese statistics are rather opaque). The United States has
around six hundred overseas military bases, while China will shortly have
three to five. The United States has several military bases close to China,
but China has none near the United States (the same disparity exists with
Russia). In 2021 China had about three hundred nuclear warheads, and
474 Possible Futures

the United States had four thousand. The Chinese aim to reach one
thousand by 2030, and they already have the “nuclear triad,” the ability to
launch missiles from air, land, and sea. The United States had twelve
aircraft carriers and two under construction, whereas China had three.
The United States has launched many overseas wars in the last sixty
years; China has engaged only in border skirmishes—which leads some
observers to cast doubt on Chinese fighting ability. But a new arms race is
potentially looming over hypersonic weapons, space arms, and cyber-
weapons, in which China is no laggard. The fear is that an attack that dis-
abled space satellites or command-and-control systems could escalate in
unpredictable ways. At present there are no channels of communication
between the United States and China over such weapons as there was
over nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Nor is economic power so skewed. In 2019 China’s nominal GDP re-
mained only just behind the United States’, and it is ahead if measured in
gross Purchasing Power Parity; but China has a far bigger population, so
its GDP per capita was only one-fifth of the American. Yet its economy
will continue to grow.
China currently plans expansion to restore the full extent of former
Chinese empires. This revisionism means securing full control of Hong
Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet, plus slivers of territory along the border with
India (which the regime dubiously claims is in accordance with the 1890
Anglo-Qing Treaty), the return of Taiwan, and predominance in the
South China Sea. These targets lay within the Ming or Qing empires,
and past imperial glory is important in modern Chinese nationalism.1
Regime legitimacy rests not only in economic prosperity and longevity
but also in bringing unity and order to Chinese lands. Official Chinese
ideology states that one hundred years of submission to foreign powers
ended in 1949. Thereafter, Mao made China free, Deng made China
wealthy, and Xi is giving China global strength. This national revitaliza-
tion rests on popular revisionism, though it is boosted by regime manip-
ulation. There is a widespread sense that all these domains are rightly
Chinese, bringing a nationalist righteous tone to aggression that is not
easy to turn aside. At the same time, as is normal in border disputes, ri-
vals in contested zones feel as strongly in the justice of their case, and
India, Japan, and Vietnam are quite substantial powers. Further MIDs
are likely on the China-India borders for strategic and status interests.
In Hong Kong Chinese repression has ruthlessly mounted into a
tragedy for a population used to far more civil freedoms than mainland
 Possible Futures 475

Chinese enjoy. The West has been helpless to intervene, except with
rhetoric and economic sanctions that harden Chinese repression. China
seems prepared if necessary to run down this great financial and trading
entrepôt, currently a valuable economic asset, rather than yield an iota of
control. For the Xi regime, domination is a value rationality to which
even economic prosperity is subordinated.
The Chinese offensive in Xinjiang is claimed to be aimed at jihadists.
The years 2013 and 2014 saw two terrorist attacks by Uyghurs. In re-
sponse, Xi promulgated a “comprehensive security framework,” calling
for vigilance toward a jihadi “virus” against which Chinese Muslims must
be “inoculated.” He urged local Chinese officials to “use the organs of
dictatorship” with “absolutely no mercy.”2 The policy seemed vindicated
to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders when a few contacts be-
tween Uyghurs and Islamist organizations abroad were unearthed, as
well as the presence of Uyghur fighters among Middle Eastern and Af-
ghan jihadists. These fighters may have not yet taken jihadism back into
Xinjiang, although affiliates of al Qaeda and ISIS have declared a desire
to do so. Hence, the forcible “reeducation” of up to a million Uyghurs
and Kazakhs is claimed as “counterterrorist preventive repression.” It
includes deporting thousands of Uyghur young women to factories in
distant provinces of China. Such measures may be counterproductive,
amplifying what is at present a minimal terrorist threat, an example of
confusion of cause and effect.
Most mainland Chinese regard Taiwan as part of their country, sto-
len away by Japan in 1895, and China prevented in 1950 from taking it
back again by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Chinese rulers might be encour-
aged into adventurism by the recent imperialism of their Russian ally.
The American military commitment to Taiwan has been vague, and the
United States does not recognize Taiwan as a separate state to avoid pro-
voking China. Yet in May 2022 President Biden seemingly abandoned
this “strategic ambiguity” by promising to defend Taiwan should China
attack it. Was he simply going off script, which is a personality trait of
this president? The pro-China element in Taiwan is weakened by the
Hong Kong repression, and a deal between the two Chinas seems un-
likely. The most likely war scenario might be a Chinese regime in do-
mestic trouble turning to diversionary war fever over Taiwan. If this
led to an invasion attempt, Chinese forces might accomplish this quickly
unless the United States intervened. The U.S. response might depend
on its own domestic considerations. It is conceivable but unlikely that a
476 Possible Futures

full-fledged war between China and the United States might be the out-
come, but unintended escalation into war has happened too frequently in
human history to rule this out. Here the UN is of no help to Taiwan,
since it recognizes China but not Taiwan, and China is a permanent
member of the Security Council.
The Chinese claim to control the South China Sea, which is called its
“historical waters.” This is a challenge to several Asian countries and to
the American fleet stationed there. The claim centers on the islands of
Senkaku, possessed by Japan, and two isolated archipelagoes, the Spratly
Isles (formerly uninhabited) and the Paracel Isles, each containing tiny is-
lets, rocks, cays, and reefs. Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia
all claim some of the Spratlys and have established small bases and air-
ports there. China claims all the Spratlys and is establishing much bigger
bases there, which caused the Philippines to go to a UN arbitration tri-
bunal in 2016. The ruling was that no single country had exclusive rights
to the isles, but China refused to accept this and has continued to con-
struct artificial islands for military purposes. The Paracels do have a per-
manent population of about a thousand fishermen on an island controlled
by China. But Vietnam also claims the Paracels, and both have produced
historical records indicating nominal control there in different historical
periods. These islands are important as fishing grounds and have poten-
tial undersea oil and gas fields, but their strategic significance is greater,
for they lie astride the shipping lanes through which a third of the world’s
maritime trade passes. The other states contesting the isles cannot credi-
bly challenge Chinese military power, nor do they want to alienate China,
so they are reluctant to object to Chinese encroachments. Japan, how-
ever, has installed missile batteries on the island of Ishigaki, only three
hundred kilometers from Taiwan, part of a package of military upgrades
in its small Pacific islands. But in the North Pacific, China is beginning to
challenge American military dominance. Material interests are secondary.
The main problems are rival claims to geopolitical status and domination.
So Chinese rulers are assertive on all four power sources. Their na-
tionalist ideology defines domestic opponents as traitors and terrorists un-
dermining national unity; they seek Asian and even global economic power
serving strategic as well as profit motives; they are embarked on more
high-tech weaponry as well as expansion in the South China Sea; and they
have a stable authoritarian political order attractive to many other would-
be authoritarians, a factor in the faltering of democracy around the world.
None of this is deterred by American rhetoric, which is easily parried. To
 Possible Futures 477

accusations of Chinese repression, they cite American drones killing civil-

ians; to American capitalism, they counterpose the Great Capitalist Reces-
sion of 2008 and their own faster recent growth; to the virtues of American
democracy, they posit bought American elections, racism, and fighting in
the streets. These are not foolish accusations, although the failings of
American democracy pale beside the repression exercised by the CCP.
Chinese rulers seem not to want to expand territorial control beyond
former imperial boundaries. To the west, they do not want to govern more
Muslims. To the north, Russia is a formidable opponent; to the south, so is
India; and to the east, so is Japan (if backed by the United States). To the
southeast, less powerful regional states would prefer accommodation with
China. Its “Belt and Road Action Plan,” announced in 2015, will encom-
pass northerly land routes (the “Belt”) and southern maritime routes (the
“Road”) to encourage trade relations with Asia, the Middle East, and Eu-
rope, primarily through infrastructure investments and economic aid—
economic, not military, power—though China has threatened trade
embargoes and sanctions, which are also American tactics, of course. But
Chinese rulers lack interest in the form of foreign regimes, unlike their
American counterparts. The Taiwanese issue apart, other powers need not
fear war with China unless they provoke it. It is difficult for U.S. leaders to
accept this expansion of Chinese power, but the peace of the world de-
pends on it. The obvious failure of recent American military aggression
has, we can hope, drummed greater Realism into its leaders. Realistically,
there is little the United States can do to stem Chinese repression at home
or the growth of Chinese power in its own region. Yet it should hold the
existing level of defense over Taiwan and counter the Belt and Road pro-
gram with its own aid and development program. Trump took a giant step
backward from this when he took the United States out of the Trans-
Pacific Partnership. That decision should be reversed and the partnership
deepened. The United States should continue to stand for the virtues of
democracy and human rights, though that stance is being undercut by the
very visible decay of democracy in America itself.
Material interests should offer restraint, but mutual desire for status
and honor by rulers might suggest otherwise. The level of economic in-
terdependence between Western Europe and Russia is quite high, cen-
tered on Russia’s energy industry, and that between the United States
and China is now very high: the United States had over half a trillion
dollars of trade with China in 2020, reinforced by a wealth of educa-
tional and scientific exchanges and mutual interests over pandemics and
478 Possible Futures

climate change. Growing trade between Britain and Germany before

1914 did not stop their warring with each other, but today’s interdepen-
dence is orders of magnitude greater. As recently as the Cold War pe-
riod, the Soviet Union was largely autarkic. Autarky no longer exists for
any country. I have often doubted rulers’ commitment to material inter-
ests while making war-and-peace decisions. But for Chinese or American
rulers to ignore such an unprecedented level of mutual material interests
would be stupidity of the highest order. That might induce a certain de-
gree of hope, except that children’s games over who is to dominate the
playground, irrelevant to the concerns of their peoples, are baked in to
the institutions and culture of geopolitics. Recent rising tensions be-
tween the great powers lend some support to pessimistic Realism, which
sees wars as ensuing from the inherent anarchy and insecurity of geopo-
litical space. In the end, however, wars are rarely possible to predict.

Existential Threats
Unfortunately, a far more serious crisis is now in sight, and solving it
requires much closer collaboration between all the powers. If no action is
forthcoming on the conflicts just mentioned, nothing disastrous would
happen. Inactive peace would be good news. But climate change differs. If
nothing is done and major mitigation policies are not implemented, it is
certain natural and human disaster on a global scale will ensue. No problem
with predicting here. Doing nothing is not a rational option, 95 percent
of climatologists say. According to the estimate of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if we continue “business as usual,” rely-
ing on fossil fuels, the earth’s average temperature will rise by 2.6°C
to 4.8°C above preindustrial levels by 2100. Implementing the 2015
Paris Agreement’s “unconditional Nationally Determined Contributions”
(NDCs) would still lead to a global temperature rise of 2.9°C to 3.4°C by
2100, which would continue to rise thereafter. Current NDC target levels
need to be tripled if emission reductions are to meet the Paris goal of 2°C
warming, and increased fivefold for the 1.5°C goal, the real solution. The
UN says these gaps can still be bridged, but each year we get further away
from a solution except in rhetoric. Yet even the rhetoric is contested, espe-
cially by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has proudly privileged “original-
ist” rhetoric in banning the federal government from issuing climate
regulations, relying on eighteenth-century notions of justice—when no one
could have envisaged the climate crisis we now face.
 Possible Futures 479

Accelerating rates of carbon emissions, ice cap melt, seawater and sea
acidity rises, heat waves, forest fires, floods, cyclones, and species extinc-
tions beyond previous experience have characterized the last two de-
cades. Emissions for 2020 were the highest recorded, and average
temperatures rose by 2°C rather than the 1°C annual rise of the previous
decade. The climate becomes more sensitive to greenhouse gases as it
warms, so that emission and temperature rises might be exponential. The
2021 report of the UN IPCC confirmed this and found that we are al-
ready locked into harmful changes in the ocean, ice sheets, and global sea
levels, which will continue for centuries to come, whatever our policies.
Using a 784,000-year-long reconstruction of sea-surface temperatures
and a paleoclimate simulation that includes atmosphere, ocean, sea ice,
and vegetation factors, researchers calculated a range of warming of be-
tween 4.78°C and 7.36°C by 2100.3 Anything over 4°C would be cata-
strophic, but even the range of 2–4°C would bring widespread disaster.
High-emissions regimes like the United States, Brazil, and Australia
were recently removing laws designed to reduce emissions. That is sui-
cidal. Reason does not rule in climate change. Short-term sectoral profit
backed by ruinous consumerism does, and they will ruin the earth if
unchecked. The positive side is that people in rich and poor countries
alike are now directly experiencing these disasters, so that politicians are
beginning to enact emission-lowering policies. That is already happening
in the United States under the Biden administration, China under Xi,
and across Europe. But will their measures go far enough, will they even
be revoked, and can they lower the rising emissions of poorer countries
as they develop?
Climate change has not yet directly produced wars, although sus-
tained local drought preceded both the Sudanese and Syrian civil wars.
But if leaders do not negotiate a lowering of greenhouse gases, violent
conflict for declining resources will rise. Poor states are unable to take or
enforce expensive measures, and they lack the military power to chal-
lenge more privileged states, so the specter might not be interstate wars,
but massive refugee flows beating up helplessly against the defensive
walls of wealthy, privileged countries. One can conceive of mass extinc-
tions of humans more easily than wars. One postapocalyptic scenario
would be a halving of the global population through genocides, pandem-
ics, or famines that could produce an era of emissions reductions for the
survivors. Yet there is also a potentially brighter scenario. Any successful
global response to climate change would have to be achieved by major
480 Possible Futures

international cooperation. A byproduct of this would make countries less

likely to war against each other. Perhaps the path toward Kant’s perpet-
ual peace might be through combating climate change.
Raymond Aron saw only two ways to world peace: a universal state or
the international rule of law.4 Resurgent nationalism is currently moving
us away from both. Optimistic liberals see a global civilizing process.
They might concede that it is slower and more uneven than initially sug-
gested, but they see present exceptions as blips in the long run. But my
history of war suggests that periods of war alternate with periods of
peace. This will probably continue for a good while yet. Recent Russian
imperialism shocked the world into realizing that even in Europe war is
not dead. We cannot explain war or peace by relying on universals like
human nature or the essential nature of societies, as historical pessimists
did. Nor can we support evolutionary theories of the rise of peace, or Re-
alist theories that assume that rational calculation of odds determines
war-and-peace decisions. This is an admittedly uncertain ending, but
wars have always been the product of unpredictable human decisions that
might have gone differently, and which might do so in the future. I wish I
could share the optimism of the liberal tradition. Goldstein concludes:
“Today, bit by bit, we are dragging our muddy, banged-up world out of
the ditch of war. We have avoided nuclear wars, left behind world war,
nearly extinguished interstate war, and reduced civil wars to fewer coun-
tries with fewer casualties. We are almost there.”5
Regretfully, this mixes reality with hope. In the words of an Ameri-
can soldier-president: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hun-
ger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world
in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its la-
borers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a
way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is human-
ity hanging on a cross of iron.”6
Rulers should fully commit to international institutions to combat
war and climate change, consider undertaking wars only in self-defense,
calculate carefully what is self-defense, calm the emotions and the tem-
per, never demonize potential enemies, consult advisers of varying views,
and use soft power unless attacked. If both parties to disputes think only
of self-defense, there will be no more wars.
 Conclusion
Patterns of War

M
ost interstate wars have been irrational in terms of ei-
ther means or ends, and often of both. Here I summarize
the evidence and explain why irrationality has dominated.
Most interstate wars that have been rational in terms of
ends would be actually termed wars of aggression as defined by the
Nuremberg Tribunal and then by the Rome Statute which set up the In-
ternational Criminal Court. Yet international courts have brought no
prosecutions for wars of aggression since Nuremberg. It would bring
more peace if they did, for then military interventions might be only
those authorized by the UN. This is utopian, of course, since 42 countries
have not signed up to the ICC or the Rome Statute (123 countries have),
and the nonsigners include the United States, Russia, and China. It would
also help if arms sales abroad, other than for policing, were banned, but
this is also utopian. I have little faith in the present capabilities of the
UN, and major military interventions would still have to be led by U.S.
forces, but the outcome of multilateral measures would be better than re-
cent unilateral interventions by the United States and its allies.
War is not universal, but it is ubiquitous, occurring in all regions and
periods, if varying in frequency and intensity. Yet years of peace have far
outnumbered those of war, and the large majority of interstate conflicts
have been settled by conciliation or continue to fester amid grumbling.
But boring peace has been considered less noteworthy than exciting wars,
from early inscriptions, chronicles, and sagas to today’s mass media. Wars

481
482 Conclusion: Patterns of War

sell better than peace. So war is neither genetically hardwired into hu-
mans, nor quite as important as it is often represented. Nor is it hardwired
only into men. Men have caused and fought virtually all wars, but this is
due to their culture and institutions, not their genes, whereas guerilla
forces and recent armies have included many women. For over 90 percent
of their time on earth, humans fought very few wars, but when fixed
agrarian settlements generated states and social classes, organized war be-
came ubiquitous. Societies, not universal human nature, cause wars.
Marxists explain the origin of war as a product of class exploitation.
In precapitalist modes of production, they say, peasants were in physical
possession of the land, and lords had to extort the surplus from them
through force. The reverse Mafia-like sequence was also common,
whereby peasants put themselves under the protection of local armed
men when threatened by armed men from elsewhere. The result was the
same: peasants were forced to yield up surplus to lords, whose privileged
lifestyles, castles, fineries, and weapons depended on it. This, I think, is a
valid theory pertaining to the origins of war.
Yet military power is only one of the four main ways for humans to
acquire whatever material or ideal resources they may desire. I have
asked why rulers use military power rather than rely on cooperative ide-
ology, economic exchange, or political diplomacy to attain foreign policy
goals. I focused mainly on interstate wars, though including civil and ex-
trastate wars when these intruded. In chapter 10 I found no long-term or
short-term trend toward either more or less war, provided we add inter-
state, civil, and extrastate wars together and note increasing civilian casu-
alties, arms sales, and internationalization of recent civil wars. Overall,
war is neither more nor less meaningful today than in the past.

Anarchy and Hegemony

The dominant theory of interstate war has been Realism, which deploys
three major concepts: anarchy, hegemony, and rationality. Anarchy con-
trasts the rule of law within states with its absence in international space.
Thus, rulers’ anxieties about other rulers’ intentions, as well as fears for
their own survival amid anarchy, inevitably entail “security dilemmas,”
by which two or more powers periodically escalate into war. This is often
true, especially in wars of mutual escalation. Yet Realists minimize
domestic causes of war. Eckstein, for example, sought to explain the
Roman Republic’s wars almost entirely in terms of geopolitical anarchy.1
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 483

In chapter 4 I showed this made some sense in the very early wars of the
republic, but domestic power relations were much more important causes
later on. Most of its wars were wars of aggression, which led first to re-
gime change abroad and then to imperial conquest of peoples who did not
threaten Roman survival. Instead, the economic, ideological, and political
institutions and culture of Rome had been subordinated to militarism.
Realism minimizes the importance of norms. Almost all wars before
the modern period were between neighbors, but so was most foreign
trade and ideological diffusion of shared norms, religions, and in the case
of trade, agreed-on regulatory procedures. Liberal theorists emphasize
pacific norms, like Confucianism, religious injunctions, or United Na-
tions resolutions, which have aimed at limiting or regulating war. Some
shared norms do restrain warriors, as in siege warfare or the treatment of
prisoners or civilians. These norms often fray, but those who surrender
hope the norm will be respected. Shared norms may alternatively em-
body warrior virtues that favor war, however, as in the feudalisms of
China, Japan, and Europe or in modern fascism. Norms may restrain or
amplify hostilities.
The opposite of anarchy in Realism is hegemony: peace will follow if
a single state has military power coupled with the legitimate authority to
set the norms of geopolitics. In many regions one great imperial state
emerged out of a plethora of contending small states. Yet to achieve impe-
rial peace, countless lives had been sacrificed in war, and most imperial
states continued to make war against newly perceived enemies until their
decline and fall. A rare exception was Tokugawa rule in Japan, where
peace predominated for 250 years after the dynasty had achieved hege-
mony, although this was helped by its island ecology, which made wars
against foreigners difficult. Hegemony has also been region-specific, as in
imperial China’s relatively peaceful tributary diplomacy with states in its
east and southeast but more warlike relations in other regions. The Amer-
ican informal empire since 1945 was hegemonic over Western Europe,
moved toward hegemony after three decades of wars in East Asia, yet was
not achieved in the Middle East or Latin America.
So hegemony may sometimes reduce war but is too rare to be the main
cause of peace. There are other causes of peace. War is costly, especially one
likely to last long. Sometimes balances of power among several states en-
courage peace. Some rulers have clearly preferred peace, such as the Confu-
cian gentry-bureaucrat class of China, some ancient Greek city-states,
eleventh-century Song China, the Iroquois Confederacy, postcolonial Latin
484 Conclusion: Patterns of War

America, recent centuries in Scandinavia, and recent decades in Western

Europe. In the Cold War, the United States and the Soviets respected arms
treaties and nonintervention in each other’s sphere of influence. In all these
cases, peace had its own virtues. It permitted extraordinary economic devel-
opment in Song China and in the postwar world, where it also avoided nu-
clear war. Though anarchy and hegemony are useful aids in explaining war
and peace, the push of anarchy is no stronger than the pull of peace. We
have seen perennial tugs-of-war between them.

Rationality
Realists say war-and-peace decisions hinge on rational choice of means
and ends. Defensive Realists say that states value above all the goal of
survival and so calculate rationally the means of ensuring this. Aggressive
Realists say that states calculate the ends of economic or strategic profit
from war set against its cost in treasure and lives and the likelihood of
military victory. If the odds seem favorable, states will go to war. States
will initiate war when militarily strong and choose defense or diplomacy
when weak. These hypotheses are plausible, and we have seen some con-
firming examples of them.
Yet I have preferred to write not of states but of rulers, whether indi-
viduals or smallish groups. We have seen that these have made the deci-
sions, and they possess cognition, emotions, and values, which states lack.
States, however, are important as political institutions and networks
within which rulers operate. These stretch outward into civil society, car-
rying orders, constraints, and resources two ways between the center and
the periphery. So for rational foreign policy there must be both rational
decision makers and some overall coherence to the rules and practices of
these institutions. The extent of state coherence has varied, and there has
not been a consistent historical trend toward either more or less coher-
ence. The Roman Republic had considerable coherence in decisions for
war. Senate and popular assembly rules were clear, as they were in some
ancient Greek city-states. The Chinese imperial state was fairly coherent
with its two courts, one dominated by the emperor and his kin, the
other by the gentry-bureaucrat class. The main problems confronting
coherence were the relations between them, as well as the sheer size and
the succession crises of the empire. In feudal monarchies, coherence de-
pended on relations between the prince and his leading vassals, who en-
joyed much autonomy. Their relations might be harmonious or fractious
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 485

and were intermittently bedeviled by succession crises. In theory, today’s

representative democracies have clear rules for war-and-peace decisions,
but the size and complexity of modern states can subvert this—as in the
chaotic multi-institution decision making that caused World War I or
the “shadow” neoconservative networks confusing the chain of command
in the Bush the Younger administration, both of which reduced the ratio-
nality of decision making. A high level of institutional coherence has
been quite rare.
Rulers always think their decisions for war are rational in terms of
both means and ends, and they will surely try to avoid a war they believe
they are likely to lose. It is difficult to probe their motives, which have
obviously been varied. Yet we can pose a simple question: Do those who
initiate wars win them? Obviously some do not, but that may only indi-
cate understandable mistakes. It might reach the level of irrationality of
means if initiators systematically either lost them or fought very costly
wars with no victor. Quantitative data are available for wars since 1816,
and I can add my own historical cases.
Melvin Small and David Singer concluded that between 1816 and
1965 initiators were victorious in thirty-four of forty-nine wars, which
apparently indicates relatively rational decision making. Yet in over half
these cases, the initiator was a major power attacking a minor power. Of
these nineteen confrontations, the major power initiated hostilities on
eighteen occasions and won seventeen. This is hardly surprising, since a
war between a shark and a minnow is not much of a risk for the shark.
When minnows fought minnows, the initiator won fourteen and lost
seven, but when sharks fought sharks, the initiators won three and lost
five. So initiating hostilities was less likely to bring victory when the com-
batants were great power near equals. The authors add that there was
only one stalemate war among their cases (which I find hard to believe).2
Reiter and Stam found fifty-six of initiators in the period 1816–1988
were winners, and only thirty were losers. The authors had discarded all
wars ending in a draw from their analysis, however. Draws are really a loss
for both sides, costly in lives and money, which renders the war pointless,
even in some cases of self-defense. If we add to the losers the seventeen
initiators who fought costly draws, we get forty-seven losers to set against
the fifty-six winners—only slight odds in favor of risking war.3 Lebow in
his sample found that initiators won forty-six, lost forty-five, and drew
six—poor odds. And the states initiating the nine biggest wars all lost
them! In his sample the odds got worse: since 1945 only 26 percent of
486 Conclusion: Patterns of War

initiators achieved their goals, rising to 32 percent if success means

merely defeating the enemy’s forces in the field (as in Iraq in 2003).4 So
when Ralph White studied only twentieth-century wars (after the age of
imperialism), he found that aggressors lost twenty and won only five, with
five draws—very bad odds. I analyzed in chapter 9 postcolonial wars in
Latin America. Initiators lost six wars and won only two.5 There were also
five mutual provocations and five costly stalemates. All eight of the rulers
who initiated wars, whatever the outcome, were thrown out of office be-
cause of the wars. This sorry record did bring a “delayed reaction
Realism”—a belated desire to process conflict not through war but mere
MIDs and mediation.
So aggressive war was risky: there was usually only around a 50 per-
cent chance of success. Would you initiate a war with such odds? But
millions of people today take on projects with scant chance of success—
like opening start-up companies. In the United States they have only a
60 percent chance of survival after three years, 50 percent after five, and
only 30 percent after ten. The U.K. figures are 40 percent, 36 percent,
and 33 percent. Given the lure of wealth and autonomy, hope springs
eternal, as it does in war. Consider also a massive global industry whose
customers are mainly losers. Yet the gambling industry is booming. Its
gross gaming revenue (GGR), the difference between revenues and pay-
outs, is rising, and GGRs are projected to reach $565 billion in 2022.
The industry exists only if there are more losers than winners. Gamblers
are risk-accepting; they get excited by the act of gambling, and they are
hopeful. So are rulers, especially since in war they are usually gambling
with other people’s lives. Most war-and-peace decisions are made in a
context of risk-induced anxiety, hope, and unexpected interactions that
are hardly conducive to reason.
But given the order to prepare for war, generals calculate campaign
plans and mobilize resources. Quartermasters’ logistics dominate this
phase, and it is highly calculative. Then comes contact with the enemy,
and all hell breaks loose. As we saw, battle is felt by the soldiers as fearful
chaos, from the ferocious body-on-body slashing of earlier history to mod-
ern callous warfare in which soldiers blaze away at a distance, keeping
heads down, but vulnerable to random death inflicted from the skies. Care-
fully laid plans can rarely be implemented because of the enemy’s unex-
pected behavior or the unanticipated battlefield terrain—Clausewitz’s
“friction” of battle and Ibn Khaldun’s “hidden causes” of outcomes. Various
commanders, including Helmuth von Moltke the Elder and Napoleon,
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 487

have been credited with the adage “No plan of operations extends
with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.”
The outcome of six of the seven biggest battles of the Hundred Years’ War
was the result of unexpected terrain or enemy action. Most of the battle
victories of the U.S. Civil War did not result from initial strategies. The
small-scale engagements by U.S. World War II units vividly described by S.
L. A. Marshall were decided by unexpected terrain or enemy dispositions,
mistakes, acute or fortunate decisions, and bravery by small groups. The
decision for war submits rulers, generals, and soldiers to the fickle fortunes
of battle. Today the lack of predictability is obvious in Ethiopia, Yemen,
and Ukraine.
I recap the extent of calculation of means in my main historical cases.
The Roman senate debated war-and-peace decisions at length; it focused
on the economic profit war might bring, not on the cost in lives. There
were deviant cases, such as Caesar’s wars in Gaul and Britain, which were
not expected to be profitable. Here the main motives were domestic pol-
itics: most senators wanted Caesar far away, where he could not foment
trouble in Rome, while Caesar’s faction wanted him to command legions
abroad and then bring them back to foment trouble in Rome (which he
duly did). The senators rarely doubted military victory, so discussion of
military odds was confined to how many legions should be mobilized.
War was usually endorsed unless jealousies stopped a rival senator from
getting the chance to command the armies or unless other wars were on-
going and therefore stretching resources. Senators were sometimes over-
confident, and defeat resulted. But their response was to dig deeper into
manpower resources and emerge with eventual victory, as in the Punic
Wars. The eventual success rate of Roman-initiated wars was high. War
for the Romans, however, was not really a “choice”—it was what Romans
did, by virtue of their militaristic institutions and culture. In contrast, the
goal of economic profit was more important for the Carthaginians, and
they did not sacrifice as much for military purposes. So they lost the
Punic Wars and were destroyed.
The rulers of the two ex-barbarian dynasties of China, the Yuan and
the Qing, behaved like Romans. They also could dig deeper into re-
sources than their enemies because militarism was baked in to their insti-
tutions and cultures. Military power restructured the other three sources
of power. As in Rome, war was considered the surest way to wealth, po-
litical power, and status, honor, and glory alike. War was what Mongols
and Manchus, Aztecs (Incas less so), and Arab conquest dynasties did
488 Conclusion: Patterns of War

whenever opportunity or insult seemed to arise. They continued aggress-

ing until they reached hubris, sometimes induced by Nature’s deserts,
jungles, or oceans. This finally constrained them into preferring diplo-
macy and peace—a delayed-reaction Realism. Until then, rulers were
constrained more by institutionalized militarism than by calculation. But
perhaps my rather aggressive cases—the Roman Republic and the Mon-
gol, Manchu, Aztec, and Arab dynasties—were atypical.
So I examined the milder two Song dynasties of China. The first Song
emperor, Taizu, was a model Realist, fighting and winning offensive wars
after cautious initial probes to test whether victory was likely, and carefully
building up adequate forces. Yet his successors initiated six offensive wars
resulting in only one success, one costly draw, and four defeats. Muddying
rational calculation were righteous revisionism demanding the return of
“lost territories,” attempts to divert domestic political power struggles, an
emperor’s overweening ambition, or choosing the wrong allies, as in the
crucial final wars of the two dynasties (the only major geopolitical cause).
Other Song rulers preferred peace or defense over aggression, less because
of weakness than because they pursued economic and social development,
following liberal, not Realist, precepts, and preferring diplomacy, cultural
cooperation, and production and trade. In contrast, the last Song emperors
(and the last Ming emperors, too) were relatively weak but hastened col-
lapse by striking out impulsively, in denial of weakness, rather than settling
for accommodation. The Song present a mixed bag.
Luard said that most European rulers between 1400 and 1940 who
started wars lost them.6 He surely exaggerated in perceiving no careful
calculation of means among rulers, but war was mainly what a medieval
ruler did when feeling slighted or ambitious or when diverting the turbu-
lence of younger sons or bolstering his or her own domestic power. These
motivations and the lure of status, honor, and glory then dictated calling
out the barons, levying taxes or borrowing, and setting off for battle with
whatever levies showed up, which the ruler could not predict. Again, war
was less a choice than what a ruler felt constrained to do in particular con-
texts. Later European rulers fielded professional armies and navies, but
they still mostly warred when feeling slighted or ambitious. It was not al-
ways a question of “choice” because conflict stances might escalate into an
unintended war. From the sixteenth century came a wave of neomercan-
tilist naval wars with material goals and the belief that the international
economy was zero-sum—for one country to gain, another must lose. This
was more calculative, although there were also ideological wars in this
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 489

period, at first religious, then revolutionary-nationalist. Finally, global im-

perial conquest was launched by Europeans in which the lure of profit
fused with righteous ideologies of civilizational and racial superiority.
In World War I no aggressor initially invoked economic goals. In-
stead, they demanded status in the geopolitical system and the honor of
defending allied client states to ensure the survival of their dynasties
(though German rulers did hope for more profitable colonies). Many cal-
culations were made by many actors, but war resulted from cascading
diplomatic mistakes and incoherent policy formation. A plethora of polit-
ical institutions produced unpredictability and brinkmanship that per-
versely meant that no one would back down. Most rulers were confident
of victory, but they had a backup belief that this would be a short war,
since economies could not support it for long. How wrong they were! So
the rulers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Em-
pire, the leading initiators, secured not only their own defeat but also the
fall of monarchy itself. Some at the time warned that this might happen,
but they lost the domestic power struggle. Yet all the rulers lost heavily in
this dreadful war, except for the two outsiders who picked up the pieces,
Americans and Bolsheviks. This war was irrational for everyone else.
In World War II rationality was disrupted more by ideology. This
obstructed Allied defense strategy in the late 1930s. War might have
been prevented or delayed if France and Britain had allied with the Sovi-
ets to deter Hitler, as many suggested at the time. There were geograph-
ical and political obstacles to this in Eastern Europe, but ideology was
the main problem, since most French and British rulers feared commu-
nism more than they did fascism. So Stalin, isolated, made his 1939 Non-
Aggression Pact with Hitler, and there was no balancing alliance. In the
Far East, Japanese rulers despised the Chinese, underestimating their
nationalist resolve; and Japanese and American rulers miscalculated each
other’s reactions and got into an unanticipated total war. War was initi-
ated by German and Italian fascists and Japanese semi-fascists. Their
economic motives were subordinated to a vision of imperial conquest
achieved by martial ideologies despising the “decadence” of the liberal
powers and China, and the “barbarism” of communism. Early successes
prevented rational long-term calculation of military and economic odds.
The Axis rulers believed their martial spirit would overcome daunting
odds of numbers and technology. For them this war embodied Weber’s
“value rationality,” commitment to ultimate values overriding instrumen-
tal rationality. Their initiation of war was suicidal.
490 Conclusion: Patterns of War

In the Korean War, North Korean, American, and Chinese rulers all
in turn aggressed, underestimating their enemies, blinkered by ideology.
They could reach only a bloody stalemate, which achieved none of their
objectives and led to a bitterness across Korea that still poisons East Asia.
After Korea, U.S. presidents were better at propping up client regimes
than at changing them, but in Vietnam they failed to achieve either and
suffered defeat through underestimating the ideological commitment
and normative solidarity of their opponent. Reagan’s pressure on the So-
viet Union did help bring about Soviet collapse, but the main causes of
that collapse lay within the Soviet Communist Party. The recent spate of
wars in Muslim countries has seen some initial battlefield victories for
the United States and its allies, yet neglect of political power predictably
thwarted goal achievement. U.S. interventions greatly damaged Afghani-
stan and Iraq and contributed together with other actors to the chaos
rending Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The United States has not achieved its
goals in any significant war since 1945, apart from the Cold War, a re-
markable series of failures by the world’s superpower. At the moment
Putin seems far from attaining his goals. So from early history to the
present day, initiating major war probably resulted more often in failure
than success, while there was substantial irrationality of means.
Of course, some wars are rational in terms of ends, initiated for po-
tential or actual profit that was achieved, mostly in raids and in imperial-
conquest wars between highly unequal adversaries, while other wars are
rational because fought in self-defense with a good chance of success.
But benefit in these cases was almost entirely zero-sum: for some to gain,
others must lose. In Central and South America, pre-Columbian empires
and Spanish and Portuguese empires alike fought wars devastating indig-
enous peoples, which embodied a ghastly racial form of rationality,
bringing benefits to a few conquerors but massacres of the defeated.
Spanish and Portuguese imperialisms, like other subsequent European
imperialisms, would today be classified as war crimes, and often as geno-
cides. In contrast, subsequent Latin American decisions were increas-
ingly rational because rulers learned from “bad wars” not to make more.
There were no serial aggressors here. Instead, rulers learned to move to-
ward lesser MID conflicts and diplomatic mediation.
Some wars might be considered rational in hindsight, having sparked
unintended benefits such as economic development, while conquest may
bring creativity by blending hitherto distinct social practices. It may also
provide more social order. Roman rulers always claimed this, as indeed
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 491

did most imperialists. Recent scholars have emphasized the creativity

generated by the blending of diverse cultures within the Mongol Em-
pire. Yet peace also brings order and creativity. Ibn Khaldun assessed the
economic consequences of early Arab wars. The conquerors seized great
wealth for themselves and their followers, for “booty was lawful prop-
erty,” but always at the expense of the conquered. Orderly imperial rule,
however, did generally boost economic growth and tax returns for the
first two generations of a dynasty, but then came decline in both, leading
eventually to the collapse of the dynasty in wars: a rather mixed bag.7
When dealing with early modern European warfare, the Industrial Revo-
lution, and the two world wars, I found that even the unintended benefits
of war, though real enough, have been exaggerated and pale beside war’s
devastation. The counterfactual of whether civilization could have been
furthered better through peace may be unknowable. But there is a major
countercase. In Song China peace favored major technological innova-
tion and economic development—and it was defeat in war which ensured
the end of the extraordinary development under the southern Song.
The post-1945 period has seen extraordinary technological and eco-
nomic progress in the Northern Hemisphere, but was this due to Ameri-
can hegemony or to the mere fact of peace there—a peace in reaction to
the most devastating war in human history. Statistical data drawn from na-
tional income accounts are available on the economic impact of wars since
1945. They show that war reduces GDP per capita, even though the main
losses, of life and the destruction of physical and human capital, do not fig-
ure in these income accounts.8 We cannot calculate such detail in earlier
wars, but chroniclers imply that interstate wars were zero-sum—for some
to gain, others must lose—and they stress the devastation of regions in
which campaigns occurred. Admittedly, this is far from perfect evidence,
and the economic effects of war need much further research. I tried to end
my cases with a rough guess at who benefited and who lost. Generally,
more lost than won. Given the certainty that war kills millions, my conclu-
sion is that most wars are pointless and irrational in terms of both means
and ends. Why are there nonetheless so many of them?

Political Power: Whose Decision?

Most decisions for war, whether made by a representative democracy, an
oligarchy, a monarchy, or a dictatorship, were made by a small coterie of
rulers, advisers, and other powerful persons—and sometimes by a single
492 Conclusion: Patterns of War

monarch, dictator, prime minister, or president. There is very little de-

mocracy in foreign policy. The extreme potential case, thankfully not yet
realized, is the sole authority of the American president to release nu-
clear missiles that could destroy the world. That might also be said of
both Putin and Xi. A recent example of a consequential single ruler of
the United States was George Bush the Younger. His personal drive to
war in Iraq was discussed in chapter 14. Decisions have been made by
rulers and their close associates, not nations or the capitalist class, with
influential colonial bankers and merchants, arms industries, and media
barons as exceptions. Most capitalists prefer to do business amid peace,
but they adapt quickly to ways of making profit from war. As I showed in
chapter 10, contrary to the views of most political scientists, modern rep-
resentative democracies have been no less likely to make war, whether or
not this was war against other democracies, provided we include all their
small colonial wars and the direct democracy found among many indige-
nous peoples. Ideally, democracy should make a difference, but in prac-
tice foreign policy decision making is not very democratic.
The people are rarely responsible for wars, not because they are vir-
tuous but because they are barely interested in either sense of that word.
They do not see their personal interests at stake, and they lack interest in
foreign affairs. Representative democracy includes hundreds of elected
persons sitting in parliaments passing laws. Yet they depend for reelec-
tion on their constituents, and so they mirror their lack of interest in for-
eign policy. In the U.S. Congress, for example, few representatives or
senators show much interest in foreign policy. They leave it to the for-
eign affairs committees. If their chairs and highly respected committee
members agree with the administration, foreign policy is rubber-
stamped, unless powerful interest groups intervene (or a gross violation
of human rights provokes them into moralizing rhetoric). This is why
congressional votes for war in the United States have been so lopsided.
In this country a plethora of think tanks add advice, yet congressional
votes suggest that dissonant advice is ignored.
Of course, public opinion does play a role in most modern societies
(rarely in large historical societies), but it is usually somewhat manipu-
lated by political leaders, entrenched vested interest groups, and media
barons. Where geopolitical relations become fraught, conflict becomes
normalized and foreign threats become “nationalized,” in the sense that
the public, lacking much knowledge of foreign affairs, can be fairly easily
persuaded that national interests are at stake, as their leaders claim. As
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 493

war looms and as it starts, a rally ’round the flag mentality usually occurs,
lasting long enough to persuade leaders that the public actually wants
war. Sometimes the result may be complex interactions among leaders,
vested interests, mass media, and mass publics, but the initiative in deci-
sion making almost invariably lies with the leaders.
Democracy is a desirable system for deciding domestic issues in which
the people show interest. But democracy has not proved its worth in war-
and-peace decisions. The people have known little about the “enemy” be-
yond what rulers tell them. In the past people saw war as defense of their
lord or monarch. Obedience was their duty, reinforced by institutionalized
rituals and by coercion. Today the people often do identify with the nation
and its rulers and so can be persuaded that even an aggressive war is self-
defense or that the enemy is evil. Americans, for a time, and Russians,
under severe censorship, will support a war claimed to be waged in self-
defense or good against evil—and leaders invariably assert both.
In some societies men have been addicted to war (and women ac-
cepted addiction as normal), as did some pastoralists in northern Eurasia
and the Middle East. Decisions for war were made by the khan or emir
and his intimates, but there was popular enthusiasm for war. More wide-
spread in human history, however, has been the ethos of masculinity and
manliness pervasive in patriarchal societies, including our own, which for
most men smothers any pacific tendencies with the smear of cowardice.
This has been especially powerful while mobilizing soldiers once war has
been decided on. At this stage, women are often complicit in the ethos of
manliness—or at least men think they are and so feel they must prove
their manliness to them. Fear of demonstrating cowardice in the eyes of
comrades and women is then important in keeping men enduring the
horrors of battle, as we repeatedly saw in chapters 11–13. This may have
been the most popular prop of militarism.
In a few societies, quasi-representative decisions for war have in-
volved many more people. In some Greek city-states, decisions were
made by the citizen body as a whole—20–40 percent of adult males.
Many were probably involved in some early Sumerian city-states. They
were in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico, in 1519, and among many native
American peoples. There was more limited citizen participation in the
popular assemblies of the Roman Republic and in twentieth-century
liberal democracies. Modern public opinion surveys may give the impres-
sion that most people have serious views on matters of war and peace,
while politicians “acting tough” may win popular support before the
494 Conclusion: Patterns of War

reality of war sinks in. Yet these are generally paper-thin sentiments easily
shredded by war itself. Some sectional interests do favor war or peace,
and some constituencies willingly supply soldiers because alternative
channels of advancement are absent—like the overrepresentation of
southern white officers and African American men in U.S. forces, or the
role of Gurkhas in British armies.
Yet even in representative governments, decisions for war have been
steered by manipulative rulers abetted by special interest groups and
compliant mass media (where these exist). In the Roman Republic sena-
torial elites manipulated the popular assemblies into war. Parliaments in
England generally left matters of war and peace to monarchs and their
ministers, except during the mercantilist eighteenth century, when mer-
chants and bankers joined in. Nineteenth-century British colonial policy
debates reliably emptied the House of Commons, and the people showed
little interest in empire except when native atrocities committed against
British people were publicized. Hitler’s lies about murders of Germans in
Danzig in 1939, Roosevelt’s distortion of the USS Greer’s 1941 brush
with a German submarine, and Johnson’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin
in Vietnam in 1964 were pretexts for war believed by most citizens. The
administration of Bush the Younger, helped in Britain by Tony Blair, fed
false information to gullible publics in 2002–3 about Saddam Hussein’s
supposed links with terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The
Putin government denied in 2014 that the masked men who seized
Crimea were regular Russian troops, and in 2020 Putin claimed that
Russian mercenaries and Russian planes in Libya were not Kremlin ap-
proved, although their weaponry could only have come from Russian
army supplies. Putin’s lies about his war in Ukraine were many. The U.S.
Congress is constitutionally empowered to declare war, but in the twen-
tieth and twenty-first centuries it has usually ratified decisions already
made by presidents. Launching World War II was a partial exception,
since until the attack on Pearl Harbor Congress had blocked Roosevelt’s
attempts to join the war. So Roosevelt retaliated with covert means and
trickery to supply Britain with aid. In 2001, during the panic induced by
the 9/11 terrorist attack, Congress passed—with only one dissenting
vote—the Authorization to Use Military Force Act, allowing the presi-
dent to use force abroad without congressional approval if such conduct
was in pursuit of terrorists or those who harbor them. The president de-
cides who is a terrorist. The act is still in force. By 2018 it had been used
forty-one times to attack nineteen countries.
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 495

Once war is declared, popular support grows in the first months, for
“they” really are trying to kill “us.” Volunteers sign up in numbers, but ral-
lies ’round the flag, helped by propaganda of the enemy’s atrocities, are
temporary. Conscription becomes necessary. Soldiers continue to obey
the order to fight since they are under discipline and believe that this is
the way the world works. Varying degrees of value commitment among
soldiers—high in religious and communist armies, and among the con-
quistadores, quite high in Roman Republican armies and in World War II,
lower in most wars with professional or conscripted soldiers—is reinforced
by repetitive drilling, harsh discipline, and entrapping battlefields. Yet a se-
cret ballot held the day before battle would probably produce a majority of
soldiers voting against battle, except perhaps in elite regiments. Alterna-
tively, the rulers who chose war could do the actual fighting—alas, these
are utopian solutions.
People believe their rulers’ narratives since they lack alternative
knowledge. Popular street demonstrations in favor of war (or peace) do
occur, but the demonstrators are small proportions of the population. If
war proves unpopular, this is because it is not going well, or because of
opposition to domestic consequences, such as conscription and extra
taxes or debts. Anticipation of this, especially taxes, is one of the main de-
terrents to rulers considering war. War-and-peace factions within ruling
groups do exist; there is also lobbying by special interest groups, and stu-
dents and intellectuals mobilize for causes. That is as popular as war-
and-peace decisions generally get. So the problem shifts away from why
human beings make wars to why rulers do. One inference is clear: the
best antidote to war would be direct participation by citizens in popular
assemblies to decide war or peace. Alas, this is also utopian.

Political Power: The Nature of Rulers

Since rulers make wars, their preferences and personalities matter. Some
rulers focus on stability, the economy, social welfare, or justice and op-
pose the conscription and higher taxes war requires. Others favor war as
profitable or heroic, necessary for grandeur and glory, and willingly raise
taxes and initiate conscription. Some strike warrior poses. Rulers’ sagac-
ity and war record matter. Sequential victories enhance prestige and vas-
sal loyalty and make future wars more likely. Rulers are capable or
incompetent, calm or impulsive, brave or timorous, suspicious or trust-
ing. Contrast three successive Ming emperors—Yongle, the successful
496 Conclusion: Patterns of War

warrior; Xuande, the administrative innovator; and Zhengtong, the in-

competent. Contrast the cruel warrior Henry V with the mentally chal-
lenged Henry VI, or the peace-loving Chamberlain with the bellicose
Churchill, or the cautious, conscientious Obama with the erratic, igno-
rant Trump. Of course, to describe rulers or their policies in terms of just
one or two character traits is grossly oversimplified. Stalin was paranoid
about domestic opposition but naively trusting of Hitler. Trump was
chronically distrustful of others and regarded business and political rela-
tions as battle zones, but he was not a militarist abroad. Yet in Latin
America I attributed four of fifteen wars to reckless presidents initiating
or provoking wars they would probably lose. The chroniclers told “great
men” narratives, exaggerated but containing some truth. Since personal-
ity differences are contingent, Realists dismiss them as “noise” in their
models, but we must not confuse models with explanation.
Monarchs, dictators, and presidents rarely make policy on their own.
Most decisions come after rulers listen to opinions at court or in councils
or assemblies. Yet outcomes depend as much on the ruler’s ability to con-
trol the information flow, generally by appointing like-minded advisers,
or on the balance of domestic political power, as on accurate perception
of external realities. For example, debates over Japanese imperialism in
the early twentieth century were settled by political power in Tokyo
shifting rightward through domestic crises caused by the Great Depres-
sion, repression of the working class, collapse of political parties, and as-
sassinations of prominent opponents. Rulers’ preferences shifted from
international market nudging to informal empire to territorial imperial-
ism. Since domestic issues dominate political debate most of the time,
war-and-peace decisions depend on which faction—conservative or re-
formist, right or left, centralizers or decentralizers, frontiersmen or men
of the core—has acquired influence on domestic issues. Of course, they
were almost all from the dominant class and ethnic groups, and they
were almost all men. For most politicians, foreign policy is peripheral
vision. Bush the Younger came to power primarily on domestic issues,
ignorant of the outside world. He let Vice President Cheney make most
appointments to foreign and defense posts, and Cheney chose hawks.
They and a converted Bush manipulated Congress into wars.
Rulers have launched many wars to shore up their domestic political
power. Others find it impossible to back away from a war going badly,
which would seem to signal weakness. Marxists stress the diversion of
class conflict, but this has been uncommon since war is prone to increase
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 497

rather than reduce class conflict, especially in defeat. It did figure in the
reasoning of monarchs on the brink of World War I, but revolution was
the actual consequence, as skeptics at court had warned beforehand. Re-
pression of the working class, “solving” class conflict, fueled interwar mil-
itarism in Germany and Japan. Diverting intra-elite conflict has been
much more common, launched by rulers beset by rivals or seeking to
counter an impression of weakness—like Taizong or Edward III and
Henry V of England. Such rulers try to factor into their decision making
whether this will work, but it depends principally on whether the war is
successful. But weak as well as strong rulers launch wars.
Fearon suggests one way conflict escalates. A standard tactic is for one
side to strengthen its bargaining power by issuing threats.9 To carry credi-
bility, these need to involve significant costs and be made publicly, per-
haps by withdrawing diplomats, seeking the support of allies, or moving
troops. This may provoke the rival to reciprocate. The protagonists now
find themselves in a downward spiral toward a war they had not initially
intended. They might prefer to back down, but this brings what Fearon
calls “audience costs.” To back down signals weakness and dishonor in the
eyes of the domestic audience. These costs worsen as the crisis escalates,
making it harder to avoid war. Fearon suggests honor results from
modern nationalism. Yet he is too modest. We saw “audience costs” in all
periods, among ancient Chinese dukes, the emperors Taizong and Chong-
zhen, the emperor Claudius, medieval monarchs, leaders plunging into
World War I, General Galtieri, and Saddam Hussein, among others. Rul-
ers face domestic threats from opposition parties, factions at court or in a
single party, military coups, or rival pretenders to the throne. So they try
to convey strength and honor by not backing down. Monarchs may also
wish to prove that they really are the Son of Heaven or anointed by God,
as we saw in China and pre-Columbian America. Putin wants to prove he
really is a new Peter the Great.
Rulers may also fear their generals and deliberately weaken the armed
forces to lower the threat of military coups. So they are less likely to initi-
ate wars, but it may encourage others to attack them. Shah Muhammad II
of the Khwarazmian (Persian) Empire separated his massive army into
smaller detachments stationed in different cities, in fear of his generals. So
Chinggis Khan picked them off one by one and destroyed his empire.
The Roman Republic’s unending wars conversely enhanced the generals’
power, and they eventually overthrew the republic. Subsequent Roman
emperors used praetorian guards for protection from the army, with
498 Conclusion: Patterns of War

mixed results. The Inca and Middle Eastern regimes sought coup-
proofing by reducing the army’s autonomous power. Saddam Hussein
self-destructed this way. Stalin almost self-destructed, purging his senior
officer corps in the late 1930s, thus hamstringing the Red Army. In con-
trast, few African rulers have devised effective coup-proofing. Between
2000 and 2020 seventeen successful military coups occurred in a conti-
nent where militaries are deployed more for domestic than for interna-
tional purposes. In such cases we see a contradiction between military and
political power—each undermining the other. Yet in contrast, stable dem-
ocratic and communist regimes have both retained civilian control of the
military.
Dynastic monarchy has been the most common regime type, with its
own rhythms of war. Unclear rules of succession and polygynous mar-
riages all made wars of succession more likely, as was true among the
Mongols, Chinese, and Inca. The absence of a competent male heir often
led to civil war between claimants, which invited interventions by foreign
rulers. Dynasties rarely lasted more than a hundred years, as Ibn Khal-
dun also noted of Arab kingdoms.10 In succession crises only one claim-
ant could win, and the others usually lost their lives, but hopeful
ambition had bent their perception of the odds. Civil wars lasted for a
quarter of China’s two-thousand-year imperial history. Such wars rarely
occurred in city-state republics like Venice and some elected monarchies,
such as the Aztec, where ruling oligarchies had devised agreed-on proce-
dures to choose the next ruler. Modern republics, constitutional monar-
chies, and one-party states have their own agreed-on rules of succession.
Nonetheless, rulers’ personalities, preferences, reproductive abilities, and
ambition all influence war-and-peace decisions.

The Three Main Motives for War

Three motives for war stand out above the others. Historians often em-
phasize two, “greed and glory,” and political scientists have explained
civil wars in terms of “greed and grievance.” Those launching aggressive
war usually visualize economic benefits and promise them to their sol-
diers and subjects, but acquiring more territories or tribute and subjects
or submissive clients also brings rulers the gratification of greater status
and honor in the geopolitical system, both for themselves and for their
states, the two being seen by them as identical. Glory is the highest
level of status and honor, for it has the advantage, rulers believe, of being
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 499

eternal, whereas profit is only for now. So status, honor, and glory com-
bine in an ideological-emotional package of motives. In a few societies
the populace may share to a limited extent in this—for example, many
Roman citizens, many modern Germans and Japanese during their peri-
ods of military success, and Americans more recently, though now this
package is mixed with nostalgia for a past, more glorious period. But a
third main motive is the intrinsic enjoyment of domination over others,
found especially in conquest and raiding, and particularly among the
great conquerors of history, but often shared by their soldiers, who
abused, looted, and raped enemy populations. We have seen these three
motives—greed, status-honor-glory, and domination—repeatedly en-
twining in my case studies in ways not easy to disentangle.
Economic motives (greed) have obviously been important. Balancing
economic costs and benefits against casualties and the likelihood of vic-
tory is the core of Realism, and rulers—and adventurist bands like the
conquistadores—did try to assess these odds. Yet this involves four sepa-
rate metrics, and there is no way to set lives, the chances of victory, eco-
nomic profit or loss, and longer-term strategic advantages against each
other in any systematic way. They had to make rough assessments.
The cost in lives may have been less of a deterrent to war, as most
rulers did not risk their own lives. In history they began in the center of
battle formations, well-protected but still at some personal risk, as
Crassus, Harold Godwinson, and Richard III all discovered. More accu-
rate archery forced rulers and generals back to command from a vantage
point in the rear, and then firearms forced them even farther back. By
the twentieth century they had become desk killers, sending out younger
men to distant deaths. Few campaigns in any era have been called off be-
cause rulers feared heavy losses. Quite the reverse: they were more likely
to intensify calls for “sacrifice,” which they were not making themselves.
Three recent U.S. presidents ordering wars had been effectively draft
dodgers—Clinton, Bush the Younger, and Trump. In the past many rul-
ers saw their soldiers as “scum,” drawn from the uncivilized lower classes.
Their lives could be casually spent. Modern soldiers have also expressed
fear of being used as cannon fodder. We saw French troops in World
War I demanding their sacrifice be “proportional” to the chances of suc-
cess, whereas in 2021 Afghan troops fled when their sense of proportion-
ality was shattered by sudden American withdrawal. So the risk of death,
the main cost of war, is usually minimized by rulers, making war more
rational to them than to soldiers or civilians.
500 Conclusion: Patterns of War

Yet the financial costs of war often did deter rulers. War requires in-
creased taxes or debts, as well as conscription, which are unpopular and
take resources from the economy. Many rulers were reluctant to squeeze
peasants hard for fear of rebellion or damage to the economy, which
would then reduce the taxes and men available for future war. Easy tar-
gets and short wars were not ruinous, nor were rule-governed wars with
few casualties, but losing or lengthy wars might threaten rulers’ downfall.
The decision was often for peace. A few astute militaristic rulers, how-
ever, devised reforms harnessing military and economic relations to-
gether to yield economic growth that could fuel war—like the legalist
reforms of the Chinese Warring States, sixteenth-century cadastral re-
forms in Japan, seventeenth-century fiscal reforms of England and Hol-
land, and twentieth-century military Keynesianism. These were strategies
making war more economically attractive to rulers with vision and the
political skills to implement reform. Nonetheless, if economic profit was
the sole motive of rulers, there would have been far fewer wars.

The Four Types of Offensive War

Offensive wars must be distinguished from defensive wars and from the
middling category of mutual provocation and escalation. I divided offen-
sive wars into in-and-out raiding; intervention to change or prop up a re-
gime abroad (informal imperialism); war to seize slivers of border
territory; and territorial conquest followed by direct imperial rule.
In raiding, goals appear as mainly material—looting movable wealth,
animals, slaves, and women. Successful raiders, however, also enjoy status
among their followers, and they enjoy domination in itself, exulting in
the fear in their victims’ eyes, especially evident in rape. Raiding was
normal among “barbarian” peoples possessing military resources. In Asia
and Africa their raids continued until the eighteenth century but have
now died out except in failed or very poor states. Looting has been per-
petrated by modern troops, however, notably by Nazi, Japanese, and Red
Army troops in World War II, by Chinese nationalist forces in Vietnam
at the end of that war, and by Iraqi soldiers in 1991 and 2003.
Military intervention aimed at foreign regime support or change was
frequent in the early phases of Roman and European “informal empires”
and in pre-Columbian Latin America. Rule was through local clients. Yet
it has persisted through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
in American military interventions. The goal may be geopolitical, to
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 501

protect an ally, or economic, for tribute, better access to raw materials or

terms of trade, or simply to enjoy wielding dominance over others.
Wars over slivers of border territories have become the most com-
mon wars. Aggression here is not always regarded by international law as
a criminal act because the contending parties often have a case. Since the
collapse of direct empires was followed by the creation of many new or
restored states, border disputes and revisionism have grown. They involve
mainly economic and strategic goals. Yet “revisionism,” a claim to recover
“lost” or “stolen” territories, has added righteousness to them. This sub-
verted the pacific Confucian bias in imperial China, and it was prominent
in the Hundred Years’ War and some Latin American cases. Timur the
Great claimed to be only recovering Chinggis Khan’s realm. German re-
visionism led to World War II, to regain territories lost in the first war.
Russian revisionism today seeks to recover some of the territories lost in
the collapse of the Soviet Union, though this was probably intended as
the conquest of whole countries, territorial empire being the final goal.
Chinese revisionism today seeks full control of Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Tibet, and Xinjiang, and offshore naval expansion—all to restore control
over lands and seas formerly dominated by Chinese imperial dynasties.
Restoring lost territory was deemed a righteous war by Azeris in 2020, but
Armenians maintain a rival revisionism. Israelis and Palestinians find it
impossible to negotiate a sharing of their promised but lost lands. Wher-
ever there are lost territories, revisionism stirs, blending motives of moral
right and economic and strategic interest. This is the dominant danger of
warfare today.
But it is not everywhere. Postcolonial Latin America has seen rela-
tively few border wars, and relatively few interstate wars at all, for three
main reasons. First, states had limited fiscal resources, enough to finance
a brief war, but raising new taxes was difficult and soon debts and politi-
cal discontent would mount. Part of the risk of war is that rulers cannot
predict how long a war will last. Second, settlement was easier in the
ecological heartland of the new states (once indigenous peoples were re-
moved) rather than near borders, which tended to be in mountainous,
jungle, or desert regions where the old Spanish maps were often unclear.
Since settler expansion was rarely around borders, wars there were less
likely. Third, where a newly independent state occupied the same area as
a former Spanish provincial, treasury, or judicial district, this strength-
ened the legal principle of uti possidetis—new states should retain the old
borders. This assisted mediation of border disputes by outsiders.
502 Conclusion: Patterns of War

African countries also inherited colonial borders, which discouraged

border wars except in the Horn of Africa, where the British, French, Ital-
ian, and Ethiopian empires had left their own border conflicts to plague
their successors. In Southeast Asia, most colonies inherited the territories
of former kingdoms, which made postcolonial restoration of sovereignty
easier. The successor states of the Habsburg Empire also inherited its
provincial boundaries and so rarely fought against each other. Nor did
many post-Soviet successor states. The Tajik-Kyrgyz skirmish in April
2021 was an exception, but most post-Soviet wars have been between a
revisionist Russia and other peoples, as in the Caucasus and Ukraine.
Wars of imperial conquest add seizure of territory and direct rule
over peoples. They have almost died out today, the Russian invasion
of Ukraine being the main recent exception. The great conquerors I
examined—Qin Shi Huang, Chinggis Khan, Qianlong, the Japanese
triumvirs, and Napoleon—all took care in preparing their wars, signs of
instrumental rationality. But their goal became conquest and domination
for the status, honor, glory, world transformation, and even immortality
they believed this would bring—value more than instrumental rational-
ity, using Weber’s term.
The conquerors sacrificed countless lives to this vision. They saw
their military conquests less as choice than as an obligation to follow
their destiny or the will of the gods, as probably did other great conquer-
ors like Sargon of Akkad, Thutmose III of Egypt, Tiglath-pileser III,
Cyrus II of Persia, Alexander, Attila, Timur, Asoka, Pachacuti Inca Yupan-
qui, Aztec kings, and many others who were styled “The Great,” “The
Earth-Shaker,” “The World Conqueror,” and the like. They slaughtered
millions and brought benefit to only a few. Most of these conquerors
were highly intelligent, like Chinggis and Timur the Great. Ibn Khaldun,
after several interviews with Timur, commented: “Some attribute to him
knowledge, others attribute to him heresy . . . still others attribute to him
the employment of magic and sorcery, but in all this there is nothing; it is
simply that he is highly intelligent and perspicacious, addicted to debate
and argumentation about what he knows and also about what he does not
know.”11 Yet Timur also said, “The whole expanse of the inhabited part of
the world is not large enough to have two kings.”12 Most great conquer-
ors were intelligent megalomaniacs, leaving triumphal stelae, arches,
and sculptures whose grandiose inscriptions and depictions boast more
of the territories and peoples conquered than of the well-being of the
realm. We can probably add rulers of less well-documented precolonial
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 503

American and African empires, such as Aztec rulers, the Songhai Empire’s
Sonni Ali or Chaka Zulu—and the failed world conqueror, Hitler.
Yet conquest produced what are interchangeably called “empires”
and “civilizations”—Egyptian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Roman, Hellenic, Per-
sian, Turkic, Muslim Arab, Mughal, Mongol, Chinese, Spanish, British,
Aztec, Inca, Maya, American, and so on. These imperial civilizations
all eventually replaced worlds of small peoples, tribes, and city-states,
mainly through aggressive war. But they also developed mission state-
ments that listed bringing order, freedom, civilization, and often the true
faith to the conquered, and these became motives or pretexts for further
wars. We should be cynical about most of these claims, and civilizations
of multiple city-states also existed for long periods before their eventual
conquest by empires—as was true of ancient Sumer, classical Greece, and
Mesoamerica.
Conquerors depended on loyal followers and obedient clients, on
compliant, militarized subjects, and on legitimacy of rule. Qin emperor
Shi Huang also drew on legalist reforms, Chinggis cited earlier Mongol
expansion, Napoleon inherited the levée en masse, Hitler had the Wehr­
macht and the SS. They knew they had to extract material rewards for
their followers and clients, in addition to tribute and taxes for themselves,
but they also knew that victories would cement follower and client loyalty
and their own fame and wealth. Men would follow a leader who had been
successful, but conquerors were in a sense trapped by their own success,
compelled to continue conquests by a mixture of Durkheim’s “malady of
infinite aspiration,” the need to keep on rewarding followers, and fear
that the militarism they had cultivated might produce threatening rivals
should their conquests end. In these pages Mongol and Aztec rulers were
conspicuously trapped by their ambitions. This was the tyranny exerted
by their personal histories.
The great conqueror is now rare—though Putin would like to be one.
Rarity is obsolete, for three reasons. First, the rise of nationalism legiti-
mizes states inhabiting a sanctified world order of states; second is the re-
placing of interstate wars by civil wars; and third is the rise of electoral
democracies with competitive elections and short-term rulers. Rulers in
the twenty-first century have aspired to notions of “greatness” more ele-
vated than base profit, but not amounting to conquest—with the major
exception of Putin. Americans’ sense of national greatness combines pride
in idealized American values and the power of the U.S. military. Support
for both is the undying refrain of politicians, baked into their ideology.
504 Conclusion: Patterns of War

Benevolent American mission statements are backed by enormous mili-

tary budgets, justified in terms less of national defense or material gain
than of “defending American democratic values”—this by the Pentagon,
the biggest authoritarian organization in the world! “Defense” is also
meant to indicate self-defense, even though it is carried through aggres-
sion to the whole world. Not even the Romans had such pretensions—
though they did share the American pretext for war that intervening
abroad was merely defending one’s allies.
So although, overall, wars have not declined through human history,
some types of war have declined, especially those creating great civiliza-
tions. There is now one great global civilization, containing rival impe-
rial cores exploiting very dispersed peripheries. But future wars between
those imperial cores might end all human civilization, and 2022 has
seemed to stoke such fears.

Ideological-Emotional Power
Ideologies and emotions fill in the gaps of human rationality when scien-
tific knowledge and certainty fall short. They enable action in the ab-
sence of full knowledge, important here since war is usually a risky shot
in the dark. Emotions play a major role in descents toward war amid un-
certain environments conducive more to anxiety and feverish emotions
than to calm calculation. Disputes may escalate through minor provoca-
tions, hostile words, saber rattling, a clash of patrols, the sinking of a
ship, maltreatment of citizens abroad, and rumors of atrocity. Hatred,
anxiety, fear, and desire for honor, status, and domination combine into
complex emotional states. Publicizing the other’s escalations and atroci-
ties intensifies hatred, making further escalation likelier. Some rivals are
seen as “evil” or “terrorists.” America is the Great Satan, Iran was a part
of the Axis of Evil. Negotiating with evil is difficult, and for the United
States it is currently illegal. Hatred is countered not by love for the
enemy but by pragmatic appeals for a compromise solution. Emotions
are invoked more for war, pragmatism for peace. Emotions intensify dur-
ing war, making it harder to disengage.
Some political scientists also stress that emotional overconfidence or
unreasonable fear (or both) lead into modern war. Lebow, analyzing
twenty-six twentieth-century wars, says failure of decision making was
mainly due not to imperfect information or commitment problems (as
Realists say), or to material interests (as Marxists and economists say), but
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 505

to sentiments of honor, status, or revenge.13 Weakening rulers seek to de-

fend or recover political status, especially domestically, while dominant
rulers rarely rest satisfied, wanting ever more status. All want to maintain
a sense of honor. Aggression derives from rash overconfidence or an
exaggerated fear of an external threat, both boosted by indignant self-
righteousness overriding contradictory information that might counsel
peace. When both sides exhibit these emotions, damaging mutual brink-
manship follows. Most spectacular was the downward spiral of decisions
leading to World War I, where brinkmanship, reluctance to back down,
maintaining rulers’ status and that of their states, and demonstrating
fidelity to allies combined to make war the path of honor rather than
reason. For Austria-Hungary and Russia, honor was seen as necessary for
the dynasties’ very survival. A monarchy without honor is illegitimate,
said Habsburg and Romanov courtiers in 1914.
Van Evera examined modern cases of provocation by a ruler that
caused others to actually start the fighting. He says great powers have
been overrun by unprovoked aggressors twice, but six times by aggres-
sors provoked by the victim’s “fantasy-driven defensive bellicosity.”
The major threat to states, he says, is “their own tendency to exaggerate
the dangers they face, and to respond with counterproductive bellicos-
ity.” He emphasizes fear.14 White stresses overconfidence, saying that
twentieth-century rulers starting wars underestimated the resistance of
the target or the chances of others intervening to help the target because
of a “lack of realistic empathy with either the victims or their potential
allies.”15 We saw mixtures of fear, overconfidence, and lack of empathy in
earlier warfare too. These modern studies did not include colonial wars
where empathy was even less in evidence.
The bonding effect that societies exert on their members was identi-
fied in Arab armies and societies of his time by Ibn Khaldun as asabiyya,
normative solidarity generating a collective will to pursue further goals.
He argued that this was the fundamental bond of human society and the
basic motive force of history, and it was at its purest in the nomadic Arab
societies of his time. This concept permeates his world history. He fo-
cused on bonding between followers and rulers, strong at the beginning
of a dynasty, but then weakening through successive rulers, as they began
to merge with conquered populations, so losing their original tribal col-
lective strength. Durkheim’s theory of solidarity was more static. He
stressed the normative solidarity of a whole society conferring trust and
confidence in the strength and virtues of one’s own group. In war asabiyya
506 Conclusion: Patterns of War

led to solidarity, commitment, and bravery by soldiers, especially in reli-

gious and communist forces and among long-distance freebooters such as
Vikings or conquistadores.
But solidarity had an external downside, for it involved a lack of em-
pathy with and understanding of the enemy—society as a cage, imprison-
ing the people within its stereotypes of the other. In wars the troops
confidently marched singing into battle, expecting to be home soon, un-
able to imagine enemy troops at that moment doing likewise, with the
same brio. Because rulers deny justice to the enemy’s cause, they under-
estimate its sense of righteousness and the morale of its soldiers. Putin is
the latest example of this. Such rulers view enemy resources opaquely,
guided by external signifiers of strength and intentions, like rumors of
political disunity or discontented generals, lower soldier morale, a sup-
posedly inferior race or religion, or cultural decline or cowardice, or the
accession of a child, a woman, or a supposed weakling (a comedian per-
haps) to power—mixing understandable mistakes with self-delusion.
Overconfidence also results from blurring fact and value. Rational-
choice theory strives to be scientific, keeping fact and value apart. “What
is” governs the world, not “what should be.” We social scientists are all
taught this. Yet human beings do not operate like this, including social
scientists on our days off. We all blur fact and value. In war this most
often appears as the belief that our cause is just, and so we should achieve
victory. The English word “should” has a double meaning—our cause is
just, so victory is morally desirable, but also our victory is probable. Both
Union and Confederate soldiers were convinced in 1860 that they
should win quickly because their cause was just. In World War I, British
troops should be back home by Christmas, German troops before the
autumn leaves fell. Roman senators believed all their wars were just,
blessed by the gods, and so they would always win, adding righteousness
to their aggression. Chinese Confucian and legalist theorists saw this as a
philosophical problem. They mostly concluded that a just and virtuous
ruler would defeat an unjust and despotic one because the people would
offer him more support. Right makes might. Whether this is true is de-
batable, but if rulers believe their cause is just, they tend to think they
should win (in both senses). If only one side feels especially righteous, its
morale may be higher and its battle performance better, as ancient Chi-
nese theorists and Ibn Khaldun argued. But if both sides have that feel-
ing, the result is a more murderous war, like the Thirty Years’ War or
World War II. For the protagonists, wars are moral as well as material
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 507

clashes. Such emotional distortions tend to be universal in human

groups, although not all lead to war.
Rarer are ideologies in the sense of generalized meaning systems
combining grandiose claims to knowledge and values, a clear distinction
between good and evil, and sometimes the goal of imposing these on the
conquered, such as a religion or fascism or democracy. Yet here overcon-
fidence and distortion especially grow. Putin demonized Ukrainians.
American administrations demonized the ayatollahs, Saddam, and Gad-
dafi, and some members wanted to forcibly export democracy there. But
they were very overconfident. They knew military power would bring
victory in the field, but they were deluded about political aftermaths, for
they believed in the global justice of their cause, and in good versus bad
guys. They “should” be welcomed by Iraqis, they “should” achieve order
and democracy. Yet killing the dictator and destroying his regime made
things worse than if he had managed to keep order. A degree of repres-
sion is better for most people than the disorder resulting from a failed in-
tervention.
Religions in historical wars played varied roles. Aztecs and Incas had
clothed war in divine rituals, some of them quite savage. Medieval Chris-
tians often preached peace, but they went on crusades and massacred her-
etics, while many peasant revolts became millenarian. Islam had initially
expanded as a warrior religion, but thereafter it became more tolerant of
religious minorities than was Christianity, though disrupted by the cycli-
cal wars identified by Ibn Khaldun, in which purist Islamic warriors swept
into the decadent cities, only to gradually succumb to city pleasures, lose
their asabiyya, and suffer defeat, usually in the fourth generation of a dy-
nasty, at the hands of the next wave of purists. Most Japanese wars were
secular, yet the feudal period saw some armies of Buddhist monks, and
Buddhism was manipulated to support early twentieth-century Japanese
militarism as well as today’s militarism in Myanmar. Confucians were am-
bivalent about war, whereas Buddhists and Daoists were more pacific, yet
their popular rebellions were sometimes fired by religious millenarianism.
Overall, however, most ideological warfare against an “evil” enemy
has been modern, contradicting Weber’s assertion of the increasing ratio-
nalization of modern society. I identified three waves of ideological war-
fare that began in Europe: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of
religion; French revolutionary wars leading to global nineteenth- and
twentieth-century wars of national liberation; and twentieth-century
global wars between communist, fascist, and liberal capitalist regimes.
508 Conclusion: Patterns of War

Some suggest a current fourth Islamic wave, but though jihadists are
strongly ideological, most recent wars between Muslims have not been,
and they have also involved Western imperialism, as we saw in chapter
14. Racial ideologies were also key to modern European and Japanese
colonial wars, dooming their empires to a short life, since they prevented
the assimilation of natives into the imperial identity, unlike peoples con-
quered by the ancient Romans and Chinese.

Symmetric and Asymmetric Wars

Three typical power balances affect the chances of success in war. The
first is where one party is so superior in power resources that its victory
and consequent gains seem certain. It may be rational for sharks to attack
and swallow minnows or weakening big fishes. U.S. secretary of state John
Hay rejoiced in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt in July 1898 of victory
over the Spanish Empire and its wooden ships: “It has been a splendid lit-
tle war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intel-
ligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.” The
second and third types are more puzzling. Why do minnows go to war
against sharks, rather than submit? And why do evenly matched powers
launch wars against each other, given probable mutual devastation?
I consider first the shark’s reasoning. Gross military inequality has been
common in wars of imperial conquest, usually the result of economic and
political inequality. In ancient China and medieval western Europe and
Japan, as in pre-Columbian America, rulers mobilizing more efficient states
in more fertile lands could achieve low-cost military victories against less
well-developed peoples on the periphery, which gave them an incentive to
make aggressive war. Conquered lands were given to military veterans or
settlers, and natives might be enslaved or enserfed. In Europe the core
powers developed more effective states and more science-based capitalist
economies, thereby conferring enough military superiority to conquer most
of the world. Gross power inequalities conferred by uneven economic
development help explain why some regions and periods of history saw
more wars of imperial conquest than others.
That war is rational for sharks faced with minnows is morally deplor-
able and is in principle criminal under UN norms, though prosecutions
have not occurred since Nuremberg. Yet the sharks need not conform to
Realist theory by carefully calculating the odds. Their obvious superiority
makes victory likely. Nor did Realist “anarchy” figure where one party
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 509

was much stronger than the other, in many wars seeking regime change
as well as in wars of imperial conquest, from Rome to China to Europe—
and probably to other expanding civilizations, too. Stronger rulers have
rarely felt insecure, except against domestic opponents.
History, however, has not always favored the sharks. “Barbarians,”
with their lesser economic and political development, had cavalry supe-
rior in flattish terrains to the bigger infantry-centered forces of agrarian
states. Here, uneven modes of economic and military power made war
more likely. Marxists stress the role of uneven economic development in
history. I extend unevenness to military development. This also set off a
dialectical development of warfare. Swift in-and-out raiding by war bands
brought easy pickings, but a sequence of raids brought forth larger
punitive retaliation from the agrarian state. In response, a few barbarian
rulers developed their loose tribal confederacy into a more cohesive
state and added infantry and siege warfare, which enabled them to fight
back and even conquer. Both sides borrowed each other’s military tech-
niques and fought combined arms warfare, conquered territories, and
even achieved a partial merging of the two peoples, a dialectical process.
For the few triumphant rulers and their rewarded followers, this was
highly rational, but it was not for the masses. Did the scale of Emperor
Qianlong’s warfare—mobilizing 600,000 soldiers and laborers while com-
mitting genocide against the Zunghars—benefit the peoples of China? I
doubt it, even though some revisionist historians have bizarrely hailed his
reign an Age of Enlightenment because of his artistic dabbling.
Today, we see a great white shark thrashing helplessly amid the shal-
lows. The United States has the world’s most powerful economy and mil-
itary, far superior to those of its recent enemies. Yet battlefield victories
have not led to desired results, for three reasons. First, the United States
cannot (and does not want to) directly rule foreign territories, nor can it
find reliable local clients through whom it can rule indirectly, except per-
haps in Latin America, where conservative elites share its goals. The na-
tionalist and religious ideologies of modernity prevent the recruitment of
many local clients, as achieved by earlier empires. Where clients are re-
cruited, this may exacerbate local ethnic or religious divisions—as in Af-
ghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Military interventions have brought disorder,
and order is the primary political goal of most peoples, on which any de-
mocracy would have to be grounded. Second, weapons of the weak (the
guerilla cell, the Kalashnikov, the suicide bomber, and so on) can sustain
asymmetric warfare against a technologically superior enemy. Third,
510 Conclusion: Patterns of War

most Americans are only armchair warriors, unwilling to serve or to see

wars drag on if they cause many American casualties. The financial cost is
no obstacle, but the human cost is. This reflects the fact that American
society (despite its proliferation of guns) is not at its core militaristic. But
these three weaknesses ensure that American wars are not simply a series
of understandable mistakes. They predictably fail, and so are irrational in
terms of ends.
The second type of case comes when, for minnows, suing for peace
and submitting might seem more rational than fighting. Rulers who sub-
mit can usually keep their domains if they swear allegiance to the more
powerful or shift toward compliance with its policies. Some did take this
route to survival, and conquerors often gave them the alternative of sub-
mission or possible death. The Inca specialized in this. Saddam Hussein
could have survived this way, as have other dictators who cozy up to the
United States. Yet often minnows choose to fight. They may try to bal-
ance the odds by counting on allies. Yet as Realists note, allies’ words
may not translate into deeds, or they may be bribed into switching sides
(and the great conquerors were usually good at this diplomatic strategy).
Sometimes the sharks even feast together on the minnows lying between
them. Poland was partitioned three times by the surrounding great pow-
ers. Balancing rarely works in the long term unless strong normative
trust is shared by the allies.
The other two reasons involve emotions and constraints. First, min-
nows are often overoptimistic because of the tyranny of history. Having
survived a sequence of wars against lesser foes, they are unprepared for a
superior one, and they are “caged” within the constraints of their own soci-
ety, which limits accurate perception of the enemy and enables ideologies
and emotions to distort vision. When the war is one of self-defense, they
also believe their cause is just, meaning that they “should” both morally
and probably win. This has been evident among Ukrainians. Native people
confronting the first waves of European imperialists were often unaware
that behind these small forces would come wave after wave of soldiers and
settlers. The natives may have already committed a few atrocities against
white people, which enraged the imperialists. Yet they were doomed any-
way. In modern times only the Japanese and then the Chinese found the
space and time to build up effective resistance to foreign imperialists.
Second, minnow rulers feel compelled to fight to maintain honor
and status. Feudal rulers often went down fighting with honor. They felt
they had no choice. Saddam self-destructed for status and honor. He did
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 511

not allow himself to be seen complying with U.S. demands on chemical

weapons (when he really was) because defiance was his badge of honor.
That was his contribution to his doom. Tiny states have survived on all
continents, but through submission, not battle (unless in a region of tiny
states, like Central America, where several attempts at regional hege-
mony failed). A weaker ruler choosing resistance in the sights of a strong
one was likely to die, and his kingdom, too.
The proliferation of vanishing kingdoms casts a shadow over defen-
sive Realism’s belief that survival is states’ major goal, for overwhelm-
ingly they have failed to survive. This was as true in pre-Columbian
America as anywhere, though it was not true of postcolonial Latin Amer-
ica, where balancing against would-be hegemons was successful in six
wars (and failed in none), aided by local terrain and colonial border lega-
cies. After the 1830s all its states survived. In contrast, only one of over
seventy polities in post-Zhou China survived. Sixteenth-century Japan
saw over two hundred polities reduced to just one. The more than three
hundred states of Europe were whittled down to thirty by the twentieth
century, a process lasting many centuries in the West but coming in a
nineteenth-century rush in central Europe. An unknown but large num-
ber of states and tribes disappeared from Italy and around the Mediterra-
nean as Rome came to dominate.
Human “civilizations” have expanded by eliminating most of the
world’s polities. They did this in three main ways: defeat in war; submitting
to the threat of force; and entering a union through marriage or inheri-
tance contracts. In three admittedly smallish studies, of sixteenth-century
Japan, medieval and modern Europe, and the world since 1816, most van-
ishing states died in battle, say John Bender, Norman Davies, and Tanisha
Fazal.16 This was less so of pre-Columbian America, where threats usually
sufficed for the Inca, and where the Aztecs conjoined war and intermar-
riage in their strategies. But vanishing no longer occurs. Iraq survived
when Saddam was killed, for the survival of states in the post-1945 world is
almost guaranteed by international institutions and nationalist sentiments.
Rulers are defeated and killed, but the countries survive. Conquest fol-
lowed by direct imperial rule may be finished, with the possible exception
of Ukraine.
The third type of odds is symmetric warfare between near equals,
like Greek city-states, the Chinese Warring States, Han Chinese dynas-
ties struggling against ex-barbarian empires, wars among the major Japa-
nese daimyo, and wars between the major powers of modern Europe. A
512 Conclusion: Patterns of War

strategic premodern reason tempted rulers into attacking a near equal,

for it gave the advantage of occupying enemy soil so that the attacker’s
troops could live off the land, wasting enemy resources while not wasting
their own. But a defender who avoided defeat yet failed to throw back
the invader would retreat, laying waste to his own domains in the path
of the invader, to deprive him of the ability to live off the land. The more
the retreat, the longer became the supply lines of the attacker. The initial
advantage was exhausted and the armies became bogged down in stale-
mate, as we repeatedly saw. The extreme was the ability of Russian rulers
to use their landmass to lure their enemy on to defeat.
Great powers fighting each other seem irrational because of the scale
of destruction and death. Yet two ways to lessen the pain existed. The
first was to develop rules of wars that kept the death rate in battle low for
the dominant classes. This was extreme in Aztec “flower wars,” but com-
mon in China during the Spring and Autumn period, and in Europe in
the Middle Ages, and then again in the century following the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648. War was not absent in these periods, but it was mu-
tually regulated, which reveals a rational calculation of ends. War might
not be so costly—for rulers and the upper classes. But that did not last.
The second way to lower pain was through wars of deflection. In an-
cient China and in Europe, wars between the major core powers could be
partially deflected on to less powerful peoples on the periphery or on to
the lesser allies of the other. Here the major powers were not occupying
the entire space of geopolitics. Empires were built on expansion into the
peripheries, much as Rome expanded around the Mediterranean, or Zhou
rulers of ancient Chinese states expanded among the “people of the field,”
or Britain and France fought each other repeatedly across the world in the
eighteenth century, when their peace treaties typically conferred territorial
gains on both of them at the expense of colonized natives. This developed
into a division of the spoils in the “Scramble for Africa” and in late impe-
rial China, where the major foreign powers contributed military units to a
joint force repressing Chinese resistance—a WEPO perhaps (West Pacific
Organization), long before NATO. Wars of deflection cost less and
brought territory, treasure, and imperial status. Major powers in Asia and
Europe could expand cheaply across their peripheries, and Europeans then
did so across the globe. The Cold War deflected superpower conflict onto
lesser clients as the United States and the Soviets fought each other only
indirectly, in proxy wars using client states and movements, a rational
strategy for the superpowers, though not usually for their clients.
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 513

Realist theory has been based on data on wars since 1816, mainly in
Europe, which had a particular geopolitics: its states occupied the whole
space first of Europe and then of the world. There were soon very few
small kingdoms to vanish, just major states and their colonies and client
states. And because rulers were caged inside their domains, ignorant of
their rivals’ intentions and capacities, this might appear to them as a Re-
alist security dilemma amid geopolitical anarchy. There have been other
cases of rival rulers filling up the whole space of a geopolitical system,
but there have been periods and places where this was not so, where ex-
pansion and deflection were possible, and so war was not simply grinding
frontal confrontations between major powers. Yet Roman and European
expansion, and Chinese and Japanese unification, culminated in life-and-
death struggle between sharks. Occupying the whole space of the re-
gional geopolitical configuration, and unable to regulate or deflect war,
they fought predictably costly frontal battles against each other. This is
the key puzzle of the third type of case. Why did they continue fighting
each other?
Again the preservation of status and honor was important, but war-
ring was amplified by ideological-emotional sentiments and by contexts
invoking anxiety, fear, and hatred of “evil” rivals, as in those European-
initiated waves of ideological warfare. Here the aggressor wished to
transform the society of those it attacked, while the latter wished to pro-
tect their way of life. The most extreme example of this was Soviet resis-
tance to Nazi Germany, for death or slavery awaited Jews, communists,
and even all Slavs if the Nazis won in the east. For these groups, self-
defense involved a truly desperate survival rationality.
But more frequently the aggression of sharks against equals resulted
from path dependence—rulers faced with rivals were tempted to follow
the paths that had brought them past success. Victories begat confidence,
which made war a more likely outcome of a dispute. Cumulative swal-
lowing meant that Rome, the last few Chinese Warring States, the last
few Japanese daimyo, and the surviving major rulers in early modern Eu-
rope had grown accustomed to victory. Most finally got their comeup-
pance, but the sequence of victories had baked in the culture and
institutions of militarism. Earlier success also strengthened martial vir-
tues, the praising of heroes over traders; rulers perceived war, not trade,
as the way to wealth, career success, social status, honor, and glory. In
this way military power was elevated over other sources of power. The
Roman Republic was the extreme case of baking in, but although Roman
514 Conclusion: Patterns of War

militarism was unusually long-lived, war was also baked in to the War-
ring States of ancient China, the ex-barbarian dynasties ruling imperial
China, the Aztec and Inca dynasties, the early rulers of Arab dynasties,
sixteenth-century daimyo lords in Japan, medieval European princes,
Prussia-Germany and Japan in modern times, and today Putin’s Russia.
Baking in also helps define friend and foe, as it does in current
American foreign policy, which defines Iran as the enemy, the Saudis as
friends, and Israel as a truly intimate friend, all for reasons—handed
down from the past and today possessing less relevance—that amplify
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an incipient civil war between Shi’a and
Sunni Muslims. This is geopolitical immobility, not anarchy, history’s
tyranny; it saves rulers beholden to entrenched pressure groups the trou-
ble of figuring out where today’s interests lie. Other examples were the
Song dynasty’s inability to figure out changing power relations among
ex-barbarian polities, Yuan dynasty wars continuing in hostile ecologies,
and Napoleonic and Hitlerian overreaching.
Conversely, repeated war defeats or costly draws lower ambition,
eventually undermining militarism—a delayed-reaction Realism, as in
imperial Rome after repeated inconclusive wars with the Parthians and
northern barbarians. Since mutual exhaustion was common in Latin
American wars, rulers were not repeat offenders. They came to prefer
saber rattling followed by mediation. Japan’s terrible civil wars in the six-
teenth century produced widespread yearning for peace, which aided
Tokugawa hegemony. More common was a shorter-term effect. Four
times in Western Europe its worst wars—the Thirty Years’ War, Napole-
onic Wars, World War I, and World War II—produced a postwar period
of greater diplomatic activity. In the first three this was, alas, only tempo-
rary. Will the fourth period last longer? China under some Han and Song
dynasty rulers reacted to defeat with conciliatory diplomacy, as did Amer-
ican politicians for a decade after defeat in Vietnam. It is unclear whether
the recent spree of unsuccessful wars will result in long-term caution by
American rulers since they have discovered risk transfer militarism, the
contemporary form of wars of deflection, deflecting the risk of death
away from one’s own troops onto enemy soldiers, civilians in war zones,
and hired contractors and mercenaries, all dying far from the public gaze.
We can perceive an outline of the development of warfare through
the ages. Each region in which states and class divisions emerged saw
intermittent warfare by those states against the clan, tribal, and stateless
groups on their peripheries, then absorbing them. When possessing
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 515

military advantages, peripheral groups could hit back, but this also
involved their forming their own states. As each region was filled with
states, their warfare turned more against each other, although incentives
for conquering further peripheral peoples continued. The militaristic in-
stitutions and culture that had grown up on profitable little wars were
then turned on bigger wars against each other. This warfare was at best
zero-sum: for some to gain, others must lose, but since the losers disap-
peared, so did their history. What is recorded for our consumption is the
success of imperial civilizations, whether these consisted of a single state
or several competitors. But in present-day societies the whole world is
filled up with states whose legitimacy is supported by international insti-
tutions. War between the major states can no longer be rational—al-
though there is no guarantee that rulers will be rational. Contemporary
battlefields have been largely transferred to the spaces inside weak states.
So wars are historical sequences in which the experience of past genera-
tions lies heavily on the brains of the living, sometimes (as Marx said) as
nightmare, but more often as exciting fantasy.

Conclusion
I began with the question why rulers choose war to achieve ends rather
than relying on softer sources of power—economic exchange, coopera-
tive ideologies, or geopolitical diplomacy. Rulers do exercise some free-
dom of choice. But choice is not quite the right word, since decisions also
embody social and historical constraints of which the actors are not
wholly aware, constituting part of their taken-for-granted reality. Sociol-
ogy sees humans as creating social structures, which then become institu-
tionalized, constraining subsequent action. Decisions are influenced by
constraints deriving from overconfidence, social caging, varied emotions,
intolerant ideologies, domestic politics, militarism baked in to institutions
and cultures, and the tyranny of history. There are thus different levels of
war causes—motives, emotions, ideologies, as well as ecological, geopolit-
ical, and historical contexts, and erratic processes of escalation. Their var-
ied interactions through time and space may defeat any simple theory of
causes, as Raymond Aron noted. In response, some Realists have broad-
ened rational choice to include all these factors, but their different met-
rics make it difficult to assign them relative weights, and if all these are
regarded as rational, the theory becomes circular and we cannot identify
irrationality. I did, however, simplify the motives contributing to causes
516 Conclusion: Patterns of War

into the main three: greed, status-honor-glory, and the enjoyment of

domination.
On rationality, rulers’ decisions over whether to make war or peace
were sometimes careful, calculating pros and cons, but miscalculation oc-
curred too often to support a rational-choice model, though there was
also a delayed-reaction rationality, whereby rulers realize they have bit-
ten off more than they can chew. But in an age of nuclear weapons and
climate change, delayed-reaction Realism would be too belated for
human survival. Combined economic and military power—seizing mate-
rial resources through war—is the heart of Realist and Marxist theory.
This is sometimes rational for the winners, although it is overwhelm-
ingly zero-sum, where for some to benefit, others must suffer. But the
perennial intervention of emotions and ideological and political motives
weakens the rationality of both means and ends.
The offensive wars that go according to plan are mostly those in
which sharks attack minnows, or in which wars among the sharks are de-
flected onto the minnows. Their military superiority means they do not
need much calculation of odds, for they are likely to reap the benefits of
victory. And since the winners write history, and the losers vanish, victory
in war is seen as commoner, more profitable, more rational, and more
glorious than it really has been. But war does not often pay, for all sides
lose where war involves material costs greater than its spoils can justify,
where there is no clear winner, or where war does not resolve the dispute
in question. These probably constitute the majority of wars. Raiding
might pay off if it does not become too repetitive, in which case retribu-
tion comes. Regime change or support might be done cheaply, but bene-
fiting only one party, as in Latin America, or expensively, with war and
without benefit, as in recent American ventures. Some wars over slivers
of territory have brought benefit for the winners where valuable eco-
nomic or strategic resources were obtained, but these wars are also in-
tensified by emotional revisionism. Imperial wars of conquest benefited
victorious rulers and attendant merchants, bankers, settlers, clerics, and
officials of empire—but not usually the colonizer’s people as a whole, and
certainly not the exploited, enslaved, or exterminated natives of the colo-
nies. Wars in self-defense are generally considered as both rational and
legitimate, and some are both. But in many, submission would be more
rational. The benefits of war are rarely shared widely.
War is the one instance where losing one’s temper may cause the
death of thousands. War pays us back more swiftly for mistakes than any
 Conclusion: Patterns of War 517

other human activity. Humans are not calculating machines—more’s the

pity, since peace is more rational than war. If the social world did con-
form to rational theory, if rulers did carefully calculate the costs and ben-
efits of war, trying hard to set emotions and ideologies aside and
ignoring domestic political pressures, they would see that most wars are
too risky and inferior to economic exchange, the sharing of norms and
values, and diplomacy as ways of securing desired goals. Realism is fine as
a normative theory, showing rulers how they should act for maximum
benefit, but it is not a description of reality, for they do not act in this
way. So we actually need more Realism, for this would bring more bene-
fit through peace!
War is the least rational of human projects, but humans are only errati-
cally rational creatures, as we know from our everyday lives, and from my
examples of business start-ups and gambling. Rulers are asked in matters of
war and peace to make decisions with momentous consequences, though
they are armed only with the sketchy information, the ideologies, and the
emotions of their imprisonment within the blinkers of their societies amid
anxiety-producing, unfolding environmental and geopolitical constraints
and the tyranny of history. The task of surmounting this is often beyond
rulers, as it might be beyond us, too. Human beings are not genetically
predisposed to make war, but our human nature does matter, if indirectly.
Its tripartite character, part rational, part emotional, part ideological, when
set inside the institutional and cultural constraints of societies, makes war
an intermittent outcome. Human nature does matter, and that is why when
wars are fought, they are mostly fought for no good reason.
Han Fei remarked in the third century bce: “No benefit is more con-
stant than simplicity; no happiness more constant than peace.” It is bet-
ter and simpler to choose peace, which is more rational, less lethal,
simpler, and less risky, tomorrow being more or less like today.
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 Notes

Chapter One. Military Power and War

1. Mann, 2003.
2. Nietzsche, 1923: 43.
3. Ratchnevsky, 1992: 153.
4. Aron, 1973: 65–69.
5. Weber, 1978: 24–26, 399–400.
6. Sun Tzu, 1993: 3.2.
7. Clausewitz, 1976: 75.
8. Ibid.: 101.
9. Goertz et al., 2016: 27.

Chapter Two. Is War Universal?

1. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 346.
2. Lahr et al., 2016.
3. Meyer, 2018.
4. López-Montalvo, 2018.
5. Dolfini et al., 2018.
6. Ferguson, 2003; Kelly, 2000; Nakao et al., 2016.
7. Malešević, 2017: 73–83.
8. Eckhardt, 1992: 24.
9. Keeley, 1996.
10. Ferguson, 1997, 2013a, and 2013b.
11. Gat, 2006, 2017.
12. Ferguson, 1995.
13. Gat, 2017: 27.
14. Kimber, 1990: 163.
15. Warner, 1958: 158.

519
520 Notes to Pages 18–34

16. Walker et al., 2011: table 2; Fry, 2007, 2013.

17. Ember and Ember, 1997.
18. Santos-Granero, 2010.
19. Fry and Söderberg, 2013.
20. Dyer, 1985: 8–9.
21. Mann, 1986: chap. 2.
22. Malešević, 2010: 90–92.
23. Coker, 2014: 202.
24. Otterbein, 2004.
25. Scott, 2017: 7; emphasis in original.
26. Graeber and Wengrow, 2021.
27. Malešević, 2022: chap. 1.
28. De Waal, 2006: 148; cf. MacMillan, 2020: 13–14; Malešević, 2022: 19–21.
29. Coker, 2021.
30. Gat, 2017: 37; 2006.
31. Pinker, 2011.
32. Collins, 2008.
33. Ibid.: 27.
34. Ibid.: 28–29.
35. Malešević, 2017.
36. Parkin, 1987.
37. Ibn Khaldun, 1958.
38. Gleditsch, 2004.
39. Wesseling, 1989: 8–11; 2005.
40. Luard, 1986; Levy, 1983.
41. Luard, 1986: 24, 35, 45.
42. Lemke, 2002: 167–71, 181; Centeno, 2002: 38–43.
43. Malešević, 2010: 95.
44. Webster, 2000.
45. Laffineur, 1999.
46. Graeber and Wengrow, 2021: 434–39.
47. Hsu, 1965: 56, 64.
48. Coker, 2014, 2021.

Chapter Three. Theories of the Causes of War

1. Clausewitz, 1976: 77.
2. Gilbert, 1947: 266.
3. More, 1952: 201.
4. Levy, 1988: 666–70; Blainey, 1971.
5. Mann, 2005.
6. Levy, 1988: 662.
7. Robinson, 2001.
8. Crawford, 2007.
 Notes to Pages 34–48 521

9. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, 2012; Reiter and Stam, 2002.

10. Downes, 2009.
11. Desch, 2002.
12. Ibid.: 44.
13. O’Brien and Prados de la Escosura, 1998.
14. Mack, 1975; Arreguín-Toft, 2005.
15. See Sanderson, 1999: 34–49; Turner and Maryanski, 2008: 170–74. For
archaeological objection, see Weisdorf, 2005.
16. Blanton et al., 1993; Hayden, 2001: 251–54.
17. Halsall, 2007; Heather, 2010.
18. Pedersen, 2014.
19. Fearon and Laitin, 2003.
20. Ibid.
21. Jervis, 1978.
22. Wendt, 1999.
23. Waltz, 1979: 92, 118.
24. Mearsheimer, 2001: 31.
25. Bueno de Mesquita, 1981.
26. Howard, 1983: 14–15, 22; emphasis added.
27. Fearon 1995: 380.
28. Cf. Jackson and Morelli, 2011.
29. MacMillan, 2020: 24.
30. Mearsheimer, 2009: 246.
31. Lebow, 1981.
32. Ibid.: 147.
33. Waltz, 1979: 138; Wendt, 1999: 279.
34. Levy, 2011.
35. Van Evera, 1999: 256.
36. Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, 1988.
37. Levy, 2011: 25–26.
38. Kant, 1891: 47.
39. Van Evera, 1999.
40. Sherman, 1879.
41. Clausewitz, 1976: 86, 101.
42. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 354.
43. Kant, 1891.
44. Bull, 2002.
45. Katzenstein, 1996: 4–6.
46. See Malešević’s critique, 2010: 64–70.
47. Lebow, 2010.
48. Van Evera, 1999: 16–34.
49. Blainey, 1973: 112–15.
50. Ibid.: 47–54, 159, 122.
51. Wright, 1957: 267.
522 Notes to Pages 49–62

52. Collins, 2008.

53. Owen, 2010.
54. Black, 1998: 22.
55. Cooney, 1997.
56. Lebow, 2010: 74.

Chapter Four. The Roman Republic

1. Harris, 1979: 10.
2. Sallust, 1992: 4.67.16.
3. Tacitus, 2010: chap. 30.
4. Harrer, 1918.
5. Livy, 1.32.5.
6. Ager, 2009; Harris, 1979: 166–75; Rosenstein, 2007: 338; Erskine, 2010:
38–39.
7. Hoyos, 2019a: 160–63.
8. Harrer, 1918.
9. Quoted by Eckstein, 2006: 308.
10. Thucydides, 1972: chapter 17.5.
11. Eckstein, 2006.
12. Terrenato, 2019.
13. Ibid.: 153.
14. Ibid.: xv.
15. Ibid.: 192.
16. Ibid.: 185.
17. Ibid.: 248.
18. Scheidel, 2009: 59–60.
19. Terrenato, 2019: 254
20. Raaflaub, 1991: 570.
21. Harris, 1979: 178–82; Beard, 2015: 163.
22. Eckstein, 2006: 47, 53, 215–16.
23. Alonso, 2007.
24. Harris, 1979, 2016.
25. Hoyos, 2019b; Gruen, 1986.
26. Gruen, 1986: 730.
27. Ibid.: 397–98.
28. Ibid.: 730.
29. Podany, 2010.
30. Ager, 2009.
31. Ibid.: 24.
32. Rosenstein, 2012: 217–18.
33. Oakley, 1993.
34. Polybius, 1889: 36.4.
35. Barton, 2007: 250–52.
 Notes to Pages 62–75 523

36. Mattern, 1999: 194.

37. Rich, 2008.
38. See, for example, Harris, 1979; Hoyos, 2019a.
39. Scheidel, 2009: 74.
40. Tan, 2017.
41. Mattern, 1999: 65–79.
42. Rich, 2004: 58–59; Morley, 2010: 27.
43. Gruen, 2004.
44. MacMullen, 2000.
45. Kay, 2014.
46. Beard and Crawford, 1985: 76–77.
47. Ward-Perkins, 2005.
48. Rosenstein, 2012: chap. 6.
49. Harris, 1979: 34–35.
50. Suetonius, 1913: 77.
51. Morley, 2010: 25–29, 33; Rich, 2004; Rosenstein, 2007.
52. Tacitus, 1996: book 15.53.
53. Mattern, 1999.
54. Gruen, 1986: 288–315.
55. Ibid.: 418.
56. Scheidel, 2019: 80.
57. Sallust, 1899: chap. 4.
58. Hoyos, 2019a: 38.
59. Harrer, 1918: 35.
60. Gruen, 2004; Mattern 1999: chap. 4.
61. Taylor, 2015, 2017.
62. Rich, 2004.
63. Mattern, 1999: chap. 4.
64. Scheidel, 2019: 67.
65. Clark, 2014: chaps. 2–5.
66. Taylor, 2015: 18–19.
67. Rosenstein, 2007: 226–37; Beard, 2015: 163–65; Harris, 2016: chap. 2;
Scheidel, 2019: 64–69.
68. Eckstein, 2006: 254–57.
69. Terrenato, 2019: 112–18; Beard, 2015: 154–56; Eckstein, 2006: 126–27.
70. Morley, 2010: 26; Beard and Crawford, 1985: 74.
71. Erskine, 2010: 12–15; Rosenstein, 2007; Mattern, 1999: 115.
72. MacMullen, 2000.
73. Pilkington, 2019; Miles, 2010; Hoyos, 2015.
74. Harris, 2006.
75. Hoyos, 2019b: chap. 4; Terrenato, 2019: 86–92.
76. Pilkington, 2019.
77. Whittaker, 1978: 71; Miles, 2010: 76.
78. Miles, 2010: 43, 76, 95, 367.
524 Notes to Pages 75–94

79. Harris, 2006: 150–90.

80. Hoyos, 2019b: 187–91.
81. Whittaker, 1978.
82. Palmer, 1997.
83. Polybius, 1889: 1:10, 11.
84. Pilkington, 2019: 170.
85. Polybius, 1889: 1:13.10–13.
86. Ibid.: 1:63; emphasis in original.
87. Hoyos, 2015: 76–77.
88. Whittaker, 1978: 89–90; Hoyos, 2019b: 179–85.
89. Rosenstein, 2012: 126; Harris, 1979: 201–5.
90. Rosenstein, 2012: 127–75.
91. Livy, 1853: 22.58.
92. Ibid.: 22.51.
93. Taylor, 2015: 38; Hoyos, 2015: 132–90.
94. Rosenstein, 2007: 238, 248.
95. Erskine, 2010: 44.
96. Hoyos, 2015: 270–76.
97. Rosenstein, 2012: 233.
98. Morley, 2010: 14.
99. Hoyos, 2019b: 66–67, 77, 81.
100. Plutarch, 1960: 15.5.
101. Beard and Crawford, 1985: 74, 85.
102. Hoyos, 2019b: chaps. 5, 6.
103. De Souza, 2008; Brunt, 2004.
104. Lee, 2008.
105. Kulikowski, 2019.
106. Scheidel, 2019: 69.

Chapter Five. Ancient China

1. Hsu, 1965: 56, 64; Hui, 2005: 150–55; Li, 2013: 182, 186–87.
2. Zhao, 2015.
3. Lewis, 1990: 33–35; Hsu, 1999: 566.
4. Lewis, 1990: 39; Zhao, 2015: 126.
5. Hsu, 1999: 557.
6. Walker, 1954: 56–58.
7. Hsu, 1999: 569.
8. Hui, 2005: 54–64.
9. Li, 2013: 163–64; di Cosmo, 2002a: 120–23.
10. According to Hui, 2005: 152, 156.
11. Elvin, 2004: 96–98.
12. Gumplowicz, 1899.
 Notes to Pages 94–111 525

13. Di Cosmo, 2002a: chap. 3; Falkenhausen, 1999: 453, 584–89; Li, 2013: 178–
80.
14. Sun Tzu, 1993: 7.20.
15. Hsu, 1965.
16. Lewis, 1999: 603; Hsu, 1965: 8–11.
17. Andrade, 2016: chap. 11.
18. Graff, 2002: 23; Sun Bin, 2003: 31–37.
19. Lewis, 1990: chap. 2; Rosenstein, 2009: 25–27; Li, 2013.
20. Hsu, 1965: 62–65; Hui, 2005: 54–64.
21. Hsu, 1965: 58–62, 68, 77, 89; Hsu, 1999: 554; Kiser and Cai, 2003.
22. Li, 2013: chap. 10.
23. Yates, 2008: 46–49.
24. Pines, 2012.
25. Storry, 1982: 60.
26. Gittings, 2012; Sun Bin, 2003: 95; De Bary and Bloom, 1999: 179.
27. Pines, 2018.
28. Sun Bin, 2003: 110, 112.
29. Quoted in Paul, 2004: 73.
30. Sun Tzu, 1993: 9.25.
31. Turchin et al., 2021.
32. Di Cosmo, 2002a: 155–59.
33. Turchin et al., 2021.
34. Hsu, 1999: 553–62; Lewis, 1999: 593–97; Falkenhausen, 1999: 525–26.
35. Hsu, 1999: 568.
36. Lewis, 1999: 619–20; cf. Lewis, 1990: chaps. 1 and 2, pp. 172–73.
37. Kiser and Cai, 2003; Zhao, 2015; Li, 2013: 223.
38. Sun Tzu, 1993: 113.
39. Hui, 2005: 78.
40. Zhao, 2015.
41. Lewis, 2007: 17.
42. Ibid.: 37.
43. Hui, 2005: 68, 73–79.
44. Hsu, 1965: 91, 107–16; Lewis, 1990: 48–49, 54; 2007: 30–35; Zhao, 2015;
Li, 2013: 234–40.
45. Lewis, 2007: 47–52.

Chapter Six. Imperial China

1. Andrade, 2016: 312–15.
2. Dabringhaus, 2011; Li, 2013: chap. 12, esp. 284; de Crespigny, 2016: 321–
22.
3. Zhao, 2015: 274–79.
4. Ibid.: 282, 15.
5. De Crespigny, 2016: 508.
526 Notes to Pages 111–125

6. Wang, 2013a.
7. Paul, 2003.
8. Fairbank, 1974.
9. Wang, 2011.
10. Ibid.: 32.
11. Wang, 2013a.
12. De Crespigny, 2016: 121–26, 164; cf. Loewe, 1974.
13. Wang, 2013a: 239–44.
14. Johnston, 1995.
15. Lorge, 2014.
16. Ibid.: 2.
17. Skaff, 2009: 171.
18. Kang, 2010: 82–106.
19. Zhang, 2015: 12–15.
20. Kang, 2010: 89–93, 105.
21. Graff, 2002.
22. Swope, 2009; Lorge, 2005: 131–39.
23. Lee, 2017: 84, 141.
24. Kang et al., 2018.
25. Wang, 2011: 152–56.
26. Phillips, 2011: 151–56.
27. Zhang, 2015: 160.
28. Fairbank, 1974; Wang, 2011: chap. 6.
29. Kang, 2010: chap. 6.
30. Yates, 2008: 35–40.
31. Kang, 2010; Zhang, 2015.
32. Lee, 2017.
33. Ikenberry, 2011: 61.
34. Cox, 1981: 139, 38.
35. Scheidel, 2019: 281–82.
36. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 347.
37. Kradin, 2019.
38. Di Cosmo, 2002b.
39. Khazanov, 2015: 362; Paul, 2003.
40. Perdue, 2005: 35.
41. Biran, 2004, 2017.
42. Scheidel, 2019: 289.
43. Khazanov, 2015: 360.
44. Rosenstein, 2009: 42–44; Li, 2013: 269–78.
45. Di Cosmo, 2002b.
46. Johnston, 1995: 247; 1996: 219–21; Kang, 2010: chap. 7; Wang, 2011: 136–37.
47. Tao, 1983: 81.
48. Perdue, 2005: 31–32.
49. Yu, 1967: 6–19, 45–46; cf. de Crespigny, 2016: 162–63.
 Notes to Pages 125–140 527

50. Tillman, 2005: 147; Wang, 2011.

51. Zhang, 2015: 150–51; Rossabi, 1983.
52. Wang, 2011.
53. Wang, 2013b.
54. Hansen, 2019; Zhao, 2015.
55. Worthy, 1983: 38.
56. Wang, 1983; Franke, 1983; Tao, 1983.
57. Wang, 2011.
58. Tao, 1983.
59. Lorge, 2015: 125–30.
60. Ibid.: 282.
61. Lorge, 2008.
62. Tillman, 2005; Rossabi, 1983; Wang, 1983: 54–62; Hansen, 2019.
63. Tillman, 2005.
64. De Weerdt, 2016.
65. Smith, 2015; Lorge, 2015.
66. Wang, 2011: 60.
67. Andrade, 2016: chap. 1.
68. Hansen, 2019.
69. Peterson, 1983: 224–31; Tao, 1983: 71.
70. Lorge, 2015; Smith, 2015.
71. Lewis, 2000; Graff, 2002: 247.
72. Lorge, 2015.
73. Ratchnevsky, 1992: 40–41, 89–90, 152, 159–60; cf. Biran, 2004.
74. Biran, 2004.
75. Hassig, 1988; Isaac, 1983.
76. Lamb, 1927: chap. 7; Ratchnevsky, 1992: 188–96.
77. Kim, 2009.
78. Rossabi, 1988: 101.
79. Lorge, 2005: 150–54.
80. Dardess, 2012.
81. Wang, 2011: chap. 5.
82. According to Andrade, 2016: 113.
83. Zhang, 2015: 119–52.
84. According to Dardess, 2012.
85. According to Swope, 2014.
86. Perdue, 2002: 376.
87. Elliott, 2009: 86.
88. Elliott, 2001; Dabringhaus, 2011; Waley-Cohen, 2009.
89. Perdue, 2002: 393.
90. Lorge, 2005: 165.
91. Perdue, 2002: 390.
92. Ibid.: 283.
93. Perdue, 2005: 284–87.
528 Notes to Pages 140–155

94. Theobald, 2013: 9, 5.

95. Elliott, 2009: 88–92, 100.
96. Dabringhaus, 2011.
97. Fairbank, 1968; Arrighi, 2007: 314–20; Andornino, 2006; Wang, 2013.
98. Lorge, 2005: 172; Chia, 1993.
99. Giersch, 2006: 47.
100. Ibid.: chap. 4; Dai, 2004: 182–83.
101. Giersch, 2006: 12–14.
102. Wang, 2018.
103. Andrade, 2016: 8, 238.
104. Sun Bin, 2003: 110, 112.

Chapter Seven. Medieval and Modern Japan

1. Friday, 2004: 6.
2. Farris, 2006: 164, 185–87.
3. Conlan, 2003: 219, 7; cf. Turnbull, 2008.
4. Friday, 2004: chap. 5.
5. Morillo, 2001.
6. Friday, 2004: 155–59.
7. Farris, 2006: 194–98.
8. Berry, 1994.
9. Ibid.: 23.
10. Ibid.: 48; 2005: 835–36.
11. Farris, 2006: 209.
12. Lamers, 2000: chap. 1.
13. Bender, 2008.
14. Lamers, 2000.
15. Farris, 2006.
16. Berry, 1982: 29–34.
17. Lamers, 2000: 76, 98, 103–4.
18. Berry, 1982: 161; cf. Stalker, 2018: chaps. 5 and 6; Turnbull, 2002.
19. Berry, 1982: 126–30; quote, 81.
20. Lamers, 2000: 163, 170.
21. Berry, 1986: 243–47; Roberts, 2012: 7; Ikegami, 1995: 152–63.
22. Berry, 1982: 81, 150–55.
23. Berry, 1986: 242–43.
24. Ferejohn and Rosenbluth, 2010.
25. Farris, 2006.
26. Ibid.: 211.
27. Berry, 1982: 107–10; Turnbull, 2002: 73.
28. Berry, 1982: 113–20.
29. Moore, 1988.
30. Ikegami, 1995.
 Notes to Pages 156–168 529

31. Totman, 1988: 48, 63.

32. Tarling, 2001: 25.
33. Metzler, 2006: chap. 2.
34. Duus, 1995; Matsusaka, 2001; Brooks, 2000.
35. Duus, 1995: 175–84.
36. Lone, 2000: 100–105.
37. Dickinson, 1999: 256; Evans and Peattie, 1997: 124.
38. Shimazu, 2001, 2009.
39. Duus, 1995; Lone, 2000: chaps. 8–10.
40. Duus, 1995: 203, 399–423; Eiji, 2002.
41. Duus, 1995: 431, 284–88.
42. Kim and Park, 2008; Eckert, 1996; Chou, 1996; Cha, 2000; Ho, 1984; Mad-
dison, 2003: table 4.
43. Gluck, 1985: 90, 216–17.
44. Dickinson, 1999: 151, 242–56.
45. Hata, 1988: 282–86.
46. Peattie, 1975: 29, 57–63.
47. Metzler, 2006: 128.
48. Peattie, 1975: 100.
49. Iriye, 1997: 50–62.
50. Peattie, 1975: 96–98; Barnhart, 1987; Jordan, 1987.
51. Humphreys, 1995.
52. Wilson, 1995: 253–55; Young, 1998.
53. Iriye, 1997: 13–26.
54. Ibid.: 26–28.
55. Benson and Matsumura, 2001: 21–38; Nish, 2002.
56. Taira, 1988: 578–89.
57. Woodiwiss, 1992: 58–66; Gordon, 1985: 416–25, 251; 1991: 203.
58. Garon, 1987: 198–218; Taira, 1988: 637–46; Odaka, 1999: 150–57; Gordon,
1985: 250–51; 1991: 287–92.
59. Berger, 1977: 85, 225, 333–34, 345–46; Snyder, 1991: 134.
60. Gordon, 1991: 302–15.
61. Nakamura, 1988: 464–68.
62. Metzler, 2006: 199–256.
63. Berger, 1977: 105–17, 346; Gordon, 1985: chaps. 9–10; Nakamura, 1988.
64. Lockwood, 1954: 117; Iriye, 1974; Duus, 1995: xv–xviii; Sugihara, 2004.
65. Brooks, 2000: chap. 5.
66. Peattie, 1975: 114–33.
67. Bix, 2001: 228–41.
68. Matsusaka, 2001: 354.
69. Barrett and Shyu, 2001.
70. Mitter, 2000.
71. Maddison, 2003: 25.
72. Young, 1998: 307; cf. Nish, 2002: 177–82.
530 Notes to Pages 168–192

73. Wilson, 2002.

74. Brooks, 2000: 200–207; Nish, 2002: 180.
75. Tarling, 2001: 42.
76. Peattie, 1975: 186–90; Hane, 1992: chap. 12; Bix, 2001: 308–13.
77. Bix, 2001: 317–23.
78. Barnhart, 1987: 89.
79. Ibid.: 90, 104–14.
80. Berger, 1977: 67–74.
81. Bix, 2001: 254.
82. Kershaw, 2007: 91.
83. Kennedy, 1999: 501–2.
84. Tsunoda, 1994; Toland, 1970: 144–45.
85. Lynn, 2003: 238–40.
86. Miller, 2007; Barnhart, 1987.
87. Miller, 2007: 242.
88. Kershaw, 2007: 91–128.
89. Kennedy, 1999: 513–14.
90. Quoted ibid.: 515.
91. Iriye, 1987: 149–50; 1991.
92. Evans and Peattie, 1997: 447, 471–82.
93. Tarling, 2001: 76–78; Kershaw, 2007: 365.
94. Kershaw, 2007: 128, 478.
95. See, for example, Wood, 2007.
96. LeMay, 1965: 387.
97. Pike, 2015.
98. Lynn, 2003: 248–49, 262–80.

Chapter Eight. A Thousand Years of Europe

1. According to Heather, 2010.
2. Ward-Perkins, 2005.
3. Scheidel, 2019: 159, 162–64; Bisson, 2009.
4. Black, 1998: 47.
5. Keen, 1984.
6. Kaeuper, 1999: 38; Keen, 1999: 4–5.
7. Bartlett, 1994.
8. Turchin, 2003.
9. Luard, 1986: 24–34.
10. Howard, 1983: 14.
11. Davies, 2011.
12. Rogers, 2000; Lynn, 2003: chap. 3.
13. Rogers, 1993.
14. Howard, 1983: 14–15.
15. Luard, 1986: 193–95.
 Notes to Pages 193–217 531

16. Lynn, 2003: 80.

17. Honig, 2001: 119.
18. Honig, 2012.
19. Honig, 2001: 117.
20. Andrade, 2015.
21. Pascua, 2008: 194–96.
22. Mann, 1986: 463–69.
23. Owen, 2010.
24. Luard, 1986: 195–205.
25. Ibid.: 204.
26. Scheidel, 2019.
27. Ibid.
28. Wendt, 1999.
29. Holsti, 1991: 64, 84; Luard, 1986: 44–52.
30. Quoted in Lynn, 2003: 132–36.
31. Howard, 1983: 13.
32. Quoted in MacMillan, 2020: 25.
33. Lynn, 2003: 140–41.
34. Ibid.: 155–56.
35. Holsti, 1991: 108–9, 112; Luard, 1986: 205–12.
36. Dalrymple, 2019: 329.
37. Yazdani, 2017.
38. Grinin and Korotayev, 2015.
39. Owen, 2010: chap. 4.
40. Parker, 1971; Ellis, 2003: 9.
41. Fazal, 2007.
42. Holsti, 1991: 141; Luard, 1986: 52–56.
43. Holsti, 1991: 142–45.
44. Owen, 2010: 278.
45. Yazdani, 2017.
46. See Mann, 1993, 2012, for fuller explanations.
47. Aron, 1973: 24–25.
48. Mann, 1993: 764–66.
49. Clark, 2012; Otte, 2014.
50. Otte, 2014: 506.
51. Judson, 2016.
52. Otte, 2014: 508.
53. Malešević, 2010; MacMillan, 2020.
54. Owen, 2010: chap. 5.
55. Kershaw, 2007: 254–56.
56. Ibid.: 290.
57. Kershaw, 1998: chap. 13.
58. Kershaw, 2007: 479.
59. Simms and Laderman, 2021.
532 Notes to Pages 218–236

60. Kershaw, 2007: 382–430.

61. MacMillan, 2020; Marwick, 1975.
62. Mann, 2004.
63. See Mann, 2012: chap. 9; Mann, 2013: chaps. 2–4.
64. Wimmer, 2013.
65. Luard, 1986: 205.

Chapter Nine. Seven Hundred Years of South

and Central America
1. Townsend, 2019; Berdan, 2014, 2021; Cervantes, 2020: chaps. 6–9; all use
these sources.
2. Hassig, 2007: 314–15.
3. Ibid.: 312.
4. Berdan, 2014: 169–70.
5. Isaac, 1983.
6. Townsend, 2019: chap. 2.
7. Berdan, 2014: 157–59.
8. Townsend, 2019: 79, 249–55.
9. Cervantes, 2020: chap. 9.
10. Hassig, 1988: 128–32, 172; Townsend, 2019: 53.
11. Daniel, 1992; Hassig, 1988: 75–94.
12. Hassig, 1988: 236–50; Berdan, 2021: 181–82.
13. Townsend, 2019: 72.
14. Graeber and Wengrow, 2021: 370–73.
15. Townsend, 2019: chap. 5.
16. Cervantes, 2020: 173.
17. Rostworowski, 1999; D’Altroy, 2014; McEwan, 2006; Cervantes, 2020:
chaps. 13–15.
18. McEwan, 2006: 127.
19. Rostworowski, 1999.
20. Julien, 2007: 342–44.
21. McEwan, 2006: 127.
22. D’Altroy, 2014: 340–41.
23. Hyslop, 1984; McEwan, 2006: 118–28.
24. Covey, 2020: 61–63.
25. D’Altroy, 2014: 324.
26. Bray, 1992: 230.
27. D’Altroy, 2014: 349.
28. Rowe, 2006.
29. Rostworowski, 1999: 46.
30. Cervantes, 2020: chap. 14.
31. Andreski, 1966: 211.
 Notes to Pages 236–250 533

32. Holden, 2004: 4.

33. Scheina, 2003: part 10; Loveman, 1999: 43–59, 105–14.
34. Lemke, 2002; Gochman and Maoz, 1984: 607; Franchi et al., 2017: 12.
35. Mares, 2001: 37; Mares and Palmer, 2012: 2.
36. Franchi et al., 2017: 10–11.
37. Jones, 2014.
38. Lemke, 2002: 167–71, 181; Centeno, 2002: 38–43; Arocena and Bowman,
2014: 52–53.
39. Gochman and Maoz, 1984: 605.
40. Palmer et al., 2015: 230.
41. Gochman and Maoz, 1984: 609; Palmer et al., 2015: 235; Ghosn et al., 2004:
151.
42. Mares and Kacowicz, 2016: table 9.1; Hensel, 1994.
43. Dominguez and Mares, 2003; Battaglino, 2012: 131.
44. Dominguez and Mares, 2003: 13.
45. Centeno, 2002.
46. Tilly, 1975: 42; cf. Mann, 1986, 1993.
47. Centeno, 2002: 66, 87, 122.
48. Ibid.: 194.
49. Mazzuca, 2021.
50. Burr, 1967.
51. Holsti, 1996: 156–57.
52. Mares, 2001: 17.
53. Ibid.: 113–30.
54. Ibid.: chaps. 3–4; cf. Dominguez and Mares, 2003.
55. Gibler, 2012.
56. Grafe and Irigoin, 2006: 240.
57. Mazucca, 2021.
58. As listed in Grafe and Irigoin, 2006: appendix 2; cf. Dominguez and Mares,
2003.
59. Carter and Goemans, 2014.
60. Goertz et al., 2016: chap. 7.
61. Scheina, 2003: 427.
62. Centeno, 2002: 49.
63. Whigham, 2002, section 2; Leuchars, 2002; Henderson, 2016.
64. Braumoeller, 2019: 106–7; Whigham, 2017: 580.
65. Fazal, 2007: 41.
66. Whigham, 2017; Leuchars, 2002.
67. Bethell, 1996: 8.
68. Ibid.: 4.
69. Whigham, 2017.
70. Collier, 2003: 51–52.
71. Ibid.
72. Burr, 1967; Sater, 2007; St. John, 1994.
534 Notes to Pages 251–276

73. Sater, 2007: 21–25, 347–56; Henderson, 2016.

74. Burr, 1967.
75. Henderson, 2016.
76. Braumoeller, 2019: 107.
77. Zook, 1960; Niebuhr, 2018.
78. Chesterton, 2013.
79. Shesko, 2015.
80. Ibid.
81. Mares and Palmer, 2012; Zook, 1964.
82. Zook, 1964.
83. Mares and Palmer, 2012.
84. Ibid.: 67.
85. Ibid.; Mares, 1996.
86. Mares and Palmer, 2012: 130.
87. Durham, 1979; Anderson, 1981.
88. Henderson, 2016.
89. Corbacho, 2003; Mares, 2001: 155–58.
90. Mares, 2001: 157–58.
91. Centeno, 2002: 129; Holsti, 1996: 166–67.
92. Henderson, 2016.
93. Migdal, 2001: 137–50.
94. Mares and Palmer, 2012: 132.
95. Mann, 2013.
96. Arocena and Bowman, 2014: 52–63.
97. Haftel, 2007.

Chapter Ten. The Decline of War?

1. Excellent summaries of social thought on wars can be found in Joas and
Knoeble, 2013; and Malešević, 2010: 17–50.
2. Joas, 2003: 128–33.
3. Ward, 1903.
4. Go, 2013.
5. Sumner, 1898.
6. Clausewitz, 1976: 260.
7. Gumplowicz, 1899: 116–24.
8. Treitschke, 1916: 395–96.
9. Weber, 1988: 60–61. I thank Stefan Bargheer for help in translating this.
10. Luft, 2007.
11. Simmel, 1903: 799.
12. Caillois, 1939, 2012.
13. See, for example, Joas, 2003; Malešević, 2010; Joas and Knoeble, 2013.
14. Mueller, 2009; Gat, 2006, 2017; Pinker, 2011; Goldstein, 2011.
15. Mueller, 2004: 17–18, 161.
 Notes to Pages 276–293 535

16. Elias, 2012.

17. Durand, 1960; Fitzgerald, 1961; Scheidel, 2019: 43–45.
18. Hanson, 2005.
19. Flory, 2006.
20. Brunt, 1971.
21. Weatherford, 2004: 118; Morgan, 2007; Frankopan, 2015: 162.
22. Di Cosmo, 2002a: 6.
23. Biran, 2018.
24. Anonymous, 2011.
25. Khazanov, 2015.
26. Ratchnevsky, 1992: 129, 151; Giessauf, 2011; Biran, 2018.
27. Joveyni quoted in Spuler, 1972: 32–39.
28. Ratchnevsky, 1992: 129–33.
29. Lorge, 2005: 85–88.
30. Schmidt, 2011; May, 2007: 118–20; Sverdrup, 2017: 347.
31. Sverdrup, 2017: 347–48.
32. Frankopan, 2015: 161.
33. Morgan, 2007: 82, 137–38; May, 2011.
34. Anonymous, 2011.
35. Pinker, 2011: 195.
36. Braumoeller, 2019.
37. Eckhardt, 1992: 131.
38. Malešević, 2010: 119–20.
39. Cederman et al., 2011.
40. Blainey, 1988: 4.
41. Gat, 2017: 131–36.
42. Braumoeller, 2019: 94.
43. Sarkees et al., 2003: 65; Sarkees and Wayman, 2010.
44. Walter, 2017.
45. Wesseling, 2005.
46. Etemad, 2007: 92.
47. Tocqueville quoted ibid.: 86.
48. Mann, 2005: 100–107.
49. Wesseling, 1989.
50. Ibid.
51. Etemad, 2007: 89.
52. Ibid.: 93.
53. Kimber, 1990: 160.
54. Evans and Ørsted-Jensen, 2014.
55. Wesseling, 2005.
56. Bairoch, 1997: 638.
57. Etemad, 2007: 94.
58. Aron, 1997: 227.
536 Notes to Pages 294–310

59. Mueller, 1988.

60. Gat, 2017.
61. Goldstein, 2011: 15.
62. Ibid.: 309.
63. Roser, 2016.
64. Migdal, 2001.
65. Fazal, 2007.
66. Roser, 2016; Strand and Hegre, 2021.
67. Braumoeller, 2019: 86–92, 114; Cirillo and Taleb, 2016.
68. Marshall, 2017.
69. Clauset, 2018.
70. Beard, 2018.
71. Dupuy et al., 2017; Strand et al., 2019.
72. Hensel, 2002.
73. Themnér and Wallensteen, 2014; Dupuy et al., 2017; Pettersson and Eck,
2018; Strand et al., 2019; Braumoeller, 2019: 85.
74. Harrison and Wolf, 2012, 2014.
75. Goertz et al., 2016; cf. Roser, 2016.
76. Braumoeller, 2019: chap. 8.
77. Marshall, 2017.
78. See, for example, Melander et al., 2009.
79. Crawford, 2015.
80. Goldstein, 2011: 260–64.
81. Lacina and Gleditsch, 2005.
82. UNHCR, 2020, 2021; Marshall, 2017.
83. Caplan and Hoeffler, 2017.
84. Eisner, 2003, 2014.
85. Du Roy and Simbille, 2018.
86. Somashekhar and Rich, 2016.
87. Sharara et al., 2021.
88. Thome, 2007.
89. All figures are from Lopes da Silva et al., 2022.
90. Collins, 1974.
91. Kaldor, 1999; Münkler, 2005.
92. Wimmer, 2013; Malešević, 2010: 311–14.
93. Arreguín-Toft, 2005.
94. Ibid.; cf. MacMillan, 2020.
95. Quoted in Malešević, 2010: 83.
96. Quoted in Bourke, 1999: 209.
97. Wezeman et al., 2022.
98. Strand et al., 2019: figures 3 and 4.
99. As did Cirillo and Taleb, 2016.
100. Gat, 2006: 662.
 Notes to Pages 313–330 537

Chapter Eleven. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield I

1. Holmes, 1985: 210.
2. Stanhope, 1888: 18.
3. This is all covered in Raaflaub, 2007.
4. Goldsworthy, 1996: 30, 244–47.
5. Melchior, 2011.
6. Keegan, 1976: 78–116.
7. Ardant du Picq, 1947: 88–90, 154.
8. Keegan, 1976: 97–107, 171–74.
9. Collins, 2008: 83–133.
10. Josephus, 1987: bk. 6, chap. 8, sections 44–46.
11. Tolstoy, 2009: bk. 10, chap. 36.
12. Holmes, 1985: 84.
13. Linderman, 1987; Hess, 1997; McPherson, 1997; Manning, 2007; Adams,
2014; Steplyk, 2018.
14. Linderman, 1987: 7–17, 61.
15. Steplyk, 2018: 27, 75; McPherson, 1997: 68–69, 100–101.
16. Manning, 2007: 21, 31.
17. Marshall, 1947.
18. Grossman, 1995.
19. Laidley, 1865: 69; emphasis in original.
20. Malešević, 2010: 220, 221, 229; cf. Jacoby, 2008: 90.
21. Rottman, 2013.
22. Adams, 2014: 114–15; cf. Steplyk, 2018.
23. Griffith, 1989: 86.
24. Ibid.: 84–90.
25. Keegan, 1976.
26. Adams, 2014: 63.
27. Griffith, 1989: 111–13.
28. Hess, 1997: 57–59.
29. Ardant du Picq, 1947: 263–73.
30. Ibid.: 115.
31. Ibid.: 120.
32. Ibid.: 111–12.
33. Griffith, 1989: chap. 2.
34. McPherson, 1997: 72, 77.
35. Hess, 1997.
36. McPherson, 1997: 72–74.
37. McPherson, 1997: 6–7, 79; Adams, 2014: 111–12, 115.
38. Hess, 1997: 150.
39. Linderman, 1987: 261–62.
40. Hess, 1997.
41. Adams, 2014: 111.
538 Notes to Pages 330–344

42. Griffith, 1989: 50.

43. Hess, 1997: 74–93.
44. Ibid.: 75.
45. Adams, 2014: 70.
46. McPherson, 1997: 39–42.
47. Sherman to Major General Logan, December 21, 1863, ehistory.osu.edu.
48. Brown, 1970: 86–93; Stannard, 1992: 171–74.
49. Adams, 2014: 166.
50. McPherson, 1997: 163–66.
51. Weitz, 2008: 284–85.
52. McPherson, 1997: 46, 47.
53. Ibid.: 49–51.
54. Hess, 1997: 114–17.
55. McPherson, 1997: 87.
56. McPherson, n.d.; McPherson, 1997: 87.
57. Holmes, 1985: 84.

Chapter Twelve. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield II

1. Roynette, 2018: 260.
2. Ibid.: 261.
3. Strachan, 2006.
4. Sheldon, 2005: 292.
5. Lebow, 2010: 137.
6. Sheldon, 2005; Middlebrook, 1972.
7. Ziemann, 2017: 74.
8. Horne, 2005: 909; my translation.
9. Holmes, 1985: 204–5, 182, 267–69; cf. Bourke, 2005: 199; Rousseau, 1999:
155.
10. Bourke, 2005: chap. 7; Rousseau, 1999: 155–60.
11. Rousseau, 1999: 223, 228.
12. Malešević, 2022: 184.
13. Jones, 2006: 239–41.
14. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2002: 93–103.
15. Cf. Horne, 2005.
16. Smith et al., 2003: 101–12.
17. Rousseau, 1999.
18. Ibid.: 309; my translation.
19. Maurin, 1982: 599–637.
20. Cochet, 2005; Loez, 2010.
21. Loez, 2010: 43.
22. Bond, 2002.
23. Ziemann, 2007; Ashworth, 1980.
24. Rousseau, 1999: 111–18.
 Notes to Pages 344–357 539

25. Ashworth, 1980.

26. Ibid.: 173–75.
27. Ziemann, 2007.
28. Rousseau, 1999: 229–30.
29. Sheldon, 2005: 391.
30. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2002: 21–25.
31. Ziemann, 2017: 26–27.
32. Ashworth, 1980: 215.
33. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2002: 39–42.
34. Ashworth, 1980: 215–16.
35. Watson, 2008.
36. Smith, 1994.
37. Saint-Fuscien, 2011.
38. Pedroncini, 1967; Smith, 1994; Horne, 2005; Loez, 2010.
39. Keegan, 1976: 335; 1999: 331–50, 401.
40. Jones, 2008.
41. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2002: 40.
42. Ziemann, 2017: 32–33, 103–19; Maurin, 1982: 522.
43. Wildman, 1980: 203–45.
44. Keegan, 1976: 274–78, 314–17.
45. Watson, 2008: 66.
46. Ibid.: 69.
47. Ibid.: 70.
48. Wilcox, 2014.
49. Sanborn, 2003.
50. Mann, 2012: 176–85.
51. Ziemann, 2007: 142–53.
52. Cf. Boff, 2014.
53. Dollard with Horton, 1943.
54. Kershaw, 2012: xvii.
55. Shils and Janowitz, 1948.
56. Bartov, 1991; Fritz, 1995; Cintino, 2017.
57. Bartov, 1985; Lower, 2005; Bartov, 1991: 132.
58. Cintino, 2017: 3.
59. Ibid.: 158–62.
60. Bartov, 1991: 26.
61. Fritz, 1995.
62. Ibid.: 10.
63. Ibid.: 188–97.
64. Ibid.: 146–49.
65. Cintino, 2017.
66. Hellbeck, 2015.
67. Beevor, 1998.
68. Merridale, 2006.
540 Notes to Pages 357–366

69. Hellbeck, 2015: 58.

70. Reese, 2011: 160–73.
71. Merridale, 2006: 199.
72. Reese, 2011: 13.
73. Quoted in Merridale, 2006: 214.
74. Hellbeck, 2015: 53, 61.
75. Ibid.: 51.
76. Ibid.: 19.
77. Merridale, 2006: 63–68.
78. Hellbeck, 2015: 149.
79. Ibid.: 43.
80. Ibid.: 188.
81. Ibid.: 22.
82. Ibid.: 181, 22.
83. Ibid.: 67–68.
84. Ibid.: 67.
85. Ibid.: 50.
86. William Slim, speech to the officers of the Indian army, quoted by Lewin,
1976: 71.
87. See, for example, Collins, 2008: 43–54; Dyer, 1985: 118–19; Holmes, 1985:
58; Keegan, 1976: 74; Malešević, 2010: 220–21; 2022: 179; Jacoby, 2008:
90–91; Ferguson, 2006: 521.
88. Marshall, 1944, 1968, 1969.
89. Marshall, 1947: 54, 79.
90. Spiller, 1988; Glenn, 2000; Chambers, 2003; Engen, 2008, 2011.
91. Malešević, 2010, 2022.
92. Stouffer et al., 1949: table 3, 201; Collins, 2008: 46–49.
93. Kaufman, 1947.
94. Bourke, 2005: 289.
95. Stouffer et al., 1949: 283
96. Glenn, 2000: 30.
97. Blake, 1970.
98. Quoted ibid.: 340–41.
99. Bourke, 1999.
100. Ibid.: 2.
101. Ibid.: 19.
102. Ferguson, 1999: 357–58; cf. MacMillan, 2020: 81.
103. King, 2013: 48–49; emphasis in original.
104. Bourke, 1999: 155.
105. Ibid.: 154.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.: 229.
108. Blake, 1970: 342–43.
 Notes to Pages 366–376 541

109. Stouffer et al., 1949: 159; Bourke, 1999: 145–49; Malešević, 2010: 224–25;
MacMillan, 2020: 78–79.
110. Collins, 2008: 77, 67–70.
111. Bourke, 1999: 219, 208.
112. King, 2013: 45–48.
113. Marshall, 1968: 56.
114. King, 2013: 170–80.
115. Steckel, 1994; van Creveld, 1982.
116. Reiter and Stam, 2002.
117. Engen, 2008, 2009, 2011.
118. Cameron, 1994: 51, 201.
119. Shalit, 1988: 142.
120. Stouffer, et al., 1949: 98–100, 135–40.
121. Junger, 2011: 229.
122. Bartov, 1991: chap. 2.
123. Moskos, 1970: 73.
124. Shils, 1950: 22–24.
125. Mansoor, 1999; Rush, 2001.
126. Stouffer et al., 1949: 150.
127. Moskos, 1970.
128. Keegan, 1976: 335; Holmes, 1985: 214–16, 326.
129. Dyer, 1985: 144.
130. Hamner, 2011: 11.
131. Sherwood, 1996: 71.
132. Gurney, 1958: 258; Sherwood, 1996: 77–78; Wells, 1995: 49; Zhang, 2002.
133. Collins, 2008: 387–99.
134. Wells, 1995: 31.
135. Sherwood, 1996: 79.
136. Wells, 1995: 48.
137. Werrell, 2005: 125.
138. Toliver and Constable, 1997: 348.
139. Sherwood, 1996: 77–79; Werrell, 2005: 137–38, 144–45, 166.
140. Sparks and Neiss, 1956.
141. Wells, 1995: 105, 129.
142. Blake, 1970: 339.
143. Wells, 1995: 99; cf. Blake, 1970: 339.
144. Sherwood, 1996: 71, 91–94.
145. Bourke, 2005: 209–10.
146. Werrell, 2005: 196, 278.
147. Sherwood, 1996: 98–99.
148. Wells, 1995: 45–46, 115.
149. Stouffer et al., 1949: chap. 7.
150. Chancey and Forstchen, 2000: 80, 131–36.
151. Sherwood, 1996: 6, 38, 67.
542 Notes to Pages 378–395

Chapter Thirteen. Fear and Loathing on the Battlefield III

1. Blechman and Kaplan, 1978.
2. Kaplan, 1981.
3. Quoted in Cumings, 2010: 14.
4. Li, 2014: 39.
5. Johnston, 1996.
6. Edwards, 2006: 143–46.
7. Tomedi, 1993: 22, 110.
8. King, 2013: 181–82.
9. Tomedi, 1993: 67; Watson, 2002.
10. Watson, 2002: 176.
11. Marshall, 1951: 4, 61–62.
12. Glenn, 2000: 41–46.
13. Little, 1964.
14. Li, 2014.
15. Mahoney, 2001; Li et al., 2001; George, 1967.
16. Li, 2007: 91.
17. Li et al., 2001: 63, 67–69, 115–16.
18. George, 1967: 27–35.
19. Ibid.: 88.
20. Quoted ibid.: 25.
21. Mahoney, 2001.
22. Edwards, 2018: 59–61; Fehrenbach, 1963: 103, 137, 170.
23. Mahoney, 2001: 109.
24. Tomedi, 1993: 129, 136.
25. Mahoney, 2001: chaps. 5 and 6.
26. Ibid.: 94.
27. Edwards, 2018: 59–61.
28. Li, 2014.
29. Mahoney, 2001: 83.
30. Li et al., 2001.
31. Li, 2014: 61.
32. George, 1967: 133.
33. Li, 2014: 111–23, 132–33, 180.
34. Ibid.: 219–21.
35. Li et al., 2001: 149–55, 175.
36. Fehrenbach, 1963: 109, 264.
37. Li, 2014: 239.
38. Li et al., 2001: 43.
39. Birtle, 2006: 36.
40. Cockerham and Cohen, 1981.
41. Moskos, 1970: 136, 141.
42. Moskos, 1975.
 Notes to Pages 395–411 543

43. Marshall and Hackworth, 1967.

44. Glenn, 2000.
45. Ibid.: 36.
46. Ibid.: 46–48, 160; cf. Collins, 2008: 52–59.
47. Marmar et al., 2015.
48. All Things Considered, National Public Radio, December 16, 2017.
49. Hendin, 1991.
50. Dennis et al., 2016; cf. Marx et al., 2010.
51. Maguen et al., 2009.
52. Holmes, 1985: 86.
53. Lepre, 2011.
54. Cf. Moskos, 1970: 78–80.
55. See Hunt, 2008: appendix, for a critique.
56. Donnell et al., 1965.
57. Halberstam: 1972: 366; Elliott, 2010: 70–74.
58. Elliott, 2003: chap. 14.
59. Hunt, 2008: 38–46.
60. Elliott, 2003: chap. 11.
61. Ibid.: 355, 374, 454.
62. Ibid.: 378–80.
63. Henderson, 1979.
64. Ibid.: 40.
65. Ibid.: 89.
66. Ibid.: 73.
67. Ibid.: 94.
68. Gouré et al., 1966.
69. Elliott, 2003: chap. 13; Gouré et al., 1966.
70. Elliott, 2010: chap. 3; Robin, 2001; 190–93.
71. According to Elliott, 2010: 182–84.
72. Hunt, 2008: 117–35.
73. Elliott, 2003.
74. Ibid.: 1133.
75. Taylor, 1999.
76. Li, 2007: 205, 220–22.
77. Elliott, 2003: 937–39.
78. Quoted in Welch, 2011: 121.
79. Hiam, 2006: chap. 5; Elliott, 2010: 193–95; Elliott, 2003: chap. 13.
80. Li, 2007: 250–59; Li, 2014: 248.
81. O’Brien, 1990: 65.
82. Collins, 2008: 57–59.
83. Report of the General Accounting Office, quoted by Buncombe, 2005.
84. Malešević, 2022: 154.
544 Notes to Pages 414–437

Chapter Fourteen. Recent Wars in Muslim Countries

1. Grinin, 2019.
2. Ibid.: 30.
3. World Islamic Front Fatwa, February 23, 1998:1.
4. Huntington, 1996.
5. Owen, 2010.
6. Pape, 2006.
7. Sharp, 2022.
8. Derluguian, 2021.
9. Ibid.
10. Agha and Malley, 2019.
11. Yazbek, 2015: 234–37, 246–47.
12. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 297.
13. Donner, 2007: 299–300.
14. “Samer,” 2017.
15. Weiss and Hassan, 2015.
16. Wood, 2016; McCants, 2015.
17. Khatib, 2015.
18. McCants, 2015: chap. 5.
19. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 394.
20. The effects are horrifically described by Yazbek, 2015.
21. Khatib, 2015.
22. Callimachi, 2018; Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2020.
23. Weiss and Hassan, 2015: 222–24.
24. Ginkel and Entenmann, 2016; Dodwell et al., 2016; Wilson, 2017; and
Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2020.
25. Atran et al., 2018.
26. Sagramoso and Yarlykapov, 2020.
27. Khosrokhavar, 2017; Speckhard and Ellenberg, 2020: table 5.
28. Wilson, 2017.
29. Wilson, 2015.
30. Dodwell et al., 2016.
31. Fishman and Felter, 2007.
32. Hegghammer, 2021.
33. Mitts, 2019.
34. Khosrokhavar, 2017: 21.
35. Knights and Almeida, 2020.
36. Hegghammer, 2021.
37. Khosrokhavar, 2017: 38.
38. Hansen, 2013; International Crisis Group, 2018.
39. Quinlivan, 1999; Kandil, 2016.
40. Sassoon, 2012: 129–61; Blaydes, 2018: 266–304.
41. Cheney, 2003.
 Notes to Pages 437–480 545

42. Fukuyama, 2011.

43. Draper, 2020.
44. Mann, 2003.
45. Pew Research Center, 2011, 2016.
46. Junger, 2011.
47. Skelly, 2006; Sheehan-Miles, 2012.
48. Kudo, 2011.
49. Brereton Report, 2020.
50. O’Grady and Gunter, 2022.
51. Hoge et al., 2004.
52. Litz et al., 2009.
53. Maguen and Litz, 2012.
54. Finkel, 2013.
55. Ibid.
56. Bandura, 1999.
57. Phillips, 2019; Cooper et al., 2019.
58. Hattenstone and Allison, 2014.
59. Shaw, 2002.
60. Khan and Gopal, 2017.
61. Moore, 2019.
62. Pew Research Center, 2011: chap. 5.
63. Chappelle et al., 2010, 2014; cf. Armour and Ross, 2017.
64. Cole, 2017.
65. Mead, 2014.
66. Lewis and Holewinski, 2013.
67. Mashal, 2020.
68. Massing, 2021.
69. Mann, 2003.
70. Alshaibi, 2022.
71. Herring and Rangwala, 2006: 147–59.
72. Crawford, 2021.
73. Gibbons-Neff, 2021.
74. Mann, 1988: 183–87.
75. Sharp, 2020.
76. Nye, 1990.
77. Donner, 2007; Niditch, 2007.

Chapter Fifteen. Possible Futures

1. Zhao, 2006.
2. Ramzy and Buckley, 2019.
3. Friedrich et al., 2016.
4. Aron, 1973: 15.
5. Goldstein, 2011: 328.
6. Eisenhower, 1953.
546 Notes to Pages 482–511

Conclusion
1. Eckstein, 2006.
2. Small and Singer, 1970.
3. Reiter and Stam, 2002.
4. Lebow, 2010.
5. White, 1990.
6. Luard, 1986: 268–69.
7. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 263, 355–65.
8. Thies and Baum, 2020.
9. Fearon, 1994.
10. Ibn Khaldun, 1958: 227–29.
11. Ibid.: 12.
12. Barthold, 1956: 60.
13. Lebow, 2010.
14. Van Evera, 1999: 192.
15. White, 1990.
16. Bender, 2008; Davies, 2011; Fazal, 2004.
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 Index

Tables are indicated by t following the page number.

Surnames starting with “al” are alphabetized by remaining portion of surname.

Achaean League, 58, 59 and, 12, 37, 45, 303; Muslim coun-
Acheson, Dean, 172, 380 tries, 415–16, 419, 434–35, 456–57;
Adams, Michael, 320, 325, 330–31 nationalism and, 30; patterns of war,
Afghanistan: ISIS in, 433; NATO inter- 481, 508, 513; political power and, 31,
vention in, 307; refugees from, 301; 493; rationality of, 218–19, 247, 484,
Taliban in, 436 486–90, 498; Roman Republic, 52,
Afghanistan War (U.S.), 299, 307, 417, 58–62, 72, 78, 86–87, 483; Russia’s in-
438–49 vasion of Ukraine (2022), 293–95,
Africa: civilian vs. military fatalities in, 301, 465–72; types of, 3, 500–504;
299–301, 300t; colonial conflicts in, universality of war and, 19–21. See
289; European imperialism and, 210; also border wars; imperial conquest
global war trends in, 297; homicide wars; raiding wars; regime change/re-
rates in, 302; interstate wars in, 26, inforcement wars; specific wars
237; postcolonial conflicts in, 269–70. alcohol use by soldiers, 11, 340, 342, 348
See also specific countries Alexander the Great, 73
Ager, Sheila, 61 Algeria, colonial conflicts in, 289–90
aggressive wars: American interventions alliances: Ancient China, 93, 97, 101,
as, 434–35; Ancient China, 94, 98– 103, 105; Aztecs, 226–27, 229, 230,
100; asymmetric warfare and, 508; 235; balancing theory and, 37, 41,
defined, 3; Europe, 182, 193, 213–14, 103, 223; Carthaginians, 80–81; de-
218–19; geopolitics of, 40, 45; ideo- mocracies and, 35; European, 186,
logical power and, 505, 506; Imperial 187, 199; geopolitics and, 44;
China, 112, 113–14, 116–17, 123, Imperial China, 117, 130, 132, 142;
126, 128, 136–38; Japan, 152–53, 163, Inca, 232, 233–34, 235; Islamic sec-
172, 178; Latin America, 227, 247–48, tarian wars and, 424; Latin America,
251, 258, 264–65, 267–68; militarism 226, 229, 232, 240, 245, 247, 250–52,

585
586 Index

alliances (continued) Aristotle, 73

262; marriage as vehicle for, 78, 93, Armenia: border disputes, 301;
186, 187, 226; Medieval Japan, 146, Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, 420–22
151; Modern Japan, 171, 172; Roman Army of the Republic of Viet Nam
Republic, 56, 57, 72, 75, 78, 86; World (ARVN), 401
War I, 210–13; World War II, 215 Aron, Raymond, 7–8, 51, 275, 479, 515
Allison, Eric, 443–44 Arreguín-Toft, Ivan, 305
Almeida, Alex, 433 Ashworth, Tony, 343, 344, 345, 346
al-Nusra Front, 424 al-Assad, Bashar, 424, 434
Alonso, Victor, 58 asymmetric warfare, 3, 42, 57, 190, 299,
Al Qaeda, 308, 415, 416, 425, 426, 433, 304–6, 455, 508–15
434 Atahualpa, 234
al-Shabaab, 308, 433–34, 452 atomic bombs, 176, 179, 278, 305, 380,
American Civil War, soldiers’ experi- 473
ences in, 312, 320–35 Atran, Scott, 430
Amnesty International, 444 Attalus I (Greece), 58
An Lushan, 126, 281t, 282–83 Attila the Hun, 21, 502
anarchy: fear caused by, 41–42, 482; geo- Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, 342, 346
politics and, 40–41; Hobbesian anar- Augustus (Roman emperor), 52, 70,
chy, 40–41, 55, 181, 193, 200; patterns 84–85
of war and, 482–84 Australia: Afghanistan War and, 441; ar-
Ancient China, 89–108; Spring and chaeological evidence of warfare in,
Autumn Period (771–476 BCE), 91– 16, 17; colonial conflicts in, 291
96; Warring States Period (475–221 Austria: Austro-Prussian War (1866),
BCE), 89, 96–106 209; Congress of Vienna (1815) and,
Andean Community, 268 208; World War I and, 213
Anderson, Thomas, 258 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 209, 210–15
Andrade, Tonio, 109, 142 Austro-Prussian War (1866), 209
Andreski, Stanislav, 236, 275 authoritarianism: Ancient China, 94,
Antiochus III (Greece), 58 100, 106; coup-proofing and, 133;
anti-Semitism, 420 economic success of, 166; Europe,
Appian, 81 207, 209; Imperial China, 133; Latin
Arab-Israeli Wars, 417–20 America, 237, 241, 244, 257; military
Arab Spring protests, 424, 428 justice and, 347; Modern China, 476;
Ardant du Picq, Charles, 317, 326, 327, Modern Japan, 178; morale and, 35;
410 Muslim countries, 414, 435, 436, 454,
Arendt, Hannah, 275 462; Russia, 467, 472; World War I
Argentina: border disputes, 260; Chaco and, 274, 350
War (1932–1935) and, 255; Falklands Azerbaijan: border disputes, 301;
(Malvinas) War (1982–1983), 238, Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, 420–22;
259–62; Platine War (1851–1852), Shi’a Muslims in, 423
244–45; Rio Protocol (1941) and, Azov Battalion (Ukraine), 469
257; War of the Triple Alliance Aztecs, 225–31, 507
(1864–1870), 245–49 Aztec Triple Alliance, 226–27, 230
 Index 587

Ba’athists, 428, 436 Blechman, Barry, 378

Bahrain: Shi’a Muslims in, 423, 424; Boko Haram, 308
Sunni Muslims in, 424; Yemen and, Bolivia: border disputes, 238; Chaco War
425 (1932–1935), 253–55, 295; War of
Bairoch, Paul, 292 Confederation (1836–1839), 240,
Baker, James, 466 249–50; War of the Pacific (1879–
balancing theory: alliances and, 37, 41, 1883), 250–51
103, 223; asymmetric warfare and, Bolshevik Revolution, 161, 164, 215
508–15; European civil wars and rev- border wars: Africa, 269–70, 502; con-
olutions, 208; European imperialism, structivism and, 47; economic power
206; geopolitics and, 44; Japanese im- and, 37; Europe, 200; Imperial China,
perialism, 160 115, 117, 124, 131–32, 136, 141–42,
Balkan Wars (1912–1913), 209, 210 143–44; International Court of
Bartlett, Robert, 183 Justice mediation of, 301; Latin
Bartov, Omer, 354, 369 America, 237–38, 241, 252–63, 511;
Battle of Cuaspad (1863), 252 as major threat to peace today, 465;
Battle of Gettysburg (1863), 324, 334–35 Modern China, 472–77; patterns of
Battle of Midway (1942), 177 war and, 501–2, 516; rationality of,
Battle of Tumu Fortress (1449), 136 37; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Battle of Yungay (1839), 250 (2022), 293–95, 301, 465–72. See also
Beagle Channel conflict (1982–1983), specific wars
260–62 Bormann, Martin, 353
Beard, Mary, 57, 72 Borneo: Imperial China’s tributary di-
Beard, Steven, 296 plomacy and, 118; Japanese milita-
Becker, Annette, 342, 346 rism and, 174
Beevor, Anthony, 357 Bosnia-Herzegovina: Austrian seizure of
Belgium, ISIS support in, 432 (1878), 209; NATO intervention in,
bellicosity, 49–50 307
Bender, John, 149, 511 Bourke, Joanna, 363, 364–67
Bentham, Jeremy, 272 Brabant, Duke of, 186
Berlin Conference on Africa (1884), 298 Bradley, Omar, 369
Berlin, Treaty of (1885), 210 Braumoeller, Bear, 247, 253, 282, 296,
Berry, Mary, 147–48, 149–50 298
Bertrand du Guesclin, 182 Bray, Tamara, 233
Bethell, Leslie, 248 Brazil: European imperialism and, 235,
Biden, Joe: Afghanistan War and, 449; 236; Platine War (1851–1852), 244–
Israel and, 418, 456–57; Saudi Arabia 45; Rio Protocol (1941) and, 257;
and, 458; Taiwan and, 475 War of the Triple Alliance (1864–
Bin Laden, Osama, 415, 436, 448, 455 1870), 245–49; in World War II, 237
Biran, Michal, 278 Bremer, Jerry, 450
Black, Jeremy, 49, 182 brinkmanship, 43, 505
Blainey, Geoffrey, 33, 48, 287 Britain: Acts of Union (1800), 188;
Blair, Tony, 494 European imperialism and,
Blake, Joseph, 364, 366 206; Falklands (Malvinas) War
588 Index

Britain (continued) religious warfare in Europe and,

(1982–1983), 238, 259–62; fighter 196–202
pilots in World War II, 373–75; impe- causes of war, 30–51; constructivism,
rialism by, 157, 202, 204, 205; ISIS 46–47; ecology context for, 37–39;
support in, 432; Japanese imperialism economic power, 35–37; emotions,
and, 158; Japanese militarism and, 46–47; geopolitics, 39–46; ideological
169; Latin American War of power, 49–51; in Latin America, 235–
Confederation (1836–1839) and, 250; 43; liberalism, 46–47; military power,
medieval warfare in, 187–88; police 35–37; overoptimism, 48–49; political
homicides in, 302; Washington Naval power, 31–35; Realist theory on,
Treaties (1922), 161; World War I and, 39–46; in Roman Republic, 52–62,
210–15, 337–51; World War II and, 85–88; tyranny of history, 39
176, 215–20. See also specific colonies Cederman, Lars-Erik, 286
British Defense Operational Analysis Celts, 53
Establishment, 368 Cenepa War (1995), 258
British East India Company, 203, 209, Centeno, Miguel, 238, 250, 265, 266
272 Central America. See Latin America
Brunt, Peter, 277 Central American Federation, 236, 243,
Buddhism, 103, 111, 142, 507 252–53
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, 42, 44 Central American Wars (1876, 1885,
Bugeaud, Thomas-Robert, 320 1906–1907), 252–53
Bull, Hedley, 46 Cervantes, Fernando, 231
Burgundians, 181, 187 Chaco War (1932–1935), 253–55, 295
Burr, Robert, 240 Chalabi, Ahmed, 450
Bush, George H. W., 435 Chamberlain, Neville, 496
Bush, George W., 436, 438, 492, 496, Chanyuan Covenant (1005), 128
499 Charlemagne, 182, 207
Charles IV (king of France), 189
Caesar. See Julius Caesar Charles V (king of France), 190
Caillois, Roger, 275 Charles VI (king of France), 194
Cairo Declaration (1964), 269 Charles le Téméraire, Duke of Burgundy,
Calgacus, 53 187
Calley, William, 396–97 Chávez, Hugo, 268
Callimachi, Rukmini, 429 Cheney, Dick, 436, 437, 496
callous vs. ferocious killing, 304–6 chevauchée tactics, 190–91
Camacho, Manuel Ávila, 237 Chiang Kai-shek, 166, 170
Cameron, Craig, 368 Chile: border disputes, 238, 260; Rio
Carter, David, 242 Protocol (1941) and, 257; Santiago
Carthaginian Empire: Punic Wars, 59, Declaration (1952), 251; War of
63, 70, 73–82; Roman Republic and, Confederation (1836–1839), 240,
56, 59–60, 70, 71 249–50; War of the Pacific (1879–
Caste Wars of Yucatán, 236 1883), 250–51
Catholics: Aztecs and, 226; in England, China: border disputes, 301; global war
188; Peace of Westphalia (1648), 200; trends and, 297; Great Leap Forward,
 Index 589

282; Japanese militarism as response Cole, Chris, 447

to perceived threat from, 166–73, Cole, Robert, 365, 367
175; Korean War and, 379–83, 386– collateral damage, 410. See also civilian
93; military spending in, 303; vs. military fatalities
Nanjing Massacre (1937), 176; nu- collective power, 4
clear program in, 473; revisionism by, Collins, Randall, 49, 190, 304, 313, 363,
472–77, 501; South China Sea dis- 366, 373; Violence, 22–23
putes and, 475–76. See also Ancient Colombia: border disputes, 238; Chile
China; Imperial China and, 240; in Korean War, 237; Leticia
Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, 7, 133–35, War (1932–1933), 256; War of the
278–79, 497, 501, 502, 503 Cauca (1863), 252
chivalric ideology, 182 Common Peace movement, 58
Chivington, John, 332 Comte, Auguste, 272
Chongzhen (Chinese emperor), 137, 497 Concert of Europe, 298
Churchill, Winston, 217, 220, 496 Confucius and Confucianism, 97, 98–99,
Cicero, 53, 58, 66, 397 103, 110, 111, 118, 125, 143–44
Cintino, Robert, 354 Congress of Vienna (1815), 47, 207, 208,
Cipriano de Mosquera, Tomás, 252, 264 298
civilian vs. military fatalities, 298–301, constructivism, 46–47
300t; Iraq War, 444–45; in Korean Cooney, Mark, 50
War, 392; trends in, 410–11; in Correlates of War (CoW) research proj-
Vietnam War, 396, 401 ect, 13, 25, 145, 236, 287–88
civil wars: in America, 312, 320–25; in Cortés, Hernán, 230–31
France, 206–7; in Germany, 208; in- corvée labor: Ancient China, 94; Aztecs,
ternationalization of, 306–9; Japan, 227; Inca, 233
146; in Roman Republic, 82–84; in Costa Rica: border disputes, 238;
Spain, 207 Central American Wars, 253
Cixi, 91 coup-proofing: in Africa, 498; authori-
Clark, Christopher, 211–12 tarianism and, 133; in Imperial
Clark, Jessica, 69 China, 116, 129, 130–33, 144; Inca,
Claudius (Roman emperor), 66, 497 232, 498; in Muslim countries, 435–
Clauset, Aaron, 296 36, 498; one-party states and, 408; in
Clausewitz, Carl von, 10, 31, 45, 96, 274, Roman Republic, 70, 85, 87; weaken-
346, 486; On War, 272, 318–19 ing of armed forces for, 10
climate change, 478–80 Cramer, Joseph, 332
Clinton, Bill, 499 Crassus, 69, 84, 499
Cochet, François, 343 Crawford, Neta, 299
Coker, Christopher, 19, 21, 28 Creveld, Martin van, 367
Cold War: ideological power and, 215, Crimean War (1853–1856), 208
293; interventions and conflicts dur- Croesus of Lydia (king), 1
ing, 13–14, 267, 378–412; Latin Cromwell, Oliver, 188, 198
American interventions, 267; Muslim Crusades, 184
country interventions, 413–14. See Cuaspad, Battle of (1863), 252
also Korean War; Vietnam War Cuba, 281
590 Index

Cuitláhuac, 231 Dollard, John, 351, 352, 363

Curr, Edward, 291 Dominguez, Jorge, 238
Cyrus II (Persian king), 502 Donnell, John, 400, 404
Downes, Alexander, 34
Dalai Lama, 142 Draper, Robert, 437–38
Dalrymple, William, 203 drone warfare, 305–6, 417, 432, 445–47,
D’Altroy, Terence, 231, 234 455
Daoism, 103, 111, 142, 507 drug use by soldiers, 11, 315, 399
Davies, Norman, 187, 511 Du Ping, 387
decline of war, 271–310; European views Durham, William, 258
after Enlightenment, 271–75; liberal Durkheim, Emile, 8, 48, 228, 275, 411,
optimism and, 275–76; Pinker’s study 503, 505
of early history and Mongols, 276–77
De Crespigny, Rafe, 111, 113 Ebro, Treaty of (226 BCE), 79
defensive wars: Ancient China, 99; de- Eckhardt, William, 16, 283–84
fined, 3; Europe, 181, 193, 211, 218, Eckstein, Arthur, 55, 58, 69, 70, 72, 73,
221, 274; geopolitics of, 40; ideologi- 482
cal power and, 49, 351, 353, 510; economic power: American Civil War
Imperial China, 112, 115, 116, 124, and, 323; causes of war, 35–37; de-
126, 128, 130–32, 137, 141, 143, 488; fined, 4; Hundred Years’ War and,
Japan, 156–58, 159, 171, 174, 177; 192–93; as motive for war, 498–99; of
Latin America, 240, 243, 245, 257, Roman Republic, 62–64
268; offensive wars distinguished Ecuador: Cenepa War (1995), 258; Chile
from, 500–504; rationality of, 8, 36, and, 240; Ecuador–Peru Wars (1830s
423, 480, 484–85, 490, 513, 516; to 1990s), 256–58; Paquisha War
Realism and, 40, 44, 511; revisionism (1981), 257; Rio Protocol (1941) and,
and, 465; Roman Republic, 52–55, 56, 257; Santiago Declaration (1952),
61, 76–77, 85; soldiers’ experiences 251; War of the Cauca (1863), 252;
in, 317, 328, 338, 342, 358, 361, 386, Zarumilla War (1941), 257
388, 411; terrorism and, 436. See also Ecuador–Peru Wars (1830s to 1990s),
specific wars 256–58
Deng Xiaoping, 474 Edward the Confessor, 21
Denmark: Protestants in, 198; Schleswig Edward II (king of England), 189
Wars (1848–1851 & 1864), 209 Edward III (king of England), 189–91,
Desch, Michael, 35 194, 497
desertion: in American Civil War, 334– Edward VI (king of England), 199
35; consequences of, 320; fear and, Edwards, Paul, 388
314, 399; in Vietnam War, 399; in Eisenhower, Dwight, 392
World War I, 348; in World War II, El Cid, 182
355, 371–72 Elias, Norbert: The Process of Civilisation,
De Weerdt, Hilde, 129 276
Di Cosmo, Nicola, 122 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 188, 199
distributive power, 4 Ellenberg, Molly, 430
Dodwell, Brian, 431 Elliott, David, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405
 Index 591

Elliott, Mark, 138, 140 Falkenhayn, Erich von, 213, 345

El Salvador: Central American Wars, Falklands (Malvinas) War (1982–1983),
253; Soccer War (1969), 258–59 238, 259–62
Ember, Carol, 18 Fan Sui, 105
Ember, Melvin, 18 Fanon, Frantz, 275
emotions: as cause of war, 46–47; ideo- Farris, William, 149
logical power and, 50–51; patterns of Fazal, Tanisha, 208, 247, 295, 511
war and, 504–8. See also ideological fear: alcohol and drugs used to combat,
power 315; anarchy causing, 41–42, 482;
Engen, Robert, 367 desertion and, 314, 399; as dominant
England: homicide rates in, 301–2; battlefield emotion, 9, 312, 341, 351–
Hundred Years’ War, 189–96; imperi- 52, 360–61, 411; fighter pilots and,
alism and, 157, 202, 204, 205; medieval 375; “forward panic,” 22–23, 190,
warfare in, 185–86, 187–88; Norman 317, 340; ideological power and,
conquest, 183, 187; Protestants in, 50–51, 387, 504–5; inactivity causing,
198–99. See also Britain 395; insecurity causing, 46, 47, 137,
Erdogan, Recep, 421, 425, 470 159, 166, 178; military discipline and,
Eritrea: border disputes, 301; civilian vs. 72, 316, 326, 357; morale and, 341,
military fatalities in, 299–300, 300t 348–49, 499; morality and, 317–18,
Etemad, Bouda, 289 365; nonfiring and, 324–27, 363–64,
Ethiopia: border disputes, 301; civilian 365, 395–96; overfiring and, 368,
vs. military fatalities in, 299–300, 300t 410; peer-group coercion and, 319,
Etruscans, 57 333–34, 343–44, 369–70, 402–3;
Europe, 180–224; archaeological evi- political power and, 31; PTSD and,
dence of warfare in, 16; barbarian 398; rationality and, 125, 214; Roman
waves following fall of Roman Republic diplomacy built on, 60, 62,
Empire, 180–83; explanations for 86; skulkers and, 329. See also soldiers’
militarism and warfare in, 221–24; experiences
global war trends since 1945 and, Fearon, James, 38, 42, 497
293–94; Hundred Years’ War, 189–96; Fehrenbach, T. R., 388
imperialism conflicts, 202–10; medi- Ferdinand VII (king of Spain), 235
eval warfare, 183–89; military spend- Ferejohn, John, 154
ing in, 303; religious warfare, Ferguson, Brian, 16–17
196–202; soldiers’ experiences in ferocious vs. callous killing, 304–6
early modern period, 318–20; Thirty feudalism, 90, 107, 147, 181–82
Years’ War (1618–1648), 198, 288; fighter pilots: aborted missions, 375; ac-
World War I, 210–15; World War II, cident rates, 373; Korean War, 372–
215–20. See also specific countries 77, 391; task absorption by, 375–76;
European Union, 293, 306 World War II, 372–77
Evans, Raymond, 291 Finkel, David, 442
existential threats, 477–80 Finland, women soldiers in, 24
First Gulf War (1990–1991), 435
Fabius Maximus, 80 Five Pecks of Grain (religious move-
Fairbank, John, 118 ment), 112
592 Index

Flory, Stewart, 277 gender differences in warfare, 23–24,

“forward panic,” 22–23, 190, 317, 340 359
Fourth Macedonian War (150–148 Geneva Conventions, 12, 159
BCE), 59 Genghis Khan. See Chinggis Khan
France: arms exports by, 306; geopolitics: in Ancient China, 91–92, 93,
Burgundians in, 187; Catholics in, 104–5; causes of war, 39–46; elements
199; civil wars and revolutions in, of, 4–5; in Imperial China, 112–13,
206–7, 286–87; colonialism in Asia, 126; in Japan, 152; in Latin America,
157; European imperialism and, 206; 240; Roman Republic, 55–58
Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), George III (king of England), 21, 119
209; Hundred Years’ War, 189–96; George, Alexander, 386, 387
imperialism by, 202, 205; ISIS sup- Germany: arms exports by, 306;
port in, 432; Japanese imperialism Burgundians in, 187; civil wars and
and, 158; Latin American War of revolutions in, 208; European imperi-
Confederation (1836–1839) and, 250; alism and, 206; ISIS support in, 432;
medieval warfare in, 185–86; police homicides in, 302; post-WWII
Nagorno-Karabagh conflict and, 421; military spending limits in, 292–93;
police homicides in, 302; soldiers’ ex- religious warfare in, 198; World War
periences in early modern period, I and, 210–15, 337–51. See also Nazi
318–19; soldiers’ experiences in Germany
World War I, 337–51; World War I Gettysburg, Battle of (1863), 324, 334–
and, 210–15, 341; World War II and, 35
215–20 Gibler, Douglas, 241
Franchi, Tassio, 236 Gilbert, Gustave, 32
Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), 209 Gleditch, Nils, 299
Franklin, Benjamin, 1 Glenn, Russell, 385, 395–96
Frankopan, Peter, 278 Gloucester, Duke of, 186, 195
Franks, 181, 183, 184 Gochman, Charles, 236, 237
Franz Ferdinand (archduke), 211 Godwinson, Harold, 499
Free Syrian Army, 424 Goebbels, Joseph, 353
Friday, Karl, 146 Goemans, H. E., 242
Fritz, Stephen, 355 Goering, Hermann, 32
Fry, Douglas, 18 Goertz, Gary, 13
Fukuyama, Francis, 437 Goldstein, Joshua, 275, 293–94, 301,
479–80
Gaddafi, Muammar, 434, 450–51, 460 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 466
Gaius Laelius, 54 Goths, 181
Galtieri, Leopoldo, 260–61, 264, 497 Gouré, Leon, 403
García Moreno, Gabriel, 252 Gracchi brothers, 82–83
Garon, Sheldon, 165 Graeber, David, 20
Gat, Azar, 17, 18, 21–22, 275, 276, 287, Grafe, Regina, 241
294, 301 Graff, David, 116
Gauls, 53, 56, 84 Gramsci, Antonio, 120
Gaza Strip, 418 Gran Colombia, 236, 243, 252
 Index 593

Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, Henderson, Peter, 246, 265, 404

171, 176 Henderson, William, 402
Great Leap Forward (China), 282 Henry I (king of England), 184
Great Wall of China, 124 Henry II (king of England), 185
Greece: Peloponnesian War, 277; Henry IV (king of England), 194
Roman Republic and, 56, 57–58, 59, Henry V (king of England), 186, 190,
61, 71; soldiers’ experiences in, 316 194, 496, 497
greenhouse gases, 478–79 Henry VI (king of England), 496
Grey, Edward, 214 Henry VIII (king of England), 187–88,
Griffith, Paddy, 325, 326, 328 194, 199
Grinin, Leonid, 203–4 Hensel, Paul, 296–97
Grossman, Dave, 324, 325, 363 Herodotus, 1, 74
Grotius, Hugo, 201 Herring, Eric, 450
Gruen, Erich, 58–59, 65, 66 Hess, Earl, 320, 322, 328, 330, 333–34
Guatemala in Central American Wars, Hezbollah, 308, 424, 425, 426
252–53 Hideyoshi, Toyotomi, 116–17, 152–53,
guerilla warfare, 11, 23, 236, 257 155
Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 94, 273 Hilferding, Rudolf, 274
gunboat diplomacy, 157 Himmler, Heinrich, 353
Hirohito (Japanese emperor), 167, 170,
Habsburgs, 103, 189, 198–99, 205–6, 208 176
Hackworth, David, 395 Hitler, Adolf: balancing theory and, 103;
Haftel, Yoram, 268 ideological power and, 215, 216, 353–
Hagel, Chuck, 447 54; rationality of war and, 5–6, 8,
Hainault, Jacqueline, Countess of, 186 217–18; Soviet Union and, 216, 217,
Halifax, Lord, 217 496
Hamaguchi, Osachi, 165 Hobbesian anarchy, 40–41, 55, 181, 193,
Hamas, 418, 419, 426 200
Han Fei, 97, 99–100, 517; Han Feizi, 100 Hobhouse, Leonard, 274
Han dynasty, 110, 113, 116, 124, 126, Ho Chi Minh, 402
127, 130, 132, 135, 137, 143, 285 Holden, Robert, 236
Hannibal, 63, 69, 72, 79–80 Holland: imperialism and, 202, 204, 205;
Hanson, Victor, 277 Protestants in, 198
Harris, William, 57, 58, 69, 75 Holmes, Richard, 341
Harrison, Mark, 297 Holocaust, 218, 351, 417, 419
Hassig, Ross, 227 Holsti, Kalevi, 200, 209, 240
Hattenstone, Simon, 443–44 Holy Roman Empire, 184, 198
Hay, John, 508 homicide rates, 301–2
Hayes, Rutherford B., 248 Honduras: Central American Wars, 252–
hegemonic power: causes of war, 41; 53; Soccer War (1969), 258–59
Imperial China and, 120, 142; pat- Hong Kong, 473–74, 501
terns of war and, 482–84 Hong Xuezhi, 390
Heian period (Japan 794–1192), 145 Hoover, Herbert, 33
Hellbeck, Jochen, 356, 357, 359, 360–61 Houthis, 425, 458
594 Index

Howard, Michael, 42, 192, 201 (960–1279 CE), 125–33, 488; state
Hoyos, Dexter, 58–59, 73, 74, 75, 81 politics of, 110–12; tributary diplo-
Hsiang Shu, 92 macy in East and Southeast Asia,
Hsu, Cho-yun, 92 114–21; war-and-peace decisions,
Huang Lao, 112 112–14; Yuan dynasty (1271–1368
Huáscar, 234 CE), 133–47, 487
Hui, Victoria Tin-Bor, 103, 104, 105 imperial conquest wars: asymmetric war-
Hulagu Khan, 278 fare and, 508–9; decline of, 310; de-
Hull, Cordell, 173 fined, 3; Imperial China, 143; Japan,
Hundred Years’ War, 189–96 216; patterns of war and, 502, 508–9;
Hungary: in NATO, 466; Protestants in, rationality of, 489–90; Roman
199 Republic, 54, 87, 483; Russia’s invasion
Hunt, David, 401 of Ukraine (2022), 293–95, 301, 465–
Huntington, Samuel, 415 72. See also imperialism; specific wars
imperialism: in Africa, 210; British, 157,
Iberians, 184 202, 205; Chinese, 120; Dutch, 202,
Ibn Khaldun, 15, 25, 45–46, 121, 427, 204, 205; European, 202–10; French,
486, 491, 498, 502, 505–7 202, 205; in India, 203, 209; Japanese,
ICC (International Criminal Court), 12, 156–65; in Korea, 156–58, 160–61,
481 164, 166, 171; in Latin America, 235,
ICJ (International Court of Justice), 238, 236; Portuguese, 202, 204, 205, 220,
251, 301 235, 236; by Roman Republic, 58–60,
ideological power: American Civil War 73–82
and, 335; causes of war, 49–51; chival- improvised explosive devices (IEDs),
ric ideology, 182; defined, 4; 432, 439–40, 445
European imperialism and, 205; fear Inca, 231–35; asymmetric warfare and,
and, 50–51, 387, 504–5; immanent, 510; ideological power and, 507; in-
50; institutionalized, 50; Korean War frastructural power, 286
and, 393; patterns of war and, 504–8; India: border disputes, 301; British im-
racism and, 205; Roman Republic, perialism in, 203, 209; colonial con-
64–67; transcendent, 50; Vietnam flicts in, 290; military spending in,
War and, 401–2; in Western Europe, 303; women as soldiers in, 24
185; World War I and, 505; World Industrial Revolution, 204, 205, 339
War II and, 218–19, 352–53, 370 Indus Valley civilization, 27
IEDs (improvised explosive devices), infrastructural power: in Ancient China,
432, 439–40, 445 104; in Europe, 185; in Imperial
Imperial China, 109–44; barbarians of China, 110, 129, 140; in Latin
northern frontier and, 121–33; America, 246, 251; modernization of
Chanyuan Covenant (1005), 128; civil wars and, 284–86, 303; in Roman
wars, 498; infrastructural power in, Republic, 64, 68–69; violence and,
285; northern frontier, 121–25; Qing 302–3
dynasty (1636–1912 CE), 137–42, Inoue, Junnosuke, 165
487; Sino-Russian Border War Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
(1652–1689), 142; Song dynasty Change (IPCC), 478
 Index 595

International Court of Justice (ICJ), 238, 159–65; Genpei War (1180–1185),

251, 301 146; Imperial China’s tributary diplo-
International Criminal Court (ICC), 12, macy and, 114–15, 116–17, 119; in-
481 formal imperialism period
Iran: Islamic Revolution in, 414–15; nu- (1868–1904), 156–58; medieval war-
clear program in, 460, 464; Shi’a fare, 145–47; Meiji Restoration, 156;
Muslims in, 414, 423; Soviet invasion militarism rampant period (1936–
of, 215; Syrian civil war and, 424; 1945), 165–77; Nanjing Massacre
U.S. interventions and, 457–58 (1937), 176; post-WWII military
Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), 416, 423 spending limits in, 292–93; Russo-
Iraq: First Gulf War (1990–1991), 435; Japanese War (1904–1905), 339; self-
invasion of Kuwait, 295; ISIS in, 427; isolation of, 27; Separation Edict
Islamic sectarian conflict in, 426, (1591), 155; South China Sea dis-
449–50; Shi’a Muslims in, 423; Sunni putes and, 475–76; Tokugawa Peace
Muslims in, 423 (1603–1868), 155–56, 483; Warring
Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (U.S.), 435 States (Sengoku) period (1467–1590),
Iraq War (U.S.), 6, 299, 417, 436–38 147–55; Washington Naval Treaties
Ireland: medieval warfare in, 187–88; (1922), 161–62; World War II and,
potato famine, 188; women soldiers 215–20; Yuan dynasty clashes with,
in, 24 136
Irigoin, Maria, 241 Jews: Holocaust and, 218, 351, 417, 419;
Iroquois Nations’ League, 34 in Israel, 417–20
Ishiwara, Kanji, 162–63, 167, 169, 170 jihadi movements, 415, 426–34
ISIS, 305–6, 308, 415, 424, 425, 426–34 Jinchuan Tibetans, 140
Islam. See Muslims Jin dynasty, 130–32
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Joan of Arc, 191
(Iran), 415, 423 John (king of England), 185
Israel: Arab-Israeli Wars, 417–20; Islamic John II (king of France), 195
sectarian conflict and, 425; Nagorno- Johnson, Lyndon, 393, 406, 494
Karabagh conflict and, 421; nuclear Johnston, Alistair, 113
program in, 419–20; Six-Day War Josephus, 318
(1967), 431; U.S. alliance with, 419– Joveyni, 279
20, 456–57 Julius Caesar, 64–65, 66, 69, 84
Italy: civil wars and revolutions in, 208; Junger, Sebastian, 369, 439
in Holy Roman Empire, 198; imperi- Justin, 74
alism and, 204
Kamakura dynasty (1192–1603 CE), 146
Jacobites, 188 Kang, David, 114, 115, 117
James IV (Scotland), 193–94 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 44, 46, 200, 269, 271,
James VI (Scotland) and I (England), 188 293
Japan: archaeological evidence of war- Kaplan, Stephen, 378
fare in, 16; cadastral reforms, 150; Kato, Tomosaburo, 163
embargoes against, 172; escalating Katzenstein, Peter, 47
imperialism period (1905–1936), Kaufman, Ralph, 363
596 Index

Kay, Philip, 64 Lacina, Bethany, 299

Keegan, John, 316, 317 Laderman, Charlie, 217
Keeley, Lawrence, 16–17 Laidley, Major, 324–25
Kenya: archaeological evidence of Laitin, David, 38
warfare in, 16; colonial conflicts in, Lalman, David, 44
289 Lamers, Jeroen, 152
Kerensky Provisional Government Latin America, 225–70; Aztecs, 225–31;
(Russia), 24 Beagle Channel conflict (1982–1983),
Kershaw, Ian, 174, 216, 217–18, 353 260–62; border disputes in, 237–38;
Keynesian economics, 166 Central American Wars (1876, 1885,
Khan emperors of Imperial China: Qing 1906–1907), 252–53; Chaco War
dynasty (1636–1912 CE), 137–42; (1932–1935), 253–55; Ecuadorian–
Yuan dynasty (1271–1368 CE), Columbian War (War of the Cauca)
133–47 (1863), 252; Ecuador–Peru Wars
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 414 (1830s to 1990s), 256–58; explana-
Khosrokhavar, Farhad, 430, 432 tions for militarism and warfare in,
Kiangxi (Chinese emperor), 138 235–43; Falklands (Malvinas) War
Kijuro, Shidehara, 162 (1982–1983), 259–62; homicide rates
Kim Il Sung, 380 in, 302; Inca, 231–35; interstate wars
Kimber, Richard G., 18, 291 in, 236–37; Leticia War (1932–1933),
King, Anthony, 365, 367, 384 256; Platine War (1851–1852), 244–
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 399 45; postcolonial era, 235–52, 501;
Kissinger, Henry, 407 precolonial empires, 225–35; Soccer
Knights, Michael, 433 War (1969), 258–59; Spanish civil
Konoe, Fumimaro, 169–70, 172, 173 wars and, 207; U.S. Mutual Security
Korea: as “hermit kingdom,” 27; Programs, 268; War of Confederation
Imperial China’s tributary diplomacy (1836–1839), 249–50; War of the
and, 114–15, 116–17, 119; Japanese Pacific (1879–1883), 250–51; War of
imperialism and, 156–58, 160–61, the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), 245–
164, 166, 171; Japan’s Warring States 49. See also specific countries
Period and, 153. See also North League of Nations, 161, 164, 167, 256
Korea; South Korea Lebanon: Hezbollah in, 426; Islamic sec-
Korean War: casualties and fatalities in, tarian conflict in, 426; Israeli incur-
295, 392; Colombia sending soldiers sion (1982), 416
to, 237; fighter pilots in, 372–77, 391; Lebow, Richard Ned, 43, 47, 485–86, 504
rationality of, 490; soldiers’ experi- Lee, Ji-Young, 117
ences in, 379–93 Lee, Robert E., 327, 332, 333, 335
Korotayev, Andrey, 203–4 LeMay, Curtis, 176
Kosovo, NATO intervention in, 307 Lemke, Douglas, 236
Kublai Khan, 116, 120–21, 135–36, Lenin, Vladimir, 274
279–80 Lepidus, 84
Kudo, Timothy, 441 Lepre, George, 399
Kuwait, Iraq’s invasion of, 295, 435 Leticia War (1932–1933), 256
Kyrgyzstan, border disputes in, 301 Leuchars, Chris, 246
 Index 597

Levy, Jack, 25–26, 33, 286 Manning, Chandra, 320, 323

Lewis, Mark, 90, 102 Mansoor, Peter, 370
Li Xiaobing, 386, 391 Mao Zedong: Great Leap Forward and,
Liang dynasty, 126 282; Korean War and, 380, 382–83,
Liao dynasty, 126–30, 133 387, 390; Marxism and, 275; revision-
liberalism: causes of war, 46–47; Imperial ism and, 474
China and, 120 Maoz, Zeev, 236, 237
Libya, intervention in, 307, 450–51 Mapasingue, Treaty of (1860), 256
Lincoln, Abraham, 321 Mares, David, 236, 237, 238, 241, 257,
Linderman, Gerald, 320, 322–23, 329–30 258, 261, 267
Litz, Brett, 442 Marius, 70, 83
Livy, 67, 79–80 Mark Anthony, 69, 84
Locke, John, 38, 41 Marshall, Monty, 296, 299
Loez, André, 343 Marshall, S. L. A., 324, 328, 346, 361–63,
López, Carlos Antonio, 246 365, 367–68, 372–73, 385–86, 396,
Lord’s Resistance Army, 308 487
Lorge, Peter, 113–14, 127, 128 Marwick, Arthur, 219
Louis XI (king of France), 278 Marx, Karl, 90, 272; 18th Brumaire of
Louis XIV (king of France), 103, 201 Louis Bonaparte, 39
Lu Wenhuan, 279–80 Marxist theory, 6, 33, 274–75, 360, 482,
Luard, Evan, 25–26, 51, 192, 198, 200, 488 509
Lucanians, 54–55 mass-mobilization warfare, 219
Luther, Martin, 196 Matilda (empress), 185
Lynn, John, 192 Mattern, Susan, 65, 66
Maurin, Jules, 343
MacArthur, Douglas, 381–83, 390 Maya, 26–27, 231
Macartney, George, 119 Mazzuca, Sebastián, 239, 246, 250, 266
MacDonald, Ramsay, 12 McCarthy, Joseph, 380
MacMillan, Margaret, 43, 219–20, 301 McEwan, Gordon, 231
Macron, Emmanuel, 434 McNamara, Robert, 401
Magna Carta (1215), 185 McNaughton, John T., 401
Mahoney, Kevin, 386, 388, 389 McPherson, James, 320, 322, 328–29,
Malešević, Siniša, 20, 23, 284, 324, 341, 331–33
363 Mead, Corey, 447
Malory, Thomas, 182 Mearsheimer, John, 40, 42, 43
Malvinas (Falklands) War (1982–1983), mediation: in Imperial China, 119;
259–62 Japanese militarism and, 165; in Latin
Mamertines, 76 America, 240, 244, 251, 253–54, 256,
Manchu dynasty, 122, 138, 139, 144 260, 266, 501, 514; League of
Mann, Michael, 204, 238; The Dark Side Nations and, 256; in Nagorno-
of Democracy, 34; Incoherent Empire, 6; Karabagh conflict, 421; patterns of
The Sources of Social Power, 4, 36, 64, war and, 486; rationality of war and,
102, 183, 211, 338, 379 486, 490; in Roman Republic, 54, 61;
Mann, Thomas, 273 United Nations and, 19
598 Index

medieval warfare: in Europe, 183–89; in Mongols: Ancient China and, 91, 101;
Japan, 145–47 casualties and fatalities of conflicts,
Meiji Restoration, 156, 178 278–80, 281t, 285; Imperial China
Melchior, Aislinn, 314 and, 121–33; infrastructural power,
Mencius, 97, 98 285–86; Qing dynasty and, 137–38.
MERCOSUR, 268 See also Khan emperors of Imperial
Merridale, Catherine, 357, 359 China
Middle East: global war trends in, 297; Monroe Doctrine, 268
Roman Republic aggression in, 60– Montaigne, Michel de, 201
61; transnational jihadist wars in, 426. Montesquieu, 272
See also specific countries Moore, Barrington, 155
MIDs. See Militarized Interstate morale: fear and, 341, 348–49, 499; in
Disputes Korean War, 384–85; in Vietnam
Midway, Battle of (1942), 177 War, 399–400, 406; in World War I,
Migdal, Joel, 294–95 348, 349; in World War II, 370–71
Miles, Richard, 73, 74 morality: American Civil War, 328;
militarism: defined, 12; in Europe, 182; Confucius on, 98; fear and, 317–18,
in Japan, 165–77; in Roman Republic, 365; ideological power and, 506–7; in
52–62, 66, 85–88 Vietnam War, 396, 398; of
Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs): Wehrmacht soldiers in World War II,
in Ancient China, 89; defined, 13–14; 354–55; of World War II Allied sol-
in Japan, 145; in Latin America, 237– diers, 365–66; World War I soldiers’
38; trends in, 295–96 experiences and, 348–49
military discipline: fear and, 72, 316, 326, More, Thomas: Utopia, 33
357; soldiers’ experiences, 313–14, Morgan, David, 278
319, 410 Mosca, Gaetano, 274
military justice, 347 Moskos, Charles, 369–70, 394–95
military power: as cause of war, 35–37; Mozambique: al-Shabaab in, 433;
defined, 9–13; routinized coercion civilian vs. military fatalities in,
within armed forces, 10–11; rules re- 299, 300t
straining, 12–13 Mueller, John, 275, 293–94, 301
Mill, John Stuart, 272 Mughal Empire, 203
Millett, Lewis, 384 Muhammad (prophet), 415
Mills, C. Wright, 275 Muhammad II (Persian shah), 497
Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 112–13, 115, Murphy, Audie, 364
118, 125–26, 132, 136–37 Muslims: Arab-Israeli Wars, 417–20; au-
Minsk Accords (2014), 470–71 thoritarianism and, 414, 435, 436,
Mithridates VI (king), 53, 69 454, 462; in Balkans, 181; Iberians
Mitre, Bartolomé, 246 and, 184; Nagorno-Karabagh con-
Mitts, Tamar, 432 flict, 420–22; in Ottoman Empire,
Mo Tzu, 98–99 199; recent wars in Muslim countries,
Moctezuma, 230 413–63; sectarian wars, 422–26. See
Moltke, Helmuth von, 213, 272, 339, also Shi’a Muslims; Sunni Muslims
486–87 Mussolini, Benito, 216
 Index 599

Myanmar: Imperial China’s tributary di- Normans, 183, 184

plomacy and, 115, 119, 141; refugees North Korea: Korean War and, 379–93;
from, 301 nuclear program in, 460; as U.S. blind
My Lai massacre (1968), 396–97 spot, 454–55
nuclear weapons, 176, 179, 278, 305,
Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, 420–22 380, 473
Nakao, Hisashi, 16 Nye, Joseph, 461
Namibia, colonial conflicts in, 290
Nanjing Massacre (1937), 176 Obama, Barack: Afghanistan War and,
Napoleon Bonaparte, 103, 206–7, 208, 448; China and, 473; drone warfare
298–99, 318–19, 486–87, 503 expanded by, 446; Libya and, 451;
nationalism: as cause of war, 30, 48; in military spending and, 453; Saudi
China, 162, 170, 474; in Europe, 191, Arabia and, 458
206, 215, 286–87; in Latin America, O’Brien, Tim, 408
246, 248, 257–58, 259, 265; overopti- Operation Barbarossa (Nazi Germany),
mism and, 48; in Russia, 468; World 173
War I and, 215; World War II and, Operation Desert Storm (1991), 416
358 Operation Enduring Freedom,
National Security Council (U.S.), 381 438–39
Native Americans: American Civil War Operation Iraqi Freedom, 438–39
and, 332; casualties and fatalities Orbán, Viktor, 470
from colonial conflicts, 281t, 282, Organization of African Unity (OAU),
289 269
NATO: Cold War and, 293; expansion Organization of American States, 258
of, 466–67; global war trends and, Ørsted-Jensen, Robert, 291
297; Libya and, 451; Syria and, 308 Otte, Thomas, 211, 212, 213, 214
Nazi Germany: Operation Barbarossa, Otterbein, Keith, 19
173; soldiers’ experiences in, 353–55; Ottoman Empire: Bosnia-Herzegovina
World War II and, 215–20 and, 209; Hungary’s alliance with,
Neiss, Oliver, 374 199; rise to power of, 189; Russia and,
Netanyahu, Benjamin, 418, 419 208; Shi’a Muslims in, 422; Treaty of
Netherlands: colonialism in Asia, 157; in Berlin (1885), 210
Holy Roman Empire, 198 Otto the Great, 182
New Zealand, colonial conflicts in, 291 overfiring, 368, 410
Nicaragua: border disputes, 238; Central overoptimism, 48–49, 192, 506
American Wars, 253 Owen, John, 49, 197, 206, 209, 210, 215,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7 416
Nivelle, Robert, 347 Owen, Wilfred, 340–41
Nixon, Richard, 399, 407
Nobunaga, Oda, 149, 150–53 Palestinians, 417–20
nonfiring, 324–27, 346, 361–63, 385, Palmer, David, 257, 258, 267
395–96, 444 Pan-American Union, 254
nonstate actors, 296–97, 416. See also spe- Pape, Robert, 417
cific organizations Paquisha War (1981), 257
600 Index

Paraguay: Chaco War (1932–1935), 253– Pétain, Philippe, 348

55, 295; Platine War (1851–1852), Philip the Good (duke of Burgundy), 186
244–45; War of the Triple Alliance Philip V (Macedon), 58, 80
(1864–1870), 245–49 Philip VI (France), 189
Pareto, Vilfredo, 274 Philippines: Imperial China’s tributary
Paris Agreement (2015), 478 diplomacy and, 118; Japanese milita-
Parker, Harold, 207 rism and, 160, 174
Parsons, William Sterling, 305 Phoenicians, 57, 74
path dependence, 39, 152, 513 Pilkington, Nathan, 73, 74, 77
patterns of war, 481–517; anarchy and Pines, Yuri, 100
hegemony, 482–84; ideological-emo- Pinker, Steven, 22, 275, 276–83, 281t,
tional power, 504–8; motives for war, 287, 293–94, 301
498–500; nature of rulers, 495–98; Pizarro, Francisco, 234
political power and, 491–98; rational- Platine War (1851–1852), 244–45
ity, 484–91; symmetric vs. asymmetric Plato, 15
warfare, 508–15; types of offensive Plutarch, 84
war, 500–504 Podany, Amanda, 60–61
Patton, George, 369 Poland: in NATO, 466; Soviet invasion
Paulus, Friedrich, 357 of, 215
Pax Romana, 84–85 police homicides, 302
Peace of Westphalia (1648), 200, 512 political correctness, 7–8
Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), political power: causes of war, 31–35; de-
297 fined, 4; patterns of war and, 491–98.
Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 172–75, 178, See also geopolitics
217 Polybius, 54, 58, 61, 66, 73, 75, 76–77,
Pedro II (Brazilian emperor), 244, 246 78, 79, 81
Peloponnesian War, 277 Pompeo, Mike, 456
Peng Dehaui, 381, 390, 391 Pompey, 84
People’s Liberation Army (PLA, China): Portales, Diego, 249–50
Korean War and, 379–83, 386–93; Portuguese imperialism, 202, 204, 205,
Vietnam War and, 405, 407 220, 235, 236
People’s Liberation Front (PLF, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
Vietnam), 394, 400–408 314, 348, 397–98, 442–43, 446
Perdue, Peter, 138, 139 Powell, Colin, 438
Peru: border disputes, 238; Cenepa War power (generally): collective vs. distribu-
(1995), 258; Ecuador–Peru Wars tive, 4; economic, 4; ideological, 4;
(1830s to 1990s), 256–58; Leticia War military, 4, 9–13; over others vs.
(1932–1933), 256; Paquisha War through others, 4; political, 4
(1981), 257; Rio Protocol (1941) and, power transition theory, 44
257; Santiago Declaration (1952), praetorian guards, 85
251; War of Confederation (1836– prisoners of war (POWs): Allied soldiers’
1839), 240, 249–50; War of the experiences in World War II and,
Pacific (1879–1883), 250–51; 366; Korean War, 386, 391, 392;
Zarumilla War (1941), 257 World War I, 341
 Index 601

Protestants, 196–202; Peace of Westphalia Reagan, Ronald, 261

(1648), 200; Reformation, 196 Realist theory: anarchy and, 482–84;
Prussia: Austro-Prussian War (1866), Ancient China, 92; causes of war, 39–
209; expansion of, 205, 208; Franco- 46; hegemony in, 482–84; Imperial
Prussian War (1870–1871), 209; im- China and, 112–13, 120, 125–33;
perialism and, 205; militarism of, 72; Latin America, 240–41; Punic Wars
Schleswig Wars (1848–1851 & 1864), and, 73; rationality of war, 6; symmet-
209 ric warfare and, 513; World War I,
Ptolemaic kingdom, 70, 73 211, 214
PTSD. See posttraumatic stress disorder Reese, Roger, 357–58
Punic Wars (Roman Republic), 59, 73– refugees, 300–301, 425
82, 277, 487 regime change/reinforcement wars:
Putin, Vladimir, 295, 465–72, 492, 494, defined, 3; Europe, 197, 203, 206,
497, 506 209–10, 215, 222; Imperial China,
Pyrrhus of Epirus, 55, 75 117; imperialism and, 209–10,
222; Japan, 160, 169–70; Latin
Qatar and Syrian civil war, 424 America, 244, 245–46, 249–50,
Qianlong (Chinese emperor), 119, 138– 252–53, 263–65, 267; motives for,
40, 142, 285, 502, 509 500–501; Muslim countries, 413–17,
Qin dynasty, 103–5, 108, 110, 112, 124 424–26, 434–38, 450, 457, 462–63;
Qing dynasty (1636–1912 CE), 110, Roman Republic, 56–57, 60, 85;
113–15, 118, 137–42, 144, 487 U.S. interventions, 295, 307, 434–38,
450, 454–55, 490. See also specific
raiding wars: Ancient China, 101; asym- wars
metric warfare and, 509; defined, 3; regional differences in warfare, 24–28
ecological contexts for war and, 38; Regional Integration Agreements (RIAs),
economic motives for, 35–36, 490, 268
516; Europe, 180–81, 190–91; Reiter, Dan, 34, 485
Imperial China, 122–24, 127, 137, religious warfare: in Europe, 196–202;
143–44; Latin America, 231; motives European militarism and, 182; ideo-
for, 35–36, 38, 490, 499, 500; patterns logical power and, 50, 507; Muslim
of war and, 509, 516; Roman sectarian wars, 422–26
Republic, 53, 56, 60; universality of revisionism. See border wars
war and, 18. See also specific wars Rhee, Syngman, 380, 381
Rand Corporation, 400, 403 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 218
Rangwala, Glen, 450 Richard the Lionheart, 182
Rankin, Jeannette, 175 Richard II (king of England), 190
rape as warfare, 35–36, 63 Richard III (king of England), 499
rationality: fear and, 125, 214; Korean Ridgway, Matthew, 390
War, 490; patterns of war and, 484– Rio Protocol (1941), 257
91; value rationality, 8, 199, 474, 489; Rio Treaty (1947), 268
Vietnam War, 490; of war, 5–8; World Rogers, Will, 14
War I, 489; World War II, 5–6, 8, Roman Empire, 84–85
217–18, 489 Romanovs, 189, 205, 213
602 Index

Roman Republic, 52–88; aggression and and, 208; Russo-Japanese War (1904–
militarism in, 58–62; art of war for, 1905), 339; Syria and, 308; Treaty of
67–72; citizenship rights in, 70–71, Berlin (1885), 210; Ukraine invasion
83, 86; civil wars, 82–84; class identi- (2022), 295, 465–72; women as sol-
ties and conflicts in, 67–68, 82–84, diers in, 24; World War I and, 210–
87–88; economic motives for war, 62– 15, 341
64; explanations for militarism and Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905),
warfare in, 52–62, 85–88; fetiales sys- 339
tem in, 54; Fourth Macedonian War
(150–148 BCE), 59; geopolitical sys- Sadatoshi, Tomioka, 174
tem and militarism in, 55–58; gran- Saddam Hussein, 6, 295, 423, 426, 428,
deur and glory as motive for war, 434, 436–37, 494, 497, 510
64–67; ideological motives for war, Saguntines, 79
64–67; infrastructural power in, 285; Saint-Fuscien, Emmanuel, 347
legionary economy, 64, 70; Punic Saint-Simon, Henri de, 272
Wars, 59, 63, 70, 73–82, 277, 487; Salamanca, Daniel, 254–55
Second Macedonian War (200–196 Sallust, 53, 65–66, 67
BCE), 59; Seleucid War (192–188 Samnites, 54–55, 56
BCE), 59; self-defense and militarism samurai, 153, 155
in, 52–55; Social Wars (91–87 BCE), Sanborn, Joshua, 349
83–84; soldiers’ experiences in, 314– Sand Creek massacre (1864), 332
18; Third Macedonian War (171–168 Santiago Declaration (1952), 251
BCE), 59, 65 Sapa Inca, 231–32, 233
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 171–72, 173, Sargon of Akkad, 502
175, 217, 218, 494 Sarkees, Meredith, 288
Roosevelt, Theodore, 508 Saudi Arabia: Islamic sectarian conflict
Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 244–45, 264 in, 423; Sunni Muslims in, 415;
Rosenbluth, Frances, 154 Syrian civil war and, 424, 425; U.S.
Rosenstein, Nathan, 80 alliance with, 457–58; Yemen and,
Roser, Max, 294 425
Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, María, Scheidel, Walter, 57, 65, 68–69, 86–87,
231, 232, 234 122, 123, 199
Rottman, Gordon, 325 Scheina, Robert, 243
Rousseau, Frédéric, 342–43, 344, 345, Scheler, Max, 273
349 Schleswig Wars (1848–1851 & 1864),
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15, 18 209
Rush, Robert, 370 Schumpeter, Joseph, 272
Russia: arms exports by, 306; Bolshevik Scotland, medieval warfare in, 188
Revolution in, 161, 164, 215; Scott, James, 19
European imperialism and, 206; SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), 424
global war trends and, 297; Japanese Second Macedonian War (200–196
imperialism and, 158, 159, 160; mili- BCE), 59
tary spending in, 303; NATO expan- Seleucids, 70, 73
sion and, 466–67; Ottoman Empire Seleucid War (192–188 BCE), 59
 Index 603

self-defense wars. See defensive wars Small, Melvin, 485

Sengoku (Warring States) Period (Japan smallpox epidemic, 231
1467–1590), 147–55 Smith, Adam, 272
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Smith, Leonard, 342, 346–47
436, 494 Soccer War (1969), 258–59, 264
Serbia: NATO intervention in, 307; Söderberg, Patrik, 18
World War I and, 210–11, 213 Solano López, Francisco, 246–47, 248–
Seville Statement on Violence (1986), 20 49, 264
Shalit, Ben, 368 soldiers’ experiences, 311–412;
Shang Yang, 97, 106 Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, 438–47;
sharia law, 428, 430 American Civil War, 320–35; buddy
Shaw, Martin, 444 theory, 369–70, 386, 410, 505; deser-
Sheehan-Miles, Charles, 440 tion, 320, 334–35, 348, 371–72;
Sheldon, Jack, 345, 349 drilling and disciplining, 313–14,
shell-shock, 342, 397 319, 410; early modern period in
Shenzong (Chinese emperor), 130 Europe, 318–20; fighter pilots,
Sherman, William Tecumseh, 45, 312, 372–77; Korean War, 379–93; long-
331–32 term trends in, 409–12; military
Sherwood, John Darrell, 375–76 justice and, 347; nonfiring, 324–26,
Shi Huang, 106, 110, 502, 503 346, 361–63, 385, 395–96, 444; peer-
Shi’a Muslims: in Azerbaijan, 423; in group coercion, 333–34, 343–44,
Bahrain, 423, 424; in Iran, 414, 423; 369–70, 402–3; recruitment, 313;
Iran–Iraq War and, 416; in Iraq, 423; Roman Republic, 314–18; skulkers,
ISIS and, 427–28; Nagorno- 327–29; Vietnam War, 393–408;
Karabagh conflict, 420–22; in World War I, 337–51; World War II,
Ottoman Empire, 422; sectarian wars, 351–77
422–26; in Syria, 423; U.S. interven- Somalia: al-Shabaab in, 433; civilian vs.
tions and, 457 military fatalities in, 299, 300t; inter-
Shils, Edward, 370 vention in, 452; NATO intervention
Shining Path, 257 in, 307
Shunroku, Hata, 171 Sombart, Werner, 273, 274; Händler und
Simmel, Georg, 273 Helden, 31
Simms, Brendan, 217 Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), 110, 112–
Simon, Max, 358–59 13, 125–33, 279–80
Singer, David, 485 Soule, Silas, 332
Sino-Russian Border War (1652–1689), South Africa, homicide rates in, 302
142 South America. See Latin America
Six-Day War (1967), 431 South American Free Trade Area, 268
Skaff, Jonathan, 114 South China Sea, 475–76
skulkers, 327–29 Southeast Asia: Japanese militarism and,
slavery: American Civil War and, 321; 171; tributary diplomacy by China,
European imperialism and, 205; 114–21. See also specific countries
Roman Republic and, 62, 63 South Korea and Korean War, 379–93
Slim, William, 361 South Sudan, refugees from, 301
604 Index

Soviet Union: Cold War interventions in Sumatra, Japanese militarism and, 174
Muslim countries, 413–14; Sumner, William, 272
Commission on the History of the Sun Bin, 97, 144; The Art of Warfare, 100
Great Patriotic War, 356; global war Sun Tzu, 9, 37, 99–101, 103, 144; The
trends since 1945 and, 293–94; Art of War, 89, 95, 96
Nagorno-Karabagh conflict and, Sunni Muslims: in Bahrain, 424; Iran–
420–21; Non-Aggression Pact with Iraq War and, 416; in Iraq, 423; ISIS
Nazi Germany, 216; soldiers’ experi- and, 427–28, 430; in Saudi Arabia,
ences in World War II, 356–61; 415; sectarian wars, 422–26; U.S. in-
women as soldiers in World War II, terventions and, 457
359; World War II and, 215–20 Sweden: Protestants in, 198; wars of, 26
Spain: archaeological evidence of war- Syria: Arab Spring protests in, 424;
fare in, 16; Aztecs and, 229–31; civil Hezbollah in, 426; internationaliza-
wars and revolutions in, 207, 215; in tion of civil war in, 308; ISIS in, 427;
Holy Roman Empire, 198; imperial- refugees from, 301; Shi’a Muslims in,
ism and, 202, 204, 205; Inca and, 234; 423
Latin American imperialism by, 220, Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), 424
235; medieval warfare in, 184; women
soldiers in, 24 Tacitus, 53, 65, 67
Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), 351–52 Taiwan: Chinese revisionism and, 474,
Spanish flu epidemic (1918), 350 475, 477, 501; Imperial China’s tribu-
Sparks, Blair, 374 tary diplomacy and, 118; Japanese
Speckhard, Anne, 430 imperialism and, 157, 161, 164, 166,
Speer, Albert, 353 171
Spencer, Herbert, 272 Taizong (Chinese emperor), 127–28, 497
Spring and Autumn Period (Ancient Taizu (Chinese emperor), 126, 127, 131,
China 771–476 BCE), 91–96 488
Stalin, Joseph, 216, 217, 356–58, 380, Tajikistan, border disputes in, 301
496 Takahashi, Korekiyo, 165–66
Stam, Allan, 34, 485 Talbot, John, Earl of Shrewsbury, 196
Steckel, Francis, 367 Taliban, 415, 427, 433, 434, 436, 441,
Stephen of Blois, 184–85 448–49
Steplyk, Jonathan, 320 Tang dynasty, 110, 112, 113, 114, 124,
Stimson, Henry, 173 126, 132
Stimson Doctrine (U.S.), 171 Tanzania, colonial conflicts in, 290
Stouffer, Samuel, 363, 369, 370, 372 Tarentines, 54–55
Strachan, Hew, 338 taxes: Ancient China, 92; European im-
Sudan: archaeological evidence of war- perialism and, 204, 206; Imperial
fare in, 15–16; civilian vs. military fa- China, 134; Japan, 150, 153; Roman
talities in, 299, 300t; Yemen and, 425 Republic, 61–62, 70
Suetonius, 65 Taylor, Maxwell, 406
Sui dynasty, 116, 124, 132 Taylor, Michael, 66–67, 70
Suleimani, Qassim, 459 Tenet, George, 438
Sulla, 83 Terrenato, Nicola, 56–57, 74
 Index 605

terrorism: jihadi movements and, 415, ing and, 453; pardoning of military
426–34; September 11, 2001 attacks, officers by, 443; Saudi Arabia and,
436, 494. See also specific terrorist 458; Trans-Pacific Partnership and,
groups and organizations 477
Thatcher, Margaret, 259, 261, 264 Tumu Fortress, Battle of (1449), 136
Third Macedonian War (171–168 BCE), Túpac Inca Yupanqui, 232, 502
59 Turchin, Peter, 101
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), 198, Turkey, Nagorno-Karabagh conflict and,
288, 298 421
Thome, Helmut, 302 tyranny of history, 39, 241
Thucydides, 55, 277
Thutmose III, 502 Ukraine: refugees from, 300; Russian in-
Tibet: Chinese revisionism and, 474, vasion (2022), 293–94, 301, 465–72
501; Imperial China and, 137–38, 140 United Kingdom. See Britain
Tiglath-pileser III (Assyrian king), 502 United Nations: aggressive war and, 12;
Tilly, Charles, 204, 238 High Commissioner for Refugees,
Timur the Great, 501 300, 425; Korean War and, 380, 383–
TINs (transnational ideological net- 86; liberalism and, 46, 47; peacekeep-
works), 49, 197 ing forces, 294, 301; Yemen and, 425
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 290 United States: Afghanistan War, 299,
Tojo, Hideki, 173, 174 307, 417, 438–49; arms exports by,
Tokugawa Ieyasu, 117, 153, 155–56 306; blind spots in geopolitical
Tokugawa Peace (Japan, 1603–1868), choices, 454–62; Chaco War (1932–
155–56, 483 1935) and, 255; Civil War, soldiers’
Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace, 319–20 experiences in, 312, 320–35; Cold
Tomedi, Rudy, 384 War interventions in Muslim coun-
Townsend, Camilla, 229 tries, 413–14; consequences of inter-
transnational ideological networks ventions by, 448–53; fighter pilots in
(TINs), 49, 197 Korean War, 375–77; fighter pilots in
transnational jihadi wars, 426–34 World War II, 373–76; First Gulf
Trans-Pacific Partnership, 477 War (1990–1991), 435; global war
Treaty of Berlin (1885), 210 trends and, 293–94, 297; homicide
Treaty of Ebro (226 BCE), 79 rates in, 301–2; interventions in
Treaty of Mapasingue (1860), 256 Muslim countries, 434–62; Iraq War,
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 273 6, 299, 417, 436–38; ISIS and, 432–
tributary diplomacy: Aztecs, 227–28; 33; Israel’s alliance with, 419–20,
Carthaginians, 77–78; by China in 456–57; Japanese imperialism and,
East and Southeast Asia, 114–21; eco- 158; Japanese militarism and, 169,
nomic power and, 36 171–74; Korean War, 379–93; in
Truman, Harry, 278, 380, 392 Latin America, 267–68; Latin
Trump, Donald: Afghanistan War and, American War of Confederation
448–49; China and, 473; draft avoid- (1836–1839) and, 250; military
ance by, 499; drone warfare expanded spending in, 303; Mutual Security
by, 446; Iran and, 459; military spend- Programs, 268; Nagorno-Karabagh
606 Index

United States (continued) Wang, Yuan-kang, 112, 118, 120, 125–

conflict and, 421; Native American 26, 131, 136–37
casualties and fatalities from colonial Wang, Zhenping, 113
conflicts, 281t, 282, 289; Oriental war: civilian vs. military fatalities, 298–
Exclusion Act (1924), 164; 301, 300t; defined, 13–14; in earliest
Philippines and, 160; police homi- human societies, 15–23; ferocious vs.
cides in, 302; Rio Protocol (1941) callous killing, 304–6; gender differ-
and, 257; soldiers’ experiences in ences, 23–24; global trends since
World War II, 369–72; Syria and, 1945, 292–98; just vs. unjust, 12–13;
308, 425; Treaty of Berlin (1885), modernization of, 284–86; rationality
210; Vietnam War, 393–408; of, 5–8; regional differences, 24–28;
Washington Naval Treaties (1922), sexual motives, 35–36; technological
161–62; World War I and, 341; changes in, 2–3, 101, 150, 319; theo-
World War II and, 176, 215–20 ries on causes of, 30–51; universality
Uppsala Conflict Data Program of, 15–29. See also aggressive wars;
(UCDP), 297 causes of war; decline of war; defen-
Uruguay: Platine War (1851–1852), sive wars; patterns of war; specific
244–45; War of the Triple Alliance countries and wars
(1864–1870), 245–49 Ward, Lester, 272
Uyghurs, 137–38, 140, 474 Warner, Lloyd, 18
War of Confederation (1836–1839), 240,
value rationality, 8, 199, 474, 489 249–50
Van Evera, Stephen, 45, 48, 505 War of the Cauca (1863), 252
Van Kirk, Ted, 305 War of the Pacific (1879–1883), 250–51
Vattel, Emeric de, 201 War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870),
Veblen, Thorstein, 272 245–49
Vegetius, 314 Warring States Period (Ancient China
Venezuela: border disputes, 238; refu- 475–221 BCE), 89, 96–106
gees from, 301; War of the Cauca Warring States (Sengoku) Period (Japan
(1863) and, 252 1467–1590), 147–55
Vietnam: Imperial China’s tributary di- Warsaw Pact, 293
plomacy and, 114–15, 117–18, 119; Washington Naval Treaties (1922),
Japanese militarism and, 171; women 161–62
as soldiers in, 24; Yuan dynasty Watson, Alexander, 346, 348, 349, 350,
clashes with, 136 388
Vietnam War: casualties and fatalities in, Watson, Brent, 384
295, 394, 405, 406–7; desertion rates, Watson Institute, 299, 451
399; rationality of, 490 Weatherford, Jack, 278
Visigoths, 181, 184, 187 Weber, Max, 6, 8, 36, 41, 273, 489, 507
Weitz, Mark, 333
Wagner Group, 308 Wellington, Duke of, 10, 313–14
Wahhābı̄s, 415, 423, 460 Wells, Mark, 375
Wales, medieval warfare in, 187 Wendt, Alexander, 40, 43, 200
Waltz, Kenneth, 40, 42, 43, 99 Wengrow, David, 20
 Index 607

Wesseling, Henk, 291, 292 Xi Jinping, 474, 492

West, Rebecca, 1 Xi Xia, 126–27, 128, 129–30
West Bank, 418 Xiang Gong, 102
Westmoreland, William, 404 Xuande (Chinese emperor), 115, 136,
Westover, John, 362–63 496
Westphalian system, 41, 47, 200 Xunzi, 99
Whigham, Thomas, 246, 249
White, Ralph, 486, 505 Yamamoto, Isoroku, 171, 172, 175
Whittaker, C. R., 74, 75 Yang Dezhi, 391
Wilson, Lydia, 431 Yazbek, Samar, 424
Wilson, Woodrow, 213 Yazdani, Kaveh, 203
Wolf, Nikolaus, 297 Yellow Turban (religious movement),
women as soldiers, 23–24, 359 112
World Islamic Front, 415 Yemen: Islamic sectarian conflict in,
World War I: casualties and fatalities, 425–26, 458; NATO intervention in,
210, 219, 281t; Europe, 210–15; ideo- 307
logical power in, 505; Japan and, 161; Yongle (Chinese emperor), 115, 117,
rationality of, 489; soldiers’ experi- 136, 285, 495–96
ences in, 337–51; women as soldiers Yongzheng (Chinese emperor), 138
in, 23–24. See also specific countries Young, Louise, 168
World War II: Allied soldiers’ experi- Yu, Ying-shih, 125
ences in, 361–72; casualties and fatali- Yuan dynasty (1271–1368 CE), 110, 113,
ties, 210, 219, 280, 281t, 282; 116, 119, 122, 133–47, 487
desertion rates in, 371–72; Europe, Yungay, Battle of (1839), 250
215–20; ferocious vs. callous killing
in, 305, 313; fighter pilots in, 372–77; Zarumilla War (1941), 257
rationality of, 5–6, 8, 217–18, 489; Zelensky, Volodymyr, 469
Red Army experiences in, 356–61; Zhang, Feng, 115, 136
soldiers’ experiences in, 351–77; Zhao, Dingxin, 89, 90, 102, 111, 138
Wehrmacht soldiers’ experiences, Zhao dynasty, 105, 108
353–55; women as soldiers in, 24. See Zheng He, 115
also specific countries Zhentong (Chinese emperor), 136, 496
Worthy, Edmund, 126 Zhenzong (Chinese emperor), 128
Wright, Quincy, 48 Zhou monarchy, 90, 91, 97–98, 99, 102
Wu Gong, 102 Ziemann, Benjamin, 340, 343, 345, 350
Wuzi: Art of War, 100 Zunghars, 139, 285, 509