The Real “War to End All Wars”

Roger Skoff, Stop the ACLU.com

We are now facing the very real possibility of a world gone mad. Runaway government is threatening to make America — that first bastion of individual liberty — also the very last; our economy and that of the entire world is tottering; we are in a two front war – precisely what military experts have always warned against — and may be about to add a third; the Middle East is aflame with jihadis raging to kill or convert all the rest of the world, and Iran is threatening, at its first possible opportunity, to make that flame radioactive and to feed it with the corpses of Israel and its nemesis: Us — “The Great Satan”– the United States of America. Some believe that Armageddon is very close. Others think World War III. Regardless of its name, it is not “the kingdom of Heaven” that is at hand, but an international conflagration that, if survived, will never be forgotten.

Is there anything that can be done to stop it?

The stated policy of the British Empire prior to World War I — “The War to End All Wars” — was to maintain a “Balance of Power” among the world’s greatest nations. This, like its much later successor “Mutually Assured Destruction”, was based on the belief that if both sides of a dispute between nations are equal in strength and a Pyrrhic victory is the only likely outcome, no war will ever be fought.

That was why Great Britain, the most powerful nation on Earth at the time, made it a matter of policy, throughout the 19th Century and into the beginning years of the 20th, to always side with the weaker power on any issue of possible international conflict. This brought the relative strengths of the contending forces, whether single nations or, as it eventually turned out, alliances, as close as possible to equality, and was thus expected to provide an effective deterrent to armed conflict.

What it actually did was not to prevent “The Great War”, but to make it inevitable.

G. Lowes Dickinson explained how that happened later, in his 1926 book, The International Anarchy, in which he set forth what he called “The Principle of Economy of Force” Put most simply, this said that no reasonable military leader will ever use “cannons against canaries”, but will always use as little force as possible to achieve his country’s goals. War, said Dickinson, is just one way – the most forceful way — of settling international disputes. The others are, in ascending order of force, Persuasion, Compromise, and Coercion, and will always be brought into play in that order, as and if necessary.

What that means in practical fact is that if there is a huge disparity in the power of two contending nations – if one is a global Superpower and the other is an international pipsqueak, even if both are equally determined, the Superpower will likely find it easy to “persuade” its adversary to agree to its position and there will neither be war nor the need for any further efforts at resolution.
If the two nations are closer in power and still equally determined, it may be necessary to compromise, but peaceful resolution will certainly still be possible.

A peaceful outcome becomes less likely if the two nations are close or equal in both power and determination. If that’s the case, one can shake its sword in the face of the other and make grim and wonderful threats in hopes that the other will back down, but if this attempt at coercion fails; if there is no retreat by either side, and neither will just walk away, war is the only remaining possibility.

That’s what happened in World War I: Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, neither the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria, Italy) nor the Triple Entente (England, France, Russia) wanted to go to war, but both sides were bound by alliances, and although persuasion, compromise, and coercion were all tried, when Russia mobilized and neither side could or would back down, the war was on. Dickinson was exactly right: Having two roughly equal alliances in a roughly equal balance of power and determination didn’t prevent war, as Great Britain had planned, but guaranteed that it could not be avoided.

What happens, though, if the differences between the contending nations are not in power, but in determination? What if, in the example of the Superpower versus the pipsqueak, the Superpower is a sissy or a pacifist? And what if the pipsqueak – regardless of its lesser power, is absolutely determined and absolutely unafraid – as Israel was prior to Ehud Barak or Iran appears to be at the present time? Wouldn’t that actually, in Dickinson’s analysis, make the two powers much more nearly equal relative to each other and push them farther along the path to war?

The fact of it is that it is not power, but determination to win that creates real national might and results in the achievement of a nation’s goals. Leni Riefenstahl, in a film documenting the rise of Hitler, called this “the Triumph of the Will”, and she was absolutely right.

We’re seeing it right now with the United States of America. There can be no doubt that The United States has at this very moment, even after the considerable reductions to our nuclear stockpile already taken since the demise of the Soviet Union, sufficient nuclear armaments to turn any nation on earth, and perhaps even the earth, itself, into a sea of radioactive blue glass. And yet everybody knows, and President Obama has once again confirmed, that we will never again be the first to use atomic weapons and that we will never use them against any opponent without nuclear capability.

Although much of the world hates us, no one ever doubts the truth of what we say: The result is that, because we say, and the world believes, that we will never use it, our much vaunted “atomic deterrent” is actually no deterrent at all.

What about our conventional forces? Again, there can be no doubt that if the United States were to mass the total of its conventional might against any nation on earth, and to actually allow our forces to fight to win, we could never be successfully opposed.
That’s not ever the case, though: It wasn’t in Korea; it wasn’t in Vietnam; it wasn’t in either of our wars against Iraq; and in Afghanistan, utterly opposite our World War II belief that “Loose lips sink ships”, and despite the teachings of all of military history in any country in any era, we engage in a very peculiar form of Foreign Aid: We save our enemies the cost of spies and the effort of verifying their reports by announcing in advance exactly what elements of our troops will attack which target at what time, using what armaments.

We say we do this to avoid “collateral damage” – the death of civilian non-combatants. We believe that doing it helps us to “win the hearts and minds” of the Afghani populace. The reality is that, because of this policy and others equally self-destructive, our enemies and the rest of the world think we’re fools.

There is no greater laughingstock on a schoolyard than a great big kid who gets pushed around by a little one. That’s the position we’ve put ourselves in: We’ve tried so hard to make sure that everybody knows that we’re not to be feared — that we’re not the evil bad-guys that our foreign detractors and our own far-left lunatic fringe make us out to be — that the world sees us not as frightening at all, but just ludicrous. We’re the country that talks big but does nothing; that fights wars “politely”; that apologizes to whomever will listen; and that, as a result, is almost constantly at war, losing its patriotic young men and uncounted billions of American dollars on wars that we insist on never winning, followed by “peace” that, as with Japan, Germany, Korea, and now undoubtedly Iraq and Afghanistan, continues to cost us more billions every year because we never fully withdraw our troops.

President Reagan may have been the only American political leader since World War II to really “get” it. When asked his strategy on the Cold War, he said: “…We win, they lose.” Compare that to the “nation-building” dreams of other presidents, notably George W. Bush.

Good Christian that he was, President Bush wanted to practice “The Golden Rule” – to do for others as we would wish them to do for us – and what he saw as the very best thing that he could do for Iraq and Afghanistan was to bring them the blessings of freedom and democracy. What he overlooked was that a very substantial portion of the populace of each of those countries found those things not to be blessings at all, but an attack on their traditional social structure, their religion and their culture. Instead of winning their hearts and minds, we alienated those people even further, and instead of creating new allies to protect our interests in their region, we truly did, as the left and our enemies have so long and loudly shouted, provide Al Qaeda, Iran, and others of our enemies with strong new tools for recruiting men to rise against us.

It is not our job to rebuild our enemies’ country after their actions have caused us, for our own protection, to destroy it. Instead, it is their job to learn from the rubble of their cities and the hunger of their children, the consequences of making themselves our enemy.
President Ronald Reagan had the truly simple, but almost never encountered in modern America, ability to understand that our enemies are our enemies; that those who wish us ill do not do so because they don’t understand how nice we are, but because, for whatever reason, they hate us. It may be that they are jealous of us, or see us as infidels, or as rivals, or as a block to their ambitions, or even truly as “The Great Satan”. Whatever their reasons, the fact of it is that their reasons don’t matter: Our enemies are our enemies, and if we treat them in any other way than as enemies, we are not setting them a good moral example; we are not giving them reason and opportunity to see the error of their ways; we are not laying the groundwork for future friendship; we are being stupid and we are inviting both their contempt and their further attack.

The real and only way to truly prevent war is not the goodness of George W. Bush; the “Balance if Power” or “Mutually Assured Destruction” of the last century; or even the endless persistence of Barack Obama, as he doggedly explains his policies over and over again in hopes that the world will eventually come around to his position. It is to truly understand and to act in accordance with Ronald Reagan’s statement that “Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.”

We need to stop apologizing for, or being embarrassed by, our status as the world’s only Superpower. We need to embrace the truth of that unique and powerful position and to use it to protect ourselves and to discourage our enemies. We need to cause our enemies and those who would be our enemies to know that we are not only powerful, but we are determined. We need to make the world know that any transgression against us or against our allies will be met with total and overwhelming retaliation, and that when they fall before us, we will NOT pick them up and make them whole again.

When the war finally comes where the world learns that we ARE the world’s Superpower; that we care more for our security than for their good will; that we treat our enemies as enemies; and that they can trust not only our promises of peace but our absolute willingness to fight them, if necessary, to their very last man, that will be the real “war to end all wars”.

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http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2010/05/08/the-real-war-to-end-all-wars/