Direct exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran. Long-range Russian missiles hitting Ukraine. Drones over our airbases. Official warnings of a cyberattack on Britain that might ‘turn out the lights for millions’. China preparing to take Taiwan.
Are we spiralling into a new global conflagration? Can anything prevent it?
All our options are fraught with peril. Using British weapons in Russia plainly carries a risk. But so does letting Ukraine lose. Dictators on every continent would note that Nato was unable to protect an ally against a rogue state.
As the ascendancy of the West wanes, things look altogether colder and darker. Grant Shapps, then the Defence Secretary, showed remarkable prescience a year ago when he observed that we had moved from a post-war to a pre-war world. How did we arrive here?
The decades after 1945 saw an unprecedented decline in violence. Wars between states became rare, and a taboo grew up around aggression.
The American military historian John Lewis Gaddis called it ‘The Long Peace’, noting not only that people were less likely to fall in wars, but also that the worst Cold War scares – the Cuban missile crisis, for example – looked more dangerous at the time than they really were.
In 2011, the brilliant Canadian philosopher, Steven Pinker, extended Gaddis’s thesis. Pinker’s book, ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined’, showed in meticulous detail that, whether we measured wars, insurrections, homicides, violence against women or anything else, we were living in the most peaceful era ever.
The reason Pinker took such pains over his statistics is that he knew they were counter-intuitive. Violence is more eye-catching than its absence. On being told that our world has never been more tranquil, our first reaction is, ‘How can you possibly say that? Don’t you watch the news?’ Naturally, no newsreader is ever going to say, ‘Good evening, there is no war in Vietnam today, nor in Yugoslavia, nor in Iraq.’
We should guard against the alarmism that, for good evolutionary reasons, we carry in our genes. In 2015, I was being breezily optimistic here on CapX. Nine years on, it is harder to be so sanguine.
The year 2011, when Pinker published his thesis, is beginning to look in retrospect like the high point, the peaceful pinnacle. It is not just that there has been a spate of wars since then (in Syria, Libya, Mali, Yemen, Nagorno-Karabakh and Burma, as well Gaza and Ukraine). It is that the trends which drove and reinforced the post-Second World War pacification have spluttered to a halt.
The American political scientists Bruce Russett and John R Oneal identified three things on which a peaceful world order rests: democracy, economic interdependence and international arbitration.
All three became stronger after the defeat of Adolf Hitler. Democracy and the rule of law spread. A wave of countries escaped fascism in 1945 and another wave escaped communism in 1990. Other nations came singly to freedom, as dictatorships were overthrown in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
But at some point, perhaps in the very year that Pinker published his book, the tide turned.
Numerous organisations publish annual reports on the state of global democracy. Each uses a different methodology, but all reach the same conclusion. After 60 years of steady advance, in the early 21st century, the process began to go into reverse.
International IDEA finds that 46% of countries have seen a decline in the rule of law and democratic norms, while 24% have seen an increase.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, things have not been so bad since 2006: ‘Less than 8 per cent of the world’s population live in a full democracy, while almost 40 per cent live under authoritarian rule – a share that has been creeping up in recent years.’
Freedom House says that there have been 18 years of decline. ‘Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries, while only 21 countries made improvements.’
It is not quite true, as is sometimes claimed, that no two democracies have ever gone to war. But it is undoubtedly true that autocracies are more belligerent, and the conflicts of the past decade have all involved authoritarian governments.
No less worrying, though it tends not to catch the headlines, is the global shift towards protectionism, which started before the pandemic, and has accelerated since.
We often forget that free trade was promoted as an instrument of peace no less than prosperity. While no one has found a way to eliminate war altogether, globalisation has a pacifying effect, because countries like to remain on good terms with their customers.
‘Do you suppose that I advocated Free Trade merely because it would give us a little more occupation in this or that pursuit?’ asked the great radical Richard Cobden in 1850. ‘No; I believed Free Trade would have the tendency to unite mankind in the bonds of peace, and it was that, more than any pecuniary consideration, which sustained and actuated me.’
Cobden was right. As Milton Friedman used to say, markets are the best way to make people who don’t get on get on.
The wars of the early 20th century were products of a protectionist age. That is why, in 1945, the victorious allies were determined to re-establish free trade.
‘The whole world is concentrating on attaining the objectives of peace and freedom,’ declared President Truman in 1947, the year that what is now the World Trade Organisation was established. ‘These objectives are bound up completely with a third objective: reestablishment of world trade. In fact, the three – peace, freedom, and world trade – are inseparable.’
The next six decades vindicated him. But we are now moving in the opposite direction. China and the EU are focusing on self-sufficiency, and trade barriers have been rising around the world since the early 2010s, often disguised as eco-measures.
Donald Trump threatens a global tariff of between 10 and 20% (or 60% vis-à-vis China). It was precisely such a policy that turned the Wall Street Crash of 1929 into the Great Depression.
These two trends – authoritarianism and protectionism – have undermined the system of peaceful global arbitration that even countries like Russia and China used to acknowledge.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a contemptuous dismissal of international norms. China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, another violation of international agreements, made the prospect of peaceful unification with Taiwan unthinkable.
The United States, whose military might traditionally underpinned peace, is withdrawing into isolation. The global delinquents, seeing that the copper is no longer on his beat, are becoming bolder.
What can Britain do? In the short term, we need to beef up our defences. There are now fewer personnel in all three of our Armed Services combined than in the US Marine Corps alone. For decades, we have sheltered under an American defence shield that may soon be snatched away.
In the medium term, we need to invest in missile defence. Not just the kind that Israel uses to knock out Iranian drones, but the space-based system that Ronald Reagan commissioned in the 1980s, and which eventually won us the Cold War. It is a hugely expensive undertaking, and we should approach it as a joint enterprise with the US, Japan and other allies. But there is no surer protection.
In the long term, we must recover our historic mission as the world’s leading free trader. We have a comprehensive trade deal with the EU. We should secure similar deals with the US and India. And we should encourage other countries to drop their barriers against each other.
Sadly, we in the UK have a government that, far from investing in defence, is borrowing unprecedented sums to appease public-sector trade unions; and that, far from pursuing trade with the US, is crawling back toward the protectionist EU. If only we had the leaders the moment demands.
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