EPILOGUE
For every state war is always incessant and lifelong against every other state. . . . For what most men call “peace,” this is really only a name—in truth, all states by their very nature are always engaged in an informal war against all other states.
—PLATO, Laws (1.626A)
THE HELLENIC LEGACY
FROM THE FIGHTING of early Greece to the wars of the entire twentieth century, there is a certain continuity of European military practice. As the chapter epigraphs suggest, this heritage of the Western war is not found in its entirety elsewhere, nor does it begin earlier than the Greeks. There is no Egyptian idea of personal freedom in the ranks; no Persian conception of civic militarism or civilian audit of the Great King’s army; no Thracian embrace of the scientific tradition; no disciplined files of shock phalangites in Phoenicia; and no landed infantry of small property owners in ancient Scythia—and thus no military in the ancient Mediterranean like the Greeks at Thermopylae, Salamis, or Plataea.
This 2,500-year tradition explains not only why Western forces have overcome great odds to defeat their adversaries but also their uncanny ability to project power well beyond the shores of Europe and America. Numbers, location, food, health, weather, religion—the usual factors that govern the success or failure of wars—have ultimately done little to impede Western armies, whose larger culture has allowed them to trump man and nature alike. Even the tactical brilliance of a Hannibal has been to no avail.
That is not to say that throughout three millennia all Western forces have shared an exact blueprint in their approach to war making through periods of upheaval, tyranny, and decay. Phalangites are a long way from GIs, and the victory at Tenochtitlán is distant from Salamis. Nor should we forget that the non-West has also fielded deadly armies, such as the Mongols, Ottomans, and communist Vietnamese, that have defeated all opposition in Asia for centuries and kept Europe at bay. But the military affinities in Western war making across time and space from the Greeks to the present are uncanny, enduring, and too often ignored—which suggests that historians of the present age have not appreciated the classical legacy that is at the core of Western military energy throughout the ages. There is a sense of déjà vu as these chapters unfold, an eerie feeling that phalangites, legionaries, mailed foot soldiers, conquistadors, redcoats, GIs, and marines all shared certain recurring core ideas about how to wage and win wars.
In battles against the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the New World, tribal and imperial alike, there is a shared legacy over centuries that allowed Europeans and Americans to win in a consistent and deadly manner—or to be defeated on rare occasions only when the enemy embraced their own military organization, borrowed their weapons, or trapped them far from home. Notice that nowhere in these case studies were Western victories a product of innately superior intelligence, Christian morality, or any notion of religious or genetic exceptionalism. While Persians, Carthaginians, Muslims, Aztecs, Ottomans, Zulus, and Japanese all battled in a wide variety of ways, they do share two affinities throughout the ages: none fought exactly as Westerners—or across the oceans as well. Xerxes, Darius III, Abd ar-Rahman, Montezuma, Ali Pasha, and Cetshwayo all envisioned war as a theocratic, tribal, or dynastic crusade, in which speed, deception, numbers, or courage might negate the discipline of Western infantry or the technology and capital of Europe. Montezuma could not envision fighting in the Mediterranean, just as Ali Pasha would never see the Americas.
In just the few episodes we have examined, the similarities are clear. Greek sailors in 480 B.C., in the way that they created and manned their fleet, discussed and voted on strategy before battle, and chose and audited their leadership, were far more similar to Venetians at Lepanto two millennia later than they were to the sultan’s men, who by law were slaves like Xerxes’ seamen at Salamis. By the same token, the rows and files of Alexander’s small army of expeditionary phalangites were in spirit replicated at Cannae, as well as Rorke’s Drift and the other battles of the Zulu War. Outnumbered British redcoats fired on orders, sought to form rank, and charged on command and in unison. The close-ordered ranks and files of the phalanx, whether of Macedonian pikemen or British shooters, are not known outside of the European experience. The manner in which Rome reconstituted its armies after the defeat at Cannae was not all that unlike the American restoration after Pearl Harbor in the months before Midway. Both cultures in the aftermath of defeat drew on common republican traditions of drafting their free voting citizenry into nations-in-arms.
It is a general rule that the Macedonian phalanx, like the army of Hernán Cortés, the Christian fleet at Lepanto, and the British company at Rorke’s Drift, fought with weaponry far superior to that of their adversaries. There was little chance that the Aztecs, for all their rich local natural resources, on their own accord could make harquebuses, gunpowder, or crossbows, the Ottomans topflight bronze cannon, and the Zulus Martini-Henry rifles—and little doubt that a harquebus was deadlier than a javelin, a Venetian 5,000-pound cannon more lethal than its Ottoman clone, and a .45-caliber slug far superior to an assegai. Japan learned to its advantage in the nineteenth century that Europe alone could design battleships—and that battleships were superior to anything that floated in the Sea of Japan. The North Vietnamese did not fight with the tribal spears of their past.
Western military power, however, is more than superior technology. Just as the peace movement and the constant political audit of the military in Vietnam conditioned the behavior of American armies in Southeast Asia, so Bishop Colenso and his family published critiques against the British invasion of Zululand. Bernardino de Sahagún’s narrative of the Spanish conquest of Mexico sought to criticize the morality of his countrymen’s army—in a way unthinkable in Aztec, Vietnamese, or Zulu society. It is no accident that Themistocles, like both the victorious Cortés and Lord Chelmsford, did not die a hero in a homeland grateful to him for the slaughter of its enemies. Did such dissent weaken consistently Westerners’ ability to wage war? Not always, at least not in the long term. The tradition of Western critique and audit has not only established European credibility and so served to ensure that the written and published story of war was largely Western; it has also shown that minds outside the battlefield ultimately had a say in how their nation’s treasure and manhood were spent, sometimes saving the military from itself.
OTHER BATTLES?
The battles of this study are offered as representative examples of general traits rather than absolute laws of military. They are episodes that reflect recurring themes, not chapters in a comprehensive history of Western warfare. That being said, however, I am not certain that the conclusions would have been very different if we had examined other randomly chosen encounters from roughly the same periods and places with similar outcomes—say, Plataea (479 B.C.), Granicus (334 B.C.), Trasimene (217 B.C.), Covadonga (718), the conquest of Peru (1532–39), the siege of Malta (1565), Coral Sea (1942), and Inchon (1950). In nearly all those engagements the same paradigms of freedom, decisive shock battle, civic militarism, technology, capitalism, individualism, and civilian audit and open dissent loom large. In the flesh it is a long way from Greek fire to napalm, from ostracism to impeachment, but in the abstract, not so distant after all.
Even a random catalog of exclusively abject Western defeats— Thermopylae (480 B.C.), Carrhae (A.D. 53), Adrianople (A.D. 378), Manzikert (1071), Constantinople (1453), Adwa (1896), Pearl Harbor (1941), and Dien Bien Phu (1953–54)—would not lead to radically different conclusions. In most of these cases, vastly outnumbered Western armies (Romans under Crassus, Byzantines under Romanos, Italians in Ethiopia, French in Vietnam) were unwisely deployed or poorly prepared—and again far outside of Europe. Even these catastrophes did not always endanger in their immediate aftermaths Greece, Rome, Italy, America, or France. Defeats that had more lasting historical impact— Adrianople, Constantinople, or Dien Bien Phu—came at the borders of European territory and near the end of collapsing regimes or empires. And the victorious Other had either Western-inspired arms or Western-trained consultants among the ranks.
The Western military heritage, itself a dividend of a much larger and peculiar cultural foundation, did not determine in some preordained fashion the outcome of every encounter between West and non-West. Rorke’s Drift, but for Chard, Bromhead, and Dalton, could have easily been lost. Salamis, Lepanto, and Midway also involved brilliance in tactical command. Wars are fought by men who are fickle and in real conditions that are wholly unpredictable—heat, ice, and rain, in tropical and near arctic conditions, close and far from home. Western armies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, as soldiers everywhere, were often annihilated— often led by fools and placed in the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time. But their armies, for the cultural reasons this book has outlined, fought with a much greater margin of error than did their adversaries.
Themistocles, Alexander the Great, Cortés, and the British and American officers of the last two centuries enjoyed innate advantages that over the long duration could offset the terrible effects of imbecilic generalship, flawed tactics, strained supply lines, difficult terrain, and inferior numbers—or a simple “bad day.” These advantages were immediate and entirely cultural, and they were not the product of the genes, germs, or geography of a distant past. The Zulu empire was doomed to be conquered once the British decided to invade its borders, regardless of its victory at Isandhlwana, despite the tactical lapses of Lord Chelmsford, and irrespective of courageous impis.
In examining many of these worst-case scenarios of the Western approach to war making, such as Cannae or Tet, the resilience and lethality of the West seems even more remarkable. If the tradition of dissent can survive Vietnam, then its place in Western military practice will remain unquestioned. If Western infantry was prevalent during the so-called Dark Ages of the mounted knight, then its intrinsic advantages at Poitiers seem even more evident both earlier and later. Mustering legions of free citizens at Cannae, only to lose to a mercenary army of Hannibal, requires careful consideration of the entire value of civic militarism. The war against the Zulus, Africa’s most disciplined and organized army, is an unlikely but valuable lesson in understanding the unmatched worth of Western order, rank, and file.
THE SINGULARITY OF WESTERN MILITARY CULTURE
Discussion of Western military prowess demands a precision in nomenclature often lacking in most accounts of the history of warfare. Political freedom—an idea found nowhere outside the West—is not a universal characteristic of humankind. Western elections and constitutions are not the same as tribal freedom, in which much land and few people occasionally give individuals opportunity to find solitude and independence. The desire to fight as freemen is also different from the simple élan of defenders who expel tyrants and foreign powers from their homeland. Persians, Aztecs, Zulus, and North Vietnamese all wished to be free of foreign troops on their native soil, but they fought for the autonomy of their culture—not as free voting citizens with rights protected by written and ratified constitutions. A Zulu could roam relatively free on the plains of southern Africa, enjoying a somewhat more “free” lifestyle than a British redcoat in a stuffy barracks; but the Zulu, not the Englishman, was subject to execution by a nod of his king. Shaka proved this tens of thousands of times over. North Vietnamese communists duplicitously promised to their troops a Western-style “democratic republic”—not an Asian dynasty, communist police state, or feudal society—the reward for conducting a nationalist war against foreign intruders.
All armies engage in mass confrontations at times; few prefer to do so in horrendous collisions of shock and eschew fighting at a distance or through stealth when there is at least the opportunity for decisive battle. Likewise, armies from the Persians to the Ottomans often developed sophisticated methods of mustering troops; none outside the West drafted fighters with the implicit understanding that their military service was part and parcel of their status as free citizens who were to determine when, how, and why they were to go to war. Foot soldiers are common in every culture, but infantrymen, fighting en masse, who take and hold ground and fight face-to-face, are a uniquely Western specialty—the product of a long tradition of a middling landholding citizenry who expresses unease with both landless peasants and mounted aristocrats.
The ability to use a weapon, even to improve its effectiveness with practice, is not comparable to inventing and fabricating arms in mass quantities. Africans and American Indians could employ European rifles, become crack shots, and occasionally repair broken stocks and barrels. Yet they could not produce guns in any great number, if at all, much less craft improved models or find in a written literature the abstract principles of ballistics and munitions to conduct advanced research.
Buying and selling is a human trait, but the abstract protection of private property, the institutionalization of interest and investment, and the understanding of markets are not. Capitalism is more than the sale of goods, more than the existence of money, and more than the presence of the bazaar. Rather, it is a peculiar Western practice that acknowledges the self-interest of man and channels that greed to the production of vast amounts of goods and services through free markets and institutionalized guarantees of personal profit, free exchange, deposited capital, and private property.
Warriors are not necessarily soldiers. Both types of killers can be brave, but disciplined troops value the group over the single hero and can be taught to march in order, to stab, thrust, or shoot en masse and on command, and to advance and retreat in unison—something impossible for the bravest of Aztecs, Zulus, or Persians. Every army possesses men of daring, but few encourage initiative throughout the ranks, and welcome rather than fear innovation, so apprehensive are they that an army of independent-thinking soldiers in war just might prove the same as citizens in peace. Bickering among soldiers and disagreement among a small cadre of generals—whether Hitler’s captains or Aztec lords—are universal traits of armed forces. But the institutionalization of critique in the military— soldiers’ subservience to political leaders, existence of law courts, uniform codes of discipline subject to review, appeal, and ratification—is unknown outside the West. The freedom among citizens to criticize wars and warriors openly and profligately has no pedigree outside the European tradition.
THE CONTINUITY OF WESTERN LETHALITY
What of the present and future? Will—and should—this lethal heritage of Western warfare continue? In a series of border wars during the years 1947–48, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982, the tiny nation of Israel fought and decisively defeated a loose coalition of its Arab neighbors, who were supplied with sophisticated weapons by the Soviet Union, China, and France. The population of Israel during those decades never exceeded 5 million citizens, whereas its surrounding antagonists—at various times including Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and the Gulf states—numbered well over 100 million. Despite having nearly indefensible borders and a tiny population base, and often being surprised, the outnumbered Israeli army—itself the creation of a brilliant generation of European émigrés— consistently fielded better-organized, -supplied, and -disciplined armies of superbly trained and individualistic soldiers. Israel itself was a democratic society of free markets, free elections, and free speech. Its enemies simply were not.
In less than three months—April 2–June 14, 1982—a British expeditionary force crossed some 8,000 miles of rough seas and expelled a well-entrenched Argentine army on the Falklands, which was easily supported by ships and planes from the Patagonian coast a mere two hundred miles away. At a cost of some 255 British lives—mostly seamen who perished from missile attacks on Royal Navy cruisers—the government of Margaret Thatcher won back the small islands in the South Atlantic at little cost, despite enormous logistical problems, the excellent imported weapons of its adversary, and the complete surprise of the initial Argentine invasion. Again, the democratic and capitalist society of the United Kingdom sent out better-trained and more disciplined combatants in this strange little war, soldiers far different from those fielded by the Argentine dictatorship.
On January 17, 1991, a coalition of U.S. allies defeated the veteran army of Iraq—1.2 million ground troops, 3,850 artillery pieces, 5,800 tanks, 5,100 other armored vehicles—in four days, at a loss of fewer than 150 American servicemen and -women, most of whom were killed by random missile attack, friendly fire, or other accidents. Saddam Hussein’s military, like the Argentines’, had purchased excellent equipment. Many of his soldiers were seasoned veterans of a brutal war with Iran. They were entrenched on or adjacent to their native soil. Their earlier invasion of Kuwait, like the takeover of the Falklands and the Yom Kippur War, was a complete surprise. The Iraqi army could be easily supplied by highway from Baghdad.
The Iraqi soldiers were not merely poorly disciplined and organized. None of them were in any sense of the word free individuals. The Republican Guard turned out to be about as effective against Westerners as had been Xerxes’ Immortals. Not a single soldier who was incinerated by American jets voted to invade Kuwait or fight the United States. Saddam’s own military plans were not subject to review; his economy was an extension of an in-house family business. His military hardware— from poison gas to tanks and mines—was all imported. Any Iraqi journalist who questioned the wisdom of invading Kuwait was likely to end up like Pythius the Lydian on the eve of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. The Iraqi military—itself having no ability to invade Europe or the United States— was nearly annihilated not far from the battlefields of Cunaxa and Gaugamela, where Xenophon’s Ten Thousand and Alexander the Great had likewise routed indigenous Asian imperial armies so long ago.
Analysis of most other recent wars suggests that even the direct importation of Western tanks, planes, and guns, or the adoption of Western-designed weaponry from other sources, does not always guarantee the success of the Other. That Arab and Argentine officers were trained abroad meant little. Nor did it matter much that their armies were organized and modeled after those in Europe. Israel, Britain, and the United States and its major European partners in the Gulf War, often despite difficult logistics, all found victory relatively easy, after short, violent fighting, drawing on a combination of practices common to Europe alone during the last 2,500 years of Western warfare.
Quite simply, the Israeli, British, and American military shared a common cultural approach to war making—a holistic tradition that transcended howitzers, and jets and one quite different from their respective and sometimes courageous adversaries. Nothing that has transpired in the last decades of the twentieth century suggests an end to Western military dominance, much less to war itself. Had the United States unleashed its full arsenal of brutal military power and fought without political restrictions, the war in Vietnam would have been over in a year or two and may well have resembled the lopsided affair in the Gulf War.
There are three often discussed military scenarios for the future: no wars, occasional wars, or a single, world-ending war. I think we can dismiss the first fantasy without much discussion. War, as the Greeks teach us, seems innate to the human species, the “father of us all,” as Heraclitus says. Both idealists on the left and pessimists on the right—whether Kantian utopians or gloomy Hegelians worried over the end of history— have at times prognosticated a cessation to civilized warfare. The former have hoped for global peace under the aegis of international judicial bodies, most recently incarnated by the United Nations and the World Court; the latter lament a spreading global atrophy as a result of depressing uniformity of worldwide capitalism and entitlement democracy, under which the unheroic and enervated citizens of the planet shall risk nothing if it might endanger their comfort.
Yet an often idealistic and self-proclaimed pacifistic Clinton administration (1992–2000) called out the American military for more separate foreign deployments than any presidency of the twentieth century. Contemporary wars are not merely frequent but often brutal beyond anything in the nineteenth century. The Rwandan and Balkan holocausts were tribal bloodletting of the precivilized variety, mostly immune to international stricture and denunciation. The Gulf War of 1991 drew down the might of the United States to its National Guard reserves, a state of mobilization rarely reached even during the worst crises of the Cold War. A not insignificant percentage of the world’s oil supply was for a time either embargoed, aflame, or in peril at sea. Belgrade was bombed and the Danube blocked; and there was unchecked mass murder for six years in Bosnia and Kosovo, only hours away from Rome, Athens, and Berlin. Nations, clans, and tribes, it seems, will continue to fight despite international threats, sanctions, and the lessons of history, regardless of the intervention of the world’s sole superpower, oblivious to the economic absurdity inherent in modern military arithmetic. The conduct of a war can be rational, but often its origins are not.
By the same token, despite a growing uniformity in the world’s militaries—their automatic weapons, chain of command, and the appearance of their uniforms are becoming Western to the core—there is little solace that some new global culture has ushered in a period of perpetual peace. Those consumers of different races, religions, languages, and nations, who all wear Adidas, buy Microsoft computer programs, and drink Coke, are just as likely to kill each other as before—and still watch Gilligan’s Island reruns on their international television screens afterward.
Gifted intellectuals of vision and character, products of this new Westernized intellectual culture, could only sigh when during the spring of 1982 in the isolated harsh seas of the South Atlantic, British seamen blew up Argentines and vice versa. The European-educated, Argentine poet and novelist Jorge Luis Borges remarked of the idiotic stakes involved in the Falklands War that the two civilized nations were “like two bald men fighting over a comb.” But fight they did, and neither seemed like Nietzschean “men without chests” who might think a few thousand windy hills of scrub in the middle of nowhere were not worth any disturbance to their Sunday afternoon televised football games. Thucydides, who claimed he wrote history as “a possession for all time,” reminds us that states fight for “fear, self-interest, and honor”—not always out of reason, economic need, or survival. Honor, even in this age of decadence, despite the gloomy predictions of Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, still exists and will, I think, still get people killed for some time to come.
True, some key ingredients of traditional Western warfare appear to be all but gone. Mercenary armies in America and Europe are the norm. They are not necessarily entirely professional militaries, but outlets for the disaffected of society who seek economic opportunity alone in serving, with the realization that those of a far different social class will determine where, when, and how they will fight and die. Fewer Americans—soldier and civilian alike—are voting than ever before. Most have not a clue about the nature of their own military or its historic relationship with its government and citizenry. The rise of a huge federal government and global corporations has reduced the number of Americans who work as autonomous individuals, either as family farmers, small businesspeople, or owners of local shops. Freedom for many means an absence of responsibility, while the culture of the mall, video, and Internet seem to breed uniformity and complacence, rather than rationalism, individualism, and initiative. Will the West always, then, possess persons of the type who fought at Midway, or citizens who rowed for their freedom at Salamis, or young men who rushed to reform their battered legions in the aftermath of Cannae?
Pessimists see in the lethargic teenagers of the affluent American suburbs seeds of decay. But I am not so sure we are yet at the point of collapse. As long as Europe and America retain their adherence to the structures of constitutional government, capitalism, freedom of religious and political association, free speech, and intellectual tolerance, then history teaches us that Westerners can still field in their hour of need brave, disciplined, and well-equipped soldiers who shall kill like none other on the planet. Our institutions, I think, if they do not erode entirely and are not overthrown, can survive periods of decadence brought on by our material success, eras when the entire critical notion of civic militarism seems bothersome to the enjoyment of material surfeit, and an age in which free speech is used to focus on our own imperfections without concern for the ghastly nature of our enemies. Not all elements of the Western approach to warfare were always present in Europe. The fumes of Roman republicanism kept the empire going long after the ideal of a citizen soldier sometimes gave way to a mercenary army.
Nor is a second scenario likely either, that of a total war brought on by a nuclear America, Europe, Russia, China, or a warlike Islamic world that would incinerate the planet. Two colossal enemies—the Soviet Union and America—did not employ their huge nuclear arsenals for some fifty years of the Cold War. There is no reason to think that either is more rather than less bellicose after the fall of communism. Their legacy to others is nuclear restraint, not recklessness. Strategic arsenals, both nuclear and biological, are shrinking, not growing. If the history of military conflict is any guide, there is also no assurance to believe that possession of nuclear weapons will always be tantamount to mutually assured destruction. Defensive systems in the cosmos are already on the verge of being deployed. The ability to shield blows is a law of military history, forgotten though it has been in the last half century during the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. The swing is once more toward the defensive, as vast sums are allocated to missile protection, to counterinsurgency, and even to body armor to deflect bullet, shrapnel, and flame.
Any nation in this new century that threatens the use of the atomic bomb realizes that it is faced with two unpleasant alternatives: massive reprisal in kind, and soon the possibility that its use will be deflected or destroyed before harming its adversary. Prudence in the use of strategic nuclear weapons, not profligacy, remains the protocol in hot and cold wars. Plague, nerve gas, and new viruses not yet imagined, we are told, will kill us all in the future. But military historians will answer that the forces of vigilance, keen border defense, technologies of prevention and vaccination, and counterintelligence are also never static. The specter of deterrence draws on a human, not a culturally specific, phenomenon, inasmuch as all nations—even democracies—engage in brinkmanship to protect their self-interests. A rogue state that sponsors a terrorist with a vial in Manhattan is still cognizant that its own continued existence is measured by little more than a fifteen-minute missile trajectory.
If we are to have neither perpetual peace nor a single conflagration to end the species, the third option, that of random and even deadlier conventional wars (more men and women have died in battle since World War II than perished in that conflict), seems to be a certainty in the thousand years to come. We in the West still shudder at the carnage of World War II largely because it took the lives of so many Westerners. We forget that far more Koreans, Chinese, Africans, Indians, and Southeast Asians have died in mostly forgotten tribal wars, at the hands of their own government and during hot spots of the Cold War in the half century after the end of Hitler’s Germany.
In this regard, the future of Western warfare seems somewhat more disturbing since so many have perished since 1945 due to the diffusion of Western arms and tactics to the non-West. The most obvious worry is the continual spread of Western notions of military discipline, technology, decisive battle, and capitalism without the accompanying womb of freedom, civic militarism, civilian audit, and dissent. Such semi-Western autocracies on the horizon—a nuclear China, North Korea, or Iran—may soon, through the purchase or the promotion of a Western-trained scientific and military elite, gain the capability nearly to match European and American research and development of weaponry and organization without simple importation or sale—and without any sense of affinity with, but abject hostility to, their original mentors. Just as deadly as satellite guidance systems in China is a Chinese chain of command with a flexibility and initiative modeled after that in Europe and America, or a private rather than state munitions industry.
In these new flash points to come, can the non-West import our weaponry and military organization and doctrine apart from the cargo of their birth? Can a capitalist China, Iran, Vietnam, or Pakistan, with a scientific elite, for any sustained period really equip and organize a sophisticated army, superior to any Western military, without free citizens, individualism in command hierarchy, constant audit, and oversight of its strategy and tactics? Or do such would-be antagonists merely pick the fruit of the West which soon withers without the deep taproots of intellectual, religious, and political tolerance? Will they merely win occasional battles but not wars, or perhaps threaten us endlessly with the specter of a half dozen nuclear-tipped missiles over Los Angeles?
A military command may steal secrets daily over the Internet, but if it cannot discuss those ideas openly with its civilian and military leadership, then there is no guarantee that such information will find its optimum application to ensure parity with the West. Even should our present adversaries adopt consensual government, free speech, and market economies, would they then really remain our adversaries? Would the embrace of Western culture gradually smother centuries of religious, ethnic, cultural, and racial hostility to the West itself? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the question is not the only one of relevance, for there is no guarantee now, nor was there in the past, that the West itself is monolithic, always stable, or not prone to turn its vast arsenal upon itself. States that become thoroughly Western are less likely to attack the traditional West, but not less likely enough to ensure that they will never attack the traditional West—and each other. The horror of organized warfare throughout history has not been the constant fighting outside of Europe between tribal societies, or even between the West and the Other, but the far deadlier explosions inside Europe between Westerners. The more the world becomes thoroughly Western, it seems to me, the larger the Europeanized battlefield shall become.
We should thus take note of another general truth from these studies. Usually, the story of Westerners fighting others is a narrative of battle outside Europe and America. Except for moments of Asian, African, and Islamic intrusion into the periphery of Europe—Xerxes, Hannibal, the Mongols, Moors, and Ottomans—the core of Western culture itself has not been in danger since the breakup of the Roman Empire. Nothing on the horizon suggests that non-Westerners will fight major wars inside Europe or the United States. When battle has ravaged the interior of the West, it is the result of civil war or struggle for hegemony between Western powers. I see no reason why such a scenario will not be more likely in the century to come than invasions and attacks from those outside the Western paradigm.
THE WEST VERSUS THE WEST
With the worldwide spread of shared ideas of democracy, capitalism, free speech, individualism, and a globally connected economy, it may be that world-encompassing wars will be less likely. Yet it will also be true that when wars do break out, they will be far more lethal and draw on the full resources of a deadly military tradition. We see glimpses of that today— tribal fights in which hideous Western weapons are used by those who have not a clue how to create them.
The peril to come, however, is not just the spread of atomic weapons and F-16 fighter jets but much more so the dissemination of knowledge, rationalism, the creation of free universities, perhaps even the growth of democracy, capitalism, and individualism themselves throughout the world—the real ingredients, as we have seen in these case studies, of a most murderous brand of battle. Most see in the advance of rationalism, capitalism, democracy, and their ancillary values the seeds of perpetual peace and prosperity. Maybe, but we must remember that these ideas are also the foundations that have created the world’s deadliest armies of the past.
The real hazard for the future, as it has always been in the past, is not Western moral decline or the threat of the Other now polished with the veneer of sophisticated arms, but the age-old specter of a horrendous war inside the West itself, the old Europe and America with its full menu of Western economic, military, and political dynamism. Gettysburg in a single day took more Americans than did all the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. A small Boer force killed more British troops in six days than the Zulus did in a year. Most of the crises that have plagued the world in the twentieth century grew out of Europe’s two world wars—the status of Germany, the division and unification of Europe, the rise and collapse of the Russian empire, the spread of communism after the defeat of fascism, the mess in the Balkans, and the entry of America into the affairs of the world.
Many have accepted the truism that democracies do not fight democracies. Statistics seem to support this encouraging belief. But in the Western context, given the lethality of Western arms, there is little margin of error, since even a single intramural European war can bring carnage and cultural chaos in its wake. Consensual governments, in fact, have often fought other Western consensual governments. Athens wrecked its culture by invading democratic Sicily (415 B.C.). Democratic Boeotia fought democratic Athens at Mantinea (362 B.C.). Republican Rome ended the Achaean federated states of Greece and leveled Corinth (146 B.C.). Italian republics of the Renaissance were constantly at each other’s throat. Revolutionary France and parliamentary England were deadly enemies; a democratic United States fought twice against the consensual government of Britain. There was a Union and Confederate president and Senate. The Boers and the British in southern Africa each had elected representatives. Both elected prime ministers in India and Pakistan have at times threatened each other. The presence of a Palestinian parliament has not brought peace to the Middle East; and there is no assurance that should its autonomy grow, that elected body would be any less likely than Mr. Arafat to war with Israel. There was also a parliament of sorts under the kaiser. Hitler first came to power through election, not a coup. The Russian entry into Chechnya received parliamentary approval.
Democracies are more likely not to war against each other; but when they do—and they have—the ensuing conflict from both sides draws on the entire terrible menu of Western warfare itself. For every Nicias, there can be a democratic counterpart Hermocrates of Syracuse; for each assembly-line Venetian Arsenal, an efficient Genovese dockworks; for every citizen soldier Grant, there may well be a Lee; for each ingenious Mauser, a Colt; for every eccentric and highly trained German rocket scientist, a British radar genius. Western civil war inside Europe or America will not necessarily be such a catastrophic event simply because it shall take more lives than those lost in Mao’s China or in the fifty years of bloodletting in Africa—although such fighting might well exceed those totals. Rather, Western fratricide, as it has in the past, threatens an entire civilization, which for good or evil has given the world its present standard of living and is the source of its industrialization, technological advance, popular culture, and blueprints for political organization.
We should be apprehensive that there are once again fundamental upheavals transpiring in Europe, more so that at any time since the 1930s. The growth in influence of a unified Germany has scarcely begun. The specter of a pan-European state highlights the increasing ambiguous position of Great Britain and seems to create unity among its members by collective antagonism toward and envy of the United States. The insecurity of eastern Europe is part of a larger dilemma facing a Russia neither quite European nor Asian. The pride and fears of a Westernized Japan remain—accentuated by the rise of a capitalist China and the unpredictability of two Koreas, who themselves promise a new unified nationalist identity, perhaps fueled by South Korean capitalism and North Korean nuclear arms. Resurgent isolationism in America grows when its own intervention is at an all-time high and yet support for it is at a historic low. Waterloo, the Somme, Verdun, Dresden, and Normandy seem the far deadlier ghosts that may well haunt the world in the future.
I am not so worried about constant warring in the millennium to come between the West and non-West—more flare-ups, for example, in the Middle East and its environs, or murderous insurrections in Africa and South America—if such theaters, despite the deadly gadgetry, remain outside the Western tradition and embrace different indigenous approaches to fighting. Rather, if history is any guide to the future, has not instead the real danger to the world’s progress and civilization always arisen when a Western army turns its deadly arsenal upon itself? If so, let us pray for another half century of aberrant European and American peace, for a few more decades of rare Western behavior so at odds with its own past. Let us remember as well that the more Western the world becomes, the more likely that all its wars will be ever more Western in nature and thus ever more deadly. We may well be all Westerners in the millennium to come, and that could be a very dangerous thing indeed. Culture is not a mere construct, but when it comes to war, a very deadly reality that often determines whether thousands of mostly innocent young men and women live or die.
Western civilization has given mankind the only economic system that works, a rationalist tradition that alone allows us material and technological progress, the sole political structure that ensures the freedom of the individual, a system of ethics and a religion that brings out the best in humankind—and the most lethal practice of arms conceivable. Let us hope that we at last understand this legacy. It is a weighty and sometimes ominous heritage that we must neither deny nor feel ashamed about— but insist that our deadly manner of war serves, rather than buries, our civilization.