Common Sense Philosophy/Chapter 9

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Chapter 9: War -- The Ultimate Failure of Reason

The Ledger

Let us begin with numbers, because the numbers are the argument.

In the twentieth century alone, war killed approximately 108 million people. That is a conservative estimate; some scholars place the figure considerably higher. One hundred and eight million. If you counted one name per second, day and night without stopping, it would take you more than three years to reach the end of the list.

But the dead are only the beginning. For every person killed in war, many more are wounded, displaced, orphaned, widowed, traumatized, impoverished, or psychologically destroyed. The Second World War killed roughly 70 million people. It displaced approximately 60 million more. It destroyed the physical infrastructure of entire continents. It produced the Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the siege of Leningrad, and a thousand other horrors that the human mind can barely comprehend and the human heart cannot bear to contemplate for long.

And the twentieth century, terrible as it was, is not exceptional. The Taiping Rebellion in nineteenth-century China killed an estimated 20 to 30 million people. The Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century killed an estimated 40 million -- roughly 10 percent of the world's population at the time. The Thirty Years' War killed approximately one-third of the population of the German lands. The transatlantic slave trade -- which was, among other things, a sustained campaign of military violence against African populations -- killed or displaced an estimated 12 to 15 million people over four centuries.

These numbers are so large that they defeat comprehension. The human mind, evolved to process the suffering of individuals and small groups, simply cannot grasp what 108 million dead means. Stalin is credited with the observation (possibly apocryphal but psychologically acute) that "one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." This is not a moral judgment. It is a cognitive fact. Our capacity for empathy does not scale. We can mourn one child. We cannot mourn a million children. And so the greatest source of human suffering in the history of the species escapes our moral attention precisely because of its scale.

This chapter insists on attention. War is not a natural disaster. It is not an inevitable consequence of human nature. It is a human institution -- created by human beings, maintained by human institutions, and glorified by human culture. It can be evaluated by the same criteria we apply to any other human institution: does it reduce suffering or increase it? Does it protect dignity or destroy it? Does it advance human freedom or crush it? Evaluated by these criteria, war is the most catastrophic institutional failure in human history. And the cultures that glorify it, that treat military valor as the highest virtue, that build their national identities around stories of martial triumph, are cultures that have elevated the destruction of human life to a sacred value.

The Mythology of the "Just War"

The just war tradition, originating with Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century and developed by Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius, and more recently by Michael Walzer, attempts to rescue war from moral condemnation by distinguishing between just and unjust wars. The tradition specifies conditions under which war may be legitimately waged (jus ad bellum) and rules for how it must be conducted (jus in bello).

The jus ad bellum criteria typically include: just cause (self-defense or defense of the innocent), right intention (the aim must be the restoration of peace, not conquest or revenge), legitimate authority (war must be declared by a proper authority, not a private actor), last resort (all peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted), proportionality (the expected benefits of war must outweigh its expected costs), and reasonable prospect of success (a war that cannot be won should not be fought).

The jus in bello criteria require: discrimination (combatants must distinguish between military targets and civilians), proportionality (the force used must be proportional to the military objective), and the prohibition of certain weapons and tactics (torture, rape, deliberate targeting of civilians, and the use of weapons that cause unnecessary suffering).

These criteria are intellectually respectable, and I do not dismiss them lightly. The just war tradition represents a genuine attempt to subject the most destructive human activity to moral constraint. In a world where war occurs, it is better to have moral rules about how it should be conducted than to have none at all.

But intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge that the just war tradition has been, in practice, almost entirely useless as a constraint on warfare. And the reason is simple: every war in history has been declared "just" by the side that started it. The Crusaders believed they were fighting a just war. So did the Jihadists they fought. The Union believed the Civil War was just. So did the Confederacy. The Allies in World War II believed their cause was just -- and they were right, as far as the cause of defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was concerned. But the justice of the cause did not prevent the firebombing of civilian cities, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers, or the internment of Japanese-Americans. Just cause, it turns out, does not guarantee just conduct. Once the dogs of war are unleashed, they do not read philosophy.

The Problem with "Last Resort"

The "last resort" criterion is particularly problematic. It requires that all peaceful alternatives be exhausted before war is justified. But who decides when peaceful alternatives have been exhausted? In practice, the decision is always made by the very leaders who have already decided to go to war. The claim "we tried everything else" is almost impossible to verify and almost always false. The United States claimed that war against Iraq in 2003 was a "last resort" after diplomatic efforts had failed. But the diplomatic efforts failed in part because the United States was not genuinely committed to a diplomatic solution -- as the Downing Street Memo, leaked in 2005, made clear: the intelligence and facts were "being fixed around the policy" of regime change that had already been decided.

The same pattern recurs throughout history. Leaders who have decided on war present that decision as the reluctant result of exhausted alternatives, when in fact the alternatives were never seriously pursued. The just war criterion of "last resort" provides moral cover for decisions that have already been made on other grounds: territorial ambition, domestic political advantage, ideological commitment, or simple miscalculation.

The Problem with Proportionality

The proportionality criterion is equally problematic. It requires that the expected benefits of war outweigh its expected costs. But war is inherently unpredictable: its costs almost always exceed expectations, often by orders of magnitude. The leaders who launched World War I in 1914 expected a short, decisive war that would be "over by Christmas." Four years later, 20 million people were dead, four empires had collapsed, and the political landscape of Europe had been transformed in ways that no one had foreseen and that would produce an even more destructive war twenty years later. The American leaders who invaded Iraq in 2003 expected a quick victory followed by democratic transformation. Twenty years later, the war had killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, destabilized the entire Middle East, produced ISIS, cost the United States trillions of dollars, and achieved none of its stated objectives.

The fundamental problem with proportionality analysis applied to war is that it requires predicting the unpredictable. War is a nonlinear system in which small causes produce large and unforeseeable effects. Clausewitz recognized this when he wrote of the "fog of war" and the tendency of war to escalate beyond the intentions of those who start it: "War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty." A proportionality calculation that cannot reliably predict the costs of war is not a useful moral tool. It is a sophisticated form of guesswork that consistently underestimates the horror of what is about to unfold.

Pinker's Thesis: The Decline of Violence

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) argues, with impressive statistical documentation, that violence of all kinds -- including war -- has declined dramatically over the course of human history. Pinker demonstrates that the per capita rate of violent death has fallen from approximately 15 percent in pre-state societies to less than 1 percent in the modern era. Wars have become less frequent, less lethal (relative to population), and more geographically concentrated. The great powers have not fought each other directly since 1945 -- the longest period of great-power peace in modern history.

Pinker's data are largely sound, and his conclusion -- that we live in the most peaceful era in human history, measured by per capita risk of violent death -- is probably correct. This is an important finding, and it should give hope to anyone who believes that war can be reduced or eliminated. If violence has declined before, it can decline further.

But Pinker's thesis has significant weaknesses that must be acknowledged.

The nuclear problem. Pinker attributes the "Long Peace" among great powers since 1945 partly to nuclear deterrence. But nuclear deterrence is a system that maintains peace by threatening the extinction of civilization. It is like saying that your house is safe from burglary because it is rigged with enough explosives to destroy the entire neighborhood. The "peace" it provides is real but fragile: it depends on the continued rationality of nuclear decision-makers, the continued reliability of command-and-control systems, and the continued absence of accidents, miscalculations, and unauthorized launches. Given that we have already come within minutes of accidental nuclear war on multiple occasions -- the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm, the 1995 Norwegian rocket incident, numerous other close calls documented by nuclear historians -- the reassurance provided by the "Long Peace" is considerably less comforting than Pinker suggests.

The distribution problem. The decline of violence has been unevenly distributed. The great powers have not fought each other, but they have fought proxy wars in the developing world that have killed millions. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, the wars in the Congo, the wars in the Middle East -- these conflicts were driven in large part by great-power competition, fought largely on the territory and at the expense of people in the Global South. Pinker's statistics, which measure average global trends, understate the concentration of violence in specific regions and among specific populations.

The complacency problem. Perhaps most seriously, Pinker's optimism risks producing complacency. The decline of violence is a statistical trend, not a law of nature. Trends can reverse. The world before 1914 was, by many measures, more peaceful, more cosmopolitan, and more economically integrated than it had been at any previous point in history. Norman Angell's The Great Illusion (1910) argued, with considerable evidence, that war between the great powers had become economically irrational and was therefore unlikely. Four years later, the most destructive war in human history began. The lesson is clear: the fact that violence has declined does not mean it will continue to decline. Complacency is not wisdom. It is an invitation to catastrophe.

Nuclear Weapons: The Permanent Existential Threat

Nuclear weapons deserve separate treatment because they transform the moral calculus of war entirely. Before the atomic bomb, war was terrible but survivable: civilizations could be devastated but they could recover. After the atomic bomb, war between nuclear-armed powers threatens not merely devastation but extinction -- or, at minimum, the collapse of civilization to a point from which recovery is uncertain.

There are currently approximately 12,500 nuclear warheads in the world's arsenals, held by nine states: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel (unofficially), and North Korea. The United States and Russia together hold approximately 90 percent of these weapons -- enough to destroy human civilization many times over.

The destructive power of these weapons is difficult to comprehend. A single modern thermonuclear warhead -- the kind carried by intercontinental ballistic missiles -- has an explosive yield of 100 to 800 kilotons, roughly 7 to 50 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and killed approximately 140,000 people. A single submarine carrying 16 Trident missiles, each with multiple warheads, can destroy every major city in a medium-sized country. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia would kill hundreds of millions of people directly and, through nuclear winter, global famine, and the collapse of infrastructure, could kill billions more over the following years.

The doctrine of nuclear deterrence -- the idea that nuclear weapons prevent war by making it too costly -- is the most extraordinary gamble in human history. It assumes that all nuclear-armed leaders, in all circumstances, under all pressures, will behave rationally. It assumes that command-and-control systems will function perfectly, forever, without mechanical failure, cyberattack, or human error. It assumes that no nuclear weapon will ever be acquired by a non-state actor willing to use it without regard for consequences. It assumes that the "stability" provided by mutual assured destruction will persist indefinitely, despite changes in technology (hypersonic missiles, AI-assisted warfare, space-based weapons) that could undermine it.

Every one of these assumptions has been tested and found wanting. Leaders have behaved irrationally under pressure (Nixon, drunk, reportedly told aides to "nuke the bastards" during the 1969 crisis with North Korea; his Secretary of Defense instructed the military to check with him before following any nuclear orders from the President). Command-and-control systems have failed (the United States has experienced numerous false alarms, including a 1980 incident in which a faulty computer chip nearly triggered a nuclear response). Nuclear materials have been smuggled, stolen, and sold on the black market. And the technology of warfare is evolving in ways that may render existing deterrence doctrines obsolete.

The rational assessment is stark: nuclear weapons are an existential threat that the current international system is not equipped to manage. Deterrence works until it does not, and when it fails, it fails catastrophically and irreversibly. The only genuinely safe number of nuclear weapons is zero. Getting to zero requires precisely the kind of cooperative international governance that the previous chapter described -- and that the nation-state system, with its emphasis on competitive sovereignty, is structurally incapable of achieving.

The Military-Industrial Complex

On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address to the nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- a five-star general who had commanded the Allied forces in Europe during World War II -- issued a warning that has proven prophetic:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Eisenhower was describing a structural problem, not a conspiracy. The military-industrial complex is not a secret cabal of arms dealers pulling strings behind the scenes (though arms dealers certainly exist and certainly exert influence). It is an institutional arrangement in which the interests of the military establishment, the defense industry, the intelligence community, and the political class converge to produce a permanent bias toward military spending, military intervention, and the perception of external threats.

The mechanism is straightforward. Defense contractors employ millions of workers in congressional districts across the country. Members of Congress who vote for defense spending are rewarded with jobs for their constituents and campaign contributions from defense industry PACs. Retired military officers take lucrative positions in the defense industry ("the revolving door"). Intelligence agencies, whose budgets and institutional importance depend on the perception of external threats, have a structural incentive to emphasize danger rather than safety. The media, which depends on government sources for access and which finds conflict more newsworthy than peace, amplifies threat perceptions. The result is a system that spends more on military force than the next several countries combined and that maintains a global network of approximately 750 military bases in 80 countries -- not because the security situation requires it, but because powerful institutional interests profit from it.

The United States is the most dramatic example, but it is not unique. Russia's political system is deeply intertwined with its military and intelligence apparatus. China's military modernization program serves the institutional interests of the People's Liberation Army as well as the strategic interests of the state. Arms exports are a major source of revenue and geopolitical influence for the US, Russia, France, the UK, Germany, and China -- creating economic incentives for the perpetuation of conflict in regions that purchase those arms.

The military-industrial complex corrupts democracy in a specific way: it makes war profitable. When powerful economic and institutional interests benefit from military spending and military intervention, the political system is structurally biased toward war and against peace. The citizens who fight and die in wars do not profit from them. The corporations that supply the weapons do. This misalignment of interests -- the people who decide on war are not the people who suffer from it, and the people who profit from war are not the people who fight it -- is one of the most fundamental corruptions of democratic governance in the modern world.

How Leaders Manipulate Populations into War

War requires popular support, or at least popular acquiescence. Democratic governments cannot fight wars that the public actively opposes (as the Vietnam War eventually demonstrated). Even authoritarian governments require sufficient public compliance to maintain the military effort. The question of how leaders generate this support -- how they persuade ordinary people to kill and to die in service of objectives that often do not serve their interests -- is one of the most important and most disturbing questions in political psychology.

The techniques are well documented and remarkably consistent across cultures and centuries.

Threat inflation. Leaders exaggerate the severity of external threats to create a sense of existential danger that overrides rational deliberation. The "missile gap" that justified the nuclear arms race in the 1950s did not exist. The "weapons of mass destruction" that justified the Iraq War in 2003 did not exist. The "domino theory" that justified the Vietnam War was a strategic fantasy. In each case, leaders who had already decided on military action manipulated intelligence and public information to create the perception of a threat that required military response.

Dehumanization. Leaders systematically dehumanize the enemy population, making it psychologically possible for ordinary people to support the killing of other ordinary people. The techniques of dehumanization are depressingly uniform: the enemy is characterized as subhuman (the Nazis called Jews "vermin" and "bacilli"), as uniquely cruel (atrocity propaganda, often fabricated or exaggerated), as an existential threat to "our way of life" (the Cold War framing of communism as an evil to be destroyed rather than a system to be out-competed), or as culturally inferior (the colonial framing of indigenous populations as "savages" requiring "civilization"). David Livingstone Smith's research on dehumanization demonstrates that these patterns are cross-cultural, systematic, and deliberately cultivated by political and military elites.

Nationalist fervor. Leaders exploit patriotic sentiment to frame war as a test of national character -- a sacred duty rather than a policy choice. The young men marching off to World War I were not making a rational calculation about the merits of the Austro-Hungarian succession crisis. They were answering the call of national honor, swept up in a tide of patriotic emotion that their leaders had deliberately cultivated and that their cultures had prepared them to feel since childhood. The flags, the anthems, the parades, the rhetoric of sacrifice -- these are not spontaneous expressions of popular sentiment. They are technologies of mobilization, designed to bypass rational deliberation and activate the tribal instincts that evolution has bequeathed us.

Suppression of dissent. Once the war machine is in motion, dissent is framed as treason. Those who question the war are accused of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," of "undermining our troops," of being unpatriotic, disloyal, or cowardly. This framing makes rational public deliberation about the merits of the war impossible, which is precisely the point. War benefits from the suppression of critical thinking, because critical thinking tends to reveal that the war's stated justifications are exaggerated, its costs are underestimated, and its beneficiaries are not the people doing the fighting.

Alternatives: The Tools We Already Have

The argument that war is inevitable -- that it is "human nature," that it is the inescapable consequence of competition for scarce resources, that it will always be with us -- is empirically false. War is not a constant of human history. It is a variable. Its frequency, intensity, and acceptability have changed dramatically over time and across cultures. Many societies have existed for long periods without engaging in organized violence. And the tools for resolving conflicts without war -- diplomacy, international law, economic interdependence, mediation, arbitration -- are more developed now than at any previous point in human history.

Diplomacy remains the most important tool for conflict prevention. The vast majority of international disputes -- over territory, resources, trade, immigration, and security -- are resolved through negotiation, not war. The disputes that escalate to war are typically those where diplomacy has been sabotaged by leaders who prefer military solutions, where communication channels have broken down, or where domestic political pressures make compromise impossible. The lesson is not that diplomacy fails but that it must be supported, funded, and prioritized over military options -- which means, among other things, investing in diplomatic institutions rather than defunding them while expanding military budgets.

International law provides a framework for resolving disputes through rules rather than force. The International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and various regional courts and tribunals have successfully adjudicated thousands of disputes. The problem is not that international law does not work but that it is selectively enforced: powerful states comply when it suits them and ignore it when it does not. The solution is to strengthen the enforcement mechanisms of international law -- not to abandon the enterprise.

Economic interdependence raises the cost of war by making states economically dependent on one another. The European Coal and Steel Community was explicitly designed to make war between France and Germany economically irrational, and it succeeded. Global trade and investment flows create mutual dependencies that incentivize peaceful relations. This is not a guarantee against war -- World War I demonstrated that even highly interdependent economies can go to war -- but it is a significant restraint, and one that can be deliberately strengthened through institutional design.

Mediation and conflict resolution have prevented or resolved numerous conflicts that might otherwise have escalated to war. The Camp David Accords (1978), the Good Friday Agreement (1998), the Colombian peace process (2016), and countless lesser-known mediations have demonstrated that even deeply entrenched conflicts can be resolved through skilled negotiation and institutional creativity.

The Case for Radical Demilitarization

The position defended in this book goes beyond the modest proposals of most international relations scholars. I argue not merely for "conflict prevention" or "arms control" but for radical demilitarization: a systematic reduction of military forces and military spending to the minimum levels consistent with legitimate defense needs, accompanied by the transfer of security functions to international cooperative institutions.

The case rests on three arguments.

First, current levels of military spending are grotesquely disproportionate to legitimate defense needs. Global military spending in 2023 exceeded $2.4 trillion -- a record high. The United States alone spent approximately $916 billion. These sums are not driven by rational security assessment. They are driven by the institutional dynamics of the military-industrial complex, by great-power competition that feeds on itself, and by a political culture that treats military spending as inherently patriotic and cuts to military spending as inherently dangerous. A fraction of global military spending, redirected to education, healthcare, infrastructure, and climate mitigation, would transform the conditions of life for billions of people.

Second, the security threats that justify military spending are in many cases produced by the military spending itself. The arms race between nuclear powers is a textbook example: each side arms because the other side is arming, producing a spiral of escalation that makes both sides less secure. The proliferation of advanced weapons to conflict zones -- driven by the arms export industry -- fuels the very conflicts that are then cited as justifications for military preparedness. The war on terror produced more terrorists than it eliminated. The pattern is consistent: military "solutions" to security problems tend to generate new security problems that require further military "solutions." Breaking this cycle requires the political courage to invest in non-military approaches to security -- and the institutional reforms that make such approaches credible.

Third, demilitarization is not merely a practical proposal but a moral imperative. The resources consumed by the global military apparatus -- the human talent, the technological capacity, the financial capital, the political attention -- represent an opportunity cost of staggering magnitude. Every dollar spent on a missile is a dollar not spent on a school. Every scientist employed to develop weapons is a scientist not employed to cure diseases. Every politician whose career depends on military contracts is a politician whose incentives are misaligned with the public interest. The global military apparatus is, in economic terms, a vast engine of misallocation, consuming resources that could address the most pressing problems facing humanity and converting them into instruments of destruction.

Addressing the Objection: "But What About Self-Defense?"

The most powerful objection to the anti-war position is the argument from self-defense. What about the victim of unprovoked aggression? What about the small nation invaded by a larger one? What about the population facing genocide? Surely these situations justify military force? And if they do, then war cannot be unconditionally condemned?

The objection has force, and I will not pretend otherwise. The Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion, the Allied fight against Nazi Germany, the Vietnamese resistance to Japanese and then French and then American occupation -- these are cases where the use of military force in self-defense was morally justified and practically necessary. A philosophy that told the victims of aggression to submit without resistance would be not merely impractical but morally obscene.

But the self-defense argument, valid as it is in specific cases, does not justify the institution of war as currently practiced. And the distinction matters.

Self-defense is a reactive right: the right to use force when force is used against you. It does not justify preemptive war, preventive war, wars of "regime change," wars of "humanitarian intervention" (which have a dismal track record of actually protecting the people they claim to help), wars for natural resources, wars for geopolitical advantage, or wars to impose ideology. The vast majority of wars in human history have not been wars of self-defense. They have been wars of aggression disguised as self-defense.

The self-defense argument also does not justify the current system of national militarization. The right of self-defense can be exercised through collective security arrangements -- mutual defense pacts, international peacekeeping forces, regional security organizations -- that do not require every nation to maintain a standing army and a permanent war footing. A world in which military force is monopolized by international institutions, deployed only in response to aggression, and subject to strict legal oversight would be a world in which the right of self-defense is protected while the institution of war is radically constrained.

Finally, the self-defense argument underscores rather than undermines the case for cooperative governance. The best way to protect the right of self-defense is to create international institutions strong enough to deter aggression in the first place -- so that self-defense is rarely necessary. A world in which every nation must be prepared to defend itself against every other nation is a world in which war is permanent and inevitable. A world in which aggression is reliably deterred and punished by an international community with the will and the capacity to act is a world in which self-defense is a last resort rather than a permanent condition.

Conclusion: The Simplest Moral Judgment

War is the ultimate test case for the rational compass developed in this book. It is the human activity that most dramatically violates every principle we have articulated: it threatens species preservation (especially in the nuclear age), it maximizes avoidable suffering, it annihilates human dignity on an industrial scale, it destroys individual liberty, and it substitutes the most primitive form of competition -- organized killing -- for the cooperative institutions that represent genuine civilizational achievement.

The honest moral judgment about war is the simplest one: it is bad. Not bad in a complicated, nuanced, "on the other hand" way. Bad. The glorification of war -- the statues of generals, the national holidays celebrating military victories, the school curricula that teach children to admire conquerors, the films and novels that romanticize combat -- is a cultural pathology that a rational civilization would outgrow, just as it has (in most places) outgrown the glorification of slavery, human sacrifice, and public torture.

This does not mean that war will disappear tomorrow, or that unilateral pacifism is a viable strategy in a world of armed states. It means that war should be understood as what it is -- a catastrophic failure of human institutions, a testament to the inadequacy of our political arrangements, and a permanent indictment of any civilization that treats it as normal, natural, or glorious. The goal of a rational civilization is not to fight wars more justly but to build the institutions that make war unnecessary.

The obstacles to that goal are formidable. They include the nation-state system (discussed in the previous chapter), the military-industrial complex (discussed in this one), and the cultural mythology of martial valor that has been woven into the identity of virtually every nation on earth. But the obstacles also include other great forces that warp human civilization away from reason and toward suffering: authoritarianism, religious dogma, cultural relativism, and corruption. It is to these obstacles that the following chapters turn.

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