Is war inevitable?

What is war? War is a state of armed conflict between two or more groups or nations.

War has been a part of human history since time immemorial. From ancient battles to modern conflicts, war has been responsible for the loss of countless lives and the destruction of entire civilizations.

It seems such a waste of human life, and suffering and so unnecessary. There must be another way.

Is war inevitable?

Are humans warlike? Groups of people can happily live together without widespread violence erupting. Violence does happen by individuals in a society, but peace is then enforced by the state.

In the international system, there is no more powerful force overriding force to enforce peace. It is enforced by whoever is the strongest and has the most power. This can lead to the breakdown of diplomatic relations and the resort to force as a means of resolving disputes.

Wars therefore happen because there are two or more states that have conflicting goals, and the way to settle it is they go to war.

The problem with war is:

• Winning wars can provide huge benefits to the winners, and so they are often worth the gamble – annexing land, becoming wealthier.
• Wars are a great way to shore up domestic support and amass power domestically. It can distract the population.
• Wanting peace can be taken as weakness. If one country wants to win, and another wants peace, the one who wants peace will lose.
• War of some sort is necessary to enforce peace. You just need one side to want to go to war for a war to start.
• Often war continues to escalate until there is a clear winner.
• The stakes are far higher now that we have nuclear weapons. We are risking escalation and total annihilation of our species.

In order to protect our species from total annihilation we need to think at a higher level. We need to envision and build a world without war.

One of the problems is that it only takes one powerful state to want to go to war for war to erupt.

Here are some scenarios where we can have peace.

1. There is one hegemon who is benevolent and enforces peace
2. There are a group of equally powerful countries who work together to enforce peace.

We can, therefore, prevent wars, and ensure peace, by:

1. Having one extremely powerful nation who enforces peace
2. Building an effective dispute mechanism for a group of countries to work together to enforce peace.

We are now entering an era where there is no longer one hegemon. US as a percentage of world power is declining. So we need to either 1) work at the second one – building an effective dispute mechanism, or 2) find a way for nations to collectively work together so they are more powerful than others and an effective hegemon.

What would an effective dispute mechanism look like? What is the alternative to war?

1. I always thought of – is there a way for wars to be resolved by a sports match, instead. The problem is that it would need to be enforced. Otherwise it would resort back to war.
2. Could there be a grass roots, council of people – to bypass government. It would need to have its own military to be able to enforce it.

There are three parts to it:

1) Becoming more powerful
2) Improving Dispute resolution.
3) Having a way to enforce it.

The dispute resolution is actually the easy part. There are thousands of ways we can solve it. We could get key people in a room, we could vote on it. We could find an independent mediator, or play a sports match. The problem is how can a decision be enforced?

The problem is, how can we prevent things resorting to war? How do we enforce decisions by people?

• Educating good people to make them more powerful so they can’t be ruled.
• Making people and citizens relatively more powerful than leaders, so their wills are stronger than their leaders.
• Building greater transparancy of how things are working.
• Building a better democratic process.

Most people think that they are just a small person and they have little impact in the wider world, but because everyone things like that, the one individual who says they can make a difference, can. You are not just a person. You are potentially powerful and you can impact the world. It might just take one person to prevent peace, and elevate consciousness to a higher level. We all need to play our part and work together to make it happen.

• We can also look at this exercise on a local level. Is there any other way of resolving conflicts between individuals rather than enforcing it?
• If enforcement (war) is necessary to enforce peace, then war, of some sort, is necessary. We just need to build a system that enforces it.

My answer to this question is. War is inevitable to humans as we are today. If we want to eliminate wars and conflict, we need to change who we are, we need to upgrade ourselves, and our thinking and our organisation.

• Understand the importance of the issue, the importance of peace
• Education of people
• Upgrading people and society so people are satisfied and have enough
• Upgrading our conflict resolution processes
• Clear reasoning and ability for people to think more clearly
• Improve our communication between our leadership, and other countries, the people of other countries
• Eliminate negative forces that are pushing towards war, within us