A Large Portion Aint What It Used To Be

By Daniel Larison • June 25, 2007, 2:59 PM

A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. ~Joshua Muravchik

Except for the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Crimean War, the War of Secession, the Franco-Austrian War (1859) and the other Wars of Italian Unification, the War of the Triple Alliance (South America), Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Turkish Wars, the War of the Pacific (South America), the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Sino-Japanese Wars, the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, WWI, the Spanish Civil War, Suez, Vietnam, Panama, the Bosnian War, NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, the First and Second Congo Wars and the invasion of Iraq, Muravchik’s generalisation holds up pretty well.

6 Responses to A Large Portion Aint What It Used To Be

RonL says:

June 25, 2007 at 9:08 pm

Professor Larson,
One could argue that the Suez (1956), and Iraq wars did occur because the Arab tyrants saw their democratic opponents as weak. Nasser believed that the leaders of thge UK and France lacked the will to fight and he believed that Israel was unable to project forces.
Saddam Hussein believed that the US lacked the weill to confront him or to take casualties. He was wrong in 1990-91. He may have been partially correct in the current war, although the Ba’athists will not get he last laugh.

Mexican ruler Antonia Lopez de Santa Anna certainly believed that America was weak and he planned to conquer parts of this country.

If you wish to discredit the idea about democracies and war, go back to the Peloponnesian War and the Athenian invasion of Syracuse.

Daniel Larison says:

June 25, 2007 at 10:47 pm

When the democracies attack and invade the “aggressive tyrannies,” I think those count against Muravchik’s generalisation for obvious reasons. Whether or not the democracies wanted to claim provocation or justification for what they did, these wars did not come from democratic weakness but rather a willingness to engage in provocative and aggressive action. I did not list the Gulf War, because arguably Hussein did think that Washington would acquiesce in the conquest of Kuwait on account of an appearance of weakness. Also, in 1990 Iraq invaded another country. That seems to separate it from Mexico, Suez and Iraq-2003 rather significantly.

Alexei says:

June 26, 2007 at 1:26 am

Muravchik has incorrectly narrowed a general thesis that looks sensible, if only by virtue of its banality: aggressors single out the weak (or, per Putin’s unforgettable maxim, “the weak get beaten up”). It applies to democracies and autocracies alike. Pasting “democracy” onto the “victim” and “tyranny” onto the “agressor” is an illegitimate rhetorical trick.

Daniel Larison says:

June 26, 2007 at 1:56 am

Just so. He takes a truism (the strong prey on the weak) and then tries to overlay it onto his preferred democracy v. tyranny framework. The other problem with his generalisation is that modern warfare has been taking place for at least two centuries and the number of representative governments and democracies involved in these wars has been very small. It is difficult to make a claim about a “large portion” of modern wars and relate it to democracy when democracy scarcely existed outside of northwestern Europe and North America for the better part of half the period in question. Of course, his interpretation of WWI is woefully wrong,on top of everything else.

What the democratists don’t like to acknowledge, or simply don’t even remember, is that states that are relatively democratic are often both strong and aggressive. Our invasion of Mexico, while technically the response to a “border” incident and therefore narrowly “defensive” in our official telling of it, was certainly not hampered by our democratic mechanisms–the declaration of war was overwhelmingly supported, and the war was extremely popular in Democratic constituencies. More importantly the war with Mexico had nothing to do with the forms of government in the two countries–it had to do with an expansionist and nationalist people on one side with superior military forces taking land from the republican nationalist people on the other side with far weaker military forces. In any case, democracy in the 19th and early 20th century encouraged warfare; it did not hamper governments from committing to wars. The masses in 1914 were instrumental in pushing all of the governments to go to war–a little less democracy would have done wonders for Europe. Muravchik takes a phenomenon specific to the post-WWI era (*European* democratic unwillingness to go to war) and makes a general claim about democracy and tyranny everywhere that is unsupportable in any other period of modern history.

One of the arguments on behalf of “democratic capitalism” is that it makes the states that embrace it stronger, more dynamic, more resilient, etc. If the fans of “democratic capitalism” are right about the strengths of their view, democracies would end up being tremendously overrepresented among the world’s imperial and aggressive powers. As it turns out, they are not quite so greatly overrepresented, but if Muravchik and company get their way we might start working on boosting those numbers.

cyrus says:

June 26, 2007 at 6:06 am

To hear our leaders and pundits speak, it’s as if history began in 1933.

Alexei says:

June 27, 2007 at 7:23 am

“Muravchik takes a phenomenon specific to the post-WWI era (*European* democratic unwillingness to go to war) and makes a general claim about democracy and tyranny everywhere that is unsupportable in any other period of modern history.”

Exactly.

Daniel Larison

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