Back in the Middle Ages, the public sphere was full of political violence. Indeed, the ability to use violence was the entry ticket to the political game, and whoever lacked this ability had no political voice. Numerous noble families retained armed forces, as did towns, guilds, churches and monasteries. When a former abbot died and a dispute arose about the succession, the rival factions – comprising monks, local strongmen and concerned neighbours – often used armed force to decide the issue.
Terrorism had no place in such a world. Anybody who was not strong enough to cause substantial material damage was of no consequence. If in 1150 a few Muslim fanatics murdered a handful of civilians in Jerusalem, demanding that the Crusaders leave the Holy Land, the reaction would have been ridicule more than terror. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you should have at least gained control of a fortified castle or two. Terrorism did not bother our medieval ancestors, because they had much bigger problems to deal with.
During the modern era, centralised states gradually reduced the level of political violence within their territories, and in the last few decades Western countries managed to eradicate it almost entirely. The citizens of France, Britain or the USA can struggle for control of towns, corporations, organisations and even of the government itself, without any need of an armed force. Command of trillions of dollars, millions of soldiers, and thousands of ships, airplanes and nuclear missiles pass from one group of politicians to another without a single shot being fired. People quickly got used to this, and consider it their natural right. Consequently, even sporadic acts of political violence that kill a few dozen people are seen as a deadly threat to the legitimacy and even survival of the state. A small coin in a big empty jar makes a lot of noise.
This is what makes the theatre of terrorism so successful. The state has created a huge space empty of political violence, which now acts as a sounding board, amplifying the impact of any armed attack, however small. The less political violence in a particular state, the greater the public shock at an act of terrorism. Killing a few people in Belgium draws far more attention than killing hundreds in Nigeria or Iraq. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence makes them particularly vulnerable to terrorism.
The state has stressed many times that it will not tolerate political violence within its borders. The citizens, for their part, have become used to zero political violence. Hence the theatre of terror generates visceral fears of anarchy, making people feel as if the social order is about to collapse. After centuries of bloody struggles we have crawled out of the black hole of violence, but we sense that the black hole is still there, patiently waiting to swallow us again. A few gruesome atrocities – and we imagine that we are falling back in.
In order to assuage these fears, the state is driven to respond to the theatre of terror with its own theatre of security. The most efficient answer to terrorism might be good intelligence and clandestine action against the financial networks that feed terrorism. But this is not something citizens can watch on television. The citizens have seen the terrorist drama of the World Trade Center collapsing. The state feels compelled to stage an equally spectacular counter-drama, with even more fire and smoke. So instead of acting quietly and efficiently, the state unleashes a mighty storm, which not infrequently fulfils the terrorists’ most cherished dreams.
How then should the state deal with terrorism? A successful counter-terrorism struggle should be conducted on three fronts. First, governments should focus on clandestine actions against the terror networks. Second, the media should keep things in perspective and avoid hysteria. The theatre of terror cannot succeed without publicity. Unfortunately, the media all too often provides this publicity for free. It obsessively reports terror attacks and greatly inflates their danger, because reports on terrorism sell newspapers much better than reports on diabetes or air pollution.
The third front is the imagination of each and every one of us. Terrorists hold our imagination captive, and use it against us. Again and again we rehearse the terrorist attack on the stage of our mind – remembering 9/11 or the latest suicide bombings. The terrorists kill a hundred people – and cause 100 million to imagine that there is a murderer lurking behind every tree. It is the responsibility of every citizen to liberate his or her imagination from the terrorists, and to remind ourselves of the true dimensions of this threat. It is our own inner terror that prompts the media to obsess about terrorism, and the government to overreact.
The success or failure of terrorism thus depends on us. If we allow our imagination to be captured by the terrorists, and then overreact to our own fears – terrorism will succeed. If we free our imagination from the terrorists, and react in a balanced and cool way – terrorism will fail.
Terrorism goes nuclear
The preceding analysis holds true of terrorism as we have known it in the last two centuries, and as it currently manifests itself on the streets of New York, London, Paris and Tel Aviv. However, if terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction, the nature not just of terrorism, but of the state and of global politics, will change dramatically. If tiny organisations representing a handful of fanatics could destroy entire cities and kill millions, there would no longer be a public sphere free of political violence.
Hence while present-day terrorism is mostly theatre, future nuclear terrorism, cyberterrorism or bioterrorism would pose a much more serious threat, and would demand far more drastic reaction from governments. Precisely because of that, we should be very careful to differentiate such hypothetical future scenarios from the actual terrorist attacks we have so far witnessed. Fear that terrorists might one day get their hands on a nuclear bomb and destroy New York or London does not justify a hysterical overreaction to a terrorist who kills a dozen passersby with an automatic rifle or a runaway truck. States should be even more careful not to start persecuting all dissident groups on the grounds that they might one day try to obtain nuclear weapons, or that they might hack our self-driving cars and turn them into a fleet of killer robots.
Likewise, though governments must certainly monitor radical groups and take action to prevent them from gaining control of weapons of mass destruction, they need to balance the fear of nuclear terrorism against other threatening scenarios. In the last two decades the United States wasted trillions of dollars and much political capital on its War on Terror. George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Barack Obama and their administrations can argue with some justification that by hounding terrorists they forced them to think more about survival than about acquiring nuclear bombs. They might thereby have saved the world from a nuclear 9/11. Since this is a counterfactual claim – ‘if we hadn’t launched the War on Terror, al-Qaeda would have acquired nuclear weapons’ – it is difficult to judge whether it is true or not.
We can be certain, however, that in pursuing the War on Terror the Americans and their allies not only caused immense destruction across the globe, but also incurred what economists call ‘opportunity costs’. The money, time and political capital invested in fighting terrorism were not invested in fighting global warming, AIDS and poverty; in bringing peace and prosperity to sub-Saharan Africa; or in forging better ties with Russia and China. If New York or London eventually sink under the rising Atlantic Ocean, or if tensions with Russia erupt into open warfare, people might well accuse Bush, Blair and Obama of focusing on the wrong front.
It is hard to set priorities in real time, while it is all too easy to second-guess priorities with hindsight. We accuse leaders of failing to prevent the catastrophes that happened, while remaining blissfully unaware of the disasters that never materialised. Thus people look back at the Clinton administration in the 1990s, and accuse it of neglecting the al-Qaeda threat. But in the 1990s few people imagined that Islamic terrorists might ignite a global conflict by plunging passenger airliners into New York skyscrapers. In contrast, many feared that Russia might collapse entirely and lose control not just of its vast territory, but also of thousands of n
uclear and biological bombs. An additional concern was that the bloody wars in the former Yugoslavia might spread to other parts of eastern Europe, resulting in conflicts between Hungary and Romania, between Bulgaria and Turkey, or between Poland and Ukraine.
Many felt even more uneasy about the reunification of Germany. Just four and a half decades after the fall of the Third Reich, lots of people still harboured visceral fears of German power. Free of the Soviet menace, won’t Germany become a superpower dominating the European continent? And what about China? Alarmed by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, China might abandon its reforms, return to hardline Maoist policies, and end up as a larger version of North Korea.
Today we can ridicule these scary scenarios, because we know they didn’t materialise. The situation in Russia stabilised, most of eastern Europe was peacefully absorbed into the EU, reunified Germany is hailed today as the leader of the free world, and China has become the economic engine of the entire globe. All this was achieved, at least in part, thanks to constructive US and EU policies. Would it have been wiser if the USA and the EU had focused in the 1990s on Islamic extremists rather than on the situation in the former Soviet bloc or in China?
We just cannot prepare for every eventuality. Accordingly, while we must surely prevent nuclear terrorism, this cannot be the number-one item on humanity’s agenda. And we certainly shouldn’t use the theoretical threat of nuclear terrorism as a justification for overreaction to run-of-the-mill terrorism. These are different problems that demand different solutions.
If despite our efforts terrorist groups eventually do lay their hands on weapons of mass destruction, it is hard to know how political struggles will be conducted, but they will be very different from the terror and counter-terror campaigns of the early twenty-first century. If in 2050 the world is full of nuclear terrorists and bioterrorists, their victims will look back at the world of 2018 with longing tinged with disbelief: how could people who lived such secure lives nevertheless have felt so threatened?
Of course, our current sense of danger is fuelled not just by terrorism. Lots of pundits and laypeople fear that the Third World War is just around the corner, as if we have seen this movie before, a century ago. As in 1914, in 2018 rising tensions between the great powers coupled with intractable global problems seem to be dragging us towards a global war. Is this anxiety more justified than our overblown fear of terrorism?
11
WAR
Never underestimate human stupidity
The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. Whereas in early agricultural societies human violence caused up to 15 per cent of all human deaths, and in the twentieth century it caused 5 per cent, today it is responsible for only 1 per cent.1 Yet since the global financial crisis of 2008 the international situation is rapidly deteriorating, warmongering is back in vogue, and military expenditure is ballooning.2 Both laypeople and experts fear that just as in 1914 the murder of an Austrian archduke sparked the First World War, so in 2018 some incident in the Syrian desert or an unwise move in the Korean peninsula might ignite a global conflict.
Given the growing tensions in the world, and the personalities of leaders in Washington, Pyongyang and several other places, there is definitely cause for concern. Yet there are several key differences between 2018 and 1914. In particular, in 1914 war had great appeal to elites across the world because they had many concrete examples of how successful wars contributed to economic prosperity and political power. In contrast, in 2018 successful wars seem to be an endangered species.
From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir.3 Whereas in our days occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their only fear was that somebody else might get there first.
Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy).4 It was the bargain of the millennium.
In 1914 the elites in Washington, London and Berlin knew exactly what a successful war looked like, and how much could be gained from it. In contrast, in 2018 global elites have good reason to suspect that this type of war might have become extinct. Though some Third World dictators and non-state actors still manage to flourish through war, it seems that major powers no longer know how to do so.
The greatest victory in living memory – of the United States over the Soviet Union – was achieved without any major military confrontation. The United States then got a fleeting taste of old-fashioned military glory in the First Gulf War, but this only tempted it to waste trillions on humiliating military fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. China, the rising power of the early twenty-first century, has assiduously avoided all armed conflicts since its failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979, and it owes its ascent strictly to economic factors. In this it has emulated not the Japanese, German and Italian empires of the pre-1914 era, but rather the Japanese, German and Italian economic miracles of the post-1945 era. In all these cases economic prosperity and geopolitical clout were achieved without firing a shot.
Even in the Middle East – the fighting ring of the world – regional powers don’t know how to wage successful wars. Iran gained nothing from the long bloodbath of the Iran–Iraq War, and subsequently avoided all direct military confrontations. The Iranians finance and arm local movements from Iraq to Yemen, and have sent their Revolutionary Guards to help their allies in Syria and Lebanon, but so far they have been careful not to invade any country. Iran has recently become the regional hegemon not by dint of any brilliant battlefield victory, but rather by default. Its two main enemies – the USA and Iraq – got embroiled in a war that destroyed both Iraq and the American appetite for Middle Eastern quagmires, thereby leaving Iran to enjoy the spoils.
Much the same can be said of Israel. Its last successful war was waged in 1967. Since then Israel prospered despite its many wars, not thanks to them. Most of its occupied territories saddle it with heavy economic burdens and crippling political liabilities. Much like Iran, Israel has lately improved its geopolitical position not by waging successful wars, but by avoiding military adventures. While war has ravaged Israel’s erstwhile enemies in Iraq, Syria and Libya, Israel has remained aloof. Not getting sucked into the Syrian civil war has arguably been Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement (as of March 2018). If it wanted to, the Israel Defense Forces could have seized Damascus within a week, but what would Israel have gained from that? It would be even easier for the IDF to conquer Gaza and topple the Hamas regime, but Israel has repeatedly declined to do so. For all its military prowess and for all the hawkish rhetoric of Israeli politicians, Israel knows there is little to be won from war. Like the USA, China, Germany, Japan and Iran, Israel seems to understand that in the twenty-first century the most successful strategy is to sit on the fence and let others do the fighting for you.
The view from the Kremlin
&n
bsp; So far the only successful invasion mounted by a major power in the twenty-first century has been the Russian conquest of Crimea. In February 2014 Russian forces invaded neighbouring Ukraine and occupied the Crimean peninsula, which was subsequently annexed to Russia. With hardly any fighting, Russia gained strategically vital territory, struck fear into its neighbours, and re-established itself as a world power. However, the conquest succeeded thanks to an extraordinary set of circumstances. Neither the Ukrainian army nor the local population showed much resistance to the Russians, while other powers refrained from directly intervening in the crisis. These circumstances will be hard to reproduce elsewhere around the world. If the precondition for a successful war is the absence of enemies willing to resist the aggressor, it seriously limits the available opportunities.
Indeed, when Russia sought to reproduce its Crimean success in other parts of Ukraine, it encountered substantially stiffer opposition, and the war in eastern Ukraine bogged down into unproductive stalemate. Even worse (from Moscow’s perspective), the war has stoked anti-Russian feelings in Ukraine and turned that country from an ally into a sworn enemy. Just as success in the First Gulf War tempted the USA to overreach itself in Iraq, success in Crimea may have tempted Russia to overreach itself in Ukraine.
Taken together, Russia’s wars in the Caucasus and Ukraine in the early twenty-first century can hardly be described as very successful. Though they have boosted Russia’s prestige as a great power, they have also increased distrust and animosity towards Russia, and in economic terms they have been a losing enterprise. Tourist resorts in Crimea and decrepit Soviet-era factories in Luhansk and Donetsk hardly balance the price of financing the war, and they certainly do not offset the costs of capital flight and international sanctions. To realise the limitations of the Russian policy, one just needs to compare the immense economic progress of peaceful China in the last twenty years to the economic stagnation of ‘victorious’ Russia during the same period.5