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We’re drifting toward a dangerous idea: that might makes right. We’ve seen this before. When the strong dominate the weak, whether in a town or on the world stage, it may look powerful at first, but over time it drags everyone down. We tried the law of the jungle...

137,069 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten •via X (Twitter)

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I spoke with Prof. Arora (Pooja Arora) about how the postwar norm against aggressive war drove decades of declining violence—and how today’s “might makes right” politics, embraced by leaders like Putin and Trump, now threaten that hard-won peace. Me: The norm that countries do not go to war except in self-defense and with authorization of the UN Security Council has been rejected both by Putin and Trump. Of course, there were often violations of that in the past, including the United States invading Iraq, for example. So it’s not as if that norm was always followed. But still, it was a change from hundreds—maybe thousands—of years of history, and that norm, I think, does deserve credit for the decline of interstate and great-power war since World War II. In my books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, I’ve plotted the rate of battle deaths since 1946. I don’t know if my image is reversed or not—whether it goes left to right from your point of view—but it goes down. It has ups and downs, and in the last couple of years, because of the wars you pointed to—Ukraine, Gaza, and even more so East Africa, in Sudan and Ethiopia—there has been an uptick. Still, that uptick has not wiped out all the progress we’ve made. We are still at a more peaceful time than in the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s. We’re back to around the late 1990s level. But it has gotten somewhat worse, and it could get worse still if that norm is permanently shattered. It is certainly being threatened. We don’t know whether it will reassert itself—given that Ukraine has been very costly to Russia, and given that Donald Trump says a lot of things he doesn’t do. I still think it’s unlikely the United States will apply military force in Greenland. But there’s no question the norm is being threatened, and I do think it’s a serious risk to world peace. Pooja Arora: It just appears that realism is back with a bang, and that “might makes right” may win. Me: Well, it is back, certainly. And the Trump administration is very explicit about that. They have basically said “might is right.” The question is, will that prevail? It might. On the other hand, there were good reasons to have the liberal international order—namely, that it prevented war. And wars, as the bumper sticker from my childhood said, are not healthy for children or other living things. There are huge disadvantages to war. Countries get tired of them. People revolt against governments that engage in them. We’re seeing that in Iran right now. One grievance is that the ayatollahs have wasted national resources on proxy wars across the Middle East at the expense of their people. There could very well be a backlash in the United States if it gets involved in wars and American soldiers start losing their lives. So yes, there is a definite movement toward what’s called realism. I think it’s a bad term, because I don’t think it’s particularly realistic. It’s actually quite realistic to believe that avoiding stupid wars is a much better path to prosperity and well-being. Still, cynical, zero-sum competition is being embraced by major world leaders. The question is whether the disadvantages will ultimately bring the liberal international order back. The European Union is still committed to it, as is much of the rest of the world, East Asia. So it’s not dead—but it is certainly threatened.

Steven Pinker

89,098 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten