Is War Going Out of Style?

How is this for a bit of good news? Wars may be going out of style.

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Joshua Goldstein of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about his book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.”

Goldstein says war may not be inevitable.

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Lisa Mullins: 2011 has not been a great year for Albert Einstein. This year scientists discovered particles that go faster than light. The finding could contradict Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, though it’s too early to say for sure. Then there was Einstein’s lesser known Theory of War. He said as long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable. Maybe, maybe not. Joshua Goldstein of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of Winning the War on War. He says war may not be inevitable.

Joshua Goldstein: In the big picture America’s coming off a decade of war. The rest of the world during that decade became remarkably more peaceful than in the past. And the big part of this change is that the regular national armies with all their tanks, and artillery, submarines and airplanes are not fighting against each other anywhere in the world anymore. They haven’t since the US invaded Iraq in 2003.

Mullins: What about in Afghanistan though?

Goldstein: That’s not head-to-head national armies. That’s a government with some outside help fighting against insurgents. And that’s what we have left in the world.

Mullins: Yeah, it’s still a major…right, it’s a major war with major conflict and lives lost.

Goldstein: Well, it is major, certainly if you’re in the middle of anything like that it’s just as bad as being in a world war, but on the scale of past civil wars these are actually smaller. So Afghanistan is about a tenth the size of the Vietnam War in terms of the number of people killed and the destruction that is caused. And also there are wars that have ended that we don’t notice anymore because they’re not worthy in places like Sri Lanka, Sierra Leon, Ivory Coast, they’re not all perfect, violence still goes on, but these are terrible long wars that have now wound down. And if you count the number of people killed in wars worldwide it’s about half what it was in the 1990s and a third what it was during the Cold War, no comparison to the World Wars. So the trend here is towards smaller wars, fewer wars, more localized, fewer people dying. The trend is down.

Mullins: You say the trend is down, but to what extent is this kind of a technical use of the term war because as you say, there are smaller skirmishes that are incredibly deadly and keep people from living normal lives all over the world. And we hear about them all the time.

Goldstein: If you had cancer and you said well, I still have tumors, so my treatment is failing. That’s not the right test. You want to know is your treatment causing your tumors to grow or to shrink? Our problem with war in the world, our treatments are working, the tumors are shrinking.

Mullins: If war, the number of wars, especially the big national armies fighting against each other, if the numbers are down, why are they?

Goldstein: I think there are three big reasons for it. One is that over time people have changed their views, and norms and attitudes about wars. So it used to be glorious and a test of manhood and this kind of thing. Now, we recognize war is pretty horrible and it’s a last resort. The second is that economically war used to pay because the conquest of land was how you made money. Now, you make money by trading and war doesn’t get you that. And as countries become more prosperous war has less appeal. And then the third is the United Nations and the international community. So that in a place like Libya which was facing a long term, very brutal civil war, the international community was able to come in with a consensus and end that civil war a lot quicker, prevent a mass atrocity in Benghazi and get to a more successful outcome. So there’s a learning curve where things we couldn’t have done 10 years ago with the international community now work better.

Mullins: All right, Joshua Goldstein, author of many books, including Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Thanks a lot.

Goldstein: Thanks for having me.

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