Isegoria

One of Gordon Tullock’s colleagues at Yale felt strongly that we should not help the French in what was then French Indochina:

Although no admirer of the French empire, I preferred it to the Communists, but I also felt it an unimportant matter from the standpoint of American foreign policy. At the time I was a Foreign Service Officer on detached duty at Yale to study Chinese, so he obviously expected me to express my views on the subject. More correctly he thought that I would express the Department of State’s views.

I responded by saying that Europe was more important than Indochina and we were attempting to restore the remnant of Germany to prosperity and give it possibly a little strength. The French were impeding this and I thought an implicit trade in which we gave them some minor assistance in their empire and they at least moderated their objections to the restoration of Germany would be sensible. He did not object to my statement about the world, but said, “I don’t think we should do this kind of trading.” Although this was only one person, his phrase stuck to my memory as representative of a general climate of opinion among academics studying the Far East.

Gordon Tullock explores the democratic peace:

Apparently many political scientists feel insecure in their teaching that democracy is the best form of government. Thus recently there has been quite a fad in political science arguing that democracies are one way or another peaceful. It’s hard to argue that the Roman Republic was a peaceful conqueror, and the Athenian democracy was hardly reluctant to get into wars. It could of course be argued that these are long ago and that maybe they’re not true democracies. I suspect, however, that they are left out simply because most modern political scientists know little about them. A classical education is no longer part of the normal background of a scholar.

Since democracies undeniably were involved in two major wars in the 20th century and United States succeeded in having a major war that was entirely internal in the 19th century, this contention seems hard to support. It has then been gradually modified in order to bring it into accord with the average political scientist’s gradually growing historical knowledge. The first step was to allege that democracies did not engage in aggressive wars. After this argument had gotten into print, somebody read a little bit about the 19th century in which European democracies seized much of the world by a series of aggressive wars. Thus that particular argument had to be abandoned. I should perhaps say that in no case did anyone say that the previous argument was in error, they just stopped using it.

This leads us to the final version, which is that democracies do not fight with each other. It is to
this myth that this paper is devoted. The two largest wars in recent times were the two world wars. In each of these there were democracies on both sides. This will surprise the average reader since the standard history in United States and England claims that our opponents were dictatorships. Indeed we normally call all of our opponents dictatorships. In essence the wars became virtuous because the democracies fought with, and in fact, defeated dictatorships.

Let us start with World War I. On one side was a German Empire that was a constitutional monarchy with an elected legislature that had the power of the purse. In fact it had a large number of socialist members in that legislature. Criticism of this from those who are proponents of the Democratic peace hypothesis normally point out that the upper house was elected by a method which permitted people of upper incomes to have somewhat more votes than the poor. This was true, but consider the upper house in England, which was hereditary. It is true that its powers had been somewhat restricted, but it still could exercise in almost completely effective veto.

Germany had permitted women to vote from well before the beginning of the war. England did not finish making women eligible to vote until 1931. Indeed during World War I there were many males who could not vote until the passage of the representation of the people act in 1918. The United States of course did not permit blacks living in the South to vote. I suppose it could perhaps be argued that this war does not contradict the thesis that democracies do not fight with each other because it could be argued that there were no true democracies on either side.

World War II raises somewhat the same problems in that Japan also had an elected legislature with a responsible cabinet and the power of the purse held by the legislature. The upper house was to some extent hereditary. The Peers elected some among their number to that house. The English legislature still had an hereditary upper house, but it’s power had been severely restricted.

During the war I used to annoy people by asking them the name of the Japanese dictator. Sometimes they replied ‘the Emperor” which simply showed hopeless ignorance of the Japanese system. He was greatly respected but with rare exceptions (one of which was the decision to surrender) respected his Cabinet’s advice. Even on the decision to surrender he did not go against his Cabinet, he merely introduced the surrender and might well have given up had the Cabinet objected.

A second potential dictator of Japan was the prime minister. Inconveniently, for people who favored this particular view there is the fact that right in the middle of the war he was replaced. That doesn’t happen to dictators. I have occasionally encountered people who say that the military class was the dictator. This involves a peculiar usage of terms, but I suppose it could be argued that it was an oligarchy rather than a democracy. So far as I know there are no studies of how the military controlled the government if it did. Thus I have produced two wars with democracies on both sides. The second I agree is a little shaky but the first is clear.

The political scientists will have to find another argument for democracy. Fortunately such other arguments are easy to come upon. The real issue here is why this rather peculiar and new argument was ever introduced.

The third war the United States lost was the Korean affair:

The North Koreans drove us back to Pusan, we then drove them back more or less to the Yalu when the Chinese, aided by the Russian air force entered and drove us back nearly to Pusan. We then recovered and moved back north to an approximation of the pre 1950 dividing line. The American generals were seriously handicapped by the fact that Maclane was the Officer in the British Embassy in charge of liaison on the Korean War. He kept the Russians and through them the Chinese fully informed on our plans. MacArthur thought somebody was betraying his plans because the enemy so often pre-empted them. At the time, there was a tendency to discount this, but we now know it was true.

In any event, the war ended more or less where it had started. After much death and destruction, nothing had been gained. We may not have lost, but we certainly did not win.

The second war the United States lost started when Jefferson decided he would try to put pressure on England:

The English held Canada, which we wanted and had a habit of stopping American ships at sea (including at least one American frigate) and removing seamen who they claimed were deserters from the Royal navy. Modern historians agree that there were many such seamen on our ships, but it is not obvious that the Naval Officers were good at distinguishing them from native-born Americans. This led to an outburst of indignation on the part of the Americans.

Before Jefferson became president, Adams sent our leading diplomat, John Jay, to England to negotiate a treaty on the matter. Under the treaty a commissioner in each American port would issue a certificate that there were no English deserters on a given ship after having inspected it to make sure. For some reason this also led to an outburst of indignation, and Jefferson never even sent it to the Senate for ratification. He invented the embargo that has caused so much difficulty in the diplomatic history of the United States. The absurd idea that a third rate power, without a real navy, could coerce the then two leading powers, France and England was absurd. It did cause more difficulty for the English than for Napoleon, but England did not stop impressing our seamen.

The situation remained in a more or less deadlock with the principle people injured being the maritime interests in New England. They were mainly federalists, so Jefferson and his successor Madison were well able to withstand their pain. Finally, just as Napoleon was marching on Moscow, We entered the war on the French side. Our major objective was Canada, but preventing impressment of our seamen was also thought important. England fought a war that strategically was defensive although tactically it sometimes involved taking the offensive. They had fought a major war with France for twenty years, and the United States had more than doubled in population since independence. Actually occupying it would have been an immense task and they didn’t want to try.

Our navy consisted of a small set of very good frigates and some half built ships of the line. Our frigates distinguished themselves, but were only an annoyance to England. The British blockade of our coast together with occasional landings was also mainly an annoyance, but a more severe one than that inflicted by our miniature navy on them.

The effort to take Canada was a frost, mainly because of the poor quality of our generalship. Scott, a very young and junior general did well, thus starting what was to be a long and distinguished career. The quality of Madison’s other appointees is illustrated by a general in command of 1200 soldiers near Niagara who surrendered unconditionally to an English general with 300. The American general was the only one of our generals sentenced to death by court martial. Unfortunately, Madison commuted the sentence.

The war continued badly and the treaty of peace did not mention any of our war objectives. I remember that my high school history text emphasized our defeat. Politically, however, Madison did well and was able to hand on the Presidency to another member of his party.

The first war the United States lost was the first war the United States fought, the war with the Barbary pirates:

Adams had been building a navy, but when Jefferson took over he stopped construction on the ships of the line, kept the frigates in commission and preserved every single naval shore station, apparently for purely pork reasons. The United States thereby became a very minor naval power.

The Dey of Tripoli had a habit of sending out his ships to capture merchantmen of countries who could not protect them, and the United States was obviously an example. The ships were captured and the crew enslaved, although he was normally anxious to have them ransomed. He was willing to stop the behavior for any country that was willing to make him regular payments, and some of the other minor powers made such payments.

The Americans took up the slogan “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute’ and sent what was left of the navy out to attack Tripoli. They based themselves in Malta and from time to time sailed to Tripoli where they bombarded the city. Although this attack on civilians rather resembled our air war in World War II, it was obviously much less effective. The guns fired round shot and the city was mainly mud brick and hence easily repaired.

In the course of one of these raids the Philadelphia ran aground and was captured by the Tripolitan forces which floated it into Harbor and put its now enslaved crew at work improving the fortifications of Tripoli. In a daring raid, indeed the only daring raid of the war, Decatur succeeded in burning the Philadelphia at anchor.

The Dey showed no signs of being other than mildly annoyed by the bombardment and the war might have gone on indefinitely had not the US army taken a hand. An army officer, with a few Marines, collected another potential heir to the throne in Cairo, moved across the desert taking the second city of the kingdom, Derna, en route, and approached Tripoli with the intention of attacking it. The advance created a crisis, first for the Dey who was apparently uncertain of his ability to defend the city, granted that his relative would have some supporters within the walls, and, more importantly, for the navy which did not want the army to win the war after the navy had spent so much time with nothing to show for their efforts.

An emergency peace was patched up in which the United states paid a large ransom for the Americans held by the Tripolitanians. Thus we ended up paying tribute and clearly lost the war. We were down the tribute and one frigate while the Dey of Tripoli got the money and had his defenses strengthened by the labor of his American prisoners. The part of the wall they had worked on was called the Philadelphia bastion in remembrance of their labor. The millions for defense was responded to by laying up most of the frigates, although the pork rich shore installations were retained.

The key environmental condition explaining the rise of ISIS was the establishment of a metaethnic frontier that resulted from the allied occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011, Peter Turchin argues:

Continued bombardment from the air by the Western powers will perpetuate this frontier. As a historical analogy, it would be like living on a steppe frontier, being constantly raided by horse nomads. It will preserve the evolutionary regime, intense war pressure, that has been selecting for the most ruthless and cohesive groups such as ISIS. Almost certainly such successful groups will adhere to some form of militant Islam since, as I pointed out in 2005, “that is the traditional way in which Islamic societies have responded to challenges from other civilizations.” In other words, pursuing the “middle route” will, in the long run, strengthen the jihadist groups and may even create conditions for their expansion outside Syria and Iraq — for example, into Jordan.

What about all-out war? Back in 2001 the conservative columnist Ann Coulter suggested that “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

It is clear that, given political will, the U.S. and its allies have the necessary preponderance of military power to defeat ISIS and occupy the territory it currently controls.

Even if Western leaders do not commit to using a massive infantry force of their own troops, the same goal can be accomplished by putting together an effective coalition of all forces currently fighting ISIS. In this case, the “boots on the ground” would be those of the Kurds, the Iraqi Shiite militia and the Syrian army (whether the Assad regime is part of formal coalition or not, it still has to fight ISIS to survive). But, supposing such a military victory is achieved, what comes next? Should we follow Ann Coulter’s advice to “convert them to Christianity”?

In technical terms what she proposed is called “ethnocide” — destruction of a defeated group’s culture, its language or religion (or both), and replacement it with the culture of the victors. In a certain way, Coulter has history on her side. There are innumerable historical (and prehistorical) examples of successful ethnocides. Take the Spanish Reconquista, the centuries-long crusade by Christian states against the Moors in the Iberian peninsula. As a result of population expulsions, a few massacres and forced conversion to Christianity, the Islamic society of Al-Andaluz ceased to exist by early 17th century. Another well-known example of ethnocide was the Albigensian Crusade.

Ethnocide is also the policy that the Islamic State is ruthlessly pursuing in the territories that it controls. So essentially this would involve outdoing the Islamic State in brutality.

Fortunately, we live in a different world, and no responsible Western leader would advocate a policy of ethnocide directed at Sunni Arabs in Mesopotamia.

What this means, however, is that the long-term consequences of decisively defeating ISIS will not be very different from the middle-route policy of using the air power against it. Given the demonstrated inability of state-building by the U.S. in Iraq and elsewhere (for example, Afghanistan), destroying the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria will merely create conditions for its replacement by another jihadist group, perhaps an even more capable one. Also, we shouldn’t forget that the Islamic State has “metastasized” far beyond the territory it actually holds. In other words, taking this territory from ISIS will not mean its end as an organization.

That leaves his third strategy, a complete disengagement and withdrawal from the region.

Theodore Dalrymple flew to Paris the day Brussels was bombed:

And yet…only the other day I was reading, in a book by Professor Henri Pirenne (a Belgian, by the way), that the barbarians made up only 5% of the population of the Roman Empire at the moment of its supposed collapse.

Historical analogies are not exact, of course (otherwise they wouldn’t be analogies), and I don’t think we’re anywhere near collapse — more like decomposition, really. I see the epidemic of tattooing and other forms of self-mutilation in that light, a population desperate to make its mark but capable only of marking itself.