If the world did away with chemical weapons, could it do the same with nuclear weapons? Recently a group of American icons proposed just that in an idealistic manifesto entitled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” The icons were not Peter, Paul, and Mary but George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn.214 Shultz was secretary of state in the Reagan administration. Perry was secretary of defense under Clinton. Kissinger was national security advisor and secretary of state under Nixon and Ford. Nunn was a chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and has long been considered the American lawmaker most knowledgeable about national defense. None could be accused of starry-eyed pacifism.
Supporting them is a dream team of war-hardened statesmen from Democratic and Republican administrations going back to that of John F. Kennedy. They include five former secretaries of state, five former national security advisors, and four former secretaries of defense. In all, three-quarters of the living alumni of those positions signed on to the call for a phased, verified, binding elimination of all nuclear weapons, now sometimes called Global Zero.215 Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev have endorsed it in speeches (one of the reasons Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009), and several policy think tanks have begun to work out how it might be implemented. The leading road map calls for four phases of negotiation, reduction, and verification, with the last warhead dismantled in 2030.216
As one might guess from the résumés of its supporters, Global Zero has some hardheaded realpolitik behind it. Since the end of the Cold War, the nuclear arsenal of the great powers has become an absurdity. It is no longer needed to deter an existential threat from an enemy superpower, and given the nuclear taboo, it serves no other military purpose. The threat of a retaliatory strike cannot deter stateless terrorists, because their bomb would not come with a return address, and if they were religious fanatics there would be nothing on earth that they valued enough to threaten. As praiseworthy as the various nuclear arms reduction agreements have been, they make little difference to global security as long as thousands of weapons remain in existence and the technology to make new ones is not forgotten.
The psychology behind Global Zero is to extend the taboo on using nuclear weapons to a taboo on possessing them. Taboos depend on a mutual understanding that there are bright lines delineating all-or-none categories, and the line distinguishing zero from more-than-zero is the brightest of all. No country could justify acquiring a nuclear weapon to protect itself against a nuclear-armed neighbor if it had no nuclear-armed neighbors. Nor could it claim that the nuclear legacy nations were hypocritically reserving the right to keep their own weapons. A developing nation could no longer try to look like a grown-up by acquiring a nuclear arsenal if the grown-ups had eschewed the weapons as old-fashioned and repulsive. And any rogue state or terrorist group that flirted with acquiring a nuclear weapon would become a pariah in the eyes of the world—a depraved criminal rather than a redoubtable challenger.
The problem, of course, is how to get there from here. The process of dismantling the weapons would open windows of vulnerability during which one of the remaining nuclear powers could fall under the sway of an expansionist zealot. Nations would be tempted to cheat by retaining a few nukes on the side just in case their adversaries did so. A rogue state might support nuclear terrorists once it was sure that it would never be a target of retaliation. And in a world that lacked nuclear weapons but retained the knowledge of how to build them—and that genie certainly can’t be put back in the bottle—a crisis could set off a scramble to rearm, in which the first past the post might be tempted to strike preemptively before its adversary got the upper hand. Some experts on nuclear strategy, including Schelling, John Deutch, and Harold Brown, are skeptical that a nuclear-free world is attainable or even desirable, though others are working out timetables and safeguards designed to answer their objections.217
With all these uncertainties, no one should predict that nuclear weapons will go the way of poison gas anytime soon. But it is a sign of the momentum behind the Long Peace that abolition can even be discussed as a foreseeable prospect. If it happens, it would represent the ultimate decline in violence. A nuclear-free world! What realist would have dreamed it?
IS THE LONG PEACE A DEMOCRATIC PEACE?
If the Long Peace is not the sturdy child of terror and the twin brother of annihilation, then whose child is it? Can we identify an exogenous variable—some development that is not part of the peace itself—that blossomed in the postwar years and that we have reason to believe is a generic force against war? Is there a causal story with more explanatory muscle than “Developed countries stopped warring because they got less warlike”?
In chapter 4 we met a two-hundred-year-old theory that offers some predictions. In his essay “Perpetual Peace,” Immanuel Kant reasoned that three conditions should reduce the incentives of national leaders to wage war without their having to become any kinder or gentler.
The first is democracy. Democratic government is designed to resolve conflicts among citizens by consensual rule of law, and so democracies should externalize this ethic in dealing with other states. Also, every democracy knows the way every other democracy works, since they’re all constructed on the same rational foundations rather than growing out of a cult of personality, a messianic creed, or a chauvinistic mission. The resulting trust among democracies should nip in the bud the Hobbesian cycle in which the fear of a preemptive attack on each side tempts both into launching a preemptive attack. Finally, since democratic leaders are accountable to their people, they should be less likely to initiate stupid wars that enhance their glory at the expense of their citizenries’ blood and treasure.
The Democratic Peace, as the theory is now called, has two things going for it as an explanation for the Long Peace. The first is that the trend lines are in the right direction. In most of Europe, democracy has surprisingly shallow roots. The eastern half was dominated by communist dictatorships until 1989, and Spain, Portugal, and Greece were fascist dictatorships until the 1970s. Germany started one world war as a militaristic monarchy, joined by monarchical Austria-Hungary, and another as a Nazi dictatorship, joined by Fascist Italy. Even France needed five tries to get democracy right, interleaved with monarchies, empires, and Vichy regimes. Not so long ago many experts thought that democracy was doomed. In 1975 Daniel Patrick Moynihan lamented that “liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19th century: a holdover form of government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may even serve well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no relevance to the future. It was where the world was, not where it is going.”218
Social scientists should never predict the future; it’s hard enough to predict the past. Figure 5–23 shows the worldwide fortunes of democracies, autocracies, and anocracies (countries that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic) in the decades since World War II. The year in which Moynihan announced the death of democracy was a turning point in the relative fortunes of the different forms of governance, and democracy turned out to be exactly where the world was going, particularly the developed world. Southern Europe became fully democratic in the 1970s, and Eastern Europe by the early 1990s. Currently the only European country classified as an autocracy is Belarus, and all but Russia are full-fledged democracies. Democracies also predominate in the Americas and in major developed countries of the Pacific, such as South Korea and Taiwan.219 Quite apart from any contribution that democracy might make to international peace, it is a form of government that inflicts the minimum of violence on its own citizens, so the rise of democracy itself must be counted as another milestone in the historical decline of violence.
The second selling point for the Democratic Peace is a factoid that is sometimes elevated to a law of history. Here it is explained by the former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair in a 2008 interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart:Stewart: Our president—have
you met him? He’s a big freedom guy. He believes if everyone was a democracy, there’d be no more fighting.
Blair: Well, as a matter of history, no two democracies have gone to war against each other.
Stewart: Let me ask you a question. Argentina. Democracy?
FIGURE 5–23. Democracies, autocracies, and anocracies, 1946–2008
Source: Graph adapted from Marshall & Cole, 2009. Only countries with a 2008 population greater than 500,000 are counted.
Blair: Well, it’s a democracy. They elect their president.
Stewart: England. Democracy?
Blair: More or less. It was when I was last there.
Stewart: Uh . . . didn’t you guys fight?
Blair: Actually, at the time Argentina was not a democracy.
Stewart: Damn it! I thought I had him.
If developed countries became democratic after World War II, and if democracies never go to war with one another, then we have an explanation for why developed countries stopped going to war after World War II.
As Stewart’s skeptical questioning implies, the Democratic Peace theory has come under scrutiny, especially after it provided part of the rationale for Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. History buffs have delighted in coming up with possible counterexamples; here are a few from a collection by White:• Greek Wars, 5th century BCE: Athens vs. Syracuse
• Punic Wars, 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE: Rome vs. Carthage
• American Revolution, 1775–83: United States vs. Great Britain
• French Revolutionary Wars, 1793–99: France vs. Great Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands
• War of 1812, 1812–15: United States vs. Great Britain
• Franco-Roman War, 1849: France vs. Roman Republic
• American Civil War, 1861–65: United States vs. Confederate States
• Spanish-American War, 1898: United States vs. Spain
• Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1901: Great Britain vs. Transvaal and the Orange Free State
• First India-Pakistan War, 1947–49
• Lebanese Civil War, 1978, 1982: Israel vs. Lebanon
• Croatian War of Independence, 1991–92: Croatia vs. Yugoslavia
• Kosovo War, 1999: NATO vs. Yugoslavia
• Kargil War, 1999: India vs. Pakistan
• Israel-Lebanon War, 2006220
Each counterexample has prompted scrutiny as to whether the states involved were truly democratic. Greece, Rome, and the Confederacy were slaveholding states; Britain was a monarchy with a minuscule popular franchise until 1832. The other wars involved fledgling or marginal democracies at best, such as Lebanon, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and 19th-century France and Spain. And until the early decades of the 20th century, the franchise was withheld from women, who, as we will see, tend to be more dovish in their voting than men. Most advocates of the Democratic Peace are willing to write off the centuries before the 20th, together with new and unstable democracies, and insist that since then no two mature, stable democracies have fought each other in a war.
Critics of the Democratic Peace theory then point out that if one draws the circle of “democracy” small enough, not that many countries are left in it, so by the laws of probability it’s not surprising that we find few wars with a democracy on each side. Other than the great powers, two countries tend to fight only if they share a border, so most of the theoretical matchups are ruled out by geography anyway. We don’t need to bring in democracy to explain why New Zealand and Uruguay have never gone to war, or Belgium and Taiwan. If one restricts the database even further by sloughing off early pieces of the time line (restricting it, as some do, to the period after World War II), then a more cynical theory accounts for the Long Peace: since the start of the Cold War, allies of the world’s dominant power, the United States, haven’t fought each other. Other manifestations of the Long Peace—such as the fact that the great powers never fought each other—were never explained by the Democratic Peace in the first place and, according to the critics, probably came from mutual deterrence, nuclear or conventional.221
A final headache for the Democratic Peace theory, at least as it applies to overall war-proneness, is that democracies often don’t behave as nicely as Kant said they should. The idea that democracies externalize their law-governed assignment of power and peaceful resolution of conflicts doesn’t sit comfortably with the many wars that Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium fought to acquire and defend their colonial empires—at least thirty-three between 1838 and 1920, and a few more extending into the 1950s and even 1960s (such as France in Algeria). Equally disconcerting for Democratic Peaceniks are the American interventions during the Cold War, when the CIA helped overthrow more-or-less democratic governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973) which had tilted too far leftward for its liking. The advocates reply that European imperialism, though it did not vanish instantaneously, was plummeting abroad just as democracy was rising at home, and that the American interventions were covert operations hidden from the public rather than wars conducted in full view and thus were exceptions proving the rule .222
When a debate devolves into sliding definitions, cherry-picked examples, and ad hoc excuses, it’s time to call in the statistics of deadly quarrels. Two political scientists, Bruce Russett and John Oneal, have breathed new life into the Democratic Peace theory by firming up the definitions, controlling the confounding variables, and testing a quantitative version of the theory: not that democracies never go to war (in which case every putative counterexample becomes a matter of life or death) but that they go to war less often than nondemocracies, all else being equal.223
Russett and Oneal untangled the knot with a statistical technique that separates the effects of confounded variables: multiple logistic regression. Say you discover that heavy smokers have more heart attacks, and you want to confirm that the greater risk was caused by the smoking rather than by the lack of exercise that tends to go with smoking. First you try to account for as much of the heart attack data as you can using the nuisance factor, exercise rates. After looking at a large sample of men’s health records, you might determine that on average, every additional hour of exercise per week cuts a man’s chance of having a heart attack by a certain amount. Still, the correlation is not perfect—some couch potatoes have healthy hearts; some athletes collapse in the gym. The difference between the heart attack rate one would predict, given a certain rate of exercise, and the actual heart attack rate one measures is called a residual. The entire set of residuals gives you some numbers to play with in ascertaining the effects of the variable you’re really interested in, smoking.
Now you capitalize on a second source of wiggle room. On average, heavy smokers exercise less, but some of them exercise a lot, while some nonsmokers hardly exercise at all. This provides a second set of residuals: the discrepancies between the men’s actual rate of smoking and the rate one would predict based on their exercise rate. Finally, you see whether the residuals left over from the smoking-exercise relationship (the degree to which men smoke more or less than you’d predict from their exercise rate) correlate with the residuals left over from the exercise–heart attack relationship (the degree to which men have more or fewer heart attacks than you’d predict from their exercise rate). If the residuals correlate with the residuals, you can conclude that smoking correlates with heart attacks, above and beyond their joint correlation with exercise. And if you measured smoking at an earlier point in the men’s lives, and heart attacks at a later point (to rule out the possibility that heart attacks make men smoke, rather than vice versa), you can inch toward the claim that smoking causes heart attacks. Multiple regression allows you to do this not just with two tangled predictors, but with any number of them.
A general problem with multiple regression is that the more predictors you want to untangle, the more data you need, because more and more of the variation in the data gets “used up” as each nuisance variable sucks up as much of the variation as
it can and the hypothesis you’re interested in has to make do with the rest. And fortunately for humanity, but unfortunately for social scientists, interstate wars don’t break out all that often. The Correlates of War Project counts only 79 full-fledged interstate wars (killing at least a thousand people a year) between 1823 and 1997, and only 49 since 1900, far too few for statistics. So Russett and Oneal looked at a much larger database that lists militarized interstate disputes—incidents in which a country put its forces on alert, fired a shot across a bow, sent its warplanes scrambling, crossed swords, rattled sabers, or otherwise flexed its military muscles.224 Assuming that for every war that actually breaks out there are many more disputes that stop short of war but have similar causes, the disputes should be shaped by the same causes as the wars themselves, and thus can serve as a plentiful surrogate for wars. The Correlates of War Project identified more than 2,300 militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 2001, a number that can satisfy even a data-hungry social scientist.225
Russett and Oneal first lined up their units of analysis: pairs of countries in every year from 1886 to 2001 that had at least some risk of going to war, either because they were neighbors or because one of them was a great power. The datum of interest was whether in fact the pair had had a militarized dispute that year. Then they looked at how democratic the less democratic member of the pair was the year before, on the assumption that even if a democratic state is war-averse, it still might be dragged into a war by a more belligerent (and perhaps less democratic) adversary. It hardly seems fair to penalize democratic Netherlands in 1940 for getting into a war with its German invaders, so the Netherlands-Germany pair in 1940 would be assigned the rock-bottom democracy score for Germany in 1939.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 42
