November 30, 2006
Peace and Globalization Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST In a piece in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune, Roger Cohen writes, in a chipper article on Chinese and Indian attitudes (“When War Is History, Let the Boom Begin”), that “these two leaders of the world’s most important emergent powers have understood that in the age of globalization the utility of wars has declined. It simply does not pay for big countries to go to war to get what they want.” Have they really? India is arming fast, and China faster. Their military expenditures are dwarfed by ours, but most of their military procurement policies are hard to explain if their elites wholly believe that it never pays for big countries to go to war. India faces a reckless adversary in Pakistan, but Indian strength is already more than sufficient to deter any rational Pakistani leadership, and it is not clear what level of armaments, if any, will deter an irrational adversary. China faces no discernible adversary, unless her leadership contemplates war with the United States over Taiwan. Given Chinese military procurement in the context of declared Chinese policy, which includes repeated if vague threats of war to secure Taiwan, it is hard to believe that all of the Chinese leadership thinks war does not pay under any circumstances. There are reasons to think that some Chinese leaders imagine a possible future of resource wars. There are also reasons to think that much of the Chinese leadership imagines that war between great powers is indeed a thing of the past, that war, as the grim old joke goes, is now a luxury only the poor can afford. But there have also been other moments when everyone agreed that great powers were so economically interdependent that war was deeply economically irrational and thus impossible. The most celebrated such moment was at the last peak of globalization—on the eve of the First World War. Another such moment was in the wake of the First World War, in a much less globalized world economy but at a time when many people had a peculiarly vivid sense of the unpredictability of war, and of its potentially horrific scale. That was on the eve of the Second World War. My own response to announcements that some political cultures have left war behind forever is much like my response to announcements that the rules of the stock market, or of the real estate market, have now changed forever and can never fall much below a current high-water mark. The response is that the study of history is not a wholly cheering enterprise, but it can spare you the embarrassment of saying some truly silly things.
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