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.”
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