The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,187

would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.”38

As for China’s erstwhile comrades in Vietnam, much has been written, often by the chastened decision-makers themselves, about the American miscalculations in that war. The most fateful was their underestimation of the ability of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to absorb casualties. As the war unfolded, American strategists like Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara were incredulous that a backward country like North Vietnam could resist the most powerful army on earth, and they were always confident that the next escalation would force it to capitulate. As John Mueller notes:If battle death rate as a percentage of pre-war population is calculated for each of the hundreds of countries that have participated in international and colonial wars since 1816, it is apparent that Vietnam was an extreme case.... The Communist side accepted battle death rates that were about twice as high as those accepted by the fanatical, often suicidal, Japanese in World War II, for example. Furthermore, the few combatant countries that did experience loss rates as high as that of the Vietnamese Communists were mainly those such as the Germans and Soviets in World War II, who were fighting to the death for their national existence, not for expansion like the North Vietnamese. In Vietnam, it seems, the United States was up against an incredibly well-functioning organization—patient, firmly disciplined, tenaciously led, and largely free from corruption or enervating selfindulgence. Although the communists often experienced massive military setbacks and periods of stress and exhaustion, they were always able to refit themselves, rearm, and come back for more. It may well be that, as one American general put it, “they were in fact the best enemy we have faced in our history.”39

Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, “Kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire.” The American democracy was willing to sacrifice a tiny fraction of the lives that the North Vietnamese dictator was willing to forfeit (no one asked the proverbial ten men how they felt about this), and the United States eventually conceded the war of attrition despite having every other advantage. But by the 1980s, as China and Vietnam were changing from ideological to commercial states and easing their reigns of terror over their populations, they were less willing to inflict comparable losses in unnecessary wars.

A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed. After Georgia lost a five-day war with Russia in 2008 over control of the tiny territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili explained to a New York Times writer why he decided not to organize an insurgency against the occupation:We had a choice here. We could turn this country into Chechnya—we had enough people and equipment to do that—or we had to do nothing and stay a modern European country. Eventually we would have chased them away, but we would have had to go to the mountains and grow beards. That would have been a tremendous national philosophical and emotional burden.40

The explanation was melodramatic, even disingenuous—Russia had no intention of occupying Georgia—but it does capture one of the choices in the developing world that lies behind the New Peace: go to the mountains and grow beards, or do nothing and stay a modern country.

Other than the end of the Cold War and the decline of ideology, what led to the mild reduction in the number of civil wars during the past two decades, and the steep reduction in battle deaths of the last one? And why do conflicts persist in the developing world (thirty-six in 2008, all but one of them civil wars) when they have essentially disappeared in the developed world?

A good place to start is the Kantian triangle of democracy, open economies, and engagement with the international community. Russett and Oneal’s statistical analyses, described in the preceding chapter, embrace the entire world, but they include only disputes between states. How well does the triad of pacifying factors apply to civil wars within developing countries, where most of today’s conflicts take place? Each variable, it turns out, has an important twist.

One might think that if a lot of democracy is a good thing in inhibiting war, then a little democracy is still better than none. But with civil wars it doesn’t