The News: War! What Is It Good For?

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

The future of the global interstate system into the rest of the 21st Century continues to command my thinking lately. I find myself constantly wondering whether a system that is as young as it is in relative terms and as palpably unstable as it has been—a source of a lot of bad as well as good outcomes in contemporary human life—is undergoing some kind of transition or decomposition, or if all of the turmoil of the last 25 years is just the way it’s going to be from here on out.

I certainly get frustrated by the way a fair amount of social science takes the global systems established in thin sliver of time of the last seventy-five years or so as the universal constant against which all human behavior can be measured and predicted. The only way that’s even remotely sound is if you subscribe to some sort of strong teleological view of history, that we live in a time whose basic nature cannot be reversed, that history is moving in a line towards something. I really can’t see how anybody, in any ideological corner, can feel confident about that proposition right now. About the only thing I’m sure of is that the planet’s climate is changing and I even suspect there are unpredictable combinatorial aspects of that change which will in turn have unpredictable effects on existing human institutions and societies.

In a narrower vein, one of the aspects of the contemporary world system that grabs my attention repeatedly is interstate warfare. I completely understand the use of police and military power to suppress dissent or seize control of the institutions and resources of the state in the post-1945 world. That’s a predictably recurrent aspect of life within a state. And I’m sorry to say, but it tends to work out in favor of most state regimes. Every once in a while, the people who control a particular state are caught flat-footed in the face of mass resistance or find that the police and military power they expected to deploy is either disloyal to them or is so attenuated through neglect and corruption that it can’t shore up the authority of the rulers of record. That’s usually a short-term condition, as for example in the Arab Spring in Egypt. Sooner or later someone with guns and men goes to war against their own population and climbs back on top.

But states deploying military and police power against another state? How often does that actually work in Clausewitzian terms, to achieve a political outcome that one state sought in another state, in the last seventy-five years? I loathe the blithe anti-war slogan that war never settles anything simply because it’s blatantly untrue, but in the interstate system established after World War II, it does seem to me that interstate aggressors have rarely achieved what they say they wanted to achieve through the use of military power.

This is, I know, a heavily analyzed subject in several large bodies of scholarship. I hope I can be forgiven a markedly naive attempt to think towards it on first principles from the examples that come to mind. Sticking first to an analysis that takes what state leaderships claim as the reasons for initiating aggression at the outset of a war (because afterwards, every state leadership will at least try to move the goalposts and claim that they got what they really wanted), are there any successful aggressors in the post-1945 world system?

Yes. There’s a handful of states that have invaded neighboring states and territories that were in some form of profound internal disorder in order to destroy a regime deemed dangerous or unstable. In many of those cases, the nominal aggressor has legitimately been able to claim that it was in fact responding to aggression and was merely escalating the scale of the conflict in order to defend itself. Tanzania successfully invaded Uganda in response to Ugandan attacks on Tanzanian territory in 1978; Vietnam’s large-scale invasion of Cambodia followed attacks by the Khmer Rouge government on Vietnamese territory. In these cases, the invading forces have often gotten more or less what they wanted: the end of a unstable regime and a restoration of previous borders, though often with some costs both in terms of military operations and in diplomatic and economic terms. Israel is a much more provocative example here, but I think you could argue that the invasion of Lebanon, despite its reputational and political costs both inside and outside of Israel, ended up securing Israel’s declared objective of curtailing PLO operations within Lebanese territory. For the United States acting alone, Grenada and Panama would be examples of major aggressive military operations that achieved their declared objectives with a minimum of consequences. I suppose you could argue that the U.S. invasion that reinstalled Aristide in power in Haiti would be another example, but that doesn’t seem to have panned out very well.

Has any state succeeded in the aggressive annexation of a neighboring nation-state since 1945, actually adding it to its national territory? The construction of the entire East Bloc—and subsequent Soviet incursions designed to maintain their hegemony in Hungary and Czechslovakia—is a complicated case, as it had the fig leaf of a treaty authorization and the East Bloc states were not directly annexed, even into what was ostensibly already a union of notionally autonomous states. More importantly, if we’re asking “who got away with it completely in the last seventy-five years, who achieved their aims in a lasting way?” postwar Soviet territorial gains largely have been undone, though there are bits of territory that Russia retains that were acquired at the end of World War II. On the other hand, in 2023, Russia does seem to have gotten away (so far) with annexing Crimea and parts of Georgia’s territory, though in the latter case there’s still some kind of legal mumbo-jumbo claiming them to be quasi-autonomous, I think. Vietnam seems like a special case here, but you could choose to see North Vietnam as a successful aggressor that annexed a neighboring nation. So far Israel has gotten away with the forceful annexation of East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the creeping annexation of the West Bank. China has so far gotten away with holding Tibet.

I’m not going to get into the question of whether forcible assertion of territorial rights into the ocean counts—that’s messy. There are many other cases that I don’t think count as war exactly where one state has been arming insurgents or engaged in some form of subversive violence against another where the question of whether those have succeeded or not in accomplishing aims would take another essay.

Then there are cases where aggressor nations made up some nonsense justification about their reasons but where the real reasons were quite different in a way that is fairly easy to demonstrate. The war over East Congo had a bit of the “because we are responding to threats to our own security that are located beyond our borders” but it had far more of “our generals, politicians and soldiers are engaged in plundering a rich territory with readily extractable assets” in which most of those invaders achieved that goal. I think there aren’t too many cases of that kind because plunder in the post-1945 world generally requires an extractive regime that squats right on top of an infrastructure built for extraction. Your soldiers might loot whatever they can, but you don’t undertake an invasion just to loot another country—you let your soldiers loot your own country instead.

Mostly, I think, interstate aggression since 1945 has palpably failed to achieve the aggressor’s goals, even in the short term and certainly in the medium term. Ethiopia didn’t hold on to Eritrea and the attempt to do so has created a perpetual security nightmare for the post-1945 Ethiopian state. I don’t think you can score Morocco’s seizure of Western Sahara a win in terms of the cost that’s been involved in holding the territory. Indonesia gave up East Timor. Iraq lost Kuwait in spectacular fashion, Argentina lost the Falkland Islands in a way that ended up causing the regime that planned the annexation to lose power altogether. The United States’ quasi-unilateral invasion of Iraq after 2001 was a failure by any yardstick; the more multilateral invasion of Afghanistan might be credited with regime change if the Americans and their allies had left summarily afterwards but instead they stayed long enough to spur the defeated regime back into power. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan was if anything an even bigger disaster. Cyprus turned into a clusterfuck for Turkey. North Korea didn’t succeed in its declared goals in the Korean War. Sorting out how to apply this to the breakup of Yugoslavia is hard but I think you could say the aggressors in that situation didn’t get what they wanted. Eritrea won its independence and then almost immediately shifted over to being the aggressor against its former oppressor.

I am absolutely not making a Steven Pinker-ish argument here, god forbid. The interstate system after 1945, especially since the end of the Cold War, is not in my view some kind of magic bullet against the use of bullets by states against other states. I’d take the position more that Georgia State political scientist Dan Altman has articulated: that there have been many “conquest attempts” in the last seventy-five years, and that underneath the system the possibility of conquest or territorial aggression is still a real and live impulse.¹ In that sense, it makes sense for nation-states to maintain military forces capable of challenging or repelling such attempts, though I think many existing state rulers have more pressing motivations for having such military and paramilitary capacity, which is the repression and control of their own populations and defense against insurgencies or internal challenges to their control of the state. Defense against interstate territorial aggression is just a kind of extra bonus.

Altman points out that territorial acquisition is far more often successful as “fait accompli”, and I think his categorization of 20th Century territorial acquisitions is correct on this point.² Even when they’re arguably successful, it’s extraordinarily rare that the aggressor rests easily in its possession: the memory of military deployment creates insecurity for a very long time to come. Hence, the most successful interstate aggressors in the present order are those who get in, topple a regime, and leave almost instantly. After that point they don’t really care what happens except that an identical regime doesn’t immediately reinstate itself and go right back to causing security issues at the border. Conquest demonstrably creates an ongoing problem with high costs even when the aggressor gets away with it. Given that this is the case, what drives any leadership in their right mind to consider “conquest attempts”? Why do the aggressors ever think about taking that chance in the first place given the crappy odds and the potential severity of consequences for the regime leadership that makes a grab for that particular brass ring?

I think part of the answer has to be (and here I’m in line with relevant political science scholarship, from what I can see) is that a regime thinking about conquest or unprovoked territorial aggression is already flagged as having a problem simply because they are thinking about aggression. It is weakness posing as strength, a regime that is trying to run away from some unbearable contradiction either within its own domestic political coalition or more deeply in the very nature of its national imaginary. It may be a weakness of a transient political regime—an opportunistic leader and his allies who think they’re untethered from limitations and see a chance to intensify their hold on the state, a regime that knows it is facing mass opposition and calculates that a successful patriotic war might change the status quo, a state that was built out of violent struggle and thus encodes a kind of aggression into its fundamental identity. A settler regime that is trying to deny its origins and relabel its subalterns as foreign enemies. Wag the dog, find a new scapegoat, buy some time. Always at war with Eurasia.

It almost goes without saying that this means that the people, groups or institutions that control states are not rational actors, in the same sense that people who spend a hundred bucks on Powerball when the jackpot is big are not rational actors. I don’t think any state is commanded by rational actors; I think rational actors in the strict sense are as real as the Easter Bunny. But if “conquest attempts”—or the possibility of interstate aggression—persists despite long odds, it’s not just derangement or miscalculation either. It suggests something deeper than that, that the interstate system will never be stable because the internal regimes that control national territories will never be stable, that all states are prone at some moment to producing rulers or potential rulers—and sometimes citizens—who decide that it is better to roll the dice, at whatever long odds, because power has always already crossed its Rubicon.

Image credit: Photo by Mahmoud Sulaiman on Unsplash

1. Altman, Dan. “The Evolution of Territorial Conquest After 1945 and the Limits of the Territorial Integrity Norm.” International organization 74.3, 2020: 490–522; Altman, Dan; Lee, Melissa M., “Why Territorial Disputes Escalate: The Causes of Conquest Attempts since 1945”, International Studies Quarterly, 66:4, December 2022.

2. Altman, Dan. “By Fait Accompli, Not Coercion: How States Wrest Territory from Their Adversaries.” International studies quarterly 61.4 (2017).