Keywords

George Kennan’s Containment

An ethos of this book is that the normal way for states to interact should be to keep it simple through dialogue and support for each other to flourish with better institutions. This generally produces better outcomes than seeking to pull off the complex task of containing them. Containment tends to conduce to covert operations and duplicity. Containment of Japan in the 1930s illustrated that complexity. Beggar-thy-neighbor policies were applied to Japan’s industrial rise with particular intensity. Japanese access to oil and steel imports was cut after its invasion of Manchuria. Western colonial domination in Asia pushed back against the emergence of a competing Japanese imperialism. All this was understandable, even defensible in certain respects. But its effects were complex in the way they led to ‘Asia for the Asians’ anti-colonialism and expansion through Japanese militarism. Japanese colonialism proved more tyrannical than its Western predecessors. The problem with how this containment was done was that it led the Emperor to believe that the only way Japan could break out of it was militarism and the folly of attacking Pearl Harbor.

Rejection of beggar thy neighbor policies after World War II, US generosity with rebuilding Japan, and embrace of Japanese companies into open competition with Western industry, was a simpler approach that renewed a democratic and peaceful Japan. This book will consider the history of the bungling of containment strategies and the empirical evidence of blowback and counterproductivity thereby generated. Keeping it simple through dialogue and support for other states to flourish with better institutions tends to be preferable even when we do not like their politics, even if we fear they will surpass our own state as a great power. Benefits flow when alternative views about how to organize economies, political and legal institutions, are put in robust, mutually respectful competition internationally. That creates a foundation for learning from societies that innovate into special institutional excellence. It can diffuse and be built upon when societies help one another.

George Kennan published the policy of containment of the Soviet Union in succinct form in 1947. This followed up on his long State Department telegram on containment of 1946. Its first principle was to contain the Soviet Union from expanding its sway beyond its extant hegemony. An oppressive regional carve-up was settled with Stalin by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at Yalta in 1945. The Soviet sphere of hegemony was basically the areas where the Soviets had conquered Hitler’s army. A second principle was to contain Soviet influence across the world. Moscow was contained from penetrating world markets, from access to Western education, knowledge, and technologies. The Soviet Union mostly contained itself from reaping the benefits of global markets and global universities by denying its youth the right to travel.

After Deng Xiaoping succeeded Mao Zedong’s leadership of China, China ceased making these mistakes. When China no longer contained its intellectuals from reaping benefits on offer from Western universities and ceased containing its businesses from competing in global markets, China grew to become uncontainable. Kennan’s hopes for Soviet containment came to fruition 40 years after his conception of the Cold War doctrine. Soviet power ultimately eroded and collapsed internally after being cut off from global circuits of power and circuits for learning institutional excellence. This became acutely true in the transition from the industrial economy (in which communism had performed quite well) to the information economy (from which it was too cut off to succeed, insufficiently nimble, and innovative) (Castells 2011). This book is about the idea that not only was Kennan right about his Cold War containment doctrine, he was also right about dialogue with the Soviet leadership during containment. Kennan was right about the imperative to respond to Soviet Premier Gorbachev and his successor, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, by dismantling NATO containment. During the Cold War, containment was interpreted by different administrations in variable ways. Some thought containment meant NATO cutting off dialogue with Russia. Kennan never thought this (Costigliola 2023). Western strategic thinking is so seduced by rational choice reductionism that it has suborned dialogue to being a reward for complying with US wishes. A fundamental commitment of human decency and effectiveness is dialogue with friends and enemies alike.

Radicalizing George Kennan and Hedley Bull Realism

George Kennan was a realist, yet one who was more influenced than contemporary realists by the English School of International Relations. The leading figure in this school was Australian, Hedley Bull. Bull joined Kennan in shared belief in a default capability for containing the Soviet Union (and communism) militarily. For Bull, this was a backstop of assurance, not necessarily the main game of making safe a dangerous world. Building international institutions of cooperation, interdependence, and dispute resolution were also important. Bull emphasized the importance of the evolution and strengthening of ‘international society’. In Braithwaite’s (2022) theoretical terms, this is about building the collective efficacy of international society to check and balance all concentrations of power, including the concentrated power of one’s allies. It is about tempering concentrated power so that power can become more effective in tackling existential threats: climate change and other forces that unravel ecosystems, war, Weapons of Mass Destruction, economic crises, pandemics, and more.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, like President Kennedy and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Kennan and Bull further strengthened their interest in simple, practical cooperation mechanisms introduced after the Cuban crisis. One was the ‘hotline’ that allowed US Presidents, and Chairs of the US Joint Chiefs as well, to pick up the hotline at moments of crisis to speak directly about concerns with their Soviet counterpart, and vice versa. In retrospect, wise thinkers began to ask whether something as simple as the hotline was not only an insight relevant to preventing nuclear catastrophes. For example, with what we now know about the failed diplomacy leading into World War I, historians pose the counterfactual: if that cascade of unwanted war against the interests of the greatest European powers might have been prevented had a hotline been available to their leaders (Clark 2012). This counterfactual is pondered at different stages of this book.

The pragmatics of this analysis are a radicalization of the international society vision of Bull and fellow Australian peace diplomacy scholars such as former Australian Foreign Secretary, John Burton, and the work of Andrew Mack discussed in Chapter 6.1 The contemporary conditions that make this necessary are the speed and character of cascades of risk that come from nonlinear expansion of unexpected technological innovation risks (for example from accidental or unintended space wars, cyber, AI, or hypersonic wars). It is no longer realistic to believe, as Harold Wilson and John F Kennedy did, that a nuclear weapons program could do the realist balancing part of a world that was a stabilized bird with two wings: nuclear balancing on the one hand, and liberal institutions of international cooperation on the other. The more these two leaders of the 1960s pondered the issues, the more convinced they became that eventually a destabilizing nuclear imbalance could threaten humankind irreversibly, just as Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein came to believe this after 1945.

This book advances the alternative of a world where risks are reduced by future accomplishments of persuading states not to acquire WMDs, or to dismantle existing WMDs (arguing that Pakistan is a good first target to persuade of the benefits of denuclearizing their defense), and to persuade growing numbers of states to scale back all capabilities for offensive operations against other societies. At each step along this road, our species becomes more capable of deferring the date of its extinction. As Ramesh Thakur (2023) puts it ‘the relationship between nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament is symbiotic, both conceptually and operationally. Each is a necessary condition of the other and the failure to achieve either is sufficient to doom the other as well’. At some future step along both roads together, total WMD disarmament might be achieved. Total conventional military disarmament (as opposed to WMD disarmament) will never occur in a world where there is always a cheap niche for startup warlords. International society might institutionalize as much disarmament as is politically achievable, realizing that this will never be as much disarmament as we would like. That inevitable residual of armament, if it can be embedded in a UN normative order, might always deliver enough conventional deterrence capability to satisfy the theoretical objectives of those of us who are peacemakers, but who wish to retain a deterrence default (while constraining arms races). I will argue that the empirical grounding for this grows with every decade as more evidence is uncovered of near misses with accidental or unintended nuclear war.

The Puzzle of Nuclear Weapon States that Rarely Invade Weak States

An empirical background to disarmament advocacy is that in contemporary conditions countries with weak conventional capabilities effectively defeat great nuclear powers by staying the course with resisting them. They do this militarily, through nonviolent civilian resistance, and diplomatically to see off invasions by great powers. If true, this hypothesis makes more plausible the peacemaking approach of this book. It makes narrowly realist analyses less plausible.

The relevant accumulation of evidence started when the United States and a number of allies, including two other nuclear weapons states (the United Kingdom and France) were effectively defeated militarily when they followed their 1950 success in pushing back the invasion of South Korea by North Korea with the folly of then themselves invading North Korea. They were defeated in that counter-invasion objective by a combination of North Korean and Chinese troops. At that time, China was not a nuclear weapons state, while the US, Britain, and France were. Later, tiny North Vietnam with support from insurgent allies in South Vietnam defeated two nuclear powers, first France, then the United States backed by troop contingents from many US allies. Later still, the people of Afghanistan defeated the then massive Soviet military which began large-scale withdrawal in 1988. In the twenty-first century, the Afghan Taliban delivered a comparable kind of defeat to invading US forces, backed by dozens of US military allies, with many of the militaries in its NATO+ coalition being nuclear weapons states (the United States, UK, France, India, with Russia providing limited military support from its bordering air-bases and China putting special forces troops on the ground in Afghanistan to kill and capture Uyghur fighters on the Taliban side). They had all retreated by 2021.

Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Afghanistan. The Chinese defeat in the second phase of the Korean War when they were pushed back out of South Korea was followed by two Chinese defeats when China invaded islands in the Taiwan Strait that were part of Taiwan in 1955 and 1958. The Taiwan Straits defeats were not catastrophic; approximately 2000 troops seem to have been killed on both sides in the fighting. But China lost several ships and 31 aircraft. They worried about escalation to full-scale war with the United States, especially after it killed some US military advisors to Taiwan. China’s short invasion of Vietnam in 1979 was its last. It was neither a victory nor a defeat. China withdrew after 27 days of terrible losses on both sides. Since this ultra-short war, China has not invaded another country. In this, my argument is that China has chosen a smart path to geopolitical ascendancy that Russia and the United States would be prudent to emulate. We see a related pattern in the fact that the United States has 700 foreign military bases, 800 on some ways of counting them, while China has five (less on dubious Chinese ways of counting some of them as on Chinese territory in the South China Sea). This in a world where we know that bases increase the likelihood of war in regions with foreign bases (Vine 2020). Build them and they will come, where ‘they’ is foreign wars.

War that once made great powers now weakens them. One reason the gap rapidly began to close between the other great powers and China is that Washington and Moscow did not change their views based on an understanding that invasions almost always have higher costs than benefits in contemporary conditions. NATO and Moscow both continued suffering catastrophic outcomes, without ever accomplishing any major great power warmaking success. At least this was true since the conversion of defeat in South Korea into the reversal of that defeat, then defeat of their own invasion of North Korea, then stalemate to endlessly frozen combativeness, though that counts as qualified failure as much as qualified success. US thinkers argue that Russia’s defeat in Afghanistan and its contemporary losses of battles, especially the 2022 battle for Kyiv, have weakened Moscow as a great power. In this, they are right. Yet such strategists are disinclined to treat the 2021 United States defeat in Afghanistan as weakening it. True, the Americans did not lose as much blood in Afghanistan as the Soviets. NATO lost a lot more treasure, however. For a Gorbachev who had decided back in 1985 to embrace Russia into Europe, the 1988–1989 withdrawal from proxy war against the West in Afghanistan was not the humiliation or debacle that 2021 was for NATO.

The United States lost much more blood in Vietnam. NATO drained a comparable amount of treasure in Ukraine, but little NATO blood. NATO supported Ukraine to fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’. Ukraine lost even more painfully from war, suffered more cruel loss of loved ones and homes, than the Russians have lost so far in Ukraine. My argument is that it was a mistake for the United States to decide not to pursue and support others in peace and preventive diplomacy early in most such conflicts (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018: Part I). The United States track record is of only pursuing peace after they get into wars when their enemies know domestic opinion in the West is against further acceleration of investment in these wars. Up to that point, US Democratic Party strategists like to prove themselves as hawkish as US neocons. This increases United States losses and weakens the United States, particularly in terms of its competition with China which has lost fewer international friends, fewer tanks and missiles, by minimizing their investments in wars and pushing early for peace, particularly in Ukraine and the Gaza war that has just begun at the time of writing.2

The historically recent failures of great power invasions were combined, I will argue, with more catastrophes than triumphs for Washington and Moscow from supporting different sides of proxy wars fought by other countries’ armies. China under Deng Xiaoping, in contrast, stopped supporting insurgencies, including those that Mao Zedong’s China had itself initiated in neighboring countries like Burma. This was also geopolitically beneficial to Chinese power and wealth accumulation.

Lebanon. Tiny Lebanon is another tragic and instructive invasion case to consider. It suffered multiple invasions from more powerful militaries in recent decades, two of them nuclear weapons states, because it gave shelter to large numbers of Palestinian refugees, some of whom caused trouble. Another Shi’a insurgency supported by Iran (Hezbollah) then emerged as more militarily capable than the Palestinians. Hezbollah was created in direct response to Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Military incursions into Lebanon (by Israel, Syria, and the United States between 1978 and 2006, with Israeli missiles targeting Beirut again in 2024) resulted in only temporary domination of Lebanon by the invaders, protracted horrors of civil war, destruction of effective democracy, and destruction of what was formerly the most flourishing Middle East economy. None of the invaders achieved any long-term control of the government of Lebanon. All three left with their tail between their legs, leaving behind a disaster for themselves, excoriated by international society for leaving behind a human rights disaster for the people of Lebanon. Syria, Israel, and the United States were blamed for the tragedy in a Beirut that is no longer the Paris of the South thanks to this period of militarist folly. As with the Kaiser’s intent with his World War I invasions, it was not the intent of Israel or the United States to occupy Lebanon indefinitely. Yet it was also not their intent to destroy the entire fabric of that society, leaving Hezbollah as the most influential of the fragmented political factions of an ungovernable society with Hezbollah backed by Iran and Syria. Hezbollah remained much more militarily dominant than the Lebanese army, with Iranian missiles and drones increasingly capable of devastation deeper into Israel. Syria would have liked a longer term occupation of Lebanon. But they were kicked out in circumstances that were the beginning of the end of Syria as a major Middle Eastern power.

Timor-Leste. Most remarkably of all the narratives of recent invasions, in 1999, a tiny country of one million people (Timor-Leste) pushed out a military invasion and occupation by Indonesia (280 million population, with one of the world’s largest armies during its 24 years of military occupation). Indonesian occupation ended with a plan of its military leadership for genocide that was foiled by international support for a UN independence referendum, UN peacekeeping and transitional administration, and a brilliant strategy of the resistance to foil genocide by the entire population fleeing to the mountains as soon as they cast their vote in the UN-supervised independence referendum. The Timor-Leste insurgency achieved little militarily beyond contributing to the ungovernability of Indonesian rule and providing mountain bases to flee to for those targeted by death squads. The resistance progressively shifted to nonviolent strategies that made Timor-Leste ungovernable and costly in financial and diplomatic terms for the invader. This was so much so that the Timor-Leste student resistance on the streets of Jakarta were indispensable leaders of the democracy movement that forced Indonesia’s autocratic Suharto regime to resign. It was replaced with an Indonesian democracy that granted Timor-Leste independence. The people of Timor-Leste defeated that invasion through those costs. This even though Indonesia had the tacit support of all the great powers—the United States, Russia and China—for their original 1975 invasion. The great powers would vote for UN resolutions from time to time against human rights abuses by the Indonesian military in Timor-Leste, yet until Suharto’s demise in 1998 they were giving the Indonesian military despot a nudge and wink that they were OK with the invasion because Indonesia was a critical swing state during the Cold War, the most geostrategically important leader of the non-aligned movement. This is the most remarkable victory of the militarily weak defender against a militarily strong invader in contemporary geopolitical conditions.

Wars won by noncooperation, weak guns. Old-time realists like Chairman Mao believed political power grew out of the barrel of a gun. Restorative and responsive theorists see contemporary power as fundamentally infrastructural (Mann 2012), utterly dependent on cooperation from citizens. There is no power if citizens refuse to obey, if they actively undermine the sources of state infrastructural power.

Needless to say, it was not guns that defeated Indonesia; it was refusal of the people of Timor-Leste to cooperate with the Indonesian occupation; it was nonviolent civil resistance of Timorese that then played a significant role in persuading the people of Indonesia to withdraw their cooperation with the Suharto regime that launched the invasion. The students on the streets of Jakarta in 1998 that forced Suharto to step down also began to persuade his successor that Indonesia would be stronger diplomatically and economically if it cut its losses from the occupation of Timor-Leste. Likewise Erica Chenoweth (2021, Chapter 1) points out that the defeat in Vietnam was mainly a result of the refusal of the people of Vietnam to cooperate with the United States and its puppets combined with the subsequent resistance of the American people to cooperate with the war. Add to this that allies like Australia were forced by the withdrawal of cooperation of their electorate to withdraw Australian cooperation with the United States years before the United States walked out on the Vietnam War. Another Australian walkout happened in 2009, years before the United States walkout in Iraq. The same in Afghanistan with Australian combat forces withdrawing in 2013, 8 years before the US withdrawal.

Chenoweth (2021) makes the same point about the defeat of the militarily superior British in the Revolutionary War. The British were mostly defeated by civil resistance to their rule during the decades before the fighting started, by citizens refusing to follow British orders, to pay British taxes, refusing to buy or consume British imports, and pledging their loyalty to parallel governance institutions led by Revolutionaries that made for de facto pre-Revolutionary independence. British colonialism had also lost the cooperation of most Indigenous peoples, who were still more numerous than white settlers in North America for much of the eighteenth century. When the fighting started, more tribes fought with Washington than against him. In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police accomplished a less murderous model for dominating Indigenous peoples into cooperation with British hegemony; white settlers then won equal freedom from British domination to their US compatriots through a slow food approach to civilian resistance to British rule. John Adams learned lessons about civil resistance as freedom’s main weapon. He wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: ‘What do we mean by the revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and a consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington’ (Chenoweth 2021, 20).

Ukraine. An addition to the list of ill-conceived invasions will probably become the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which many realists thought would be a walkover for Russia. It will likely end with both sides losing disastrously. Russia has little prospect of winning the cooperation of the people of Ukraine, not even the cooperation of the large part of its population that are Russian speakers who traditionally voted for pro-Russian politicians. The rot of resistance and noncooperation set in early with Putin’s war. Russia went in believing that Belarus and China would be staunch allies; they quickly became more half-hearted allies. Smart great powers listen to civil society resistance to war inside half-hearted allies; allied peoples may be ahead of the more brainwashed publics inside invader societies like Russia. Smart warmakers cut their losses early and enter peace negotiations early.

Kuwait, Georgia. There is a danger that my analysis selects on the dependent variable. So far I have considered only cases of failed invasions of the last 70 years. So let us consider the best examples of successful invasions of other countries by more militarily powerful states. Just as the 2003 NATO invasion of Iraq was an initial success, Iraq’s invasion of the weaker state, Kuwait in 1990 was initially a success that was later turned to failure militarily by a ‘coalition of willing’ greater powers and internal resistance especially from the Kurds. Later we consider that perhaps Gorbachev is right that with more time he could have persuaded Saddam Hussein to voluntarily withdraw. Either way, an initial invasion victory was never going to stand. The Iran-Iraq war up to 1988 was an even bigger invasion disaster for both countries.

We must go back quite a number of years to find a possibly, yet doubtfully, successful invasion. Perhaps one is the 2008 Russian invasion of tiny Georgia, which the West declined to defend. Yet international opinion forced Russian troops to pull back to the South Ossetia independent enclave of Georgia that Georgia had been provoked to attack first, before Russia counterattacked. Russia actually sucked Georgia into the attack. Then Russian counterattack could punish it for seeking to join NATO. It is doubtful that this was a fully successful invasion because Russia did not take over Georgia and it was forced to shoulder the financial burden of propping up a landlocked, economically unviable South Ossetian government. As in Ukraine, Russia marched toward the Georgian capital, but did not occupy it. It merely furthered an already existing fragmentation of Georgia in South Ossetia and Abkhazia rather than conquering Georgia. This seemed to harden the resolve of President Putin next time to push on with the invasion of a defector to NATO (Ukraine). That also worked out well! Georgia was a stepping stone toward Russia becoming Europe’s most hated state, and therefore a great power of limited potency in a post-realist world.

Ending the Cambodian genocide. Perhaps a convincing example of invasion succeeding during the past 70 years is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 that ended the Cambodian genocide. For different reasons, neither the United States nor China supported the invasion. China responded to it with an invasion of Vietnam in February 1979, discussed above, which cost both sides heavy loss of life. This short Chinese invasion of Vietnam did not persuade Vietnam to pull out of Cambodia but did trigger the first step of what became a decade of progressive Vietnamese drawdown from Cambodia. Nothing about these two invasions was pretty. A free and democratic Cambodia was not the result. Ending genocide was followed by the ultimate reversal of the Vietnamese invasion and abandonment of the invasion objective of making Cambodia a Vietnamese puppet. Then a UN Transitional Administration after Vietnam backed the Paris Peace Agreement was a better outcome than continued genocide or continued occupation.

Failed genocide prevention in Congo/Rwanda. There is no more deadly, post-Cold-War example of UN and institutional failure to prevent an invasion than the preventable invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996. The invasion was led by Rwanda, supported by a coalition of willing states that resented President Mobutu’s corrupt and oppressive rule of Congo. Disgruntled Congolese joined the invaders to help overthrow their despot. Rwanda installed as President the man from among these disgruntled factions who they thought would be a Rwandan puppet. As with the Indonesian invasion of Timor-Leste, the United States tacitly supported the invasion. Rwanda’s President Kagame was a poster-boy of neoliberal pro-American development whose country had survived a genocide at the hands of Hutu militias. Genocidaires had fled to hide in refugee camps in Congo. Rwanda won their invasion war easily to install armed groups to loot gold, diamonds, and coltan mines with slave labor that transported the loot to Rwanda. The army of Rwanda’s main alliance partner in the invasion, Uganda, did the same. All this quickly turned sour for Rwanda. Today democrats and other sections of Rwandan society pray for the day when Kagame’s tyranny ends. Almost immediately, their supposed Congolese puppet, President Laurent Kabila, turned on Rwanda and sought to evict the Rwandan-backed armed factions that were looting his country. This blowback meant that Kagame’s invasion plan became another ‘Catastrophic success’, as discussed in Downes’s (2021) research, and more fully later. Kabila’s assassination did not solve these problems after he was succeeded by his son, Joseph Kabila. DRC and the region were thrust into war that continues to this day and has caused more deaths, more rape, and more slavery than any other war of the past 50 years. Rwanda still suffers instability on its borders as profound as that which motivated the invasion.

The retribution against Hutu genocidaires hiding in Congolese refugee camps turned into a counter-genocide against all Hutus in those camps (Reyntjens 2009, 80–101). The conflict diamonds and the coltan in our smart-phones and laptops that was mined by slave labor under the guns of Rwandan gangs created a public relations disaster for Western corporations like Apple and for the failed US diplomacy of tacitly supporting the invasion of Congo, the slavery, the counter-genocide, and propping up as murderous a despot as Kagame. Only a tiny fraction of the Tutsi elite were winners; Rwanda’s dominated Hutu majority were hardly winners. Many Tutsi cronies who benefitted most from the DRC slavery and its loot turned on Kagame and themselves were assassinated. Kagame’s time as a poster-boy for anyone is over. Audiences that once admired him, domestically and internationally, now see him as a tyrant and war criminal. The invasion of Congo was a short-term triumph for Kagame that generated great wealth for him and his cronies, however. The United States could, or should have prevented it by refusing to give Kagame a green light to invade. Instead, Rwanda could have been protected through funding a UN Report proposal to move Hutu refugees camps that were threatening Rwanda back from its border and interposing UN peacekeepers between those camps and Rwanda. A realist invasion that cost millions of lives and in addition spread HIV-AIDS across the Continent was no solution for Rwanda, Congo, or the United States. UN Peacekeeping and liberal institutionalism should have been the 1990s solution to both the Rwandan and Congolese genocides.

Grenada, Panama. It might be said that a successful historically recent invasion was Grenada by the United States in 1983. It occurred after the assassination of leading members of the government by factional competitors produced destabilizing waves of violence. A request ensued from the head of state for a peace enforcement operation to the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. A coalition of six Caribbean states joined the United States in what was not therefore a literal US ‘invasion’. The peace enforcement oversighted a transition to a democratic election and a stabilizing regime succession in 1984, though this was accompanied by dollops of US domination that attracted international criticism. This was not an invasion but hegemonic regional peace enforcement.

In 1989 came a more literal US invasion of Panama that was a definite success. More than that, the successful US invasion ended the despotic military regime of Manuel Noriega that a quite impressive civil resistance campaign and international sanctions regime failed to budge (Schock 2015, Chapter 4). So this case not only supports the realist theory that invasion can succeed by imposing superior military power; it also refutes the theory that civil resistance can defeat superior state military power.

Noriega was plied with lucrative offers to flee to refuge in a friendly haven with US support. He turned them down because the specific circumstances of his military rule had made him, his military, and his state a narco state that paid handsomely for loyalty to Noriega. This prevented the military from remaining in the barracks in response to civilian uprisings. They terrorized protestors and regime opponents. Noriega believed that if he were disloyal to the Medellin cocaine cartel by fleeing to freedom with US guarantees, the cartel would assassinate him. The solution therefore really was a US invasion that cut through the Panama military with ease to install a democracy that became more popular than the despot. Noriega was imprisoned as a drug lord in the United States. The military occupation lasted 6 weeks at a cost of fewer than 400 lives. Noriega made it easier for the United States to invade by declaring war against the United States after the United States supported oppressed protestors defending an opposition that had legitimately won an election stolen by Noriega. So a suite of factors converged to make a realist military invasion work in this case. Both Panama and Grenada had comparatively successful transitions to democracy.

Summarizing the Modern History of Invasions

In the Korean War, if we push this analysis back that far, both sides, militarily powerful though their great power backing was, became losers when they sought to invade the other. Their grandchildren inherited a dangerous frozen conflict. Further back still, Germany and its alliance partners lost badly from the invasions of World Wars I and II. So did the Habsburg Empire from invading Serbia to punish it for the murder of the successor to its throne. So did the Russian Czar, whose family could not even survive World War I thanks to his decision to reciprocally invade the Habsburg Empire in defense of Serbia. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, accrued benefits at a cost of millions of Soviet lives when it conquered the Nazis in invaded Eastern Europe. It reasserted hegemony when it brought troops back into Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. On the other hand, 1968 in particular was a first step toward brooding defiance and ultimate imperial disintegration.

We can discern a huge strategic reversal during the twentieth century in how war works. The twentieth century has a long transitional phase of invasions sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding. Actually, the first of all world wars, where all major powers decided they had to join an alliance cascade, was the 30-Years War, 1618–1648, the first world war of a modernity that was emergent. It may have been the first case of a non-zero-sum war for a large number of states in the way World War I was (or in the way a nuclear war among the great powers would be). In the 30-Years War all participants were losers, not only from the sheer scale of troop losses, but from a great European famine the war caused, combined with war spreading a typhus epidemic and bubonic plague that took the lives of 8 million Germanic peoples alone.

As rare as invasions have become, this chapter has traversed the dismal record of invasions beginning with the Korean War, for achieving the invader’s objectives. This book will return to further discussion of China’s defeats in the 1950s by Taiwan when it attempted to invade Taiwanese islands in the Taiwan Strait, the French and then US invasions of Vietnam and Laos with many allies, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in retaliation, the separate Russian and US invasions of Afghanistan, the two US invasions of Iraq and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Israeli, Syrian and US invasions of Lebanon, the Indonesian invasion of Timor-Leste, the invasion of Democratic Republic of Congo by Rwanda, Uganda, and many other states, the attacks on Libya by NATO aircraft, NATO advisors on the ground and Sudanese tank battalions inside Libya in 2011 (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018), the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine by Russia, the earlier Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the short, low-casualty invasions of Grenada and Panama led by the United States.

Let me list some other invasions I could also have discussed that would not have changed my conclusions. I would say that they are all catastrophic failures rather than the ‘catastrophic successes’ of proxy interventions discussed in future chapters. None are clear successes in the way Panama was. I could have discussed the disastrous Suez Crisis of 1956 when the UK, France, and Israel attempted old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy against Egypt, the 1961 Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion by an army of US citizens armed by the US state in pursuit of a CIA invasion plan, the invasions of Indian Kashmir by Pakistan in 1965 and 1999 and of Pakistan by India in 1971, the 1973 invasion of Israel by Egypt and Syria, the multiple Israeli invasions of Palestine, the 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, the 1975 invasion of Spanish Sahara by Morocco, the 1982 Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands, and finally the Iraqi invasion of Iran of 1982 that was such a tragedy for both sides with more than a million lives lost, and a return to chemical warfare after a successful 62-year chemical weapons taboo.

None of these invasions change my conclusion that the short, low-casualty US invasion of Panama of 1989 is the only invasion since 1950 I can classify as a clear, sustained success for the invader. It was not a major invasion. Nevertheless, the Panama Canal, the Medellin Cartel, and removing a hated military dictatorship in Panama at that time were all important to the United States. Nor was it one of those short-term successes like the military defeats of Saddam Hussein that morphed to the ‘catastrophic success’ outcomes discussed in future chapters. Panama has been a peaceful and stable democracy in the 35 years since the US invasion. The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to defeat Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge was a merciful outcome for the Cambodian people in ending their genocide. But it did not achieve Vietnamese objectives of installing a regime of Vietnamese clients; it caused military fragmentation that turned to bite Vietnam; Vietnam was punished militarily for it by China, and ultimately withdrew in favor of a UN peace operation. Alexander Downes (2021) found the Vietnamese invasion to be a ‘catastrophic success’ in terms of the realist interests pursued by Vietnam. Yet it was a historically unique kind of humanitarian success.

The low ratio of one minor invasion success to many major failures between 1950 and 2024 is the reason invasion has become infrequent compared to its high frequency during four full millennia before World War I when invasion was the best way to accumulate wealth and power, and during the transitional period of peak world war catastrophes between 1914 and 1950 that ushered in a new world with a UN Security Council.

War Made Past Empires

Prior to World War I, invasions to suppress competitors in a zero-sum way, to acquire resources and slaves, made total sense, and made realist international relations theory come true. Invasion was on the widest scale and was greatest in enrichment when the Americas were invaded by European powers. Russia’s protracted expansion by taking bites out of the Ottoman, Chinese, and Habsburg Empires also built a huge and rich empire. Napoleon’s conquest of most of Europe further illustrates this reality that dominated before World War I. Yet the reaction to the tide of triumphal Napoleonic invasions also reveals the kindling of new diplomatic thinking. This was the idea that many lesser powers could unite in an implausible coalition of old enemies and temporary partners to resist and end Napoleon’s world domination. That notion can be advanced in a somewhat different way from Waterloo and the Concert of Europe, through the United Nations for example. The idea at the core of this book is to grow in an institutionally improved way the seed planted at the time of the Concert of Europe. What must be avoided about the Concert is a multipolarity that carves the world into spheres of domination by multiple major powers. There are no certainties, but it is possible to hold together an alliance of old enemies for long enough to see off a tyrant who seeks to dominate the world.

Invasions before World War I enriched winners in manifold ways. For the Spanish that could be as simple as stealing gold and silver from invaded lands. Conquest of the wide lands of the United States was also partly about gold in the West and rich agricultural land. Control of stupendous US hydrocarbon resources turned out to be more economically decisive by the time of the industrial revolution. Invasions built large internal markets throughout the long period of history when tariffs and customs duties were so high as to discourage the growth of flourishing markets without a big internal market. The large internal market could also deliver food security, energy, and raw materials security during wars. It could construct the finance power of geopolitically nodal banks and even the domestic advantages of commanding a reserve currency like the US dollar for the past century, the British pound before that, the Dutch guilder before the pound. The United States could dominate the design of the post-war rules-based economic order at Bretton Woods, and the architecture of the World Trade Organization to support US economic interests (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). By dominating the world militarily, the economy of the greatest great power always benefits enormously from weapons exports. Given how massive these structural advantages of US hegemony have been, we will see that it is surprising that a dozen countries have a higher GDP per capita than the US, especially in purchasing parity terms, in terms of how much American consumers and American armies can afford to buy with their money. The United States does have more rich people than all these dozen countries, but they have richer people. I will show in the next section that a reason is that a full accounting for the costs of being warlike shows that the states that go to war most in contemporary conditions are economically weakened by this, and therefore decline in relative terms as a great power. Nevertheless, people today also fail to appreciate how important it was to the economic growth of empires that a large swathe of territory was pacified from the disabling levels of violence from highwaymen, pirates, and common robbers that prevailed before Napoleon (Braithwaite 2022). That is an underestimated part of why realism was such an empirically validated theory up to 1950.

As great a scholar as Graham Allison is, my analysis suggests it is a mistake for Allison (2017) to contend that because in almost all cases where an ascending power was challenged by a rising power since the 1400s, war resulted between them. Therefore the risk of war between the United States and China today is acute. For more than a century to the present, however, Allison finds only five such contests, of which three did result in war: the rise of Germany in 1914 and 1939 and Japan in 1941. No such wars in the rising power cases since then. My hypothesis is that this thinly populated pattern since World War II is a better guide to the likelihood of war between China and the United States than the pre-twentieth-century pattern because of the wider pattern of warmaking by great powers and other major powers revealed in the earlier pages of this chapter. As Allison (2017, 154) himself points out, RAND estimates that a conventional war with the United States that did not escalate to nuclear war would cause Chinese GDP to decline by as much as 35% in the first year of war, and if it went nuclear, war would all but totally destroy the Chinese economy. Rising powers did not face this level of economic risk by their frequent warmaking of centuries ago. China has no intention of taking such risks today. Of course if diplomacy is conducted during the next decade with enough stigma, bravado, bluster, bullying, or provocation, a humiliated rising power might be foolish enough to get into such a fight. Democratic politics can create incentives for populist xenophobic politics, so this could happen. My argument is that even quite modest doses of restorative diplomacy can avert that outcome.

It must be added that widening the frame for understanding patterns of war beyond the narrow frame of examining the conflict between the two most strategic powers is not only a methodological imperative for seeing the bigger picture of warmaking patterns. It also goes to the problems of seeing war in Congo through the lens of the invasion of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda with US encouragement. That lens is important, but these countries entered wars that already existed for years as very local armed conflicts inside Eastern Congo. In the end, dozens of armies chose to fight their pre-existing conflicts from other parts of Africa inside Congo. Local conflicts co-opted national schisms to their projects and vice versa. Dualities of local fractures in Eastern Ukraine co-opting Russia, then Russia more profoundly co-opting them are important for comprehending the complexity of war in Ukraine. The same is true of Vietnam and Cambodia, Libya and its cascading effects across Africa that Islamic State piled into, and so many more of those conflicts in which major powers do join. At least since the Korean War, however, most war has been civil war; major powers join few of them. The chapters that follow consider wider patterns of the decline in civil wars for more than 20 years from the ending of the cold war, reversing to a steep rise in war and war deaths for the past decade and a half. The tragedy of civil wars in Eastern Congo, as in other places is that if peacemaking and peacekeeping had worked in the early 1990s in reconciling local Congolese conflicts, dozens of additional militaries could have been dissuaded from returning to one anothers’ throats inside Congo, consequences so bad as to make Congo the most deadly war the world has seen for many decades, and a war that spread HIV-AIDS across Africa and devastated uniquely rich ecosystems of the Congo river system region. We will see that simple enough forms of early detection, early prevention through local peacemaking and international peacekeeping can help prevent the terrible nests of wars we have seen cascade in Congo, Syria, Lebanon-Israel, the Balkans, and beyond (see also Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018).

Why Indonesia Grows Toward Becoming a Future Great Power

A decisive insight is provided by Indonesia deciding it was in their interests to let Timor-Leste go. It was no longer true that imperial mastery of a maximally large archipelago was crucial to the ascendancy that the East Indies had built as one of the richest societies on earth long before the Dutch enriched themselves by invading it. Indeed, by 1998 little enclaves that had remained separated from Indonesian sovereignty—Singapore and Brunei—had become much more nimble and affluent ASEAN members than Indonesia. Indonesia has credible prospects of becoming a great global power again, growing as fast as it is and embedded as it is in a formidably wealthy regional security community of Singapore, Malaysia, the other ASEANS, Australia, and New Zealand. A surrounding security community of states formally committed to peace with it (as opposed to a military alliance) is an advantage Indonesia enjoys over India (with its threat from, and hobbled trade with, as militarized a neighbor as Pakistan) in India’s rise toward becoming a great power of the future multipolar world. Withdrawing from Timor-Leste helped the cause of Indonesia’s global reputational capital. No great power would dare invade Indonesia today in the way the old Dutch empire did in a move that helped build Dutch affluence of the era when the Amsterdam stock exchange dominated the London, Paris, Frankfurt, and New York stock exchanges.

The Tunnel Vision of a Nuclear Peace

Learning from Timor-Leste is resumed as a topic later in this chapter. Before moving on to it, it is important to note a problem with the logic of claims made for the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence in creating a world where great powers have not gone to war against each other (not directly, not by invading one another) for eight decades. It is true that Russia has not attacked the United States directly, nor the US Russia, since the invention of nuclear weapons. Russia was a state that was endlessly attacking not only great powers but countless other major powers during the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and the twentieth century to 1945. Since 1945 it has not attacked other major powers at all, though it invaded weak ones in Afghanistan and then in the new era that started with the 2008 invasion of tiny Georgia and continues today in Ukraine. Likewise the United States in the early twentieth century, the nineteenth and eighteenth, was attacking major middle powers including its neighbors Canada and Mexico, the declining power Spain, but also France and Britain’s colonial armies. The United States has not been in the business of invading any of these powers since 1945. That has nothing to do with the fact that two of them have some nuclear weapons. Nor have any of the major powers of Europe waged war on one another regardless of whether they were European states with or without nuclear weapons, members of the EU or not. This is when they were so endlessly at war every which way with one another across the previous three centuries. Nor did Russia or the United States invade other G-20 states far away from Europe that had no nuclear weapons, like Indonesia, Australia, or Japan.

The pattern is that the era since the creation of the United Nations has been a good one for the prevention of wars among all major powers, nuclear and non-nuclear alike. Hence, the creation of nuclear weapons is a less credible explanation of the pattern than the creation of the United Nations (that can claim a larger number of cases as an explanation). This book is about arguing that the explanation is more complex than either of these simple-minded explanations. My Prologue pointed out that so many old generals say that they never experienced nuclear weapons being any practical use to them as military commanders. There have been more than two dozen cases of threats to use nuclear weapons, most recently by Vladimir Putin. There is no record of any of these nuclear threats deterring effectively. They were all as ineffective as Putin’s recent threats. Yes, NATO fears an unthinkable nuclear war with Russia, but it also fears an unthinkable conventional war between NATO and Russia that could escalate to a word war that drew in the massive armies of North Korea and China on the Russian side and other armies from Belarus, Syria, Central Asia, and Iran’s huge army. That kind of conventional Word War III would be worse than World War II. Today’s tiny German army would suffer a greater slaughter than in World War II trying to fight its way across Belarus.

George H. Bush and his Secretary of State explicitly and implicitly threatened Saddam Hussein after Iraq invaded Kuwait with a nuclear strike if he proceeded to blow up Kuwait’s oil and oil storage facilities. Hussein then proceeded to blow them up. As retired generals say when they come out of the closet to reveal themselves as nuclear abolitionists, nuclear weapons have not empirically proven themselves useful in any really existing strategic situation they have experienced, not when Nixon brandished them in Vietnam, not in Korea, not anywhere. Evidence of the power of implied threat is also weak. Sechser and Fuhrmann (2017, 73) analyzed 210 instances of one state making an explicit ‘compellent threat’ that threatened the use of force against another state to secure an outcome: ‘The evidence is clear: states that possess nuclear weapons enjoy no more success when making compellent threats’.

Just as nuclear deterrence is a simple-minded unitary explanation of the great power peace and non-use of nuclear weapons in the nuclear era, so is nuclear deterrence a weak explanation of compliance of all great powers with the taboo against the use of chemical weapons since 1918. It is the taboo itself that explains better than the power of the weapons; it is a taboo that has worked with even the greatest militarists—Stalin, Putin, Hitler, and Tojo. Therefore further strengthening the taboo is a more useful approach to prevention than building more WMDs. Actually, what is required is a web of preventive controls akin to the 124 controls in Taiwan’s epidemic preparedness plan. Criminologists learned this lesson long ago about deterring murder (Braithwaite 2022). If you increase deterrence with longer prison sentences, capital punishment, boiling murderers in oil, and tearing strips of flesh from their bodies before you finish them, piling on more power to deterrence does nothing to reduce the murder rate. The fundamental insight from the criminological evidence is that for most people murder is simply unthinkable. If someone rips us off, it does not even enter our minds to deal with this by murdering them. So we do not get to the point of weighing how many years of prison we might get for doing so, and with what probability, in the unlikely event that we actually knew such facts. Again the main explanatory driver is a murder taboo, and the main game of criminological prevention is strengthening that taboo, but not just that taboo, also better mental health services, poverty reduction, redemptive schooling, stronger families, a list of something like 124 preventive policies (Braithwaite 2022)!

The Nonviolence Alternative of Timor-Leste Plus 21 Abolitionist States

Now let us consider a more radical empirical challenge to realist militarism today. How should we think about states like Costa Rica whose Constitution since 1949 has forbidden re-establishment of its standing army? It was abolished after a military regime was dismantled in 1948. Costa Rica has enjoyed a much less violent and more affluent society with less poverty than the average across the rest of Central America and Latin America. Costa Rica has not been invaded by any of the militarily more powerful states that surround it. Nor has any jealous neighbor assassinated its leadership, fomented coups, or interfered in elections to achieve regime change. Costa Rica has survived for 76 years since military abolition without committing troops to any war. Central America roiled around it as one of the most war-afflicted, death-squad-decimated regions of the planet since 1948. Other Central American states suffered hundreds of war-afflicted years compared to the Costa Rican experience of zero war-afflicted years across 76 years. This and the kindred comparison of Costa Rican war-years with the war-years and non-war-years of all other states of the Americas is statistically strong. This statistical pattern is stronger still when one adds data from other countries of the Americas that followed the Costa Rican example of abolishing their militaries and/or changing their Constitution to ban the creation of a standing army since 1979: Panama, Grenada, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, and the Grenadines. These are much weaker states than Costa Rica, even tinier states that are ‘easy’ to invade. They have survived 284 war-free years and zero war-afflicted years since they abolished their militaries, compared to the hundreds of war-afflicted years of other South, Central American, and Caribbean societies.3

There are 21 small countries on the planet that between them have had more than a thousand war-free years and invasion-free years since they abolished their standing army. Political, ethnic, and religious conflict does at times become violent in these societies. Foreign enemies can infiltrate arms to mount an insurgency. What happens then when states have no army to manage this situation? What they do is ask the United Nations or a regional organization of states to approve an international peacekeeping operation to support their police to restore order. An example of a country which has never had a standing army that had an armed uprising that might easily have cascaded to a full-scale war was Solomon Islands. Reluctantly at first, Australia led RAMSI, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands from 2003 that disarmed insurgents. It was not a UN peacekeeping mission, but a UN-authorized regional mission that was police-led, militarily-supported, and supported by contingents from most Pacific Island states. It succeeded in preventing a full-scale war that was in the process of being mounted. RAMSI assisted the Solomon Islands state to prosecute the commanding war criminals, disarm them, and restore criminal enforcement against all forms of violence with guns (Braithwaite et al. 2010).

Timor-Leste did not become number 22 on the list of 21 countries without a standing army. Its history of armed conflict is nevertheless instructive to the disarmament discussion. Timor-Leste had an extreme outbreak of armed violence in 2006 that bore some similarities to Solomon Islands. The first government after the 1999 independence referendum initially had a Costa Rica policy—no standing army. How could its standing army possibly resist militarily its nearest neighbor, Indonesia, or its other near-neighbor, Australia? It opted instead for a successful restorative diplomacy of healing, reconciliation, and truth-telling with Indonesia, though of weak justice (Braithwaite et al. 2012). In the end Timor-Leste created a tiny army to placate combatants who demanded secure post-war jobs. Sadly, it was so tiny that an ambitious police minister who was still a Marxist revolutionary was able to arm his police sufficiently to be a dire threat to the more moderate ex-combatants in the military. Firefights broke out between the military and the police, supported on each side by co-opted youth gangs. The UN responded with a new UN peacekeeping mission that disarmed all fighting factions, reformed the police and the military in accordance with principles of democratic policing. Sixteen years of peace ensued in Timor-Leste since 2008 It is consolidated as a democracy with fair elections and a deepening separation of powers (Braithwaite et al. 2012). These South Pacific experiences of successful UN-sanctioned peacekeeping in countries with no standing army that are endangered by armed violence are empirically persuasive. It may not be irresponsible to abolish their standing army and concentrate their tax collections on improving education systems and health care systems in a way that creates sustainable development and saves more lives. This can only be responsible if the UN and regional organizations like the African Union increase peacekeeping budgets and strengthen peacekeeping guarantees for responsiveness to elected governments without militaries.

The contemporary context for these hypotheses is that there is no sociologically possible future world where all societies will decide to abolish their standing armies. There is no possible future world where all neighboring countries that want peace and prosperity in their region refuse to send peacekeepers to support elected governments under siege from insurgents. To be able to depend on regional or UN support from an invasion, however, what governments must be careful to do is remain democratically elected and refuse to get involved in regime change meddling in their region.

Civil Resistance Often Works in Contemporary Conditions

Nor is there any sociologically possible world in which a ruthless invasion, replete with death squads, will not be resisted militarily by some partisans who reject nonviolence. In contemporary conditions, nonviolent civil resistance can do most of the work that was done by defense forces before 1950. It cannot solve all security problems, however; it cannot defend against blackmail by rogue WMD states or terrorists. Moreover, purist nonviolent defense of Costa Rica is not what would happen if it were invaded. If Costa Rica were invaded by Venezuela tomorrow, the United States might arm partisans with drones and other technologies of war with the aim of rendering the invasion ungovernable and costly; if the United States invaded Costa Rica, Russia or sympathetic Latin American states might do the same.4 Cheap drones can come out of nowhere to blow a locomotive off its tracks. They may prove a gamechanger for long-term disruption of invasions that render invasions even more unprofitable adventurism in contemporary conditions. What in the past became ‘frozen conflicts’ may in future become semi-frozen intermittent drone wars in Ukraine and beyond. Teenagers may arrive at night in wooded sections of city parks with their flat-pack cardboard drone, launch at a faraway target, then sneak home through the trees. No resistance army is required for that; rigorous training for disciplined civilian resistance is required.

Agents provocateur might well be planted undercover within the ranks of nonviolent activists to undermine the effectiveness of nonviolent discipline, as has increasingly happened since the Tiananmen Square tragedy in China, 1989. Nevertheless, most of the ungovernability for an invader of Costa Rica would be accomplished by nonviolent means such as strikes, sabotage, noncooperation with governmental decisions, rallying international sanctions, the diverse range of Gene Sharp’s (1973, 2005) 198 techniques of nonviolent resistance, with modern cyber-resistance added. These have proven valuable in reversing what would have been rewards from invasions before 1950 to costs today. The emerging paradox of simple solutions here is that because contemporary governance has such networked complexity, simply withdrawing networked cooperation of citizens from it can cripple it when the motivation for noncooperation is robust, organized, and disciplined.

Luke Abbs’ (2021) pathbreaking study on the impact of nonviolent resistance to war concludes empirically that large-scale and nonviolent resistance does increase the likelihood of negotiated resolution to civil wars between 1955 and 2013. This is a study of resolutions aimed at maximalist institutional change to transform military dominance over the state.5 The Abbs analysis and the literature he reviews support the conclusion that the more potent and disciplined a nonviolent resistance movement is in transforming resistance away from armed struggle and toward more nonviolent resistance, the better the outcomes are in terms of non-domination.6 More broadly we know from large N studies that transitions brought about by nonviolence are more likely to succeed than those that pursue maximalist institutional change by violent means. The evidence is that nonviolent transformation is less likely to be followed by civil wars than violent regime changes, and are more likely to accomplish transformation of state institutions toward democracy.7 The effect sizes in these literatures tend not to be small. There are large effects of nonviolent resistance in achieving outcomes with less domination than armed resistance.

These empirical lessons inform an ethical position. It is that although prevention of resort by some to violent resistance to an invasion or a military coup is difficult, the ethical thing might be to push for nonviolent civil resistance to the invasion that is as potent as possible. With patience and creative adaptation in the struggle, democratic civil resistance can almost certainly win in the long term if it is robust and organized enough because the invader will eventually crumble and decide to pull out. Gandhi and Martin Luther King saw this emergent reality of modernity. Theirs is the simpler wisdom we do best to attend to in the age of WMDs and space war that beams in AI warfare that could evolve to become monstrously risky for human survival.

It may seem that I stray too far from my prime objective here. I simply say that military realists cannot point to an example of any of the 21 countries undefended by a standing army that has been invaded in recent decades because they have no army. Nor can they dissuade me that Indonesia will ever invade Timor-Leste’s insignificant army again, notwithstanding their many disputes over offshore oil and many other matters, and their bitter past as enemies; this is because Indonesia and Timor-Leste practice restorative diplomacy with one another that helps both to heal and grow (Braithwaite et al. 2012). Nor can realists credibly assert that it would not be a painful experience were any army to attempt to invade any of the 21 countries with no standing army at all, regardless of how unaligned the invader and invaded country were. On my analysis, realists can point to only one example of a country with a standing army that has invaded a foreign country since the Korean War and made a clear success of the invasion (the United States in Panama, 1989). Bull’s international relations as a bird with a wing of realist default and a wing of liberal institutionalism with a consolidated rule-based international order can allow pacifist states to flourish. It also causes invasions increasingly to fail ever more profoundly as modernity moves forward.

The Puzzle That the Wealthiest Societies are Militarily Weak

There are many ways that great powers cash in on their geopolitical might to grow rich. Great powers are rule makers of the world system, small powers are rule takers, and great powers write the rules to enrich themselves (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). This persists as a huge economic advantage great powers enjoy, but became increasingly offset by growing costs of wars and high military spending to defend great power status. Historically, militaries enabled the biggest driver of great power economic advantage, which was conquest. This chapter argues that conquest has shifted from being a driver of wealth to a driver of the decline of great powers. Big economies drive tougher bargains in trade deals than weak economies. But the toughness of trade deal negotiation has become much less important to economic growth than innovation and productivity that drives high prices for exports to somewhere, whatever is in the text of trade agreements with great powers. Military power used to enable cost-effective military-backed meddling in other countries. If the ruler of a British colony decided to ignore their imperial obligation to import from British factories, preferring to buy from cheaper suppliers, this was not tolerated. British meddling backed by gunboat diplomacy replaced that ruler. Chapter 9 argues that in the eighteenth century, it was still possible for Britain to do that in North America, but meddling became increasingly costly for Britain. It had become expensive indeed by the Revolutionary War with the United States, escalating American Indian wars and Indian resistance, and the wars with France on American soil. Chapter 9 argues that regime change by great powers remains today extremely successful at changing regimes, but the cost and blowback of doing so has grown to become a cause of great power wealth depletion rather than great power ascendancy.

It is important to elaborate the conclusion that superior national prosperity was built in the realist world from ancient times until 1945 by military might and invasions. This ceased being very true in the more complex world that followed the founding of the United Nations in 1945. In the nineteenth century, the country that had been the richest for more than a millennium, China, was deposed from that pedestal by militarily superior European invaders sailing gunboats up the Yellow, Yangstze, and Pearl Rivers to control strategic trade hubs. They humiliated China to become their vassal, to keep buying their opium, as they carved up its trade routes. With the normative disintegration that followed, China was further decimated, fragmented by its own Chinese warlords. Invasions had built the wealth of all the greatest powers of the nineteenth century—the Ottoman and then the Habsburg Empires that were eclipsed by the Russian Empire, then briefly by Napoleon’s French Empire, the British Empire, then the German empire that Bismarck built. The French, British, Germans, Russians, Ottomans, and Habsburgs were all eclipsed by the United States after the invasions of the two world wars devastated all European powers much more than the United States. American power/wealth was initially based on the invasion of the fecund lands of Indigenous America. By the end of the nineteenth century, another society built even greater wealth per capita than the United States and every nineteenth-century European society by invading rich Indigenous lands—Australia. One reason Australia built even greater wealth per capita than the United States by 1900 was that it not only stayed out of European wars of conquest, as did the Americans; Australia also avoided any large-scale civil war of the kind that set the Americans back in the 1860s. That was also true of the comparatively stupendous per capita wealth of New Zealand before World War I.

A big clue to how the relationship between military power and prosperity changed after 1945 came with the economic growth of what had become a militarily weak Japan and West Germany to become the second and third largest economies (after the United States) for 60 years until China sailed past them. If we look at GDP per capita in current US dollars, the United States today ranks 13th, however. The three countries that are 14th to 16th (Iceland, the Netherlands, and Denmark) are small, militarily weak states, as are all the countries that rank ahead of the United States on this list (in order, Qatar, Macao, Luxemburg, Singapore, Brunei, Ireland, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait. Switzerland, San Marino, Hong Kong). One can quibble that Hong Kong and Macao are now subordinated to China, which is militarily strong, but the fact is that these colonies became so much wealthier than the rest of China when they were independent, before their integration under the Chinese military umbrella.8 If the comparison is done in GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Parity terms (according to how much per capita income can buy in each country), the United States is also 13th on IMF numbers (slightly lower in World Bank and CIA data)9 but the countries above it are still all militarily weak (in order Ireland, Luxemburg, Lichtenstein, Singapore, Qatar, Monaco, Macao, United Arab Emirates, Bermuda, Switzerland, Isle of Man, Norway) and again the five countries immediately below the United States are also small, militarily weak states. The next major military power moving down this list is France, which has a lower GDP per capita than 31 other mostly small, weak states. Military weakness has paid hearty dividends during the 76 years since Costa Rica showed the path to that payoff.

The reason the United States is the huge exception to this is well documented in the political economy literature. It is the degree to which US prosperity is based on the sheer scale of US military exports, as discussed in Linda Weiss’s (2014) work. Stockholm International Peace Research numbers for 2022 show that every other major weapons exporter is an arms exporting pygmy compared to the United States. US arms exports are much more than four times as high as those of France, more than five times Russia’s, more than seven times China’s weapons exports (SIPRI 2022). Even though the United States has 30 times the value of exports as the number 10 country on this list, doubtless all top ten arms exporters benefit enormously from war in a way that normal states do not. America’s national security economy also made the United States the preeminent information economy. Without Pentagon R & D investment, there would have been no internet and much more limited development of computers and AI.

Being a warlike realist with a huge military-industrial complex did drive the United States down to 12th or 13th on the GDP per capita league tables, but not as far down that league table as it might have without offseting by stupendous weapons exports that made America richer. Being a warlike realist delivered the US middle and working class more meager returns. It is in the character of a national security economy that it becomes a more unequal economy, as we see is also happening to China and Russia. There are more than 20 countries where the incomes of the middle class and the working class buy them more than their middle and working class comparators in the United States (and in Russia and China). A state that is a warlike realist can serve well the interests in power accumulation for its military-industrial complex. In the United States case, it has served the interests of its ordinary people poorly in terms of how comfortably and safely most of them live (Braithwaite 2022). Indeed this is true of all great powers in the world today in a way that was not true of what imperial military power delivered to ordinary people living in great powers in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth, the seventeenth, and indeed for half the twentieth century. Realist warmaking delivered for rich and poor alike in these previous centuries. Realist international relations theorists are loathe to look in the eye how the realist interests of states and power elites increasingly pull apart from a rational choice analysis of the interests of citizens.

I invite readers to contemplate their own answers to a big question here. Why does Indonesia not invade nearby Brunei and Singapore when these two societies have so much wealth and smaller militaries? One answer might be that before these countries became extremely wealthy, Indonesia did invade East Timor in 1975. We have seen that this proved a costly folly. Why does not militarily powerful France, a nuclear power, invade more wealthy and militarily weak Luxemburg, Lichtenstein, San Marino, and Monaco? Why does not militarily strong Britain, a nuclear power, re-invade its former colony Ireland from bases in Northern Ireland? Is the pain experienced from continuing to swallow and occupy the Northern Ireland porcupine in contemporary conditions one answer? Now the United Kingdom is out of the EU, why does it not occupy the Faroe Islands in the North Sea, which are much wealthier than the UK, seizing them from Denmark? Why does not large and militarily powerful Mexico consider occupying disarmed Costa Rica and other richer microstates in the Caribbean like Bermuda (one of the ten richest countries in GDP PPP). There are some good realist answers to all these questions. I hypothesize that another good answer is that the norm against invading other countries now has deep roots in the world system, in international law, and in the consciousness of international civil society. The invasion taboo has institutional roots through the UN Security Council. In the case of Ukraine, Russia can and does veto Security Council resolutions aimed at defending the sovereignty of Ukraine. Powerful Putin allies, however, including Presidents Xi and Erdogan, endorsed Ukrainian sovereignty as strongly as the US and EU, even if they did not donate arms at scale to either side.

The US military-industrial complex promotes a strategic consensus through its captive thinktanks. It dismisses the Costa Rican example of 76 years ago, disengages from their empirical experience. It may be in the interests of the United States if countries like Costa Rica changed course and helped build US affluence by buying US weapons systems. But for 76 years it has been in the interests of Costa Rica to depend on the peacemaking of the United Nations, on the civilian resistance capabilities of its civil society, and support from the Organization of American States to guarantee its four pillars of democracy, human rights, security and development in its peacemaking.

In the overwhelming majority of democracies where elites reject the Costa Rican path, where voters understandably want security delivered by a standing army, what is the democrat who believes in graduated mutual disarmament (GRIT) to do? That depends on the strategic circumstances of a particular time and place. One option is to argue within the democracy that in contemporary conditions it is best to keep defense spending as low as our fellow voters can be persuaded to keep it. Invest instead in quality education and other forms of human, social, and infrastructural capital that will better grow a strong economy that is capable of scaling up defense spending quickly at times of danger. Early 2020s military victories by Ethiopia and Azerbaijan showed that drone warfare capability in modern conditions can be scaled up quickly to states with the wealth to pay for rapid drone deliveries. Saudi Arabia is wealthy enough that it believes it does not need nuclear weapons. It seems to have agreed with Pakistan on how to rent its mobile nuclear weapons in a dangerous crisis with a nuclear-armed Israel, for example. Ukraine demonstrated that its success rate in defense against endless incoming Russian missiles and drones could scale up quite rapidly to high enough to frustrate Russian aggression.

To the extent that a democracy insists on growing the military, in an Australian context for example, nonviolent resistance activists can at least argue against long-range missiles and submarines that can hit and provoke China, Japan, or any emergent regional power. They can argue instead for shorter-range missiles that can hit ships and aircraft invading Australia before they near Australia’s border. That is, advocate a defensive balance secured by sustainable economic growth (Gholz et al. 2019). My take on the work of defensive balance theorists is, first, that most states seek security less than the domination of other states. Second, security is plentiful in contemporary conditions; restorative diplomacy can cultivate security that is even more plentiful. In contrast, conquest is difficult in contemporary conditions. Offensive balance creates dangerous incentives to strike first when states achieve an offensive advantage over their foes. It creates security dilemmas that result in an insecure potential enemy hitting us before we hit it.

Defensive balance contributes to stability, offensive balance to instability and war. Stephen Van Evera (1998) makes the paradoxical case for defensive balance: ‘a chief source of insecurity in Europe since medieval times has been this false belief that security was scarce. This belief was a self-fulfilling prophecy, fostering bellicose policies that left all states less secure’. Van Evera argues that the long-term empirical record since medieval times is that great powers have been three times as likely to be overrun by provoked aggressors than by unprovoked aggressors. Today it is impossible to imagine that any power could overrun Russia, China, or the United States; in the first half of the twentieth century, it was easy to imagine and see great powers being overrun. Hence, the defensive balance calculus is even more profound for a world where the risks of being overrun continually reduce. But the risks of provoking a nuclear war that destroys the planet, as a result of offensive provocations by either side in Taiwan, or preference of both sides for fighting over diplomacy in Ukraine, are at higher levels than ever. Provocation risks also escalate because some of the newer nuclear powers are politically unstable. Finally, provocation risks from a cult of offense worsen because of the capability of cyberweapons, hypersonic missiles, AI weapons, the proliferation of long-range cruise missiles and sea-based ballistic and cruise missiles that can strike anonymously.

States that seek security can cooperate with likeminded states in the rare circumstance where a state acts to secure military domination of other states in preference to market domination. Market domination has a higher benefit–cost ratio for all powers with large GDPs or high productivity that can grow GDP rapidly. Hence, a preference for domination by military rather than economic means is irrational for states with substantial military capability. However, advocacy of domination by military means is rational for arms manufacturers. It is rational for those employed or funded as scholars to be professional fellow travelers of the military-industrial complex. Domination by military means is rational for politicians who get dollops of campaign funding from arms traders. It can also be lucrative for some influencers to showboat stigmatization of enemies or to sow panic in cyberspace. Such interests do get the upper hand at times of populist politics. That risk is not so great, however, that it makes sense to play the security game in the same irrational way as competing states caught up in such populism. Non-military competition through markets combined with restorative diplomacy is more sensible and more rationally lucrative for states and for the citizens of those states. That is a better description of the way China, Japan, and ASEANs think than of the way NATO states think.

The difficulty of contemporary conquest makes it unthinkable for China to invade Australia and Indonesia for the first time, or Japan to attempt it again. It is no longer D-Day. An invading army could not secretly sail toward Australia today without Australian detection thousands of miles before their arrival, and without time to sink many ships before approaching the Australian border. Better for Australia to pursue a diplomacy of missile destruction to end acceleration of the emergent missile race in its region (Ogilvie-White 2020). But if Australia must arm with hypersonic weapons, let us make them short-range for hitting those ships and aircraft rather than long-range for hitting China’s homeland. In other words, reject the ‘cult of the offensive’ that produced the folly of World War I that then cascaded to World War II (Snyder 1989; Van Evera 1984), reduce defense expenditure, but maximize defensive balance.

One might counter that a society like Israel, quite unlike Australia, is uniquely subject to existential threats by Iran and others that are geographically nearby. Israel might have a history of offensives against Palestine and Lebanon in particular that have not been as productive as restorative diplomacy might have been. In recent times, restorative diplomacy has proved productive for Israel with old enemies like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Even so, one can understand that there may be a stronger case for offensive balance in a case like Israel. Good theories seek to perform moderately well even in a ‘least likely case’ like Israel (Eckstein 2000). On this view, a theory that holds up in the circumstances where it is least likely to work will prove a good theory. In least-likely case terms, it is worth noting that Israel has seen a significant shift toward greater defensive balance in recent decades as its hybrid military has assessed critically the benefits of an offensive balance that it sustained in earlier decades (Barak et al. 2023). Gaza in 2024, 2025 and beyond will be a new test of whether offensive balance delivers less than in the imaginations of Israeli leaders.  All that said, AI has duel offensive and defensive uses in warfare and it is hard to foresee what the impact of AI on the offensive balance doctrines of great powers versus weak powers will be.

It is also important to argue that offensive balance is inferior to defensive balance that trains warriors dispersed across a society to resist invasions by launching local drone sabotage attacks against the camps, the logistics, the communications, and the bridges vital to invaders. Democracies can decide to turn those drone units from sabotage units into units that kill invading troops. The most important elements in effective drone defense that provides a nonviolent resistance option are, first, training a large cadre of civilian resisters who can craft diverse, unpredictable tactics of civil resistance, and second, the wealth to keep up an endless supply of the most advanced drones and well dug-in and supplied defensive positions in mountains. The advice of the military chief of Louis XII to his question of what is the key to success in wars endures: it was three things: ‘money, more money, and still more money’ (Blattman 2022, 87). In other words, this is more true today because money can scale up drone defense very quickly, but can also help scale up nonviolence defense by civilian resistance. Although money remains more important than missiles, even more important today is an activist international society that builds restorative diplomatic capital, more diplomatic capital, and still more diplomatic capital.

Offensive balance in economic innovation by reducing the taxation and economic burdens of wars and defense spending makes sense today for the rational society partly because it allows them to be richer and therefore more capable of sustained weapons purchases and preparation for civilian resistance when dark clouds gather. Offensive military balance and the arms races they drive no longer make sense. They made more sense in the first half of the twentieth century, and probably most previous centuries. That was because in previous centuries diplomatic capabilities were much weaker—for example UN diplomacy, preventive diplomacy, and hotlines barely existed, diplomatic corps had meager resources and the social science of evidence-based diplomacy had not begun to show empirical results like the cost-effectiveness of UN peacekeeping. In previous centuries, societies were much less complexly coupled. This meant civilian resisters had access to fewer chokepoints that could uncouple the governability of a society and its economy. In the world of previous centuries, there was a better realist case for offensive balance because national wealth and security were constituted by military victories against rival powers who had been on the rise for decades as challengers to the power of their rival. Wealth was built by empire building, enslavement of people, and gunboat diplomacy, by domination of large spaces, their resource riches, and large numbers of slaves and subject peoples.

Temporary Alliances to Contain Nuclear War Threats

I hypothesize that in any possible future world, a state or terrorist organization that sought to develop covert WMDs could motivate the rest of the world to contain and deter it. The world would not need nuclear weapons to accomplish this.

In a non-nuclear world it must be legal to respond to the use of WMDs under Art. 51 (self-defence) and via UNGA Uniting for Peace, empowering both a forceful national as well as collective response with conventional means. Even (collective) missile defence might be a part of this response. (Muller 2020, 157; citing other literature relevant to this)

However much progress disarmament had made, the residual combined conventional deterrence capabilities of a coalition of willing United Nations members to contain any rogue WMD state would always be sufficient to contain it. It would be irrational for any rogue state to pursue such a path. More specifically, I contend there is a conventional deterrence path to one of the two wings of Hedley Bull’s or George Kennan’s approach to the survival of our species. But there is no longer a nuclear deterrence wing that can keep succeeding during the next century or two.

The nuclear deterrence wing of security must be replaced by deterrence that is more realistically attuned with contemporary realities of technological risk and risks of disintegration of the institutions of a rules-based international order. The priority then is not an arms race balance. That will endlessly become unbalanced, as we can see with the superior data that hindsight provides about the deep and incipient imbalances of every past historical period. The future will be even more frequently and rapidly unbalanced than in the past by the fecundity of innovation in technological complexity coupled to the flux of cascading crises. The deterrence priority is to repair and strengthen the institutions of the rule-based international order, to strengthen the UN, and most of all ‘international society’, and its ‘civil sphere’ (Alexander 2006). The idea is to ensure that there is always the capability to assemble credible residual containment and deterrence capabilities (by military, economic, and social means) to dissuade rogue states or terrorists from dominating the world with WMD threats.

Of course another way of moving toward abolition and enforcing this step by step is to replace anarchy with world government in the way Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and other great thinkers articulated as the path to surviving nuclear weapons during the late 1940s. They may have been right. Moreover, world government might be a better way of institutionalizing a global climate, pandemic, and inequality response than our current anarchical order dominated by grasping, violent great powers. World government is harder to accomplish, however, than voluntary cooperation and coalition building to enforce step by step containment of WMDs and other catastrophe risks.

Thinking softly about alliance diplomacy. Australia has security treaties with Indonesia and New Zealand that require mutual respect and assistance to preserve the territorial sovereignty of each other. This was good for Indonesia in earlier decades when Australia was more militarily capable than Indonesia. It was good for Australia because sometime in this century, Indonesia was bound to become more militarily powerful than Australia. It was also a credible commitment because even without a formal alliance, Australia had supported the liberation of Indonesia from Japanese domination and then from its pre-war colonial master, the Netherlands. More fundamentally, it is also a credible agreement, because who would be so foolish as to invade an Indonesia supported by Australia and New Zealand today? In the unlikely event that China or Japan sailed their navies down against these countries today, so many of their ships would be detected by contemporary technology and sunk in the Pacific long before they arrived. Invading Australia was too much for Japan to accomplish in 1943, and today far too much for China to consider. China has zero interest in doing this. China’s interests are to enjoy economic hegemony over Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia instead. If China did win on all the southern battlefields required, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand would be some triplet of echidnas (porcupines of the south) to swallow and pacify. This is true even though Australia’s national resources are perhaps more tempting for an invader than those of any invadable large land mass protected by a thinly dispersed population. Pacifying an invaded Australia would still be more costly than paying the market price for the import of Australian natural resources, especially for a dominant buyer like China.

Do Indonesia-Australia security agreements make sense when Indonesia was seemingly opposed to alliances as a leader of the non-aligned movement, and as the leader of ASEAN? ASEAN is a regional grouping stringently opposed to ever becoming a military alliance. It has no formal military alliance with Australia. It is enough to show any northern invader heading toward Australia via Indonesia that Australia would help Indonesia, as it did against Japan in 1941, and that Indonesia and Australia enjoy deep and beneficial diplomatic relationships. All societies need protection with allies when as powerful and malevolent a leader as Hitler storms the stage. In that circumstance, Roosevelt and Churchill had to make Stalin their ally. Potential future Hitlers must understand that precisely the reaction they will trigger by a combination of murderous tyranny and a will to world domination is that unlikely allies like Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin will indeed align against them. China worked with the United States a decade and a half ago to persuade the Myanmar junta to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and then even let go of power. They could work together in future to subdue reckless North Korean nuclear blackmail of South Korea. I nevertheless argue that alliances are best when they are soft, contingent, and temporary. George Washington may have been right when he said in his Farewell Address that US policy should be to grow strong commercially by trade with all countries:

[Europe] must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities… it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world …. (Office of the Historian 2023)

Translating this to contemporary decisionmaking, Washington’s analysis might imply that the world should want alliances of China with North Korea and Russia to be sufficiently soft that if North Korea initiates ridiculous provocation of South Korea, China should be utterly circumspect about rushing to back them with the kind of military support it did afford them in 1950. In 2030 it should not repeat any such folly; it should not risk escalation to World War III. Or if Russia initiates a preventable war with Ukraine, the rest of the world if required must persuade China against responding by putting Chinese Divisions on the ground in Ukraine or by missile attacks on German factories that supply tanks and missiles to Ukraine. China of course was prudent in needing no persuasion of this kind.

Conversely, if an Eastern European state indulges a provocative military attack on Russia, and Russia responds militarily, other NATO states would be wise to decline from piling in on a World War III that cascaded from such imprudent provocation. If Taiwan provoked China in a reckless way, and China overreacted, causing in turn a military overreaction of the United States in defense of Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and the European Union should be reticent to pile into that war. They might consider the alternative of piling in on soft diplomacy to avert escalation, to prevent nuclear war or a conventional war on Taiwanese soil that the United States would likely lose or fail to win. A good US ally would work hard at persuading both China and the United States not to overreact, just as it should have tried harder to persuade the United States not to overreact to September 11 in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In summary, it is good that despotic great powers understand that tyranny will be resisted by many other powers allying against them to defend a rules-based international order that rejects wars of aggression. It is also good when regional bodies like ASEAN are infused with the Indonesian spirit of non-alignment. It is good that ASEAN sets its face against being a hard military alliance for mutual protection against China, or renewed militarism in Japan, or US adventurism directed against an ASEAN member like Vietnam. It is good when NATO and its alliance mentality is kept out of Asia. It is healthy when the Global South unites against the mentality of both Russia and NATO of building empires, building military alliances, Warsaw Pacts, and Monroe Doctrines. They can cascade violence widely, can cascade to repeated world wars. NATO has re-emerged as a hard alliance that neglects preventive diplomacy and peacemaking. It failed to prevent a preventable Ukraine war that risked another world war.

In September 2023 NATO proved incapable of deploying peacekeepers to prevent ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia was unwilling to do so. The follies of European preventive diplomacy meant Europe sat on its hands as Azerbaijan also invaded and occupied Armenian national territory, taking by armed force bits of border areas that Azerbaijan desired in 2022–2023, taking the high ground of border villages, cutting villages in half, then rolling burning tyres down on the half of the village not ethnically cleansed. Europe proved impotent as one of the ugliest genocidal chapters of its history risked resumption. European diplomacy preferred fossil fuels that flowed through pipelines across Azerbaijan rather than Russia. The Global South shows leadership for international society to resist enduring colonial mentalities of Russia and NATO in theaters like Ukraine and Armenia, as it did with unsuccessful attempts to resist the 2011 NATO attack on Libya led by President Sarkozy of France and supported by most NATO countries.

In 1914 when Serbia responded insufficiently to tame its Black Hand terrorists after they assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, Austria would have done better with a diplomatic response that was consequential enough to be an alternative to invading Serbia. Then Russia would have done better by its interests, and those of all Europe, by responding diplomatically as a healer rather than by mobilizing against Austria to defend Serbia. When that diplomatic prudence failed to prevail, Germany and Britain could have worked together to contain the war against any further escalation. Together they could have averted a war that would leave Germany and Britain with huge war debts, weakened powers. Had Germany declined to do that, Britain would have done better to decline to treat its loyalty to Belgium as a hard treaty obligation. It was not. Britain likely would have had a better future by staying out of World War I, even at that late stage.

Britain’s interest was to avert the loss of 700,000 of its youth, avert the terrible sequence of debt, rise of communism, then depression, fascism, then World War II, that cascaded from World War I. Even when Britain had gone in, my hypothesis is that Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and India would have done better by the interests of their people, and by all humankind, by refusing to pile in. In 1914, it would have been preferable for them to transform the British Empire to what it became after 1945, a super-soft alliance structure that involved no binding commitments to jump into wars of the colonial master. These colonies should have learnt lessons from George Washington of a century earlier. The United States itself followed the enduring counsel of George Washington in 1914, but by 1917 its choice was somewhat different. In 1914, the United States was not the dominant power in the world system, but by 1917 Germany, Britain, and Russia had been so weakened by the war that US hegemony was sufficiently assured that its very entry to the war meant that it would bring an end to it, achieved without the massive loss of life suffered by other major combatants.

Had Germany won that war because Britain and its Empire walked away in 1914 in favor of international peace diplomacy, critics say a tyrannical Germany would have quickly dominated Europe. We cannot know what would have happened. But the Kaiser was far less of a tyrant than Hitler. A higher percentage of the German population was voting in elections in 1914 than in Britain (let alone across the British Empire). Germany had the strongest independent university system of 1914 with many critical voices, robust social democratic political parties, and a stronger welfare state than Britain. Germany likely would have exacted major reparations against its principal foe France. We need not speculate about how bad that would have been because we had already seen it after Germany defeated France in their 1870–1871 war. That oppression of France by Germany in the 1870s did not totally crush a resilient European civilization, nor European democratic diversity, though it did hobble the financial power of the Paris Stock Exchange, mainly to the advantage of the City of London, then Wall Street. Europe in 1914 would have been politically indigestible for Germany to swallow and fully tyrannize. Vassal states occupied by Germany would have been wracked by democratic, labor movement, and liberal sentiment to resist tyranny through underground movements. These movements surely might have linked arms with German and global liberalism or social democracy, making for an irascible German-European populace for the Kaiser to tame. Perhaps with no prospect of British or American allies, Russia would have come to terms earlier with German hegemony over Western Europe and would have transitioned to social democracy rather than capitulated to communism? We can never know. Yet my inclination is to concur with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress analysis of the time that Europe was endangering its future by betting the bank on a reckless world war.

Moreover, as we saw when Hitler’s infinitely more demonic and genocidal militarism did conquer continental Europe upon the ashes of World War I and the Great Depression, the world’s remaining democracies—including Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, combined at the last minute in a just and effective war working with continental anti-fascist undergrounds and the swathes of a Soviet Union that was still not defeated. That alliance saw off Hitler. None of this is to deny that critics of British and American Appeasement of Hitler were right. It would have been better to begin earlier to confront Hitler militarily, to have scaled up armaments production earlier. Sufficient evidence of Hitler’s true intent was apparent long before it persuaded the British and American strategic establishment to mobilize. My point here, however, is that had there been no World War I humiliation of Germany and slaughter of its youth, no debt crisis so severe as to pave a path to a crash and depression as deep as 1929, perhaps then Europe would have been a seedbed less receptive to fascism and genocide. Perhaps then Hitler would never have secured the political support to get away with the mass execution and imprisonment of German social democrats and even liberals. Keynesian economics and Bismarkian welfare state leadership after all proffered superior economic solutions to the economic dilemmas festering from 1917 than communism or fascism. These are considerations for a counterfactual analysis of freedom and tyranny. It could only provide uncertain answers.

There has always been a strong minority of opinion among British political and intellectual leaders of no lesser prominence than the Liberal Prime Minister of 1914 Lloyd George and Keynes, that in retrospect World War I might not justify its toll of blood and treasure. Contemporary British-American historian Niall Ferguson (2011, 362) concludes from his germinal work of counterfactual history that ‘fresh assessment of Germany’s pre-war aims reveals that, had Britain stood aside… continental Europe would have been transformed into something not unlike the European Union that we know today’. Though surely this would be a Europe in which a Germany less weakened by the two world wars and the depression would be more hegemonic than today’s Germany. Nevertheless, Ferguson is convincing that the ascent of fascism in Europe and communism in Russia would have been less likely had Britain stood aside. German objectives in 1914 were not so unlike Japanese objectives in pursuing an Asian co-prosperity zone through World War II; Germany and Japan both wanted empires of free trade to compete with the British Empire advantage from its free trade community across the British Empire, and to compete with the pan-American zone of trade under hegemony enforced by the US Monroe Doctrine. The main lesson is that there was policy learning from these bruising experiences. It was learned that wars of aggression had become worse than a blunt instrument for achieving these objectives. Better to stay economically strong by staying out of wars and pursue such objectives by bilateral or multilateral trade agreements. That indeed was the profound lessons the rising number 2 and 3 economic powers of the period since 1945—Japan, Germany and China—learnt wisely and well.

Not only would this counterfactual history of freedom appeal to US Presidents from George Washington onwards, undoubtedly it might appeal in hindsight to the majority of the British Cabinet who were initially opposed to entering the 1914 war, but ultimately persuaded by powerful captives of the military-industrial complex inside the cabinet. Some went for war because they hoped it would unify the country against what they saw as the deeper threat to the Empire of a civil war over Ireland. The counterfactual analysis might likewise have appealed to German, Irish, and Australian social democrats, and to the social democrats of the Indian Congress Party, who believed that piling into imperial wars was rarely in the interests of imperial peripheries, of working classes of all combatants, indeed rarely in the interests of freedom and peace across international society.

Re-diagnosing Cold War containment successes. The containment policy bequeathed by Kennan was a collective accomplishment of the Truman administration and every US administration from Truman through to Reagan. There were prominent early critics like John Foster Dulles who wanted to confront and roll back Soviet power rather than contain it. Nevertheless, containment prevailed as one of those rarities of long-term policy consensus. Containment of communist powers worked. While the consensus around containment was enduring and did see off the Soviet Union, it was fraught with tensions. Most Westerners were rightly consumed with guilt over failure to help uprisings against communist domination in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in lesser ways at other times during the Cold War.

On balance, containment was wise. We can still learn today from the dangers of the Dulles alternative of confrontation and meddling in the domestic politics of other countries. A premise of containment policy was that capitalist markets regulated to prevent their worst excesses were economically superior to state-owned and state-controlled economies. Over time, the containment assumption was that the gap between capitalist and communist economies would widen until the balance of power between NATO and the Soviet Union would be replaced by US hegemony, especially when those behind the Iron Curtain realized the potential of the freedom on offer from Western compared to Soviet hegemony. In George Kennan’s day that was an heroic belief because the Soviet economy outperformed the West in economic growth during Stalin’s long Soviet reign (Castells 2011). Stalin also positioned Russia to take the strategic early lead in the space race, with Sputnik putting humankind in space a few years after his death. Socialism was effective in industrializing countries fast, but only when they had been backward industrializers. Most societies behind the Iron Curtain, including Russia itself, had been industrialization laggards. Stalin pulled levers of state power to change that quickly, with large initial economic dividends. Deng Xiaoping and his successors in China did that even more deftly with their transition from a socialist developmental state to a capitalist developmental state with a mix of private and public ownership after 1976.

We see legacies of the era of communist industrialization today in the subways of Moscow and St Petersburg that are so superior to subways of New York and London. Some systems are efficiently built by top-down machine bureaucracies in which Soviet communism was capable (Mintzberg 1990); subways were an example, as was the Red Army machine that overwhelmed Germany and its allies. It was more effective in decisive ways than capitalist armies of World War II. With the dawning of information capitalism, however, communism proved a weak competitor. Western leadership in all the technologies of the information age, starting with computers, was almost total by the late twentieth century. This history of innovation is ably worked through by Castells (2011: Volume 1). Freewheeling minds, free education, and adhocracies (Mintzberg 1990) began to outperform socialist machine bureaucracies at every turn. Agile is a capitalist management brand, a fad du jour (see Beck [2001] and Tam et al. [2020] on the factors that make for success with Agile). It is an unusually resilient fad, having captured the imaginations of not only most of the IT sector, but most engineering organizations in the United States and many other democracies. It is a brand that came out of the opposition of computer coders to top-down management control of their work. There seems to be evidence that it increases productivity (Uraon et al. 2023) and work satisfaction (Tripp et al. 2016). Their agility captures the essence of what proved the decisive competitive advantage of capitalism over Soviet communism during the information age.

This advantage is less persuasive when it comes to arguments for containing contemporary Chinese Communism. 5-G was a strategic technological race during the years when this book was conceived. Huawei won all early laps of that race against Western corporations, just as China seems so far to have won early laps in the race for hypersonic weapons. This happens because Chinese communism today is unlike Soviet communism. It is a hybrid of capitalism and communism. China broke out of containment in the 1970s when Deng Xiaoping embraced capitalist markets and spurned alliance with the Soviet Union.

There are pockets and aspects of Chinese capitalism that are more neoliberal than neoliberal capitalism itself in terms of low corporate tax rates and freedom from state regulation (Kipnis 2007). We see this especially in China’s free trade zones. China is vast, covered by a patchwork quilt of variegated capitalisms (Zhang and Pack 2016). Some patches of that quilt are like inventive Silicon Valley capitalism, others like mid-twentieth century Western industrial capitalism with mega factories, and some are hybrids of peasant-communal-agribusiness production systems. Others still are much like the hybrid capitalist-socialist production systems of the military-industrial complex that we see in US cities dominated by defense contracting firms. Both countries have their space industry cities that are also socialist-capitalist hybrids strongly enmeshed with NASA, the dominant defense contracting firms, university researchers who have integrated into the military-industrial complex and the national security state. After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and again after the covid recession, the economic growth advantage of China over NATO states widened, even though the wings of Chinese export growth were still clipped by this era of crisis.

Another containment advantage that was correctly diagnosed by George Kennan was that in the long run citizens of authoritarian societies would look across to the freedom and democracy of the West and find it attractive. Liberal capitalist regimes would enjoy more legitimacy among its people than the legitimacy of communist regimes. This proved true not only behind the Iron Curtain, but in China and Mongolia as well, as was evident in the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, and probably in communist satellites like Vietnam and Cuba that have slowly permitted capitalist markets more scope, and gradually granted their citizens more freedom of movement to pursue education at Western universities.

Like the liberal economic advantage, that democratic advantage in legitimacy of the state is less true today. This is not fundamentally because communist societies have become more liberal, notwithstanding the loosening of some constraints such as on freedom of movement and economic freedom. One reason for the corrosion of the force of containment as a doctrine is that the legitimacy of democratic societies has collapsed faster across a number of recent decades than that of former communist societies. Western publics are astute in having less trust in their democratic institutions than their parents and grandparents had (Van der Meer 2017; Citrin and Stoker 2018). One driver is the empirical finding that economic crises destabilize democracies more than they destabilize dictatorships (Przeworski et al. 2000). Although China is less buffeted by a blizzard of distrust than the United States, it is still vulnerable to the same dynamics. There has been some decline in trust in government in China; the decline is deepest in the regions where income inequality is most extreme (Yang and Xin 2020). The problem has been that democratic institutions and communist party institutions have likewise become more systematically corrupted by capitalist commodification. I have already argued that Western universities have had their independence corrupted by the military-industrial complex. Political parties progressively became more adept at gaming institutions and corporate power to win elections and then bestow enough favors to hold power for a time. Chapter 10 shows that foreign meddling in democratic elections has become widespread and surprisingly effective in affecting outcomes and cascading distrust. This is what works; high integrity contests of governance ideas do not work as well this century as in the twentieth century.

When US Democrats looked back on Republican Presidents like Lincoln, Theadore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Republicans looked back on Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy with genuine admiration in the twentieth century, their mentality was different from that of twenty-first century US citizens looking back on recent past presidents of the party they decline to vote for. Trust in the US government reached the mid-70s% during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, but has languished in the low 20s for most of the years since the mid-1990s. Trust in government fell off a cliff during the era of the assassination of three great leaders in quick historical succession, the two Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King. Trust recovered somewhat during the Reagan era, but only temporarily. As a non-American, I struggle to judge whether a reason for the post-Kennedy decline was the failure of the vast investigative resources of the US state to establish a settled, transparent national narrative of who was behind these ‘murders most foul’ (in the words of Bob Dylan’s profound poetry of song). Or was it the lurking fear in the hearts of Americans of Lee Harvey Oswald seeming to have a CIA handler and a KGB handler? And how could the police be so incompetent as to allow Oswald to be shot dead in their custody? The competing narratives of three epochal assassinations make such limited sense. Or was it anger on both sides over waves of burning American cities that first started in a huge wave after the King assassination? Was this a driver of division and distrust at that time? I know not. Whatever the root causes, we all know that distrust and division have been accelerated by platform capitalism in all societies.

As in Kennan’s time, it remains a pro-freedom policy to encourage freedom of movement in and out of totalitarian societies to democracies so that intellectuals and leaders get a taste of the range of kinds of freedoms that do persist in other societies. Even if so many of these democracies have profoundly imperfect freedoms, to taste any kind of freedom that is freer than the tyranny of one’s homeland is to learn a little love for freedom. In time, lovers of freedom in the most despotic societies get their historical moment. They get their chance to argue for democratic transformation to open up those kinds of freedoms which they learned through exposure to them.

George Kennan proved right that confronting the Soviet Union was folly that could cause war, while containing Stalin behind the Iron Curtain would ultimately cause the Soviet Union to crumble from within. Indeed it did. Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s pitches for reform were initially warmly received in Russia, and across the communist world. A remarkable transition of massive swathe from communism to markets and democracy was accomplished quite peacefully in those few years until 1991 thanks to the astute containment theory analysis of successive Western leaders across the political spectrum.

Three Historic Spikes of Short-Range Nuclear Missile Risk

The nuclear disarmament movement was important to a fabric of international society in the 1980s. It helped persuade the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev that nuclear Armageddon was nigh, and then Ronald Reagan. It had been nigh before at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why? For the same reason it is nigh for a third time today in 2024. In 1952 Turkey was embraced into NATO so NATO missiles could be lined along the Black Sea to threaten the Crimean fleet and Southern Russian missiles. Russia reciprocated with missiles in Cuba. This put both sides at risk of an accidental launch, of a launch by miscalculation or calculation, by insanity or an overly rationalized sanity of offensive balance that dominates deterrence, by the vice of revenge or virtuous concern to protect innocent citizens. Or it could be the understanding of a Russian submarine in 1962 that they were under attack, but misunderstanding that the intent was only to force them to the surface, combined with the failure of the Americans to understand that the sub was nuclear armed.

Kennedy and Khrushchev did well for human survival by pulling nuclear weapons back from each other’s borders. They opened the pathway to the first strategic nuclear arms reduction agreements. These measures had greater importance for nuclear war prevention than we realize. Had this strategic moderation not been commenced at the hands of Kennedy and Krushchev, we might all be dead by now. Kennedy unilaterally announced a US ban on atmospheric nuclear weapon tests and asked for reciprocation, which was granted by Krushchev. Then followed the Nuclear Tests Ban Treaty. Three months before he was assassinated, Kennedy gave his renowned speech at American University. It issued a warning relevant to America’s relationship with Vladimir Putin today:

Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy--or of a collective death-wish for the world. (Kennedy 1963)

Within six years of Kennedy’s speech, the world honored its promise with the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banning the use of outer space for warfare, Latin America’s leadership for the first nuclear weapon ban treaty for the Global South in 1967, the Treaty of Tlatelolco, and the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

During the Reagan era, Kennedy’s concerns were back with a second great spike in nuclear war risk. The Brezhnev regime had developed dangerous new strategic nuclear weapons. They could hit NATO cities eight minutes after launch. The Reagan administration reciprocated with short-range missiles in Europe. Reagan was seriously frightened by these developments. US and Russian leaders alike could now be hit before they got out of their chairs, let alone before making it to their command bunker. Reagan spoke to his staff and confidantes of his fear that he might be the president who ended American civilization (Krepon 2021).

Gorbachev was sufficiently persuaded by the politics of the nuclear disarmament movement and by the GRIT theory of its scholars—Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension Reduction—that he advocated complete nuclear disarmament well before the end of the twentieth century. Gorbachev acted on this by unilaterally moving to halve Russian nuclear weapons in the knowledge that Reagan wanted to reciprocate. He did. Gorbachev also unilaterally announced a 500,000 reduction in Soviet military personnel. He successfully negotiated with Reagan the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty) that completely abolished all those new intermediate-range nuclear weapons and provided for US inspectors in Russia, and Russians in the United States to monitor the ‘trust and verify’ regime. Kennedy had wanted this, but until Gorbachev, weapons inspections was an absolute nyet for the Moscow military leadership. In the extreme risk environment of the 1980s, had not moderation prevailed between Reagan and Gobachev, for a second time it might be said we could all be dead by today. Reagan proved a paradoxical combination of a first-term anti-communist spending big on defense, but a second-term abolitionist of nuclear weapons when Gorbachev gave him an opportunity to act on this side of Reagan’s belief system (Krepon 2021).

Today there is a third similar spike in risk because President Putin openly broke away from the INF treaty. Arms reduction and mutual inspection are stone dead. We can disagree with John Mearsheimer’s realism on many things. Yet we might concur that if it looks to Putin like he is going to lose Crimea, this could be an existential threat to Putin personally, might be seen as an existential threat by most Russians. So Putin really might be criminal enough to seek to end the war at that point, as he has warned, by using a strategic nuclear weapon.

The social movement for nuclear disarmament got zero credit for the great things accomplished during the decade after the 1986 Reykjavík summit. Gorbachev and his successor Yelsin did their best to show good faith. NATO did fully reciprocate in missile reduction but not in good faith. Moscow showed good faith by saying we will not only ‘pull down that wall’, but we will also give Berlin and East Germany back to our old enemy. They showed good faith by abolishing the Warsaw Pact. They wanted the West to reciprocate by abolishing NATO, building instead an inclusive European security architecture that embraced Moscow as part of Europe. Moscow’s message was that we will pull all the nuclear weapons out of Ukraine and Belarus where there are thousands of them, and all other non-Russian Soviet republics, bring them back to Russia and destroy them under supervision of NATO weapons inspectors. But we will only halve Russian-based nuclear missiles, then halve them a second, and third time as we see your reciprocation, pursuant to GRIT theory, on weapons destruction and dismantling of NATO as an anti-Russian military alliance. Neocons in the Reagan White House spun the narrative that Reagan won the Cold War, Gorbachev surrendered, the Unipolar moment had arrived. No one sold the narrative that the GRIT moment had arrived. At the time of the 1986 Reykjavik summit, Henry Kissinger together with Richard Nixon excoriated Reagan for recklessly advocating nuclear abolition. In retrospect in 2007 Kissinger recanted to view the Reykjavik moment as the great lost opportunity to lock into a trajectory toward nuclear abolition. After Reagan retired, the West no longer saw it as their turn to show the leadership for the next step in reciprocal reduction in tensions. Gobachev was hung out to dry. He was lucky to escape with his life. During his holiday in Crimea, he was arrested by the KGB leadership and his military commander. From that moment, GRIT ground into the dust of Western triumphalism. This was in the political interests of neocon icons of future Republican administrations who were part of the Reagan administration and both Bush administrations. Was it in the interests of the peoples of NATO states?

Covert Distrust of Free Russians by Western Neocons and Hawks

Western leaders remained distrustful of Russia as the Cold War ended. They failed to reward leaders like Gorbachev for huge concessions Moscow unilaterally proffered. One was dismantling the Warsaw Pact without demanding the reciprocation of dismantling NATO. Ultimately Russia eliminated almost 90% of Soviet nuclear weapons, much of this by unilateral reductions, accompanied by a plea for reciprocation. This did elicit a Western response that was almost as high in percentage terms, but that involved destroying at least 10,000 fewer US nukes. Gorbachev was buffeted by so many responses from Western leaders that lacked the grace of restorative diplomacy. When Gorbachev announced in 1989 that Moscow would cease arming Nicaragua’s Sandinista rebels, White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, described Gorbachev as a ‘drugstore cowboy’, meaning an insincere person dressed to mask a phony. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney undermined Gorbachev a month before that by predicting on television that he would crash and burn (Krepon 2021, 369). Gorbachev requested in the same period to be given a little time to persuade Saddam Hussein to voluntarily withdraw from his 1990 Kuwait invasion. According to my Peacebuilding Compared interviews in Iraq, Gorbachev probably rightly believed he could accomplish this to avoid war. He was snubbed. President Bush had set his mind upon a war that lasted until the defeat of Islamic State in Iraq a quarter of a century later.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin insisted on one assurance as they handed Berlin and East Germany back to their old German enemy. This was that while NATO weapons could be deployed in East Germany, they wanted assurances about NATO weapons not spreading to other regions that at the time were behind the Iron Curtain that was about to be lifted. US Secretary of State, James Baker, in a meeting between Gobachev and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl with both their Foreign Ministers did eventually give Russia the assurance, as recorded in his notes of the meeting, that NATO would expand Eastwards ‘not one inch’10 from its current boundaries. This was duplicitous of the US and NATO leaderships. According to Gorbachev, the meeting had discussed as an alternative to this undertaking that a West Germany unified with East Germany would stay out of NATO to adopt a position of neutrality (Krepon 2021, 473). The third alternative was for the German Democratic Republic to remain a separate country. Germany opted for the deal that NATO would not move one inch Eastwards apart from the expansion into East Germany. NATO dishonored the deal under US pressure. The Russian perspective was shocked that the top leadership of a Germany that had slaughtered so many Russians in a war of aggression would renege, then act as if they had never committed to this agreement.

Both Presidents Bush and Clinton, and subsequent US Presidents also denied that their government had lied about NATO never being allowed to expand an inch further East. They preferred the narrative that Moscow were simply bad negotiators who failed to make any demands in return for withdrawing to allow reunification of Germany. This helped Vladimir Putin to later position himself as the redeemer of Russia who would never again surrender Russian territory or vulnerability to NATO missiles in weak submission to NATO lies. Putin, the KGB creation, had no sympathy for Gorbachev after he was hung out to dry by his NATO friends.

Even though Russia made so many unilateral concessions to the United States in the ten years from 1986, it did not get the enormous bounty Japan, Italy and Germany received at the time of the Marshall Plan. Russia was distrusted and supported at the end of the Cold War in a manner more like the way the German Weimar Republic was distrusted from November 1918. The harvest from those two eras of distrustful and dishonorable diplomacy was not so different.

Japan, Italy, and Germany had been supported with huge resources and consultants who had Keynesian institution-building competence after 1945. In contrast, United States and private foundations like the Margaret Thatcher Foundation sent post-Cold-War consultants who were often neoliberal conmen. They privatized communist economies from public monopolies that had been subject to some state checks and balances into the hands of monopolies and oligarchs subject to no checks and balances. These consultants were mostly young ideologues who had limited experience of building institutions, nor experience of most of the things they were advising post-communist leaders to do. They could not speak Russian. The Russian economy was ravaged. Ordinary Russians acquired deep distrust of Boris Yeltsin and his Western advisors. Russian public health and life expectancy, and Russian security from crime and war cascaded catastrophically. The crime rate, the imprisonment rate, corruption, inflation, unemployment, and inequality went through the ceiling; life expectancy fell through the floor. So did the economy, with GNP having fallen by more than 40% when Vladimir Putin came to power. From that point, GDP per capita began to rise sharply, recovering to its 1990 level by 2007, but then tumbling backwards again with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, after which it resumed an upwards trajectory until a further steep decline occurred after the 2014 Ukraine invasion and a lesser decline, but a decline, after the 2022 Ukraine invasion. Putin was something of a savior of the Russian economy who then wrecked it again with his invasions.

While many of the consultants who traveled to fix the economies behind the Iron Curtain were simply naïve about their meddling in a society they did not understand, the outcome was what some of the old CIA and Pentagon hardheads wanted. They wanted a Russia that was so weakened on every front that it could never rise again. Many of them still want that today and believe that they were the worldly-wise ones in thinking that in 1990. These are the Western military-industrial complex characters who railed against Russian requests to transform the architecture of NATO to embrace Russia into a shared security architecture rather than the adversarial alliance structures that cascaded to former European wars. No, NATO diehards stood firm as covert advocates of expanding US hegemony through NATO. They never diverted from NATO empire building. Defense contracting corporations propagandized NATO institutions and NATO societies with this folly. They believed their NATO empire should survive and grow by continuing the containment of Russia as a covert policy. Then their beautiful opportunity arrived. It brought containment back into the open as a policy around which NATO could become more ‘united’ again. The opportunity for these covert hawks to become overt warriors for the containment of Russia came with Putin’s criminal folly in Ukraine.

This continuous de facto policy of containment of Russia that was for a long-time covert is now touted overtly more widely than just by a cabal of longstanding hawks such as Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Bolton. Today the neocons advocate containment of Russia and China frontstage, asserting they were right all along. This has been their complex game of at one moment being covert and duplicitous about containment, deniers that Gorbachev and Yeltsin were ever lied to. At the next historical moment, they became honest and open about their belief in the containment of Russia, China, and ‘rogue’ states like Syria, Libya, and Iran. They might have been better patriots by playing a simpler game on containment that was more like George Kennan and Hedley Bull’s realist analysis. This is the simpler, open, collaborative position on containment developed in a new way in the pages that follow.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Many different Australian social democratic leaders embraced different aspects of the thought of not only Harold Wilson, but also their Australian forbears, Bull and Burton. These include former Australian Labor prime ministers, Gough Whitlam (who met with Chairman Mao Tse Tung before President Nixon) and Paul Keating (who wanted to transform the obsolescence of NATO for embracing Russia after the Cold War, as discussed later in this Chapter). Former Hawke and Keating government Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans, was also in this Australian line of IR thinking (as discussed in Chapter 5). These leaders disagreed on various things, yet they all worked at their own vision of how to strengthen Hedley Bull’s two wings of a deterrence default on the one hand, and on the other an international society that learns how to improve its capabilities for peacemaking. There have been many other leaders in Australia and other countries who have manifested those Hedley Bull influences, such as recent New Zealand Prime Ministers Helen Clark and Jacinda Adern, but conservative ones as well like Germany’s Angela Merkel. American wartime general and Republican President, Dwight D Eisenhower, with his early brainstorming on nuclear disarmament and warnings to future presidents of risks in where the ‘military-industrial complex’ might lead resonates with this tradition (Krepon 2021), as did the shortened life of his opponent and successor John F. Kennedy.

  2. 2.

    The mainstream of realist advocacy argues that Ukraine is about the main game with NATO peer rival, China. In this rivalry NATO should want to embrace Russia in a balancing coalition against China, rather than push Russia to become a vassal of China that increases geostrategic allegiance to China. Russia became an ally and nuclear supplier to Chinese ally, North Korea. See, for example, the writing of Mearsheimer (2018).

  3. 3.

    This is so far a statistically significant pattern in my Peacebuilding Compared dataset still in the process of accumulating years and cases.

  4. 4.

    Given the inevitability of some kind of radical violent flank in street protests, in resistance to invasions, leaders with a nonviolent strategy can and perhaps should use the inevitability of that radical violent flank strategically. Nelson Mandela was an example of a nonviolent regime-changer who played his violent radical flank card with wisdom in his South African struggle (Braithwaite 2014). But see the critical views on the negative effects of a violent radical flank in the work of Schock (2015) and Chenoweth (2021, 2023), who concludes that the balance of evidence is that an armed radical flank undermines the otherwise formidable effectiveness of nonviolent movements.

  5. 5.

    Moreover, we know that resolution by peace agreements in turn tends to reduce the subsequent incidence of war. Another large-N study by Leventoğlu and Metternich (2018) found that greater civilian protest activity is associated with increased likelihood of peace negotiations and settlements for African civil wars. Abbs did not find an association between the degree of nonviolent resistance that occurred during a war and the subsequent incidence of further wars.

  6. 6.

    Here I am tracking the normative position on minimizing domination developed by Pettit (1997). On the positive impact of nonviolent resistance on enduring postconflict democracy beyond Abbs (2021) and Chenoweth (2021) see also the Bayer et al. (2016) finding that democracies installed after an elite-led violent transition lasted only five years, but lasted on average 47 years after nonviolent resistance led democratic transitions.

  7. 7.

    See Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) and updates in Chenoweth (2021). But see also recent critiques and revisions to the strength of their effect sizes in Dworschak (2023) and Anisin (2020). On the other hand, Johnstad’s (2010) study found a higher success rate of nonviolent civil resistance compared to armed struggle than found by Chenoweth and Stephan. Another study by Cunningham (2023) reveals a level of civil resistance power in mobilizing international human rights pressure on violent regimes at a level that goes beyond Chenoweth and Stephan.

  8. 8.

    When I did a last minutes update on these numbers before going to press using World Bank data on GDP per capital in current US$, the rank order had moved around quite a bit, with a number of new small economies joining the 16 richest per capita. The US post-covid economy also performed comparatively well: the United States moved from 13 to 12th. But it was still true that all the other countries in the top 16 were small, militarily weak countries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=false (accessed September 29, 2023).

  9. 9.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita (accessed September 29, 2023).

  10. 10.

    See Footnote 10, Chapter 5 for the now declassified documentary evidence on this.