My take on why warfare is becoming less popular differs in emphasis from either the liberal or realist school as described in the TNI article. I would place emphasis on the growing understanding that wars of conquest are increasingly unprofitable in the modern world. It used to be the case that, if you were really good at warfare, you could conquer a territory and extract more in loot, tribute, and territory than the the war set you back in the first place. Even if this was never the norm, the successes of those who did make it work would encourage others to try it, in the fashion of Las Vegas gamblers for whom the occasional high-profile success story outweighs the knowledge that the house has a built-in edge in the games that they offer.

From this perspective the colonial adventurism of Europe in the industrial age can be seen as the last time when wars of conquest could yield a net profit (at the outset, at least) due to the technological imbalance of the combatants and also due to material resources constituting a much larger percent of the value of end products during that era. Put simply, natural material resources were a bigger prize earlier on than they are today. By the middle of the 20th Century, conventional weapons had become so expensive and so destructive that the "winner" of a war ends up with a smoldering ruin that requires massive expenditure to piece back together. The notion that a lust for Iraq's oil could be a rational motivation for the war, for example, can be seen as bizarre from this perspective. Even if one uses the massively low-balled estimates of the cost of the Iraq war by its proponents, it would have been far cheaper to simply pay for the Iraqi oil on the open market even if you assumed (counter-factually) the the US was going to expropriate all of the revenues on oil from Iraq.

This analysis suggests that as more leaders act on the understanding that conquest is a losing game from a P and L standpoint, like the above mentioned gamblers abandoning casinos with a house edge so large that were no longer any high-profile winners to be seen, the remaining wars would be skewed towards ideological, religious, ethnic and other conflicts where material gain is beside the point. My perception is that most of the on-going conflicts today appear to fit this pattern.

I would also suggest that the North Korean example offered in the article actually illustrates that nuclear weapons are not the deciding factor in this stalemate. Here is my reasoning: With the end of the Cold War, it became clear that there was no longer any "nuclear umbrella" beneath which the DPRK could find shelter, even as it became clear that North Korea was pursuing, but did not yet have, nuclear weapons of its own. If nukes had the kind of primacy implied in the article, that period would have been the time to apply pressure up to and including war to force the DPRK to abandon its weapons program in a way that we could verify. That we did not speaks to the costs of another Korean war fought with conventional weapons.

One of the really big headaches of any such conventional war is that Seoul is "forward based" (i.e. it is close enough to the North to be within range of literally thousands of tubes of conventional artillery, which could do a good job of laying waste to the South Korean capital before we would be able to silence them). In addition, the Koreans closely followed what happened with the re-uniting of Germany and realized that even a peaceful implosion of the Pyongyang government would impose a huge cost burden on those taking over. Add in the costs of devastation on both sides of the 38th parallel, just from conventional munitions and it is clear why, even though letting North Korea test a nuclear device is highly undesirable, going to war to stop them could be thought even less desirable.

"“winner” of a war ends up with a smoldering ruin that requires massive expenditure to piece back together."

Greg, you appear to assume that all such 'winners' would want or need to 'piece' the conquered territory back together. That is a valid assumption for Western democracies, perhaps, because the world trading system which we depend upon suffers if Humpty Dumpty is not put back together again.

But is it a valid universal assumption? I think not. Many who war regard it as a positive good if their 'enemies' are wiped out. Think of the Sudan government's war on their own citizens in Darfur. I suspect they wish to cowe the Darfurese, but if that fails they seem to be willing to settle for genocide, partial or complete.

Consider what Gengis Khan did to Central Asia: 'They made a desert and called it peace'. There are many others who would be willing to plunder and go home with no rebuilding.

"Personally, I liked it better when both arguments trended in the same direction."

Amen.

If the most important index of war-proneness is the number of new conflicts starting each year then the new millennium is not more peaceful than the '60s, 70s and '80s.

Total war numbers have fallen because there have been more terminations than onsets since the end of the Cold War.

More wars have been ending in negotiated settlements and that these settlements have become more stable -- i.e less likely to relapse into renewed conflict.

The latter seems to be for three reasons. First, a much greater interest in 'peacemaking' (UN-speak for stopping ongoing wars). Second, a learning process which is delivering better crafted peace agreements. Third, FAR more support for peace agreements––via peacekeeping, 'Friends Groups' etc.

I suspect that there WILL be an increase in onsets if/when the most risk-prone states in the developing world experience rapid declines in gdp. Economic decline is a negative sum game and the econometric evidence supports claims that economic shocks increase the risk of political violence. But if there are new onsets for this reason they may still be offset by increased numbers of terminations.

All of the above of course applies to intrastate wars which are mostly fought in very poor countries. On interstate wars I have never understood why liberals and realists felt that nuclear deterrence and liberal theories of peace were antithetical.

What is contradictory about (a) arguing that possession of nuclear weapons has made the NWS very cautious in their security interactions and hence reduced the risk of war and (b) that economic independence (and related liberal mechanisms) also reduce the risk of war.

Andrew

I'm in the realist camp; but, I think we're going to see a good deal more small-scale wars of the type of Russia-Georgia, between nuclear-armed countries and their smaller neighbors, especially those that control vital resources or pipelines.

The model for most wars throughout history has not been the Iraq/rebuilding/if you break it, you have to fix it type. There's generally not the ““winner” of a war ends up with a smoldering ruin that requires massive expenditure to piece back together," and I doubt, for example, Russia feels much heartache at leaving much of Georgia a smoldering ruin. In fact, this is a relatively-unique American view of war, and to think otherwise seems rather naive. Look at how profitable, for example, the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe was for them for several decades; that's the much more common example. Also, the notion that material resources aren't all that valuable is a very new idea--like about 3 months old. It wasn't too long ago that oil was selling at a record-high nearly $150/b and copper, etc. were also selling at sky-high prices.

As far as wars beyond that in geographical terms, these simply are untenable when the US has such a superiority in terms of a blue-water navy. At any time, if say, someone other than the US wanted to invade and grab Nigeria's oil, for example, they would be subject to an immediate cut-off in terms of supply and manpower by the US unless they had bases close enough to the conflict area. Instead, I think we're going to return to a cold-war era model where large countries give weaponry to allies to cause trouble for strategic reasons (i.e., Russia supplying Syria/Iran for war in the mideast to raise oil prices).

Madagascar spent $329 million on its military in 2005, according to globalsecurity.org, an amount which puts it well down on the list (Madagascar is hardly the first country which comes to mind when one thinks of military power, which is why I selected it as an example). Small, easily portable high value items tend to disappear in front of an invading army precisely because they are portable and high value. Of what remains, a significant amount is often destroyed in the fighting as modern military technology tends towards being promiscuously destructive, in addition to being expensive. If you can find examples where the amount that was looted by the government itself, as opposed to the soldiers, exceeded the cost of the military action I would be interested to hear it, but I am dubious that this happens much in the modern world.

As for trying to piece things back together if you do stay, I don't see this so as a matter of liberal democratic altruism so much as pragmatism. Remember, Rumsfeld's DoD's attitude towards the chaos that was post-invasion Iraq could best be summarized by the quote: "Sh*t happens". Now one could make a case that the wheels were going to come off once we invaded no matter what, but I think it is beyond doubt that the aversion of Rumsfled's DoD to "nation building" greatly exacerbated the process. Failure to nation build plays into the hands of any insurgency that may be opposing your occupation and the more wealth that you try to extract from your conquest, while letting things continue to circle the drain, the greater the multiplier there is to this effect.

As far as wars that occur despite the economic drain that they impose, I not only agree that those will persist, I predicted that they would come become the most prevalent types as the economic motive for conquest subsides. A good, if perhaps somewhat extreme version of this type of conflict is the Siachen Glacier, where India and Pakistan have spent insane amounts of money fighting with and staring down each other from positions thousands of meters high over a spot that has no economic value, so far as I can tell. Even I am wrong and there is some other-than-prestige value to the glacier, it has long since been dwarfed by the massive costs of supporting armed forces (to say nothing of actually fighting) in such a remote and inhospitable environment.

Rob- The subjugation of Eastern Europe during the Cold War was so profitable that after 45 years of occupation of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was effectively bankrupt. Given that the Soviets were spending a staggering 15 to 17% of their GDP on the military by the mid 1980's, according to Global Security, and given that a substantial that outlay was to maintain the massive Red Army to face off against NATO in Europe and keep the rest of the Warsaw Pact under Soviet control, I would say that the Russians didn't get very good value for money.

Also, while I agree that it is unlikely that the Russians are going to be doing much in the way of nation-building in the part of Georgia that they occupy, I also don't think they got much of value compared to the amount expended on the operation nor, for that matter, compared to the loss of value in the Russian stock market triggered by the invasion (as distinct from the further drops in the market as part of the global meltdown in equities). While this may be a cost that Putin is well prepared to pay in order to feel that Russia is once again a player to be reckoned with, have no doubt but that it is a cost and not a profit.

It really depends on what an "interstate war" is. Was the war in the Congo from 1997-2003, which drew in five neighboring countries and caused the most casualties out of any continuous conflict since World War 2, an "interstate war"?

My best guess as to why we aren't seeing the Great Powers and the Superpower fighting among each other is the Realist explanation - nuclear weapons. And not just in terms of destroying the attacker's cities - stick a nuke at the end of an air or ground-launched missile/rocket, and you have a formidable weapon against conventional forces (this was, in fact, the strategy of the US "tripwire" in Central Europe during the Cold War under the Eisenhower Administration).

The problem with the Kantian triad explanation is that it didn't explain World War I. The regimes involved were as democratic as they'd ever been (particularly France and Great Britain, and even Germany to some extent), international trade was only recently surpassed by current trade, and technology was soaring ahead along with means of communications (and in terms of human movement, more people changed countries back then than today).

Greg, I am slightly uncomfortable with your somewhat balance-sheet oriented analysis of Russian security policy. While it's difficult to disagree that the military spendng of the USSR contributed to it's collapse, I fear that you miss some of the differences between the Russian strategic position over time and that of the US and Western Europe, and the impact those differences have on the national psychology.

Of all the blessings that the US has, I think the greatest blessing is our strategic position. The US lacks major strategic threats anywhere near it.

Conversely, Russia historically has been surrounded by serious and credible threats which have several times threatened it's very existence. Russia was conquered, plundered, and exploited by the Mongols for a long time, and since then has been invaded and vastly hurt by Napoleon, and the Germans twice.

The US has the luxury of looking at the world in terms of trade and 'profit'; I suspect that Russians look at the 'profit' of an conquest or an occupation not only in balance-sheet terms but also in terms of threats neutralised. Occupying Eastern Europe for 2 generations doesn't make much sense except when you consider that three major invasions of Russia have been launched from Eastern Europe within the past two centuries, but none occurred between 1945 and 1989.

I suspect Putin adds the 'profit' of not having the Russian heartland torn up to the balance sheet profit and finds that imperialism pays.

Contrast that to the US, which has not troubled to conquer Mexico or Canada. Why not? Perhaps some idealism but more pragmatism - neither country is much of a strategic threat to the US, and it is more profitable to influence and trade with them than to conquer and occupy them. Europe started the post-WWII period more similar to Russia than to the US strategically. The major accomplishment of the EU and NATO have been to replace collective insecurity with collective security, and thus to make the European strategic position more similar to that of the US than that of Russia.

"As far as wars beyond that in geographical terms, these simply are untenable when the US has such a superiority in terms of a blue-water navy."

Rob, I'm not so sure of that one. There are at least two counter-examples in recent historical records, the building by European powers of colonial empires in the face of the enormous superiority of the British Navy, and the ability of the USSR to build a network of client states globally in the face of an overwhelming US navy during the 60's and 70's.

I agree that it would be impossible for China to invade a US ally such as Australia or Japan because the US Navy would cut off the invasion force. Similarly it would be impossible for China to invade any country in Latin America because the US would likely invoke the Monroe Doctrine and cut them off. But if Russia were to invade Madagascar I doubt the US would go to war over the matter, and it could be done - at a cost perhaps.