War: What is it good for? (55 page)

This is most obvious in the case of commerce. In ancient times and again after
A.D.
1500, the invisible hand increased the benefits of commercial cooperation—but only because the invisible fist had already raised the costs of using force. Whether we look at the ancient Roman, Han, and Mauryan Empires or the early-modern European ones, the fist always preceded the hand. When the fist failed in Eurasia after about
A.D.
200 and steppe nomads overwhelmed the ancient empires, the hand failed with it. Only when European ships and guns conquered the oceans did global trade take off, reaching dizzying heights in the age of the nineteenth-century globocop. When the globocop faltered in the early twentieth century, trade
contracted and violence surged, and as we will see in
Chapter 7
, the installation of a new globocop since 1989 has driven a new age of commercial expansion.

The long-term pattern is clear. Leviathan raises the costs of force, making peace pay off better than violence, and the more peaceful that conditions become, the easier it is for commerce to flourish, increasing the payoffs to be won by cooperating.

Empathy and rationalism were also consequences of productive war in ancient as well as modern times. Enlightened eighteenth-century gentlemen penning pamphlets arguing that universal sympathy was bringing about perpetual peace regularly appealed to Roman writings to justify their ideas, for the very good reason that Roman gentlemen had often held very similar views. But in neither case was empathy or rationalism a prime mover in the decline of violence. As we saw in
Chapters 1
and
2
, the nonviolent messages of Confucianism, Buddhism, Stoicism, and Christianity won mass followings only after the wars of conquest that created the Han, Mauryan, and Roman Empires had passed their peaks; similarly, Europe's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century age of empathy and rationalism came after the worst parts of the Five Hundred Years' War had already passed. These intellectual movements justified and explained worlds that Leviathan was already making safer, rather than themselves creating peace, and as we saw in
Chapter 3
, when the Leviathans collapsed in the first millennium
A.D.
and violence returned, no philosophical system was able to stop it.

Feminization is even more clearly a consequence rather than a cause of the decline of violence. The empowerment of women played little part in the ancient decline and is hard to spot in the modern version until the nineteenth or even the twentieth century, by which time Leviathan had already driven rates of violent death lower than ever before. Perhaps it is only when societies are so pacified that violent death falls below 2 percent that women become sufficiently empowered to challenge male aggression. This was never consistently achieved anywhere before about
A.D.
1750–1800, but the moment this level was reached, in Europe and some of its settler colonies, we begin to see signs of feminization.

Sticking with the payoffs Pinker assigned in the Pacifist's Dilemma (+5 for each player when he cooperates, +10 for winning a fight, –100 for losing a fight, and –50 all around when both sides fight), I now want to look at how the game might play out. The 15-point penalty that Leviathan imposes on aggressors makes cooperation much the best game in town. The result is that productive war drives violence down, and as this happens,
Pinker's other four factors also come into play, acting as multipliers. First, peace encourages commerce (this was clearly happening in several of the ancient empires by 200
B.C.
, and in modern Europe by
A.D.
1700), and even a much smaller bonus than the huge 100-point bump that Pinker suggested would make a big difference. It only takes 10 points to give peaceful merchant societies a payoff of +15, far ahead of the next-best option of –5 (for winning a fight and then being punished by Leviathan). Pinker does not suggest a score for rationality but does have empathy yield 5 points for the peacemakers. If we share these 5 points between rationality and empathy, the payoff for being peaceful goes up to +20, and when rates of violence fall really low, as they were doing in Europe by 1800, feminization kicks in and makes force even less attractive.

The whole process depends on Leviathan's being strong enough not only to punish its own subjects but also to defend them, because, of course, the game of death that Leviathan is playing with its subjects is nestled into other games that Leviathan is playing with its neighbors. A Leviathan that wins productive wars, picking up +10 points each time, will eventually dominate its neighborhood, swallowing up its former rivals. It will turn into something like the Roman Empire, within which trade, empathy, and so on flourish on a much larger scale. Eventually, it may even become a globocop.

Reality, of course, is messier than simplifying games such as the Pacifist's Dilemma. In the late nineteenth century, as we saw in
Chapter 5
, the globocop ran into unanticipated feedback loops as its success in running an international system made everyone richer, which stimulated new industrial revolutions, which then created rivals that undercut the globocop's ability to punish rule breakers. By 1914, several players had concluded that the payoffs from using force had risen back above the payoffs from peaceful cooperation—with catastrophic results. And then things got worse: in the 1930s, the Pacifist's Dilemma abruptly morphed into a game of hawk-and-dove. Most European governments, traumatized by the bloodletting of World War I, consistently pursued peace at any price, which left the field free for Hitler to turn hawkish. He almost won the game in 1940, again in 1941, and a third time in 1942, before the British, Soviets, and Americans finally figured out how to play. Once that happened, of course, the game's unforgiving logic could only lead one way, and by 1945 the Allies had beaten Hitler at his own violent game. Most of Europe and East Asia were in ruins, about a hundred million people were dead, and the United States had the bomb.

Payoffs now changed out of all recognition, because nuclear weapons began driving the penalty for using force up toward infinity. According to the cold rules of the game, even without a single globocop to impose penalties, force could only have positive payoffs if it was applied so timidly—in insurrections, coups, and limited wars—that it did not provoke a violent countermove. If either superpower did anything that challenged the other's survival, both would lose the game. Logic therefore demanded that force become obsolete, and, following the logic, the Soviets and Americans managed for decade after decade not to go to war. But the problem, as Ronald Reagan memorably put it, was that having two nuclear-armed hemispherical cops instead of one globocop was “like having two westerners standing in a saloon aiming their guns at each other's heads—permanently.” Everything would be fine, so long as neither gunslinger ever had a bad day.

Getting Past Petrov

Game theory got its big break in the incongruously beautiful setting of Santa Monica, California. Realizing in the early 1950s that the game of death had taken an alarming turn, the American government outsourced to the RAND Corporation the job of figuring out—objectively and scientifically—how to avoid blowing up the world. RAND's solution was to lure away from Ivy League universities one brilliant mathematician after another and set them to calculating the payoffs from every conceivable move in the game.

These chalkboard warriors were a quirky crowd of geniuses. The best known today is John Nash, the hero, if that is the right word, of the bestselling book and film
A Beautiful Mind
. Nash had proved that payoffs could be set up so that bitter rivals would work their way toward a mutually satisfactory balance (what mathematicians call a Nash equilibrium) without resorting to force. This suggested that nuclear deterrence really should work, so long as the people playing the game remained steely-eyed and rational. Nash's own judgment, however, did not inspire confidence. He began hearing voices, had his security clearance revoked after he was arrested for indecent exposure in a men's room, and then turned into a schizophrenic recluse.

Fortunately, the men who made the decisions about nuclear war and peace were less brilliant but more grounded than Nash. But in the absence of a globocop, and with unknown unknowns thicker on the ground than ever before, even someone as stolid as Dwight Eisenhower soon found himself losing sleep, drinking milk for his ulcers, and suffering heart
troubles that put him in the hospital. The tiniest miscalculation or accident could mean the end. In theory—in games played on a blackboard over and over again—deterrence made perfect sense, but in reality the fate of the world hung on the snap judgments of men like Petrov. Deterrence lacked stability, and without that, there can of course be no evolutionarily stable strategy.

Throughout history, the only stable solution to the game of death has always been for someone to win it, meaning that the only way to get past moments like Petrov's was for one hemispherical cop to defeat the other. The Cold War's arms race, proxy wars, spies, and coups were all attempts to find a game changer, a gradual or sudden shift in the balance of power that would bring the other side to its knees (or prevent the other side from bringing us to our knees). In the early 1980s, many Soviet strategists began worrying that precision weapons would undo them (the expression “revolution in military affairs” was in fact coined by Soviet analysts to describe this new technology). They were right, although not in the way they expected.

The American computerization of war changed the military balance in Europe enough for Moscow to start exploring ways to fight without going nuclear, but hindsight has revealed that what mattered most about Star Wars, Assault Breaker, and the other newfangled weapons was that countering them would be really, really complicated and costly. The Soviet economy could churn out tanks, Kalashnikovs, nuclear warheads, and ICBMs but could not rise to—or pay for—the computers and smart munitions that promised to dominate 1990s battlefields.

This leap in the costs of war came at the worst possible time for Moscow. Much of the Soviets' success in the 1970s had been paid for by oil exports, driven to sky-high prices by war and revolution in the Middle East, but between 1980 and 1986 the cost of a barrel of oil fell by almost 80 percent, wiping out much of Moscow's disposable income. Adding to the Kremlin's woes, while the productivity of American workers surged by 27 percent between 1975 and 1985 and that of western Europeans by 23 percent, Soviet citizens' output grew just 9 percent, and their eastern European subjects only performed 1 percent better. Communist farms were so inefficient that productivity barely rose at all. Consequently, grain imports (especially from the United States and Canada) more than doubled, paid for largely by huge loans from banks in the American alliance. One debt crisis followed another.

“Force,” Clausewitz famously insisted, is “the
means
of war; to impose
our will on the enemy is its object.” Therefore, Clausewitz concluded, we should not hesitate to kill if that seems like the best way to break the enemy's will to resist, but when killing is not the best way, we should not waste our time doing it. The brilliance of the grand strategy of containment that the United States unveiled in the late 1940s was that it recognized this. Most of the time, American policy makers rejected the dovish claim that two hemispherical cops could coexist indefinitely, and most of the time they also rejected the hawkish counterclaim that victory would come if the United States just waged its proxy wars more aggressively. Instead, they followed a middle course that played to American strengths.

The United States had inherited Britain's mantle as the great outer-rim power and with it Britain's role as a liberal Leviathan, promoting free markets, elections, and speech. The way to leverage liberal strength, American strategists realized, was to wage liberal war, using freedom as a weapon to undermine the Soviets' will to resist. The United States could only wage this kind of war if it had an invisible fist to back up the invisible hand, and so, divisive and distasteful as this was, Washington had to keep building hydrogen bombs, fighting proxy wars, and cozying up to dictators. But through it all, American leaders had to remember that bombs, battles, and brutality would not by themselves deliver victory—that could only be delivered by the Soviet Empire's own subjects as they waited in line at the store, cursed at cars that would not start, and bought Bruce Springsteen LPs on the black market. Little by little, the invisible hand would choke the will out of communism.

The plan was hardly a secret. As early as 1951, the American sociologist David Riesman had both mocked and celebrated it in a short story called “The Nylon War.” In it, the Pentagon top brass sells liberal war to the White House by explaining that “if allowed to sample the riches of America, the Russian people would not long tolerate masters who gave them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners.” The president agrees, the air force rains stockings and cigarettes from the Russian skies, and communism collapses.

The reality was, of course, not so simple, but little by little, Stalin and his successors came to understand the importance of stockings. A year after Riesman's story came out, the Soviet premier told China's foreign minister (“jokingly,” the transcript says) that “the main armament of the Americans … is nylons, cigarettes, and other goods for sale … No, the Americans don't know how to wage war.” Before the decade was out, however, the Soviets had learned that the only way to win the Nylon War was for their
own ideologues to push back, denying the truth of American claims and highlighting capitalism's unfairness. Thanks to the fact that nuclear weapons meant that a shooting war would effectively be suicide, the Soviets never seriously considered the path chosen by hundreds of rulers in earlier times, who had responded to economic decline by attacking their more prosperous neighbors and taking their rich provinces or trade routes. Instead, Soviet leaders let the liberal war of attrition grind on until it broke their empire apart.