What Makes a War

I just finished reading The War that Ended Peace, by Margaret MacMillan, a history of the events leading to WWI. She asks the obvious question, how all of Europe could enter such a war apparently without any reason.

She gives multiple explanations:

–the rise of social darwinism that valued struggle and even war as an improving process;

–the increase of nationalism and a valuing of national honor, so that both leaders and public looked for a chance to demonstrate national valor and could not countenance backing away from conflict;

–the intricate alliances formed on behalf of security that caused one assassination—which concerned Austria-Hungary but hardly anyone else—to ripple into world war;

–the persistent success of the international community in averting crises in the decade before, resulting (ironically) in a blithe confidence that peacemaking was inevitable;

–a mistaken analysis that war would necessarily be brief, because no economy could sustain its costs more than a few months;

–and the misfortune that put some unstable and callow leaders at the head of several countries, at the same moment that more cautious leaders fell out of power for various reasons.

MacMillan paints a clear picture of the forces in each of half a dozen countries, but she insists that these forces did not determine what happened. Ultimately, the decision to go to war came down to the will—or the weakness—of a handful of leaders, who pushed for war or failed to push against it. They all went into it blind—either not recognizing the edge of the cliff as they approached it, or believing it to be an opportunity for glory or greater security rather than the absolute horror that the war proved to be.

I found it chilling to absorb the reasons for war in such detail. The lesson we have absorbed so well from WWII—that you must stop the Hitlers of the world while they are still weak—is very different from the lesson we might learn from WWI—that it is possible to drift into war in a spasm of enthusiasm or obligation and then find it a tar pit that cannot be escaped. The hard part is to decide which lesson applies best to any particular situation–to the rise of the Islamic State, for example.