Why nations fight wars: out of aggrievedness, for example

[Skybird]

This is a long interview with Richard Ned Lebow. I think its brilliant, and very deeply thought. I found it in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The articles there often disappear behind a paywall after some days, thats why I give this text, and many others from them, in full translation.

Lebow is Professor of International Political Theory at King's College, London, and Bye-fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of the British Academy. His most famous works include Between Peace and War, A Cultural Theory of International Relations, and Why Nations Fight.


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We in the West get wars wrong, says political scientist Richard Ned Lebow. It has long since ceased to be about money or power.


Richard Ned Lebow was born during the war and has spent his life studying the war. Lebow was born in 1941 - at least that's what his birth certificate, issued by a judge in New York, says. Lebow did not know his exact date and place of birth: he had been smuggled from France to the United States by the Jewish resistance in 1942, the only survivor of his family.

He has no memories of the time before his escape. "I only remember a kind of dream in which I'm talking in a language I don't know." Four years ago, Lebow did a DNA analysis and learned about his birth family. Jews from Hungary.

Lebow, who is a professor of international political theory at King's College in London, says he has always wanted to understand what leads to war because his life began in World War II. His theories have changed the way we think about wars. They challenge the classic assumptions of international relations. These assume that wars result from states' rational pursuit of power and security.

In his book, Why Nations Fight, Lebow examined all wars between states since 1648 and concludes, "Most wars are the result of grievances." He says nations, like individuals, are motivated by the quest for recognition. This, he says, is how the current war in Ukraine can be understood.

You have studied war for sixty years. How surprised are you now to see a tank war in Europe?

I am completely - the British would say gobsmacked - flattened. I'm really very surprised. I didn't think we would see another major war in Europe, and certainly not one where you see a column of tanks approaching a city on a computer screen. It's frighteningly reminiscent of World War II. And I'm just old enough to have memories of the end of that war. It's horrible because now, as in all wars of this kind, civilians will suffer. In the present war even more than usual. Because when you can't defeat the other side militarily, you go after the civilians. Just like the Russians have done in Syria before.

In recent weeks, there have been a number of prominent scholars, for example, John Mearsheimer and other so-called neorealists, who say that the United States is to blame for this war because the Russians felt threatened by the expansion of NATO. They say that the Russians and Putin even told us that. What do you make of that argument?

First, if you look at the statements and predictions that John Mearsheimer has made: No one has been so consistently wrong about everything he has said in his entire career. After the end of the Cold War, he predicted that in a multipolar world, NATO would collapse and European countries would be at each other's throats. He was not referring to the Russians here, but to Western Europe. He called on Germany and Japan to acquire nuclear weapons. And he published a book with his colleague Stephen Walt in which they made the rather crazy argument that the Jewish lobby was responsible for the Iraq war. So I'm not surprised to see my former student John spouting more nonsense.

To be fair, there is no doubt that the West and NATO have expanded further east and that the Russians disapprove.

That's true. But that is not a cause of war. I think a good starting point for analysis is Vladimir Putin, who is deeply committed to a kind of czarist notion of Russia's greatness. He believes he has the task of restoring the territory and the greatness of the former Russia and the Soviet Union. That is what is happening here.

With war?

He has already used force in Chechnya and Georgia. It didn't hurt him, now he is using it again. What surprised me is what I observed in the preparation for the war: I didn't realize how irrational Putin is. I thought, all right, he's doing all this to build up pressure. He will then hedge the Russian occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk even more, and the West will breathe a sigh of relief and look the other way because, after all, there is no bigger war.

But do you really think he is irrational? Stephen Kotkin, the great Soviet and Stalin scholar, said in a recent interview: Putin is only pretending to be crazy so that we will believe that he is actually capable of anything, including a nuclear attack.


There might be something to that. Richard Nixon tried the same thing. He claimed that the best way to deal with the Soviets was to give the impression of being a madman. We now know from Soviet documents that he convinced them. They were afraid of him. With Putin, I would imagine that the threat of nuclear weapons was simply to intimidate the West. But I really believe that he thought he would meet no resistance in Ukraine. He has surrounded himself with yes men for so long that no other opinions are getting through to him. He is only told what he wants to hear. And since he has imperial ambitions, everyone tells him that these ambitions are realistic. So in that sense, he is irrational. He is irrational in the sense that he has created a system that corresponds only to his illusions.

That is very typical of an autocrat.

It's not atypical, but it's extreme. Think of Stalin, and Stephen Kotkin certainly knows this: Stalin was convinced during World War II that Hitler would abide by the pact. No one was willing to present him with all the mounting evidence to the contrary. And even when his intelligence service informed him that the Germans were planning an invasion, Stalin ignored it and continued to supply raw materials to the Germans. Putin is in that tradition.

The product then is a war that is a miscalculation.

Exactly. But we shouldn't really be surprised by that. We in the West get war wrong because we apply our model of rationality. We still follow an old pattern of thinking here, the school of thought of the realists, the neorealists, who say, roughly summarized, states want power and behave as rationally as possible and go to war when a gain in power or a gain in security through war seems realistic. This is fundamentally wrong. I can cite good empirical evidence for this.

In your book "Why Nations Fight," you have analyzed all the wars between states since 1648, the start date of the modern state system. You categorized each of the states involved in wars into rising, dominant and declining powers.

It is worth looking historically at the rising powers. Powers like China with its pressure on the U.S. now, or the West in general. In the 18th century that was Germany, Japan in the 19th century, the U.S. basically from its founding until the 1920s when it became a dominant power. Rising powers usually want to be recognized as great powers, and that's why they start wars; that's been the theory for a long time. My analysis shows that the initiators of wars have won only 52 percent of the wars they have started.

That's similar success to flipping a coin.

You would think that if you were going to start a war, you would wait until circumstances were favorable. Then the war initiators should show a better success rate than 50 percent. I used a very loose success criterion: victory over the other side's military forces.

What does the success rate of the aggressors look like if you also examine whether they achieved their political goals? For example, not only the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but also the introduction of democracy in Iraq.

You talk about the Clausewitzian definition of the goal of war. According to the military historian Carl von Clausewitz, the purpose of war is not simply to achieve military victories, but to pursue political goals that cannot be achieved through diplomatic means. If we examine wars for these political goals, we see: The aggressors have failed even 75 percent of the time because they could not turn military victory into political success. Think of all the wars in which Israel defeated the other side by force. But aside from the negative goal of preventing an invasion, it didn't really achieve its political goals. The same is true of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Has this changed in more recent times after World War II? One might assume that more knowledge, more interconnectedness, better intelligence would lead to wiser risk assessment.

The post-1945 era is indeed quite different. Wars have changed because territorial conquest has become a no-go. If you use force that has not been authorized by an appropriate international organization, you lose prestige as a state. It used to be different. So you would think that states would think even more carefully about instigating a war - and then act more successfully. But since World War II, the initiators of wars have failed militarily in as many as 72 percent of wars and have failed to achieve their political goals in over 90 percent of cases.

This contradicts the standard war theory of realists and rationalists, who claim that actors on the international stage acted rationally and waged war when there was a reasonable prospect of success.

Exactly, this is a slap in the face of the rationalists, because they would say that the initiators of a war assess the balance of power. They don't go to war until they think they can win. It is the prospect of a cheap victory that leads them to start the war in the first place. None of this is true.

Why is it that the attacking nation is so often defeated?

Clausewitz described war as a twofold competition: on the one hand, it is about who can inflict more damage, but on the other hand, it is also about who can endure more damage, pain. That's where the attacking nations often make miscalculations. You can understand this if you look at the development after 1945.

What changed after the Second World War?

Nationalism is also on the rise in the Third World. People in Vietnam, Algeria, Egypt or Indonesia were more willing to drive out their colonial masters and fight against occupation. This increased the military price for the West, a price that people in France, England, etc. were no longer willing to pay. Most glaringly, this miscalculation was demonstrated in the Vietnam War, where the Americans won almost all the battles but lost the war.

Because Americans at home were less able or willing to bear the losses on the battlefield than the North Vietnamese?

Yes, and the government simply did not understand that. Economist Thomas Schelling gave a lecture at Yale in 1964 in which he proclaimed that the U.S. could drop more bombs on Vietnam than all the war powers during all of World War II combined. I remember Janice Gross Stein, a fellow student of mine who later became a professor and advised three Canadian foreign ministers, telling him that this was pointless. There were, after all, no targets for these bombs. When intervening powers are confronted with local nationalism, they run into difficulties, as they are now in Ukraine.

This leads to the very fundamental question of whether war is something that we humans simply do, something that is innate to us.

Violence is something fundamentally human. War is something else.

What is war, then?

War is violence exercised by states for political ends. And that shows: war is a product of the state system, of organized societies. If we look at the history of the last four hundred years, war is on the decline. In each century there has been less of it, and since 1945 there has been less again. At the same time, we have to note that the cost of wars became higher and higher. So wars became bloodier, deadlier.

Is that the reason why we have fewer wars between different states?

In the past, there were three motives for war. The first was the pursuit of wealth. So wars of conquest, where people wanted to grab lucrative territories. But in the 18th century, Adam Smith and later David Ricardo taught Western leaders that economic development depends on peace, because you don't get poorer when your neighbor gets richer, you get richer. Before that, it was believed that the wealth of the world was finite. If someone else had more, there would be less for oneself. That was suddenly no longer valid.

From that point on, people actually went to war despite the economic costs - and not because they hoped to make a profit.

Wars became economically unreasonable. The last wars for economic reasons took place in the late 18th century. The second motive for war was the security of one's own state. One defended oneself or attacked potential aggressors to keep them weak. But with collective security, systems like the UN or NATO, that became obsolete. That may change tomorrow, of course, but since 1945 there has been no war between the great powers because of it.

But one could argue that wars between smaller powers or between a big power and a small one are also wars for security. For example, when a big power wants to keep a small, emerging power down by means of war.

This is a question that so-called power transitionists are concerned with. They claim that wars break out because the balance of power in the international order shifts. For example, when the U.S. emerged as a world power in the early 20th century, it replaced France and Germany. The problem with this theory is: there is no historical evidence for it. There has never been a war by an emerging state that attacked a large, dominant state because it felt it could now change the balance of power.

It is a relevant question because that is how many today look at a possible conflict between China and the United States. Historian Graham Allison calls Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor a conflict that arose from a shift in power.

This is silly. In 1941, the gross national product of the United States was already twelve times that of Japan, and it was growing faster than that of Japan. So there was no change of power there. The problem was that the Japanese had invaded China before and were stuck there. China had become a kind of big Ukraine for Japan. The U.S. had imposed sanctions and got the other Western powers to also impose sanctions on Japan, to stop selling them oil or rubber.

That sounds familiar.

Yes. The Japanese concluded that their navy could not function without oil within six months. So they said to themselves, if we're going to attack, it's now or never. So Pearl Harbor is more attributable to the Japanese attack in China.

So Japan did face a security problem. Without a navy, it would have been vulnerable. Russia also felt threatened by NATO.

Hardly anyone in Russia seriously believed that the West or NATO would attack them. That is perfectly clear. There is a third motive for war that previous theories do not take into account: the desire for good self-esteem. This is achieved by doing things that are valued by our peer group or society, gaining their approval and thinking in return, Hey, we're pretty good.

You call this desire for good self-worth in your theory of international relations thymos, the Greek term for spirit, or man's longing for recognition. You say that self-worth is also one of the central motivating factors for nations and heads of state, and that this needs to be taken more into account in the analysis of wars.

Exactly, thymos is also what motivates Putin. Aristotle and Plato wisely told us that when self-esteem is threatened, one's status is questioned. Then one becomes very angry. The sociologist Max Weber argued that an insult to a country's honor is much more serious than a threat to its security. And he was right about that. So that's partly what's going on now in Russia and Ukraine. And this quest for prestige or the desire for revenge when one feels offended was the main cause of international wars in the 20th century. In my opinion, it is also the cause of what is happening now.

For decades, people have been trying to explain wars because they hope that this will make them more likely to be prevented. Why is it so difficult to explain something as fundamental as war?

Because people usually limit themselves to rational explanations. This is based on a false image of man. The Marxists and the liberals simply assume that man wants to maximize wealth. Then he is happy. The realists believe that man wants security. Then he is happy. But there are deeper motives that drive both people and states.

This image of homo oeconomicus as a utility-optimizing or security-optimizing individual is now outdated.

Yes, and it should have been clear for much longer. Joseph Schumpeter, one of the fathers of neoliberalism, actually knew this already. He wrote an excellent book, there he talks about entrepreneurs and says that these people work twenty-four hours a day, not simply to make money, but to make a name for themselves. That's why they name their companies after themselves, so that their name lives on. It is a pursuit of immortality.

There is another contradiction. You write that humanity now despises war and looks down on nations that start wars. Yet there is still war and soldiers who give themselves to it. Why?


First, we must understand why war is increasingly despised. We are living longer today. If you have a limited life expectancy like the Romans and the Greeks, who lived to be only thirty years old, then it matters less if you die with glory and honor in a war at the age of 22. Today, people live longer, have fewer children, but invest much more in them. The individual human life has been revalued. In every country, economic development has been accompanied by a greater aversion to war.

So you have to justify wars differently.

With a history aimed at the self-image, the prestige of the nation. Why is the U.S. so upset about the rise of China? Primarily because Americans see themselves as a hegemonic power, and that view has become part of the American self-image, so it threatens American self-esteem. And the Chinese still see themselves as a dominant power that was simply humiliated during the period of imperialism.

If war is despised, why do the people often support war anyway, such as in the U.S. before the Iraq War or in the various countries before World War I? Historian Alan Pollock has described the period before World War I as an era in which there was an unprecedented sense of national unity, which at the outset created almost enthusiasm for war. Why were people cheering then?

This has been disproved today. Today there is a lot of evidence that there were more people who were afraid in 1913 and 1914 because of the prospect of war. In the 18th century, wars were fought mainly with mercenaries, but even the mercenaries did not want to die. They wanted to earn money. So when it came to real battles, many deserted. It wasn't until Napoleon's French Revolutionary Army that this army came with people who felt connected to the nation, not stupid conscripts or mercenaries.

Why?

Nationalism created that. It mobilized people. People projected their own need for a sense of self-worth and success onto the state. Then people are ready to die for the state. Now nationalism in the West has been discredited in large parts of the population since 1945. It still lives on the margins. And if nationalism is rejected, then the cost of war and the value of war are seen quite differently. With one exception.

The United States.

In the United States, nationalism is still very much alive in one part of the country. Self-esteem there depends so much on America's position as a leading world power that many Americans are willing to die for it. Especially in the South. Nearly 60 percent of the officer corps and 64 percent of the enlisted are Southerners. The American South is the last honor society in the Western world.

What do you mean by honor societies?

I distinguish between two ideal types: Societies in which you can achieve status by means of wealth. On the other hand, there are honor societies in which status and prestige are gained mainly through military struggle, through heroic deeds. I am thinking of the Romans and the Greeks, the Plains Indians.

That sounds very uncivilized.

In all these societies, interestingly enough, war was considered the highest and most valuable of all activities, but it was also clearly defined. There were rules. Among the Greeks, where you fought was negotiated, it had to be level ground, everyone had equal footing. You didn't pursue the enemy to the end because it was less about killing the enemy and more about demonstrating bravery. In today's societies, it is considered pointless to waste your life in war when you could be making money and living a good life instead.

And the American South is still supposed to operate by these old rules?

Thymos still affects us all. Not just in the American South. It's just not articulated or acknowledged in our country. But think of the frenzy that can come over us when we're driving, that's something completely irrational. In the U.S., there is something else that increases the willingness to go to war: faith. 90 percent of Americans profess a belief in a deity, compared to 25 to 35 percent in Europe. And if you believe that you're going to heaven, that you're going to be reunited with your family after death, then war looks a little different than it does for those of us who believe that you're just going to return to dust.


But isn't this understanding of honor, of heroism, still prevalent in Russia? The historical point of reference there is still the Great Patriotic War, plus the ideas of the great Russian empire, which is constructed from quite a few sources.

Yes, many Russians also define their identity through the country. But Putin's rhetoric before the war was very revealing. After all, he couldn't simply justify a war of aggression to the population with this theory of a Greater Russia. He had to present it as a kind of rescue of eastern Ukrainians from Ukrainian Nazis.

What emotions is he playing with here?

It is about achieving greatness for the state. But not for its own sake, but to save the brother people of Ukraine from the oppressor. It is again an appeal to self-esteem. And if you have projected your own need for self-esteem onto the state of Russia, this message confirms you. There is a lot of good research showing that people feel good when their sports team wins, and they feel bad and have low self-esteem when the team loses. This phenomenon is amplified when it comes to states.

It's a very primitive drive.

There are very few countries that have managed to avoid it. I think it's fair to say that the Germans did a very good job, but it's not an experience you want to repeat.

Are wars deadlier, bloodier, when they play on these primitive urges? Is that why Ukraine is now repeating what happened in Syria?

There are two types of wars that are particularly bloody: intrastate wars, the result of the disintegration of colonial empires in which local populations each claim the same territory. The Irish conflict, Israel, Palestine, India, Pakistan. The second case is wars that end in stalemate. The classic example is World War I, in which all sides looked for ways to break the stalemate, resorting to increasingly cruel weapons such as poison gas. Or the submarine warfare and bombing of cities in World War II. Genocidal wars are still a special form.

What does this mean for Ukraine?

Warlords rarely imagine a major escalation at the beginning. Putin also imagined the war in Ukraine differently. I think he really thought that people would put flowers in the pipes of the tanks and greet the Russians as liberators. The problem now is that for him, survival as a political leader is at stake. He cannot afford defeat. Nor can he afford a long stalemate. Body bags coming back, and Western media and Ukrainian hackers informing the Russian people what really happened. So he believes he has to win quickly. To do that, he's escalating and using whatever force he sees fit.

Could this turn into a hegemonic war? Could it get out of hand so that other states are drawn in?

That could happen if Putin attacks the corridors in Poland and Romania through which weapons are supplied to Ukraine. And if NATO realizes that it has to respond. Not with a no-fly zone over all of Ukraine, but in limited border areas to protect supply lines into Ukraine. At that point, Putin has to decide whether or not he wants to accept that. And one could see the possibility of further escalation.

Historian Stephen Kotkin says Russia has always been like this: autocratic, oppressive, militaristic, suspicious of the West. The war now, he says, is the product of problems within Russia and has nothing to do with us. How often are wars the result of a nation's internal process?

There are very few wars that are fought exclusively for internal political reasons. But in most wars, domestic politics plays some role. There are always a lot of factors that come together in any war. And in the end it depends on the character of an individual. If a Yeltsin or a Gorbachev had been in power now, the war would never have happened.

How decisive are political leaders?


Crucially, had Hitler been killed on the Western Front in World War I, or had he suffered an accident during the 1930 campaign, Germany's history would have been different. Henry Turner, for example, argued this way in his book Scourge of the Century. He claims there that Germany's fascists, under different leadership, would still have waged a war against Poland, but it would have been a limited war in the east to regain territory, and they would not have attempted it in the west. And certainly there would have been no Holocaust. As president, would Al Gore have attacked Iraq? No.

The German philosopher Richard David Precht recently said that the Ukrainians should surrender, that the fight made no sense against a superior force after all.

Regardless of whether his military assessment is correct, this is an incredibly arrogant statement. Who does he think he is? Precht obviously does not understand what the Ukrainians' goal is. If your goal is survival, then it makes sense to surrender. Actually, in any case. But if you are a nationalist, if you associate your self-esteem with repelling a foreign invasion and giving your children a future of freedom, then you calculate differently.

How do wars end?

In two ways: one side wins, or no one wins and there is a stalemate. Then it gets exciting, then there is the possibility of negotiating a settlement. That can also look like both sides claiming victory. The Chinese invasion of North Vietnam was so costly to the Chinese that they withdrew. So the Chinese actually lost. But they claimed victory because they claimed they taught North Vietnam a lesson. So one of the most interesting things about the end of wars is the claims that people make about them. And if wars are indeed fought for political purposes, then the proper evaluation of the results is indeed not an objective process, but a political process.

Could this be a way out for Putin?

This is his personal war, just as the campaign in Kuwait was Saddam Hussein's personal war. That also means that military defeat means his fall - at least that's what he fears. And for a solution at the negotiating table, the Russians would have to withdraw their troops from Ukraine. That's hard for Putin to justify at home, even if it's not impossible. But his mission to restore Russia's greatness will be shipwrecked. So it could be a way out. But I am not very optimistic.

[Skybird]

Added to my to-read-list.



https://www.amazon.de/Why-Nations-Fi...ps%2C51&sr=8-1

Four generic motives have historically led states to initiate war: fear, interest, standing, and revenge. Using an original data set, Richard Ned Lebow examines the distribution of wars across three and a half centuries and argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, only a minority of these were motivated by security or material interest. Instead, the majority are the result of a quest for standing, and for revenge - an attempt to get even with states who had previously made successful territorial grabs. Lebow maintains that today none of these motives are effectively served by war - it is increasingly counterproductive - and that there is growing recognition of this political reality. His analysis allows for more fine-grained and persuasive forecasts about the future of war as well as highlighting areas of uncertainty.
(...)
'Richard Ned Lebow makes an extremely successful attempt at broaching lucidly the main theories of war, and offers a most fascinating and convincing way of bringing them up to date. He strongly renews a classical field of IR studies by considering the new conflicts in a very relevant manner.' Bertrand Badie, Professor, Sciences Po, Paris

'In Why Nations Fight, Richard Ned Lebow makes a welcome contribution to the study of war by bringing motives and reasons (rather than just goals and intentions) back in. Extending his theory of human motives, he develops a typology of wars and establishes a series of propositions about war-initiation which he evaluates on a new historical data set. Last, but not least, he speculates on the future of wars by extrapolating from historical shifts in both the salience of motives and the changing understanding actors have of them.' Stefano Guzzini, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies

'In Why Nations Fight Richard Ned Lebow continues the path-breaking attempt that he started in A Cultural Theory of International Relations to re-orient the way that we study international relations. In this new book he delivers on his promise to draw on systematic data to assess his theoretical analysis of war and, as a consequence, is able to reach some fascinating and broadly optimistic conclusions. Both his theory and evidence indicates that although one of the major reasons that states have gone to war in the past is to raise their international esteem, because of some complex social and cultural changes, war is now much less likely to achieve this goal. It follows that states are becoming much less motivated to go to war. This is a stimulating and challenging attack on orthodox thinking in the field.' Richard Little, University of Bristol

'… understanding why states enter into wars that have, in the last century alone, led to the collapse of empires, the subjugation of great powers and the destruction of man and his environment is essential, if only to mitigate the ruthlessness and danger and not to solve it. In this disciplinary and historical context, Richard Ned Lebow's Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War offers and argument that, if heeded, should teach theorists and practitioners of international affairs just how and why they continue to find themselves embroiled in conflict year after year. CEU Political Science Journal