War Has Almost Ceased to Exist: An Assessment

In 1911, the eminent British historian, G.P. Gooch, concluded a book by elegiacally declaring that “we can now look forwardwith something like confidence to the time when war between civilized nations will be considered as antiquated as the duel, and when peacemakers shall be called the children of God.” And in that yearʼs edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Sir Thomas Barclay predicted, in the article on “Peace,” that “in no distant future, life among nations”would be characterized by “law, order and peace amongmen.” During the intervening century, the world has, of course, experienced a very large amount of often hugely destructive warfare, and God, far from blessing peacemakers, appears mostly to have decided to fight “on both sides in that encouraging way He has,” as A.A. Milne put it bitterly in the interval separating the two largest of those armed conflicts. During that same period, philosopher George Santayana proclaimed, even more bitterly, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Indeed, some writers have dubbed the decades after 1911 “the century of warfare,” and a very large portion of the international relations and political science literature has been focused on the causes and consequences