Joshua S. Goldstein: We're Winning the War on War
Joshua S. Goldstein is a professor at the School of International Service at American University, winner of the International Studies Association "Book of the Decade" award, among others, and a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he lives.
In the first half of the twentieth century, world wars killed tens of millions and left whole continents in ruins. In the second half of that century, during the Cold War, proxy wars killed millions, and the world feared a nuclear war that could have wiped out our species. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the worst wars, such as those in Iraq and Sudan, kill hundreds of thousands. We fear terrorist attacks that could destroy a city, but not life on the planet. The fatalities still represent a large number and the impacts of wars are still catastrophic for those caught in them, but overall, war has diminished dramatically. Can the world, step by step and with ups and downs, actually reduce the amount of war violence taking place? Can it move down the scale of war over time? Actually, this has been happening already for decades.
In the post-Cold War era that began in 1990, far fewer people have died in wars each year than during the Cold War. And within the post-Cold War era, the new century so far has seen fewer deaths per year from war violence than in the 1990s. More wars are ending than beginning, once ended they are less likely to restart, and the remaining wars are more localized than in the past.
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar describes the state of the world when he became secretary-general of the United Nations (UN) in 1982: Iraq and Iran were in a "cruel war," Israel and the PLO were battling over Lebanon, the Soviet Union occupied and brutalized Afghanistan, U.S.-Soviet relations had hit a low, apartheid ruled in South Africa and postcolonial conflicts raged elsewhere in Africa. Central America had "social strife and insurgency ... And casting its ominous shadow over all was the mounting arsenal of nuclear weapons, bearing in them the threat to humanity's very survival....