War

 

Dennis Copeland's monument to the War of 1812.

I have recently once again encountered the inedible horse chestnut that “war never solved anything.” I have seen it attributed to Oriana Fallaci. The argument is that the underlying problems will remain and resurface, no matter the outcome.

It sounds good, and virtuous, and consoling, but it is wrong. It is equivalent to saying that policing, or self-defense, never solved anything. That could be true if there were no evil in the world. In most wars, there is a right and a wrong, and if the right does not war, the wrong triumphs.

The Second World War prevented Nazism from taking over Europe, then the world, and killing all the Jews. It may not have wiped out the ideas underlying fascism and Nazism—they seem to stay with us, now masquerading as “postmodernism,” “progressivism” and “antifascism.” But note that they have to masquerade. It certainly wiped out the credibility of fascism or Nazism openly so-called.

The US Civil War ended slavery in the US, and ended the option of states seceding from the union.

The US War of Independence achieved US independence; and perhaps brought the ideals of liberal democracy, of human equality and of fully democratic representative government, to the world stage.

Some wars, it is true, end ambiguously. Perhaps there is an argument here that the war accomplished nothing. Conversely, you might instead argue that the peace accomplished nothing; that it might have been better to keep on fighting to some definite conclusion. The First World War comes to mind.

The First World War is indeed often cited as a pointless war. It seems pointless to us because the casus belli seems unclear, so little ground was physically fought over, and another big war with the same combatants started only a couple of decades later. But it is wrong to say it had no significant results. It ended the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire. It established American world dominance. It triggered the Russian Revolution. It ended the era of European dominance, European empires, European cultural confidence, and the days of monarchies. It established the nation-state as the international norm. It changed the world utterly.

And there is probably a good argument that, had the Armistice actually been refused, and the Entente continued to occupy Germany, no second war need have been fought. The “stab in the back” legend could not have arisen.

 Americans might be seduced into the notion that war is pointless by their experience since the Second World War. Since then, largely because of the nuclear option, they have been unable to fight any wars to a definite victory. The Korean War, for example, ended about where it started. 

On the other hand, it is clearly wrong to say that the UN and South Korea accomplished nothing by fighting that war. Just compare conditions in North Korea to conditions in South Korea today.

Vietnam seems to have been pointless. It gained nothing for the Americans or the South Vietnamese. For the North Vietnamese, it was about independence, but it seems dubious that America or France would still be there had the war not been fought. The economic and political doctrines that came with it probably held Vietnamese development back for a generation or two.

The wars in Iraq may seem pointless to Americans, but only because ultimate victory was thrown away. It recovered the independence of Kuwait and took out the most open aggressor since Hitler, preserving international law and almost certainly preventing future wars.

Afghanistan seems to have been pointless for the Americans, since they leave with the status quo ante. Not for the Taliban, who were fighting to preserve their religious culture against foreign influences. Time will tell whether they succeed.

War is intrinsically awful and a malum in se; that is a separate argument, or rather, probably not even arguable. It is possible for a war to be pointless, but this is the exception, not the rule. More often, to refuse to fight when wrong meets right is simple moral cowardice.