The Monkey Cage

Well,

provocative indeed.
Some thoughts:
1. Should we expect to observe a reduction in international trade of weapons as the number of wars decreases?
2. And what about Iraq war types?
3. Should we observe an increase in the number of other kinds of conflict (I think here of conflicts like the “black hawk Down” movie)?.
4. Don’t you think that this looks like Fukuyama’s End of History?

I was thinking of exactly Manoel’s second point, about Iraq (and Afghanistan, along with Israeli operations in Gaza and Lebanon, Russia’s in Georgia, even the Vietnam War, etc…). I think the missing category is “interventionist” wars, where one powerful country invades a significantly less powerful one either to protect its national interests or to (at least in theory) defend the local population.

This model has been increasing greatly in the 20th and 21st centuries, and seems unlikely to end soon. Rather than the end of war, I think what we’re seeing is a change in type. We rarely see two sides line up and pound each other until everyone’s dead on one of the sides, but we do see some very severe conflicts with death tolls in the thousands or tens of thousands on a fairly regular basis (as much as we Westerners—the droppers of bombs, rather than the dropped-on—sometimes forget).

The article discusses “policing” actions of this interventionist type (including Afghanistan and Iraq but not Gaza), although for some reason it doesn’t get its own category; in the fascinating chart, they’re included under “international wars”. But apparently there haven’t been very many of them.

It’s worth being clearer about the definitions: for Mueller, a war has at least 1000 deaths/yr and has two factions that fight each other. Thus South Ossetia was too small. I’m not sure how Gaza was classified; perhaps he would classify it as a massacre rather than a war.

Even the extremely rare big war is hugely destructive. Thus, frequentist thinking isn’t very helpful when it comes to war; black swans aren’t restricted to financial markets.

OK, I’m back to my skepticism point of a couple of weeks ago. I just don’t buy Mueller’s point.

Since “the end of the Cold War,” I believe, the United States has fought TWO WARS against Iraq. Interstate wars. Really. With bullets and everything!

Now, maybe, technically, one or both don’t count with the correlates of war (COW) folks. Maybe they weren’t up to the standards of the War of Jenkins’ Ear. (Look it up,people.) Now that was an interstate war, COW-style!

But when we say, “end of war,” we don’t really mean “war as defined by a marginal set of political scientists,” do we? We mean an end to war. W-A-R.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Another interstate war.

That’s THREE in addition to the Ethiopia-Eritrea dust-up. That’s FOUR. Not one.

And I’m not an IR guy. There are probably some conflicts that one might include.

Panama? Not 1000 U.S. dead, but probably a lot of Panamanians, no?

Or, as mentioned above, Israel versus ‘bad’ Islamic group of the week. That ‘scuffle’ in Lebanon sure looked like a war to the folks whose houses were bombed. I have a friend . . . his family thought that was a real war. It was a war at the Beirut airport.

Also, diverging from the COW folks even more, the last U.S. presidential administration, not that long ago, declared a “Long War,” a “Global War on Terror,” or a (something like the) “Struggle Against Violent Extremists.”

Whatever you call it, there is no end to war in this world.

The article sounds counterintuitive because it is. What war is shouldn’t by defined by Political Scientist it’s defined by populations who live through the process, as Thomas said.

Anyway, on a quick read the article seems to me to only work if you have very specific definitions of war, which no-one really shares. I need to re-read it but to take on each of the bullet points in summary:

Wars amongst developed countries:
One could comfortably argue that Iraq and Kuwait are ‘developed’, unless by developed he means ‘Western’, though the former Yugoslavia would have to crop up here.

Other international Wars:
Again, I’d start with the former Yugoslavia. Palestine / Israel / Iran is an international war between states - Hamas was elected in a state and Israel invades to stop Hamas rockets. U.S. and Afghanistan as well - the U.S. invades against the administration of a country.

Imperial and Colonial:
See above. And arguably a number of humanitarian acts, and of course Iraq. To the best of my knowledge the U.s has invaded Iraq with the intention of regime change in order to protect itself. A classic justification used by Britain over the years of colonialism.

Civil war?!
This point I find most bizarre as Mueller admits there are still many Civil Wars, but to redefine one as a ‘competitive criminal exercise’ is a tautology, especially when lots of people still die in them and two sides are involved and in many (though admittedly not all) those sides are indigenous to the region.

As for rethinking theories, regardless of the simplistic understanding of something like Realism, it doesn’t actually rest on the idea of their being war to mean there is competition. And anyway, whilst there is still one war between two states it would still have relevance. Unless of course, like me, you think it’s a deeply flawed theory whether there are wars or not.

I think Muller is missing the point: sure, military conflict is declining around the world, but the ideological war is not. We focus all our energy on raw power, forgetting the spirit behind our civilization. Unless we maintain that, what are we gonna do with our military might, besides bailing out Europe from civil war?

Counterintuitive it may be, but it’s a fact that the amount of armed violence in the world (a broader category than war) has decreased over the past 20 years or so: see the 2005 Human Security Report. This doesn’t mean, however, that I would necessarily accept Mueller’s war-is-almost-now-entirely-obsolete view. The long-term trends may well be in that direction, but there is still a lot of military spending, a lot of arms trade, a lot of weapons development, and not a small number of potential zones of conflict, all of which suggests that we haven’t reached peace with a capital P yet. (Not to mention, as others already have, some obvious points of recent history.)

I’m… well, really confused by this. I mean, let’s even be really, really generous and exclude the Afghanistan and Iraq matters that are going on. Vietnam, anyone? Korea? Just because it wasn’t a declared war doesn’t make it not one.

For that matter, what about the goddamn Falkland Islands matter? How about Israel’s entire existence? While we’re in the neighborhood, what about the Iran-Iraq war?

I’ll grant that direct, large-scale, traditional war may well be extinct-or-nearly-so between very powerful nations. But anything beyond that seems to be flatly absurd.

Sometimes major wars come after a long skirmishing work-up. Do not be surprised by nuclear bombings in the mid-east within ten years…or less.