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Dyer: Has post-war generation forgotten how hard-won peace is?

Post-WW2 slaughter, the solution settled on was simple: changing borders by force is against the law; attacking another country is a crime.

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Eighty years ago, we set out to drain the swamp. At least 50 million people were dead after the greatest war in history, around half the cities in the northern hemisphere had been smashed flat, and the first nuclear weapons had just been dropped on Japanese cities.

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People were in shock. They hadn’t known how destructive war could get, and now they realized the next big war would be incomparably worse: nuclear war. So, they decided the goal must be not to win wars, but to end war.

Don’t think they were naive. They were having this conversation standing hip-deep in the wreckage of the last war. Many of them had fought in it, and almost all of them had lost people close to them. So, between 1945 and 1948, they wrote new rules that made war illegal.

Early in my career as a journalist, I interviewed quite a lot of these people, and what struck me was the brutal realism most of them brought to the project. No airy-fairy stuff about brotherhood and peace, just hard-nosed calculations about how to contain or thwart the large number of countries which had designs on their neighbours.

They decided the key issue was territory, because that’s what the great majority of wars have been about, not just in historical times, but also in pre-historic times and even in the pre-human past.

The Middle East wars of the past 75 years are all ultimately about the division of Palestine between Jews and Arabs in 1948. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is entirely about bringing at least the Slavic parts of the old Soviet Union back under Moscow’s control. India-Pakistan, North Korea-South Korea … there’s an endless supply.

The solution they settled on was simple. From then on, it will be against the law to change a border by force. Attacking another country will be a crime.

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Yes, this was unfair to countries that lost territory in the past and want it back, but that’s the only way to break the cycle.

Border changes by negotiation and compromise are permissible, but conquest is over. Past grievances have to stay in the past, or else we will end up fighting nuclear wars.

We may not be able to stop every conquest, especially if the violator is a great power, but the rest of us will never acknowledge that what the aggressor has seized is really his.

It was not a perfect solution. It didn’t even address the problem of guerilla wars and civil wars inside a single country, mainly because they were unlikely to cause a nuclear world war. But it did the job.

No nuclear weapon has been used in war for 80 years. No great power has fought any other great power directly since 1953. (Proxies are sometimes employed.)

We have been far more successful that anyone dared to hope in 1945. Even the number of deaths in war have fallen in every decade since then — until now.

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The problem, I suspect, is generational turnover. The generation who wrote the new rules is long gone, but as recently as the 1990s I would regularly get lectured about the importance of the international rule of law (code for the above rules) by diplomats at both the State Department in Washington and the Foreign Ministry in Moscow.

The general public always was hazy about the rules that gave us this long peace, but the people who ran the system continued to understand what the basic deal was. However, I don’t hear these arguments any more. The line has gone dead.

We set out to drain the swamp and we made some progress, but now we have lost the plot.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England and author of the book The Shortest History of War.

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