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"War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to wa

• chinathrow 9y ago
  > "War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. Yet that one rule is broken multiple times a year by multiple nations in multiple regions on earth.
  • coding123 9y ago
    I think the jist is that this was still successful because if the UN didn't exist we may have already had 7 additional multination wars (that is if the first 2 didn't kill everyone). Of course we don't know for sure if that would have happened.
  • Diederich 9y ago
    It's a process. The point is that there is far less war going on now than ever before, on a population adjusted basis.
    • adventured 9y ago
      Further to that point, there hasn't been a serious war between major powers in seven decades. One of the longest stretches in recorded history. Overwhelmingly what we've seen in the way of war deaths since WW2, is in civil war and genocides by Socialist, Communist and Fascist regimes.
      • maccard 9y ago
        Don't forget that the US has had a hand in very many of those wars, and have been responsible for massive amounts of deaths in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.
  • eloisant 9y ago
    Including by the countries supposed to enforce the rule (UN security council: Russia who annexed Crimea, China building illegal islands in the Pacific, US who started wars based on lies for oil..)
    • adventured 9y ago
      Which wars did the US start on a lie for oil?
      • buttcoinslol 9y ago
        You already know which one. Halliburton share prices from 2003-2005: https://i.imgur.com/UgPNCBg.gif https://i.imgur.com/UgPNCBg.gif NY Times article about the division of Iraq oilfields: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/business/energy-environment/15iht-srerussia15.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/business/energy-environmen...
        • adventured 9y ago
          That's a false context setup. Show me Halliburton's chart where it collapsed down to $16 in 2008 after the commodity bubble burst. All commodity companies and prices soared at the same time, it wasn't at all isolated to Halliburton or oil. That was due to a debased dollar, which also sent all dollar-based GDP numbers skyrocketing around the world simultaneously. Go to Google and type in: "Czech GDP" or "Colombia GDP" (or dozens of other nations) and witness the incredible spike from ~2003 to ~2008, that's the dollar in action (ie the dollar losing value). Gold similarly soared historically for the same reason. It all crashed simultaneously as well. Those GDP figures almost all have gone down since ~2013, that's the dollar in action again, this time the dollar gained immense strength which sent oil down to ~$26. Iraq's oil production is at an all-time high, and that oil belongs to them. They're currently directly competing with the vast US domestic oil production. If the US had started the Iraqi war over oil, it wouldn't have willingly left Iraq when asked to, and it would have used its military to lock up all the oil contracts and supply coming out of Iraq, for itself and its closest allies, effectively annexing the oil. That didn't happen.
  • topleveldomain 9y ago
    The data shows a downward trend in interstate conflicts, colonial conflicts, and per capita battle deaths since the 40's. Civil conflicts peaked in the early 90's, but nukes aren't a factor in those. Source: https://files.prio.org/publication_files/prio/Gates,%20Nyg%C3%A5rd,%20Strand,%20Urdal%20-%20Trends%20in%20Armed%20Conflict,%20Conflict%20Trends%201-2016.pdf https://files.prio.org/publication_files/prio/Gates,%20Nyg%C...
    • kiliantics 9y ago
      There is other research[0] (also recently posted to HN, though it got a lot less traction than Gates and Pinker), that claims this trend may very likely not be there. It's very hard to prove. [0] http://www.mn.uio.no/math/english/research/projects/focustat/the-focustat-blog%21/krigogfred.html http://www.mn.uio.no/math/english/research/projects/focustat...
  • rictic 9y ago
    The fact that a law is broken is not a counterexample of the law existing. War was once the default, and lauded. Now it is the exception, and is decried and worked against. When a war happens we ask ourselves why, and the international community works to try to prevent it the next time. That would be truly alien to a world leader even a couple centuries ago.
• agumonkey 9y ago
  How much of this is UN and how much is the new world structure and technology meaning any conflict can diverge into WW2 and nobody wants to end up being Germany again ? I see this as the basis for cold wars and other international competitions, conflicts are converted into other outlets.
• jmilloy 9y ago
  Yeah. It seems to me that it's not so much that "war is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it." Or at least try to. That's probably a good thing, but it seems useful to me to approach it with a more accurate perspective.
  • dfmooreqqq 9y ago
    "It seems to me that it's not so much that war "is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it."" In some lines of thought, that's the definition of illegal...
    • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      OK, but even by that definition, it's not the UN that has made it illegal. The UN is pretty toothless. I mean, yes, they have peacekeeping forces. Those forces are not keeping the peace by force. In fact, there have been times when they have stood aside while one side violated the peace, because the UN force's rules of engagement didn't allow them to use force to prevent one side from starting the war back up.
      • simonh 9y ago
        It can be pretty toothless, but the mere fact that it exists as a platform for discussion, expression if views and the firmation if consensus is a huge improvement compared to nothing. I think the experience nations get of working together on issues is also pretty valuable.
        • jessriedel 9y ago
          AnimalMuppet isn't making a general criticism of the UN, he's arguing that the UN isn't responsible for war being illegal under dfmooreqqq's operational definition.
  • mcguire 9y ago
    The "Pax Americana". That term isn't right, since there are a few other countries involved, but it brings to mind the right associations.
• hoopladler 9y ago
  >Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal." No way, no how. Russia's economy, at their peak, was 1/7th of the size of the USA's. At the end of WW2, it's unlikely they could have beaten western Europe, let alone kept the US out, who were clocking 50% of world GDP at the end of '45. Equally, the USA could have never beaten Russia in the USSR itself. The entire nation was an absolute fortress. The armies of tanks, that would be vulnerable to air power in an offensive war, would be absolutely unstoppable in a defensive war, where you don't have long supply lines.
  • simonh 9y ago
    the cist of tye war to Russia was also ruinous and maintaining that level of conventional forces would have been a real priblem. Bear in mind they got a lot of material support from the Allies during the war and continuing without that would have been very painful. One of the first things Kruschev did was cut ground forces by a third, to rely on missiles for a deterrence based defence because they realisec they couldnt match the west in conventional capability.
  • scarmig 9y ago
    The 1/7 GDP figure is misleading. It is absolutely true that everyone had an incentive back then to overstate the USSR's position: Communists and sympathizers for ego gratification, American liberals to use as an argument for government intervention in the economy and internal reform, and the American Right to ramp up militarism and domestic repression. That said, the revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base. GDP captures something meaningful, but in terms of ability to project power it's only somewhat correlated. In a Communist state, it captures even less, because pricing mechanisms are all off kilter. For much of the USSR's post WW2 existence, it could likely have invaded and taken much of continental Europe using only conventional weapons. The USA had troops stationed in Germany not in hopes of stopping any invasion, but to buy a little bit of time and to make its defensive pledges plausible to allies: thousands of American dead would mean it would have to join in a total war, instead of calculating costs and benefits of total war (which would be unacceptable). Even then, other counties worried about America's commitment to an incredibly costly war with the USSR: that's part of why France developed its own nuclear deterrent and left NATO. Discussion of whether the USA or USSR would "win" an all out war between them is almost besides the point: they both possessed enough military power that the only way to win would be to, um, not to play.
• greeneggs 9y ago
  "The Internationalists" makes the case that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact to outlaw war was what started the paradigm shift against war [1]. (Of course the thesis is controversial, as you say.) You might enjoy the book; here's an Op-Ed the authors wrote in summary [2], and a podcast interview with the authors [3]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30753784-the-internationalists https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30753784-the-internation... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/opinion/sunday/outlawing-war-kellogg-briand.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/opinion/sunday/outlawing-... [3] https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-oona-hathaway-and-scott-shapiro-internationalists https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-oona-hathaway-an... > From 1816 until the Kellogg-Briand Pact was first signed in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one territorial conquest every 10 months. Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year... The average amount of territory seized between 1816 and 1928 was 114,088 square miles per year... > Since World War II, conquest has almost come to a full stop. The average number of conquests per year fell drastically — to 0.26 per year, or one every four years. The average size of the territory taken declined to a mere 5,772 square miles per year. And the likelihood that any individual state would suffer a conquest in an average year plummeted — from 1.33 percent to 0.17 percent, or once or twice a millennium.
  • smhenderson 9y ago
    Neal Conan covered this in an episode of Truth, Politics and Power [1]. Can't say I completely agree with everything discussed but it's definitely a good listen. Both authors are on the episode and, as usual, Neal does a great job of giving them plenty of time to discuss their book and get their points across. [1] https://truthpoliticsandpower.org/897-2-2-2-2-3-2-2/ https://truthpoliticsandpower.org/897-2-2-2-2-3-2-2/
• bloak 9y ago
  War is perhaps illegal, except in self-defence, but certain people interpret "self-defence" to mean "defence of (national) interests", but also, belt-and-braces, they don't actually declare war any more and claim that what they're doing, killing and maiming people, bombing hospitals, television studios, water purification plants, isn't a "war". Also, Geneva Convention does not apply because the victims are "unlawful combatants" or some such bullshit.
  • thret 9y ago
    It still applies. It applies to the weapons we use, how we treat prisoners, and how we treat the injured. Bad things happen, but please don't ever think your solider's are willfully bombing hospitals or killing civilians.
    • abusoufiyan 9y ago
      Why not? American soldiers literally bombed an operating Red Crescent hospital. They've also been caught on film laughing and bragging about killing civilians.
• martin1975 9y ago
  Nothing has had as large an impact on the maintenance of relative peace, at least between large/nuclear nations, as the atomic bomb. It's the MAD principle - mutually assured destruction. I think our discovery of nukes is actually pretty cool.
  • mcguire 9y ago
    I've heard that there was a sign at Oak Ridge National Labs congratulating them that their work had kept the peace for decades. My first thought was that they ought to have a monument to the Rosenbergs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg), if that is the approach they're taking.
  • CamperBob2 9y ago
    No question about it. Nukes accomplish something that no other deterrent can: they make world leaders personally afraid to go to war with each other. Those who advocate nuclear disarmament are basically advocating a return to increasingly-bloody world wars every few years. Of course, it's also true that the leaders who are afraid to confront each other directly are more likely to resort to proxy wars that cause massive pain and suffering in their own right. But that's a different problem that will have to be solved by different means.
• dotancohen 9y ago
  The bombed-out city that turned the Europeans was Dresden. Not Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Dresden.
  • kgabis 9y ago
    Not all Europeans, just Germans.
    • pselbert 9y ago
      It was what stopped the British led allied bombing which had escalated out of the Blitz. Dresden was not a military target and its destruction killed so many civilians that they stopped night time bombing raids.
      • lostlogin 9y ago
        Have you any source for that? It certainly raised questions but the war was winding down and destroying things the allies would need wasn’t in their interest. Bigger raids happened after Dresden as well and Harris gave his opinion: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” Luckily he alone didn’t make describe I guess.
      • KineticLensman 9y ago
        > It was what stopped the British led allied bombing which had escalated out of the Blitz. Dresden was not a military target and its destruction killed so many civilians that they stopped night time bombing raids. No. Dresden was bombed on 15 February 1945 [0]. The British continued night raids until the end of the war, peaking in March, and with the last raid on Berlin on the night of 21/22 April (76 Mosquitos) and the final raid on the night of 25/26 April [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden#Second_World_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden#Second_World_War [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command#Strategic_bombing_1942%E2%80%9345 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command#Strategic_b...
    • jacquesm 9y ago
• intrasight 9y ago
  I think the fact that liberal democracies don't go to war was the main reason - at least amongst western democracies. And even among non liberal democracies (eg China and Russia) as long as there is enough wealth and quality of lifestyle at risk amongst the ruling elite, there's not going to be much appetite for war.
  • CWuestefeld 9y ago
    Or more to the point, countries that trade together don't go to war against each other. The surest way to keep the peace is to be mutually dependent.
    • mcguire 9y ago
      That was the assertion prior to WWI.
      • intrasight 9y ago
        Exactly. It's not enough to have mutual dependency. You must also have liberal democracies.
• beebmam 9y ago
  If war has become illegal, then perhaps it is time that we make Nuclear weapons illegal as well. It only takes one bad actor to light the fuse that ends the world.
  • dotancohen 9y ago
    If having nukes is considered rogue, then only rogue states will have nukes.
    • jrs95 9y ago
      This is similar to what you've said, but I'd say the issue is more that it becomes more advantageous to use them if the same people who would normally levy sanctions against you have all disarmed. Currently there's little risk of North Korea actually using nuclear weapons. If they could do so without nuclear retaliation, it becomes a much more likely scenario. Even if banning nuclear weapons makes it much more difficult to obtain them, the consequences of someone obtaining them become much worse.
• 8ytecoder 9y ago
  The author covers that. (More details and argument for why he thinks that is in his book) https://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-about-better-angels-our-nature-why-violence-has-declined https://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-ab... The explanation for the decline of violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb. The theory of the Nuclear Peace is evaluated in chapter 5, pp. 268–278. I think it’s unlikely. World War II proved that conventional warfare was already unthinkably destructive, so the superpowers were already deterred plenty from provoking a third world war. Also, since the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so disproportionate to any strategic goal, its threat is for all practical purposes a bluff, which is why so many non-nuclear powers have defied nuclear ones since 1945. Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.
  • Nomentatus 9y ago
    In the past, such small-power wars generally began once the (at least failsafe) support of a larger power was obtained. This always had the risk that the conflict might escalating to a first-power war (such as the first Punic War which was sparked by a tiny-power conflict.) Nowadays, the downside of such escalation is obviously even sharper. The U.S. was never going to chose between Spain and Canada in advance of actual fighting (or Canada and France re similar issues), because the larger nuclear-fueled conflict with Russia made dumping allies overboard foolish; whoever began shooting would have lost. I would argue that the nuclear standoff trickles down.
  • kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    The bomb is only a real deterrent amongst the superpowers. The cost of maintaining and deploying a modern military force is a bigger influence. Devoting a large portion of GDP to a standing army is only possible for demagogues and those few nations wealthy enough for the waste to not be felt by the populace. And even for the demagogues, their impressive manpower isn't all that well equipped or trained because it costs too much.
  • Bartweiss 9y ago
• hinkley 9y ago
  We also had the horror of chemical weapons in WWI. It was becoming more and more clear that there were things men could do that men should never do, even in war. Otherwise you could just crop-dust your downwind neighbors and be moved in before anyone could even report an attack. I still don't understand why we're allowed to stockpile nerve gas given the past 100 years of warfare and treaties.
  • simonh 9y ago
    Actualy the reason the Germans didnt use nerve gas in WW2 was because they mistakenly assumed Britain and Russia also already had them. Hitler was otherwise pretty keen on them.
    • danieltillett 9y ago
      Hitler was an experienced soldier and had been gassed a few times in the Great War. He ruled out using gas.
      • simonh 9y ago
        That's a popular theory, but not supported by the testimony of those involved at the time. For example Hitler ordered that tabun production be continued as the highest priority even though the precursor chemicals were in high demand and very short supply. https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-Hitler-use-his-extensive-stocks-of-poison-gas-when-losing-the-war https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-Hitler-use-his-extensive-sto...
        • danieltillett 9y ago
          Well he certainly didn’t enjoy the experience of being gassed and he never ordered it used on the battle field.
• aljones 9y ago
  The US and Russia avoided conflict with each other before and after the atom bomb, and also before and after the UN made it illegal. I'm not sure either were essential or even effective deterrents.
  • macintux 9y ago
    In fairness, the US did come into conflict with Russia in a sense, by supporting the White Army in the civil war. But setting that aside, when would they have come into conflict? Prior to WWI, the US did its best to stay out of international affairs, and Russia wasn't trying to export a political philosophy. In the gap between the wars, the Soviet Union was preoccupied with internal concerns. It's very hard to compare the potential for conflict post-1945 between the two powers with any period of time before that. Russia and the US simply weren't all that relevant to each other (Alaska aside).
• nscalf 9y ago
  On top of that, I would argue that war was able to be made illegal because the major world powers found war among themselves to be incredibly ineffective. Many years, massive amounts of money, and hundreds of millions of working/reproducing aged citizens died for almost no gain by most countries. It makes a lot more sense to work things out through international policies and economics than by bombs and guns. All that being said, Russia still invades Crimea and Georgia, maybe because it's just easier and faster with absolute overwhelming force.
• pmarreck 9y ago
  If you consider war as (among other things) "a contest" (albeit a very grim one), do any of you think there'd ever be any traction in settling disputes via something more sportsmanlike and without such fatality and waste of human life on both sides? I am reminded of the pistol duels of ages ago (although those were often fatal). Something that could test the "will and skill" of opponents who agree to settle it in such a fashion... I'm also reminded of the flavor of the Olympic Games during the Cold War as almost a "proxy war" between the Soviets and the U.S.
  • jnicholasp 9y ago
    No, because a symbolic contest is not final in the way that the physical imposition of force is: a country who loses a symbolic contest has limited incentive to abide by the symbolic outcome if they believe they can nevertheless impose their will on the other country by force. Wars end when contestants lose the will or the ability to resist the will of the opponent. There can and should be other options to settle differences, but in the end, people and groups who have gone through all the other options will still always have the choice to simply physically resist the outcome, and there is no other counter to that than sufficient physical force to overcome the resistance. War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is.
    • pmarreck 9y ago
      > War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is. Perhaps when it comes to sovereign states, but with individuals you have things like tort law, instead of simply killing the person you have a dispute with. Why couldn't there be something like that on the international level?
      • jnicholasp 9y ago
        What incentivises individuals to obey the decisions of courts? In the end, again, it's force, as monopolized by the state. If you don't abide by the court's decision, the state will take measures against you: it will impose fines, garnish wages, take away various privileges, and ultimately imprison you. If there were no such unpleasant and inevitable consequences, many people would simply ignore a tort judgment against them.
• jk2323 9y ago
  ""War is illegal. This idea seems obvious." Well, was has always been a privilege for countries. It is absurd that some German generals were executed after WW2 for "fighting an aggressive" war (not talking about war crimes). Obviously the WW3 will make look WW2 like a piece of cake. "Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation." 1983
  • gowld 9y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIoBrob3bjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIoBrob3bjI Tom Lehrer - So Long Mom (A Song for WW III)
• WalterBright 9y ago
  Another factor making war less likely is the mass media. Remember how the Vietnam War was "the first television war"? Actually seeing what happens in war turns peoples' stomachs, and the propaganda of war's "glories" is revealed for what it is.
  • GeorgeTirebiter 9y ago
    Which is why the Afghan and Iraq wars never made it to TV in the same way. Journalism was strangled in scope to conform to commanders' wants; else, no access.
• danieltillett 9y ago
  War became illegal when those that declare war could not avoid being killed in war.
  • Making_It_So 9y ago
    STOP THE PRESSES!! Erase all prior analyses and all following as misguided. There HAS been a change: you nailed the reason spot-on: Nuclear weapons mean that those that declare war cannot insure they will not be killed by it. This does not apply to (1) pathologically narcistic insecure megalomaniacs, (2) multi-national organizations/companies that profit from war, (3) competing, well-siloed, immortal military AI strategic advisors, unfortinately!
• baby 9y ago
  > Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? Never thought about that. It's hard to tell, Everyone was in some sort of cold war with Germany before the two world wars. Nobody wanted to fight and this is what led Germany to conquer very quickly a number of countries.
• godelmachine 9y ago
  And any direct war that happened after 1945, had one belligerent that did not possess nuclear weapons, who turned out to be loser. That's the reason victor decided to wage war against him, citing some puny reason for the aggression.
  • ternaryoperator 9y ago
    > And any direct war that happened after 1945, had one belligerent that did not possess nuclear weapons, who turned out to be loser The Vietnam War would seem to belie your claim
    • godelmachine 9y ago
      I don't think Vietnam had nuclear weapons back then, or did they?
      • ternaryoperator 9y ago
        The US did
  • abusoufiyan 9y ago
    Do you really think the Americans "won" Iraq or Afghanistan? 15+ years of war, many trillions of dollars spent, nearly a million civilian casualties in Iraq, and what is there to show for it?
• tim333 9y ago
  I wish the "War is illegal" thing would have more effect on stuff like Turkey's recent attacks on Arfin. Not much seems to happen on the legal front there.
• iwintermute 9y ago
  I would argue that it’s just USA centric view of impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the damages where on par with “traditional” fire bombing. So their role in ending the war is hugely overestimated for propaganda reasons.