Not my area of expertise, of course. But Neerav Kingsland, also not an expert, wrote this post on the Ian Morris book, which I have not read, and he wondered if I had thoughts. First, some excerpts from Neerav’s post:
Morris’ thesis is this:
1. Government is the primary source of the reduction of violence in societies.
2. Wars caused societies to merge, thereby increasing the scope, scale, and efficacy of government.
3. It would have been great if societies had figured out a way to merge without war, but this, unfortunately, has rarely happened.
4. So, like it or not, war has been the driver of government innovation.
5. Therefore, wars have been the primary cause of our long-term decline of violence.
…Generally, massive war breaks out when a superpower declines.
My thoughts:
1. If you’re a libertarian having a hard time getting your mind around this, think of war as a way of achieving open borders. That is, before they fight, country X and country Y have borders. After they fight, the winner takes over all the territory, and the borders no longer matter.
2. If you are a Hobbesian, then you believe that only a strong government can produce peace. You might regard the U.S. Navy as the force that made the last 70 years of globalization possible.
3. In the wake of the attacks in Paris and San Bernadino, you would think that Congress should declare war on somebody.
Instead, we have this vague “authorization to use military force.” The most charitable reading I can give of that is that it allows the President maximum flexibility to wage war in a very ambiguous setting, in which enemies do not wear uniforms and they are embedded with civilians. But I personally do not like this approach. Here are two alternatives that I think are better, although it should be clear on reflection that there are major problems with every possible approach.
a) Get rid of the authorization to use military force and legislate a strict non-interventionist policy. I think that has at least two things going for it. First, it is a clear, unambiguous policy. Second, it does not run all of the risks of flawed execution and unintended consequences that flow from interventions. However, it does mean that whatever advantage there is/was from having the U.S. as hegemonic power gets tossed away. For example, we might go through a period of de-globalization, as various conflicts spin out of control.
b) Get rid of the generic authorization to use military force and instead declare war on the Islamic State. One advantage of this is that it designates a specific enemy and implies a finite objective. We would stop sending drones all over the map and instead focus on taking over the territory that now belongs to barbarians. The disadvantages are that this increases casualties in the short run and it probably means that we would have to undertake a long-term military occupation, which has many pitfalls. It exerts no leverage against Syrian President Assad (it probably helps him). It ignores any barbarism that originates elsewhere.
For the purposes of limiting the government’s ability to go to war, an aumf is not clearly worse than a declaration of war. You can have very narrow aumfs (i.e., our aumf in the quasi war back in the 1790s, limited geographically to high seas and, I believe, requiring renewal)), but pretty much every deceleration of war we’ve ever had has been unlimited as to time and geographic scope. It’s not like they avoid quagmires or war aims shifting as a practical matter either: see our declared war against Spain turning into the long occupation of the phillipines.
If congress had declared war against al Qaeda and associated groups/nations in 2001 instead of issuing am aumf, there’s absolutely no way in which the president would have less authority than he currently does. The president’s inherent national defense power is a much bigger problem.
A third approach is intervention between states or at the edge or within stateless areas while allowing wide autonomy to them, allowing them to sort out their problems. This is more what is done in practice as resources are limited but risks of non intervention rise, a policy of containment, uncertain and difficult in practice, but pragmatic.
Most of my Civ-Barb chips (11) resulted directly from synthesizing Arnold’s concerns. But after thinking about this issue a lot since 9/11/01 I couldn’t shoe-horn my thinking into the 3-axis model. Even still all the options are interconnected. The only way I see the Islamic State doing anything like the Nazis is if the globe becomes aligned as us versus them. How is a religion really going to threaten global domination? The Islamic State is basically limited to islamic states and trying to build brand by bombing non-islamics. I doubt the Nazis could have gotten that far out of Europe. The greatest threat was global communism and even that petered out. So, anyone highly concerned about (A) over (C) to me is drastically projecting (A) such that “Caliphate” approaches something like the Nazi threat and/or is isn’t paying attention to how effective terrorism has been at causing us to attack ourselves. Tyrannical islam simply has no political or economic advantages like the Nazis or communism- not that those are the scales required for “some concern.”
The left is also insane because we profile muslims so very little considering the long tail of the projected threat (mushroom clouds, etc.) The main reason I have more concern for (B) over (A) is that (B) creates (A) via the mechanism above. This is what we just demonstrated through Iraq and Syria. Even their own domestic tyrannies weren’t enough to create “The Islamic State” without our intervention. The only way A happens is by doing it to ourselves via (C) or by conflict alignment recruiting and radicalizing a signifcant number of the Billion muslims that we have to get along with for the foreseeable future.
What facts, not projections, should make me think that I’m only heavily weighting C because of my axis bias?
I meant this to be on the other blog post, but it’s basically the same subject to me. So, move it, leave it, or delete it, whatevs.
Don’t think we should profile Muslims. Someone being a Muslim is not very indicative of them being a terrorist. At most I would say 1 in 10,000 Muslims in America are terrorists (low end estimate of 3 million Muslims, high-end guesstimate of 300 active Islamic terrorists). A .001 percent chance of someone having committed a crime is not very probative.
And obviously the odds of them being a terrorist with a wmd are much, much lower.
Profiling in general is a pretty dumb way to allocate law enforcement resources in most situations. Conducting stings, gathering evidence, and following up on leads trumps it by a wild mile.
But when the alternative to profiling is applying no-fly lists to millions of people, taking 100 millions of American Rifleman’s (no small reason we won WW2) guns, grabbing granny’s knitting needles at the airport, and causing more people to die by deflecting them away from flying than died on 9/11, that is not more reasonable.
That’s a false choice. You’re basically saying “we do all this dumb security theatre that creates problems for millions and doesn’t help anything. Instead we should do dumb profiling that creates problems for millions of people and doesn’t help anything.”
If we only applied airport security to profiled individuals would that be more or less expensive?
I’m sure the government could screw this up and end up spending more on determining who to profile than on executing the security, but assuming they didn’t it would have to be cheaper.
Then the question would be how relatively effective it would be? Assuming the government didn’t manage to screw that up too, it would likely be more effective focusing on fewer individuals with known markers.
I still don’t have to think they should or shouldn’t. I’d love to convince people that more people have died due to airport security than died on 9/11, but nobody seems to buy it or care. But by applying the security level that the market will bear across-the-board is likely making the security too expensive and ineffective and counterproductive. This will also, by the way, result in more successful attacks followed by more ineffective and counterproductive security.
The question you have narrowed the discussion down to is whether the dynamic between Democrats saying “we can’t profile” and Republicans saying “we need security” is the cause of this situation, and I think it is. I see few Democrats calling for less overall security. Obama suck his neck way out for the NSA illegal domestic spying, for example. The only thing that seems to motivate him more protecting the illegal domestic spying would be demagoguing the latest racial red herring.
I do think the case can be made that treating muslims poorly through ham-handed profiling could radicalize them and also be counterproductive (and I didn’t suggest broad-based profiling purely on religious affiliation) . But that is a pragmatic concern. I don’t see many Democrats making this case, though I don’t look that hard.
If everyone who wasn’t a Muslim got to skip airport security then yes, I’m pretty sure that would lead to an absolute explosion of smuggling and terrorism (remember, most terrorists in the US aren’t Muslims) and that the costs would exceed the benefits, even ignoring problems with implementation.
If all you mean is that airports should consider religious affiliation (how would they know?) when selecting whom to give heightened screening, no, I don’t think that would help reduce costs much, especially since TSA already can and does consider national origin.
No. It wouldn’t lead to an explosion of smuggling and terrorism.
There has basically been one significant terrorist attack that resulted in the security theater, none before the security theater, and several attempted attacks that the security theater didn’t stop. And the security will not stop an actual future attack that will circumvent the rudimentary TSA security which will be stopped by citizens. And it would not even stop the type of attack that took place on 9/11, which now would be attacked by citizens.
It is also not a matter of whether or not most terrorists are one group or another, it is a matter of what percentage of an identifiable group is terrorists.
Please refer back to Arnold’s “Do you really believe that?” post. Do you believe the security theater is effective or not? You are being inconsistent in your argument.
It is also a function of how many organized terrorists there are, and of that there are literally zero non-muslim organized terrorists in the US.
Check that. There is one domestic organized terrorist cell operating in the US persistently and stupidly focusing on the played out target of airlines. The TSA, who as I stated, has killed more Americans than were killed on 9/11 by diverting people from safe air travel to far deadlier roads.
If something is ineffective, it should be stopped, not broadened. If something is effective it should be focused and the resources from those ineffective and cancelled programs redirected to the focal point.
So, is the implication of Morris’ theory that now that we’ve basically run out of inter-governmental war, governments will stagnate or decline? Without external threats, will governments start to resemble stationary bandits more and more?
Blah. Accidentally hit reply too soon. Basically, I think it’s common sense that wars promoted cooperation and innovation. Clearly, though, we hit an inflection point in the early 20th century. This innovation created a lot of very powerful weapons that were put to very destructive use, such that the returns to waging war became negative for most circumstances and it thus began to decline in frequency.
It’s worth pondering what that means going forward. For example, it might be fair to speculate that nation states will for the most part undergo a significant decline, as people only cooperated to form high-functioning states out of necessity, and absent external threats, lots of people find they don’t really like or care for one another and really don’t want to associate anymore. Look at Europe’s various secession movements, for example: Scotland, Catalonia, the proposed partition of Belgium, etc.
The road to Raqqa goes through Damascus. We can’t solve the ISIS problem without first neutralizing Assad. Assad is creating most of the refugees among whom ISIS hides. Also, Assad prevents us from building a stable Sunni coalition against ISIS.
At very least we need to take out Assad’s airforce.
First, my definition of war: War is a social activity whereby coherent political communities use organized violence to achieve political ends. Note that a coherent political community does not necessarily have to be a state in the Westphalian sense nor a government.
Regarding Morris:
1. “Government is the primary source of the reduction of violence in societies” Government usually enjoys a monopoly of legal violence, so it makes sense that government will want to enforce that monopoly by reducing violence in other parts of society.
2. “Wars caused societies to merge, thereby increasing the scope, scale, and efficacy of government.” Obviously not true in many cases, particularly civil wars. War can also split societies – just ask the Baluchi’s or Kurds or any other stateless group. Or, consider governments that collapsed and new states were formed from the political communities of the old empire. This is why political communities are more important than governments when it comes to war.
3. “It would have been great if societies had figured out a way to merge without war, but this, unfortunately, has rarely happened.” That’s probably because most societies have little desire to merge with other societies. Fear and distrust of the “other” is human trait. For example, there’s nothing preventing the peaceful unification of Canada and the USA except the complete lack of desire by people in both countries. So, the peaceful option is always there.
4. “So, like it or not, war has been the driver of government innovation.” This is a product of survivor bias. The governments that survived existential wars were forced to innovate – those that failed lost. The prospect of near-term destruction is a great motivator for change.
5. “Therefore, wars have been the primary cause of our long-term decline of violence.” I wonder what long-term is here – since WW2? If so then the cause is not wars, but a change is the cost-benefit calculus in going to war.
To get rid of violence you just have to kill everbody. Yogi Berra
The theory makes a lot of sense until Europe WW2. Then after two huge great wars it appears Europe has finally settled down and figured out not to fight wars. My guess the Middle East nations need a massive wars to learn our lesson.
In terms of libertarian views on open borders, Historical cultural assimilation is journey takes centuries not a couple of generations. (This is not just about Trump run but Romney beat Rick Perry on immigration in 2012. Also can you imagine the Middle East with complete open borders?) Open borders is not a political reality in 2015.