The standard explanations of warfare rather than the excuse for a war, are short in number but all unsatisfactory because no explanation explains all wars.
George Marshall thought that Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War” was the best book ever to explain foreign policy. He was perhaps thinking of the conference in Melitus where the representatives of the opposing sides met behind closed doors and talked to one another truthfully, each presenting why the other side should do in their own interests. The people from Militus lost the arguments and so they were massacred. A terrible object lesson of interest over ideology. But that vivid example of warfare shows how diplomacy is conducted rather than why wars arise. Mostly, histories of war describe the process that take place in preparation, execution and aftermath of war, as when Robert Sherwood described in “Roosevelt and Hopkins”, how FDR conducted warfare from the White House. rather than the purposes of war which are the motivations for leaders and population to decide to go into war, such as to please god, nation or morality, the number of those motivations few and often repeated and one or another of those applied to different circumstances, as when Mahan proposed that sea power projected influence onto many shoes and so warfare had a military purpose even though he restricted his examples to before the age of steam but his applications were best exemplified in World War II, where American sea power projected across the Pacific and the Battle of the North Atlantic every much vied with the Battle of Britain to make Great Britain secure. There was victory at sea but also on land. However, the theories of those motives of war that have been offered in the last 2500 years mostly arise and are applied at a particular stage of social development and I will offer at the end of my essay a theory of war that is viable only, I would say, since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Shakespeare, as usual, does better by providing both description and explanation. In “Henry V”, the best epic since the Greeks. He shows how a nation decides to go to war, mobilizes for war, engages in war, and creates a post war peace. He offers an explanation in the first act, where lawyers argue about the legitimacy of England’s claims on France down to a foolish detail and Henry remarks that such matters are not the reasons for the war but merely disguise the interests which lead a nation to war and wonder whether people will be thought that the rationalizations for war are taken to replace the real reasons as the motives. The American people might have thought the Spanish American War was about the sinking of the U. S. S. Maine. But REand others thought better. The Bay of Tonkin incident was clearly an excuse for a war whose reasons had been fully aired for a long time: to control the borders in the Cold War and to show that counter-insurgency worked even if doing so meant using American troops..Beware, Shakespeare says, of confusing blather with reasons.
Various social forces are attributed to be the basic force for warfare but each of these forces really just explain a particular situation or an era of social development, which means that warfare does not have an essential motive but is an instrument for some other purpose. It is therefore a mistake to think, for example, that warfare began after the domestication of animals and agriculture and so was always ever afterwards for the purpose of conquering land. Sometimes it is conquering ideas and sometimes in the far past confronting people from a different clan. Warfare is existential only in the sense that it is a modality to exercise influence and seems obvious and elemental only for people like Hitler who had a limited imagination about how to make Germany great. He was already doing it with economic and cultural and technological advances.
The cold war was also a military driven reason for warfare. The weapon wasn’t the warship. It was a nuclear bomb that could be delivered by plane, missile or submarine.There was no point in getting an irradiated territory, only a don’ trespass sign to the remains of the nation that lost a nuclear exchange. The great lever for arranging the avoidance f war was nuclear deterrence, and it lasted until the Soviet Union no longer had the economic resources to stand up against American technology or the prospect of a SDI which made the United States impregnable and so no longer subject to mutual assured deterrence.
Here are some of these overly restrictive motives for warfare. Samuel Bemis in “Pinckney;s Treaty” describes the real abuses of the American Revolution by carefully examining one of what seems to be latter day diplomacy whereby Great Britain and the newly formed United States made agreements about fishing rights and.. And so might conclude that cleaning up the debris of the war of independence amounted to its real motives, just as when people say that the Revolution was about taxation without representation or the Stamp Tax, when these were excuses for a people in the few years between the end of the French and Indian Wars in 1767 and the outbreak of hostilities in 1775, a new people had come into being as a nation, the Americans, which happens every once in a while, as has happened recently when Yasser Arafat established Palestinians as an independent people, an ethnic community rather than a set of Arabs who happened to own their homes in the area called Palestine, and so not part of Jordan, after the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and the Arab states.
The putative economic explanation of warfare also comes from a very different corner. Lenin in Imperialism insists that colonialism is done so that one or another of the great powers can acquire minerals and other resources including manpower for their own economic good. That would suggest that the great powers should be on one another;s throats because they each have greater booty to win but that does not happen in that they fight for land, the balance of power and grandeur, which is a very different set of motives than profit. The great powers go after the backward countries because they can and so marginally increase glory and the influence on the other great powers.
There was an attempt to rephrase Lenin’s economic theory by making it internal to a nation. C. Wright Mills domesticated the war of the rich over the poor. Nations did not conquer other peoples to get their riches but took the wealth of their own population so as to create domestic munitions industries and so the rich got even richer. The wars against others was a pretext for internal accumulation of those already the best off. The best answer to Mills came decades before in Shaw’s “Major Barbara” where the munitions maker supports the poor and builds model towns for its employees. The munitions makers can rely on public opinion to make the government buy munitions. No pressure need apply.buy
That leads to “realpolitik”, which is the theory that people go to war so as to maximize their geopolitical situation in the contest between the great powers. England needed Belgium and the Netherlands weak so as to provide it with a buffer against the continent. Germany had to deal with the main danger to it which was the British Royal Navy. Kaiser Wilhelm was not as crazy as people thought him to be. He just alienated both Russia and France, just the opposite of Bismarkian politics, and the two became allied and created a two front war, just as Hitler would do the same.
Hans Morganthau was for a generation a model statement of the science of realpolitick, every nation consulting its own interests as to rationally assess what it needed to protect itself. So realpolitick was thought a science in that an analyst could coldly, unemotionally, what were in a nation’s interests and conclude what demands by nations were reasonable or not, perhaps deferring to the United States instance on the Monroe Doctrine to prevent a European invasion of South America as a way to secure the United States in the Western hemisphere, an arrangement even agreed to by the United Nations, however singular declaration the Monroe Doctrine was. The cold and even cynical approach was hard headed rather than sentimental. Serious nations do not go to war lightly, as De Gaulle said to Acheson when he was informed not consulted about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nations have their reasons not their whims or their fancies or their excuses treated as reasons. The realpolitik approach remains a high standard against which to compare the often foolhardy adventures into war that are sometimes waded. The shortcomings of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War were abundantly clear at the time, Vietnam misjudging a nationalist war of no consequence to the Cold War, and Iraq based on a lie attested to by the people in and about the White House, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The excuse was the only reason ever given for the adventure.
Realpolitik applies best to the multipolar world of the seventeenth century when Germany, France, Spain vied with one another for domination, like a game of risk where who would win battles was chancy and people traded with one another for favors. It is less applicable as a description of reality than half a century before when Spain was a wealthy world wide power out to undermine England, which was a small nation, the purpose of Spain to reclaim Britain for the Catholic realm. Losing the Spanish Armada was a bad roll of the dice. Nor did realpolitick describe the colonialism of the nineteenth century which was about more developed civilization imposing itself on less economically and culturally developed areas to do whatever excuse they might come up with from the White Man’s Burden to exploiting workers. Nations today have more serious issues at stake, such as nuclear proliferation and destroying the ways of life of other countries. Why can’t China and the United States just get along? They both need one another economically. Conflict is not a rational policy but still seems inevitable.
There is an explanation other than the usual social forces tor the trajectory from peace to war and back again. That is incompetence. The diplomacy before the American Civil War was not incompetent. They had forged clever compromises for at least thirty years to avert a civil war. They failed and so the inference is that the Civil War was inevitable, Nit si with the First World War where the negotiations to avoid the war after Sarajevo were heated but inconsequential, as that is detailed in Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August”. Better should have been expected of experienced diplomats familiar with one another’s motives and national interests. Incompetent is also the judgment offered by John Maynard Keynes in “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” that would result in a major war just a generation later. It is the earlier history that reveals how surprisingly effective were the Allied parties in World War II at forging a post war world that has lasted through today and has moved on to other issues than a Europe that was a continent in perpetual war. The Marshall Plan, NATO, and American tutelage to Japan resulted in Germany and Japan as staunch allies for the West as well as economically prosperous. Give credit for the tail end of the Greatest Diplomats since Ben Franklin’s generation.
Here is another social force that can explain warfare but is generally neglected as being naive. That is the force of culture. Samuel Huntington, in the aftermath of 9/11, wrote “The Clash of Civilizations” He said that distinct civilizations which were distinctive ways of life, and exemplified by Japan, China, and the Anglo-European West, inevitably came into conflict with one another because their divisions were so opposed to one another. The particular flashpoint in the early twenty first century was the conflict between the Islamic world and the West, a conflict only war could resolve. I would generalize Huntington’s theory to a cultural conflict which has dominated warfare since the middle of the nineteenth century, when public opinion became a force in nations deciding to go to war. Nations and coalitions go to war because they have cultural antagonisms with their opponents and make allies with nations that have cultural affinities. That happened even when the Anglo American alliance joined with the Soviet Union against the Axis. Churchill said he would make war with the devil at his side so as to defeat Hitler. That was not the view of the Vichy French, the French being their “natural” cultural allies and where the conflict between the French and the allies lasted only a few days.
The great cultural transformation of an antagonist to an ally took place in the late nineteenth century when Great Britain became over time an ally with the United States departing from the time when Great Britain might have joined the Confederacy so as to have an easy market of cotton for its British mills coming from the Southern states. By the time of the First World War, it was clear that Great Britain was a friend rather than an enemy, further inflamed againstGermany by the Zimmerman Telegram and the sinking of the Lusitania. Those causes celebres confused the excuses of a war with the reasons of the war, which did have to deal with the balance of power though in one interpretation Germany was already at the time part of an expansionist and jingoistic posture. The Second World War was needed because there was no quarter between the new Nazi ideology and the democracies, however much the foreignness of the Germans to the West had developed so rapidly after 1933. Remember that FDR was sly when he served hot dogs to George VI when he visited Hyde Park. It was an effort to win Great Britain to the American people for when the war would start. FDR thought ahead about cultural affinities, as did Churchill, who made sure that the parts of the religious service performed during the meeting between Chyrchill and FDR were drawn from what was used in religious services at Groton, FDR’s prep school. This is not trivial stuff but at the heart of matters.
There was no question that the Soviet Union was an arch enemy, long predating the Cold War, because its civilization was inimical to the West, and so the hawks in America thought “Better Dead than Red” when confronting nuclear warfare. Indeed, warfare had become an existential matter rather than an endless antagonism between great powers as had been the case with France and Great Britain , France restored even after the defeat of Napoleon to being a distinctive great power, while afterwards the end of a war meant the destruction not only of a regime but a new cultural direction. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated and Germany didn’t recover until 1989 when it was reunified. Japan became democratic and people hoped that a different cultural arrangement would come to pass following the demise of the Soviet Union but Putin emerged so as to solidify the permanent Russian tendency to authoritarianism.
Contrary to Huntington, civilizations can be malleable. Yes, the Arabs are the only civilization that has not adapted to Western Dress. The Chinese wear ties and jackets and Africans wear tribal dress for ceremonial reasons, incorporating their distinctive dress into international fashion. But Arab states modernize by trying to expand their industries beyond oil and however slowly changing their attitudes to women. They want to make peace with Israel, already a member of the Western alliance. Resistance to that are the Palestinians and the Iranians whose people are restless under a theocratic regime that does not allow women to be free. The state of women is the litmus test for all nations, including America..