CHAPTER FIVE

Choosing Peace

As a boy growing up in Turkey in the early twentieth century, Muzafer Sherif had first hand knowledge of war’s horror. In 1919, he barely survived a massacre carried out by Greek soldiers in his hometown, Smyrna. After emigrating to America, Sherif earned a doctorate as a social psychologist and started exploring, among other topics, our tendency to separate people into “us” and “them.” He is remembered today primarily for the Robbers Cave Experiment, which he carried out in 1954. Like the studies of Milgram and Zimbardo, Sherif’s has become a classic of social science research, but it has a much happier ending.

Sherif brought twenty-two fifth-grade boys to a camp at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma and divided them into two groups, Rattlers and Eagles. Sherif housed the boys in separate cabins and kept them apart for a week, during which boys in each group bonded and grew suspicious of the “others” whom they could only see and hear at a distance. Sherif finally brought the Rattlers and Eagles together and pitted them against each other in swimming races, tugs-of-war, and other competitions.

Rattlers and Eagles were soon hurling insults at each other, like “tubby,” “fatso,” “sissy,” “baby,” “communist,” and “little black Sambo” (even though all the boys were white). The boys also started “brutalizing and raiding each other with sticks, bats, and rocks in socks,” the psychologist Steven Pinker notes in his best seller How the Mind Works. Pinker cites the Sherif experiment as evidence of how readily we can be manipulated into hating and fighting others. “Jingoism is alarmingly easy to evoke,” he writes, “even without a scarce resource to fight over.”

But Pinker neglects to mention the second half of the experiment, during which Sherif presented the Rattlers and Eagles with “problems” that they could solve only by cooperating. Sherif told the boys that the camp could rent a movie, Treasure Island, only if all the boys chipped in money, which they did. Then a camp truck “broke down,” and all the boys had to push it to jump-start it. Another pseudo-malfunction forced the Rattlers and Eagles to share a truck on an outing. The hostility between the Rattlers and Eagles soon dissolved and they became friends, laughingly recalling their previous exploits against each other. On the last day at Robbers Cave, they voted to take the same bus home.

So yes, we all too readily separate people into those like “us,” whom we treat empathetically and altruistically, versus those we treat as “others.” Leaders can exploit this tendency to drum up support for persecution, repression, war, and genocide. But we can clearly also learn to overcome our hostility toward others, and not just because we have been manipulated into doing so, like the boys at Robbers Cave. We can use our reason to recognize our commonality with others, or at the very least to resolve our differences nonviolently.

Sherif extracted another optimistic lesson from his experiment. In a 1958 paper, he proposes that traditionally hostile groups can overcome their differences if they are bound together by “superordinate,” or shared, goals. We have many such goals today, but two stand out. One is figuring out how we can all prosper in every sense—materially as well as spiritually—without irrevocably damaging our planet. Another, which will help us achieve the first, is ending war.

RELINQUISHING WAR

Throughout history, people in a wide range of societies, some of which were once quite bellicose, have renounced war, at least temporarily. One notable warrior-turned-pacifist was the legendary Indian emperor Ashoka, who lived in the third century BCE During the first part of his rule, he unified all of India through brutal wars and repression. He was ruthless, even killing his brothers to eliminate them as rivals. But after an especially bloody war against a rebellious province, Ashoka embraced Buddhism and its doctrine of ahimsa, or nonviolence, and he renounced war, executions of criminals, and even the slaughter of animals.

What we know of Ashoka derives mostly from ancient stone inscriptions that probably mix myth with fact. But modern history offers well-documented examples of societies relinquishing war. The Vikings were once the scourge of Europe, raiding lands as far away as modern-day Iraq. Their Swedish descendants created an empire via wars of conquest against Poland, Russia, and other northern European states. The Swedes’ last armed conflict took place in 1814, when they forcibly annexed Norway. Likewise, the Swiss were once famed as mercenaries. The Vatican’s Swiss Guard is a relic of this martial past. But like Sweden, Switzerland has remained neutral since the Napoleonic wars.

In 1948, Costa Rica’s corrupt legislature refused to turn over power to a newly elected president. An armed uprising led by businessman-turned-revolutionary José Figueres overthrew the government in a battle that killed more than two thousand people in forty-four days. The new regime rewrote the national constitution, granting voting rights to women and blacks and abolishing the army, which previous governments had employed to repress political opposition. Costa Rica has remained disarmed and peaceful ever since, while violence (often exacerbated by U.S. policies in the region) has wracked Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador, and other nations in Central America.

I don’t want to overstate the pacifism of these societies. Ashoka, the Buddhist emperor, never entirely abolished his army. Costa Rica could take the risk of disarming in part because it aligned itself with the U.S. during the cold war and cut off ties with Cuba after its communist revolution. Sweden and Switzerland traded with Germany during World Wars I and II, in part to keep it at bay. Both countries maintain armed forces for self-defense and have contributed troops to international peacekeeping operations. But if all nations emulated these nations, there would be no war.

One of my favorite examples of people turning away from war are the Waorani. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, this Amazonian tribe had a rate of violent death twice as high as that of the “fierce” Yanomamö. When contacted by anthropologists in the 1950s, some Waorani deplored the savagery of their inter-village raiding, which they realized threatened them with extinction. But their intense distrust and hostility dissuaded rivals from meeting to hash out a truce, and they felt they had no choice but to keep fighting. “Warfare, under these conditions, is contagious,” the anthropologists Clayton and Carole Robarchek point out. “Once one group adopts it as a tactic for advancing its ends, others must take it up or be destroyed.”

Then several Waorani women who had fled the carnage and lived with other tribes returned to their village, accompanied by two American missionaries, and they came up with a plan to end the epidemic of violence. Using a small plane, the missionaries flew Waorani from hostile bands over each other’s camps so that they could deliver conciliatory messages over a loudspeaker. These contacts were followed by face-to-face meetings. The first encounter went badly; a Waorani band from one village killed the emissary from another. But within a few months the inter-group raids ceased, and the Waorani soon reaped further benefits as they began trading and intermarrying. Peace, it seems, can be contagious too.

The Waorani, far from missing the constant combat, “unanimously stressed their relief that the cycle of killing has come to an end,” recall the Robarcheks. They emphasize that the Waorani relinquished war without any other dramatic changes in their situation. They did not all convert to Christianity. Nor were they conquered and disarmed by an outside force. They did not overhaul their social or sexual relationships or their methods for obtaining and distributing food. The main reason why war among the Waorani ended, the Robarcheks say, is because “the people themselves made a conscious decision to end it.”

WAR VERSUS SLAVERY

The crucial first step toward peace is for people to reject war. To say, “Enough!” The political scientist and anti-war activist Randall Forsberg arrived at this conclusion late in her career, after decades of pursuing peace through arms control agreements. In the early 1980s, she spearheaded the nuclear freeze movement, which called for a moratorium on testing and deployment of new nuclear weapons by the U.S. and Soviet Union. During the summer of 1982, a coalition of peace groups, which I joined as a volunteer, organized a nuclear freeze rally in New York City’s Central Park attended by as many as 1 million people.

The freeze referendum failed to win sufficient popular support to slow down the Reagan administration’s buildup of nuclear weapons. Forsberg, undeterred, came up with an even more ambitious program for disarmament. In a 1999 paper, she proposed that all nations reduce arms to minimal levels, needed only for self-defense. Nations would resolve disputes before an “International Court of Justice,” the decisions of which would be binding. Just as the freeze campaign had no real hope of success during the Reagan administration, so Forsberg’s proposal for international disarmament was ignored after 9/11.

When I interviewed Forsberg in 2003, she no longer viewed arms and armies as the chief impediment to peace. Instead, her focus had switched to cultural—and especially moral—attitudes toward war. For as long as she could remember, she had had an aversion to war; that’s why she became obsessed with ending it. She did not merely view war as irrational and immoral. She was repulsed by it. “The idea that people settle political disputes by blowing up bodies…” Forsberg paused and grimaced, as if overcome by a foul odor. “It’s just unthinkable! Barbaric in the most primitive sense.”

She always assumed that most people shared her view, but she gradually realized that many rational, decent citizens, scholars, and leaders—including some of her colleagues in the arms control community—still saw war as a legitimate form of resolving disputes in certain circumstances. This cultural tolerance of war, Forsberg claimed, accounts for its persistence, and not “innate aggressive impulses.” To end war, Forsberg concluded, we need a “change in moral beliefs, not a change in power or politics.”

She noted that shifts in moral attitudes led to the eradication—or at least outlawing in most societies—of once sanctioned practices such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, corporal punishment, and slavery. Like war, these bad habits arose thousands of years ago, primarily in agrarian societies, and some of them—notably slavery—remained legal and socially accepted, even in supposedly “civilized” societies, well into the nineteenth century.

Proponents of slavery cited biblical scripture and, later, pseudo-scientific theories to make the case that these practices were “natural” and hence inevitable. Most nations have nonetheless abolished slavery, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and corporal punishment out of growing “respect for the dignity and worth of every individual,” Forsberg once wrote. War will surely be next. “If we got to the point of thinking about war as being as gross and inhumanly awful as cannibalism,” she told me, “then war would never come back.”

I agree with Forsberg that the abolition of war would be a natural consequence of our growing recognition of human rights. This recognition has inspired a host of social transformations in addition to the ones Forsberg specifies, including legal protections for women, workers, children, ethnic and religious minorities, and homosexuals. On the other hand, we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves too much on our moral enlightenment. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 initially freed slaves in rebel regions but not in loyal ones, and it was at least in part a political and even military stratagem aimed at the south. The U.S. passed child labor laws during the Great Depression to preserve precious jobs for adults. Today, the U.S. and other supposed paragons of justice often pay lip service to individual dignity while still permitting discrimination, economic exploitation, and other abusive practices at home and abroad. Slavery, while not legally sanctioned, persists belowground. Seen in this context, war’s persistence seems a bit less anomalous.

There are also crucial differences between war and the other cruel customs on which Forsberg focuses. One society can unilaterally ban slavery, human sacrifice, burning at the stake, and cannibalism without regard for the behavior of neighboring societies. If one society disarms, however, it becomes vulnerable to attacks from others. And you can’t stop slavery with more slavery, or cannibalism with cannibalism, but you can stop armed aggression with armed aggression. Allied opposition to Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany forced them to relinquish their warlike ways.

Even pacifists must acknowledge that some wars have had better outcomes—and have been more legitimate—than others. War is thus more morally complex than, say, slavery, to which it is often compared. I don’t consider my father and grandfather to be the ethical equivalents of slave-owners because they fought in World War II. I’m proud of them. The terrible, tragic irony is that every relatively “successful” war—and especially World War II, the deadliest conflict of all time—helps perpetuate war’s legitimacy, making future wars more likely.

Forsberg, who died in 2007, was well aware of these paradoxical aspects of war. Although she loathed war, she was not a pacifist—“because of Hitler.” She was nonetheless confident that war would one day fade away, just as other inhumane customs have. In fact, she saw signs of a growing revulsion toward war not only in massive protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, but also in the decline of major international wars since World War II. War, she said, “is on the wane.”

THE DECLINE OF WAR

War “on the wane”? At first glance, this claim might seem absurd. My favorite source of data on military matters is the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. According to the SIPRI Yearbook 2011, major armed conflicts—which by definition include at least one government-sponsored force and kill at least one thousand people a year—wrack fifteen regions in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East. These regions include Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Colombia, Peru, Kashmir, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Kurdistan. SIPRI’s list does not include Libya and other Arab nations where civil conflicts erupted in 2011.

Between 2001 and 2011, global military spending surged more than 50 percent. U.S. outlays grew by 81 percent to $698 billion, which is almost as much as the rest of the world combined. The next biggest military spender after the U.S. is China at $119 billion a year. Humanity is awash in weapons, from AK-47s to nuclear-tipped missiles. The eight declared nuclear powers possess an estimated 20,530 warheads. For many people around the world, war provides not just meaning, excitement, and political power but also enormous profits.

But other data lend support to the idea that we are losing our taste for war. Estimating war casualties, including civilians, has always been extremely difficult. War zones are not exactly conducive to things like counting bodies. Scholars also debate what counts as a casualty, or a war. Should only wars between states count? Civil wars? Colonial uprisings against imperial powers? Genocidal campaigns? Deaths from famine and disease in war zones as well as from bombs and bullets? Bias is rampant among estimators. Combatants, government representatives, U.N. officials, journalists, anti-war and human-rights groups, medical organizations, and scholars have different national, religious, ethnic, and ideological allegiances, which sometimes motivate them to inflate or deflate numbers.

Not surprisingly, body counts often diverge wildly. Estimates of World War I deaths range from under 8 million to over 17 million (the higher number includes civilian deaths). Counts of the civilians killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2006 range from 48,000 to 600,000. All casualty statistics—especially those with pretensions of precision—should be taken with large grains of salt. But investigations by a wide variety of groups reveal a dramatic, recent drop in the worldwide incidence and lethality of war.

The twentieth century produced the greatest carnage in human history, at least measured in absolute (rather than proportional) terms. The political scientist Rudolph Rummel distinguishes war from “democide,” his term for mass slaughter of civilians by their own governments, which accounted for far more bloodshed than international or civil wars. (Unlike genocide, which is directed at certain ethnic or religious groups, democide involves killing any civilians.) Rummel estimates that democide—which includes deaths from famine and disease as well as violence—killed 262 million people between 1900 and 1999 and war another forty-three million for a total of 305 million. He contends, for example, that Mao’s Great Leap Forward resulted in the death by starvation of thirty-eight million people between 1958 and 1962.

The political scientist Milton Leitenberg proposes a lower number of deaths, 241 million, for the twentieth century. Of this total, 190 million deaths occurred between 1900 and 1945 and another 41 million between 1945 and 2000. According to these statistics, which include direct and indirect deaths, the toll from war dropped from about 4 million a year in the first half of the twentieth century to less than 1 million in the second half. During this same period, the world’s population more than doubled.

The decline has become even more dramatic since 2000. One organization that tracks war casualties is the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development. This U.N.-affiliated organization, which is based in Switzerland and sponsored by more than ninety states (not including the U.S.), is committed to achieving “measurable reductions in the global burden of armed violence.” In 2008, the Geneva Declaration issued a report, “Global Burden of Armed Violence,” which notes that since 2000 annual war-related deaths have fallen well below rates in the twentieth century.

“Wars grab headlines, but the individual risk of dying violently in an armed conflict is today relatively low,” the report states. Drawing upon several different studies, the report estimates that between 2004 and 2007, an average of 52,000 soldiers and civilians died violently each year in armed conflicts, including civil wars and terrorism. If deaths from “indirect” war-related causes such as disease and famine are included, the average annual total rises to 250,000. Almost twice as many people, 490,000, are homicide victims, and more than three times as many, 800,000, are suicides.

On December 2, 2010, the Human Security Report Project, which is based at Simon Fraser University in Canada and sponsored by Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, England, and Canada, issued another encouraging report. It notes that the global economic downturn, which started in 2008, “did not lead to the expected increase in political violence” (again, contradicting the linkage of scarcity to conflict). Deaths of combatants in wars crept up a bit between 2005 and 2008 but are still quite low compared to averages in the twentieth century; moreover, in 2008 “the estimated number of civilians killed by organized violence was the lowest since data started being collected in 1989.” The Simon Fraser researchers attribute this decline in part to immunizations and other healthcare measures that have reduced infant and child mortality rates in war zones.

The decline in war-related mortality over the past two decades corresponds to a decline in “high-intensity” wars, which kill at least one thousand people a year, the Simon Fraser group asserts. There has been a shift away from wars fought by “huge armies equipped with heavy conventional weapons” to wars waged “within, not between, states and by small armies mostly equipped with small arms and light weapons.” These smaller-scale wars, although they can be extraordinarily brutal, usually generate far fewer casualties than conventional international wars.

Between 2001 and 2010, the number of major civil conflicts in Africa fell from seven to four. The continent has become so stable that in 2010 the consulting firm McKinsey & Company offered a bullish assessment for investments in Africa. The report was issued just before conflict erupted in Egypt and other northern African nations. But as of this writing, only the fighting in Libya appears to have killed more than one thousand people.

DOES DEMOCRACY PROMOTE PEACE?

Scholars have attributed the recent decline of war to various factors, some of which I have already critiqued. They include gender equality, prosperity, globalization (that is, capitalism plus international trade and investment), and the deterrent effects of nuclear weapons. One intriguing idea is that the surge in life expectancies, which have almost doubled over the last century in most regions, have made people more reluctant to risk their lives or the lives of their loved ones in armed conflicts.

As a journalist, I’d like to believe that the media has helped bring about the reduction of war. At its best, the media exposes the horror and hypocrisy of war. Photographs of children burned by napalm inflamed opposition to the Vietnam War, just as photographs of American guards taunting naked, terrified Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib eroded support for the war in Iraq.

But of course leaders can all too easily employ the media to exploit our docility and bounded rationality, and our tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them.” The Nazis used radio and newspapers to incite hatred of Jews and other groups. Broadcasts by Hutu leaders in Rwanda helped trigger the genocide against Tutsis in the early 1990s. The jingoism of American media after the 9/11 attacks helped George Bush make the case for invading Iraq. The media ia a problem as well as a solution.

The most popular explanation for the decline in war is the spread of democracy. I first heard about the link between democracy and peace in 1991, when the U.S. and its allies were trying to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Gloomy about the war, I sought out scholars trying to find solutions to militarism. One is Bruce Russett, a professor of international relations and political science at Yale and editor (until 2009) of the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Russett was as disturbed by the Gulf War as I was; he felt that the U.S. should have given sanctions against Iraq more time to work before launching air strikes.

But he became excited telling me about the so-called democratic-peace phenomenon, which he called “perhaps the strongest non-trivial or non-tautological statement that can be made about international relations.” Kant was the first scholar to propose a link between democracy and peace. The philosopher speculated that political leaders will become less likely to wage war as they become more accountable to their people, who always bear the brunt of war and hence will be more reluctant to fight.

Russett and other scholars started investigating Kant’s thesis empirically in the 1980s, and they found evidence for democratic peace dating back to the early nineteenth century. Democracies, although they fight non-democracies, Russett says, “virtually never go to war with each other.” The democratic-peace phenomenon implies that “anything we can do to further the spread of democracy will reduce the likelihood of war.” It offers “the beginning of a vision of a world without war.”

The spread of democracy correlates closely with the recent decline in international and civil wars. The nonprofit think tank Freedom House has charted the ebbs and flows of democracy around the world since the 1940s. Freedom House defines a nation as democratic, or “free,” if it meets two criteria. First, it must “elect representatives who have a decisive impact on public policies and are accountable to the electorate.” Second, the nation must allow “freedoms of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy without interference from the state.”

In its 2011 annual report, Freedom House categorizes eighty-seven of the world’s 194 nations as “free” and another sixty as “partly free.” People are “not free” in forty-seven countries, home to 34 percent of the global population. A single nation, China, accounts for roughly half of this percentage. The report states that global freedom declined in 2010 for the fifth consecutive year; twenty-five countries show decreased scores, and only eleven have increases. (The report does not address the Arab uprisings in early 2011.) But even with this backsliding, more people are living in genuine democracies than at any time in history. Only 12 percent of humanity lived under democratic rule in 1900 and 31 percent in 1950.

Now come the caveats. Democracies, needless to say, are not always paragons of peace, justice, and enlightenment. After French revolutionaries overthrew their corrupt monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century, they slaughtered thousands of their own people and, under Napoleon’s leadership, embarked on wars of conquest against the rest of Europe. Throughout the nineteenth century European republics maltreated their colonial subjects. Americans slaughtered and stole the land of Native Americans; enslaved Africans; waged imperialist wars in the Philippines, Vietnam, Central America, and elsewhere; propped up dictatorial regimes that favored U.S. interests; and built up a nuclear arsenal that could destroy humanity, if not all life.

Moreover, democracies wage war in the name of democracy. U.S. officials cited democracy as a justification for invading Iraq in 2003, although this cause was invoked after the original pretext—Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction—had been exposed as fallacious. “The reason why I’m so strong on democracy is democracies don’t go to war with each other,” George W. Bush stated in 2004. “And that’s why I’m such a strong believer that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to promote democracy.”

Another problem—especially evident in Iraq and Afghanistan—is that “emerging” democracies, which still lack competent governments, legal institutions, and media, are often wracked by violence and corruption. And finally, peoples’ yearning for freedom often culminates in deadly violence, as demonstrated by the American and French Revolutions and the recent revolts in Libya and other Arab nations. Democracy, in other words—like capitalism, socialism, prosperity, and the media—can be a problem as well as a solution.

JOHN MUELLER’S OPTIMISM

So why, then, have we been waging war less frequently since World War II? My favorite explainer of this trend is John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University. I met Mueller, ironically, at the “Hybrid Warfare” conference I described in the previous chapter. The organizer of that meeting, the historian and Army veteran Peter Mansoor, saw the recent decline in war as just a temporary, random calm—like the one preceding World War I—that will inevitably erupt once again into large-scale violence.

Mueller rejects this fatalistic view. The most important difference between our era and the early twentieth century, he points out, is that we have learned from two world wars and countless other cataclysms that war is stupid, destructive, wasteful, and immoral. In short, wrong. As Mueller puts it in a 2009 paper, which echoes the thinking of Randall Forsberg, war is declining because “attitudes toward it have changed, roughly following the pattern according to which the ancient and once-formidable institution of formal, state-sponsored slavery became discredited and then obsolete.”

Prior to World War I, Mueller points out, many prominent leaders and thinkers still extolled war as a progressive force in human evolution, which promoted the propagation of the fittest and winnowed out the weak. Kant wrote that “prolonged peace favors the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice and effeminacy.” War “almost always enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character,” the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville agreed. And Teddy Roosevelt declared at the end of the nineteenth century: “All the great masterful races have been fighting races. No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war.” Such glorifications of war became much less common after the horrific, industrial-scale carnage of World War I. Since then, Mueller notes, most leaders and pundits have tended to describe war as at best a necessary evil—a means to resist aggression and defend freedom—rather than an intrinsically good end in itself.

Like Margaret Mead, Mueller views war as a cultural “idea” or “invention” that has gripped humanity for millennia. War is “an institution,” he writes, “that has been grafted onto human existence, rather than a trick of fate, a thunderbolt from hell, a natural calamity, a systemic necessity, or a desperate plot contrivance dreamed up by some sadistic puppeteer up high.” He disagrees with Mead only on the point that we need to invent something to replace war. We don’t need to replace war with anything, Mueller says. We just need to end it, and we seem to be doing just that.

Mueller has been predicting the end of international war since the late 1980s, when virtually no one took the idea seriously. He first contended that war between major powers was becoming “obsolete” in his 1989 book Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War, published in timely fashion just before the remarkably nonviolent collapse of the Soviet Union. He has repeated and expanded upon this thesis since then in a half dozen more books and scores of articles. “[W]e may be reaching a point where war—in both its international and civil varieties—ceases, or nearly ceases, to exist,” he writes.

He acknowledges the fascination that war exerts over many males. “There’s this camaraderie,” Mueller says, plus “the exhilaration of being in this dangerous area with adrenaline pumping all the time.” But he dismisses the idea that war is the inevitable consequence of deep-rooted male compulsions. After war ends, he points out, the vast majority of soldiers are relieved, not disappointed, when they go home and resume their civilian lives. Neither the Swiss nor the Swedes have fought a battle in more than two centuries, he adds, and “they don’t seem hungry to get back in it.” The same is true of modern Japan and Germany.

Mueller is also skeptical of economic theories of war, noting that nations often fight not primarily for land, oil, or other resources but for more emotional motives such as humiliation, anger, and pride. The war between England and Argentina over the tiny Falklands Islands in the 1980s was an example of a war fought almost solely for national honor. Many pundits have linked the recent decline of war to the spread of trade and democracy, but Mueller is dubious. Correlation does not equal causation, he says, and if anything, peace promotes trade and democracy rather than vice versa.

Nor is Mueller a great believer in arms control treaties, whether conventional or nuclear. Decreased international hostility, he suggests, is more likely to bring about disarmament rather than vice versa. Since the end of the cold war, France has gotten rid of two thirds of its nuclear weapons simply to save money. Mueller thinks that Britain may soon follow suit. Mueller discounts the view that nuclear weapons have deterred war between major powers. While nuclear weapons “may have been sufficient to prevent another major war, they have not been necessary to do so.”

The memory of World Wars I and II and other major conflicts should provide sufficient deterrent for future international wars, he says. “Even allowing for stupidity, ineptness, miscalculation, and self-deception in these considerations, it does not appear that a large war, nuclear or otherwise, has been remotely in the interest of the essentially contented, risk-averse, escalation-anticipating powers that have dominated world affairs since 1945.”

Mueller may not be as sanguine about the future as he sometimes sounds. If he were, why would he bother writing books and articles predicting the end of war? And he does admit to one major concern. Since 9/11, he says, the U.S. has “wildly overreacted” to threats from terrorists. Over the past few decades, he notes, accidents involving home appliances and deer have killed more Americans than terrorists have. The 9/11 attacks provoked the U.S. into launching two wars, which so far have killed six thousand Americans—twice as many as died on 9/11—and tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The U.S. has also antagonized millions of Muslims around the world, exacerbating the problem it sought to solve. In other words, the biggest threat to peace is our excessive fear of war.

As Mueller would be the first to admit, peace is no more inevitable than war. We are still plagued by what Mueller describes as “the remnants of war,” including terrorism, insurgencies, and criminal violence. He warns that attacks on civilians by “predatory militia bands in places like Sudan and Congo cause more damage and suffering than many wars.” And the accidental or deliberate detonation of a single nuclear weapon could instantly reverse the recent decline in war-related casualties.

Also, I would add, leaders of the world’s most powerful state still view war as legitimate under a wide range of circumstances. We keep spending more on preparations for war and finding new reasons to fight. In 2011, the Pentagon announced that it reserves the right to respond with bullets and bombs to “cyber war,” digital attacks on U.S. communications and information systems. We revel in our victories over bullies like Hitler and Saddam Hussein. We cheer the news of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. We Americans glorify past wars, from the War of Independence to World War II. Far from reviling our veterans, for the most part we honor them, as I honor my father and grandfather.

I also think Mueller too quickly dismisses democracy as a contributor to war’s recent decline. Although democracy does not guarantee peace, I find the correlation in the decline of war and the surge of democracy over the past half-century striking. Peace could foster democracy rather than vice versa, as Mueller suggests, but the reverse could be true as well. As people gain more power over their own destiny, they seem to be choosing peace over war and prodding their leaders to do the same, as Kant predicted. After all, ordinary citizens rather than leaders always bear the brunt of war. Peace will certainly be more robust if it stems from the will of citizens and not just the whim of tyrants.

These concerns aside, I find Mueller’s optimistic analysis persuasive, and inspiring. He convinces me that we can achieve a peaceful, largely disarmed world without first transforming it in other dramatic ways. To abolish war, he assures me, “you don’t have to get rid of weapons. You don’t have to change testosterone levels. You don’t have to change social balances. Don’t have to democratize. Don’t have to become capitalist. Don’t have to have trade. You don’t have to have any of those things.” We just have to want war to end, and to believe we can end it. The choice is ours. We are apparently already making this choice. Far from being a temporary, statistical anomaly, like a quiescent hurricane season, the decline of war reflects our growing aversion to war.

PEACE IS THE WAY

Throughout this book, I’ve examined attempts by scholars to identify factors especially conducive for peace. But there seem to be no conditions that, in and of themselves, inoculate a society against militarism. Not small government nor big government. Not democracy, socialism, capitalism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, nor secularism. Not giving equal rights to women or minorities nor reducing poverty. The contagion of war can infect any kind of society.

Some scholars, like the political scientist Joshua Goldstein, find this conclusion dispiriting. Early in his career Goldstein investigated economic theories of war, including those of Marx and Malthus. He concluded that war causes economic inequality and scarcity of resources as much as it stems from them. Goldstein, a self-described “pro-feminist,” then set out to test whether macho, patriarchal attitudes caused armed violence. He felt so strongly about this thesis that he and his wife limited their son’s exposure to violent media and contact sports.

But by the time he finished writing his 522-page book War and Gender in 2001, Goldstein had rejected the thesis. He questioned many of his initial assumptions about the causes of war. He never gave credence to explanations involving innate male aggression—war breaks out too sporadically for that—but he saw no clear-cut evidence for non-biological factors either. “War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes,” Goldstein writes. “Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.” He admits that all his research has left him “somewhat more pessimistic about how quickly or easily war may end.”

But here is the upside of this insight: if there are no conditions that in and of themselves prevent war, there are none that make peace impossible, either. This is the source of John Mueller’s optimism, and mine. If we want peace badly enough, we can have it, no matter what kind of society we live in. The choice is ours. And once we have escaped from the shadow of war, we will have more resources to devote to other problems that plague us, like economic injustice, poor health, and environmental destruction, which war often exacerbates.

The Waorani, whose abandonment of war led to increased trade and intermarriage, are a case in point. So is Costa Rica. In 2010, this Central American country was ranked number one out of 148 nations in a “World Database of Happiness” compiled by Dutch sociologists, who gathered information on the self-reported happiness of people around the world. Costa Rica also received the highest score in another “happiness” survey, carried out by an American think tank, that factored in the nation’s impact on the environment. The United States was ranked twentieth and 114^th, respectively, on the surveys. Instead of spending on arms, over the past half century Costa Rica’s government invested in education, as well as healthcare, environmental conservation, and tourism, all of which helped make the country more prosperous, healthy, and happy. There is no single way to peace, but peace is the way to solve many other problems.

The research of Mueller, Goldstein, Forsberg, and other scholars yields one essential lesson. Those of us who want to make the world a better place—more democratic, equitable, healthier, cleaner—should make abolishing the invention of war our priority, because peace can help bring about many of the other changes we seek. This formula turns on its head the old social activists’ slogan: “If you want peace, work for justice.” I say instead, “If you want justice, work for peace.” If you want less pollution, more money for healthcare and education, an improved legal and political system—work for peace.