Does War Pay?

Out of fashion for 100 years, wars of conquest are once again becoming more thinkable in 2025. Is that wise?

With pundits proclaiming a new era of realism in foreign relations in which Great Powers like Russia, China, and the United States can’t be expected to restrain from bullying and/or conquering internationally recognized states for all that sweet, sweet rare earth (total global market value of rare earth mining in 2024: $3.9 billion), it’s worth reviewing why wars of conquest, long the chief employment of kings, faded from popularity in the decade after the 1918 Armistice.

I wrote three sizable blog posts in August 2006 when the neocon fever swamps of D.C. were aflame with demands that the United States start a war with Iran to restore Israel’s wounded amour propre. Or something.

Back in the summer of 2006, Israel and Shi’ite Hezbollah in southern Lebanon got into a modestly scaled war after a number of provocations by Hezbollah such as cross-border raids capturing a few Israeli soldiers (compared to what Hamas did on October 7, 2023 to hundreds of Israeli civilians, Hezbollah’s behavior toward a handful of Israel soldiers seems practically Arthurian). The Muslim troops then retreated to their fortified rural bunkers and, by all accounts, put up a tougher fight against the Israel invaders than Israel had expected.

What turned out to be roughly a draw apparently humiliated Israel, which then devoted the next 18 years to its remarkable project to blow up Hezbollah leaders with explosive-packed beepers. (Unfortunately, in order to carry out such a prodigious plot against Hezbollah, Israeli intelligence appears to have taken their eye off Hamas: after all, how much mischief could they get up to?)

Hezbollah fighting the Israeli invasion to roughly a tie on Hezbollah’s home turf also drove American neoconservatives into paroxysms over the Shi’ite Menace to America’s Interests, such as, besides Israel, well … But that was not the point, the point was that American must gear up to fight … somebody, somewhere (beyond our already fighting in Iraq, then in its most violent year, and Afghanistan).

Whom should we attack in our third concurrent war?

Probably Iran.

Reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page in the summer of 2006, I started to worry about the sanity of the center-right, so in late August 2006 I wrote three blog posts laying out my theory of why, increasingly, war does not pay.

Who exactly will Iran invade?

August 26, 2006

"Spengler" has been claiming for some time that because of Iran's rapidly falling birthrate (the number of babies per woman in Iran is now lower than in the U.S.), Iran must lash out at its neighbors in a string of conquests to secure its prosperity before it runs out of cannon fodder. (Of course, that raises the questions of why the mullahs began promoting birth control in the early 1990s if they were planning on a campaign of conquest, but never mind that for now ...)

I've been pointing out, however, that Iran doesn't seem to be doing much of anything to prepare itself for the military offensives that Spengler sees in its future. Instead, it's devoting itself to strengthening its defensive capabilities, which is what you would do too if your east and west neighbors [Iraq and Afghanistan] had both been conquered in the last half decade.

Maybe I'm wrong and Spengler is right. But who exactly would Iran conquer?

It shares a border with nuclear-armed Pakistan, but the only reason for fighting a war over the Baluchi Desert would be to force the loser to take more of it. West Asia is full of horrible places, but Baluchistan, I hear, is special even in that league. And that's just the landscape, climate, and scorpions. The Baluchis themselves are worse.

Iran has a long border with Afghanistan, but, folks, while the Iranians might be crazy, they aren't so crazy that they want to try to occupy that place. Afghanistan is a fun setting for a few of your less-housebroken countrymen to wage the Great Game, as Kipling called the British-Russian rivalry centered over Afghanistan, but there's nothing worth the cost of occupying the godforsaken place. Afghanistan appears to be the last foreign country that a Persian Army went deep into, but that was over 150 years ago, and they may have been invited in.

And then there's Turkmenistan. Verily, it is written: "The nation that rules Turkmenistan shall rule the world!" Verily, it is wrong.

Moving counterclockwise along Iran's borders, we come to little Azerbaijan, which has oil. It also has a nasty post-Communist hereditary dictatorship, so I guess the Iranians could announce that they were invading to spread democracy to Azerbaijan. But big oil brings big friends, like the U.S., and the Iranians remember what happened to the last guy in the region who invaded a small oil country.

Iran has a 20 mile border with Armenia, which has an important natural resource: Armenians. For poorly understood reasons, Armenians can make money anywhere in the world ... except Armenia (although Armenia's economy is finally taking off, and Armenia should soon reach half of Mexico's per capita income).

Iran borders Turkey, but, trust me, Iran will not invade Turkey. (See the Mel Gibson movie "Gallipoli" for details.)

Then there's Iraq, where Iran has close ties with influential members of the Shi'ite majority that was recently installed in power, to the joy of the Iranian mullahs, by ... America.

Iraq has oil, but it is also full of American troops, who would much more enjoy a mission of obliterating an Iranian tank assault than their current mission. I'm not sure quite what the current mission is, but it's definitely less fun than would be squaring off in open country against a shooting gallery full of Shah-era tanks and planes.

Finally, beyond Sunni-dominated and American-garrisoned Kuwait, there's a real prize: the oil field region of Saudi Arabia, which is heavily populated by Shi'ites.

One advantage of being an old coot like me is that when the latest worries come along, after awhile you remember that you already worried about it long ago ... and got bored. Folks, I was worrying about Iran taking over the Shi'ite oil zone of Saudi Arabia in 1979. Despite all the complex theories I constructed at the time about how this was about to happen, it didn't. And it didn't happen over the last 27 years. Will it happen over the next 27 years?

The basic problem, as far as I can tell, is that Arab and Persian Shi'ites are Arabs and Persians. They speak different languages, have different cultures outside of religion, and have different relatives.

Then there's the changing economics of oil.

Obviously, the best thing is to own the oil, because then you can be rich, like President Bongo of oil-exporting Gabon, plus enjoy other perks, like renaming your hometown Bongoville, which would be fun to do even if you were not named Bongo.

If you grabbed ownership of an oil country, you could, presumably, use the proceeds to buy weapons to take over another country, and so on. That's what we theorized Saddam was intending in 1990 after seizing Kuwait (although I haven't seen much evidence emerge recently that he really intended to keep going on a chain of conquests).

From America's economic standpoint, however, it doesn't particularly matter who owns the oil because oil is fairly fungible and the price is determined, more or less, by the global balance of supply and demand.

However, we don't want any one government owning too large a fraction of the oil because that makes monopoly price hikes more feasible. Saudi Arabia's huge share of the world's reserves and low population made OPEC's oil price rise feasible in the 1970s -- OPEC was less a true cartel than Saudi Arabia and a bunch of hanger-ons. If Saudi Arabia was willing to cut production radically, the world price went up, even if Iran and other countries pumped more than they agreed. Likewise, Saudi Arabia could singlehandedly cut the price of oil to $10 in 1986 at the Reagan Administration's behest to strangle the Soviet economy.

Theoretically, you wouldn't need ownership to exercise this kind of pumping restraint to drive up prices -- if Tehran could put the word out to the new Shi'ite oil regimes that they were all going to cut back, a Shi'ite consortium might be able to have sufficient market power to boost prices.

But, that all seems terribly theoretical. I strongly doubt that separate Shi'ite states could or would coordinate that much, sacrificing their own sales because they trust the others to cut back too. There are good reasons people in that part of the world aren't very trusting.

Of course, the most likely outcome of instability in the Gulf is simply more chaos, more vandalism and corruption, fewer repairs, and lower production for all concerned, as we've seen in Iraq.

This could drive the world price of oil into 3 digits, but as a strategic or economic weapon, an oil boycott, in these days of large populations in the OPEC countries, is akin to holding their breath until they turn blue.

I came back with a more theoretical post:

August 30, 2006

War! What is it good for?

And here I will put the paywall.

Perhaps not absolutely nothing yet, but less and less these days. Civil war will be around for a long time, but invasion and conquest looks less and less sensible, even from a completely amoral national cost-benefit calculus.

Back in the good old days of James K. Polk, starting a cross-border war for lebensraum, minerals, and strategic harbors, such as the Mexican-American War, could be highly profitable, especially, as in the case of Mexican California, when the target was ridiculously underpopulated.

In the 21st Century, however, there just aren't that many such worthwhile targets laying around. Siberia, perhaps, but not too much else.

The lebensraum ("living room" -- yeah, I know, it sounds amusing, but it's not) rationale for war makes sense if you're using all your farmable land and your population is growing faster than the output per acre and you can't trade your manufactured goods for food. Japan fell into this trap when the Depression and rising tariffs choked off international trade, with the per capita consumption of calories by the Japanese falling during the 1930s toward dangerously low levels. Thus, Japan's horrific war in China. Fortunately, all those conditions are unlikely to apply these days.

Minerals, other than oil, just aren't that important economically anymore. And we're spending 50% more on occupying Iraq each year than all the whole country's current oil production is worth at $70 per barrel even if we stole every drop.

Harbors and other strategic spots are still of some value, but the great natural harbor of San Francisco is, oddly enough, less busy these days than the artificial harbor of Los Angeles-Long Beach. Owning stuff like Gibraltar and the Panama Canal just isn't that important anymore.

If you are a high tariff country, it's economically advantageous to bring more territory within your tariff barriers, but tariffs are awfully low these days.

Also, most of the great empires are largely broken up. Most countries are ruled by somebody from, more or less, their own continent and race. Israel is seen as a European intrusion into the Middle East, so it's highly unpopular with its neighbors, but most of the other extra-continental outposts of white rule are gone, like Rhodesia and South Africa, or are dominant, like Canada and Australia.

Of course, there will continue to be fighting that will probably eventually break up some existing countries like Sudan, and there will continue to be civil wars over who controls the machinery of state, but the era of cross-border conquest is probably largely over, except in political and media vacuums like the Congo.

The perceived cost of holding a conquest has skyrocketed. There just aren't that many empty spots on the map anymore, the way the San Francisco Bay Area, perhaps the finest spot for human habitation on earth (and I'm from LA so that's not easy for me to say), was practically empty in 1845.

Moreover, the spread of the idea of nationalism from Europe to the rest of the world, replacing dynasticism as the reigning assumption, means that the kind of easy occupations that, say, the British enjoyed in India for so long just aren't feasible. If the masses assume that who rules them is none of their business, then it's pretty easy for an outsider to take over. But, nowadays, everybody believes that their rulers should be, more or less, from among them.

Further, countries that are advanced enough to enjoy the air supremacy that allows you to conquer another country are generally also so advanced that they don't have the stomach for a massive occupation of a foreign country that's not directly threatening them. To permanently crush a popular insurgency, you have to slaughter a lot of insurgents, and that's hard to do when the victims' relatives have video cameras to show the carnage on television around the world.

Of course, there will be plenty of opportunities to carry on the Great Game of States by other means. But the payoffs from war-by-other-means will be far less than in the days when a few hundred Conquistadors could conquer two empires.

Still, there will be plenty of men who will get very excited over every twist and turn in the Game of Nations, and bay for war to prevent any loss of the slightest advantage. As former war correspondent Fred Reed notes, after decades of following the sounds of guns it occurred to him that war, important as it seems at the time, is just something males do.

And my August 31, 2006 post:

The Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies

The decline of war: A reader points me toward Ohio State professor John Mueller, who occupies the manliest-sounding academic position I've ever heard of: the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies.

Woody was the famous Ohio St. football coach who got canned for punching too many people on the sidelines. One of my most cherished sports-watching memories is the live shot of Woody reacting, poorly, to his team's late turnover in the big game against Michigan. Woody noticed the cameraman recording his agony, turned, and, live on national TV, punched the cameraman in the face. The sight of Woody's fist heading for a point just next to the lens and then the TV camera woozily broadcasting a shot of the sky was totally great. I couldn't find the incident on YouTube, but I did find this later clip of Woody punching an opposing Clemson player, starting a riot, which is what finally got him fired:)

Anyway, Doc Mueller's presumably not some panzy-wanzy pacifist commie symp, at least by the standards of college professors. But, in these days of war fever (over Iran, is it now? Or Iraq? Irap? I can't keep straight which Ira_ country is supposed to be the next Nazi Germany this year...), he's a real spoil-sport.

The Dregs of War

His 2004 book, The Remnants of War, argued:

"War is one of the great themes of human history and now, John Mueller believes, it is clearly declining. Developed nations have generally abandoned it as a way for conducting their relations with other countries, and most current warfare (though not all) is opportunistic predation waged by packs—often remarkably small ones—of criminals and bullies. Thus, argues Mueller, war has been substantially reduced to its remnants—or dregs—and thugs are the residual combatants."

Sailer's Dirt Theory of War: In the past, when thinking about whom to conquer, the key fact was that most of the value of the potential conquest was in the dirt acquired. You could use the ground to raise crops or mine for valuable minerals, which made up two large parts of the economy back in the good old days. War couldn't hurt dirt. Conquering California in the 1840s, for example, did almost zero damage to the place, which turned out, immediately afterwards, to have lots of gold in the ground.

Today, though, most of the asset value of a territory is in the buildings on top of the dirt, which are very easy to blow to smithereens during the course of modern war. And if you don't raze your enemy's cities, they provide formidable makeshift fortresses for conducting resistance to your invasion. So, you just can't win. The expected profit isn't worth your trouble. You might as well stay home.

(Slaves were also an incentive for war, but they aren't too fashionable these days. Who needs them? If you are rich enough to conquer some other country and enslave its people, you are also rich enough to pay the pittance more it would cost to get immigrant indentured servants from a place like Bangladesh. The radical increase in economic inequality in the world over the last couple of centuries has made slavery less profitable.)

Thus, most fighting around the world these days is conducted less like Grant vs. Lee and more like the Corleones rubbing out the rival families at the end of the The Godfather. It's less honorable, but less destructive and more profitable.

And in a new paper, Mueller puts forward:

Six Rather Unusual Propositions about Terrorism

1. Terrorism Generally Has Only Limited Direct Effects

2. The Costs of Terrorism Very Often Come Mostly from the Fear and Consequent Reaction (or Overreaction) It Characteristically Inspires

3. The Terrorism Industry Is a Major Part of the Terrorism Problem

4. Policies Designed to Deal With Terrorism Should Focus More on Reducing Fear and Anxiety as Inexpensively as Possible than on Objectively Reducing the Rather Limited Dangers Terrorism Is Likely Actually to Pose

5. Doing Nothing (or at Least Refraining from Overreacting) after a Terrorist Attack Is not Necessarily Unacceptable

6. Despite U.S. Overreaction, the Campaign against Terror Is Generally Going Rather Well

Now, I don't necessarily agree with everything Mueller says (I sound just like somebody writing about me!), but five years after 9/11, this sounds more and more worth considering.

There's a good reason, however, that people worry so much about violence. It's the same reason the New York Times has run so many more front page articles over the last decade about potential epidemics that haven't panned out -- Mad Cow disease, SARS, and avian flu -- than it has run about car crashes, which have killed lots more people. Unlike auto accidents, violence can be contagious.

We are right to worry about violence.

One reason that warfare doesn't pay these days is because the U.S. maintains an amazingly vast military establishment (here's a picture of just part of the "Boneyard" at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, where the U.S. mothballs 4,000 disused warplanes, which probably cost tens of billions to build -- in 2006 dollars). We can establish air supremacy just about anywhere on earth, which pretty much means that nobody can conquer anybody without our say-so. Similarly, the 19th Century after Waterloo was more peaceful than people expected because the Britannia ruled the waves.

Eventually, new kinds of weapons may negate our advantage, but in the meantime, it can pay to take a few deep breaths before charging off to the latest war.

Uh oh, I've now noticed that Dr. Mueller has one of those "Germanic surnames" that Dana Milbank warned us about in the Washington Post yesterday, and, judging from Mueller's picture, might possibly be "blue-eyed" too. So forget I ever mentioned him. You can't be too careful these days.

In case you were wondering, "Sailer" is an old, uh, Andaman Islander name and my eyes aren't blue, they're ... cerulean, which is not at all the same thing.

In my 2011 review of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, I expanded upon Mueller’s findings about the 1990s most notorious set of wars:

As John Dolan, the War Nerd, was complaining a decade ago, war has been tailing off in both quantity and quality. Young men would rather play first-person shooter video games than get shot at themselves. John Mueller, who holds the manliest-sounding academic position imaginable, the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State, pointed out in his 2005 book The Remnants of War that the much publicized Balkan wars of the 1990s were not quite the mass frenzies of ancient ethnic hatreds they were commonly portrayed as being. The politicians had such a hard time getting draftees to show up for basic training that they largely turned the fighting over to prison gangs, racketeers, and soccer hooligans.

Similarly, in the current Ukraine-Russia war, you see the Russians employing lots more felons, even at the risk that their boss, the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, might turn on Putin and drive toward Moscow (which, hilariously, happened, although Prigozhin wimped out halfway to the Kremlin), than middle class draftees from the suburbs of Moscow and St. Petersburg. And the Ukrainians have had the extraordinary policy of fighting an Old Man’s War with young men long being exempted from the draft.

But Twitter tough guys in America increasingly posture that wars of conquest would be profitable and enjoyable.

In an age of flying death robots over the battlefield, that’s … well … not true.

But there’s also an emerging market for War Is Fun neo-Nietszchean nonsense for callow youths.

Is it true?

Nah.

Take the word of a man who’d seen it all for himself:

“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.”