I think, what we need to do is to remind people that the earth is a very dangerous place these days.
—White House press secretary Sean Spicer, February 7, 2017
February 16, 2012, was, from all appearances, an unremarkable day. The political world was focused on the upcoming Republican presidential primary in Michigan, in which the frontrunner, Mitt Romney, was facing a spirited challenge from former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. Journalists were mourning the loss of the New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid, who had died on a reporting trip to Syria. New Yorkers obsessed over the Knicks’ budding superstar point guard, Jeremy Lin; the Simpsons marked its five hundredth episode; and Chinese President Xi Jinping was in Iowa hoping, as the Washington Post put it, “to emphasize the idea of an enduring U.S.-Chinese friendship.”1
Yet, on Capitol Hill, the most senior officer in the world’s most powerful military, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, saw something else altogether: danger. Testifying before the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on budget sequestration—the congressional mandate passed in 2011 that required all federal agencies, including the Pentagon, to automatically cut their budgets by 5 to 10 percent in the following decade—Dempsey warned, “in my personal military judgment, formed over thirty-eight years, we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime, right now.”2 This is a surprising statement. After all, Martin Dempsey was born in March 1952, during the tail end of the Korean War—which killed more than two million people, including 36,574 Americans. When he attended elementary school, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear holocaust than at any other point during the Cold War. By the time he enlisted in the army in 1974, the Vietnam War had been going on for several years and before it ended would take the lives of more than three million people, including 58,220 Americans. As Dempsey rose through the military ranks, he witnessed the strategic nuclear arms buildup of the 1980s, when the United States and the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear-armed missiles pointed at each other. Later, on September 11, 2001, the most lethal terrorist attack in American history took the lives of nearly three thousand people. While all of these events directly affected Americans, there were plenty of other dangerous moments in Dempsey’s lifetime, such as the Biafra separatist civil war in Nigeria that killed two hundred thousand, the Angolan civil war in which one million people died, the Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia that took the lives of approximately a quarter of that nation’s eight million people, the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s that killed more than one million people, and the internationalized civil war in Congo that has led to three million war-related deaths since the mid-1990s.3 Yet, if Dempsey is to be taken literally, none of those moments compared to the dangers facing the world on the morning of February 16, 2012.
What made Dempsey’s statement particularly odd was an observation he made one year later testifying before Congress: “I will personally attest to the fact that [the world is] more dangerous than it’s ever been”—in other words, since the earth was fully formed 4.6 billion years ago.4 Though Dempsey’s comments were clearly hyperbolic—and easily disprovable—they garnered little attention. In a political environment dominated by habitual threat inflation, they barely stand out. Indeed, two years after Dempsey’s testimony, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told Congress, “looking back over my more than half a century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we have been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.” Remarkably, he had made virtually the same statement—word for word—a year earlier when testifying before Congress.5
In January 2015, army chief of staff Gen. Raymond Odierno told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “today the global environment is the most uncertain I have seen in my thirty-six years of service.”6 This assertion was especially well received by the committee’s chairman, Sen. John McCain, who only days before had proclaimed, “we are probably in the most serious period of turmoil in our lifetime.”7 In November 2017, Air Force Lt. Gen. Steve Kwast went further back in time proclaiming, “There’s no question that this generation . . . is living in the most dangerous time since the Civil War for the Republic.”8
There are specific bureaucratic and political reasons for such apocalyptic descriptions of the global environment (the more vivid the threat, the more likely Congress will be to maintain military and intelligence-community funding). Such views, however, are mimicked across the national security community. Indeed, in the elite world of foreign policy punditry (and national politics), the notion of grave, growing, and irreversible dangers facing the United States is the default (and unchanging) position. So we should not be surprised that most Americans think the world is getting more and more dangerous.9 In the immediate aftermath of the bombing of a subway train and airport terminal in Brussels in March 2016, MSNBC news anchor Brian Williams asked Senator McCain if the world was on the verge of World War III. McCain unsurprisingly said yes.10 Sen. Lindsay Graham, then in the running for the Republican nomination for president, echoed these fears, claiming, “there is a sickness in the world that has to be dealt with, and the civilized world must come together to confront it.”11 Quite simply, this is the lingua franca of the Threat-Industrial Complex.
There is one problem: this image of the world is completely wrong. In virtually no element of our national discourse are Americans provided with a more inaccurate depiction of the world than when it comes to matters of war, peace, and freedom. Americans live in a world that is safer and freer than ever before in human history—and it is not even close. To state this is not to be insensitive to those who are suffering real harms or being denied their personal freedoms. It doesn’t mean one is naïve to the potential of current global challenges—some of which are neither illusory nor false—to become serious threats in the future. But facts are facts, and the transformation in the human experience over the past two to three decades is the most consequential global trend in security affairs in any of our lifetimes—and it is largely unknown to the wider public.
A Safer World
The data supporting the proposition that the world is safer than ever are so overwhelming that they can barely be disputed. For example, interstate war, or war between states, was the defining characteristic of international relations for centuries. Today, such wars have largely disappeared. Since 2012, there have been just two interstate wars: one between Sudan and South Sudan in 2012 and one between India and Pakistan in 2014 and 2015 that led to fewer than one hundred fatalities in total over both years.12 In the seven years before 2010, there was one major interstate conflict—started by the United States in Iraq in March 2003.13
How about great-power conflict? These protracted and bloody wars—such as the Thirty Years’ War, World War I, and World War II—have been historically the most devastating and consequential conflicts. They’ve repeatedly led to massive death tolls of soldiers and civilians, forced transfers of millions of people, and the redrawing of national boundaries to the benefit of the victors. As the historian Timothy Snyder has documented in Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, 10.5 million civilians (Germans, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews from various countries) were killed by Germany and the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1945.14 Put another way by the eminent British historian Max Hastings, approximately twenty-seven thousand people lost their lives every single day of that conflict.15 That means that during World War II, between a given Monday and Thursday, there would have been as many deaths as there were battle-related deaths in all of 2016.16 Despite the December 2015 claim by Chris Christie that the United States was “already in World War III,” the world has not seen such a total global conflict in more than seven decades.17
All of this might sound like apostasy when you consider the daily fare on cable news segments, in social media feeds, and in the nation’s newspapers and magazines. Foreign reporting in these outlets has been dominated in recent years by North Korea’s nuclear weapons development, stories of terrorist attacks in Iraq and western Europe, a bloody civil war in Syria that has killed an estimated five hundred thousand people, the barbaric cruelty of the Islamic State, Russia’s meddling in its near abroad, and China’s campaign of building military facilities on disputed territories in the South China Sea.18
For those whose lives are directly affected, these crises are serious matters. But alarmist coverage of these global hot spots has deluded Americans into believing that the world is a chronically violent place. It’s not. In fact, modern war is not only a rare occurrence, but when it does happen, it tends to be less violent and of shorter duration. On average, conflicts kill about 80 percent fewer people now than in the 1950s, when wars in Korea, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa took millions of lives.19 The vastly greater harm today is the displacement of civilians caught up in the fighting between combatants. By June 2018, sixty-eight million people around the world had been forced from their homes.20
To the credit of the United Nations, international organizations, and nongovernmental groups, the breadth and depth of understanding about the underlying dynamics and drivers of conflict have expanded dramatically, and there now exist far more tools for preventing and mitigating such armed violence. Not surprisingly, conflict gets more attention than does the successful use of international and regional conflict-prevention methods to prevent wars from occurring in the first place. The wars that never occurred between Israel and Iran, Peru and Ecuador, Russia and its Baltic neighbors, and Turkey and Russia after the shooting down of a Russian fighter in 2016 receive precious little attention.
Despite routine alarms of mounting tensions between China and its neighbors over territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas, conflict there has been avoided. This is true of the overwhelming number of maritime and land disputes, which a majority of countries have with their neighbors. Additionally, of the 430 bilateral maritime boundaries in the world, most are not defined by formal agreements between affected states. Unfortunately, peace, even between bitter adversaries, is not an “event” worth recognizing, much less celebrating; the dominant media narrative is that of an ever-threatening world.21
The current era of relative peace and stability has also contributed to a notable decline in the prevalence of state-directed mass killings of civilians.22 During the Cold War, approximately one in seven countries experienced a state-sponsored mass killing. This number increased to nearly 25 percent immediately after the Berlin Wall came down and declined to between 5 and 10 percent by the 2010s.23 In fact, far fewer people have been killed in war in the past quarter century than in any other quarter century over the past six hundred years. In 1800, one out of every two thousand people on earth—civilians and combatants—died from a combat-related death; in 1900, it was one in every twenty thousand; by 2016, it was one in every one hundred thousand.24
The overall decline in global conflict has had extraordinary ripple effects. William Tecumseh Sherman famously declared in 1879 that “war is hell,” but his words barely capture the full costs of warfare and armed violence. As one would expect, warfare significantly limits life expectancy. The Syrian civil war, for example, reduced life spans there from 79.5 years before 2011 to 55.7 in 2015, an extraordinary twenty-year decline in just a four-year period.25 Children living in conflict-affected poor countries are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday as are children in other poor countries, and warfare diminishes educational opportunities at all levels as well as overall quality of life. For example, children who grow up in conflict-affected countries are less likely to be literate and far less likely to be enrolled in primary school.26
Beyond the immediate human costs, wars do untold physical and environmental damage. In 2016, a time of relative peace and stability, all of the world’s armed conflicts combined cost the global economy an estimated $14.3 trillion. That is nearly 12.5 percent of global GDP.27 The relationship between conflict and economic distress is self-perpetuating—just as war drains government coffers, economic slowdowns also increase the likelihood of the outbreak and recurrence of conflict. Finally, conflict-prone countries are far less democratic, and, in fact, the presence of an autocratic government increases the risk of a civil war starting within that government’s territory.28 As noted previously, this matters because civil wars—including those like Syria’s that became “internationalized” with external support—are virtually the only type of armed conflicts that still occur in the world today.
Ironically, Americans tend to see the world as far more dangerous than it is precisely because the world is safer. Conflicts that were once far more routine have become more unusual and thus receive greater (and more vivid) media attention. This bolsters the impression that we live in a world of constant conflict when compared to recent history. Yet it is often forgotten exactly how bloody the final years of the Cold War were, particularly in comparison to today. The Cold War is mistakenly remembered as an era of relative quiet in which Washington and Moscow co-managed global affairs. For example, in February 2016, Clapper said the reason there were more threats than at any point in his seventy-three-year lifetime was the disappearance of the superpower rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union. “Virtually all other threats were sort of subsumed in that basic bipolar contest that went on for decades and was characterized by stability,” said Clapper.29
Yet, in the decade preceding the end of the Cold War in 1991, there were more than two million battle-related deaths around the world. In the ten years immediately after, there were 651,000, and in the past ten years, there were even fewer: 402,000.30 While the Cold War saw a bipolar (albeit unimaginably costly) peace between two nuclear-armed superpowers, it does not mean the rest of the world enjoyed peace and safety. There were significant internationalized wars, genocides and mass killings, and lengthy and bloody civil wars dotting the globe, from Indonesia and Afghanistan to Vietnam, Nigeria, and throughout Central America.
There is also the inconvenient fact that the United States and Soviet Union possessed nearly seventy thousand nuclear weapons, many perched on intercontinental missiles pointed directly at each other. The two adversaries also had tactical nuclear weapons deployed in twelve countries—many poorly secured or with the authority to use them resting with local military commanders.31 In the event of a full-scale superpower conflict, human life as we know it would have likely ceased to exist. Since Americans misremember what happened during the Cold War—and forget how real the threat of nuclear conflict was—they are far more prone to accept claims that the world is less stable and safe today.
One more reason Americans perceive the world to be so dangerous is that the overwhelming foreign policy focus of government leaders, Congress, and the media is on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Chronic political instability, proxy wars, and occasional interstate wars have long come to dominate the region. Indeed in 2017 alone, eight of nineteen MENA countries experienced intrastate conflicts (noninternational conflicts that resulted in twenty-five or more battlefield deaths).32 That is the exception, not the rule, in comparison to every other part of the world. Though the MENA region gets oversized media attention, it constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s population and is not representative of the overwhelming majority of the planet’s seven and a half billion residents. Painting a picture of the world solely using the chaotic and violent imagery from the Middle East severely distorts one’s image of global affairs.
The world is not merely safer than ever before; it has also become demonstrably freer over the past quarter century. Just as the Cold War is misremembered for being an era of relative peace and stability, it is often forgotten that the world then was defined far more by authoritarianism and totalitarianism than by democracy. In most corners of the globe, political freedom represented an aspirational, seemingly unachievable, goal. Today, even in the face of troubling reversals and assaults on democracy, a greater percentage of people are freer than before. They enjoy personal, political, and economic self-determination that would have been unimaginable to most people living outside the United States and western Europe just thirty years ago.
In November 1989, as the Berlin Wall was being dismantled, there were just 69 electoral democracies in the world, or 41 percent of 167 countries in total. Today, according to the Freedom House Index, that number is 116 (out of 196 countries), or 59 percent.33
In the 1980s, Latin America was mired in economic stagnation, social injustice, persistent conflict (both civil wars and cross-border conflicts), and above all, an almost complete lack of democratic governance. In Chile in 1973, a democratic election was overturned by a military coup, leading to dictatorship, widespread human rights abuses, and a full-fledged economic crisis. In Argentina, a military junta invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, sparking a pointless war with the United Kingdom. Throughout the late ’70s and ’80s, Central America became a hotbed of human rights abuses, civilian massacres, and economic deprivation, fueled by superpower competition between Washington and Moscow. Today, while economic and political progress across the region has been uneven and backsliding is evident, all of Latin America—with the exception of Venezuela and Cuba—is today designated as “free” or “partly free” by Freedom House.
Thirty years ago in Europe, half the continent was under the thumb of totalitarian leaders, basic freedoms were restricted, and barbed-wire-topped walls prevented citizens from traveling outside their borders. With the exception of Belarus and Russia, every country in western and eastern Europe is today considered a free or partly free democracy. In the Far East, South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan—countries once (wrongly) considered by Western academics as culturally inappropriate for political liberalization—have become full-fledged democracies. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, which has experienced a decline or stagnation in democratization since 2005, the majority of people live in free or partly free countries.34 Once again, it is the Middle East that remains outside the global shift toward greater political freedom, with only Tunisia and Israel being considered free countries and a handful ranked as partly free.35 These gains have also led to greater political stability as there has been a marked decline in the number of coup attempts across the globe over the past three decades.36
The Polity IV project, a widely respected data source of global governance trends, assigns “polity scores” to states to quantify their governing authority on a scale of –10 to +10. It does this by coding democratic and autocratic traits, such as political participation, competitiveness of political leadership positions, and constraints on the chief of state. A polity score of +10 would be a full democracy, such as Sweden, while a –10 would be a severe autocracy, such as North Korea.37 In 1989, the average score for all governments was –0.5, the equivalent of an Afghanistan governance score by the latest rankings. By 2016, it had moved all the way to +4.3.38 Meanwhile, today a country with a score of –0.5 would be somewhere between Afghanistan and the Central African Republic. Moreover, when changes in polity scores from 1949 to 2014 are tracked against changes in “human rights scores” over the same period, a hopeful trend is apparent: as countries become more democratic, their respect for human rights also increases.39
Democratic progress, however, remains fragile, and according to Freedom House—which tracks relative democratic rankings—global freedom has declined for the past twelve years. In aspiring great and midlevel powers such as China, Russia, and Turkey, there has been a disturbing uptick in autocratic behaviors. In all three countries, there’s been the silencing and even murder of independent journalists, the overregulation and harassment of civil society organizations, consolidation of political rule by authoritarian leaders, and more centralized control of security forces. Notable and troubling declines are also evident in the Philippines, Poland, Hungary, and Nicaragua. Moreover, confidence in elected officials in strongly democratic countries—including the United States and in western Europe—has notably fallen in recent years as populist, nativist, and xenophobic political movements have made inroads.40 The extraordinary democratic progress made in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is now moving in the opposite direction.
Struggles for more entrenched democratization and personal freedoms are constantly contested, messy, and even bloody affairs—and many young democracies go through extended periods of political turmoil. Those who hold power generally seek to exercise it with the fewest possible restraints, and those restraints are growing. Indeed, if there is one area where the path of human progress could potentially be slowed or even reversed, it is on the expansion of political freedom. The growing disinterest among U.S. policy makers toward the issue—and the cultivation of authoritarian leaders by President Donald Trump—will undoubtedly make this situation worse.
Yet the path of progress over the past thirty years cannot be denied. Quite simply, the world is far more democratic and free today than it was during the height of the Cold War.
Why Does This Matter for America?
While fewer armed conflicts and increased political freedom is good news for the vast majority of the world’s seven and a half billion people, it is also great news for America. If there is one relatively ironclad rule of international affairs, it is that democracies tend to have happier, healthier, and better-educated citizens. They almost never go to war with other democracies, much less even threaten each other; and they are also far less likely to find themselves in conflict with nondemocratic governments.41
A world that is relatively freer and thus less conflict-prone is one that is indisputably better for the United States. It means the U.S. homeland is less likely to be threatened or attacked by great powers with conventional or nuclear weapons. It means treaty allies are not at war, and as a result, the U.S. military is not required to come to their defense. Indeed, in 2015, only five armed conflicts (all internal) took place in countries that are U.S. treaty allies: Philippines (two of them), Colombia, Thailand, and Turkey.42 It means that fewer countries host or sponsor transnational terrorist groups dedicated to attacking the United States, its citizens, or its overseas diplomatic facilities. It means there are fewer disruptions to global flows of trade, tourism, and energy supplies that benefit the U.S. economy and American jobs. It means fewer people grow up in societies where hopelessness, resentment, and alienation make them susceptible to the appeals of violent extremists. Finally, it means governments are more likely to cooperate on transnational challenges such as fighting climate change, preventing the spread of infectious diseases, lowering the barriers to global trade and furthering human development.43
Since terrorism dominates contemporary foreign policy debates, Americans might immediately ask, “What about 9/11?” Understandably, the September 11, 2001, attacks are deeply imprinted into our national consciousness and will remain an inflection point for the division of historical eras, similar to the “Cold War” and “post-Cold War” eras. Yet it is important to understand just how tragically lucky al-Qaeda was on 9/11 and why the attacks were such an anomaly. U.S. homeland security policies, intelligence cooperation, and commercial aviation security were hugely deficient, and this combined negligence made America needlessly vulnerable. As we will detail later, the United States is vastly safer today from such a mass-casualty terror attack.
There are still terrorist groups seeking to kill Americans on American soil, yet they have been overwhelmingly unsuccessful in their efforts to do so. Since 9/11, 103 Americans have been killed within the United States by jihadist terrorists or affiliated terrorist actors, which is almost the same number of Americans killed in hate-crime attacks since 2002.44 Since 9/11, 402 U.S. citizens have died in terrorist incidents while living abroad, but nearly 75 percent of them died working as diplomats, contractors, aid workers, or journalists in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—the very places where the United States started wars and continues to conduct air strikes to destroy terrorist safe havens.45 It is tragic but unsurprising that individuals bravely serving in places where conflict is occurring face severely heightened risks to their personal safety, but that does not mean Americans should feel at increased risk of being killed by terrorists.46
Indeed, at the same time that Americans have become safer from terrorism, such attacks have increased globally. In 2002, there were fewer than 200 terror incidents worldwide, which killed a total of 725 people; in 2017, there were 8,584 incidents, which took the lives of 18,753 people, one-quarter of whom were the perpetrators.47 Yet seventy percent of all these fatalities occurred in just five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, and Syria. The perpetrators are relatively weak, nonstate actors using violence to achieve their political objectives, while the victims are overwhelmingly civilians (who themselves are overwhelmingly Muslims) caught between government security forces that cannot protect them and terrorist armies willing to kill them. Even in these five countries, however, there have been notable improvements, especially within Pakistan, which has experienced a decline in civilian deaths from terrorism every year between 2012 and 2017, with 3,007 deaths in 2012 and 540 in 2017.48
Contrary to General Dempsey’s apocalyptic warnings, the world that existed on February 16, 2012, was far less dangerous than at any point since he had been alive—and it remains so today. In the years after the end of the Cold War, many foreign policy analysts predicted a very different world—a “coming chaos” of continuous ethnic conflicts and genocidal civil wars.49 The political scientist Samuel Huntington warned of a potential “clash of civilizations,” while John Mearsheimer wrote ominously in the pages of the Atlantic that we would soon miss the Cold War.50 The journalist Robert Kaplan predicted that the post-Cold War years would be defined by “anarchy” and regional wars sparked by ancient, tribal hatreds. U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that renewed ethnic tensions could turn the planet into a “pandaemonium.”51 Contrary to this drumbeat of doomsaying, globalization failed to produce the xenophobia and unchecked ethnic and racial hatreds that were confidently predicted.52 If anything, the end of the Cold War led to a period of expanded global commerce, communications, and travel, as well as vastly higher living standards for the majority of people on earth.
Global and regional cooperation, not competition, is the defining characteristic of international politics today. That includes national governments, corporations, industry associations, nongovernmental organizations, and individual citizens. As we demonstrate in the following chapter, the world is not just safer and freer; it is a far better place to live now than at pretty much any point in the history of the human race.