I published a book a few years ago called 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and dedicated one of the chapters to the future of war. Subtitled “Never Underestimate Human Stupidity,” the chapter argued that the first decades of the 21st century had been the most peaceful time in human history, and that waging war no longer made much economic or geopolitical sense. Although that reality in no way guaranteed peace, because "human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history" and "even rational leaders often end up doing very stupid things."
Despite these reflections, in February 2022 I was shocked by Vladimir Putin's attempt to conquer Ukraine. So destructive were the foreseeable repercussions of such an eventuality for Russia itself and for all of humanity that it had seemed an unlikely move even to a ruthless, megalomaniac being. Yet the Russian autocrat chose to end the most peaceful time in human history in February and push humanity into a new age of war that could be worse than anything we've seen so far. In fact, it could threaten the very survival of our species.
This is a tragedy, especially since the last few decades have shown that war is not an inevitable force of nature. It is a human choice that varies from place to place and from time to time. Since 1945, we have not seen any case of war between great powers, nor any case of destruction by foreign conquest of an internationally recognized state. More limited regional and local conflicts have remained relatively common; I live in Israel, so I know it very well. However, despite Israel's occupation of the West Bank, countries have rarely attempted to unilaterally expand their borders through violence. And that is one of the reasons why the Israeli occupation has received so much attention and criticism. What was the norm for thousands of years of imperial history has today become anathema.
Even accounting for civil wars, insurgencies, and terrorism, wars have killed far fewer people in recent decades than suicides, traffic accidents, or obesity-related diseases. In 2019, some 70,000 people died in armed conflicts or police shootings, some 700,000 committed suicide, 1.3 million died in traffic accidents and 1.5 million died of diabetes.
However, peace has not only been a matter of figures. Perhaps the most important change in recent decades has been psychological. For thousands of years, peace meant a "temporary absence of war." For example, in the midst of the three Punic wars waged by Rome and Carthage there were decades of peace, but any Roman and any Carthaginian knew that this "Punic peace" could be broken at any time. Politics, the economy and culture were conditioned by the constant expectations of war.
At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the meaning of the word peace changed. If the Old Peace only meant a “temporary absence of war”, the New Peace came to mean the “improbability of war”. In many regions of the world (though not all), countries stopped fearing that their neighbors might invade and destroy them. The Tunisians ceased to worry about an Italian invasion, the Costa Ricans did not believe that the Nicaraguan army could advance on San José, and the Samoans did not fear the sudden appearance on the horizon of a Fijian war fleet. How do we know that countries stopped caring about those things? For state budgets.
Until recently, one might have expected the military to be the number one budget item in empires, sultanates, kingdoms, and republics. Governments spent little on health and education, because most of the resources went to pay soldiers, build walls and warships. The Roman Empire spent between 50% and 75% of its budget on the army; the figure was 80% in the Sung Empire (960-1279); and 60% in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 17th century. Between 1685 and 1813, the proportion of military expenditure in British public spending never fell below 55% and averaged 75%. During the great conflicts of the 20th century, both democracies and totalitarian regimes did not hesitate to incur large amounts of debt to finance machine guns, tanks, and submarines. It is reasonable when we fear that, at any moment, our neighbors will invade us, plunder our cities, enslave our people and annex our land.
State budgets in the days of the New Peace make far more hopeful reading material than any peace treatise ever written. At the beginning of the 21st century, the average public expenditure dedicated to the army was only 6.5%; and even the United States, the dominant superpower, spent only about 11% to maintain its supremacy. Since the population no longer lived in the grip of fear of foreign invasion, governments could invest much more money in health, welfare and education than in the army. Average spending on health, for example, has been 10.5% of the national budget, that is, approximately 1.6 times the defense budget. For many people today, the fact that the health budget is greater than that of the armed forces is an insignificant fact. However, if we take the New Peace for granted and therefore neglect it, we will soon lose it.
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The New Peace has been the result of three main forces. First, technological changes and, above all, the development of nuclear weapons have greatly increased the price of war, especially between superpowers. The atomic bomb turned superpower warfare into a senseless act of collective suicide, which is why since Hiroshima and Nagasaki the superpowers have not gone to war directly with each other.
Second, economic changes have greatly diminished the benefits of war. In the past, key economic assets were material resources that could be conquered by force. When Rome defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars, it grew rich by looting its defeated rival, selling the defeated into slavery, and seizing the silver mines of the Iberian Peninsula and the wheat fields of North Africa. However, in recent decades, scientific, technical and organizational knowledge have become the most important economic assets in many places. Silicon Valley does not have silicon mines. Many times billion dollar companies like Microsoft and Google stand on what engineers and entrepreneurs have in mind, not under their feet. And while it is easy to seize a few silver mines by force, it is not possible to acquire knowledge in the same way. This economic reality has caused a sharp decline in the profitability of the conquest.
Although wars over material resources have not ceased to be characteristic of certain parts of the world (such as the Middle East), the great economies of the post-1945 period grew without imperial conquest. Germany, Japan, and Italy saw their armies decompose and their territories shrink; But after the war, those economies boomed. The Chinese economic miracle has been achieved without entry into any major war since 1979.
As of this writing, in early November, Russian soldiers are looting the Ukrainian city of Kherson and sending truckloads of rugs and toasters stolen from Ukrainian homes to Russia. That will not make Russia rich or compensate the Russians for the enormous cost of the war.
However, as Putin's invasion of Ukraine demonstrates, technological and economic changes alone have not been enough to bring about the New Peace. Some political leaders show such a thirst for power and such irresponsibility that they are capable of starting a war even if it proves economically ruinous for their country and drags all humanity into a nuclear Armageddon. Consequently, the third essential pillar of the New Peace has been cultural and institutional.
Human societies have long been dominated by militaristic cultures that viewed war as inevitable and even desirable. The aristocrats of Rome and Carthage believed that military glory was the crowning achievement of a lifetime and the ideal path to power and wealth. Poets such as Virgil and Horace agreed on this, devoting their talents to singing about weapons and warriors, glorifying bloody battles and immortalizing brutal conquerors. During the time of the New Peace, artists have devoted their talents to denouncing the horrors of war; while politicians have tried to make their mark by initiating health reforms and not looting foreign cities. Leaders from around the world—influenced by fear of nuclear war, changes in the nature of the economy, and new cultural trends—have joined forces to build a world order that would allow countries to develop peacefully and, at the same time, At the same time, contain the sporadic warmongers.
That world order has been based on liberal ideals, namely that all human beings deserve the same basic freedoms, that no human group is inherently superior to any other, and that all human beings share fundamental experiences, values, and interests. These ideals have encouraged leaders to avoid war and to collaborate in protecting common values and promoting common interests. The liberal world order links belief in universal values to the peaceful functioning of global institutions.
Although such a global order is far from perfect, it has not only improved the lives of people in former imperial centers like Britain and the United States, but also in many other parts of the world, from India to Brazil and from Poland to China. . Countries on every continent have benefited from increased global trade and investment, and almost every country has enjoyed the peace dividend. Not only Denmark and Canada have been able to transfer resources from tanks to teachers, so have Nigeria and Indonesia.
Anyone who complains about the flaws of the liberal world order must first answer a simple question: in what decade has humanity found itself in a better condition than in the 2010s? What decade is, in your opinion, the lost golden age? The 1910s, with the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Jim Crow laws of racial segregation in the United States, and the brutal exploitation of much of Africa and Asia by European empires? The 1810s, with the bloody height of the Napoleonic Wars, Russian and Chinese peasants oppressed by their aristocratic overlords, the East India Company securing control of India, and still-legal slavery in the United States, Brazil, and the United States? most of the rest of the world? Or the 1710s, with the War of the Spanish Succession, the Great Northern War for supremacy in the Baltic, the Mongol Wars of Succession, and death before adulthood from malnutrition and malnutrition? diseases of a third of the world's children?
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The New Peace has not been the result of a divine miracle. It was achieved because human beings made better decisions and built a world order that worked. Unfortunately, too many took that achievement for granted. Perhaps they assumed that the New Peace was guaranteed above all by technological and economic forces, and that it could survive without the third pillar: the liberal global order. Consequently, that order was first neglected and then attacked with increasing ferocity.
The attack started with rogue states. Iran and rogue leaders like Putin, but on their own they were not strong enough to put an end to the New Peace. What really contributed to undermining the world order was that both the countries that had benefited most from it (including China, India, Brazil and Poland) and the countries that had participated in its creation (particularly the United Kingdom and United States) turned their backs on him. The Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 symbolized this turn.
Most of those who have challenged the liberal world order did not want war. They only wanted to defend what they consider to be the interests of their country, and have argued that every nation-state must defend and develop its identity and its sacred traditions. What they have never explained is how these different countries were going to treat each other all in the absence of universal values and global institutions. Opponents of the world order have offered no clear alternative. They seemed to think that somehow the different countries would get along and the world would become a network of walled but friendly fortresses.
However, strongholds are rarely friendly. Every national stronghold usually wants a little more land, security, and prosperity for itself at the expense of its neighbors; and, without the concurrence of universal values and global institutions, the rival strongholds cannot agree on any common rules. The network of strengths model was a recipe for disaster.
And the disaster was not long in coming. The pandemic revealed that in the absence of effective global cooperation, humanity cannot protect itself from common threats such as viruses. Perhaps it was then, watching covid further erode global solidarity, that Putin came to the conclusion that he could deliver the coup de grace and break the greatest taboo of the New Peace era. He thought that if he conquered the Ukraine and incorporated it into Russia, some countries would make some gasps of disbelief and condemn him, but no one would take effective action against him.
The argument that Putin was forced against his will to invade Ukraine in anticipation of a Western attack is absurd propaganda. A vague Western threat is not a legitimate excuse to destroy a country, plunder its cities, rape and torture its citizens and inflict untold suffering on tens of millions of men, women and children. Let anyone who believes that Putin had no choice say which country was preparing to invade Russia in 2022. Does anyone think that the German army was massing in order to cross the border? Does anyone imagine that Napoleon came out of the grave to lead his Grande Armée back to Moscow and that Putin had no choice but to anticipate the imminent French onslaught? And we must not forget that Putin already invaded Ukraine in 2014, that 2022 was not the first time.
Putin has been preparing the invasion for a long time. He never accepted the breakup of the Russian Empire and never saw Ukraine, Georgia or any of the other post-Soviet republics as legitimate independent countries. Thus, while (as noted above) military spending has averaged around 6.5% of national budgets worldwide and 11% in the United States, in Russia it has been much higher. We do not know the exact percentage, because it is a state secret. However, estimates put the figure at around 20%, and it may even exceed 30%.
If Putin's gamble is successful, the result will be the final collapse of the world order and the New Peace. Autocrats around the world will learn that wars of conquest are possible again; and democracies will also be forced to militarize to protect themselves. We have already seen how Russian aggression has led countries like Germany to dramatically increase their defense budget overnight, and countries like Sweden to reintroduce conscription. So money that should go to teachers, nurses and social workers will go to tanks, missiles and cyber weapons. At the age of 18, young people around the world will do their compulsory military service. The whole world will resemble Russia: a country with an oversized army and underfunded hospitals. The result will be a new era of wars, poverty and disease. On the other hand, if Putin's feet are stopped and he is punished, the world order will not be broken as a result of his behavior, but will be strengthened. Anyone who needs a reminder will rediscover that such things simply cannot be done.
Which of these two scenarios will materialize? Fortunately for the world, despite all his military preparations, Putin was missing one crucial factor: the courage of the Ukrainian people. The Ukrainians have pushed the Russians back after a series of stunning victories near Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson. Yet Putin has so far refused to acknowledge his mistake and has reacted to defeat with redoubled brutality. Seeing that his army cannot outmatch the Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines, he now tries to freeze Ukrainian civilians to death by preventing them from having heating in their homes. It is impossible to predict how the war will end, as it is impossible to predict the fate of the New Peace.
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History is never deterministic. After the end of the Cold War, many thought that peace was inevitable and would continue even if we neglected the world order. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, some have come to hold the opposite view: that peace has always been an illusion, that war is an unruly force of nature, and that the only choice humans have is to decide be prey or predator.
Both positions are wrong. War and peace are decisions, not fatalities. Wars are made by people, not a law of nature. And just as they make war, human beings can also make peace. Now, making peace is not a single decision, to be taken once forever. It is a long-term effort to protect universal norms and values, and to build cooperative institutions.
Rebuilding the world order does not mean going back to the system that fell apart in the 2010s. A new and better world order should give larger roles to non-Western powers willing to be part of it. It should also recognize the relevance of national loyalties. The world order was disintegrated first and foremost by the assault of populist forces, according to which patriotic loyalties contradict global cooperation. Populist politicians preached that if you are patriotic, you must oppose global institutions and global cooperation. However, there is no inherent contradiction between patriotism and globalism, because patriotism is not about hating foreigners. Patriotism is about loving your countrymen. And in the 21st century, if you want to protect your countrymen from war, pandemics, and ecological collapse, the best way to do it is to cooperate with foreigners.
