GLOBAL POWER TRANSITION: TWILIGHT OF PAX AMERICANA AND THE RISE OF CHINA

INTRODUCTION

The world power structure has been undergoing a fairly rapid transition in the last four decades. From an American-dominated world economic system to an Asian-dominated one, the transition means that China is becoming the world’s number one economic power. Most analysts, including the World Bank, have been predicting as much. By the end of 2014, China will be the world’s largest economy in terms of PPP (purchasing parity power). While the US now ranks 10^th in the world in terms of PPP per capita, China is very poor, ranking 89^th, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Global power transition also means a de facto expansion of the G-7 to G-20 or even G-22, despite the objections of the US based on political considerations that have nothing to do with objective economic power of countries such as Russia. 

Many political observers of the US and the international order believe that indeed the era of Pax Americana – the US-dominated international order from 1945 to the end of the 20^th century – is experiencing its twilight in the early 21^st century. Some believe that China along with Russia, India and Brazil would be influencing the world order later in the 21^st century, especially if another deep global recession later in the century delivers a serious blow to the US and EU. Others argue that we are probably going back to pre-WWI Great Powers decentralized structure that would mean the end of globalization and a new round of nationalism, regionalism, trading bloc alliances, and instability owing to greater competition at the economic, military and political level.

America’s economic fall from global preeminence will be a gradual process largely because the US will retain the number two spot behind China, but it will remain militarily number one in the world for the balance of the century, thereby exercising enormous political and economic influence. Paradoxical as it may appear, the transition from the West to Asia actually extends, strengthens and prolongs the capitalist system rather than weakening it, just as the transition from London to New York in the 1920s did the same, despite the Great Depression. Nevertheless, the transition will continue to have an impact on the US socioeconomic structure as currently constituted because the dominant voice in managing the world system will no longer rest with the US and its junior European and Japanese partners. In other words, the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Labor Organization, to mention just a few, will eventually have to heed the voice of the number one economic country China, rather than the number two US.

What will the transition mean for the US and its Western allies, Japan and Australia? Do we now live in a polycentric economic structure with the US remaining the world’s military superpower? Will the US play second fiddle to China economically, trying to remain influential by forging alliances to contain China? More important, does global transition entail upward socioeconomic mobility for Asians and downward mobility for the US; greater pluralism and democracy for Asia and lesser democracy for Americans? Does the transition entail greater or lesser global stability, greater or lesser lifespan for capitalism?  

Beijing’s Skepticism about Global Preeminence

There is the question of whether the Chinese political elites want to replace the US as the world’s number one economy at this point or even in the next couple of decades. Does the government in Beijing believe it is in their favor to have moved this fast, raising expectations of their own population that aspires to higher living standards, greater pluralism, greater Westernization and greater voice to religious and ethnic minorities, and the end of the one-party state? 

Even if the domestic demand rises to meet consumers’ higher expectations, there is a debate among China’s political and military elites if the country ought to strengthen the defense sector that lags far behind the US by a 10 to 1 ratio. Unlike Japan and South Korea that have relied on US defense support while they industrialized, China is not in a comparable position. Regardless of trade agreements and even scientific and technology contracts that even involve defense cooperation with Russia, China has to take into account nuclear-powered Russia on one side, and the military allies of the US on the other side, including India that is competing with China. These geopolitical realities require that China vastly expand both air force and navy that will go hand-in-hand with economic expansion. If the US forces China to spend itself into oblivion for the sake of military competitiveness, would China not risk serious damage to the civilian economy?  

The Chinese military establishment has questioned the wisdom of the military power gap with the US, and this is one reason Beijing has been collaborating with Russia in new military technologies. Asymmetry in Chinese economic vs. US military power status present a threat to global peace in the 21^st century or even a direct clash between US and China? Although Beijing has indicated with its votes at the UN Security Council that it is shy about directly confronting US interventionist policies, it tends to vote with Russia on key issues affecting the balance of power in the Middle East and Asia. 

Neither Republicans under Nixon-Ford nor Democrats under Carter had any illusions that China would not become an American strategic partner like the UK, but it had its role to deter the USSR and an enormous economic potential. In the 1970s under Republican and Democrat administrations, the US made a political decision to help strengthen China economically so that it could benefit from its integration owing to cheap labor and cheap raw materials, while at the same time helping to hasten the downfall of the Soviet bloc. Achieving the goal of bringing down the Communist bloc, the US helped to create a very powerful China amid an emerging polycentric economic structure in which the US is destined to play a secondary role later in the 21^st century.

Not that the world economic structure was not evolving toward a polycentric model even before China’s emergence to globalism and the downfall of the Communist bloc. However, the emergence of a very strong China and a weakened Russia created geopolitical problems for the US and Europe. It is not in China’s interest to permit the West to determine the Eurasian balance of power. Experienced US diplomats knew this while negotiating trade deals with China, but there was always the priority of undercutting the USSR.

As much as China continues to pursue economic integration with the entire world, it has a very clear geopolitical agenda that includes preventing the EU and US from reducing Eurasia into spheres of influence as was the case from the Opium Wars until the Civil War of the 1940s. The Ukrainian crisis in 2014 demonstrated to China and the world that the US and Western Europe are not only interested in securing markets and energy in the former Soviet republics, they are also pursuing containment of Russia by trying to acquire new spheres of influences. 

US Eclipse from Global Power Politics: Realistic or Hyperbole?

The transition from the US and the West to China and the East does not mean that the US is about to eclipse into a global role comparable to the Russian Federation that has been on the defensive and using energy and nuclear weapons as leverage. Despite its rich land in agriculture, minerals and energy sources, and despite its defense sector and space program, Russia has lapsed into a regional power. It is highly unlikely Russia will have a major global impact in the next three to four decades as it once did during the Cold War. Unlike the USSR that was a military superpower without achieving economic superpower status but still playing a global political role, the US will retain its Western preeminent influence. This is largely because of the various international organizations from trade and financial to defense under US influence. 

While it is true that wars have been responsible for many of the transitions of power from one country to the other, invariably it is internal government policies that find expression in foreign affairs that lead to the ascendancy or demise of a country. This is not to understate the role of war that assumes a militarist foreign policy and considerable defense spending. Although I am convinced that disproportionate spending on defense at the expense of the civilian economy is detrimental and has brought down great powers in the past, I do not subscribe to the theory that war is the sole cause for the decline of empires. 

From the Athenian and the Roman Empire in ancient times, to the Carolingian and Angevin Empire in the Middle Ages, from the Ottoman to the Hapsburg Empire in the early modern European era, from the British to the German Empire, the combination of costly wars and disastrous domestic policies undermined the economy and social fabric led to decline and fall. At the same time, the absence of political, economic and social modernization converging of anachronistic militarist policies pushes powerful countries toward decline and fall. 

Short of anything drastic like the use of nuclear weapons or costly military interventions, it is highly unlikely the US will crash like Europe and Japan after WWII or the USSR after its dissolution. Equally unlikely owing to the very close economic integration of China with the US is a direct military conflict between the two that would spell disaster for both and the rest of the world. A smooth transition is much more likely. After all, the power transition from Japan as Asia’s dominant economy to China went very smoothly when China took the number two position. A similar scenario could possibly evolve when the US lapses into number two behind China, though with the key difference that the US will retain the number one military role for at least a century.

Those who have doom and gloom scenarios for America ignore very basic facts. The US has the natural protection of the two oceans, the vastness of its rich energy, mineral and agricultural land, and neighbors highly unlikely to engage in the kind of encirclement policies that Germany felt it suffered before 1914, or the kind of containment policy the USSR endured and Russian Federation continues to endure. A containment policy toward China is also in existence at various levels, from economic, political and military, given the various trade and defense treaties of the US with Asian nations. Contrary to what many politicians, analysts and journalists assume about the dire consequences of the global power transition from US to China, from the West to East Asia, the result will be prolonging and further empowering capitalism, just as China’s integration into the global economy has contributed a major jolt for the market economy in the last three decades. 

Historical Antecedents to Pax Americana and the Road to Asian Transition

While the US emerged from a British colony to emulate the mother country and become the preeminent world power in the 20^th century, China was a powerful player in Asia for many centuries before the Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60) that reduced its fate to a satellite of the Great Powers. Similarly, Russia from the reign of Peter the Great to Catherine the Great enjoyed regional hegemony that elevated the country to Great Power status, despite its failure to modernize the economy and government institutions. Russia’s failure to modernize its state structure and economy, the absence of a political and industrial revolution entailed failure to compete on a global basis and erosion of their power until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Revolutions in the case of the US, Russia and China propelled all three to change regime, strengthen and modernize the state structure along with the economy. The catalyst to the rising power was not anything the private sector did, as neoliberals assume, but the radical restructuring of the state apparatus that provided the mechanisms for society to modernize and explore the full potential of natural and manpower resources. Political revolution was the common denominator as much in the US as in Russia and China. Just as the English Glorious Revolution and French Revolution unleashed the channels that allowed for the Industrial Revolution to move ahead, similarly, the American Revolutionary War and especially the Civil War that accounted for national economic integration did the same. 

With roots in the Monroe Doctrine, the US has actually been a force of global instability abroad through covert and overt military operations as a way of building and keeping the empire for as long as possible. The American Empire has gone through a cycle of infancy in the 19^th century with internal colonization and wars against Mexico (1840s) and Spain (1898-1900), proceeding toward a policy of economic imperialism in the 20^th century through integration based on the patron-client model. Pursing aggressive interventionist policies amid economic expansion, the US opted to build its defense sector in the 1890s and accelerated such spending during the 1910s. Policies based on the rise of Pax Americana are themselves the seeds of internal decay and a major cause of the cycle of decline. 

The US suffered public debt deficits almost on a chronic basis from the War of Independence until the end of World War II. Deficit financing was one way that the US used to build its infrastructure in the 19^th century and under the New Deal to recover from deep contraction. Because the US enjoyed political stability, with the exception of the Civil War years, and because it had at its disposal enormous natural resources and even bigger potential for growth, Europeans continued to invest in the US, and to finance the public debt that was inconsequential. The US underwent rapid industrial and agricultural development after the Civil War, emerging as the world’s number one food producer by the end of the Spanish-American War.

During the Progressive Era (1900-1920) under Republican and Democrat presidents, the public sector expanded to reflect the expansion in big business that the state had to serve and to a degree regulate amid fierce inter-sector competition where the railroads could have seriously undermined the mining and agrarian sectors by insisting on high prices under monopolistic practices. The state structure continued to strengthen and to play a catalytic role in helping in the economic expansion of the private sector, securing greater foreign markets in the Western Hemisphere as well as Asia, and looking ahead to a competitive century by securing the Panama Canal. Pax Americana was guided by the state for the benefit of the private sector, especially large corporations and banks that became even larger in the first three decades of the 20^th century, contracting temporarily in the late 1920s and1930s.

London was still the world’s financial capital, but New York was quickly catching up replacing it after the end of WWI. Facing very serious economic problems and falling into debtor status, England tried to place some of the costs on its colonies. After 1920, the US could have grabbed the reigns of managing the world economy through international organizations as it did after WWII, but it opted for isolation that contributed to the Great Depression.

That the US became involved in two global wars in the 20^th century, both fought outside its soil, and both weakening its European and Japanese competitors helped propel the country from Great Power status that it enjoyed during the Spanish American War to Super Power by 1945. Pax Americana was never more powerful, more prosperous, and more influential to determine the global balance of power as the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the various conferences proved at the end of World War II. It was not only geopolitical issues that were settled at those conferences, but also key issues about access to crude oil, minerals, and especially markets to sell the surplus products the US was producing as it industrialized very rapidly.

Besides the core issue of military and economic concentration within the G-20, there is also the question of whether the core countries, especially the US-led NATO alliance is a global force of stability or instability amid the Western decline and Asian emergence. There are scholars who argue that not just the US, but all imperial powers are forces of instability because their goal is economic, military and political expansion or influence. There are also those who maintain that in the post-Cold War world order, nationalism which had been dormant from 1945 to 1990 is about to reawaken along with intense competition because the bi-polar geopolitical division is now dead and the multi-polar one is a reality. 

If the term stability according to apologists of Pax Americana means adherence to the US-imposed model of global integration, then of course there was stability by force. In this case, however, we would have to argue that Pax Romana from Augustus Caesar to Marcus Aurelius was an era of stability and peace, with minimal military intervention in order to conquer new lands, largely because Rome had created a world empire and all enemies of any consequence had been conquered. Rivaled only by the distant Chinese Empire under the Han dynasty 206 B.C.-220 A.D., Rome was left with the role of policeman of its Mediterranean-European empire. That the early Roman Empire experienced roughly two centuries of relative peace and stability does not mean that there were no social problems, despite the “Bread and Circuses” that was in essence of form of welfare to keep plebeians docile. Pax Romana shows the inexorable link between relative domestic tranquility and success in foreign affairs, something we also see in Pax Britannia as well as Pax Americana.

From the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Great Britain played the role of world policeman during an era known as Pax Britannia. The vastness of the British Empire and its dominance of the seas and international trade permitted England to play such a role. However, the period from 1815 to 1914 was hardly free of smaller wars and after 1870 the global competition for colonies, semi-colonies and spheres of influence cause the wars of imperialism that ultimately led to WWI. In short, the famous Pax Britannica was not nearly as peaceful, nor effective in maintaining the international order because imperialism had its own dynamic driving the policies of the Great Powers.  

Contradictions in Pax Americana and the Road to Decline

In the case of Pax Romana and Pax Britannia the end was inevitable because imperialism was the driving force of all policies. Intended for the glory of the rulers and for the benefit the socioeconomic elites, imperialism led to internal contradictions in the economy owing to parasitic military spending. Just as the Roman Empire and the British Empire collapsed largely because of decadence from within and only in part because of external forces like the Barbarian invasions, similarly, the US has been declining from within and hardly because there are any Barbarians at the gate. Of course, some apologists of Pax Americana blame everything from lack of a stronger commitment to defense and intelligence, others blames the welfare state and lack of an even more pro-business regime, still others fault the US for helping China’s global economic rise as part of a plan to undermine the USSR. 

Having enjoyed Great Power status from the Spanish-American War 1898 until the outbreak of WWII, the US found itself in the preeminent economic, military and political role in the world after 1945. This was an enormous responsibility because it meant the US would have to establish and/or reorganize national and international organizations to manage the world economy and political order. The establishment of IMF and World Bank as well as NATO, Organization of American States, and South East Asian Treaty Organization to maintain military hegemony. 

The degree to which the US will be able to continue exerting dominant influence in these organizations depends on domestic politics of the member nations as well as new alliances are forged. The US will find it increasingly difficult to provide military aid to all of its allies to keep them loyal in a broader containment policy toward China and Russia. Maintaining the robust alliance system in tact assumes a strong economy that can sustain a strong military. Choosing between a strong global military presence and a strong civilian economy is always seems possible and desirable to reach consensus among the elites. Despite his rhetoric that guns (militarism) and butter (social welfare based on the Great Society model) are possible, president Johnson recognized he had weakened the dollar and driven the balance of payments deficits much higher because of defense spending. When Nixon came to office, he discovered that it is either guns or butter, not both, a contradictions the Reagan administration settled in favor of guns and against the social welfare state.

US Balance of Payments Problems during the Cold War

The Bretton-Woods system established in 1944 with the IMF and World Bank as the two institutions that would manage the world capitalist economy by coordinating their policies with the Federal Reserve Bank of the US helped to solidify the dollar as a reserve currency. The dollar simply rested on the faith of the US economy, the gross domestic product, plus the balance of payments - deficit or surplus - that largely determine the currency value against other currencies. Because the dollar was and remains a reserve currency, the US could write checks as though they represented gold in the bank as collateral. While the IMF imposes austerity on debtor nations, the US has always been above such restrictive IMF conditionality and enjoyed total monetary sovereignty.

After 1945, both public and private investment increased immensely in the US that investors deemed the safest place for their money. In 1945, the US held 70% of capital in the world, and even in 1952 when Europe and Japan were beginning to recover the US held 50% of the world’s reserves, although it population was a mere 7% of the world’s total. While Europe experienced balance of payments deficits and dollar shortages from 1945 until 1953, the US was enjoying dollar surpluses and the dollar remained a very strong reserve currency. After the end of the Korean War, Europe began to accumulate dollars amid a better balance of payments situation given the trade surpluses it was enjoying with the rest of the world. 

Capital outflows accelerated during the Eisenhower administration and continued thereafter, leaving the US for Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and Canada. US gold reserves began to dwindle following the trend of the rising balance of payments deficits. Some of the reasons for the gold and dollar outflow were directly related to US-based corporations investing in the rest of the world. The US military bases in Europe, Asia, and Panama, along with NATO, OAS, SEATO, and the chronic arms race at the conventional and nuclear levels absorbed enormous resources, weakening the civilian economy and adding to the drain of gold and dollars. For the privilege of maintaining global military hegemony, the US had to pay part of the bill to defend Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Western Europe, Latin America and parts of Africa and the Middle East, especially Israel as the largest aid recipient. 

Besides outflow of US public capital, there was massive outflow of private capital, chasing cheap labor, cheap raw materials and market share. The bulk of private US investment in the world has been made by the top 500 companies listed on the stock exchange. This was made possible because the US government – departments of Commerce, Agriculture, and State – but also the World Bank and IMF have been pressing for decades for favorable treatment of foreign capital, favorable tax, labor, and environmental laws, as well as guarantees against nationalization, and access for local banking capital. 

With the balance of payments problem eroding the value of the dollar toward the end of the 1950s, as the IMF secretly informed the Eisenhower administration, the US could have reversed course from the costly policies of massive defense spending – from Keynesian militarism (surplus capital absorbed by the defense sector) – and moved toward a more measured and less militaristic foreign policy. However, both ruling parties decided to continue feeding the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned would undermine the civilian economy.

Capital outflows from the US to the rest of the world had an impact on the value of the dollar but also on the US consuming what the rest of the world was producing. Flight of capital and industry from the US to the rest of the world is not the only reason for the inevitable weakening of the US economy that went from a credit surplus to a debtor nation. The massive capital concentration combined with the parasitic defense sector spending, and a shift from social welfare to corporate welfare crippled the economy. 

While critics of the US public debt argued that during the Reagan-Bush decade of the 1980s the debt tripled, US companies also tripled their borrowing. Private debt as a proportion of shareholder equity doubled over the same period reflecting the trend of mergers and massive capital concentration. The Reagan-Bush decade was not only crippling for the public debt that weakened the dollar as a reserve currency, but it was accompanied by a comparable rise in corporate debt, largely because government deregulation allowed for a businesses, including banks and insurance companies once deemed safe investments, to gamble on the stock market with massive debt.  

When Ronald Reagan took over in 1980, the US public deficit was around one trillion dollars, climbing to three times that size ten years later. In just ten years of Reaganomics, massive tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations, combined with massive defense spending, the US became the world’ largest debtor nation. During the same decade, corporate mergers, leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers, added immensely to the privately-held debt. This meant increased reliance on foreign borrowing because the US was spending roughly five percent more than it was producing. The only thing that saved it was the dollar was still a reserve currency, something equivalent to writing checks without having any collateral in the bank. At the same time, the US was celebrating the end of the Communist bloc and the opening of fresh new markets for integration into the Western-based global economy.

The enormous balance of payments deficits, weaker dollar, and weaker economic foundation at a time that the rest of the world was trying to catch up with the US meant declining living standards for the middle class and workers. If it were not for the role of the dollar as a reserve currency and crude oil transactions conducted in dollars, the US economy would have gone into tailspin during the Nixon-Ford-Carter years. Even in the last two decades the dollar has retained its value largely because of the oil producing countries, China, and Japan have been buying US treasury securities. Of course, the buyers of the US securities really have a self interest, but this is a form of dependence that eventually could create complications for the US. For its part, the US and EU have tolerated a significantly undervalued Chinese currency that in essence helps China’s exports and limits foreign products in the Chinese market.

With other reserve currencies in the world market diminishing the dollar’s status, how long would international trade and financial transactions by relying even less on the US dollar? Tokyo and Beijing are concerned about carrying such a heavy load of US securities. For its part, the US has tolerated manipulation of their currencies and recognizes that during the global recession of 2008-2012 China’s robust growth kept the world economy from an even deeper crisis. Nevertheless, chronic US public debt means the dollar would depreciate, even if the euro has currently taken a dive because European economic prospects look much worse than those of the US.

There are those in political and financial circles in Asia favoring a single Asian currency competing with the dollar, euro and British pound sterling. This prospect ought to concern everyone in the West for it would mean the sharp drop of the dollar and the euro, especially if this comes suddenly and without lending support for the Western currencies. 

While many expect the days of Pax Americana are over and strong defense is the last leg of the imperial system, no one wants a sudden death situation because it is to no one’s benefit in this interwoven global economy where interdependence is a reality and reserve currencies are based not on gold but “faith” and “in God we trust” to keep the currency going in a credit-based economy. 

The signs are already there not just in the statistics of living standards, but in decline of upward social mobility and growing socioeconomic polarization. In addition, there is the absence of reversing the current trend that has been brewing in the last four decades because the political elites inexorably linked to the economic and military elites do not and will not for the rest of the century change course in any significant manner to slow down the decline in the societal structure. If were running a company in the military hardware business, I would put the company’s quarterly profits above all else because this is what investors expect. 

Inordinate defense spending does not mean that the scientific and technological fields would suffer from lack of funding, but that the beneficiaries of such progress would be lessening instead of growing and this will eventually impact progress in science and technology. The global struggle for control of strategic minerals, energy, and raw materials that was intense during the Cold War has not ended and it will become more intense. 

China’s Global Market Share and US Geopolitical Role

China has already started to be a major competitor in Africa and Latin America, diluting the historic trading privileges of the US and Europe by striking special deals for raw materials. The response of the US is to use its military hegemony, political influence, relative self-reliance on raw materials and energy, and the influential role of the US-based multinational corporations along with the IMF, World Bank, and WTO to continue exercising influence on the world scene.

Flight of industry and capital from the US to the rest of the world was natural because businesspeople chase the lowest cost, highest profit and fewest government regulations at the safest possible place of investment. One of the pressures that both the IMF and World Bank placed on their members resorting to currency stabilization loans (IMF) or development loans (World Bank) was and still is open investment climate, low taxes, fewest labor regulations possible, and freedom to repatriate profits.

In addition to capital and industry flight from the US, the tax laws and tax loopholes that permit corporations and individuals to shelter billions abroad so they can avoid paying taxes in the US has had a crippling impact on the fiscal structure and of course on the public debt. From the Reagan presidency to the present, we have seen the expansion of corporate welfare without a corresponding increase in productivity because of the enormous rise in speculative investments that even the IMF has condemned as a drain from productivity not just in the US but globally.  

The US cannot retain its privileges in the global arena in the absence of key alliances and alignments, as was the case with the British Empire before WWI and especially during the interwar era when the home-base economy was in serious trouble and the government manipulated the economies of the colonies and dependencies to strengthen the mother country. The lack of trust on the part of all nations toward each other affords the US the luxury of retaining considerable influence. This does not mean that the end of Pax Americana will not be responsible for small crises in the international political economy that hates uncertainty and marches to the tune of market and financial stability.

Political uncertainty translates into economic uncertainty and that places pressure on investors who are motivated by fear and greed. Excessive profits and capital concentration, speculative investment, and borderline legal financial transactions intended to avoid paying taxes and deceive if not defraud investors have contributed to the decline of the capitalist system in the US. Rather than investing in research and development, rather than setting aside short-term quarterly profits for long term growth, including good salaries and benefits for employees, the private sector with the acquiescence of the state has undermined the economy, sinking it deeper into a parasitic mode that contributed to the deep recession of 2008-2012. 

One irony in the process of Pax Americana’s decline is that for decades it preserved itself by diminishing the national political, economic and military sovereignty of other countries over which it exerted inordinate influence. Yet, the price the US is now paying for the privilege of creating and maintaining its global role is that it inadvertently strengthened the national sovereignty aspects of countries reacting to Pax Americana’s hegemony. This is not just in the case of extreme cases like Iran and North Korea, but of France under Charles De Gaul in the 1960s and of Russia under Putin in our time. The same holds true of South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina and Brazil, to mention just a few where national preeminence became a priority overcoming the obstacles of external dependence the US imposed.

Anything can change in the global power structure in case of unexpected wars that weaken certain countries, as was the case of the two global wars of the 20^th century, while strengthening others. In 1900 it was difficult to predict that 100 years later the US and China would be the dominant economic powers, while Germany and Great Britain would have secondary roles. The irony of the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions is that the first unfolded and resulted in a weakened nation-state by the end of the 20^th century, while the other continued strengthening the state structure by adapting into the capitalist mode of production.

Even in 1970 it was impossible to predict that China would emerge so powerful while the Soviet Bloc would collapse; that Japan would fall behind China in world economic rankings; that the US would rely increasingly on its military might rather than economic power to influence the international balance of power; that India, South Africa, and Brazil would be candidates for rapid economic expansion; that Europe would revert to a pre-1914 integration model in which Germany is dominant on the Continent competing to remain a global player at the expense of and imposing economic imperialism on southern and eastern Europe  by using the leverage of the common currency.

US Containment Policy and Lingering Pax Americana

There is a possibility of rival alliances unraveling in the 21^st century and reshaping the global balance of power. This was the case before WWI, when suddenly Japan and Germany demanded to exercise hegemonic power at the expense of other Great Powers, without taking into account the US also emerging as a Great Power and influencing the global balance of power. If there is fairly even power distribution among several countries as was the case from 1870 to 1914, presumably the possibility of war is much greater than if there is concentration of power as there was between the USSR and US during the Cold War when the two superpowers were keeping the world balance of power and keeping their spheres of influence in check.

Theories of concentrated global power as a catalyst to stability do not necessarily mean that in the future a similar pattern is likely to take place. After all, Rome had no enemies, but scattered Barbarian tribes against the background of its many economic, political and social problems that resulted in its decline and fall. Furthermore, between 1945 and 2000 an estimated 27 million people died in regional wars in which the USSR and U.S. were usually on side or the other. This statistic alone hardly justifies the theory of power concentration as catalyst to stability.

During the Cold War, the US set out to prove to the entire world that capitalism under an elected representative system is superior because it promotes individual freedom and prosperity and social justice at the same time. This at a time of immense civil rights problems, as well as a climate of intolerance toward anyone suspected of leftist sympathies as the Communist witch hunt revealed in the 1950s. Despite the absence of social justice in America, the economy experienced steady growth in the two decades following the end of WWII, and US living standards were the highest in the world. At the same time, the US owned about one-third of the world’s wealth although it represented roughly 6% of the world’s population by 1968 when Nixon was elected president. During the Vietnam War, the US could point to its cumulative wealth, with 60% of the population owing half of the wealth indicative of a strong middle class that sustained the viable political economy.

By the end of the Bush administration and into the Obama one, the US was experiencing its worst socioeconomic polarization since the Gilded Age, with the number of billionaires and millionaires owing most of the wealth, the number of poor rising and the middle class shrinking rapidly. According to the Sadoff Investment Research Group, “the top one percent of wage-earning households in the US were reaping in around $1,264,065 in 2012 — or around 41-times as much as the average income for all wage-earners, who pulled in a comparable meager mean income of $30,997 that year.”

Socioeconomic inequality translates into political apathy and cynicism, undermining democracy and its institutions that increasingly cater to the elites. The poor not just in the US, but in general have very low participation in the political process, proving that electoral politics in practice is indeed for the middle class and the economically active working class. The argument that democracy works as long as capitalism does is indeed false because it assumes a strong middle class and not socioeconomic polarization. If the poor remain inactive in the process because they are disillusioned, they will eventually rise against the oppressive system that can call itself anything it likes but in reality it is a form of tyranny.

Continued socioeconomic inequality and low political participation by the lower strata of society will undermine bourgeois democracy in the 21^st century, but it may take place in conjunction with developments in the domain of foreign affairs.  Along with the decline of US economic power there is the decline of democracy as evidenced in low participation, high level of cynicism about politics, and a two-party system serving the same socioeconomic elites whose narrow interests are largely responsible for the transition of power to Asia.

Geopolitical developments as well as popular uprisings that we cannot predict today will play a role in determining the global balance of power one hundred years from now. Given the existing polycentric world power structure very likely to remain in place during the 21^st century, the burden on China to keep stability and peace is great, especially because the US has more to gain and not much to lose by encouraging regional instability as with the “war on terror” and the various NGO-financed uprisings from North Africa and Syria to Ukraine. China’s foreign policy designed to engender stability as counterweight to US policy of instability will be a catalyst on the former’s success in integrating as many countries under its aegis as possible.

From 2000 until the present, China has inadvertently benefited both economically and geopolitically from US militarist adventures. The US “war on terror” and institutionalization of “anti-terrorism” is so imbued with contradictions that “terrorism” as Washington defines it has increased, Meanwhile, US spending to combat it is a major source of drain on the budget. It is difficult to predict the degree to which China will continue to derive inadvertent benefits from US interventions such as the ones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.

Equally difficult to predict is the harm the US could cause China’s stability by instigating a “Ukraine-style” crisis with one of the neighboring Asian countries, such as Cambodia or Mongolia. Some analysts have already described Mongolia as a US-NATO Trojan horse whose only goal is containment of both Russia and China. Clearly, Beijing can easily “manage” Mongolia in case it begins to pose a serious military threat. However, the US is already positioned to cause problems on China’s borders in order to pursue containment.

The inevitability of periodic recessions and probably two very deep recessions in the 21^st century will contribute to weakening some countries while strengthening others. Powers that many people may not expect to play a role in the global scene later in the century would probably become major players, among them Australia, Canada, Norway, South Africa and Brazil, assuming their political regimes navigate society toward development. The relative strength of the state structure is the catalyst to where the Western powers will wind up at the end of the century, where East Asia will be and what unexpected players could emerge from the ashes of declining powers of today.

China’s extremely uneven geographic - development is concentrated in the major Eastern cities to the neglect of the Western rural areas - and extremely uneven social development has resulted in the kind of polarization that ought to concern the political elites. As mass communications are becoming more prevalent, the lower echelons and half of the population living in rural areas will be demanding a larger slice of the expanding economic pie. Because of its quasi-statist policies the government has a major role in poverty reduction, just as it has a role in managing the entire economy. Price inflation, however, catches up with programs intended to reduce poverty. Can China’s weaknesses help extend the life of Pax Americana as many assume would be the case?

It is entirely possible that because the US is nearly self-sufficient in raw materials and because of its historic ties in the Western Hemisphere, it could revert to near isolationism and confine itself to a regional bloc where the integration model would still have America playing the dominant role. After all, this is how it emerged into a great power after asserting itself on the Hemisphere and taking steps to become hegemonic. No doubt, a number of its neighbors, north and south are already well integrated with Asia and Europe. The US will continue to offer a large domestic market to attract some of its neighbors along with some Asian countries that may not wish total economic integration China, Japan and Australia. In other words, regionalism has worked well for the US in the past when it was on its way up as a power, and it would probably work just as well as it adjusts to a secondary role in the global arena.

While it is difficult to predict the role of today’s great powers in one hundred years, it is a safer bet to predict that the social structure will most likely remain as unequal as it is today, if not deteriorate further as population pressure and intense competition for resources leave billions of people lacking material needs to survive and outside the institutional (health and education) mainstream. There is not much evidence that there is an institutional commitment to address social justice issues any more in China than in the US, but rather to focus 

on accumulation and concentration of wealth protected by a state structure. 

Is there anything that governments can do to reinforce their countries by strengthening their economies or at least preventing the inevitable deterioration? Can new technologies and science help to preserve the existing political economy and current world power structure? It is true that science and technology are very important in the progress of a society. However, just as Western Europe was far ahead of any other place on earth before 1914, it quickly collapsed because of two global wars, allowing the US and USSR to fill the global power gap. Scientific and technological advances in comparison with the rest of the world did not prevent Europe’s catastrophic political-military developments from 1914 until 1945. While science and technology can make significant contributions to a society, the ultimate responsibility of a society’s direction rests with its political regime. 

Perhaps there is nothing the US can do about its slow decline in the 21^st century. But, is there anything it can do about managing the rise of China by strengthening trading blocs, military and political alliances? If the US and its Western allies deem China to have inordinate global power, the US will help strengthen India as a counterweight to China. This kind of indirect challenge to China is already taking place partly because corporations are in India for low-cost labor and a vast domestic market, but also because the US government is pursuing an economic and military containment strategy toward China by using India as counterweight. After all, there are those who believe India is a potential superpower that could replace China. 

Not that India’s rise to a preeminent global position would necessarily help the US and EU. However, the goal is not to permit any one country to rise to the superpower status that the US once enjoyed during the early Cold War. Containing India by meddling through Pakistan is yet another strategy. Australia and Japan have been steady US allies in the China containment strategy and they can easily become even closer as the US sounds the alarms about inordinate Chinese power. Just as the US has an encirclement and containment policy toward Russia, there is one toward China, though at a much lower level of hostility because Beijing’s economic cooperation is vital to the global economy.  

It is just as likely that the US would try to forge alliances and alignments that would act to slow down the rising power of China, India, Russia and Japan. The evidence for this theory is already there given the number of commercial and defense treaties the US has signed with a number of countries in the Pacific, and it could cultivate closer strategic ties with Mongolia and Cambodia to offset China. For the US strategy to work, Australia would be the key in this containment model, especially given its strategic, raw materials and expanding market significance in the world economy. Geography has always been a factor in relations between nations and regional integration has always played a key role in relations between great powers and lesser ones, patron and client states. 

Direct conflict avoidance between the Great Powers may be a realistic expectation. This is not only because of nuclear deterrence that neutralizes the main rivals, but because of the interlocking economic interests and the common interests of capitalists whose loyalty to capital transcends loyalty to their respective national flags. Defense contractors, corporations in the business of building infrastructures, even entire cities, ideologues in the military, political arena and private sector have an interest in instability, conflict, and military adventures. After all, war profiteers are always lobbying not in the name of lining their pockets, but for national security, strong defense and democracy! 

Continuing the existing policy of containment toward China and Russia, while pursuing instability in the Middle East in the name of US national security interests, US policy is fairly predictable. On the flip side, instigating geopolitical instability does not inspire confidence in markets, especially if it impacts energy and raw materials. The international nature of capital traded in seconds through computers as well as the massive non-Chinese investments in China by multinational corporations make it very difficult either for the US and its allies to engage in behavior that would damage the interests of capitalism, no matter how loudly “national security interests” are invoked to justify manufacturing instability. 

One could argue that economic prosperity and military power means eventual decline and fall for they cannot possibly maintain a steadiness of uninterrupted growth without periodic renewal to keep up with changes in society and the international power structure. Although China managed to maintain a relatively steady power base from the Qin dynasty (221-209 B.C) until the last dynasty Ching (Manchu 1644), the imperial system failed to undergo a Renaissance, a Scientific Revolution, an Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution like Europe, so it lost its sovereignty and fell victim to European, Japanese and US exploitation after the Opium Wars. In the late 20^th century, China decided to become a global power and recapture the glory it enjoyed under ancient dynasties. 

If China manages to achieve its goal of reviving the glory of the imperial past, the entire global power structure will change, elevating some countries and reducing others in the power hierarchy owing to alliances and alignments in a new Asian-based world order. While we can expect for the next one hundred years a shift of countries previously in the periphery of the capitalist system – India and Brazil for example – we can also expect that the current economic and social structure will continue as it will take many very deep crises and uprisings to shake the foundations of the existing political economy and social structure. Transitions in global power do not necessarily translate into transitions in the mode of production, in the social structure, but instead they tend to extend it by preserving the world capitalist system until decay sets in from within each country because of irresolvable contradictions in the political economy that polarizes society.

IS WAR INEVITABLE? A Historical Perspective

Introduction: Human Nature and War

The topic of war is one that politicians and scholars in different fields have studied throughout history. Needless to say, the topic is far too complex for any one academic discipline to explain without taking into account every perspective from the petty profiteering of weapons salesmen to the ideologue adventurist who sees war as a glorifying task.  An entire encyclopedia can be devoted to the topic of wars throughout history and it would hardly scratch the surface of its multiple facets. I chose the title to analyze this topic because of the inspiring exchange of views between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein struggling to understand why human beings engage in organized mass destruction. Like Freud and Einstein, the world in the interwar era was fascinated by the tragic reality of the first global war and the prospect of another one.

Even today, anything to do with war – from large defense contractors to motion pictures and video games - is big business and controversial because it involves everything from fiscal policy to how diplomatic conflicts may be resolved. Clearly, there are those who advocate armed conflict because they profit, while others believe in war for ideological reasons. No matter where we look around the world, we are faced with small to larger conflicts that concern people about the eruption of another global war. The hyperbolic rhetoric on the part of anti-Russian elements in the West has led some to beat the drums of a third world war for which Putin would be responsible.  Just the thought ot another global war both scares and fascinates people.

What does this say about the fascination of people with the ultimate form of mass destruction?  Philosophers, priests and poets have all dealt with the topic and how it is a reflection of who we are as a species. In modern times, psychologists and varieties of social scientists have made their contributions, as have celebrated writers like Leo Tolstoy and Ernest Hemmingway.  For novelists to be devoting so much work to this topic, it reveals that war goes to the heart of our societal structures and how they shape the nature of human beings that in turn shape those structures. In short, the idea that free will is at work may be more in doubt than people realize.  

In the second half of the 19^th century, rear Admiral S. B. Luce argued that “war is one of the great agencies by which human progress is affected.” Against the background of the US Civil War, Luce who was the founder of Naval War College believed that was in general solves political, economic and social problems. No doubt, the Civil War solved the issue of a divided nation that had to choose between the agrarian slave-based economy of the south or the industrial-commercial mobile labor based north that was interested in national economic integration and competition with Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution.  The price was 600,000 casualties and it cannot be argued even by the most loyal southerner that the social and racial issue was solved, although the political and economic ones were.  Furthermore, does the legacy of the US Civil War justify S. B. Luce’s arguments and those who agree to this day regarding military solutions for political, economic and social problems confronting society?

Perhaps there is something fascinating about war, given that Hollywood has devoted billions of dollars producing war films depicting nothing less than the worst in human nature, yet, managing to romanticize and honor it as though to tell the audience that mass destruction is just another aspect of life. After all, if human are innately aggressive like other animals. War makes perfect sense.   Of course we are not so sure what other species regards mass destruction as an honorable enterprise and takes pride at it, deriving a sense of power as though it is a godly trait to kill people for no reason other than the government said “they are the enemy”.  Some psychologists blame not the soldiers doing the killing, but the personality disorders in the leaders. After all, it could not possibly be the fault of the Nazi soldier carrying out atrocious acts in WWII, but it was all Hitler and the blame stops there and goes no father.

Thinkers embracing pessimistic assumptions about human nature – Machiavelli, Hobbes, for example – conclude that human beings are capable of just about any atrocity the mind can conceive. Therefore, aggression in human nature finds expression in all forms including war that some believe is “natural”.  Life itself is a struggle, according to Thomas Hobbes who lived during the bloody English Civil War (1642- 1650) witnessed the destruction of his country owing to a war based on political, religious, and socioeconomic differences that failed to find consensus until the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Hobbes saw war as an innate or instinctive human trait, perhaps because of the Biblical original sin and fall from grace – Adam and Eve committed sin against their own creator. Living a generation after Hobbes, John Locke, father of Western Liberalism, insisted that war is an aberration of the human condition while harmony is the norm. Locke’s view influenced the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment in the 18^th century, though it hardly put an end to war driven by concrete political and economic interests.

Ancient Beliefs about War: Classical Greece, Rome, India and China

Wars – organized and institutionalized conflict under the aegis of the state - began with the dawn of civilization when the earliest tribal invaders known as Sumerians took over the lower Mesopotamian region, an area that has endured thousands of wars in the last five thousand years and remains in turmoil to this day.  Unlike modern day politicians making pretenses about the causes of war, ancient Sumerians were honest about why they engaged in conflict with other tribes and city-states; the goal was to capture trade routes, loot them, secure slaves for labor, and impose hegemony upon them.

The war s between Athens and Sparta – Peloponnesian Wars – created a pacifist trend as revealed in the works of Thucydides (Peloponnesian Wars), Aristophanes (Lysistrata, 411),  and Euripides (Trojan Women, 415 BC) all critical of militarism and from the perspective of the victims rather than the conquerors.  Plato and his pupil Aristotle argued that war was an integral part of state structure, a concept that Alexander the Great put into practice by ruling through perpetual warfare. 

The concept of honor and duty in war was introduced by the Hindu faith and later by the ancient Greeks. In the Homeric epics – Trojan War - war becomes a virtue, while the ancient Spartans, themselves invaders of the indigenous population of southern Greece, linked warfare to the highest noble aspect of human nature and the greatest pursuit for humanity. By the fifth century B.C., Athens under a democratic city-state discovers that war can be justified in the name of freedom and democracy – as Athenian historian Thucydides describes in “The Melian Dialogue”. The Athenian historian exposed the hypocrisy of Athens that wanted democracy and freedom for itself but would deny it to other city-states and engage them in war to reduce them into satellites. The double standard Thucydides describes of Athens became an issue in 20^th century United States.

The concept of war for the sake of freedom and democracy became popular with the US from the Woodrow Wilson presidency (under missionary diplomacy) until the present when every military and covert intervention that the US has undertaken is nothing less than a crusade to “save the people invaded and placed under some type of hegemonic control”.  Free of illusions that the invader was benevolent and well-intentioned, the people on the receiving end of aggression never accepted the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, while the citizens of the invading nation were much more generous with their government’s justifications of war.

To explain why human beings kill each other in organized conflicts sanctioned by the state, philosophers and scholars of various disciplines argued that it is inevitable to have organized conflict between societies because it is a reflection of innate aggressive traits in human nature, and symptomatic of military, political, economic and social conditions that reflect antagonism rather than harmony and coexistence.  Plato, Aristotle, Roman and Christian thinkers accepted the view of war as necessary, even acceptable, as did the Hindus in India.  In China, however, the status of the soldier was lowly, equated with that of a dog, despite the fact that China also has a long history of organized conflict and internal colonization, just like Russia – Eurasia.

Closer to the Spartan worldview on war, the Roman intellectuals and politicians identified war with civic duty, and the soldier is a symbol of reverence rather than a necessary evil as some Chinese intellectuals saw it. Death in the battlefield was a virtue, rather than a dreaded reality. Despite an ideology of war that the political social and military elites used to justify it, the fundamental causes and goals were no different for Rome than they were for Sumer and Athens. As was the case in Athens, there were pacifists in Rome. Philosophers of Stoicism, a cosmopolitan school of thought reflecting the cultural structure of Rome, contended that all humanity is one.  Therefore, war is unacceptable because it destruction of humanity. However, this was in the early stages of Stoicism. Once Stoicism became the official school of thought for the Roman Empire, war became acceptable.

Dating back five thousand years, Hinduism does not object to armed conflict if it is carried out in the name of protecting property and people from evil and injustice. Hinduism as well as Buddhism as an offshoot after the 6^th century BC adamantly oppose war for the purpose oppressing people and causing violence against them. More so with Buddhism, non-violence is essential for spiritual transcendence and salvation possible only through meditation and wisdom.  

Like most religions, Hinduism condemns war on moral grounds but also insist it is a matter of honor and duty, while cowardice is infamy. Throughout their history, Hindus carried out wars despite the taming influence of some pacifist voices against it. In a conversation regarding the morality of war between Ajuna and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita (Hindu “Bible”), the following passages reveal the contradictions.  “I do not see how any good can come from killing my own kinsmen in battle, nor can I desire any subsequent victory…I would consider it better for the sons of Dhrtarastra to kill me than to fight with them. … Consider your specific duty, you should know that there is no better engagement for you than fighting for religious principles. If however, you do not fight this religious war, you will certainly incur sins for neglecting your duties and thus lose your reputation as a fighter.”

While Hinduism like all religions respects all life, this does not mean that the followers and especially the leaders who espouse religious doctrines and a body of ethics rooted in pacifism follow such a path. On the contrary, religion is invariably used to justify mass violence. A power-rooted if not crusader mentality takes precedence in those who rule because the ethics of pacifism entails weakness, if not manipulation or some type of subjugation by the strong. The great warrior king Ashoka (269-232 BC) is a good example in ancient Indian history as one of the bloodiest rulers who in embracing Buddhism realized that there is no glory, victory or justice in war.

Pacifism was an underlying pacifist trend among all religions, but most pronounced about the oneness of humanity so characteristic of Indian religions can be found in Guru Nanak (1469-1534), the first Sikh Guru who wrote a hymn regarding the sacredness of life and peace.

‘No one is my enemy
No one is a foreigner
With all I am at peace
God within us renders us
Incapable of hate and prejudice.’

The importance of non-violence and the equality of all humans is a belief that decries war while promoting the spiritual reverence of humans and their creativity that wars obviously destroy. If human beings are special because of their creative potential, then war is their enemy.  

Some scholars contend that China’s history is not militaristic, like that of the West. However, China had its share of wars, especially from the 10^th to the 13^th century, an era that coincides with the zenith of Arab civilization. Wars also characterize Chinese history during the Ming dynasty from the mid-14^th to the mid-17^th century, an era when Europe experiences its Commercial Revolution and expands outward in search of colonies. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu outlines various aspects of warfare that influenced the Chinese from ancient times to the present. China’s wars focused on its internal politics and internal colonization similar to Russia, and mostly of defensive mode against Japan and the West. This is unlike the West where the object was to take trade routes and conquer colonies.

The Han Dynasty (206BC-220 AD) may be pointed to as an exceptionally enlightened, but it lived and declined by the sword as the Roman Empire. China’s history is one of wars, especially from the 10^th to the 13^th century, an era that coincides with the zenith of Arab civilization. Wars also characterize Chinese history during the Ming dynasty from the mid-14^th to the mid-17^th century, an era when Europe experiences its Commercial Revolution and expands outward in search of colonies. 

Living in China five centuries before Christ, Confucius provided a moral guide for institutional and individual practices. A moral guide that has prevailed in much of East Asia for twenty five centuries, the system Confucius laid down has had far reaching influence in East Asia for the past 25 centuries. Unlike Christ, Mohammad and the Buddha, Confucius did not focus on afterlife. It is believed he stated that he would only worry about the “next world”, only after figuring out the proper way to live in this one.  More interested in social relations and maintaining order in society without overturning the status quo, he believed that war has no place in society if everyone just follows their proper role – clearly an optimistic way of thinking. If there is war, then Confucianism has failed.

Confucianism has shaped a certain perception of Chinese security strategy, symbolized by the defensive, nonaggressive Great Wall. Many believe China is antimilitary and reluctant to use force against its enemies. It practices pacifism and refrains from expanding its boundaries, even when nationally strong. They adopted defensive strategies when their country was weak and pursued expansive goals, such as territorial acquisition, enemy destruction, and total military victory, when their country was strong. Despite the dominance of an antimilitarist Confucian culture, warfare was not uncommon in the bulk of Chinese history. Grounding his research in primary Chinese sources, Wang outlines a politics of power that are crucial to understanding China's strategies today, especially its policy of "peaceful development," which, he argues, the nation has adopted mainly because of its military, economic, and technological weakness in relation to the United States.

Ancient Rome and Medieval Christianity

The Roman militarist ideal, also found in other ancient societies, becomes an important legacy of Western Civilization passed on through Christianity. The history of Rome was roughly 1000 years of war with interval of peace, a history that left a legacy on the Barbarians who inherited Rome’s militarist legacy and passed it on to European Christendom.  Like Stoicism in its early stage, Christianity was pacifist and more non-violent than any humanist philosophy. However, in its institutional stage, Christianity advances numerous justifications for war, adding God into the equation, making it war a holy affair instead of a secular one as it really is. St. Augustine, a Platonist, was the first Christian theologian to advance arguments in favor of war, arguing that defense necessarily entailed going to war.

St. Thomas Aquinas, an Aristotelian, argued that peace is preferable, but war is necessary to defend the integrity of the realm. Between Augustine writing during the Fall of Rome in the 5^th century, and Aquinas writing in the late Middle Ages, St. Gregory of Tours and Einhard, both representing Barbarian Christendom, argued that war was moral only if carried out in defense of the faith and its institutions, but immoral for any other reason.  Religious institutional interests transcend any other consideration, including individual life. Therefore, killing Barbarian pagans who refuse to yield to Christianity is moral, whereas harming Christians or church property in the course of war is immoral. This was the birth of Christian ‘exceptionalism’ that would lead to Christian imperialism and it would be used as the doctrine to justify the crusades from the 11^th to the 13^th century. 

To glorify God the Papacy and Christendom, many thousands of European knights rushed to “save the Holy land”, a place dripping with blood for more than a thousand years.  Of course, the real goal of the crusaders was to capture trade routes of the Near East, the Arab gold trade and set up colonies at the core of Muslim territories, not far from Byzantium.  Crusader thinking about trade, gold and hegemony finding expression in religious wars would ultimately shape European thinking about wars of colonization in the 15^th, 16^th and 17^th century.

A significant consequence of religious wars between Christians and Muslims – the Crusades -  was not just the wars of colonialism by Portugal and Spain in the late 15^th and early 16^th century, but northwest Europe and Russia. Northwest Europe’s colonial exploits through warfare are well documented, as they launched a new era in North-South, East-West divisions of the planet, along with racism thinly veiled behind the cloak of Christianity and Western civilization. Russia too began wars against Muslim-dominated Ottoman Empire, and just like its European counterparts, Russia under Catherine the Great in the 18^th century (Enlightenment) passed laws legally discriminating against minorities, including Jews. In other words, wars against distant lands and non-Christian religions had reverberations back home where war became both a catalyst for national unity and conformity to the regime, as well as a pretext for the domestic elites to consolidate power and isolate minorities deemed a threat to the status quo.

War from the Reformation to the Present

Were there any voices of reason and pacifism amid such strong institutional tides of war from the Iberian to Eurasia? In 1510, Dutch theologian Disiderius Erasmus published ANTI-POLEMUS, or the PLEA OF REASON, RELIGION, AND HUMANITY AGAINST WAR. Arguing that war was antithetical to human nature because people are not born with an innate proclivity to destroy, Erasmus believed that humans wish to love and serve their fellow man. A Christian humanist, Erasmus represented a minority view, considering that German theologian Martin Luther had no problem with war as long as it was not carried out by the Church or against Christians. Luther made an exception to this golden rule during the German Peasants War in the mid-1520s when the church joined the nobility to crush rebels inspired by Thomas Muntzer, a Reformation theologian who believed that spiritual egalitarianism Luther preached ought to have political, economic and social applications here on earth.   

Inspired by Muntzer and viewing the Peasant’s War as the first mass revolution in Europe, Marx and Engels argued that war s an instrument of the elites trying to exert control over the masses at home and abroad. According to Marxist thought, war is symptomatic of the class system in which the socioeconomic elites control the state and determine policy to advance their interests against the working class that does the actual fighting, killing and dying in war. A few decades after Marx and Engels, V.I. Lenin (Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism) argued that war is inevitable owing to the global struggle for markets between the hegemonic nation-states. This thinking makes sense if one considers that Lenin was a product of the Age of New Imperialism (1870-1914) that witnessed a series of regional conflicts ultimately leading to the First World War.

If we accept that WWI led to WWII, then 19^th century wars of Imperialism were the genesis of 20^th century global wars. The Marxist-Leninist war theory includes social, economic, political and cultural factors, rather than isolating causes of war on human nature or environment as determining factors. As followers of the rationalist tradition that assumes human nature is prone to harmony rather than conflict, the Marxist school of thought dismisses the psychological factors that it sees as products of societal conditioning and symptomatic of the uneven conditions between social classes.    

In contrast to Marxist theory on war, there were 19^th and 20^th century thinkers mesmerized by war, depicting it as a mythological transcendent experience. Most of these thinkers came from the German militarist tradition that celebrates the warrior-hero as much in myth and folklore as in politics given that German unification came not as a result of diplomacy and  compromise , but war against Austria first and then France as a catalyst to rallying support behind Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian foreign policy. In The Will to Power and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, F. Nietzsche indicates that war is the essence of human nature that allows humans to transcend the mediocrity of Christian pacifist morality.

Nietzsche the existentialist thinker was focusing on the individual and the pursuit of the individual transcending experience through the kind of exercise of power. According to Nietzsche, this ideal existed among the pre-Socratics – for example, we read in Heraclitus that: One must know that war is common and justice is strife, and that all things happen by strife and necessity.  War is father of all and king of all: some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free.  This kind of realism (ethical realism) in the world of the constant becoming, Heraclitus demonstrates that the essence of being is change and that does not come harmoniously because even harmony is the result of opposing forces coexisting.  Heraclitus did not advocate war any more than Nietzsche, regardless of how the German philosopher’s views were twisted by the militarist racist Nazi regime.

More important German thinkers than Nietzsche contributing to German, European and US militaristic psychology were Heinrich von Treitschke, Friedrich von Bernhardi and Karl von Clausewitz, the latter in the group by far the most celebrated among Western politicians, military analysts and fans of warfare.  A rationalist and realist coming out of the Age of Reason, Clausewitz argued that "War is the continuation of Politik (policy) by other means".

 We could assume that there is a sense of stark realism here because indeed where diplomacy ends war may indeed start because it is but an instrument of policy in the hands of those conducting diplomacy to achieve a certain goal. While this is a view that hard realists may accept as unavoidable, some could argued against his view that the interplay between national character and military functions defines the nation in the modern world. This Prussian militaristic view would leave a far reaching mark on Prussia and later Germany and it would define its history until the end of WWII.

 A contemporary of Bismarck and witness to the “Blood and Iron” route that Germany followed, Treitschke argued that if the duty of the state is to maintain relations with other states, than the bounds of the state are not confined to the sovereign territory. Ignoring the right of national sovereignty and right to exist under self-determination that war obviously upsets, he argued that armed conflict is a manifestation of a great society.   This kind of nationalism (the individual must submit to the duties of the state) as expressed in the age of Social Darwinism (blatant racism) and European colonialism in Africa and Asia represents the euphoria that Treitschke projected in his work and the spirit of nationalists.

Not too far from such views, Bernhardi was also a product of Prussian militarism, best known for his book, Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg. He argued that war is merely a function by which civilized nation-states express their true greatness. In fact, he had no regard for international treaties and believed that there was “divinity” in armed conflict between nations.  This view is not so far from that of Luce and other militarists during the Age of Imperialism when Europeans realized that enormous economic, political, and military benefits of imperialist expansion that made northwest Europe the center of global power. The flipside of this was the wars of imperialism led to the Great War in 1914 and this marked the beginning of Europe’s global decline in the first half of the 20^th century.

Late 20^th century existentialist thinkers have argued that war is a destructive human tendency, for it provides the illusion of meaning, honor and greatness, a transcending experience of the individual who identifies with the nation-state that is presumably eternal while the individual is finite. For existentialists, engaging in war where the object is to destroy other people and their property, presumably to conquer them and their territory, affords the individual militarist with numerous illusions that provide a sense of satisfaction for the self.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt deals with war as a perverse force that affords meaning to an otherwise alienating life in a world of nihilism. Existentialist interpretations of war as something that can be fulfilling against the background of mass politics and mass alienation is something to contemplate, although by no means should one fall into the trap of assuming that human beings are not conditioned into accepting war as natural like the weather.  Although the individual believes her/his free will is at work when deciding on supporting or opposing war, the value system, social, ideological and political conditioning account for peoples’ support or opposition of war. As a method of resolving conflict instead of resorting to political solutions, war appeals to those whose brain is neurologically prone to fear, while those skeptical about war are more risk oriented.

The irony of many militarists is that they insist war is necessary to bring about peace. Equally absurd, the argument of those in favor of conventional war governments carry out and which result in massive destruction oppose unconventional war (guerrilla war, revolutionary war, separatist, ethnic or religious war) that results in random killings and random destruction of property on a very small scale in comparison with conventional war. This is not to suggest that unconventional war is acceptable in comparison with conventional war, although there must be a distinction between revolutionary struggle to bring about social change and all other types of unconventional war.  The issue is one of scale, one of purpose, and one of using the pretext of the small unconventional armed conflict to justify the larger conventional one.

Ten Points on the Benefits and Detriments of War

1.       War can be a god-like experience because killing other people that the soldier has never met and has no motive other than ideological, entails constructing animosity inside the human mind that fills the void with a sense of high purpose.    

2.       War is the ultimate sense of adventure to feel like an animal hunted down and at the same time a hunter doing the hunting against the other to be killed. This reveals a sense of self-hatred and self-destruction as well as a sense of daring or trying to defy death thus testing finiteness of life.

3.        War affords the illusion that by killing the other under legal cover the individual transcends

4.       Killing en masse indiscriminately, while enjoying legal cover under the legitimacy of the state at the individual and societal level, killing indiscriminately en masse affords the illusion of spiritual cleansing, removing evil and restoring good as though life is a myth of Barbarian tribes - Beowulf.

5.       No matter what naïve pacifist claim, war stimulates economic activity because it places pressure on demand for everything from military hardware to food.  Therefore, war serves the higher goal of society. Of course the price paid for carrying out war is that innocent people are killed, injured, and displaced, invariably women and children. Moreover, is war the solution every time the economy contracts?

6.       War can serve as a vehicle of bringing down authoritarian or tyrannical regimes and thus deliver greater political openness and social justice in society. War can also serve to bring to power less democratic or even tyrannical regimes that play with the nationalist sentiments of the masses who identify with the sanctity of the nation-state.

7.       Minorities and workers traditionally outside the institutional mainstream can be integrated because of the emergency situation of war. But does society need to endure the horrors of war in order to integrate into the mainstream women, minorities, and workers? Is the price of greater social justice more wars which is itself a grave injustice and impacts minorities and workers as the first casualties?

8.       War stimulates new technologies that initially have military applications but eventually benefit the civilian sector. No doubt this is true, but it assumes human beings can be creative only in time of war. Nothing prevents the public and private sectors from engaging in research and development to serve the civilian economy in the absence of armed conflict. Furthermore, the new science and technology coming out of war situations are invariably intended to destroy and do not necessarily have civilian applications. I can see how nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are related, how bio-warfare and research bio-medical research are also related, but defense spending is a dead-end parasitic cycle, while there can easily be direct spending for science and technology projects intended solely for the civilian market.

9.       Peace organizations such as the League of Nations after WWI and the United Nations arise from wars, as do other peace-oriented organizations that governments and civilian groups support. Furthermore, international aid organizations also emerge or existing ones are strengthened.  Are wars necessary to create international organizations whose goal is to prevent war, and do such organizations actually prevent war or are they mere window dressing and a pretext for politicians that at least they tried the multilateral diplomatic route before engaging in unilateral and/or multilateral military action. 

10.   After a war, there is a rise of social consciousness about the horrors of wars, corporate profiteering, and the need for political solutions to problems without resorting to militarism. This is certainly true after all wars from ancient time s to the present, but memories fade quickly and the advocates of war propagate to start conflict because there is no other way.

Pacifism is always at a distinct disadvantage because people automatically associated it with “weakness”, while fear of the demonized enemy leads them more readily to accept the military solution. Between the end of the Second World War and 2010, the number of people killed directly in combat or as a result of war conditions is about half of WWII. This is an astonishing figure for a world that claims to enjoy peace, while in reality it is immersed in conflict. Even more amazing, many in the US and NATO want higher defense budgets as they speak of an impending power struggle for global hegemony between the West and Asia at some point in the 21^st century. 

On Historicism and War
 
 Regarding the issue of what we know as "the fallacy of historicism", especially as it pertains to the question I raised in my article about the inevitability of war.

Historicism is a topic that Karl Popper developed in "The Poverty of Historicism". This was mainly as a critique of Hegelian philosophy of history, and of Marxian historical determinism, although Popper included Plato along with the two modern German philosophers as the greatest enemies of liberty. You have to judge for yourselves here why Popper the darling of neo-conservatives in the 1980s wanted no trace of any philosophy embracing the "collective" good vs. the individual.

Even if one does not embrace the philosophical argument of historical determinism and dialectical materialism and Hegelian historicism, and even if one accepts the Lockean epistemology of Empiricism and rationalism with its emphasis on individualism as does Popper, this does not preclude the logical conclusion derived from empirical evidence that wars are inevitable for the near future (next two decades), given the realities of today's global power structure, and the foreign policy direction of the key players at the regional and global levels.

For example, is there any doubt whatever, that of current US foreign policy and the outcries of many militarists (Republicans and some Democrats) that greater spending on defense, tougher policy toward all "potential enemies" and greater reliance on unilateralism? The big winner of the US MID-TERM election is DoD, and the trend will be to become more interventionist and rely more on military solutions, This sends the a strong message to the rest ofthe world to militarize and to resort to US-style military solutions. Israel will have no problem with this policy, and neither would Turkey and Russia, in an overt fashion, while others will follow in more indirect manner.

This analysis is not based on Hegelian or Marxian historicism but on the realities of current policy trends. In addition, there is the ever present pressure from the defense industries but also from militarists of various types from ideologues to opportunists. I regret to inform the group that there will most definitely be more wars, but let us hope a larger one as many are hoping, using Putin as the latest pretext for their own adventuristic dreams of glory, is avoided.

Longer-term, it is not as easy to predict where the human race is headed, and here is where the fallacy of historicism that attacks teleological views both of Hegel and Marx may have some validity. My guess is that wars will always be with the human race as long as there are elites because elites are behind wars, and I have to agree with Sartre that there will always be elites.