WHY WE FIGHT

A bracing look at the many reasons nations go to war.

“There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefitted.” So wrote Sun Tzu, whose The Art of War is a classic text. Blattman, a professor of global conflict studies at the University of Chicago, concurs—but he also notes that while there are countless reasons for individuals to fight individuals and countries to fight countries, war is rarer than it might be. The reason, as he brightly puts it, is simple: “Even the bitterest enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace.” Of course, war has always occurred, and Blattman identifies five principal reasons. One is “unchecked interests,” meaning that the goals of the ruling class are out of alignment: They gain power and wealth while ordinary people lose their property and lives. The author argues persuasively that these unchecked interests account for much of the world’s organized violence, but another is just as opportunistic: the “commitment problem.” If a rival nation seems to be growing in power, then why not crush it now, before it gets too strong to defeat with any certainty? (Think Vietnam.) Blattman attributes much warfare to what might be considered venal causes rather than the usual explanations of conflict as emanating from the quest for resources or ethnic divisions, though they certainly figure. More to the point, as he writes, “there is seldom one reason for a war.” Against modern theories of intervention, the author observes that aims such as regime change are often unrealized, but there are useful nonmilitary weapons that can be deployed in place of actual arms—targeted sanctions, for instance, and decentralizing authority, the latter of which is difficult for bureaucratized world police officers such as the U.S. government and the United Nations.

Valuable for readers interested in understanding matters of war and peace.