Will Morrisey Reviews

Michael Mann: On Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.  Chapter 10-Conclusion

 

Although “most European writers since the Enlightenment have claimed that war was declining or was about to decline,” Mann considers this wishful thinking. By his reckoning warfare has waxed and waned from one region to another and from one time to another, with no discernible trend. Some modern writers expect peace to result from the adoption of a favored political regime—typically, republicanism or socialism—or a favored economic system—free trade, industrialism. Another candidate for peace has been imperialism, whether the liberal imperialism of John Stuart Mill and Max Weber (the English and German varieties of the doctrine eventually would clash on, well, the battlefield), or the mission civilisatrice of the French. In the nineteenth century, Social Darwinists added ‘race science’ to such claims, whether on the basis of Caucasian superiority or of the disappearance of races via “assimilation and miscegenation.” And, it should be noted, the tyrannical, then oligarchic form of socialism, once seen in the Soviet Union, engaged in imperialism without calling itself that. Today’s Communist China may have similar ambitions.

Nor have casualties declined. Death rates have declined only because the global population is bigger, major wars have become shorter, and medical treatment has improved. World War II saw the deaths of a smaller percentage of the world population than did the Mongol conquests, but the Mongol conquests went on for a hundred years, World War II less than a decade. The two world wars of the twentieth century caused higher annual rates of killing than any other wars in human history. Whether considered in terms of societies structured to make war or the fatalities caused by war, “history is not a divide between modern and pre-modern states and armies,” even if modern science and its technology does constitute such a divide.

What about the world since 1945? Although (or perhaps because of) nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction have threatened states, no major war has occurred, despite the sharp regime differences between commercial republics and their several enemies. Although “optimism is understandable within recent Western Europe,” the Russian invasion of Ukraine “blasted apart such European complacency.” As to smaller wars, Africa alone has seen ten of them, with over 700,000 battlefield deaths and millions more dead of slaughter, disease, and malnutrition. The United Nations “peacekeeping troops,” numbering 110,000 soldiers in fourteen countries, have kept the peace for more than a dozen years in about half of their interventions. “Unfortunately, peace achieved through negotiated settlement does not last as long as peace achieved by the victory of one side,” possibly (although Mann doesn’t claim this) because the loser’s regime may change into one more favorable to the winner. 

It is true that “internally the West has become fairly pacific.” Mann ascribes this outcome to the institution of the modern state, which wields the “infrastructural power” to “penetrate civil society and logistically implement its decisions through the realm”—quite unlike the much less efficient pre-modern states, whose rulers “relied on repression, including killing,” to maintain order. “Modern rulers have infrastructural power whose institutions routinely preserve order without inflicting lethal violence,” unless of course the regime itself intends to inflict violence, as in the modern tyrannies, wherein things can get very bloody, indeed. “Yet overall, there has been a decline in militarism in the principal institutions of society” in the West, despite the growth of military spending in “both liberal and illiberal countries.” However, such spending is a smaller percentage of the GDP of twenty-first century countries, never exceeding 4.1 percent in the West. Mann chastises the United States nonetheless; “never has a single country had such military overpreparedness, its bases spread over the globe, prepared for and launching military interventions across the world.” He prefers not to recognize that America’s international system of military bases was designed by the Theodore Roosevelt administration as an alternative to the imperialism then prevailing among European countries; as those empires collapsed between the years 1915 and 1990, the United States was left with the responsibility of keeping sea and air lanes open to international commerce—an expensive policy to which there may be no palatable alternatives for a commercial republic. Mann also complains that Western capitalists, especially American firms, sell arms to “the regimes and rebels of poorer countries; “addiction to militarism by southern warlords is fueled by northern arms lords in a symbolic relationship,” rather in the manner of the relations between slave-owning planters of the American South and textile mills of the North, and of Great Britain. This violence is compounded by the use of foreign regimes as proxy forces in great-power struggles. As a result, “many poor countries remain beset by wars, especially civil wars, which show little sign of decline.” Although Mann claims that “rich countries have exported militarism far from the attention span and the well-being of their citizens,” who pay little attention to wars that do not involve them directly, it is far from clear that the militarism has actually been exported, that it has not rather provided an indigenous market for the arms exports Mann deplores.

From these statistics-based arguments, Mann turns to an analysis of the effects of wars on the soldiers who fight them, beginning with the American Civil War, the first in which ordinary soldiers wrote down their experiences—that is, the first war in which one of the effects of democratic republicanism, widespread literacy, could be registered. Before that, scholars can only draw conclusions from the ways in which armies were organized to force soldiers to stand and fight instead of fleeing at their first experience of combat. An example of this was Wellington’s manner of deploying his troops at the Battle of Waterloo in squares or rectangles with each side consisting of two or more rows of infantry; “an enemy attack on the square then trapped the soldiers into fighting.” As modern technology improved the lethality of weapons and the distance from which they could be fired, rulers and often the higher-ranking military commanders removed themselves from the front lines, distancing themselves from the terror of warfighting. Meanwhile, soldiers were recruited by appeals to patriotism and the “sense of adventure,” obviously not by warnings of the dangers they would face. 

In the American Civil War, Union soldiers were motivated primarily by “duty backed by conscience,” Confederate soldiers by “honor backed by public reputation.” “This was a war between transcendent ideologies deriving from the key American contradiction, a country of white male democracy and mass slavery,” Mann contends, somewhat inaccurately. More precisely, the Civil War was indeed civil, a war fought by rival regimes: commercial and democratic republicanism in the North, slave-based oligarchy in the South (the latter regime a contradiction of Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution). It is in this sense, as Mann does write, that “no matter which side of the divide a Civil war soldier stood on, he knew that the heart of the threat, and the reason that the war came, was the other side’s stance on slavery,” as indeed Lincoln maintained in his Second Inaugural Address. Once in the war, soldiers fought because they were in it together, dependent upon one another for survival, self-respect, and victory. 

Mann denies that the war was worth tens of thousands dead and wounded, millions of traumatized survivors. “A better solution would have been two American countries,” sparing those lives. Mann claims that the slaves would have fled north, the North would never have needed to pay attention to “racist politicians” in the halls of Congress, and slavery “would have collapsed anyway near the end of the century, as soil erosion and boll-weevil infestation destroyed the cotton industry and the profitability of slavery.” While it is touching to see Professor Mann upholding the opinions of the Civil War era British political class, which also wanted the American Union to split, it must be observed that (a) most slaves could have been prevented from crossing the North-South border, once it had been militarized; (b) slaves could have been employed in tasks other than cotton harvesting, if cotton itself were no longer a viable crop; (c)the Confederates intended to expand southward, colonizing parts of Latin America; (d) a divided America might well have fought subsequent wars on that continent; (e) the two countries might well have taken opposite sides in both world wars of the next century, throwing Europe’s democratic-republican future into question. Lincoln’s primary intention, to save the Union, made sense for Americans and quite possibly for Europeans as well. In this, he followed the arguments of The Federalist and of George Washington.

In those world wars, soldiers’ motives for fighting differed. In the First World War, men signed up for duty supposing warfare to be an honorable, even heroic endeavor; both sides claimed self-defense; soldiers fought in units drawn from their home regions, which increased social pressure to enlist; and finally, many men liked the pay. Once in the war, continued social pressure, now felt within the unit, a sense of duty, absorption in daily tasks (very much including survival), drilling and training, punishment of the disobedient, and “a claim of self-defense” all contributed to steadfastness throughout the years of combat, although sheer physical and psychic exhaustion began to prevail in the end. Heedless of the lessons the American Civil War should have taught them about the devastating effects of modern military technology (what did Americans know about warfare?), commanders and civilian rulers alike grossly underestimated the casualties they would incur. Given the ruin, “this now seems a pointless war, fought neither for genuine national interests nor for high ideals, but for ‘reasons of state’ mediated by the survival interests of dynastic monarchies and the diplomatic incompetence and cult of ‘honor’ of upper-class leaders who did not themselves fight.” But does this criticism apply equally to the monarchs and the republicans? Is it clear that the republicans were not defending a better regime for the soldiers and their families? It would have been far better, had the Central Powers not started the war in the first place, or if they had sued for peace much earlier, once the kind of war they were fighting was obvious, but they didn’t do either of those things.

Mann judges the Second World War to have been “very different,” a war not “caused by confusion and miscalculation” but by “ideology,” a “war of aggression created by the militaristic ideologies of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy,” a war of self-defense by the Allies, whose soldiers “were not cannon fodder in the power ploys of rulers,” as Mann supposes the Allies to have been in World War I. He goes much too far in blaming British and French statesmen for “their ideological anti-Bolshevism,” which, he claims, “prevented them from allying with the Soviets to deter Hitler in 1938 and 1939.” In fact, Stalin, operating under his Marxist illusions that Nazis and republicans would exhaust one another in an inter-capitalist war, was already conniving with Hitler in a vain attempt to keep the Soviet Union out. “We can also blame the Roosevelt administration for its provocative sanctions against Japan”—equally nonsensical, given Japan’s imperial intentions in the Pacific. At most, one can blame FDR for failing to anticipate and prepare for the Pearl Harbor attack, but the geopolitical regime struggle was on, and had been on, for a long time before that. These considerations notwithstanding, Mann affirms that “Allied soldiers viewed this as a legitimate war, and it was.” The republican allies fought “a just war in defense of their way of life,” whereas the German, Japanese, and “above all the Red Army” soldiers fought on behalf of “transcendent ideologies” that ginned them up for self-sacrifice in a manner not unlike that of Muslim jihadis before and since. In the Red Army, such ideological commitment was reinforced by the presence of Communist Party agents in each unit, leading ideological instruction of the soldiers in between the battles. “The pervasiveness and effectiveness of political involvement in military units set the Red Army apart from other modern armies.” Mann tries to claim that the contrast between Communist and Nazi morale and the more low-key spirit of republican soldiers “makes a mockery” of the claim that democratic armies were more intensely motivated than the soldiers of tyranny. This ignores what would surely have been Tocqueville’s point: If by democracy one means social egalitarianism, not political republicanism, then modern tyrants can rule societies as democratic as societies ruled by representatives elected by the people. 

The non-transcendent “ideology” of the Allied soldiers enabled them to be “massaged into willingness to kill, although rarely with enthusiasm.” “Sadism was rare and few frontline soldiers were motivated by deep hatred for the enemy.” They were probably less capable warriors than their enemies, “being overly dependent on air and artillery superiority.” For the Americans, loyalty and solidarity centered not on “country, army, or regiment, but to the small group of comrades with whom they shared their life in and out of battle.” It might be suggested that the regime of democratic and commercial republicanism fostered all of these things: American soldiers thought of their enemies as fellow human beings; American politicians and military commanders were ‘economical’ in organizing their forces, preferring to spare the men unnecessary risks; soldiers thought of their buddies as fellow citizens, conscripts in a war against regimes that denied the citizenship rights that conscription itself limited in that war. “Of course, Islamist terrorists also experience this” sense of comradery,” as Mann cannot resist to add, proving only that one can feel solidarity with partners in any ’cause,’ good or evil. 

All of this “tells us little about human nature, except how malleable it is,” confirming rather what a sociologist is likely to think, “how mighty social power relations are, capable of disciplining men into behavior that would be unthinkable to them in peacetime,” namely, “repeatedly trying to kill others while exposing themselves to risk of death or mutilations” in “a socially induced hell.” Then again, what the mightiness of social relations may tell us about human nature is that human beings are naturally social, even political.

Mann next considers wars fought against Communist regimes. Both the United States and the Soviet Union intervened against one another and, in the Soviet case, to keep their eastern and central European allies in line. Many of these interventions consisted of aid to proxy warriors. The United States succeeded in nearly three-quarters of their direct interventions that lasted no more than six months, less than fifty percent in interventions lasting longer than that—Vietnam being the primary example of failure. “But attaining American or Soviet objectives did not necessarily benefit the peoples at the receiving end,” a comment that is obvious enough, although one might add that Soviet objectives were much less often beneficial. Mann’s analysis highlights the American wars in Korea and Vietnam, betraying an intention, increasingly evident in this second half of his book, to influence American readers more than any others. In Korea, he claims, “vital American interests were not at stake” but internal politics “obstructed rational thinking.” Although the American commander, General Matthew Ridgeway, wanted to retake the whole of the Korean peninsula, he knew he could only do that “with casualties acceptable to the American people,” a point that “has remained an American weakness,” albeit “a healthy sign of declining militarism in American society,” as might be expected in the American regime’s way of life. 

The Vietnamese jungles made fighting more difficult for the Americans than it had been in Korea, giving the advantage to the Communist guerrillas, despite copious use of defoliants and artillery. Crucially, the Vietcong saw reinforcements from North Vietnam, Communist China, and the Soviet Union along with support from much of the peasantry. The ‘People’s Liberation Front” “could replace their casualties from village militias and northern regiments and fight on indefinitely,” buoyed by the ideological fervor similar to that of the Soviets in World War II, similarly reinforced by Party members embedded in military units. As a result, “the soldiers of the democracies performed worse, not better,” winning only when “advanced technology and firepower” could get a fix on the enemy. This didn’t happen often enough to save America’s South Vietnamese allies. 

Mann concludes this set of chapters by calling soldiers, not proletarians, “the most truly exploited persons on the planet,” and their ruling exploiters “callous desk killers, inflicting fear, death, and mutilation from afar on those they define as the enemy, on their own soldiers, and on nearby civilians.” He considers this perhaps “the greatest inequality in life chances in the world today.” 

Evidently, many Muslims disagree that they are being exploited by their warlike rulers. Islamism—not simply Islam—is “popularly rooted in the everyday practices of the people.” Meanwhile, the bad Soviets and Americans, seeking “global grandeur and oil” while “claim[ing] their missions were defensive,” should never have fought the Muslims. This ignores what Mann himself had said about ideological motivation in the Soviet Union, but that was in earlier chapters. 

Muslims have fought four kinds of war: Muslim states against non-Muslim, non-imperial states; Islamic sects against one another; jihadists against “more secular Muslims”; and wars fought against “foreign imperialists initiating wars against both Islamic jihadists and unfriendly Muslim states.” In the first category, he places Muslim wars against Israel, in which he takes the side of the Palestinians, ignoring their irredentist claims not only to the ‘West Bank’ but to Israel and Jordan—to all of what was Palestine, claims based either on the supposition that Palestinian Arabs somehow descend from the ancient Philistines, predating Jews on the land, or on the Islamic claim that any territory once conquered by Muslims remains rightfully Muslim land forever after. The sectarian wars have pitted Sunni Muslims against Shi’a Muslims centered in Iran. Mann claims that these conflicts “reflected geopolitical more than religious motives,” although it is quite doubtful that the participants separated the two so neatly. He is more critical of the jihadis, saying that their reading of the Koran ignores its stipulation that jihad refers “only to wars of defense against unbelievers,” who must be given time to repent. This overlooks the jihadists’ insistence that heretics are unbelievers and the fact that wars that have broken out over many centuries have afforded both sides ample opportunity for repentance. 

As to the wars of defense against foreign imperialists, Mann zeroes in on the two Gulf Wars. He doesn’t mind the First Gulf War, which “had the UN seal of approval,” which “brought genuine global legitimacy” to the enterprise and was supported by Muslim state allies in the region, threatened by Saddam Hussein’s territorial ambitions. President George H. W. Bush wisely saw he “lacked the political power to form a stable alternative government in Iraq,” and so did not attempt to change its regime. Not so, his son, who equally lacked “substantial local allies on the ground,” except for the Kurds—who, Mann comes around to conceding, have shown the capacity to found a decent, self-governing state-within-the-state. After the jihadist ISIS movement was “crushed, for the moment,” Iraqi “ethnic-religious tensions are currently simmering rather than exploding,” making the war “only a minor disaster,” in his estimation. 

When it comes to fighting wars, Mann points to two “enduring domestic weaknesses” of the United States: squeamishness about the loss of life and “fragile popular support for wars.” Americans can’t stomach the long haul. Politicians continue to enter wars despite these weaknesses because they suffer from three “blind spots”: belief in “an imperial civilizing mission,” by which he means regime change, which he deems “unachievable” in “an age of rising nationalist and religion resistance”; ignorance of the long-lasting resentment of American intervention (“North Koreans hate America with good reason,” having suffered two million wartime deaths at its hands); and “conservatism,” by which he means retaining alliances (with Israel and Saudi Arabia, especially) and antagonisms (Iran) that are no longer in American interests. “The solution is not war. It is to moderate U.S. policies in the region.” To this it may be counter-argued, first, that regimes working at cross purposes may temporize, but they remain enemies until one or both principals change; rising nationalist and religious resistance may or may not make forced regime change unachievable, as seen in Iraq, in which the Americans did in fact change the regime, for better in one region, not necessarily for the worse in the others. Long-lasting resentment of American intervention can in fact be ameliorated, if the rulers want it to be, as seen in today’s Vietnam. And it is by no means clear that Israel and Saudi Arabia are no longer useful allies of the United States, or that Iran can be induced to “change tack on Israel,” which it currently has targeted for destruction, even as it has long chanted, “Death to America.” Mann urges America to act as “a neutral referee” among warring Middle East states, “helping settle these disputes through conciliation laced with incentives.” But there are no neutral referees when major ‘powers’ (now, the United States, China, and Russia) contend for superiority, as they will continue to do, given their regime differences and conflicting geopolitical objectives.

Looking to the future, Mann turns his attention to those three major powers. He deprecates both the NATO expansion that enraged Vladimir Putin and Putin’s overreaction to it. Identifying himself with the Russian state and people, Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in a spirit of military overconfidence, expectation of increased popularity at home, fear that the republicanism of Ukraine might spread to Russia, contempt for the character of Ukrainians, and expectation that NATO would do nothing much to stop him. His fears were mostly groundless, his hopes disappointed thus far. 

Mann reckons China to have understood its clear military inferiority to the United States and to have responded by putting resources into developing cyber weapons designed to paralyze American weaponry and communications. It “plans expansion to restore the full extent of former Chinese empires,” which means rule over Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan, along with some small sections along its border with India. And it intends to secure “predominance in the South China Sea.” “Past imperial glory is important in modern Chinese nationalism,” an element maintaining the authority of the Communist oligarchy. The Chinese narrative features three stages: “Mao made China free” of imperial domination by foreign powers, “Deng made China wealthy, and Xi is giving China global strength.” Like the Russians, the Chinese rulers engage in a regime struggle against the democratic republics although, in Mann’s generous estimation, “the failings of American democracy pale beside the repression exercised by the CCP.” This notwithstanding, “other powers need not fear war with China unless they provoke it,” except when it comes to Chinese ambitions regarding Taiwan. He recommends that the United States “hold the existing level of defense over Taiwan and counter the Belt and Road program with its own aid and development program,” both of which policies are currently in place. Mann takes this sanguine view because, although trade between Germany and Britain (to say nothing of Germany and France) was robust in the years before 1914, proving that commercial relations do not prevent war, “today’s interdependence is orders of magnitude greater”; “autarky no longer exists for any country,” and “for Chinese or American rulers to ignore such an unprecedented level of mutual material interests would be stupidity of the highest order.” It would, but of course one might go to war for reasons that have nothing to do with material interests, and one devise a war strategy that would not ruin the economic assets of the enemy in any long-lasting way. In past centuries, the Chinese were quite good at that sort of thing. 

What to do about the world of today? Mann absurdly imagines that an international push to reverse climate change—a “far more serious crisis” than any other humanity faces, according to him—might unite the countries of the world in a peaceful struggle not to conquer nature but to protect and restore it. “Rulers should fully commit to international institutions to combat war and climate change, consider undertaking wars only in self-defense” as defined by—whom? (According to Mann, Americans carry out “self-defense” by “aggression to the whole world,” making their country into “a great white shark thrashing helplessly in the shallows.” Not promising.) Will the international institutions define defense? Who will rule them? And if no one does and deadlock ensues, how will that prevent wars?

If “war is neither genetically hardwired into humans, nor quite as important as it is often represented,” and if “fixed agrarian settlements generated states and social classes,” leading to war,” and if Mann’s version of William James’s “moral equivalent[s] of war” are likely to be as ineffectual as James’s have been, this would mean that we can prevent war only by going back to the nomadism of pre-agrarian communities or by acceding to the worldwide hegemony of an unprecedentedly great power. “The best antidote to war would be direct participation by citizens in popular assemblies to decide war or peace. Alas, this is also utopian.” It is also wrong. Did direct participation by citizens in popular assemblies prevent Athenians from embarking on empire? 

War began in border disputes between and among states; with their characteristic socioeconomic classes struggling for authority, warfare could unite peoples so ruled and augment their territories, serving the interests of the rulers. This induced neighboring peoples to found their own states. “The militaristic institutions and culture that had grown up on profitable little wars were then turned on bigger wars,” state against state. Losers seldom write histories (the American ex-Confederates being a notable exception), so interstate war was made to seem more practical and glorious than it is. Today, however, “the whole world is filled up with states whose legitimacy is supported by international institutions” and war between “the major states can no longer be rational.” This won’t stop wars from happening, since “the perennial intervention of emotions and ideological and political motives weakens the rationality of both means and ends.” With his distinguished sociological predecessor, Max Weber, Mann believes that ideological and political motives are non-rational—mere ‘values’ as distinguished from the ‘facts’ pragmatists attend to. One may doubt this.

In the end, in his final response to Raymond Aron’s claim that there can be no general theory of war causation, Mann admits that “human nature does matter, if indirectly.” “Part rational, part emotional, part ideological,” human nature’s “tripartite character” makes war “an intermittent outcome” in the course of human events. “Human nature does matter, and that is why when wars are fought, they are mostly fought for no good reason.”

Michael Mann: On Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Introduction-Chapter 9.

 

Unlike many sociologists, Michael Mann does not reduce politics to sub-political ‘forces’—currently fashionable are ‘race, class, and gender’—instead regarding politics as an independent causative ‘variable,’ along with economics, ideology, and military power/organization, all of which ‘entwine’ to produce social effects. In his previous work, he added ‘leadership’ to those causes, allowing scope for both statesmanship and tyranny. Here, he introduces several refinements to this framework, distinguishing domestic political power from what has come to be called ‘soft’ power projected abroad—diplomatic, cultural exchange, and the like—while closely associating ideology with emotions, “since both surpass empirical knowledge,” and adding libido dominandi to the several purposes human beings aim at. Nietzsche wasn’t entirely wrong: “Those who command may get intrinsic enjoyment from dominating others, regardless of what other benefits they might experience.”

Mann wants to know three things: “what determines whether war or peace is chosen”; whether wars are “driven by human nature, the nature of human society, or other forces”; whether wars are rational as means or as ends (“Do they do any good at all?”). His invocation of the good shows that he is no ‘value-free’ social scientist but one, like Aristotle, who distinguishes good from bad regimes. Sociology as conventionally understood today cannot tell him what is good, but he does not let that stop him from thinking about what is good. He concludes that while “there is an element of rationality in wars,” it “gets entangled in varying degrees within the emotions and ideologies of human beings, especially their rulers, and within the social structures and cultures of human societies.” That is, wars aim at serving the regimes of the states that fight, although they often fail to serve those regimes well and, given the many regimes ruled by rulers who are not good, they often benefit “only a small proportion of human beings.” Fewer wars would be better for humanity as a whole—assuming, one might add, that the regimes that bring peace do not bring it in the form of unjust rule, itself a sort of war against the human beings subject to that rule. “The vast majority of people throughout history seem to have preferred peace to war, so far as we can judge,” and in this they are usually quite reasonable.

The modern, centralized state typically combines Machiavellian political science with the modern, Baconian natural science. Lo Stato has changed war, as seen in the artillery of the early modern period, the steamships of the nineteenth century, the air power and nuclear weapons of the twentieth, and the cyber-weapons of the twenty-first. While modern medicine “has produced a major decline in those dying from their wounds, accompanied by greater consciousness of psychiatric ailments,” modern weapons “have increased the civilian casualty rate and it is now routine to define the total population of a country as the enemy.” Indeed, as he drily remarks, “the main problem of an infinite aspiration to conquest is the number of lives it destroys,” while self-defense from rulers who may be animated by that aspiration often proves “quite an elastic concept.” This bodes ill for the future, and in many passages, Mann proposes such peaceful substitutes for war as commerce and international peacekeeping organizations, only to acknowledge that to invest much hope in such phenomena is utopian. 

“Military power is the social organization of lethal violence,” the attempt, in Clausewitz’s words, to use force “to compel our enemy to do our will,” usually by killing people and breaking things, destroying lives and property. General William Tecumseh Sherman was right; “war is hell” and “militaries train soldiers for hell.” Military power should be distinguished, Mann writes, from militarism, which is an ethos animating a regime, typically one ruled by militaries exalting “military virtues above ideologies of peace,” and pursuing “extensive and aggressive military preparedness,” i.e., preparedness well beyond the need for self-defense (this, too, being an elastic concept). Following the necessarily somewhat arbitrary conventional measurement proposed by political scientists, Mann defines war as “an armed dispute that causes one thousand or more battle-related fatalities inflicted within a twelve-month period,” as distinguished from military incursions, which cause fewer than a thousand fatalities. 

If war is simply endemic to human life, then the claim that war inheres in human nature would be hard to deny. Mann doubts this, because “minimally organized warfare” seems to have begun after 8,000 BC, and “much later in some parts of the world”; it is associated with the development of “settled farming,” i.e., property (as Rousseau asserts). And even the early wars were unimpressive by later standards, consisted of raids by hunter-gatherer bands on others. “The likeliest conclusion is that pre-state communities”—what Aristotle calls extended families and tribes—featured “interpersonal violence but only rarely warfare.” Of course, Aristotle also maintains that families and tribes tend over time to develop political communities or ‘states,’ so in this sense war is the consequence of natural aggression as expressed in the natural, if only eventual, human society, the polis. Mann admits the teleological nature of human beings without necessarily admitting their political character, whereas Aristotle locates the origin of political rule in the natural family itself. 

None of this is to deny that for “more than 95 percent of the 150,000 years of humans living on earth had passed before the appearance of warring states.” Not our genes but our societies bring us to fight wars. Mann goes further: “there has been no natural bias toward aggressive behavior,” although even that claim allows for the naturalness, if not the predominance, of human aggression. It is fair to say that aggressive behavior is brought out by circumstances—as announced, Mann wants to know what those circumstances are—and aggression is part of the natural human repertoire. Rather than saying “violence is not primordial, and civilization does not tame it” inasmuch as “the opposite is nearer the truth,” it might be more accurate to say that violence is among the primordial kinds of action, although by no means as prevalent as (for example) Hobbes contends. (This may be what Mann means when he writes, “Indirectly, of course, human nature does matter, for that yields hot tempers and aggressive ideological commitments.”) To organize violence, rulers need to train their soldiers to “obey orders,” since soldiers “are always initially terrified” of war, “would often prefer to flee than fight,” but “do usually fight,” with few desertions.

Even civilized societies need not be violent. Evidence of the human propensity to peace may be found in the Indus Valley civilization, which enjoyed, water and sewerage systems, literacy, standard weights and measures, all without the trappings of military power—a “relatively egalitarian and highly cooperative society” that traded widely but fought no wars, not even civil wars, as far as archaeologists can determine. We don’t know enough about this civilization to say why it was so peaceful, although the conjecture about egalitarian communitarianism seems to Mann to be the best bet; the work of Pierre Clastres runs along these lines, as well. [1]

More usually, “war is the sport of rulers,” not the ruled, or more polemically, “a conspiracy among old rulers to kill the young.” In pre-modern societies, the ruling class of the state “makes the decision for war, and other classes die as a result,” decisions following from “pre-capitalist modes of production” extracted from “the direct producers” (mostly peasants) “in the form of unfree labor statuses, such as serfdom, corvée labor, and slavery, all supervised by military power.” So far, Marx, but Mann doubts that rulers usually decided for war in order to “deflect class conflict”; “it may be more common for rulers to go to war to demonstrate their political strength to rival elites,” ‘the many’ being usually disorganized, only potentially powerful. 

John Locke was right. “War began when human groups settled fixed natural environments that could support them and which they called their own,” lands “worth defending” and also “worth attacking,” if one group estimated that it could succeed in seizing the lands of another. “Mother Nature does not lead us into war, for war is a human choice, yet choices are affected by ecology’s effect on society.” Nor does history determine warfare, although “past wars” do “weigh on the brains of present decision makers,” often causing a cycle of warfare that makes war to seem “normal and even virtuous, making it more likely.” Mann is especially eager to refute the grander claims of foreign-policy ‘Realists,’ who claim that states “are the sole actors in an ‘anarchic’ international space,” with no lawgiver or judge above them to stop them from fighting; under such conditions, Realists say, “contagious feelings of insecurity make war more likely” as a “necessary self-defense against the uncertainty of geopolitics.” While admitting that this can be true, it is often false, since war costs blood and treasure and its outcome is seldom certain. War occurs not out of carefully reasoned calculation of advantage so much as ideology and emotion. 

Ideology itself comes in three forms: “transcendent, immanent, and institutionalized.” Transcendent ideologies seek “to remake the world” according to a higher standard; as such, their adherents regard their enemies as evildoers or even intrinsically evil, “which increases casualties and atrocities.” Immanent ideologies, ideologies vaunting the inherent goodness of a given human group—typically the rulers, or would-be rulers—reinforce “solidarity and morale” of that group, very much including the soldiers under their command. Neither of these ideologies is long-lasting, at least at peak, warlike level. They tend to become institutionalized, as in religions but not (especially in modernity) only religions, since (for example) adherence to a secular political regime is readily passed on by means of educational and other institutions by one generation to the next. If these institutions and the ideologies they purvey endure, succeed, and if the wars they fight are successful, then bellicosity can become, as Mann likes to put it, “baked into” the ethos of the regime. “People keep doing what seemed to work in the past—path dependency,” in sociological terminology. Military success, institutionalized and spurred by a regime, will result in an ethos of militarism, valorizing honor and physical courage at the expense of “self-interest” understood as material well-being. 

Such complex, interacting causes of war “provoked Raymond Aron into declaring that a general theory of war was impossible.” [2] But, Mann bravely writes, “I will have a shot at one.” He begins by gathering evidence from civilizations and regimes on three continents, four geographical regions: The Roman Empire and modern Europe, China (both ‘ancient’ and ‘imperial’ China), Japan, and Latin America. He includes the United States only in relation to wars on the other continents and their rival regimes and in a way, this is just as well, since he evidently understands the United States least of all the regimes he examines. 

He begins with Rome, an empire under both its republican and monarchic regimes. Rome built “a formidably enduring record of militarism that few states in history could match,” thanks to “its militaristic social structure and culture,” persisting across its two main regimes. In its early years, Romans were defending themselves, but the republican regime (really an aristocracy in which decisions for war were made in the patrician-controlled Senate) “attracted neighboring aristocracies because it defended their rights against the lower classes and granted them Roman citizenship,” an attraction that lasted for the first two centuries after the founding of the republic in 509 BC. Political ambition, greed for slaves and landed property, and love of glory spurred conquest; Rome “almost never conceived of a realm of economic power relations separate from other power realms.” Glory consisted not only in the thrill of victory but in the claim that Roman rule “brought peace and the rule of law to less civilized peoples, and so was blessed by the gods.” As a religious ‘ideology’ (Mann means the term simply as a system of ideas and sentiments), this was more (again in his terms) immanent than transcendent, the relation between success and the gods’ approval, failure and the gods’ disapproval, being very tight—a civil not a prophetic religion. Roman civilization was indeed highly civil-political, was generals “used the riches won from wars to strengthen their political power in Rome,” not for the indulgence of luxurious living. “The desire to achieve domination, honor, and reputation came to triumph over money.”

“This state was really run by its militaristic class structure, defined by nobility, wealth and military service, whose combination of collective solidarity and hierarchy of rank conferred considerable infrastructural power.” The few administrators or ‘bureaucrats’ were usually slaves of the military-political class, which understood itself as an aristocracy, ruling a republic in the sense that it was not-monarchic—not in the American sense of a democracy or rule of the many refined by the deliberations of elected representatives. “The poor, the conquered, and the enslaved” usually remained firmly among ‘the ruled,’ although there were opportunities for advancement into the ruling class. “Citizens were lightly taxed, for their main duty was onerous military service,” which could last six to fourteen years, depending on the military needs of the rulers. It was only the later monarchy, under Augustus, that professionalized the army, breaking “the tight links between citizenship and the army” that had for centuries deterred attempts at military coups. Even then, soldiers could hope for reward in the form of land after their enlistment. This regime featured perpetuated wars, since continued victories were needed in order to satisfy this expectation of landed property. “The crucial Roman advantage” over its rivals was both regimes’ refusal to identify citizenship with ethnicity or region. Rome was inclusive, although not at all in the pablum-like sense prevalent in contemporary democratic republics; it ‘included’ you by conquest, but (as André Malraux wrote) “welcomed into its Pantheon the gods of the defeated” and, at least as pertinently, welcomed foreigners into citizenship, if they subsequently fought on the side of the Romans.

“Roman militarism reached its apogee in overthrowing the very republic that had institutionalized it.” Aristocrats bought land with war spoils, cultivating it with slaves drawn from the peoples their troops had conquered. With such wealth came corruption, including “electoral bribery for high office” instead of electoral reward for the exhibition of military virtue. As a result, the farms owned by peasants “could not compete, and farmers were forced off their lands into a poverty-stricken existence in Rome, whose populations rose greatly.” The ‘ancient’ equivalent of a lumpenproletariat thus arose, and slaves, too, became restive. This forced the senators to appeal to the generals for protection, generals who “recruited armies more loyal to themselves than to the state by extending military service to the lower classes, offering them bounties and lands upon discharge”—in effect taking over what had been the prerogative of the republican regime. “The ensuing civil wars of the period involved much plundering in order to pay the troops and ensure their loyalty to their generals.” 

Factionalism finally ruined the monarchy that resulted, although the emperors did hold Rome together for centuries after Augustus. Although eventually weakened so much as to become prey to the barbarians of northern Europe, “for almost a millennium, Rome was perhaps the most successful example of militarism the world has ever seen.” Unlike the most impressive empire of the East, China, the Romans’ “secret was not a powerful bureaucratic state, but the embedding of dominant classes in political institutions.” Mann hardly equates Rome’s success with goodness, however. “The Roman upper classes were the main beneficiaries of war, followed by legionaries who survived intact, merchants trading with the legions and in conquered provinces, and foreign upper classes who switched allegiance when the perceive Rome would win.” Massacre, rape, pillage, and slavery were the fate of ‘the many’ among the peoples so conquered. Peaceful economic development might have achieved greater benefits for a greater number, although Mann concedes that this is “unknowable.” As for the advance of Roman civilization, such non-material benefits as law, literature, the arts generally, this did occur but “with great loss of life.” “Overall, these wars probably benefited few of the peoples around the Mediterranean. Rationality of ends was mostly confined to Roman elites and their dependents”—a critique, perhaps, not so much of war itself as of the regime that made war its way of life.

Mann divides Chinese history into its “ancient” and “imperial” periods, devoting one chapter to each. “Ancient” China means China between 710 and 221 BC, when the Qin dynasty consolidated much of the region under its rule. China saw some 866 military conflicts during this time, but most of them “probably” were skirmishes, not wars by Mann’s definition of the term. Between 710 and the mid-400s BC, the number of Chinese states declined from over seventy to about twenty, as the stronger consumed the weaker. The final century before the Qin victory saw a substantial increase in wars per annum, as the Qin made their geopolitical push. Little wonder that the famed sixth-century military strategist, Sun Tzu, called warfare “the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Way to survival or extinction.” The Way: warfare was built into many of the Chinese regimes, early, no doubt in part because they waged so many skirmishes, early. 

Before 771, the Zhou dynasty had expanded by conquering “mostly stateless agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers.” The Zhou were the only ones who could be said to have had a ‘state,’ and their success demonstrates the vulnerability of stateless persons, once some group among them conceives of politics written larger than households, clans, and tribes. After 771, “rulers shifted from being mere heads of clans and lineages and stabilized their conquered realms by ‘enfeoffing’ kin and allies in small walled towns and military colonies, in which these became lesser replicas of the king, while their own hereditary ‘ministers’ became lesser replicas of themselves.” That is, absent a bureaucratic apparatus or Roman-style warrior-citizenship, a regime ruling a large territory necessarily devolves political authority to local aristocrats/oligarchs. Given the monarchism that pervaded all levels of government, the eldest son of the ruler’s “principal wife or concubine” inherited rule, leaving the younger sons either as rulers of towns on the outskirts of the feudal realm or as soldiers eager for more conquest. Well-armed, the rulers extracted surplus from the peasants to finance such wars, although rulers needed to be sufficiently prudent not to kill the geese that laid those golden eggs, not to take too much from the peasants or too many peasants as soldiers or slaves, who built those impressive city walls unearthed by modern archaeologists. “Warfare remained key for aristocrats, their culture bellicose,” with wounded honor often triggering wars among them. The Zhou declined “in a typical feudal way as power shifted downward through this hierarchy of lineages,” lacking “the infrastructure to control their vassals or stop their feuding.” Foreign invaders from the north and west eventually toppled them and the Zhou fled eastward, conquering weaker peoples along the way. “Militarism continued,” but China had now split into at least seventy, and possibly twice as many, sovereign “lordships.” War remained “normal, baked into culture and institutions.” Post-771, the larger monarchies swallowed the smaller ones while alternatively fighting and negotiating with one another over less-populated spaces. “There were always more winners than losers, as the declining number of states confirms,” substantiating Mann’s thesis that rulers often miscalculate their chances in war. 

Unlike northern Europe, later on, warriors fought no religious/ideological wars. Chinese aristocrats fought for “lineage, patriarchy, blood, war, oaths, and covenants of fealty,” all for the sake of honor, as is at least partly true of aristocrats in all places and times. No impersonal ‘states’ existed, as “polities were identified by the name of the ruling dynasty, a ducal house, not a state.” As in Rome, the material incentive was spoil, translated into political power. “The expected utility of war was high,” being “the only avenue for advancement.”  It was “initially bad for the conquered,” obviously, “many of whom were enslaved, but it might eventually bring economic and other civilizational benefits—provided the conquered did not rebel, for then they would be slaughtered.” War intensified in the two-and-a-half centuries before the Qin prevailed. In this “Warring States Period,” bureaucracy, fortifications, walls, armies, and wartime deaths all increased, although years of peace solemnized by treaties still outnumbered years of war. The set of ideational doctrines now known as Legalism recommended that states harness their economic resources more systematically for the purpose of warfare; such militarism “now affected the people more intensely.” “Deference to the Zhou monarch collapsed” in a period “probably more ruthless than it was in medieval Europe, where Christendom and kinship networks meant that a petty prince conquered by a major kingdom might be treated mildly.” Not so, at this time in China, were “defeated aristocracies and soldiers were put to death or enslaved en masse.” 

Aristocide weakened aristocrats vis-à-vis monarchs, and not only the Legalists but the more peaceable Confucians yearned for an idealized form of monarchy, a sort of nostalgie de la Zhou, with an added claim that such a unifying regime would be consonant with the order of the cosmos. The Confucians ‘moralized’ such rule, asserting that China was “the universal state, of greater moral authority than any rival,” justified in fighting wars if they were fought to restore China’s unity. They claimed that virtuous rulers would win wars over the unvirtuous, having won the minds and hearts of their soldiers, and even Sun Tzu concurred, writing that the ruler who obeys the “moral law” will win the consent of the people, who “will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger,” whereas an immoral ruler will always be at a disadvantage, even if skilled in the art of war, a man of virtù in the sense Machiavelli would formulate, centuries later. Mann takes the occasion to lament, “If only that were true.” By contrast, the Legalists, led by Han Fei, “saw the state as the only source of order and morality, so all should be subordinated to it.” None of these ideational factions was militarist, however, preferring the (to coin a phrase) peaceful rise of a dynasty as the better way, either because it was more moral (Confucians) or often more sensible (Legalists). Religiously, they adhered to cults of the ancestors, not a transcendental God associated with Church and Ummah in the Europe of several centuries later.

Geopolitics strengthened the states on the northern and western peripheries of China. They confronted the barbarians, nomads and semi-nomads who augmented their horses and camels with saddles and stirrups, enabling war by horse archers with iron-tipped arrows. Fortunately for the Chinese, nomads don’t institutionalize political power, so their formidable cavalry could do little more than launch raids. This gave the frontier Chinese time to develop their own cavalry and to build defensive walls. Eventually, this gave the western and northern dynasties a substantial advantage over the Chinese of the south and east. By the sixth century BC, China saw four dominant states, with the Qin eventually defeating the others. Balance-of-power strategies are fragile, Mann observes. 

The Qin won because they were advantageously situated to the north and west of the other warring states. Having fought barbarian cavalries, they had experience in wars of rapid maneuver and also enjoyed relative security thanks to mountains that protected them on two sides. They lived “outside the main line of fire of most wars,” and so could wait “for most of their rivals to weaken each other before they attacked,” a process speeded by exercising divide-and-rule tactics—a strategy the Chinese Communist Party evidently has understood. As “their territorial gains were piecemeal and opportunist, they did not unduly alarm rivals,” another lesson taken by the CCP; the Qin “had not seemed an existential threat” to its rivals “until too late.” By the last third of the third century BC, the Qin shifted to more blatant expansionism, “wag[ing] war against one’s neighbor in alliance with more distant powers that could force the neighbor into a two-front war.” (The CCP did this initially, allying with the United States against the Soviet Union, its former sponsor, but then shifting to alliances with the nearer powers of Russia and Iran against the United States, in what is now a three-front war in Europe, the Middle East, eastern Asia with the United States.) The Qin also practiced what we would now call economic statism, making sure that they controlled the most powerful civil-social groups. “Surpluses must be consumed by war, for settling into enjoyment of the surplus would lead to self-interested squabbling and idleness,” as indeed it has often done in the West. In summing up the results in terms of morality, Mann judges that “Qin unification was seen as likely to bring order to China, but it is finally impossible to say whether the millions of casualties and the devastation produced by hundreds of wars were justified by the much later creation of a somewhat more peaceful and very long-lasting realm.” It is safe to say, however, that the ruling Qin had no qualms on that score.

“For most of its over two-thousand-year history, the Chinese Empire,” under a succession of dynasties, “was the leading edge of human civilization.” For much of that time, it waged war at a rate similar to that of Europe, a parity that only changed in the middle of the eighteenth century, as Europeans more fully deployed the military technologies generated by modern science. Chinese wars were fought mostly against the northern and western “pastoralists,” whose dependence on ever-moving herds of livestock instead of stable plots of farmland made them elusive prey and, sometimes, formidable enemies. The Qins were displaced by the Han dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC to 8 A.D., a regime that vindicated, during that time, Confucian mildness and bureaucratic rule over Legalist harshness and militarism. The bureaucracy under the Han and the subsequent Tang dynasties increased to 153,000 officials, ten times larger than the Roman bureaucracy, although puny compared to the bureaucracies of modern states, which “pursue many functions unknown to early states.” Bureaucrats acquired their offices through competitive examinations, causing “a national gentry-bureaucrat class with a common Confucian culture” to emerge, linking the central government to local ruling classes and thereby avoiding feudalism, unlike post-Roman Europe. Confucians controlled the education system, teaching emperors and the ruling families. As for Legalism, in accordance with its name it provided “the law and punishment, Confucianism the morality.” All of this ensured that emperors could still make war but not without the limits commended by Confucianists, limits substantiated by their alliance with local aristocrats, who esteemed Confucianism’s “advocacy of low taxes” and what Mann somewhat anachronistically calls “laissez-faire” economics. Then as before, these ideational systems “lacked a transcendent divinity,” preferring order “above any ultimate notion of truth.” An emperor who failed to keep order “was perceived as having lost the mandate of heaven and could be overthrown,” but the moderation inculcated by a Confucian education made such failures uncommon. 

Internationally, the Chinese emperors practiced “tributary diplomacy” over Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and indeed ruled Vietnam for a thousand years. So long as the neighboring states paid tribute in the forms of material support and deference to the emperor, they could rule themselves. (Taiwan wasn’t occupied until 1662.) The emperors fought only approximately a dozen land wars over six hundred years—evidence of “a defensive, diplomatic imperialism, mostly at peace, especially under Han Chinese dynasties.” “Here was a satiated power.” By what Europeans now call the late medieval and early modern period, the Chinese were calling their imperial rule “all under heaven” or “harmonious world.” After all, “once a state did homage” to the emperor, “it could participate more in the world’s biggest trading network” and could “deploy their forces elsewhere” than their border with China. “For China the main reward was peace,” and they had no fear of the European barbarians whose refusal to kowtow to the emperor merely meant their exclusion from the Chinese market.  Mediating conflicts between other Asian countries, “never submitting to mediation themselves,” the emperors “said they were bringing civilization to Asia, and neighbors sometimes appeared to accept this.” Mann approves: “The answer here to ‘who benefited?’ was almost everyone.” 

The main threat came from those barbarian peoples to the north and west, the “marcher lords.” “Ethnic stereotypes sometimes intensified hostility,” leading one official of the Song dynasty, which ruled from 960 to 1279 AD, to call the Khitan people “insects, reptiles, snakes, and lizards,” and Ming officials to call the Mongols a people with “faces of humans but the hearts of wild beasts,” “dogs and sheep whose insatiable appetites and wild natures made them unenculturable.” For their part, barbarian rulers or ‘khans’ “regarded the Chinese as herds of sheep to be pushed around at will.” Such “racism made calculative decisions more difficult,” as each side loathed and underestimated the other. But above all, “China was too big to be stably ruled by a single monarchical state.” Not only barbarian incursions but provincial rebellions periodically sundered the empire, although for centuries the dynasties would strike back, recovering lost lands. 

The Song were overthrown in the north by the Mongols under the ruthless Chinggis (more usually “Genghis”) Khan. “Steppe and field came under a single yoke, as “fewer than one million Mongols with an army of just over 100,000 ruled half of Asia,” albeit “precariously.” In his regime, “aristocratic status was achieved through performance in war.” Rather like the Romans, Chinggis did not hesitate to integrate Chinese military men into his own force. “Mongol civilization left many positive legacies for Eurasia even after its empires collapsed,” although “whether these benefits were worth the death of around 10 million people is another matter.” Chinggis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, completed the conquest of the Song in 1271, supplementing his inherited khanate with a successful claim to the Chinese throne, founding the Yuan dynasty. This dynasty itself foundered in the jungles of southeast Asia and the seas off Japan, falling to the Ming dynasty, which ruled from 1368 to the 1650s, and which fell in its turn to another set of khanate rulers who named themselves the Qing dynasty. The Qing rulers were no Confucians, valorizing martial virtues which they instantiated in “their rituals, artworks, and monuments.” “As usual among the Mongols,” rule after the initial conquest “was not cruel if a people did not rebel, as the Qing drew together agriculturalists and pastoralists” with a Rome-like recognition of “the conquered peoples’ ethnic cultures, descent myths, and lineage histories.” They fought a war in Myanmar/Burma in the 1760s but wisely concluded a peace before getting too much entangled. The emperor complained, “Human beings cannot compete with Nature….So [I am] determined never to have a war again” in that place.

By the nineteenth century, the Europeans began encroaching. China may have invented guns, but the Europeans had improved them, and they had established modern, centralized states that extracted men and materiel much more efficiently than the Chinese emperors could do. “Over two millennia this was the most technologically inventive, educated, and culturally creative civilization on earth, one that almost broke through to an industrial society six to seven hundred years before Europe did.” But “almost” doesn’t count in international politics; Confucian bureaucrats and law-enforcement Legalists did not conceive of the experimental science aimed at conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate, an ambition that the Qing emperor had judged irrational. 

In Asia, Japan is to the continent what the British Isles are to mainland Europe. Mann turns there, for his third ‘case history’ of warfare and regimes. For centuries, its geographic isolation shielded it from foreign wars but it fought many civil wars between the eighth and twelfth centuries AD. By the twelfth century, the military class, the samurai “dominated the aristocracy.” The Chinese Yuan dynasty’s navy attacked at the end of the thirteenth century, only to be defeated by storms which wrecked their ships and cut off the troops who had gone ashore. The ensuing massacre persuaded Chinese rulers to leave the Japanese alone for the next three centuries. The Japanese wouldn’t leave one another alone, however; prolonged internecine wars “prevented economic growth” well into the 1600s. 

“Warfare in Japan was more ferocious than in medieval Europe because of distinctive features of Japanese feudalism.” The state owned the land but clans ruled each parcel, collecting taxes from it. If one clan “wiped out an enemy clan, it could claim possession of its lands, which the central authorities then ratified”—ensuring frequent efforts at mass slaughter. No one religion predominated, and so none could restrain the warfare; the state, its tax revenues so limited, also lacked the power to stop the fighting. Eventually, one clan leader, Oda Nobunaga, amassed sufficient military power to seize the capital and eventually to extend his rule to nearly half of Japan’s provinces. “Ruthless, intemperate, impetuous, and unpredictable,” Nobunaga “preferr[ed] terrorizing over negotiations,” saying, after killing everyone in a temple fortress, “You cannot imagine my happiness that I have slain them all, for I hated them deeply.” Although he was himself killed in a coup attempt in 1583, Nobunaga took the first step in unifying Japan; his successor, Toyotami Hideyoshi, ruled with mildness, conciliating the defeated and reconciling them to imperial rule, while Hideyoshi’s successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu prudently refrained from invading Korea while his main rivals forged ahead and exhausted their strength. “Unification produced a spectacular reversal of history: almost no wars over 250 years.” The many peasant uprisings, usually over taxes, were easily crushed. Peace enabled commerce and agriculture to flourish, cities to thrive. The samurai could switch from military action to policing.

This ended with the arrival of British and U.S. naval forces in the nineteenth centuries, forcing the emperor to sign treaties opening the trading ports to foreigners. The treaties stipulated that resident aliens were subject to the laws of their own countries, not the laws of Japan, and that the foreigners could adjust their own tariffs at any time while Japanese tariffs for imported and exported goods were fixed by the treaties. Unlike their policy in China and India, however, the foreign powers did not rule, did not add Japan to their empires. This gave the Japanese the opportunity to learn modern science and then to apply the new technologies to military revival. They were exceptionally able students. By the 1890s, they had settled on an imperial policy of their own, directed at China, Korea, and Taiwan. In 1905, when they saw Russia planning to extend its railroads and fortify its ports in the far east, they launched a preemptive strike in Siberia and Manchuria, wiping out the Russian fleet in the region and defeating Russian land forces in “the first victory inflicted by non-Europeans over a major European power” in modern times. (“Many oppressed peoples celebrated.”) Japan followed this triumph with the annexation of Korea, five years later, and “wisely chose the Allied side” in the Great War. “By the 1920s Japan had a colonial empire in Taiwan and Korea; an informal empire in Manchuria and parts of north China; and substantially free trade with the rest of Asia, the British Empire, and the United States.” Postwar treaties limiting the size of navies, worldwide, “end[ed] British dominance in Asia and allow[ed] Japan to play the United States against Britain.” 

Within the country itself, Japanese liberals reduced the military budget in order to lower taxes and reduce the sway of the military. This led to a regime struggle between Japan’s ‘Anglo-Saxons,’ who admired parliamentarism and advocated an “informal empire” of commercial hegemony, and its ‘Germans’ (oligarchs, army officers, bureaucrats) who admired hierarchical government and advocated an empire based on military strength. The more extreme ‘Germans’ endorsed the recommendations of Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, who preached “total war” against the West in Asia, envisioning a series of short but decisive battles culminating in “a final war” between Japan and the United States. ‘German,’ indeed—more specifically, Hegelian: “The last war in human history is approaching,” he wrote, a “titanic world conflict, unprecedented in human history” will serve as “the gateway to a golden age of human culture, a synthesis of East and West, the last and highest stage of human civilization.” By taking more territory on the Asian mainland and establishing an industrial base there, Japan could “harmoniously join” Japanese financial power and industrial management with Chinese natural resources and labor. Koreans could “do the farming.” 

Although under different circumstances the liberals might have enjoyed the advantage of popular support, the Japanese people were impressed by the military’s string of victories and offended by racism in the West, whether in the form of the white-man’s-burden imperialism of Europe or of the harsh immigration restrictions in America. Liberalism in theory was contradicted in practice. The Great Depression completed their disillusionment with Western economics. Between 1936 and the end of the Second World War, the de facto rule of military elites subordinated labor and capital to war, seizing Manchuria in 1931 and attacking China, then ruled by the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek, in 1937. “The war proved costlier and more difficult than anticipated,” as Japanese forces were in the grips of delusory notions of racial superiority, committing “atrocities alienating many Chines who might otherwise have joined them.” Japan’s rise to world-power status had been carefully calculated and successful, “but ideology-infused emotions were beginning to cloud material interest and rational strategy.” As the United States shipped military supplies to China and Britain designed a railroad from Burma to ship supplies there, Japan saw their war in China beginning to stalemate. They responded by invading Vietnam in 1940 and, after the Roosevelt administration embargoed exports to Japan—crucially, oil—the Japanese regime chose to wipe out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, cutting the remaining civilian officials out of their deliberations. This would give Japan a free hand with which to seize control of oil fields in Dutch East Asia/Indonesia.  Mann stages this as a war prompted by the rivalry of “different forms of imperialism”—military in Japan, commercial/financial in the United States.  “Both were only exaggerating the reality the other posed,” but for the Japanese military rulers compromise would lead to dishonor, violation of the moral core of their regime. They also felt contempt for what they took to be the softness, the decadence, of the liberal democratic regimes. Their military difficulty was simple: Japan could not invade the American mainland, but the Americans could attack Japan. When trapped on the Pacific islands they had conquered, Japanese soldiers fought to the death and embraced it: “On ten islands the average death rate was an astonishing 97 percent,” a rate “unparalleled in any other war discussed in this book.” Notoriously, it took the atomic bombing of Japanese cities to extract surrender. “The mayhem of the Asia-Pacific War was a far cry from the calm calculation of Realism or the beneficence of liberalism,” Mann concludes.

Europe, eventually the home of the ur-Realist, Machiavelli, and of such liberals as Locke and Montesquieu, “may have had more interstate wars than any other region of the world” in the thousand years stretching from the tenth century to the twentieth. That is, neither realism nor liberalism had as much influence as their theorizers and practitioners hoped—very much including those would-be Realists, Machiavelli and Hobbes. 

After the fall of the Roman empire, Western Europe saw the rise of “large ex-barbarian kingdoms built on Roman foundations,” kingdoms weakened by succession crises and conquered by a succession of warlords, each of whom met ruin in turn. “The Franks came the closest to reestablishing political unity within Europe, but the division of their realm into three parts undercut this.” The conquests of Spain and the Balkans by Muslims, and subsequent European resistance, “added to continental militarism.” 

European feudalism prevailed because there were no stable empires and as yet no modern states. Kings financed their wars from resources derived from their personal estates, paying mercenaries and conscripting their vassals. “Thus, kings had an incentive to make war in order to acquire new lands, which they could distribute as rewards to existing and new vassals, who in return would provide more soldiers,” a “circular process” which “made war more likely” while keeping European military power “highly decentralized.” Christian piety entwined with aristocratic honor, yielding “consciousness of the duties of rank, courtoisie toward ladies, and protection of the poor”—a culture “more religious than that of medieval China or Japan” but no less warlike, as young men of noble families, “especially younger sons and bastards” who sought war as the means of satisfying “greed for land, wealth, and serfs,” “glory and honor.” 

Mann identifies three “phases” of war in Europe. In the Hundred Years’ War, beginning in 1340, Edward III of England attempted to recover English domains in France lost by his father. He fought Philip of Valois, who claimed the French throne after Charles IV died without a direct male heir. Since both men asserted a legal claim to the throne, both sought alliance with French aristocrats. There being no modern state, loyalty attached to persons, not country. The people had no ‘say’ at all. The war ended when the Duke of Burgundy defected to the French in 1435, tipping the scales. Despite being started on ‘aristocratic’ terms, the war saw a ‘democratization’ of war, as infantry-archers replaced knights on horseback and cannons made castles less imposing. The aristocratic ethos ensured that “righteousness outweighed prudence,” as “war was what you declared when your honor had been affronted or when you saw an opportunity to claim long-nurtured rights.” Accordingly, Mann finds it “difficult to separate greed and glory” in feudal wars. He does find self-imposed limitations, however, rules of war consistent with the fact that “this was a struggle over who was the rightful king of France, divinely anointed.” Knights captured one another but held their captives for ransom and did not kill prisoners. Also unlike the Chinese, European aristocrats lacked efficiency; drilling and logistics were minimal. 

The second phase consisted of the religious wars fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “For over 150 years after Luther’s defiance, Europe saw major conflict between the Catholic Church and Protestant sects, all possessing rival transcendent ideologies claiming divinely inspired truth and seeking to impose it on others.” That is, Christianity ceased to be a curb on war and became a spur to it and more, causing war to intensify. “Forcible regime change” was the aim of regimes and their armies. The Thirty Years’ War centered in the German states, pitting Protestant German princes against the Catholic Hapsburgs, rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. Benefiting from new agricultural techniques that increased the productivity of heavy, wetter soils of the north and from their seizure of Catholic monastic estates, the Germans shifted geopolitical power from the Mediterranean to the northwest. Offshore, the English Protestant Tudors worked to prevent alliance between the Habsburgs and France, the two main Catholic countries. But French monarchs “prioritized geopolitics over religion” after they reached a settlement with their native Protestants, the Huguenots; France first financed, then fought alongside the Protestant armies, preventing the Hapsburg empire from dominating the continent. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia limited war to border disputes and dynastic matters, forbidding wars to change the religious regime of any country. As a result, wars in the next century “were usually fought for clear and limited goals and ended with negotiated treaties,” thus instancing Realist theories of international politics more fully than perhaps any others, before or since. 

That didn’t last. “Ideology as a driver of war shifted from religion to race,” even as the Enlightenment shifted intellectual authority from religion and churchmen to materialist science and scientists. “Racist beliefs were not new among imperialists—as we saw in China,” but ‘scientific’ racism, wedded to the power of the technologies generated by modern science, was. Although (pseudo-) scientific racism justified ever expanding imperial conquest, made possible by technology and by the organizational capacities of modern states, it also “prevent[ed] the assimilation of natives that the Roman and Chinese empires had achieved,” ultimately shortening the time of European world domination. In Europe itself, the peripheral states, England and Russia, prevented any continental empire from establishing itself, the most spectacular attempt being that of Napoleon. Although the Congress of Vienna settlement of 1815 secured European monarchies, the democratization of militaries accelerated by both the French Revolution and Napoleon induced those monarchs to develop “top-down versions of mass mobilization armies.” Peace in Europe (only one major war, in Crimea, between 1815 and 1914) and imperialism overseas set Europe up for the even more cataclysmic wars of the following centuries.

The World Wars were “the two deadliest and least rational wars in history,” culminating “in the suicide of imperialism.” The First World War saw the unbalancing of the apparently stable balance of power between the Central Powers, Germany (unified during the nineteenth century by the Hohenzollern dynasty) and Austria-Hungary, and the Triple Entente, consisting of Britain, France, and Russia. The regimes of the Central Powers saw a split between militarists and civilians in which the militarists, as they would do in Japan, won the struggle. They miscalculated the character of the war itself; although they had the sobering example of industrial warfare before them, in the example of the American Civil War, militarists assumed that the high casualties there only showed how incompetent Americans were when it came to fighting. “None made plans for the massive industrial and military mobilization that proved necessary.” And when the Germans, banking on that supposed incompetence, declared unlimited submarine attacks on American shipping, the entry of the United States into the war ruined them.

World War II “differed,” as it began with “naked aggression encountering survival defense” and “was primarily an ideological war” resembling the European wars of religion. Inspired by his “transcendent ideological vision of a Thousand-Year Reich,” Hitler “consistently declared that he sought world conquest,” a major justification for which he found in rescuing the world from the “Jewish capitalism” supposedly “dominating U.S. governments.” ‘Race science’ told him that he was being supremely realistic in believing so, but reality begged to differ. 

If there was anything like a Thousand-Year Reich, it was in Europe’s immediate past, not Germany’s future—a ‘reich’ of warfare, as “militarism was so baked in to culture and institutions that war became what rulers did when they felt insulted, wronged, entitled, or self-righteous in seizing the opportunities provided by succession crises,” whether monarchic or democratic. “Through all these wars, few people benefited,” Mann concludes, although it must be said that political and economic liberty finally resulted, as the many attempted tyrannies were defeated. 

Mann’s final case study is South and Central America. He begins with the two major indigenous empires, ruled by the Aztecs in Mexico and the Inca in Peru. Having long served as mercenaries for other states, the Aztecs founded the city of Tenochtitlán in 1325. A century later, they allied with the city-states of Texcoco, and Tlacopan, establishing an empire that survived until the Spanish conquistadors imposed an empire of their own, beginning in 1519. The fertile, well-populated Basin of Mexico, with internal communication assured by its system of lakes, formed the geographic basis of an empire that “defeated many city-states, replacing their rulers, raping their women, capturing their men, and distributing estates and their workers to their own noble and warriors,” thereby “achiev[ing] their two main aims, to seize lands and labor and to worship the gods by sacrificing captives.” “Numerical superiority was always their main military weapon,” but Aztec core military units were “well drilled, and all young men received military training.” “War was rational for them and highly calculative,” if of no benefit to their victims. The empire grew to encompass more than four hundred cities, whose rulers swore allegiance to their conquerors, paid tribute and corvée labor, and provided soldiers when so instructed. The conquered were never brought into the Aztec way of life, which was highly ritualized. (“Spanish soldiers had never before seen enemies doing ritual dances as they advanced into battle, decked out in bright colors, covered with paint, jewelry, feathers, elaborate headdresses and hair styles, some resembling jaguars, eagles, or other creatures with religious significance.”) One important benefit of victory in war, the Aztecs believed, was to provide the means of the survival of life itself. “The sun god needed to drink human blood to survive”; “if he died, darkness would envelop the earth and all life would end.” Since the sacrifice of war prisoners was “the only reliable source” of the “quantities of blood” needed by such a deity, prisoners taken by the Aztecs were “delivered to the gods by having their beating hearts ripped out, their blood spilling out over the temple steps in the presence of the people,” who were grateful and well reassured at the sight. Each new ruler “had to deliver large numbers” of prisoners for sacrifice “to show he was approved by the gods.” Spaniards, outnumbered but fortified by superior military technology and the diseases they introduced unintentionally, defeated the Aztecs by promising neighboring peoples a share of the booty if they joined the fight. They did, although the Spanish then betrayed their allies and conquered them, too. 

The Spanish went on to conquer the Inca, rulers of an older empire centered in Peru. Inca monarchs proved their fitness for rule by conquest, the continuation of which was fortified by the custom whereby royal successors inherited offices, titles, and an army but not wealth, which they could only take by victories in war. If a conquered enemy agreed to pay homage, he could continue to rule. The army officers were taken exclusively from the royal family, but excess political ambition was discouraged by the practice of “executing overly successful generals.” With no lakes, as in Mexico, the Inca oversaw the construction of “a magnificent road system covering the long spine of their empire,” using corvée labor. Those among their conquerors who survived sometimes received land upon their return home, but the main beneficiary was the king of Spain, entitled to one-fifth of the spoils. 

It is the post-colonial period in the region that has been in many respects unique—unique for its relative peaceableness. Looking to the “new liberal republican ideology” animating the United States’ regime (President Jefferson gave a copy of the Declaration of Independence to a visiting Brazilian medical student to take back to his country, so the Americans were not slow to encourage this interest), the colonists saw their chance when Napoleon invaded Spain and deposed its king, who was a Bourbon and therefore Napoleon’s enemy. The restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 and Ferdinand VII’s claim of absolute rule over the colonists only provoked them further. By 1833, ten newly independent states had their sovereignty recognized by the United States, Great Britain, and the pope. 

These new republics—in fact ruled by wealthy landowners—lacked the organizational capacity to wage war, precisely because those landowners preferred “a weak state unable to interfere with [their] power and wealth.” Only two South American states, Chile and Paraguay, achieved ‘stateliness’ in the modern sense. No ideology of militarism developed. They shared a culture of Iberian Catholicism, and the landowners “had much more in common with each other than they did with their populace.” That precluded the more dangerous forms of nationalism. Moreover, there was little land over which states could dispute, and the largest state, Brazil, was isolated from the others by mountains and the Amazonian Forest. Mexico, to the north, was also “a giant, but Britain and the United Sates would not permit it to swallow up the minnow states to its south.” The longest, bloodiest war was the War of the Triple Alliance, which pitted Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil against Paraguay, whose president, Francisco Solano López, became too ambitious for his, and his country’s, own good. The result of his defeat was the halving of Paraguay’s national output, the cession of one-third of its territory, and its reduction to a buffer state alongside its rivals, who didn’t trust one another sufficiently to extend their warfare any further. The weak tax base of Latin American states made wars few and short. Worse still in the eyes of ambitieux, every regime that began a war was “overthrown either during or immediately after the war,” “a salutary lesson.” “Latin American history does reassure liberal theory that in the right circumstances human beings can calculate that war is bad and to be avoided.”

In general, then, Mann finds evidence that to initiate war is to court ruin, and such a war often exacts an extremely high toll in blood and treasure on the winners. Since the overwhelming majority of regimes have been ruled by one or a few, they are the principal material beneficiaries of victory, even if their peoples may satisfy a rooting interest in the outcome. In the second half of his book, he analyzes the results of his case studies more thoroughly.

 

Note

1. See Pierre Clastres: Society Against the State. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein translation. New York: Zone Books, 1987. See review, “Where Does Political Life Come From?” on this website under “Philosophy.”
2. Raymond Aron: Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. Richard Howard and Annette Baker translation. New York: Routledge, 2003. This later edition of the English translation includes an excellent forward by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson.