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A book
meaningless of someone, who is imperialist and elitist. The usual arguments
ofKaplan and those who serve militarycomplexindustry. I don't fullyunderstand
the consequences of their theories.
1.
Rosenthal: Good evening and
welcome. I'm JoelRosenthal, president of theCarnegieCouncil. Our program this
evening is a conversation with StevenPinker and RobertKaplan, discussing the
question, Is the world becoming more peaceful? From time to time, an idea comes
up that is so central to theCarnegieCouncil'swork that we stop everything, call
the person responsible, and invite him or her to come and talk. This is one of
those moments. StevenPinker's book, TheBetterAngelsOfOurNatureWhyViolenceHasDeclined,
goes right to the heart of the CarnegieCouncil'smission. AndrewCarnegie founded
this Council nearly onehundredyearsago because he believed that violence was
indeed in decline. Carnegie had a progressive view ofHistory, famously summed
up in his favorite phrase: "All is well, since all grows better."
Mankind was improving. Science and Technology were ascendant. In social life,
all kinds of barbarous practices were being eclipsed by sweet reason. Practices
like Slavery and dueling were being outgrown. Next on the horizon, without a
doubt, was the abolition of war. In his NewYeargreeting in1914, on the eve of
the great calamity of WorldWarOne, Carnegie wrote, and I quote, "It is the
killing of each other that still stamps man the savage. That this practice is
not soon to pass away from civilised man is unthinkable, since History proves
from age to age, byLaw of his being, he has slowly yet surely been developing
from the beast. Hence, we are justified in believing that there is no end to
his upward march of perfection." Carnegie thought he could help this march
along by building hisPeacePalace atTheHague, lobbying Presidents,
PrimeMinisters, Kaisers, Kings, and Czars to sign treaties of arbitration and
join a league of nations, and creating educational forums like theCarnegieCouncil
to enlighten public audiences. Carnegie's efforts leave us with the obvious
painful question: Why did the optimism of1914 fade into the terribleHistory of
thetwentiethcentury, giving us worldwar, genocide, ethnic cleansing? We are
also left with the question of what to make of Carnegie's original hypothesis.
Is it possible to leverage some kind of normative shift, a shift in expected and
required standards of behavior, to delegitimise violence and reinforce Moralrestraint?
It is selfevident that norms and standards change over time. But what impact
does a change in our values and standards have on the pursuit of peace? StevenPinker'swork
is at the frontier of knowledge in this area. [Kiss my ass.] It's my honor to
introduce him to you tonight. A scholar of brain and CognitiveSciences,
Language, and MoralPsychology, Steven has written books with titles such as TheLanguageInstinctHowTheMindWorks,
an excerpt of which is wonderfully titledHotheads, and TheBlankSlateTheModernDenialOfHumanNature.
We're delighted that Steven has aimed his recent work toward our area of
concern, that is, conflict and cooperation, war and peace. I mentioned that
from time to time we have these special moments when the Council's mission
comes to the center of public debate. I realised that, on several of these
occasions, RobertKaplan has been present. This is no coincidence. One such moment
was the publication of one of his previous books, WarriorPoliticsWhyLeadershipDemandsAPaganEthos,
and another was a conversation we engineered around the publication of RobertWright'sbook,
NonzeroTheLogicOfHumanDestiny. RobertKaplan is one of the most thoughtful and accomplished
analysts of worldPolitics today. His new book,
TheRevengeOfGeographyWhatTheMapTellsUsAboutComingConflictsAndTheBattleAgainstFate,
is characteristically philosophical and practical. [Kiss my ass.] I recommend
it to you. Our topic this evening is, Is the world becoming more peaceful?, Rather
than a debate, pointcounterpoint, we have decided to have a conversation. There
are many ways to look at this issue and there are many perspectives to be
shared. We'll start off the conversation withSteven, who will introduce the
main idea of his thesis. We'll then have a response fromRobert, which will be
followed by a rejoinder or two. We'll see how it goes. Then we'll open it up
for questions. I'm sure that Mr.Carnegie, rest his soul, would be thrilled to
know that this conversation has been renewed. Thank you all for coming, and
I'll turn it over toSteve.
2. Pinker: TheBetterAngelsOfOurNature advances the hypothesis that mostpeople
find literallyincredible, that violence has declined over the course of humanHistory,
on a variety of scales of time and magnitude. Joel mentioned some of them, the
fact that humansacrifice is no longer found in the world, we no longer throw
virgins into volcanoes to improve the weather, legal chattelSlavery [This
implies that Pinker thinks that there's chattelSlavery legal and illegal],
burning heretics at the stake, dueling, debtors's prisons, and rates of homicide
have plunged since theMiddleAges. The book works through a number of declines,
which I have tried to document with numbers presented in graphs. But the one
that I think will be of most interest to the people in this room, and the topic
of my conversation withRobertKaplan, is on the fate of war. A little known fact
is that war appears to be in decline. It's hard to discern this fact if you get
your information from the news, because you never see a reporter in some part
of the world saying, Well, here I am, and there's no war here today. Wherever
the war is, that's where the journalists fly to. It's certainly not the case
that rates of violence and war have fallen to zero. As long as they are not
zero, there are always going to be enough of them to fill the evening news. If your
sense of the state of the world comes from the events you see on TV or on your
computerscreen rather than from the statistics, you can be misled about how
many opportunities for war there are that don't actually result in war. Let me
back that up by my favorite method ofCommunication, which is visual. We're
primates. We're visual animals. So I like to tell the story with just a few
pictures. The book itself has more than onehundredgraphs and maps. Let me just
present four of them to establish what facts I'm talking about. [Slide]
Thefirstgraph comes from a political scientist namedJackLevy. It pertains to
the war between great powers. These are the eighthundredspoundgorillas of the
day, the largest five to ten States or Empires. This is relevant just because
of the statistical distribution of wars. The big wars account for the lion's
share of the deaths. "When elephants fight, it's
the grass that gets trampled." I think this is a saying attributed to
countless african tribes, probablyapocryphal, but it does establish a
statistical point that a few big wars kill a lot more people than lots and lots
of little wars. So the great powers are interesting. This graph spans half
a millennium, [from]1500to2000, and it plots the percentage of years in
every twentyfiveyearperiod in which the great powers were at war with each
other. What the graph shows is that a fewhundredyears
ago, the great powers were pretty much always at war with each other. That's
what great powers did. They fought other great powers. More recently, they have
almost never been at war with each other. The last great powerwar, that
is, a war with one great power on each side, was concluded almost fiftyyears
ago, namely, theKoreanWar. [What the fuck are you talking about?] [Slide] I'm
going to now zoom in on the last twentyyears. Thetwentiethcentury has been
called the most violent inHistory. For a number of reasons, I think this is
quite dubious. [Slide] This slide shows the rate of death from all wars in thetwentiethcentury,
not just the greatpowerwars. [Slide] What the graph shows is, this actually
extends from1900to2010, there were two unmistakable spikes of horrific
bloodletting in thetwentiethcentury, concentrated on the two world wars. But
contrary to many predictions that this was just the beginning of an escalating
sequence, WorldWarOne, fifteenmillion, WorldWarTwo, fiftymillion, WorldWarThree,
which is inevitable; theUnitedStates and theSovietUnion are bound to lock
horns. When they do, they will use nuclearweapons. It will makeWorldWarTwo look
like ["]peanuts["], but WorldWarThree never happened. In fact, if you
look after the spike for WorldWarTwo, you see that the graph ["]wiggles["]
a lot, but pretty much hugs the floor, and that the twoworldwars were not a
sign of worse things to come, but something closer to a last gasp. [Slide] I'm
now going to zoom in on the postwarperiod. You could say, Well, you're kind of
grading on a curve if you say that the world hasn't been as bad as it was
during WorldWarTwo. That's not a veryimpressive standard. So let's just look
from1946to the present. That will be in the next graph. [Slide] This graph is a
stackedlayer graph. I'll explain it before the colors start appearing. It runs
from1946to2009. The thickness of each wedge that you're going to see represents
the rate of death in war on a per capita basis in each of four categories of
war. [Slide] Here we see the rate of death from colonial wars, where anEmpire
tries to hang on to a colony that tries to become independent. As you can see, it tapers off to nothing as the europeanEmpires
eventually relinquish their colonies. [Slide] These wedges correspond to
interStatewars. That's a war with a Government on each side. It's a spiky
progression. There are big spikes corresponding more or less to theKoreanWar,
theVietnamWar, and IranIraqWar, with one little blip closer to the present for
mostly theDemocraticRepublicOfTheCongo. But the trend is unmistakable. There
are these horrible spikes, but the overall trend is downward. We haven't had a
bad one for quite some time. [Slide] Here we have the civilwars. There was a
burst of civilwar starting in the 1960s, in terms of the sheer number of wars.
But civilwars tend to kill fewer people than interStatewars, and so, even
superimposed on the other totals, it does not mask a downward trend. [Slide]
These are internationalised civilwars. [contradicton?] This is kind of a hybrid
where some thirdpower ["]butts into["] a civilwar, generally on the
side of theGovernment. The height of the entire stack represents the human toll
from these wars. The postwarpicture, then, overall is one that is uneven, but
unmistakablydownward, and, if you look at the right tail of the graph
corresponding to thetwentyfirstcentury, the decade we just lived through, it's
a fairlythin laminate of layers hugging the floor. So Carnegie was a little
premature, he's ahead of his time, but in a veryreal sense, what he predicted
might be coming to pass, namely, wars are becoming fewer and lesslethal. [Slide]
What about genocide? It's often said that war is a misleading indicator of
human violence, because more people were killed in thetwentiethcentury by
genocide than war. Those statistics aren't completelyclear. It depends on how
you count [define?] genocide, how you count [define?] war, and so on. [Slide]
In this graph, I have plotted from two different datasetsestimates of the
trajectory of death by genocide in thetwentiethcentury. It would be verycallous,
not to say incredible, to say that there is anything particularly good about
this graph. But, in a sense, there is, in that it was often said that we were
entering a new age of genocide in the 1990s and the 2000s, but statistically
that is veryfar from the case. There was an absolutely sickening burst of
genocides concentrated in the 1940s and, to a lesser extent, in the1950s, but
once again the trajectory is unmistakably downward. Genocides, both in absolute
and in relative terms, are a fraction of what they used to be. You can see a
tiny little ["]spike["] there forRwanda.
[Implying that the genocide inRwanda was trivial compared to thetotalnumber.
The classic argument of a comissar.] The fact that it's small should not minimise
the horrific humancosts. Nonetheless, it's a big world, and even a genocide of
that magnitude means that the worldwidegenocidetrend is waydown from what it
was in the middle decades of thetwentiethcentury. What went right? In the book,
I test a number of hypotheses. I don't think that human nature has changed. I
believe that there is a human nature. I believe that it is flawed in many ways.
We harbor many ugly, nasty impulses that can lead to human conflict, like dominance,
honor, revenge, Sadism, Greed, I run through them all. However, I think that
the humanbrain is a complex system, it has lots of parts, and, together with
these nasty impulses, there are mental faculties that can be mobilised to combat
our inner demons, namely, "the better angels of our nature," which
gave the title to my book and which I stole fromAbrahamLincoln.
History depends not on humannature being denied or eliminated, but just by the
balance between these different parts of humannature. That's how I can be both
a realist, indeed, almost a cynic, when it comes to the humanspecies, but
something of an optimist when it comes toHumanAffairs. So what went right? I go
through a number of hypotheses. Democratisation had something to do with it.
There's good evidence that pairs of democracies tend not to fight each other. Liberalisation
of economic policies and Globalisation, Freetrade. Countries that trade a lot
are statisticallylesslikely to fight a war. [Fucking disgusting.] The rise of
international institutions. Countries that both belong to an international/intergovernmental
organisation are less likely to fight each other. The increased costs of war,
the fact that WorldWarTwo proved that wars do an awful lot of damage to both
sides that nullifies mostanticipated gains. But I think there's another factor
that combines with the world's experience as to how destructive a war could be.
I'm sitting next to this repeated slogan, EthicsMatterEthicsMatterEthicsMatter.
I think Ethics matter, not in the sense of, obviously, they do by definition,
just in a normative sense, but I think humans are moralistic animals. That
doesn't necessarily mean that our morals lead us to do the right thing. Quite
the contrary, I think theworstatrocities in humanHistory were inspired by
moralistic [moralist, noun, a person who teaches or promotesMorality] [Moral]causes,
but just that the nature of humanMoralisation has changed. Namely, there is a
shift, both within countries and in international relations, from a morality
based on national grandeur, the supremacy of a race, a nation, a religion, a class
toward a morehumanisticEthics, where the flourishing of individual men, women,
and children is elevated as closer to a cardinal virtue. [Selfcontradiction.] The
reason that I think the carnage ofWorldWarTwo led to a change in sensibilities,
but contrary to the predictions from the earlytwentiethcentury that the
invention of smokeless gunpowder or dynamite or chemical weapons would make war
obsolete, that didn't happen, because destructive technologies only give people
second thoughts when they are combined with an ethic that says human life is
precious. I think it's that combination rather than just the destructiveTechnology
by itself that's necessary to reorient nations away from war. The change in
norms has resulted in the fact that, certainly among rich, developed, and western
nations, and increasingly trickling down to other parts of the world, war is
moreandmoreremoved from the set of live options, the kind of thing that you
would even contemplate as a way of resolving disputes. I think that has led to
fewerwars being initiated and the wars being terminated more quickly.
3.
Kaplan: Steve, that was great. In
fact, his book is evenricher than he lets it on to be, I can say, having read
it and reviewed
it positively, before I was even invited to do this. In theearlytwentiethcentury,
there was a british writer, NormanAngell, who wrote a
book, TheGreatIllusion. It was along the Carnegie["]angle["] about how war
should be obsolete because it did not comport with human selfinterest. It was a
brilliantly argued book. Anyone who knows my work knows that I'm not a
pacifist. But if I was going to be one, I would be one like NormanAngell,
because he writes so brilliantly. I first heard ofNormanAngell'sbook because I
had heard about twentypeople at dinnerparties, separately, denounce it, saying
how it was all wrong. Whenever I hear a book denounced, rather than believe it,
I read it. What I found was that this was a brilliantly argued book that, if
humannature was just a little bit better than it was and if things had gone
slightly differently in thetwentiethcentury, he would not have been humiliated
the way he was. And, by the way, he didn't deserve to be humiliated, because he
never wrote that there would be no more wars. He just said, Here are the
reasons why there should not be. The word should is often in the book. Steve
has written probably thebestbook since NormanAngell on this subject. And I hope
it's not misunderstood. What I would like to do is elaborate on it and
challenge Steve, in a way. The first thing I would like to say is, what were
the reasons for this long peace, since1946? Steve gives a lot of reasons. Some
he didn't state, massEducation, feminisation of culture, just the rise of
nationStates, because nationStates monopolise the use of violence. That's why Hobbes
was actually a liberal, idealistic philosopher for his time, because he
believed that his Leviathan
could actually lead to peace and humanprogress. A lot of reasons. One reason
Steve doesn't go into, I would argue, is ForeignPolicyRealism. If you were to
ask me, What was themostMoral initiative taken in the last few decades
inForeignPolicy? many of you would probably say RichardHolbrooke inBosnia. And
that would be a good answer. I'll give you a better answer, RichardNixon inChina.
Nixon'smotives were very["]Realpolitik["], not particularly
uplifting. [Usual Rhetoric of an imperialist] But what Nixon did was, he said
to the chinese, "You don't have to worry aboutTaiwan. We don't believe in
["]theFiction["] that Taiwan is independent. You don't have to worry
about theSoviets, because we're teamed up with you now against theSoviets. You
don't have to worry about the japanese, whose Economy was just starting to boom
then. We'll take care of the japanese. That's our responsibility. And he gave
them a whole bunch of other assurances. What did that do? For thefirsttime in
decades, since the highQingDynasty at the turn of thenineteenthcentury, China
felt secure on the outside and could devote itself to internal development.
That set the context forDengXiaoping'sliberalisation. DengXiaoping'sliberalisation
not only lifted hundreds of thousands of chinese out of stark poverty to
approaching the middle class, but, because China became the largest trading
partner of almost everywhere else in eastAsia, it also lifted millions of
Vietnamese, Malaysians, and others, Filipinos, into a much higher standard of
living, so that literally billions of people saw their material lives and their
safety improve dramatically because of this initiative. Another reason, Why was
the peace so long? Because you had realists like DwightEisenhower and others.
You know, one thing about Eisenhower that people forget is that it was under
him that all the hydrogen bombs were built. Why did he build it? Because he
didn't want to fight a real war on land inEurope. He wanted something so
terrible, but also so cheap, because nuclearweapons were cheap compared to
preparing for actual conventional warfare. So the cold warriors, rather than be
parodied in Dr.Strangelove, actually kept the peace in many ways. So this is a
good story. Steve writes in the book that one of the problems is that realists
believe in this HobbesianPathology ofAnarchy. That's not actually what they
write. If you read StephenWalt, KennethWaltz, JohnMearsheimer, SamHuntington, other realists,
they defineAnarchy in a veryspecific, verynarrow sense. It just means there's
nobody in the world who is the nightwatchman, who guards over other nations.
Anarchy does not mean violence. It doesn't mean necessarily Iraq
in2006and2007. It just means there's no higher order other than the nationStates
themselves. Let's bring this all down to earth and see what the real prospects
are for a more peaceful world. Let me bring this discussion down to one part of
the world. I don't want to use theMiddleEast, because, in a way, that's too
easy. We know the horrors of theMiddleEast. I want to use eastAsia. The reason
is that eastAsia has undergone an economic boom for decades. It has had massEducation,
women's rights, the feminisation of culture. Almost everything that Steve
writes about you can see in eastAsia, fromJapan toAustralia. What's the result?
One of the greatest armsraces inHistory now, even though theNewYorkTimes and
others are not really covering it verywell. Japan is coming out of its quasipacifistic
shell to become a real military power. Nationalism is on the rise inJapan. The
japaneseNavy is four times the size of theBritishRoyalNavy and much more
deployable, with niche capabilities and submarines and special operations
forces. China, since the mid1990s, has built a great navy and air force.
Everyone, the vietnamese, the chinese, the malaysians, they all have a
["]shop'tilyoudroppolicy["] on the acquisition of submarines, both nuclear
and the latest quiet diesel electric. The australians, with a population about
the size ofCanada, are putting an extra twentybillionsUSD just into fourth and
fifth generation fighterjets and new submarines. There is a vast armsrace going
on in eastAsia. The chinese are going to have more submarines deployed in the
water than theUnitedStates in about ten or fifteenyears. What is driving this?
Several things which are relevant to Steve'sbook. If you were to ask me, as a
journalist on the ground, What is the biggest underrated force out there in the
world today? I would say Nationalism. Nationalism is de passé in theWest.
Europe is supposedly in a postnational era. America, if you use the word,
Nationalism, you're thinking of some TeaPartyRepublican somewhere. But Nationalism
is alive and well throughout theIndoPacific, from India eastward all the way up
toJapan, and a veryvirulentNationalism, which is the direct result of the economic
development and the massEducation and all of that that has been going on. It's
really stark. You see it in public demonstrations. When the chinese tell me inBeijing
that they would love to compromise on the territorial claims they are making in
theEastSea and theSouthChinaSea, they tell me, "We can't," because
the nationalist ["]genie["] is out of the bottle and the party is
afraid. The party is afraid to compromise, so it can't. So, Nationalism is not
dead. It may have passed its peak in theWest, but it's rising at a great
trajectory in a part of the world that is not minor, but, in fact, the
geographical heart of the globalEconomy and of global demography, too, if you
callAsia everything fromIndia eastward up toJapan. And what are people fighting
over? Not even islands, but rocks that are under the sea during high tide. Yes,
these rocks may have oil and natural gas around them, but it's a contest for
status, for king of the hill. That's what I see it is about when I talk to
people there. And I would like Steve to comment on that in a little while. The
contest for status is still verymuch alive in thehumanpsyche. Remember, we're
talking about eastAsia. We're not talking about a poor part of the world, where
there are tribes fighting or this or that. We're talking about people who have
bullettrains, who go to work in suits and ties, and who totallysupport
biggerandbigger defensebudgets. You would say, But this disprovesSteve'sthesis.
I would say, Not necessarily, because Steve is not saying that we're not going
to have military expenditures. He's just saying the actual outbreak of war may
be less because of decisions that people will make. They will walk back from
the brink and all of that. We don't know that yet. All I can say is that we
have taken the stability of eastAsia, theIndoPacific for granted. We have
reduced it to an economic story for toomany decades, and it's emerging into
something much larger than that. Another unfortunate trend out on the horizon
is something that Yalemanagementprofessor PaulBracken writes about. Paul is coming out with a new book in vovember calledTheSecondNuclearAge, how the second nuclearage will be different than the first nuclearage.
The first nuclearage involved essentially two conservative bureaucracies, theUnitedStates
and Moscow. TheRussians were themostconservative, because they had all survivedStalin.
They learned to surviveStalin by saying nothing and having no opinions. That's
what theSovietpolitburo was about essentially. Two stodgy bureaucracies that
were the opposite of emotional, who gave up their nucleartheory to the most
bloodless academics and gametheorists and all of that. So there was no emotion.
You didn't have mobs in the streets inWashington or Moscow baying for american
or russian blood throughout theColdWar. TheColdWar was cold. Nothing
happened. It did happen, terrible wars in Vietnam and Ethiopia and
elsewhere, but they were at the margins, so to speak. But one of the things
Bracken writes about is that the second nuclearage is going to be very["]hot["].
It's not going to be cold. It's going to be accompanied by mobs baying for
blood because of the new countries that are acquiring nuclearweapons. It's going
to involve countries likeIran that won't put their nuclearweapons in silos
inNorthDakota or something away from population centers. They will put them
right next to schools and hospitals and in the middle of big cities, so that,
if you take them out, you are going to kill large numbers of civilians as well.
The iranians are veryrational. It's not true that they are irrational. But
their rationality is different. It's just different. We
have had this long peace that, I would argue, the people that deserve the most
credit for are the realists, the GeorgeShultze, JamesBaker, HenryKissinger, and
others, who were vilified in their time. But looking back now from the era
where we are now and looking at where theRepublicanParty is now and where it
was then, I think we can really appreciate them. But it's unclear that
this long peace will survive because of some of the things I brought up. I
could go into centralAsia and how I think that's going to unravel in an evenmore
tumultuous way than theMiddleEast has. One last thing about theMiddleEast that
is verytroubling. You had relative peace in theMiddleEast, outside of veryformal
interstate warfare
between Israel and some Arab countries, between Iran and Iraq, because most of theMiddleEast
was run by authoritarians, and authoritarians had strong institutions, strong
bureaucracies through which they could govern, and on which theUnitedStates
could exert influence, as the Soviets did as well. But the Soviets were not a
war-making influence. They also wanted stability, if you recall. But now, with
the collapse or weakening of authoritarian regimes, it has revealed an utter institutional
void. So there are veryweak institutions in places like Libya, Syria, Yemen, et
cetera. That provides a vacuum in which various forms of jihadism and other
forms of radical, violencepronegroups can operate. So theMiddleEast is going to
be more and more tumultuous. CentralAsia is about to burst onto the headlines,
I believe. And I can go around the world as well. I'll stop here. Again, none
of this disproves Steve'sthesis, which is about the relative decline of
violence, not the absolute decline. Again, all this posturing and submarine
buying in eastAsia may lead to just tension for decades to come or years to
come. I don't know.
4. Pinker: Thanks for the generous words and all of those verythoughtprovoking
comments. Let me see if I can work through some reactions to them. I do talk a
bit about the academic theory calledRealism. It's kind of a tendentious title,
selfgranted. One could actually debate how realistic Realism is. Not being a
scholar in internationalrelations, but being a socialscientist who is quite
familiar with statistical number crunching, I tried to base my arguments
not so much on plausible scenarios, which I had no way of evaluating or
weighing in on, but on the studies that try to make testable predictions
from different theories and to identify what the contributors are to war and
peace. One of the problems is that socalledRealism has predictions that are all
over the map, literally and figuratively. One realist theory says you get peace
when you have a single hegemon. That's what is really stable, because they can
kind of bully everyone else. They can be a quasiLeviathan. Another one says, No,
no, no, you get peace when you have a balance of power. [Imperism and Elitism]
You need two. That way, each one keeps the other one deterred. Another one says
multipolar, that's the best. So it's not real clear what socalledRealism
actually predicts. It seems to me that there are a lot of developments
surrounding the long peace and what I call the new peace, that is, the spread
of the long peace to the rest of the world since the fall
of theSovietEmpire, that don't obviously fit any realist narrative, including
the one that appeals to nucleardeterrence. For example, the fact that nonnuclearStates,
latinAmericanStates, for example, Germany and Italy or Italy and Spain, have
not fought each other, even though I think it would be farfetched to think that,
if they started a war, theUnitedStates would nuke either of them in punishment.
The fact that you have had a lot of nonnuclearStates defying nuclearones, Argentina
trying to take back theFalklands, defyingBritain, a nuclearpower, SaddamHussein
["]thumbing his nose["] at theUnitedStates repeatedly, Sadat invading
IsraelheldSinai, and the fact that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of
relationship between military expenditures and probability of actually getting
into a war, eastAsia might be a perfect example. For thelasttwentyfiveyears, I
don't think there have been any shooting wars in eastAsia, I guess northKorea
and southKorea, with the sinking
of that ship twoyearsago that did kill fortyodd southkorean sailors. But it has
actually been a prettystable part of the world if you actually tally up people
killed in warfare. China, contrary to all predictions that rising great powers
always pick on their neighbors, hasn't been in a shooting war since 1987,
a better trackrecord than some countries we happen to belong to.
TheUnitedStates has been in a number of shooting wars. The political scientist,
JamesPayne, wrote a fairly obscure but I
think veryinsightful book calledWhyNationsArm that tried to correlate different
measures of being on a war footing with actual likelihood of getting involved
in a war and found that expenditures on military hardware had a veryloose
relationship. What did have a stronger relationship was number of men in
uniform. The decision as to whether to close down a shipyard is driven almost
entirely byPolitics. Because of the paradoxes ofDemocracy, those with the
strongest local interest push policy. Those that pay the bill diffusely just
don't notice. So you can have a ramping up of the defensebudget because each
military contractor, eachState with a defenseplant is in favor, the taxpayers
in general. There isn't one constituency that opposes it. But if it's your son
who is being drafted and sent in harm's way, then there is much more of a brake
on nations' likelihood of picking fights and getting into trouble. Worldwide,
even though military expenditures have not been going down, percentage of the
population in uniform has been going down. In terms of prognosis for the future,
rather than just playing out scenarios in your imagination, which I think is a veryfallible
method of prognostication, I have a whole list of predictions of wars deemed to
be inevitable that never happened. And here I'm going to speak as a
psychologist. Recalling anecdotes, visualising scenarios is extraordinarily
unreliable. It's a reflection of the imaginer's own psychology. It's a
reflection of how vivid events are, how many inches of column space they get,
how big a bang they make. But it doesn't take into account factors that really
do predict war and peace. Two different studies that look at probability of
great power war based on predictors that have had a ["]successful["] track
record in the past, like democratisation, trade, membership in international
organisations, relative power, and so on, one
byBruceRussett and JohnOneal, showing that the probability of a war involving a
great power has never been lower, and another study from thePeaceResearchInstituteOslo
that looks at the world as a whole rather than just the great powers, showing
that if you look at all the different factors that statistically correlate with
war versus peace in the past, they predict that the chance of war worldwide
will continue to get lowerandlower over the next few decades. I tend to put more
stock in that kind of analysis than just, Well, I can imagine suchandsuch
happening, which I consider to be, and I think the historical record shows to
be, pretty worthless.
5.
Kaplan: Let me pick up on two
of your points, Steve. One of the reasons why there are fewerandfewer people in
uniform is because the nature of war is changing. The modernisation of forces
means you have smaller conscript militaries, but with higher quality, smaller
militaries of volunteers that are muchbetter trained. When theWarsawPact
collapsed and NATO absorbed every country from Poland to Romania intoNATO,
thefirstthing NATO said was, We want you to fight better, to be better killers.
In order to do that, we're going to make your military smaller. We don't want
you to have onethousand jets, old, vintage jets. We'd rather you have threehundredhighTech.,
fourth generation fighters. We don't want conscript armies that are good for
just building roads and bringing in the crops. We want special operations
forces. So the nature of war itself is becoming more professionalised in a
highTech.age, where soldiers and marines and sailors and airmen need to know so
much more. They need to be better trained with different equipment. Therefore,
because training is longer, the way to get a military that will actually fight
and engage in a war is to make it smaller. The best example of that is the chineseAirForce.
The chineseAirForce has come down from many thousands of planes to just about twothousands.
But guess what? They are all fourth and fifth generation fighter jets. So you
have fewer pilots, but the pilots that there are, are more lethal. So I would
say just counting numbers doesn't show an understanding of how war itself is
changing. The other thing is democratisation. Here's the problem with democratisation.
Democracies are less likely to go to war. But to get from an authoritarian
system to a stable democracy could take years or decades, and you can have all
manner of instability in between. What are most likely to get into a war are
weak democrats who are paranoid, always looking over their shoulder. The best
example of that is Turkey and Cyprus in1974. Turkey invadedCyprus,
a brutal invasion and occupation by democrats. The country was recently
democratic. It was a minorityGovernment out to prove its patriotic bona fides,
which, had the military been in power, it wouldn't have had to do. But a weak
minorityGovernment stumbled into war. What I see everywhere, from
TunisiatoPalestine, is weaklyinstitutionalisedGovernments that are unable to
control their own borders, unable to control extremists inside them. For
instance, China, let me get back toChina. We have had it lucky withChina the
last few decades. We really have. We have had stodgy, collegial authoritarians
who had no charisma, who purged anyone who did have charisma, making practical
decisions that they telegraphed ahead of time to-Washington and -Tokyo and other
places, and we had peace inAsia. Now it gets rough, because China will go
through political change. It has to, because when yourEconomy develops that
fast over thirtyyears, your society becomes more complex. As it becomes more
complex, as SamHuntington wrote brilliantly in his1968book, PoliticalOrderInChangingSocieties,
a morecomplex society requires political reform and evolution. But it's never
pretty. It's often never peaceful. Yet China is embarking on that road, and so
China is going to be less predictable in the years to come, more nationalistic.
As the party loses total authoritarian control, the military is going to be
more autonomous. One of the reasons why the chinese may not have been fighting
a war since1987 or so, but they have certainly been threatening all their
neighbors, more in the last tenyears than they have had in the previous fourdecades,
they are doing it because the military is more out of control, because we are
starting to see already the breakup of a oneman authoritarian system.
6.
Pinker: A few things. I agree
that there has been, obviously, a verygreat shift in the composition of
national forces and the mechanisation, computerisation of fighting, of the
skill required of men and women in uniform. But part of that is itself a
reflection of the fact that modern societies have much less tolerance for
casualties than they used to and for diversion of human capital into the
military sector, which is partly why so much investment has been put into robot
warfare, drone warfare. The fact that armies have been moving in that direction
is itself a reflection of the increased value placed on human life. We still
haven't reached the point where wars can be conducted just with robots, drones.
Boots on the ground were the major factor that made the difference in the Iraqsurge. It's one of the major differences in why we are not going all out
into Syria,why theLibyanWar was fought the way it was, without American boots on the ground. You
could imagine, even with a higherTech.armedforces, that a country could still
draft a lot of its college graduates and postgraduates and have them do all of
that high-tech work. The fact that the armed forces have gotten more selective
means that there are fewer unskilled people, but it doesn't explain why nations
don't just make up the difference by having moreandmoreengineers, Ph.Ds,
increasing the ranks of the people who are designing and manning this
equipment. Also it's muchless of a factor in countries other than theUnitedStates
and Israel and Britain. InIsrael, of course, there's still a large percentage
of the population in uniform, even with one of the world's highestTech.armedforces.
In terms of the democratisation, again there's a danger in recalling examples
without looking at the phenomenon worldwide and statistically. What you said
about Turkey is certainly true. There are cases in which newly democratic
states get their countries into trouble. But, of course, there are manymanycountries
that became democratic and were pretty wobbly in their early years that didn't
get into wars, latinAmerica, SouthKorea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Poland, Lithuania,
Latvia, Estonia, a lot of the countries of Eastern Europe. [He doesn't know
what the fuck he's talking about.] My understanding is that statistically, this
again depending on data from BruceRussett and JohnOneal, there is a little bit
of a blip of an increased chance of getting into a war, compared with other
democracies, for brand-new democracies. That is, the democratic peace, that two
democracies don't fight each other, is attenuated for new democracies, for the
first couple of years. But then they join the rest of the democratic world in
having an extremely low probability of getting into a fight with other
democracies.
7.
BillBruce: I lived in southeastAsia
for tenyears, inSingapore, in the1960s. I know a lot about it. A lot of the
things that you seemed to imply, Bob, about China, China has already
accomplished. Through the chinese people living in-Indonesia and -Malaysia,
they run theCommerce there. What they might gain through a war or attacking
them, they already have anyway. The second point. A lot of people, especially
you in your writing, treat southeastAsia as sort of a new thing. And it really
isn't. In 1880, the commercial activity in Singapore, import, entrepôt,
whatever, was thirtyfivepercent of thePortOfNewYork. A lot has been going on
out there for years. China did not nee Nixon to do anything for them. They were
shipping huge quantities of products all through, you couldn't go into a store
in Singapore without buying canned goods made in China. You could go down to
the Horn of Africa and see them inZanzibar, all the ports. You could go into
Amsterdam and places like that and see chinese goods. I think it has evolved
much more slowly than your writings indicate. I don't have the fears about
things happening.
8.
Kaplan: I totally disagree. First,
if you looked at China in1972, with everyone wearing Maosuits, what they were
exporting was lowquality goods, relatively lowquality goods.
9.
Questioner: We bought them.
10. Kaplan: The fact that we bought them didn't mean that they were. You
cannot compareChina in theearly1970s with2010. It's a totally remade, different
society, with the same cultural verities that have come through and have
flowered and blossomed, but theEconomy, you didn't find tens of thousands of
american businessmen inChina in 1965. You didn't find tens of thousands of european
businessmen or tens of thousands of american students inChina in the early
1960s duringMao'sGreatCulturalRevolution.
[Fucking disgusting.] It's a totally remade society. The 1979 new
economicMechanism byDengXiaoping was a real break in that country. Yes, there
has always been an entrepôt inSingapore. I wrote about itsHistory. But the
strides economically that Asia has made, in the mid1960s, Singapore ranked on
the level of some of the poorest african countries.
11. Question: Mr.Pinker, at some point you mentioned that human beings
are Moralistic animals and that the nature of the human moralisation has
changed. Could you please explain a little bit more about how that happened and
how what we call Morality is related to things like historical circumstance and
the world around us? Is Morality something like a result of that?
12. Pinker: I think humans have always been Moralistic animals. And
that's a big problem. I write in the book that the world has far toomuchMorality.
If you were to add up all of the individual homicides that the perpetrators
believed at the time were Morallyjustifiable, to exact revenge, to punish a
transgressor, if you looked at the casualty of religious wars, of utopian
ideologies, like Communism and Nazism, they would vastly outnumber the deaths
from just raw Amoral predation. But I do think that the basis for our Moralisation
has been changing, particularly since theEnlightenment. It has become morehumanistic
in the sense of valuing the life and flourishing of individuals as opposed to
abstractions, like Religions, classes, nations, races, enforcing orthodoxies,
enforcing deference to authority, enforcing Moralpurity, all of which go into
the humanMoralsense. I take it that your question is, Okay, but why did those
happen? I think that's one of themostinteresting questions in worldHistory. I
have some speculations, but nothing like the kind of statistical analysis that
could strengthen the case for cause and effect. I suspect that the rise of literacy,
ofEducation, of massCommunication, Journalism all played a role. The lives of
other people became more immediate to us. We buy fiction, memoir, History, Journalism.
We enter the minds of other people, which makes it harder to demonise them and
encourages more universalism. We travel more. We are more cosmopolitan and rub
shoulders with people unlike ourselves. Because of the rise of mass media, war
has become less romanticised. It was said that the Vietnam War was the first
war brought into people's living rooms in real time. In earlier wars, the Government
successfully censored war photography while the war was in progress, and so
people's sense of war came from romantic poets who glorified it, often never
having participated in it. People have more of a sense that war is hell and
they have a morearticulatedMoralPhilosophy. Could you really justify the purity
of the race or the glory of the tribe or the nation if you were forced to argue
with someone unlike yourself, as people moreandmore are forced to do? It's hard
to argue in the face ofReality and in the face of people coming from different
backgrounds that my nation is superior to yours just because I belong to it and
you don't. And that pressure of intellectualisation, cosmopolitanism, exchange
of ideas, enriching of experiences, I think, over long periods of time, pushes
the conventional wisdom aboutMorality more in a humanistic direction.
13. Kaplan: Steve, that's all great, but here's the problem. The problem
is that a lot of people don't read seriousFiction. They don't read serious nonFiction.
A lot of the people that I encounter, not just uneducated people in various
countries, but people like people in the armed forces, last night I spoke at
theMarineClub inSanFrancisco, and it's a totally different environment and
atmosphere. Let me take Poland for an example. Poland is dramatically
increasing its military budget because they don't trust the russians. You talk
about european defensebudgets going down. That's a generalisation. It's not a
real truth. The defensebudgets in the countries closer toRussia are, in fact,
increasing. Again, we're talking about more highTech.militaries, where the
stronger the military, the fewer men you have in uniform, and you depend on
cyberwarfare, all kinds of things which are being developed. So even inEurope,
which we have reduced to being just a financialdebt story, but where GeoPolitics
are alive and well, because the russians are flush with cash and are buying up
all kinds of infrastructure now in central and easternEurope, Nationalism is
alive and well, and a lot of people just don't think this way. A lot of people
do. I'm just saying not everyone does.
14. Pinker: And I don't think it has to be greatLiterature. I think it
can be soapoperas and middlebrowLiterature. [Argument worthless] But just to be
concrete about what I had in mind, in this country during the SecondWarWorld,
the japanese were considered subhuman. My mother, who lived through it, told me
that the germans were an enemy, the japanese were just a contemptible race in
the eyes of theWest. It probably had something to do with some of the tactics
in the way the war was fought, the firebombing ofTokyo, the nuclearstrikes.
According to oneopinionpoll, fifteenpercent of the american population, when
asked what should be done toJapan after an allied victory, offered the solution
of extermination. In our own country, we rounded [incarcerated]
up onehundredthousand japaneseamerican citizens. I think that's lesslikely
now. The numbers certainlysuggest that, and opinion polls, even in the more
militant parts of, at least, the richer countries. The kind of demonisation
that would have been possible, that was possible, sixty or seventyyears ago,
probably, even inWorldWarOne, you had the english thinking of the germans as
huns and as raciallyaggressive, those don't stand up to the kind of scrutiny
that even middlebrow awareness nowadays, I'm sure, in theMarines, you would
never find those kinds of contemptuous actions.
15. Kaplan: No, you don't among theMarines, because theMarines are great
people who are veryenlightened. I mean that veryseriously.
16. Pinker: I have a passage in the book on theEthicalMarineWarriorProgram,
which tries to inculcate humanistic values inMarines by having them empathise
with the people that they serve among. It's this ["]touchyfeelything["]
in our ["]leathernecks["], which is, I think, a sign of the times.
17. Question: Not to pick on Mr.Kaplan, but you mentioned a new book, TheSecondNuclearAge,
regarding the hot war, and you specifically notedIran, if they acquired a nuclearbomb.
How does that compare to, say, the two conservative bureaucracies, one of
which, theUnitedStates, actually dropped a bomb?
18. Kaplan: PaulBracken goes into this. One of the things he says about
thesecondnuclearage is that countries, fromIndia toPakistan toIran, want to
acquire nuclearweapons for the same reasons theUnitedStates and the Soviets
did. The primary use of nuclearweapons during theColdWar was not to drop them.
It was to use them for influence and intimidation and for actual statecraft,
actually preventing hot wars on the ground. Now, in some of these cases this is
what Iran and Pakistan and India want. They use nuclearweapons as part and
parcel of their diplomacy the same way the U.S. and the Soviets did for decades
during theColdWar. But in addition to that, there's a new factor. The new
factor is that, whereas the U.S. and the Soviets were separated by thousands of
miles of Arcticice and you had no emotional dislike between Americans and
Russians during theColdWar to a verysignificant degree, the emotional dislike
or insecurity between Indians and Pakistanis, whose high population centers are
only twohundredsmiles apart, between theIndusRiverValley and theGangesRiverValley,
is something else. Then you have a country like Iran, which, as I said earlier,
I don't believe is irrational, but it's a different kind of rationality. And,
if you factor into an Iran with six or twelve tactical nuclearweapons, imagine
how much more fraught crises in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah
would become. Again, this does not negate Steve'spoint. This may even prevent
war. KennethWaltz wrote a piece
inForeignAffairs saying, if Iran had nuclearweapons, it would actually stabilise
things. I don't agree with that, but it was just an interesting argument to
read. It took you ["]places["] where you hadn't been before.
19. Question: MichaelLapid. [phonetic] I don't get a lot of comfort from
knowing that there are so many countries arming so quickly. How do we
adjudicate between these? How would international institutions settle issues
between them and try to deal with the miscalculations that are inherent with so
many centers of different weapons?
20. Kaplan: Let me use theSouthChinaSea as an example. There's something
called theLawOfTheSeatreaty, which theUnitedStates did not sign, but which it
obeys, which China has signed, but which it doesn't obey. TheLawOfTheSeatreaty
really should be called the LawOfTheLandtreaty, because it's based on where
your coastline is and then it projects your territoriality outward twohundredsmiles
or whatever it may be. According to the legalities of it, China has no claim in
many of the places that it's claiming. China says, InternationalLaw be damned.
We have historical claims that go back before theLawOfTheSea treaty. When you
actually look at all the claims, they are incredibly fraught, incredibly
complex. Nobody I have spoken to thinks they will be resolved by legal means or
arbitration means. The best that can be hoped for, and again, this doesn't
contradict Steve, is a military balance of power that prevents war. As China's
navy and air force get larger and larger proportionately to the navies and air
forces of Vietnam, the Philippines, and other countries, all those countries,
especially Vietnam, are now calling on theUnitedStates to have more warships
and planes in the region. The vietnamese are redredgingCamRanhBay so that
American warships will visit more often. And so it goes. The filipinos are
inviting back the americans toSubicBay and ClarkAirfield so that american
warships and planes will visit. In other words, the solution to keeping the
peace, to keeping the long peace, seems to be more military deployments.
21. Pinker: I'm not sure that that's true. You could make the argument
both ways, that the balance of power keeps the peace, but there are these
statistical studies byRussettAndOneal that show that an asymmetry of power keeps
the peace because theweakerparty doesn't want to mess with thestrongerone.
[Imperialist] If the outcome is a foregone conclusion, it's in the interests of
both parties to back down. So you could run the argument both ways. A lot of
the changes, like the ones that I've shown on the graphs, such as after the
fall of theSovietEmpire, weren't clearly related to an even balance of power
with neither side probing the other. One of the powers just vanished. But it
didn't lead to an increase in war. It led to a decrease.
22. Kaplan: There is an australian strategist, HughWhite, who has just
written a book
about the challenge of China's rising military might. He makes the point,
similar to yours, that the problem in coming years and decades is notChina. It's
America, because America will find it hard to adjust, to adapt to having
another great military power in the region. White says, "As australians,
we had it easy for threedecades or so. We had the rise ofChina, which made us
all rich, and yet we had american protection, which made us all safe." But
this period that he dates back to Nixon'svisit, he said, is now ending. What's
happening is, rather than a unipolar military environment in theFarEast, it is
becoming more of a multipolar or bipolar one, with America and China. He's
almost calling forAmerica to back down somewhat, to allowChina to become the
hegemon of the region. So there's an argument in your favor. However, here's
the problem. TheUnitedStates has treatyallies inJapan, in southKorea, and the philippines
that won't allowAmerica to do that. And it has a new rising ally, Vietnam,
which is essentiallysaying, Don't you dare do that. We need you to balance
against China. So it may be that you're right, whether it's asymmetrical or
not, what will keep the peace. But again, remember what we're really discussing
here. We're not discussing the abolition of military force. We're just
discussing how to apply it and in what proportion.
23. Rosenthal: Along those lines, I have a question. We're all living
through the traffic associated with theGeneralAssembly here at theUnitedNations.
Steven, when I was looking at your graph, I was thinking about1945to1948, the establishment
of theUnitedNations, but also theUniversalDeclarationOfHumanRight.
I would be curious to hear from both of you, just in terms of the establishment
of some sort of international Moral norm or standard, whether we think of it as
Law or just some standard, in terms of accountability, whether, for political
leaders and for military leaders. Does that play at all into your story? If so,
could you elaborate a little bit?
24. Pinker: Yes. TheUnitedNations has a mixed role. Obviously, the soapboxorations
in front of theGeneralAssembly are just kind of theater to comedy. Those are
irrelevant. The peacekeeping forces, though there have been some conspicuous
disasters, on average, do much more good than harm. A number of studies have measured
that. If you put [the]UnitedNations or other peacekeeping forces between
warring parties, the war is much more likely to stop and it's much less likely
to reignite. So theUnitedNations is not exactly an internationalLeviathan, but
that role as international quasipoliceman, even if inconsistently deployed,
does some good. The third thing, though, that also matters is a norm that
basically member states of theUnitedNations are immortal. They don't go out of
existence. Unlike centuries ofHistory in which States just ["]gobbled each
other up["], Poland gets ["]wiped off the map["] repeatedly, no
UnitedNations memberState has been eliminated through conquest. In fact, it's
extremelyrare even for any territory to have changed hands by conquest since
the establishment of theUN. And the exceptions almost prove the rule. [Exceptions
improve the rule. DumbAss.] IraqinvadedKuwait.
It took short
work for an international coalition to push them back. So a new norm
seems to have emerged that the boundaries ratified by theUnitedNations, no
matter how illogical, drawn by drunken colonial administrators, you don't mess
with them. It has probably done moregood than harm, though it has undoubtedly
done a lot of harm, as Robert has written about. But, still, the idea that you
can't just say, We have a lot of members of our ethnic group behind our border,
so we're going to take that chunk of territory. By all Moral reckoning, it ought
to be part of our country, that hasn't happened. That, I think, the sanctity of
international borders and the immortality ofStates, as a kind of norm, not
something that's Ethicallynecessarilyjustifiable, but just that we don't do
that anymore, you don't mess with them. It's not thinkable, has probably been a
stabilising force. [This reveals who he is.]
25. Kaplan: Let me just say that that's true, but what's also true is
that States have collapsed internally, and that has led to significant degrees
of violence. You have had Somaliacollapse, Haiti, the formerYugoslavia.
TheSovietUnion collapsed, violently inTajikistan and inNagornoKarabakh and
other places in theCaucasus, but generally nonviolently, in the BalticStates.
So you have this sort of inverse problem here. A State is inviolable, but theUN
can't keep it from collapsing internally. But to answer your question, Is there
a MoralEthic?, I would say, this is something I write in my recent book, TheRevengeOfGeography,
just because you're a Democracy and you hold elections and you believe in the
global good, in advancing global civil society, does not mean that your use of
military force will necessarily have a Moral result. It could have a negligible
result. It could have an Immoral result. It could have a lot of results.
Therefore, even Democracies, especially Democracies, have to be especially wary
of getting involved militarily around the world. Remember, to get approval from
a Democracy to go to war, you have to emotionalise the masses to a certain
degree to get them behind it. And that can lead to miscalculation. This is
something that HansMorgenthau goes into in great detail in his book, PoliticsAmongNations,
and why I feel he is the mostMoral of the realistic writers, because he deals
with these questions. This is a hard question. Even though you're a Democracy,
even though you save the world from naziGermany, from fascistJapan, you still
may have the best of intentions, but if you blunder, you can have the worst of
Moralresults.
26. Pinker: Iraq and Vietnam are two good examples. I think it's
certainly true that theIraqWar would not have happened had it not been forNineEleven
[SeptemberElevenAttack]. Even though there was no causal connection, there was
enough ["]spillover["] emotion that more of the population mobilised
behind it than would have otherwise.
27. Kaplan: Yes. And Vietnam, people forget theHistory. When we entered
intoVietnam, it was for Moralreasons, we told ourselves. The northvietnamese communists,
as ruthless a bunch of people as anyone can imagine, had killed tens of
thousands of their own people before the firstUSregular groundtroops arrived.
So there was a Moralreason to do this, so we told ourselves.
28. Rosenthal: I think with that, I'm going to adjourn the session with
a mixture of Moralism and Realism, appropriate for us. I want to thank Steven
and Robert and all of you for participating.
29. Pinker: Thank you.
30. Kaplan: Thank you.
