A War-Winning Institution

It is important to understand that Goldstein is not making the argument that Steven Pinker makes in his recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (Reference Pinker2011). Pinker maintains that violence of all kinds has been declining over the course of human history, whereas Goldstein focuses more narrowly on war. Moreover, Goldstein believes that peace has been on the rise only since 1945. In fact, he maintains that “the twentieth century may indeed have been the bloodiest relative to population but is not really much different in character than earlier ‘bad’ centuries” (p. 37). Of course, it was the first half of the twentieth century, with the two world wars, that accounts for much of that murder and mayhem.

This observation implies that something important happened shortly after World War II, altering the course of international politics in a significant and benign way. We need to know what changed, what accounts for the stark differences in the patterns of war between the first and second halves of the twentieth century. We need to know why “peace is increasing,” why Goldstein believes that “year by year, we are winning the war on war” (p. 6).

Although the author applauds the good work the “international community” is doing to promote peace, he maintains that the UN is principally responsible for the decline of war since World War II. “The UN,” he writes, “lies at the heart of the ‘war on war’” (p. 8). He cautions, however, that the UN “has many problems … but they should not distract us from the tremendous good that the UN has accomplished … in reducing war since 1945” (p. 8).

According to Goldstein, the key UN mission principally responsible for its effectiveness is peacekeeping. In a brief but important section that deals with “The Question of Causality,” he writes: “The kind of explanation we want would kick in mainly after 1945, and would accelerate after 1989. The UN system in general, and peacekeeping in particular, fit the bill in this regard” (pp. 44, 316). In other words, progress in peacekeeping after 1989 explains why the post–Cold War period was more peaceful than the Cold War (p. 72). Goldstein gives some but not much credit to “a vast but disorganized mass of people and organizations working for peace around the world.” He calls these nonmilitary forces “the Unarmy” (pp. 177–79). He also maintains that the concept of “responsibility to protect” (R2P), which the UN formally adopted in 2005, promises to further reduce the number and lethality of wars in the decades ahead (pp. 322–26).

Finally, Goldstein stipulates that he does not believe that the decrease in warfare since 1945 is due in any meaningful way to nuclear weapons, the advance of civilization, the spread of democracy, increasing prosperity, or the end of the Cold War (pp. 6, 42–44).

Flaws in the Argument

What is wrong with Goldstein's story? For starters, it is paradoxical for Americans like this author (as well as Pinker and John Mueller)Footnote ¹ to suggest that war has effectively been burned out of the international system. After all, the United States has fought six wars since the Cold War ended: Iraq (1991), Bosnia (1995), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001–present), Iraq (2003–11), and Libya (2011). By my count, we have been at war during roughly two out of every three years since 1989, and there is the possibility of more wars to come against countries like Iran and Syria. There may be a worldwide decline of conflict, but it certainly does not apply to the United States, which appears to be addicted to war.

Second, Goldstein does not provide a theoretical explanation for the way in which an international institution like the UN helps bring about peace. To be sure, there is a substantial body of literature dealing with international institutions that affect state behavior.Footnote ² Indeed, the dominant school of thought, liberal institutionalism, maintains that institutions can alter state preferences and therefore change state conduct. In this view, international institutions are important actors in international politics, powerful enough to help push states away from war and to promote peace.

There is an alternative realist perspective, with which I am identified, that maintains that international institutions cannot do much to push the great powers around. These organizations are essentially useful diplomatic instruments that the great powers employ to pursue their own selfish interests. When a powerful state does not like the policies being pushed by an international institution, it either ignores them or works to change them.

One would expect Goldstein to engage in this debate and make the case—liberal or otherwise—that international institutions can affect the behavior of the great powers in important ways, and thus foster peace. But he says almost nothing about this subject, and the reader has little idea what he thinks about the relationship between international institutions—specifically the UN—and the leading states in the world.

This brings us to the third problem with Winning the War on War. Almost all of Goldstein's evidence supports the realist position that international institutions have little independent influence on the major powers. This contradiction matters greatly for his argument because it is the great powers that dominate and shape international politics and cause its deadliest wars. Consider the Cold War, for example. One would expect him to argue that the UN—the key player in his story—had a significant effect on relations between the superpowers from 1945 to 1989, and thus it accounts in good part for the relative peacefulness of that period. But he makes no such argument and, of course, cannot because the UN was virtually powerless when it tried to push a policy that one of the superpowers opposed. Thus, it is hard to see how Goldstein could maintain that the UN played a key role in promoting peace during the Cold War.

We see the same problem at play in the post–Cold War period. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States was by far the most powerful state on the planet. How much influence has the UN had on American foreign policy since 1989? The answer, as Goldstein's own account makes clear, is hardly any. When the United States grew disenchanted with UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in the mid-1990s, for example, it used its Security Council vote “to bar a second term” and instead insisted on putting Kofi Annan (“the U.S. favorite”) in his place (p. 111). When the United States could not get the UN's permission to invade Iraq in March 2003, it simply ignored the UN and went to war anyway. It had done the same thing four years earlier (1999) when it initiated a war with Serbia over Kosovo. The UN's inability to put limits on American behavior is one of the main reasons why the United States has been so warlike since 1989.

None of this is to deny that Washington views the UN as a useful diplomatic instrument. After all, it helped legitimize the first Gulf War in 1991 and the Libya War in 2011. The more important point, however, is that Goldstein provides little evidence that the UN has had a significant effect on the behavior of the major powers, which are largely responsible for determining the broad contours of world politics. Thus, it is hard to see how he can argue that the UN is the principal cause of the decline in warfare since 1945.

This problem brings us to the fourth flaw in the book. Goldstein's story about how the UN brings about peace focuses mainly on minor powers, not the great powers, and is concerned with UN peacekeeping efforts in those smaller countries. There is no question that the UN has played an important role in helping to shut down some deadly conflicts over the past six decades, although it has also had its share of failures, as the author makes clear. Nonetheless, the UN should be celebrated for its efforts to keep the peace in some war-torn areas, which have undoubtedly reduced the level of human suffering there.

Yet this emphasis on minor powers, and especially on peacemaking, creates serious problems for Goldstein's argument. Minor powers are not the main driving force in international politics, and thus their behavior cannot tell us much about why armed conflict has been on the decline since 1945.

The focus on peacekeeping creates an even bigger problem. Goldstein's enterprise is heavily dependent on his ability to explain why war has not been breaking out as often as it did in the past. That means he has to be concerned about the causes of war and peace. But peacekeeping occurs after a war breaks out, and thus has little to do with why wars break out in the first place. In other words, UN peacekeeping, which is the centerpiece of Goldstein's argument, cannot account for the reasons that wars do or do not happen. Therefore, it cannot explain the drop in the number of armed conflicts since World War II. It can only explain why some wars were shut down after they started, a matter that is largely irrelevant for explaining why war has declined since 1945. This is a fatal flaw in his argument.

To take this assessment a step further, it was widely recognized by the early 1990s that UN peacekeeping had little influence on the outbreak of war. To address the problem, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali wrote a report in 1992 called “An Agenda for Peace.” Goldstein notes that it described peacekeeping “as a stage in managing conflict, following ‘preventive diplomacy’ and ‘peacemaking’” (p. 74). The report maintained that the UN should go beyond peacekeeping and “address the deepest causes of conflict.” It also recommended that member countries assign military forces on a permanent basis to the UN. The report, Goldstein tells us, “ran into serious opposition from the permanent Security Council members and never got off the ground” (p. 74).

The bottom line is that while there has been a decline in armed conflict since 1945, and especially since 1989, the author's explanation for this development is not persuasive. UN peacekeeping has its virtues, but there is no reason to think it has been a major force for peace during and after the Cold War. Indeed, some of the alternative explanations that Goldstein dismisses are more compelling.

Alternative Explanations

Consider the impact of the nuclear revolution and the end of the Cold War on peace in Europe, the region of the world that has seen many of history's bloodiest wars and has also caused numerous wars in other regions of the world. Europe, which was at the center of the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, has been remarkably peaceful since 1945. During the Cold War, however, the continent was almost completely occupied by two rival alliances—NATO and the Warsaw Pact—that were armed to the teeth and run by the United States and the Soviet Union, two countries that disliked each other intensely. Yet there was no war between them, and no European crisis that seriously threatened to escalate into a war. The main reason was that both sides had huge nuclear arsenals, which meant there was a grave danger that if fighting broke out between them, it would escalate to the nuclear level and both sides would end up getting annihilated. Nuclear weapons, in other words, were a major force for peace in the Cold War.

When the Cold War ended, the United States could have removed its troops from Europe, but it did not, mainly because American and European leaders feared that Europe would then go “back to the future.”Footnote ³ They believed that the United States acted as a pacifier in Europe and naturally wanted American troops there to stay put and NATO to remain intact. In fact, the Russians shared that sentiment, although they did not like NATO expansion. The key point here is that Europe has been peaceful since 1989 in large part because the United States continues to act as a pacifier in the region.Footnote ⁴

The UN and R2P

A final word is in order about Goldstein's embrace of R2P, which calls for initiating wars against countries that commit serious crimes against their own civilian populations. That doctrine, which goes well beyond peacekeeping, can only be implemented under UN auspices. If the major powers, especially the United States, get serious about this doctrine, there should surely be a significant increase in the number of wars fought in the future. After all, there are more than a few countries at any one time that are behaving badly toward some portion of their civilian population. That almost certainly means that war would be with us for the foreseeable future and Goldstein's hope of winning the war on war would fail. He might argue that these are good wars (a distinction he avoids in his book), but this development would also keep the United States addicted to war for some time to come.

Fortunately, R2P is not likely to gain much traction, simply because it will be difficult to get the Security Council to sanction R2P operations. This is certainly true with regard to recent events in Syria: The United States and its European allies have been pushing to intervene in Syria, but China and Russia will not agree to an R2P operation in that country. If this case is a harbinger of what is to come, the UN might end up making a more substantial contribution to world peace. To do so, however, it would have to act in ways that cut against Goldstein's prescription for “what we can do” to make the world more peaceful (p. 308).