Jeremy Black on War Termination & Wars to Come

It may be a little odd to post something so extensive on a presentation that I did not even attend, but since the US Army War College has been charitable enough to share the material from its 21stStrategy Conference on YouTube, I was able to catch Dr Jeremy Black’s contribution to this event, which I found highly stimulating, for a number of reasons.

You can view the full presentation here (H/T Weichong Ong), but as a recap (and to allow me to comment somewhat), these were some of the points that stuck with me:

‘we ought to be cognisant of the fact that the majority of the world’s population are not involved in wars with us, that the majority of the wars in the world don’t involve us and that we don’t define, in our experience, warfare’

This has to do with the data points and experiences we use to define and think about war. Two aspects of this strike me as quite staggering; both relate to what I might term ‘strategic solipsism’:

First — the persistence with which war is understood, in the Western world, as occurring on an isolated battlefield and ending, decisively, when one force is militarily defeated. Statistically, this heuristic notion is clearly an anomaly, and historically, it may be nothing more than a grossly simplified recollection of some of those wars that disproportionately shape our understanding of the term (primarily the Second World War). Clearly, the recent re-emergence of ‘irregular warfare’ or of ‘wars among the people’ have helped to challenge this conception somewhat, but this is also an understanding of war that is firmly entrenched and one that I believe still exerts a powerful influence on our worldview.

Second — the stubbornness with which we seek to export our historically questionable and statistically insignificant understanding of war on the rest of the world. Jeremy Black comments on this in his presentation, noting that ‘one of the difficulties is that our entire analysis of military affairs is predicated on the view of a kind of paradigm power diffusion, in other words, we set the standards and the other peoples are supposed to, in some way, conform’. As Black further notes, this may in fact be ‘an absurdity’.

A second memorable part of the presentation deals with the unprecedented global economic growth in the last 60–70 years, which Black posits as a bulwark against the inherently destabilising effects of the simultaneous processes of democratisation and growing populism. Black goes on to argue that if we can’t replicate this economic growth, there are going to be larger numbers of unmet expectations and grievances worldwide, grievances that tend to be interpreted on the basis of historicised distinctions, often along the lines of ethnicity, regionalism or religion (though he also proposes the comeback of ‘class’ as a growing factor in explaining political violence).

This reminded me of E. H. Carr’s excellent Twenty Years’ Crisis, about the 1919–1939 period of course, a time he described as marked by:

the abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first decade to the grim despair of the second, from a utopia which took little account of the reality to a reality from which every element of utopia was rigorously excluded.

Will we face a similar crisis in the coming century? Carr presented his twenty years’ crisis as resulting from the breakdown of an international order whose relevance had long lapsed, and the failure of Western powers to adapt to the conditions of the new inter-war era. The problem, really, was the stubborn conviction in many Western capitals of a ‘harmony of interest’ among nations, in toothless legalism and the irrationality of war given the recent and very destructive experience of World War I.

These tendencies appear eminently repeatable. Indeed, it is quite conceivable that our enduring strategic solipsism and lack of enforcement mechanisms for the order that we seek to champion (be it through NATO or even the US military, following Iraq and Afghanistan) may, particularly against the backdrop of growing economic and political instability, bring about a very similar crisis in the century to come.

Originally published at kingsofwar.org.uk on May 18, 2010.