Historically, the major motivations for war were population, resources, and national security, and all three are mostly self-explanatory.
Pre-industrial agricultural countries constantly struggled with cyclical famines and food shortages, so it was beneficial to conquer other territories. A kingdom consisting of just a few provinces in one climate zone is in constant danger of crop failure, but if you conquer ten provinces in several climate zones, the farmlands prospering at that particular moment can export food to the areas that are experiencing crop failure, so no one starves and prices are stable. This keeps the people happy and less likely to storm the king’s palace.
A related problem was the absence of birth control, so populations would constantly expand. It was helpful to send the disenfranchised men to ravage the land and women somewhere else.
Industrialization and globalization eliminated most of the existential motivations for war. It’s not a coincidence that the less developed a population is, the more warlike they are. Tribes are constantly at war while modern nation states barely fight at all, and a man may live out his entire life without ever touching a weapon. A modern economy of a 100 million people is far less desperate than a tribe of a thousand people, so they’re no longer constantly preoccupied with invasions and defending themselves from invasions.
There is no longer any particular benefit to conquering a foreign population and directly ruling them. Food and resources can be bought on the global marketplace, so from an economic standpoint there isn’t much to gain from the expense and risk of seizing their stuff by force. Consider Iraq for example. The USA did not annex Iraq and make all Iraqis American citizens.
Liberal apologists for US imperialism of course sneer and say “See, America is good because we don’t annex territory” which is nonsense, because all of the territories the USA would reasonably want to annex were already annexed long ago, so any American war now is just a project of neo-colonialism; to install a puppet government that cooperates with whatever goal the US government had wanted in that region.
The third motivation is the most nuanced, and unlike the others, hasn’t become outdated. Medieval fiefdoms might squabble over a particular river crossing or mountain pass because it gives the owner a strategic advantage. A medieval country might for a similar reason decide that the best way to eliminate the threat of a warlike neighbor is just to annex them. They can’t attack you if you have them occupied with your troops and they’re not allowed to have a standing army of their own.
Such matters of national security are the cause of the overwhelming majority of conflicts in the modern day and attempts to morally distinguish them are usually dishonest propaganda. For example, Israel seizes neighboring territory and occupies it with their troops all the time, but no westerner calls Israel a pariah state, or says that all Israelis are subhuman “orcs.” But if any US so-called “adversary” conducts any kind of military action, no matter how small or limited in scope, they’re portrayed as the next Hitler who will conquer the entire world unless we spend hundreds of billions of dollars and risk nuclear annhilation to stop them. There is also the common sense principle that if you don’t control a certain neutral territory, one of your enemies will, and will fill it with weapons pointed at you.
That last paragraph can easily explain any military conflict by most countries, like Russia with Georgia and Ukraine, and China with India. The wild card that messes everything up is the USA. Why does the USA have suicide pacts with so many other countries, most of whom are totally irrelevant to the USA’s national security? Why does the USA have a suicide pact with Estonia, which is literally smaller than most American cities? So I am to understand that if Estonian and Russian border guards get into a fight, for any reason and no matter how trivial, every last American man, woman and child will die? That’s like taping a brick of C4 to your forehead and giving the detonator to a toddler. But I actually find the anti-China suicide pacts, though less former than NATO, are more bizarre. Most Americans don’t even like Filipinos or respect them as a country. But US politicians have made at least verbal promises that all Americans will sacrifice their lives for Filipino sovereignty? Imagine hiding in a cave hunting (or being hunted by) mutated rats, because there was a fight in the Philippines.
Of course that makes no sense and the only alternative explanation is that these suicide pacts are a bluff. I hope they’re a bluff, at least.
Ian Kummer
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