Thoughts on Blainey's 'The Causes of War' and its relevance to political polarization
What do war dynamics and polarization dynamics have in common?
I recently read the 1988 book The Causes of War, by Geoffrey Blainey. It’s a famous book, and has had three editions. I read the book because I was interested in finding links between war dynamics and political polarization dynamics, and I’ll share a few meandering thoughts I had on reading it.
And, by the way, it’s a great book, and I highly recommend it. Even apart from learning about the causes of war in general, it’s a great education about so many interesting details about major wars. And Blainey is an entertaining writer, even surprisingly funny in parts.
A few caveats:
I don’t claim to be a war expert or conflict expert: I’m just someone who’s been interested in learning more about conflict dynamics over the last few years.
There’s a chance other people have written about these ideas below, as I haven’t read on these topics extensively. (If you know of similar writings, I’d appreciate hearing of them.)
I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on this; it’s a little rough.
People fight wars because they think they can win them
Blainey’s main thesis is that the primary cause of war is a confidence on both sides that they’ll win. There can of course be assorted other factors, and Blainey talks about those, but his main idea is that war will usually be avoided when one or both sides don’t think they can win a war. If a country thought it would lose a war, it would likely not enter that war and would look for other options, like appeasing the other country via negotiations in some way, or ceding territory, or something. Usually, the costs and risks of losing a war will be seen as much worse than alternative war-avoiding options.
To support this point, Blainey goes through many wars where countries on both sides were highly confident that they could win—and not just win; often they thought they’d win quickly. The overconfidence Blainey describes is almost comical at certain points, especially for those wars where leaders of a country started out highly confident and then were promptly crushed. Or the many cases where victory was predicted to be short and swift—and then raged on for years.
Blainey’s point seems kind of obvious in hindsight—like many great observations do, I think. People are cocky; they over-estimate their powers, and so they are more likely to enter wars.
There were a couple thoughts I had about this in regards to a country’s internal conflicts (e.g., toxic polarization).
People don’t understand that attacking people creates a pushback
One thing I thought about was: Why do countries, and the people leading them, so often underestimate the difficulty of winning wars?
I think one reason this so often happens is because attacking other people creates a powerful response in them: attacking others can create a huge motivation in them that surprises everyone. That is what I think helps explain why so many people overestimate their chances of victory. Sure, there may be assorted other reasons for their overconfidence (e.g., human cockiness, especially the cockiness of military leaders) but I think a major reason is that we don’t understand how much our attacks and insults on others create the very pushback and anger that we’re fighting against. We don’t understand conflict dynamics, and how a force we aim at other people will often be returned in our direction.
I was expecting Blainey to talk about that but he didn’t, at least not in this book. It seemed to me to explain so many of the specific scenarios of specific wars he talked about. To take one example: France thinking it would be a piece of cake to defeat Algeria in the 1950s, and then they faced a long entrenched guerilla war, and Algeria eventually gained its independence. France didn’t understand the pride and anger of the Algerians; they somehow thought they’d just lay down and take it.
And we can see this dynamic in many wars: Russia invading Ukraine is another example. There’s been a lot of reporting that Putin and his generals thought it would be a piece of cake.
One quote I have in the book is from Jonathan Haidt: it goes, “Culture wars are different than real wars: the more you attack the other side, the more you strengthen it.” But maybe there is an element of “strengthening the other side” in actual wars, too. At least, to some extent, sometimes aggression can strengthen people’s anger and pride and resolve.
I was recently watching the 2023 documentary Waco: American Apocalypse. The negotiator Gary Noesner, who was present for the early part of the Waco siege, said this, “As a negotiator, I know that’s what we call the ‘paradox of power.’ The harder you push, the more likely it is to get resistance.” (I want to read Noesner’s book on his negotiation career soon.)
In Defusing American Anger, one of my main points is that we should, all of us, see reducing toxic polarization as important because that polarization is what helps create the very things we’re upset about. The two sides in a conflict don’t exist in a vacuum: they aren’t just trying, out of the blue, to do things. Their emotions are involved, and their emotions are directly linked to the people they’re in conflict with; they feel threatened, they feel humiliated, they feel proud; they feel a variety of things that are created by group-related psychology. It’s these emotions that make them strive so hard, and make their beliefs more extreme and hardened and non-negotiatable.
So I think this aspect is the same in war and polarization: we underestimate how much our more aggressive and insulting actions will create in our enemies more willpower to defeat us.
And do we also overestimate our chances of winning?
Getting back to Blainey’s main thesis: do both sides, in our cultural/societal wars, overestimate their chances of winning?
I think this is the case for many of the more polarized and righteous people on the left and right. One piece of evidence for this is the presence of “we will defeat/vanquish them forever” type of language and thinking on the right and left. Many people seem to think that the “culture wars” can be won: as if some strategy or approach will finally rid us forever of the “bad guys.”
But of course this won’t happen (or at least, not for a while). We have real differences on various issues, and those won’t just go away. And, a lesson we might take from Blainey is that, when we think we will “beat the bad guys,” we’re more likely to behave in war-like ways: ways that dehumanize and insult our fellow citizens, and in ways that create the very pushback and anger that bother us.
One iteration of this kind of “we will defeat them” mentality on the left is people who’ll say things like, “The far right will soon be defeated; we just have to wait for the old and ignorant and racist people to die off.” (This is a view I hear surprisingly often that seems completely ignorant of the fact that Trump’s support amongst younger people has grown, and of the gains Republicans have made amongst racial minorities in the last 15 years or so.)
And some of the more aggressive behaviors by far-left activists on college campuses and elsewhere seem to be predicated on an idea that “those ideas and people we don’t like can be defeated.” Taking militant, aggressive action, to Blainey’s point, is typically something one does when they think they can win a battle, or at least when they can’t lose.
And of course, this kind of thing is rampant on the right. The rhetoric of Trumpism is predicated on the idea that “we will defeat the enemy”: it is often heard in his speeches and emails. And you can regularly hear conservatives talk about “defeating the enemy.”
I’m reminded of David French’s response in a debate with Sohrab Ahmari (which was basically two conservatives, one arguing for less toxic polarization and one for more) where French said the following: “There is no circumstance under which any political movement in this country can create a super-structure where the people that you like always win and the people you don't like and think are bad are always going to lose, and you're going to always like that outcome—-and if you try to do it, you'll rip this place to pieces.”
French put the risks of toxic polarization pretty eloquently, I think.
Does internal polarization make wars more likely?
One thing I wondered reading Blainey’s book was if a highly polarized country, producing highly polarized, polarizing, us-vs-them leaders, was then more likely to start wars. Polarization gives more power to people who think in more narcissistic, us-vs-them ways, so I would think it would be a logical connection. But it’s not something I’ve thought much about or researched; just something I was wondering about.
