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Opinion: What happened to promise of no more wars?

We've forgotten an important lesson learned in the Second World War about the causes of war - and how to keep them from happening

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‘When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original goal was to drain the swamp.’

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(Not very old folk saying)

Eighty years ago, we set out to drain the swamp because we feared that otherwise we would all be pulled under. 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.

People were in shock. They hadn’t known how destructive war could get, and now they realized that the next big war would be incomparably worse: nuclear war. So they decided that in the future, 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 that have designs on their neighbours.

Why territory is at the root of wars

Their theory was that most wars have at least a large element of territorial dispute at their root. The wars tend to be about land that one side has lost in the past, or the other side believes should be theirs in the future, for reasons that do not seem to justify large-scale killing to people who are not involved in the confrontation.

Territory is what the great majority of wars have been about — not just in historical times, but also in prehistoric times, and even in the pre-human past. (See Netflix’s ‘Chimp Empire’ for a brilliant documentary mini-series about a war between chimpanzee groups over territory.)

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It’s still mostly about land today. 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 chosen by these veterans of the worst war in history was simple: from now on, it will be against the law to change a border by force. Attacking another country will be a crime. Yes, this is very unfair to countries that have lost territory in the past and want it back, but that’s the only way we can break the cycle.

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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 guerrilla wars and civil wars inside a single country, partly because that was too hard — there is usually no consensus on who is in the right — but also 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 than anyone dared to hope in 1945.

Even the number of deaths in war has fallen in every decade since then — until now.

Why have things changed?

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 was always 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 for several more decades.

However, I don’t hear these arguments anymore. The line has gone dead.

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

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’. The previous book, ‘The Shortest History of War’, is also still available.

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