The Decline of War: What Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Speech Should Have Said

No, a telegram would not do. That was the means of communication chosen, one imagines in an off-hand way, by the previous two sitting presidents bestowed the Nobel Peace Prize. Theodore Roosevelt fired off a terse message, expressing his gratitude to the distinguished Norwegian committee, before making the bizarre announcement that the award monies would go to an organization entrusted with reducing trade union unrest. Woodrow Wilson's epistle was rather more vacuous, and expressed nothing except humility. The top-hatted apostle for the League of Nations was being publicly recognized for ending the war to end all wars, and all he could muster was a meek word of thanks.

But, Barack Obama? No, the great orator of Hyde Park was not about to send a Western Union to Scandinavia. Nor, indeed, was he was he about to do the modern equivalent and Twitter away such a golden opportunity. He was going to fly to Norway and deliver an address. Not just a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, but an old-fashioned presidential address. In other words, he gave a rather too-long, formal speech outlining state policy. The meat of the speech, once he had finessed his way through the controversy surrounding his award, provided a theory of just war and what's already being ominously referred to as the "Obama Doctrine".

The foundations of this doctrine were laid bare in Oslo, and can be abbreviated as follows: even after the agony of the Iraq War and the debacle in Afghanistan, the United States will continue to employ war as an essential element of foreign policy, either in concert with other nations or unilaterally, and not only for reasons of self-defense, but whenever civil strife, ethnic violence, or state oppression in some far-off land beckons. To quote from his address:

The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

These are common themes, repeated ad nauseam by ex-diplomats and former senators at Washington think-tanks and Sunday morning talk shows: that we live in an era of small wars and ethnic cleansing, a time when fanatical non-state actors can threaten entire nations with acts of terror. Of course, nobody expects the President of the United States to quote statistics in a major address to support these assertions, so it is left to us to sort out truth from half-truth, common sense from common delusion. So, what can we say about the validity of the President's claims regarding war in the modern age?

In fact, there's an entire genre of scholarly literature devoted to the question of whether war has declined in recent decades, and out of it a near consensus has emerged: armed conflict is less frequent than ever and in particular has undergone a precipitous descent since the end of the Cold War. One study from international researchers at the Human Security Center revealed that there's been a 40% drop in armed conflict since 1992. And this figure includes minor conflicts in which less than 1000 battle deaths occurred; when focusing only on major wars, the decline is an extraordinary 80% during the same time period.

The numbers continue to astonish and finally dumbfound: while ethnic cleansing in Darfur has rightfully awakened the world's conscience, the data indicates that the number of genocides, like that of all conflicts globally, has plummeted about 80% since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This "peace epidemic" has contributed to a fall in the population of refugees worldwide by about 45%, as formally displaced people have returned to their homes. Moreover, the wars that still transpire are less deadly than before. While the average death-toll per war in 1950 was a brutal 38,000, more than half a century later it's down to 600.

In fairness, it must be admitted that the most recent data as reported by the Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), indicates that the diminution in conflict was arrested in 2005, when an uptick in civil violence occurred, and has only just been renewed since then. Nevertheless, there are strong reasons for believing that the secular downward trend will continue. Despite the recent setback, interstate wars, that is to say, wars between nations, have not made a comeback and there are none ongoing. Moreover, despite what the President suggested in Oslo, civil internal strife is also still less frequent than it was during the Cold War. And finally, the fall in the number of casualties per conflict has not been reversed in recent years.

So, with qualification, it's possible to declare that what at first appeared to be a remarkable downward trend in conflicts worldwide, appears upon closer inspection to be nothing less than the virtual disappearance of war over the last couple decades. And this is why President Obama's performance while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize seemed so inappropriately bellicose and dour. The arguably premature award could have been refashioned into an opportunity to call the world's attention to the remarkable progress being made in eradicating militarized conflict and in developing an international order where differences are settled in the mundane confines of the United Nations or the World Trade Organization, rather than on the more gallant terrain of the battlefield. For, despite the unwarranted pessimism and stern moralistic posturing that characterized the president's speech, the scarcely believable truth is, that for the first time in recorded history, the end of war appears to be more than just an unrealizable dream.

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After 9/11 and Fort Hood: The Anti-Muslim Backlash That Almost Never Happened

A strange rhythm reverberates through American society. Every few years or months, another mass shooting punctuates the national consciousness. Each massacre is like an aftershock of the last, a seismic tremor that immediately seems to foreshadow the next inevitable tragedy. Of course, the Fort Hood shooting stands apart. Here, the assailant's religion and motives, the non-civilian nature of the targets and it's connection to the Afghan War, mark off the shooting as belonging to that murky sub-genre of mass violence called terrorism.

After having been both victimized and turned into helpless spectators during 9/11, and since then, in a massive case of overcompensation, having borne the brunt of the military casualties in two wars, it would seem plausible that the United States would have fallen prey at home to a wave of anti-Muslim prejudice. Has this, in fact, occurred? The answers are complicated, as the real world has an annoying tendency of being. To begin with, Americans are far less biased against Muslims than almost any other Western nation. The Pew Global Attitudes Project, found in 2008 that the English speaking countries, the U.S. and Great Britain, at 23% of those polled, had lower levels of unfavorability towards Muslims than the nations of Continental Europe. By contrast, in Germany and Spain about 50% the population had a negative perception of their Muslim minorities.


Notably, the U.S. was the only country polled where public sentiment towards Muslims significantly improved since 2004. In other words, there was a backlash against Islam after the Al Qaeda attacks, but it fairly quickly died down. This is confirmed by evidence provided by Human Rights Watch, in a report ironically intended to prove the precise opposite. In the year following the September 11th hijackings, there was an unmistakable surge in hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs in America, from 28 the previous year to 481 in 2001. During that period, four murders, two by the same individual, can be attributed to the anti-Muslim backlash. Yet, the bulk of the violence took place in a window of just a few weeks after the theatrical demolition of the World Trade Center. Again, the same pattern emerged following the London bombings of July, 2005: a disturbing, but brief spate of racially motivated violence, followed by a return to the average trend.

In other words, the data from both international public polling, and from the number of hate crimes committed simply do not provide consistent support for the proposition that levels of terrorism correlate well with bigotry towards Muslims. Rather, the stronger correlation is with levels of racism towards minorities in general. Intriguingly, the same Pew survey indicated that, in broad terms, those nations with higher levels of anti-Muslim animus, are those where anti-Semitism still has prevalence. The lesson here is the moral of the 20th century, the one redeeming value that emerged from the ruins of the last global war: that an injury to one is an injury to all.

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Why the Chinese Will Win in Afghanistan

The debate in Washington over Afghanistan is sustained by the familiar dichotomy of troop increases versus withdrawals, targeted counterinsurgency tactics versus nation building. Underlying it all is the remarkably durable ideological framework according to which all American wars are either World War II redux or Vietnam all over again. But, what if the question of whether the U.S. wins or loses is almost besides the point? Robert Kaplan raises the question: is China the inevitable winner from the war in Afghanistan?

IN Afghanistan’s Logar Province, just south of Kabul, the geopolitical future of Asia is becoming apparent: American troops are providing security for a Chinese state-owned company to exploit the Aynak copper reserves, which are worth tens of billions of dollars. While some of America’s NATO allies want to do as little as possible in the effort to stabilize Afghanistan, China has its eyes on some of world’s last untapped deposits of copper, iron, gold, uranium and precious gems, and is willing to take big risks in one of the most violent countries to secure them.

In fact, this is a growing trend in those countries lucky enough to have been recently subject to U.S. cruise missiles. The pattern is clear: country X is bombed into submission, which subsequently leads to a regime change, and finally, the new government proceeds to signs massive deals with our major geopolitical rivals China and Russia.

In 1999 the Clinton Administration waged a war against Milosevic's Serbia, ostensibly in defense of the Kosovar Albanians. Over a year later, following claims of fraud in federal elections, Milosevic was peacefully overthrown, and the new regime announced it's intentions to join the European Union. The stage was set for a new era of pro-Western good feelings, and American-led corporate domination. Instead, Russia's state-owned behemoth Gazprom proceeded to buy up Serbia's gas and oil interests: essentially the country's energy sector has been annexed by Moscow. And with the current economic crisis having hit the Balkans hard, the Serbian government has most recently negotiated two separate billion dollar loans with both Russia and China. Somehow, against all the odds China, whose embassy was notoriously bombed during the Kosovo War, is reaping the benefits from America's role in that conflict.

The same story has repeated itself in Iraq. After more than a decade of obsessing over the country, the U.S. invaded and toppled Saddam's Baathist regime in 2003. Famously, while an anarchy of looting descended upon Baghdad after the initial U.S. victory, American troops were tasked with defending one particular government building: the oil ministry. The move quickly became a symbol for the mercenary motives that drove the war, and seemed to lend credence to the slogans of protesters the world over. So, today, with the apparent triumph of the Surge and the quelling of the Sunni insurgency, have American companies come to monopolize Iraq's oilfields? Well, not quite. Once again, the Chinese have made a vigorous play for a market newly opened by the American military: their largest state owned oil company CNPC just signed an initial agreement along with the British BP to develop the oil fields of Rumaila. In other words, the largest oil field in Iraq is now part owned by the Chinese. Another major Chinese company, Sinopec, is currently involved in a dispute with the Iraqi government over the Taq oil field in Kurdistan, but at the moment they too stand to profit indirectly from the American invasion.

So, the fact that this pattern is reemerging in Afghanistan should hardly qualify as a shocking development. On the contrary, what's surprising is that both parties in Washington still seem so committed to a militaristic foreign policy that seems, on a strict cost-benefit analysis, only to significantly benefit a small number of U.S. corporations - most notably, our military contractors. As a general rule then, whenever the U.S. topples a Third World dictator, while red and blue state patriots alike stand united in support of their commander-in-chief, we can assume that American troops will unwittingly end up defending the interests of state owned companies from Russia and China.

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