Chapter 2. Conditions for the Abolition of War

2.1 Introduction

Most studies of the underlying causes of war and peace focus on political institutions, economic conditions, culture, or genes. This study argues that alongside these factors, moral beliefs play an important role in perpetuating war and could play a key role in ending it.

Moral beliefs are a neglected dimension of political behavior. They are the ‘spirit in the machine’ of much concerted human action: they motivate the creation of political institutions and ensure that institutions work as intended. In matters of war and peace, beliefs about ‘just’ (or socially acceptable) and ‘unjust’ (or unacceptable) uses of violence or armed force determine the course of events. The point is not that moral beliefs operate independently of institutions or culture, but that they help shape institutions and culture. For institutionalized forms of group violence such as war, moral beliefs resemble the gates of a walled town: they can grant admission to or shut out whole worlds of behavior, in which institutions and culture, transmitted from one generation to the next, channel impulses, needs, and desires into socially accepted forms of action.

Outside anthropology, the social sciences tend to treat moral beliefs as a constant rather than a variable—a constant which, though not necessarily uniform across populations nor well understood, remains substantially unchanged across cultures and over the course of human history. It is true that for many moral values—for example, marital fidelity, honesty, loyalty, and not stealing or killing—diverse cultures have much in common. In the realm of institutionalized violence, however, moral values differ from one culture to the next and change over time. Because moral beliefs change slowly, over centuries or millennia, we often view the changes as differences in custom rather than changes in morality. Moreover, we tend to be ethnocentric, viewing the values of our own culture and time as normal, and the values of other cultures and times as peculiar. But close study shows that in virtually all cultures, what most people would consider basic moral values regarding violence do change. One important recent change in beliefs about acceptable forms of violence is documented by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979), which looks at the decline of corporal punishment and rise of incarceration as the accepted means of punishing violations of the law. Over a period of several centuries, extremely painful forms of physical punishment, including torture and dismemberment, have been replaced almost entirely with incarceration in prison, that is, the largely mental form of punishment caused by the deprivation of privacy and of freedom of action. Over the same period, norms about acceptable forms of violence in families and communities have changed from permitting to forbidding acts in which husbands strike wives, parents and teachers hit children, and dishonor occasions deadly duels.

Most briefly put, my hypothesis is that war could be abolished if, in an analogous development, one of several competing contemporary views of ‘just war’ became the norm: this is the view that there is no just use of armed force except defense, strictly and narrowly defined. According to this view, there is no just use of force among nations except when one nation violates the norm and attacks another, in which case the victimized nation and other nations are justified in resorting to the minimum use of force needed to stop the attack and repel the attacker’s forces. Within nations, given this same view, the use of deadly force is never justified except as a means of defense against attack. Specifically, it is not acceptable for either subnational groups or the international community to use violent coups d’etat, armed revolt, guerrilla warfare, or armed intervention against an existing government to rectify injustices or to establish basic human rights or civil liberties. The one exception, which can be strictly defensive, is armed intervention by the international community with the limited purpose of ending genocidal bloodbaths in civil or ethnic conflicts.

The view that defense is the only acceptable reason for the use of deadly force is already the norm for interactions among individuals in most nations. In countries with well-developed democratic institutions, there are no circumstances which legally or morally justify the use of deadly force by one person on another, with the single exception of the employment of physical violence or armed force to defend oneself (or help defend another person) if physically attacked by someone who is violating this standard. I call this view ‘democratic commitment to non-violence’ or ‘commitment to non-violence except for defense, narrowly defined,’ which I shorten to ‘commitment to defensive non-violence.’62

The standard of defensive non-violence resembles the pacifist standard of absolute non-violence in incorporating unqualified rejection of the use of violence by some individuals against others as a means of achieving political, economic, or moral ends. Defensive non-violence differs from pacifist non-violence, however, in permitting one narrowly defined exception to the rule that individuals must never resort to deadly force, that is, the minimum use of deadly force needed to end the threat or use of deadly force by others.

In section 2.2, I expand on the thesis that commitment to defensive non-violence could bring about the abolition of war. In doing so, I draw several key distinctions. First, I distinguish between general conditions which could lead to the end of war and the least-change conditions, on which I focus. Most readers will agree that while sweeping, utopian political and economic change might lead to the end of war, such change is of little interest. What is at issue is not the most comprehensive but the most modest change in current world conditions that could conceivably lead to the end of war.

Second, in identifying the least-change conditions for ending war, I distinguish between the conditions needed to bring about the initial transition to the abolition of war, and the conditions needed to preserve peace indefinitely, once war has been abolished. I argue that solid commitment to defensive non-violence in part of the international community could catalyze the changes needed to bring about the initial transition to the abolition of war, but that what is needed to preserve peace indefinitely is a more profound moral rejection of war, which is likely to develop only after the initial abolition.

In discussing the conditions needed to bring about the initial abolition of war, I differentiate between the conditions needed to stop international war and those needed to end internal civil or sub-national war. To catalyze the abolition of international war, I argue, it is likely to be essential for moral commitment to defensive non-violence to be reflected in an international security regime able and willing to enforce this standard.63 In the case of internal warfare, the key factor is the development of a norm sufficiently powerful and widespread to marginalize the holdouts. Because commitment to non-violence is weakened by the observation or experience of war, and by national policies which arrogate a right to use force as a means to ends other than defense, the development of the degree of individual commitment to defensive non-violence needed to end internal wars would be facilitated by steps to end international war.

Next, section 2.2 turns to the prospects for achieving the degree of commitment to defensive non-violence needed to catalyze the transition to the abolition of international war. I argue that the modern shift to individual-centered political organization, which underlies and infuses democratic institutions, makes the near-term future achievement of the needed degree of commitment to defensive non-violence possible and even likely. Even though ‘the democracies’ have engaged in many acts of self-interested military intervention, they have maintained the standard of defensive non-violence in interactions among themselves; and as democratic institutions spread to more and more nations, this standard will characterize their foreign policies more and more fully.

The asymmetrical character of commitment to defensive non-violence (that is, fighting fire with water, not with fire) enhances the prospects for a near-future transition because it is compatible with the establishment of an international peace-enforcement capability that can deter international war without raising the specter of a tyrannical, all-powerful world government.

In the last part of section 2.2, I summarize my hypotheses on the relationship between moral beliefs and other factors in accounting for the perpetuation and potential demise of war.

Section 2.3 compares and contrasts my hypotheses with those of other approaches to peace. First, I identify a number of complementary approaches, which would strengthen commitment to defensive non-violence, but which focus on government institutions and political culture, rather than on the character of moral belief about war, as the key instruments of change. While agreeing that institutional and cultural change are central components of any change in norms, I argue that lack of clarity and consensus about the nature of the moral change to be achieved vitiates efforts to create supportive institutional and cultural change.

Then I discuss three competing approaches to peace, which differ substantially from the approach presented here. These are: (1) the view that commitment to complete non-violence (pacifism) is a better catalyst and the needed means to ending war; (2) the view that the conditions for the abolition of war include the existence of political freedom and economic equity (or, the fulfillment of basic human needs) throughout the world; and (3) the view that war cannot be abolished, only held at bay more or less successfully (that is, made infrequent and brief and small in scale when it does occur) by military power-balancing. In response, I argue as follows:

Commitment to complete non-violence: Preponderant individual commitment to complete non-violence cannot be achieved before the initial transition to the abolition of war, but it is likely to develop after that transition, when it will become central to the long-term maintenance of peace.

Minimum standards of freedom and justice: While conducive to the abolition of war, greater freedom and justice than exist today are not necessary for the abolition of war, that is, not required as part of the ‘least-change’ conditions for the initial abolition of war. Furthermore, since concepts of adequate freedom and justice are constantly evolving, and since peace is conducive the achievement of greater freedom and justice, it more useful and practicable to treat peace as a condition for freedom and justice than to treat freedom and justice as conditions for peace.

Power-balancing: The idea of deterring war through power-balancing was a product of a particular phase in world history (the last five centuries), in which expansionist, imperialist ‘great powers’ competed for the control of territory, resources, and international trade. The phenomenal rise in per capita income during the past century, and the replacement of economic competition based on the physical control of natural resources (on land and while in transit over water) with competition based on the superior technological transformation of natural resources, has made war-based means of striving for political power and economic wealth economically obsolete and counter-productive. The susceptibility of war to being abolished has grown as a direct function of the decline in the utility of war as a means to power and wealth.

2.2 Main Hypothesis

‘Least-change’ Conditions for the Abolition of War

Because moral beliefs and political behavior tend to change in interactive ways, with feedback loops in both directions, moral beliefs are likely to take one form during the initial transition to the abolition of war, and a substantially different form in the later process of maintaining peace for the indefinite future. In this section, I discuss each of these phases in turn.

Moral beliefs capable of catalyzing the initial abolition of war

The time between the continued practice of war and its complete cessation will inevitably be a period of transition, in which many aspects of politics and moral belief undergo flux and change. During such a time, various combinations of political and economic conditions could conceivably lead to the abolition of war. In this essay, I make a case for a limited, well-specified set of changes as the ‘least-change’ conditions capable of leading to the abolition of war. I argue that a modest shift in norms (that is, predominant moral beliefs) in some nations could lead to changes in government policy in those nations, and later to changes in belief and policy in other nations, sufficient to bring about the abolition of war. In other words, I argue that a modest change in moral beliefs in some nations could serve as a catalyst, jump-starting the transition to abolition and minimizing the larger political and economic changes needed to complete the process.

The least change needed to catalyze the transition to the abolition of war would be for one of several contemporary views of just war to become the norm in a number of nations: this is the view that there is no just use of deadly force except defense (of oneself or others) against the use (or threat of use) of deadly force initiated by those who are not (yet) committed to this standard.

For defensive non-violence to be the norm would mean that in the relevant nations, this moral standard receives not mere lip service, but robust support, manifested in actions as well as words. Specifically, the following conditions would have to be met:

• In the committed nations, most people refuse to use or condone the use of deadly force to achieve political or economic ends, such as opposing oppression or injustice at home or pursuing economic interests abroad.
• The governments of those nations publicly espouse defensive non-violence as the foundation of their security policies, and practice this standard by maintaining armed forces that are trained and equipped solely for defense (of their own nation or others) against external attack, and for humanitarian intervention to stop genocide.
• The committed nations undertake to enforce the standard of defensive non-violence—that is, to deter and halt military aggression and genocide—and to foster the global spread of the view that such actions are wrong by establishing joint means of rapid intervention to prevent or end such acts among themselves and, when most other nations have joined them, throughout the world.

The catalytic role of the initial commitment by some nations to defensive non-violence would be twofold. First, the example set by the participating nations would be likely to foster the global spread of democratic values and institutions, including commitment to defensive non-violence. People in other nations, seeing that defensive non-violence is not only morally attractive, but also politically respected and viable as a government policy, would be likely to give this position more weight in their own thinking. Second, the joint practice of defensive non-violence by a group of nations would be likely to reduce the number and scale of occurrences of international aggression, civil war, and genocidal ethnic conflict; and the declining incidence of war, in tum, would make adoption of a policy aimed at ending war seem less utopian and more useful than it seems to most people today. Eventually, when commitment to defensive non-violence became the norm in most (if not all) nations, war would end in the sense defined in Chapter 1: it would be rare, small in scale, and quickly ended through international action.

The degree of commitment needed for the initial abolition of international war: The degree of commitment to defensive non-violence needed to catalyze the transition to the abolition of war cannot be predicted with precision, but some sense of the value can be given.

For commitment to defensive non-violence to be meaningful as a condition for ending war, the number of countries in which this value is the norm must be fewer than all countries. The reason is that if every country were fully, explicitly committed and prepared never to use armed force except to the minimum extent needed to defend against its use by others—and, with respect to civil wars, if every individual and subnational group within every country were, similarly, committed to employ only non-violent means of resisting oppression and injustice—then we could be sure that war would never occur. But identifying this situation as meeting the conditions required for the abolition of war would amount to little more than a tautology: that is, if every person and political organization in the world were absolutely committed never to go to war, then war would cease to occur.

In other words, for the conditions set out above to be significant, there would have to be some nations, some subnational groups, and some individuals not committed never to use violence or armed force as a means to political or economic ends. Thus, the question of the extent to which the relevant conditions must be met can be phrased in relative terms, for example, ‘What proportion of committed to uncommitted nations, and what degree of commitment among the committed, would have to be reached in order to lead to the abolition of war within the reasonably near future?’

If, for the moment, we limit this question to the degree of commitment to defensive non-violence needed to end international war, then the answer might be that the establishment of such a commitment among the handful of great powers—perhaps the United States alone, perhaps the United States joined by one or more of Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan—would be sufficient. These nations alone, without the assistance of any other nations, currently have, or could field, sufficient military power to stop and reverse international military aggression by any other nation, or by any of their own number (except possibly the United States), anywhere in the world.

Another possible answer is that commitment to defensive non-violence by any substantial group of nations—say, any 20 nations from among the 50 most populous nations—might be sufficient to lead to the end of international war because the example these nations set and the rhetoric they used to explain and support their policy would be contagious: sooner or later, enough nations with enough military power to make deterrence effective would join them. These two examples suggest a more general rule: What is needed to make war very rare and very brief and small in scale when it does occur is the espousal of democratic commitment to non-violence by enough nations to reach a specific (but not yet identified) threshold of relative military power—that is, the ratio of the combined military power of nations supporting this commitment to that of nations not supporting—sufficient to deter acts of aggression by the non-supporters.

Yet another possibility might be that international war would end only when all nations except a handful of rogue states were committed not to use armed force: fewer than, say, ten holdouts might be a sufficiently small number for the international community to be able to monitor the problem nations closely and keep their aggressiveness in check. This suggests another possible rule: the holdouts must be few enough in number not to overload the capacity for attention and rapid response on the part of the international community.

These two rules can be combined in a more general response to the question:

The minimum quality and quantity of democratic commitment to non-violence needed to end war is the level at which the supporters, when combined, will deploy enough military power to be able to put a quick end to acts of aggression by holdouts (regardless of whether the latter act singly, simultaneously, or in concert); will have shown their willingness and ability to take quick, effective action to stop aggression; and, thus, will be able to deter virtually all acts of international aggression.

The charter of the United Nations gives the UN Security Council the right and duty to oppose international aggression; but the charter has been interpreted and applied by the five permanent members of the Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States) and the ten rotating members in such a way that hitherto, the United Nations has not functioned as an impartial international peace-enforcement organization. In other words, the nations represented in the Security Council have not demonstrated the willingness or ability to consistently take quick, effective, joint action to stop and reverse international aggression. In principle, this lack could be remedied within the existing terms of the UN charter, with or without various proposed measures of UN reform. Alternatively, it could be remedied by a more ad hoc arrangement: a new, possibly explicitly temporary collective defense alliance comprising all and only countries committed to limit the use of force to defense, narrowly defined.

In sum, an optimistic response is that the establishment of the standard of defensive non-violence among a few nations might suffice to persuade others of the same view, until eventually the committed nations would predominate in the international community. A conservative response is that the commitment to defensive non-violence will suffice only when the supporting nations, in combination, are able and willing to put a quick end to acts of international aggression by holdouts perpetrated anywhere in the world. It would not be surprising if the actual threshold lay somewhere between these two extremes, perhaps at the point where the committed nations, acting together, command sufficient military power to successfully defend against and deter international aggression against any of their number.

The degree of commitment needed for the initial abolition of civil war: It is not obvious that the conditions specified for the abolition of international war will lead to the abolition of wars within nations and wars that may spill over national boundaries but involve no more than one national government: civil wars over governance, wars of secession, and wars over territorial affiliation or political control among subnational groups identified by ethnicity, religion, language, or some other aspect of regional populations. Wars of this kind tend to be smaller in scale than international wars, that is, they typically involve fewer military and civilian casualties and smaller numbers of combatants per unit time. (The recent bloodshed in Rwanda is the exception that proves the rule.) At the same time, internal wars tend to be protracted, continuing intermittently for decades rather than the months or (formerly) years of a typical international war. Equally important, internal wars are generally fought by subnational groups, at least on one side, and, thus, are not susceptible to prevention by agreements solely among governments—that is, agreements among a relatively small number of well-defined parties, whose policies and actions are subject to international scrutiny and to some degree limited by agreed international rules of order. Instead of lying mainly in the hands of governments, the prevention of internal wars lies mainly in the hands of the individuals who comprise the subnational groups that fight such wars.64

To what extent would the individuals that potentially make up warring subnational groups have to become committed to non-violent means of resistance and protest in order for internal wars to end? And what conditions might bring about needed degree of commitment?

The degree of individual commitment to defensive non-violence needed to end internal wars must be substantial, representing well over half the population. The reason is that even though the likelihood of armed revolution or guerrilla warfare grows with the intensity and scale of dissent, relatively small-scale dissent by individuals not committed to non-violence can fuel a civil war.

On the matter of how democratic commitment to non-violence might take root among the great preponderance of individuals in regions of conflict, I propose three possible paths. One route involves a trickle-down effect of the commitment by the international community to renounce the use of armed force as an instrument of policy. What might trickle down are the principle that violence should never be used except for defense, and the sense that this principle is taken seriously by the vast majority of people and their leaders. In a second possible route, individual commitment to defensive non-violence might grow as a product of the spread of democratic institutions, which facilitate non-violent change and inculcate commitment to non-violent processes of group decisionmaking.

Third, individual commitment to non-violence might grow as a function of the long-term global trends that make both international cooperation and the spread of democratic institutions increasingly common: that is, growing global interaction and interdependence in finance, trade, the environment, communications, and so on. In this case, however, the causality is likely to be indirect: that is, the growth of individual commitment to defensive non-violence brought about by global changes in communications and economic activities would be likely to foster both the global spread of democratic institutions and, more particularly, the spread of commitment to defensive non-violence on the part of governments.

Whatever the precise combination of factors responsible for growth in individual commitment to defensive non-violence, it is unlikely that any major new institution involving the use of force—apart from the international peace-enforcement military capability discussed earlier—will play a significant role. The existing institutions of representative government and law-enforcement (police, courts, prison, and so on) generally suffice not only to prevent the outbreak of war, but to reinforce individual commitment to defensive non-violence (that is, commitment neither to conduct armed violations of the law, nor to take the law into one’s own hands, with violent action).

In fact, the key issue is whether the needed degree of commitment not to use violence in internal wars is likely to be a cause or a product of the establishment of democratic institutions.65 Does there need to be some minimum standard of human rights and civil liberties—the absence of violently repressive governments and of anarchic, failed governments—before civil wars and ethnic wars will end? Clearly, the presence of democratic institutions (along with economic equity or the fulfillment of basic human needs) is conducive to commitment of defensive non-violence; and in a world where all states maintained a high standard of participatory democracy (currently found only in a few democracies), we should expect a near-universal commitment to defensive non-violence. The question, then, concerns the relative independence and order of precedence in the interactive spread of democratic institutions and commitment to defensive non-violence.

I contend that the number of nations which currently have democratic institutions (or even the much smaller number reached by, say, 1945)66 and the extent of participatory democracy in those nations have surpassed the threshold needed to create a global ethos and expectation of individual worth and dignity; and that given this ethos, individual commitment to defensive non-violence is likely to spread and deepen more rapidly than will democratic institutions and participatory practice. The main evidence for this claim involves the history of actual transitions to self-government and democratic institutions over the period since World War II. In the great majority of cases, authoritarian, repressive governments (both foreign and domestic) have been replaced by more representative, liberal governments through a process of non-violent opposition, protest, and change. Moreover, in virtually all parts of the world where democratic institutions had not previously existed, acts of non-violent resistance against oppression and injustice, undertaken more or less spontaneously by ordinary individuals, have played a critical role in the ouster of repressive governments. Fine examples of this have occurred in earlier decades in India and Iran, and in the past decade in the Philippines, the Baltic states, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.67 Moreover, in 1996–1997 non-violent public demonstrations in South Korea, Serbia, and Burma have repeatedly challenged repressive governments, and, in Serbia, won the concessions to justice and freedom which they sought.

Moral beliefs capable of maintaining peace indefinitely

Because of the interactive nature of moral beliefs and political practice, there is likely to be a further evolutionary change in moral norms regarding war once war has ended: a shift from the view that war is sometimes a necessary evil to the view that it is an unthinkably barbaric practice which lies beyond the pale of civilized behavior. This development would parallel the changes that have taken place in the past when previously sanctioned forms of group violence have ended. The most important precedents—institutionalized forms of violence or violation which were practiced routinely in all parts of the world for hundreds or thousands of years—are ritual cannibalism, ritual human sacrifice, slavery, and mutilating or lethal corporal punishment for violations of law or custom. In all of these cases, practices that had once been morally condoned and politically acceptable or even required became first repugnant, then illegal, and, eventually, unthinkable.

The key aspect of these precedents for the abolition of war is the character of the moral rejection of the practice that developed not before but after each was abandoned, and the role of that much deeper moral rejection in preventing a future recurrence. In every case, once a previously sanctioned form of violence was banned, people developed an abhorrence of the practice that was deeply internalized, virtually universally shared, and constantly reinforced by a myriad of cultural signals. As a result, in later crises of the kind once thought to justify the abolished practice, the practice was no longer considered an option for dealing with the problem: instead, it had become irrelevant as a means of coping with any problem.

This degree of moral rejection of war—its transformation into an unthinkable barbarity which, like slavery, torture, and human sacrifice, is an absolute evil that can never be justified as the lesser among evils—is a condition that would be likely to develop over a period of decades after war had initially been abolished, mainly as a function of the non-occurrence of war; and it is a condition which, once achieved, would be likely to preserve peace throughout the longer-term future, regardless of the crises and pressures that might arise.

Prospects for Achieving the Catalytic Threshold of Commitment: Democracy and Defensive Non-violence

Defensive non-violence and individual-centered politics

A change in beliefs about ‘just war’ of the kind needed to end war represents one plausible outcome—and quite possibly the most likely outcome—of global political and economic trends which have been under way for several centuries and seem likely to continue for the foreseeable future. At the heart of these trends, flowing from them if not causing them, is a fundamental change in attitudes toward the individual. Pre-modern complex societies (for example, Greece, Rome, China, and India) all had hierarchical social orders in which the individual’s worth varied with social standing. In contrast, to a degree not matched since the time of the some of the simplest societies, modern society attributes equal worth to each individual. Though far from complete in any society, this ‘leveling’ of the social worth of all human beings has fostered or paralleled the development of democratic institutions. At the same time, democratic institutions have prompted, or paralleled, a growing rejection of violence as a means of achieving political or economic ends within and between nations.68

Though little recognized, the renunciation of violence as a means to any ends except defense is as much a cornerstone of democratic institutions as its widely-recognized counterpart, freedom of expression. Commitment to non-violence protects and preserves freedom of expression and other civil liberties by precluding intimidation or coercion by violence or the threat of violence. Within democracies, wherever non-violence is not the rule—for example, in sub-national regions controlled by organizations like the Mafia or the Ku Klux Klan—other democratic rights and freedoms are lost or severely compromised.

Commitment to non-violence lies at the core of democratic institutions, where it can be seen most clearly if the means of political decisionmaking are contrasted with those of pre-democratic societies. In the empires, kingdoms, and principalities that preceded contemporary republican forms of government, national decisionmaking authority was vested in individuals or small elites who were believed to be qualified by criteria recognized as arbitrary—genes or wealth—rather than by talent, training, or any other quality relevant to the job; and whose authority was routinely guaranteed by superior military power. In other words, the winning combatant in armed contests for the crown was routinely recognized as the legitimate holder. Similarly, clearly incompetent, weak-minded heirs to the throne were generally kept in place despite their limitations, on the grounds that the relevant factor for authority was the inherited mantle, not competence.

With the rise of democratic institutions and republican forms of government in the 16th–18th centuries, the highest decisionmaking authority was no longer entrusted to arbitrary forms of succession, nor to superior wealth which could buy superior military power. Instead, the ultimate national decisionmaking authority of the executive and legislative bodies began to rest on two non-violent sources: the opinions of the entire populace, expressed through the mechanism of ‘one man, one vote’; and non-violent, largely verbal means of persuasion, including negotiation, bargaining, and trade. The essential shift in this transition was from arbitrary authority backed up by military power to authority derived from the opinions of the ruled, backed up by the non-violent means of persuasion incorporated in democratic procedure, due process, and civil liberties (particularly freedom of expression).

Near-universally supported as the standard for the behavior of individuals within democratic nations, defensive non-violence is also widely supported, albeit less well-understood, as a moral position on international war. This position represents a special version of the classical ‘just war’ view: war is just so long as the ends are just and the means are proportionate to the ends. First articulated by St. Augustine of Hippo around 400 AD (during the break up of the Roman Empire), just-war reasoning has predominated among political leaders ever since. Over the last two centuries, however, the idea of ‘peace through law’ has begun to replace just-war thinking. The idea is to apply in international affairs the domestic standard that enforcing the law (specifically, enforcing the non-use of deadly force) is the only just use of deadly force. This standard is far more restrictive than the traditional just-war guidelines; in fact, it is closer to the pacifist rule that there are no just uses of violence or deadly force. For if every nation, every sub-national group, and every political leader refused to use armed force except in self-defense (or to help defend others from armed attack), then armed force would never be used.

The great potential of democratic commitment to non-violence to serve as a bridge to a world without war lies in the fact that this commitment is well understood and strongly supported as a norm in domestic affairs in most nations. As a moral concept, democratic commitment to non-violence has incomparably greater public support in all parts of the world than either pacifism or the just-war view. And wide experience in domestic affairs regarding the practical application and interpretation of commitment to non-violence except for defense offers innumerable examples and precedents which would facilitate the interpretation and application of this principle in the conduct of international affairs.

Decentralized international governance

Many people may doubt that the espousal of democratic commitment to non-violence in international affairs, alone, will lead to the abolition of war. The reason is that even if democratic institutions continue to spread, atavistic nations bent on conquest and empire may continue to exist, or to arise, and threaten aggression, or conduct aggression, against their neighbors. The only way to prevent this, the argument goes, is to create a world government with a monopoly on armed force; but this cannot be done without risking intolerable tyranny. In other words, the conditions required to maintain a lasting peace would jeopardize freedom, and, freedom deserves to come first both in its own right and as a condition for genuine peace (not tyranny masquerading as peace).69

In this context, the anarchic state of the international system poses a serious dilemma of political organization. On the one hand, upholding and strengthening norms does seem to require legal systems which not merely codify but enforce the norms. On the other hand, without any system of checks and balances on the use of power, it does not seem wise to give the United Nations power analogous to that of a national government; that is, exclusive control of the military means of enforcing peace worldwide. This could lead to tyranny in either of two forms: the tyranny of the majority, or a condominium among the great powers.

Fortunately, the principle of commitment to non-violence except for defense offers a way to supplant anarchy with law and law enforcement while avoiding the danger of creating a despotic world government.70 This third choice involves creating an international regime in which some nations jointly undertake to limit the use of their own armed forces strictly and narrowly to defense of themselves and defense of each other against external attack. Such a regime—a federation based on no other interests, obligations, or powers except a shared commitment to end non-defensive uses of force—would serve as a substitute or ‘dress rehearsal’ for the effective functioning of the UN as a guarantor of security in the manner originally planned. The process of creating the regime would resemble the process of negotiating arms control agreements: nations would voluntarily, out of perceived self-interest, undertake to forego the use of armed force beyond national borders, except when defending one’s own or a partner’s borders, in exchange for a reciprocal commitment by other nations. The participating nations would undertake to come to each other’s aid if attacked, and take other helpful arms control and foreign policy initiatives to promote participation in the regime and to maximize its effectiveness.

If the formation of a defense-oriented international security regime prompted a rapid, strong, and fairly even spread of commitment to defensive non-violence around the world, that might trigger support for a more ambitious program of demilitarization, confidence-building, non-violent conflict resolution, and multilateral peacekeeping and peace enforcement—a program which would vest in the United Nations (or a subgroup of participating governments) a weak form of world government. The UN (or the subgroup) would then offer effective means of war prevention. It would not, however (at least, not initially), require or provide guarantees of human rights or human welfare, beyond freedom from war.

If the international spread of democratic commitment to non-violence were more erratic, however—delayed in many parts of the world for decades or longer—then the development of a defensively-oriented security regime of the kind outlined above might not play a major role in the demise of war. Instead, war might end in a more haphazard, drawn-out process, as a function of various nations’ independent policies which limit the use of force to defense in their own conduct of international affairs. In this case, it can be argued, effective international peace enforcement institutions are not a necessary condition for peace, only a highly conducive condition.71

The Relationship between Moral Belief and Other Factors in Accounting for the Rise and Demise of War

In making a strong claim for moral beliefs as a determinant of war, I do not mean to suggest that such beliefs exist in a vacuum, detached from the institutions that teach and implement them, or from the choices and life experiences of the individuals who hold them. On the contrary, predominant moral beliefs represent nothing more than an abstraction from their manifestation in institutions, in culture, in the ideas that people are likely to articulate, and in actual behavior.

What, then, is the causal relationship that I postulate between norms, on the one hand, and political institutions, economic organization, and other aspects of culture, on the other? What determines the path along which the normal curve moves over time? Are moral beliefs only a mediating factor between some other ‘first cause’ and the existence or non-existence of a socially-sanctioned form of violence such as war?

For the purposes of this essay, I assume that there is a relationship of continuous interaction and mutual modification among political institutions, economic organization, a culture’s ‘world view’ (general values and assumptions about the nature of the world and the important features of human life), and moral views about violent behavior. Perhaps one of these factors—the economic, the political, the moral, or the world view—or some other factor, such as technology, tends to play a leading role in bringing about social change, while the others tend to follow. The leading factor may well differ from one era to the next, or from one society or part of the world to another.

More formally, the causal chain which accounts for the rise and demise of institutionalized, socially-sanctioned forms of group violence, including war, is, I hypothesize, as follows:

• A crisis (economic, political, or existential) leads to the practice of a form of group violence that had not previously occurred.
• For one reason or another, the practice becomes embedded in a larger system of moral beliefs—that is, beliefs justifying the practice; and these beliefs, rather than the initial crisis conditions, subsequently become the main motivation for perpetuating the practice.
• Because culturally-transmitted, predominant moral beliefs are ‘sticky’ (tending to persist until deflected), the practice may continue long after the conditions that originally gave rise to it cease to exist.
• Eventually, however, the development of new circumstances leads to a weakening of the moral view according to which the practice was justified.
• The combination of changed circumstances and changed beliefs lead to the abolition of the practice.
• The ratchet effect involved in the banning of a previously sanctioned form of group violence, and the natural deepening of moral opposition once a practice has ceased make its recurrence virtually impossible.72

Postulating an evolutionary, interactive character between predominant moral beliefs and the cultural and political environment, I do not argue that moral beliefs play the leading role in the rise or demise of various forms of socially-sanctioned group violence.73 I support more limited claims for the role of moral beliefs in permitting or preventing socially-sanctioned forms of violence: First, for violent forms of social action generally, moral beliefs serve as a gate which can be wide, facilitating violence, or narrow, deflecting stress toward non-violent expression. Second, moral beliefs represent an important independent variable in the interplay of ideas, institutions, and political and economic conditions that perpetuate a sanctioned practice of violence. Third, under current international conditions, a modest change in moral beliefs about war in some nations could catalyze the further political and economic changes needed to bring about the initial cessation of war. Finally, the moral abhorrence of war that can be expected to develop once the practice has ended is likely to be the single most important factor in the long-term preservation of peace.

2.3 Comparison With Other Approaches

As noted earlier, the theory of peace presented here differs from certain other ideas about peace mainly in identifying a condition which, if achieved, could reasonably be expected to preserve peace indefinitely: that is, the emergence of a universal moral revulsion or abhorrence toward war.

The question of the conditions under which the abolition of war, once achieved, might last indefinitely has not generally been studied separately from the question of the conditions under which war might initially cease to occur. Even the transition to the initial abolition of war is rare as a subject of study compared with a much broader version of the topic: that is, the conditions under which the incidence of war might decline. The latter question—how to make the world more peaceful without ending war altogether—has received a great deal of attention.

Generally speaking, ideas about the achievement of peace focus on voluntary individual or government actions which, in their authors’ views, would improve the prospects for peace. In some cases the author may believe that the relevant actions would achieve their goal by fostering the growth of certain moral beliefs; but relatively few authors identify war-condoning or war-preventing moral beliefs as lying at the heart of the matter. In many cases, however, the stress on specific actions (for example, UN reform or national military budget-cutting), rather than on general moral principles, represents a way to operationally distinguish between two quite different policies which, given the cooption of the word ‘defense,’ might otherwise appear to be based on identical moral beliefs.

Complementary Approaches Focusing on Institutional Change

For the most part, other proposals for strengthening peace complement the approach outlined here, rather than competing or conflicting with it. They involve strengthening conflict-prevention and conflict-resolution institutions, along with related developments in culture and formal education of a kind likely to strengthen democratic commitment to non-violence.

Complementary approaches differ from the approach presented here mainly in how they identify the fulcrum of change. Their authors tend to assume that moral beliefs are too malleable—too subject to self-interested interpretation—to provide a reliable foundation for peace, and that only carefully constructed institutions can reliably translate good intentions into consistent results. My approach, too, calls for carefully-constructed educational, policy, and peace-enforcement institutions to reinforce and operationalize moral values in complex situations. It differs from the others mainly in underscoring the need for explicit, morally-defined limits on the legitimate uses of armed force as the foundation for institutions that are likely to be effective in preventing (or ending) war.

There are three main approaches to peace, which tend to overlap with each other and with the views put forward here, but have important differences in emphasis. They are: arms control and disarmament; the establishment of a genuine, supra-national world government or, on a more modest scale, the strengthening of the United Nations’ collective security institutions and peace-enforcement capabilities; and the establishment or strengthening of other, dedicated means of non-violent conflict resolution.

Certain subsets of these general approaches deserve special mention. Early armament-oriented approaches involved proposals for general and complete disarmament. Notable among these were the proposals debated in the interwar disarmament negotiations among the major European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan;74 the disarmament plan included in Clark and Sohn’s proposal for world peace through world law (1966); and the McCloy-Zorin agreement negotiated by the US and Soviet ambassadors to the United Nations during the summer of 1961.75 After the early 1960s, the idea of general and complete disarmament was considered unrealistic, and attention focused instead on partial arms limitation and arms reduction measures (‘arms control’ agreements).76 A new approach introduced in the 1980s stressed qualitative (as well as quantitative) changes in armed forces, which would build confidence between potential military opponents by reducing the risks of surprise attack, preemptive offensives, and mobilization for large-scale aggression. In addition to recently-agreed measures for on-site inspection of stored equipment, observation of maneuvers, and data exchanges, more far-reaching proposed confidence-building measures involve structural reconfiguration of armed forces to defensively-oriented means of defense. Prominent among the theorists of defensive defense are Lutz Unterseher (Studiengruppe 1984), Wilhelm Nolte (Nolte and Nolte 1984), Bjørn Møller (1987–), Dietrich Fischer (1982), and Egbert Boeker (Barnaby and Boeker 1982).77 Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, and the gradual integration of the states of eastern central Europe into West European institutions, a number of analysts incorporated defensive defense concepts in a broader approach called ‘cooperative security.’78 Under this approach, potential military opponents would cooperate in developing confidence-building security policies. A cooperative approach could be applied globally to processes and concepts of security involving some or all of the military great powers (the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China); or it could be applied regionally among the key players in major regional conflicts (for example, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt), or between countries with border disputes (for example, India and Pakistan).

Among the means of non-violent conflict resolution, some involve early warning;79 others focus on institutions and techniques for effective non-violent conflict resolution through negotiation and mediation;80 and one emphasizes organized, systematic civilian resistance as an alternative to armed revolt or armed defense.81

The approaches that involve the creation of some form of world government have a history dating back for centuries.82 In this century, support for better international governance has broadened to include interest in international law and international norms as factors that can help prevent armed conflict.83 Like arms control and disarmament measures, and proposals for confidence-building defenses, most ideas on ways to strengthen the peace-fostering roles of the United Nations and international law are fully compatible with my approach: indeed, practical changes in all of these areas would be desirable and, in some cases, required to implement my approach. Again, my approach differs from these others in arguing that no combination of peace-fostering measures is likely to lead to a peace that is global and lasting unless those measures aim to limit the use of armed force to defense, narrowly defined, and to end other uses of armed force, designed to support, protect, or advance ‘national interests.’

As noted earlier, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia have focused attention on the need for a stronger body of law on secession, which lies at the boundary between domestic and international law and between civil and international war.84 Another related area involves collective security arrangements of a partial rather than universal nature: many of those who believe that an effective world security system lies far off and may never be possible support more limited collective security arrangements—such as NATO, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or the Western European Union—as a viable alternative means of strengthening peace for the foreseeable future. Such arrangements represent adaptations of Karl Deutsch’s ‘pluralistic security communities’—that is, groups of nations which share enough common values to join together to prevent war among themselves and protect each other against war with other nations.85

All of these institutionally-based paths to a more peaceful world are compatible with the morally-centered conditions for the achievement and maintenance of peace that I describe; all of them would help strengthen commitment to non-violence; and some combination of them would probably be required to operationalize (that is, to express and enforce) the predominant commitment to defensive non-violence that I identify as key to peace. Similarly, most of the changes in popular culture and children’s education that have been proposed to strengthen commitment to non-violence would not merely complement the moral changes needed to end war, but help bring them about.

Competing Approaches

There are areas of significant difference between the ideas put forward here and three other, competing approaches to peace. Two of these might be described as lying to the left of mine politically: one identifies commitment to non-violence with no exception for defense as the most effective path to peace, or the only path with moral integrity; the other identifies minimum conditions of political freedom (that is, civil liberties and human rights) or economic justice, or both, as prerequisites for peace. A third competing approach, which lies to the right of mine politically, is the ‘power-balancing’ view that the closest the world can come to a complete and lasting peace is to keep war at bay through military deterrence and military balances of power.

Unqualified commitment to non-violence

Those committed to non-violence without exception for defense tend to believe that condoning any use of violence, including defense narrowly defined, is immoral and, even more important, represents a slippery slope that will lead to the perpetuation of war. Instead of drawing a moral line between defense and aggression, they draw a line between violence (regardless of the ostensible purpose) and non-violence.86

This is certainly a morally consistent view, and one which is arguably more internally coherent and powerful than the view that I advance, that democratic commitment to non-violence offers a more readily achievable route to the complete rejection of war which is needed for a permanent peace. Clearly, commitment to absolute non-violence is not merely conducive to the development of the view that war is unthinkable, but represents a far larger step toward that view than does qualified commitment to non-violence. The problem I see with this approach is that commitment to total non-violence requires a leap of faith that lies well beyond the reach of most people, whereas commitment to defensive non-violence is already the predominant view of most people. In today’s world (as distinct from a future world with little or no warfare), the great majority of people are likely to oppose any approach to peace that excludes the right to and means of self-defense. Moreover, it is feasible—and possibly essential for peace in the longer term—for most individuals to be able to make reasonable judgments about whether or not given uses of force are defensive, and even whether a given use of deadly force was limited to the minimum required for defense.

By refusing to publicly support defensive uses of military force and to draw a sharp distinction between defense of a nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity on the one hand, and aggression or intervention to advance national interests on the other, those whose who advocate total non-violence leave the practical business of defining the norms that are applied in public policy to those who support the use of force to advance national interests—and who deliberately blur the distinction between defensive and self-interested uses of force to win public support.

There is, however, one pragmatic point that may favor those who support complete non-violence in the industrial countries, though not necessarily in Third World areas where opposition groups are fighting for freedom or justice. Because of its ambiguity—absolutely rejecting war for ‘us’ but not for ‘them’—this approach may be emotionally and politically the path of least resistance to a world without war. Ironically, trends in US military strategy and geopolitical thinking, which emphasize the use of aircraft and missiles to conquer less technologically advanced Third World armies with no loss of US lives, illustrate the enormous appeal of a world in which the rich and powerful live in a ‘zone of peace,’ while other parts of the world continue to suffer from war.87

The United States is continuing to maintain large, powerful, very costly military forces that underscore the US ability to protect itself, its friends, and its interests even though the Clinton administration and congressional leaders agree that there is today no imminent threat of major war involving the United States or the Western world,88 and no other threat that is worth putting US soldiers ‘in harm’s way,’ as it is euphemistically phrased. The consensus on the lack of any cause worth dying for (or, in the view of proponents of non-violence, worth killing for), for the first time since 1939, is indicative of positive changes in the international system and in attitudes toward war. In large part, it reflects the fact that since the end of the Vietnam War, US public opinion and US government policy have moved much closer to democratic commitment to non-violence than they were earlier, even though current government policy statements continue to maintain the right to use force ‘to protect vital national interests.’ Thus, in the long run, it is possible that unwillingness to risk dying, rather than principled opposition to killing, will make non-violence the norm.

Political freedom and economic justice

As suggested above, many people in the industrial nations combine unqualified commitment to non-violence for themselves and their own countries with support for or acceptance of the use of armed force by Third World groups to rectify injustices in their nations and regions. This moral position does not fundamentally differ from that of politically conservative adherents of the just war view: for both, the morality of the means (the use of deadly force) depends on one’s assessment of the justice of the ends. The problem with this position is that acceptance of certain wars as just by people who otherwise are committed to total non-violence obstructs and undermines the development of the more deeply-rooted norm of non-violence that is needed to make war unthinkable.

The earlier section on the abolition of internal (civil) wars raised a question about whether such wars were likely to end in areas where democratic institutions have not been established. In that section, I argued that over the last 50 years, there have been many cases in which the transition to democratic governance was accomplished largely or entirely by means of non-violent protest and resistance. Thus, it cannot be argued that war cannot end unless and until democratic institutions have been established in all countries. It can be argued that the more countries that have established democratic institutions, the less likely will be both civil wars and international wars of aggression. From the viewpoint of the ‘least change’ conditions for the abolition of war, a reasonable case can be made that democratic institutions now exist in a sufficient proportion of the world’s nations, and in adequate quality in those nations, that war could conceivably be abolished prior to any further spread of democracy. At the same time, it must be stressed that the abolition of war should not be seen as depriving those who seek political freedoms and equality before the law of a useful means to those goals. On the contrary, to the extent that repressive regimes respond with violence and brutality to non-violent protests supporting social change, they lose legitimacy and authority at home and abroad, setting the stage for their own demise. Thus, rather than identify peace as unrelated to or counterproductive for the spread of freedom, we can assume that the abolition of war is likely to foster the spread of democratic values and institutions.

Similarly absent from my list of conditions for peace is any economic factor, such as the establishment of a minimum standard of living around the world, the elimination of the most egregious disparities in wealth and opportunity within or among nations, or even further guarantees than exist today of equality of opportunity. The argument here parallels that regarding the need for democratic institutions as a prerequisite to peace: the establishment of a minimum standard of living and the narrowing of the gap between rich and poor are both likely to be conducive to peace, but neither is a necessary precondition to peace. Just as is the case for freedom, an argument can be made that defining justice as a condition for peace is putting the cart before the horse: war and threats of war are, in the first instance, an instrument of the rich and powerful, who can use their wealth and power to secure various advantages in any open military contest. The abolition of war is likely to promote economic welfare and equity. Regarding the distribution of wealth, ruling out the use of force by the mighty to preserve or extend their advantages would improve conditions for narrowing the income gap between the rich and poor nations. Regarding the fulfillment of basic human needs, it is widely recognized that disarmament can promote development, by freeing up resources, removing obstacles to international aid, and changing domestic economic priorities.

In many cases, the view that peace cannot be achieved without prior conditions of political democracy or economic justice may be more an expression of concern with freedom and justice than a considered view on the conditions for peace. Thus, the same view might be more accurately phrased in one of the following formulations: (1) Global deficiencies in democracy and justice are more pressing and merit more urgent attention than do problems of war and peace, which are less acute; (2) Working for peace should not be misinterpreted as accepting the status quo in regard to oppression and injustice; (3) Rich nations (or, domestically, middle-class yuppies) may have the luxury of addressing the intractable issues of war and peace; poor nations and poor people have to focus on problems of economic survival; or, finally, (4) Just because I am a rich yuppie and have the luxury of taking a principled position on the intractable and (given the low likelihood of my action having any serious political impact) theoretical issues of war and peace, that does not mean that I do not give a high priority to the concrete, urgent economic and political problems of those who are not as well off as I am, at home and abroad.

The idea that peace might be more readily achievable than freedom or justice and could facilitate and strengthen efforts for freedom and justice seems to offend the sensibility of many liberal and progressive activists, as though time and effort put into political efforts to end war (or intellectual efforts to think through how to end war) necessarily steal time and effort from trying to help the less fortunate in our own societies and in the world. But if, on reflection, one concludes that ending war can be achieved more quickly and easily than ending oppression and injustice, and that ending war would greatly help efforts to end oppression and injustice, this resolves the sense of competing priorities.

In cases where there is no effort to make a serious assessment of the prospects of achieving peace, freedom, or justice to the degree needed to bring about the others, but merely a casual statement such as “If you want peace, work for justice,” I infer that the real content of the claim is something like “Working for justice is a higher priority for me than working for peace; and besides, I believe that insofar as justice is achieved, the prospects for peace will be increased.” The claim that justice is conducive to peace is consistent with the idea that principled commitment to non-violence is an important factor, but not the only factor which affects the prospects for peace. The fact that the speaker gives justice a higher priority than peace is the expression of a personal preference, not a theoretical idea about the relationship between the two.

The leading intellectual proponent of the view that peace cannot exist without justice is Johan Galtung, who introduced the concept of ‘structural violence’ into peace research in the 1960s.89 The core meaning of the concept is that people are subjected to forms of physical ‘violence’ (starvation, malnutrition, disease) and other severe deprivations comparable to the losses suffered in war not only as a result of acts of war, but also as a result of the ostensibly ‘non-violent’ structure and workings of capitalist socio-economic systems. Later generations of peace researchers have incorporated the concept into their work using the short-hand phrases ‘positive’ peace and ‘negative’ peace: positive peace is peace with justice and freedom (and, more recently, appropriate treatment of the natural environment); negative peace is the mere absence of war.

The Galtungian school does not explicitly claim that justice is a precondition for the abolition of war. Instead it argues that peace without justice is not genuine peace, nor likely to be a lasting peace. Many university-based ‘peace studies’ (or ‘peace and justice’ studies) programs are based on this view, which has encouraged students to learn about poverty and inequality but has not been particularly fruitful as a source of ideas, research, or public debate on the conditions for ending war.

Power balancing

Analysts and politicians of the ‘power-balancing’ school of thought believe that war cannot be abolished, only kept at bay.90 They argue that the most reliable, effective means of keeping war at bay is the deterrent effect of the threat of punishment for aggression by means of retaliation with conventional or even nuclear military forces. They believe that military alliances and military power-balancing strengthen deterrence by increasing the forces available for retaliation and bringing the political legitimacy of multilateral support to deterrent threats—and, perhaps, by bringing the discipline and predictability required by military alliances into the turbulent course of international affairs. They assume that it is dangerous to disarm, because this will weaken deterrence and increase the risk of war. For the same reason, they tend to put a higher priority on maintaining the internal coherence of power blocs than on goals conducive to the abolition of war, such as limiting weapon deployments and military actions as narrowly as possible to defense, or supporting the growth of egalitarian, participatory international political institutions.

The main reasons advanced by the power-balancing school for the view that war cannot be ended are the key obstacles to war addressed in this essay: innate human aggressiveness, powerful incentives to go to war, the lack of a world government to prevent war (and the potential for tyranny inherent in the creation of a world government), and the frailty of political institutions in general, and peacekeeping and peace-enforcement institutions in particular, when placed under great stress.

In brief, my comments on these obstacles are as follows: the nature of innate aggressiveness is not such as to preclude the abolition of war; like domestic violence, the tendency to go to war can be restrained by appropriate socialization, even when powerful incentives for war appear to be present; limiting the use of armed force to defense offers avenues for creating a non-tyrannical peace-enforcement system; and a deeply-internalized moral commitment to non-violence can make peace-enforcement institutions work even when placed under stress. These arguments are developed more fully in Part II of this essay.

2.4 Conclusions

Like advocates of complete non-violence, experts of the power-balancing school often support arms control and the strengthening international security institutions.91 At the same time, like adherents of power balancing, non-violent activists usually describe their goal as ‘reducing the risk of war’ rather than ‘ending war.’ As a result, the public is left uncertain as to the real differences in the peace-related goals and means supported by these schools of thought. The shared value that pierces the public’s confusion is an interest in making a warlike world more peaceful. This lowest common denominator of the most prominent schools of thought has an unfortunate impact: it leaves the public with the view that available public policy choices cannot do more than affect the risk of war in the short term; none will actually increase or decrease the (presumably very dim) prospects of ending war altogether in the longer term.

By failing to develop a theory of how war might end and a set of political and security strategies to achieve that goal, advocates of complete non-violence, along with advocates of power- balancing, have limited public debate to the question of how to reduce the risk of war and the costs of preparing for war in a world where war is inevitable. Typically, the difference between those two schools on this question boils down to whether to rely on more or less armed force for the purposes of deterrence and warfighting. In any such dispute, middle-of-the-road publics generally take the view that ‘it’s better to be safe than sorry’: thus, they agree to spend more rather than less to buy more rather than less armed force. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, since maintaining more than enough force to minimize the risk of war in the short term precludes confidence-building limits that would deter war in the short term while moving gradually toward the conditions needed to end war over the longer term.