long peace

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pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Some experts on nuclear strategy, including Schelling, John Deutch, and Harold Brown, are skeptical that a nuclear-free world is attainable or even desirable, though others are working out timetables and safeguards designed to answer their objections.217 With all these uncertainties, no one should predict that nuclear weapons will go the way of poison gas anytime soon. But it is a sign of the momentum behind the Long Peace that abolition can even be discussed as a foreseeable prospect. If it happens, it would represent the ultimate decline in violence. A nuclear-free world! What realist would have dreamed it? IS THE LONG PEACE A DEMOCRATIC PEACE? If the Long Peace is not the sturdy child of terror and the twin brother of annihilation, then whose child is it? Can we identify an exogenous variable—some development that is not part of the peace itself—that blossomed in the postwar years and that we have reason to believe is a generic force against war?

Several months later the fraction of recipients that got the lucky matching run will think he is a genius. A skeptic of the Long Peace could claim that anyone making a big deal of a long run of nonwars at the end of that very run is just as guilty of data snooping. But in fact there is a paper trail of scholars who, more than two decades ago, noticed that the war-free years were piling up and attributed it to a new mindset that they expected to last. Today we can say that their a priori predictions have been confirmed. The story can be told in titles and dates: Werner Levi’s The Coming End of War (1981), John Gaddis’s “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System” (1986), Kalevi Holsti’s “The Horsemen of the Apocalypse: At the Gate, Detoured, or Retreating?”

The balance of nuclear terror deterred them from starting a war that would escalate to a holocaust and put an end to civilization, if not human life itself.188 As Winston Churchill said in his last major speech to Parliament, “It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.” 189 In the same vein, the foreign policy analyst Kenneth Waltz has suggested that we “thank our nuclear blessings,” and Elspeth Rostow proposed that the nuclear bomb be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.190 Let’s hope not. If the Long Peace were a nuclear peace, it would be a fool’s paradise, because an accident, a miscommunication, or an air force general obsessed with precious bodily fluids could set off an apocalypse. Thankfully, a closer look suggests that the threat of nuclear annihilation deserves little credit for the Long Peace.191 For one thing, weapons of mass destruction had never braked the march to war before. The benefactor of the Nobel Peace Prize wrote in the 1860s that his invention of dynamite would “sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions, [since] as soon as men will find that in one instant whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they will surely abide in golden peace.”192 Similar predictions have been made about submarines, artillery, smokeless powder, and the machine gun.193 The 1930s saw a widespread fear that poison gas dropped from airplanes could bring an end to civilization and human life, yet that dread did not come close to ending war either.194 As Luard puts it, “There is little evidence in history that the existence of supremely destructive weapons alone is capable of deterring war.


pages: 392 words: 106,532

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Able Archer 83, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative

Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, translated and edited by Strobe Talbott (New York: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 411n. 47 John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 158–59. 48 Pechatnov and Edmondson, “The Russian Perspective,” p. 139. 49 James V. Forrestal to Chan Gurney, December 8, 1947, in Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), pp. 350–51. 50 Gaddis, The Long Peace, pp. 111–12. 51 PPS/39, “United States Policy Toward China,” September 7, 1948, FRUS: 1948, VIII, 148. 52 James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 217. 53 Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 50. 54 Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 58–66. 55 Marc Selverstone, “ ‘All Roads Lead to Moscow’: The United States, Great Britain, and the Communist Monolith,” Ph.D.

Dissertation, Ohio University History Department, 2000, p. 380. 56 Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 66–67. 57 Ibid., p. 94. 58 David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983), pp. 108–9. 59 Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 96. 60 Kathryn Weathersby, “Stalin and the Korean War,” in Leffler and Painter, eds., Origins of the Cold War, pp. 274–75. 61 Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 66–70, 158–61. 62 Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 97. 63 Montefiore, Stalin, p. 608. 64 Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 143. See also Shu Guang Zhang, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), pp. 55–86. 65 Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 79–80. 66 Interview with Lt.

For the overall sequence of events, see Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 103–10. 27 There is extensive information on Soviet military involvement in the Korean War at: http://www.korean-war.com/ussr.html. 28 Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, pp. 416–30; George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1967), pp. 471–76. 29 Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 113. See also Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 230–32. 30 George Cowan and N. A. Vlasov, quoted in ibid., p. 224. 31 Andrew P. N. Erdmann, “ ‘War No Longer Has Any Logic Whatever’: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Thermonuclear Revolution,” in Gaddis, et al., eds., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, p. 101. 32 Ibid. 33 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 336–37. 34 Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 109. 35 Jonathan Rosenberg, “Before the Bomb and After: Winston Churchill and the Use of Force,” in Gaddis, et al., eds., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, p. 191. 36 James C.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

The role of the nation-state is important when understanding the particularly peaceful period in human history that begins with the end of World War II, a period known as the “Long Peace”. During this period, conflict between the great powers became a rare occurrence so much that the only major instance is the US (and Allied) fight against a million-strong Chinese “volunteers” during the Korean War in 1950–1953. Pinker may downplay the predictive aspects of his narrative, but he nevertheless sees the Long Peace as something more than just a statistical oddity, so much that a large part of The Better Angels of Our Nature is spent trying to explain its uniqueness and how it is leading us to the “New Peace” we live in today.29 Two elements of this argument need to be disentangled.

Such a claim is laid on Pinker by statistician Nassim Taleb in a 2015 essay which pretends to show that there is nothing statistically anomalous about the post-1945 era,30 while another statistical study by computer scientist Aaron Clauset suggests that we need another 100–150 years of data to make a definitive claim that the Long Peace “could plausibly be called a genuine trend”.31 Laying the rates of conflict-related violence between the twentieth century next to those of the relatively peaceful fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (where there was lack of major continental-scale wars anywhere in the world) could have made anyone writing in the middle part of the millennium claim things had never been better (Figure 7.3). Figure 7.3: Is the Long Peace really that peaceful? Notes: This chart overlays the death rates in combat in the twentieth century with those of the relatively peaceful fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, where there was an absence of large-scale global or continental wars.

As one 2018 piece by political scientist Dan Altman (who also directly debunks Pinker’s claim of “zero” conquests since 197540) stated, “more than it declined, conquest evolved” so much that “although less war-prone than ever before, conquest attempts still occur frequently enough that territorial war remains the predominant type of interstate war”.41 Will the Long Peace endure for longer? In his response to Taleb,42 Pinker writes that “none of these phenomena proves that a war between developed states is less likely today than it was in the past”, and echoing the disclaimer on any financial report that “past performance is no guarantee of future results”. If this is the case, then any explanation of the Long Peace on the basis of Enlightenment ideals instead of great power dynamics is meaningless. When describing the distinctly American abhorrence of realism, international relations scholar (and leading exponent of offensive realism) John Mearsheimer explains in terms that seem to directly address the naive faith in liberal international institutions of the New Optimists: [R]ealism is a pessimistic theory.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

The Civilizing Process was a fortyfold reduction in homicide and other violent crimes which followed upon the entrenchment of the rule of law and norms of self-control in early modern Europe. The Humanitarian Revolution is another name for the Enlightenment-era abolition of slavery, religious persecution, and cruel punishments. The Long Peace is the historians’ term for the decline of great-power and interstate war after World War II. Following the end of the Cold War, the world has enjoyed a New Peace with fewer civil wars, genocides, and autocracies. And since the 1950s the world has been swept by a cascade of Rights Revolutions: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, children’s rights, and animal rights.

But as their armies became better manned, trained, and armed, the wars that did take place became more lethal, culminating in the brief but stunningly destructive world wars. It was only after the second of these that all three measures of war—frequency, duration, and lethality—declined in tandem, and the world entered the period that has been called the Long Peace. It’s not just the great powers that have stopped fighting each other. War in the classic sense of an armed conflict between the uniformed armies of two nation-states appears to be obsolescent.5 There have been no more than three in any year since 1945, none in most years since 1989, and none since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the longest stretch without an interstate war since the end of World War II.6 Today, skirmishes between national armies kill dozens of people rather than the hundreds of thousands or millions who died in the all-out wars that nation-states have fought throughout history.

War in the classic sense of an armed conflict between the uniformed armies of two nation-states appears to be obsolescent.5 There have been no more than three in any year since 1945, none in most years since 1989, and none since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the longest stretch without an interstate war since the end of World War II.6 Today, skirmishes between national armies kill dozens of people rather than the hundreds of thousands or millions who died in the all-out wars that nation-states have fought throughout history. The Long Peace has certainly been tested since 2011, such as in conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russia and Ukraine, and the two Koreas, but in each case the belligerents backed down rather than escalating into all-out war. This doesn’t, of course, mean that escalation to major war is impossible, just that it is considered extraordinary, something that nations try to avoid at (almost) all costs.


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What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

This is simply because of the sheer scale of destructiveness required to cause human extinction or other irrecoverable harms to future generations: an all-out war between the world’s largest and most technologically advanced militaries is more likely to exceed that grim threshold than more limited conflicts. Longtermists may thus be tempted to rejoice in the observation that soldiers from the great powers haven’t met in battle since the end of World War II. This “Long Peace” might suggest that great-power wars are a relic of the past, or at least much less likely today.60 Unfortunately, I don’t think we can take the Long Peace for granted. As I revise this chapter for publication, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminds us that war can all too quickly return to regions that have enjoyed peace for decades, and that initially more limited disputes can push the world’s largest nuclear powers dangerously close to the brink of a direct confrontation.

As I revise this chapter for publication, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminds us that war can all too quickly return to regions that have enjoyed peace for decades, and that initially more limited disputes can push the world’s largest nuclear powers dangerously close to the brink of a direct confrontation. And there are several reasons to think that the risk of great-power war in the next hundred years remains unacceptably high. First, it seems plausible that maintaining the Long Peace has involved a healthy dose of luck in addition to structural factors like economic growth and international cooperation. We know that the United States and the Soviet Union came close to war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example. But this was hardly the Cold War’s only moment of danger. Tensions were also high during the Berlin crises, the Suez Crisis, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, multiple crises in the Taiwan Strait, and proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, as well as on several occasions when early-warning systems failed and sent false alarms of incoming nuclear attacks.61 World War II has been characterized in part as hugely unlucky, due to Hitler’s unlikely rise.62 But the peace that followed has also been partly the result of chance.63 Second, changes in the distribution of global economic and military power may increase the risk of conflict.

In addition to asteroids, comets, and engineered pathogens, there are many other natural and anthropogenic extinction risks. These include supervolcanic eruptions, gamma ray bursts, nuclear war, and climate change. The extinction risk these threats pose is discussed at length by Ord (2020). I discuss the risks from nuclear war and climate change in Chapter 6. 60. The term “Long Peace” was first coined in 1986 by John Lewis Gaddis in an article that noted a systemic absence of war, not just an absence of great-power wars (Gaddis 1986). More recently, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker argued that there has been a longterm decline in war, especially since World War II, as part of a general civilisational decline in violence of all kinds (Pinker 2011).


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Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

This is not a book about China. It is about the impact of a rising China on the US and the global order. For seven decades since World War II, a rules-based framework led by Washington has defined world order, producing an era without war among great powers. Most people now think of this as normal. Historians call it a rare “Long Peace.” Today, an increasingly powerful China is unraveling this order, throwing into question the peace generations have taken for granted. In 2015, the Atlantic published “The Thucydides Trap: Are the US and China headed for War?” In that essay I argued that this historical metaphor provides the best lens available for illuminating relations between China and the US today.

As Thucydides explains in the introduction to his work, the purpose of his chronicle is to help future statesmen, soldiers, and citizens understand war so that they can avoid mistakes made by their predecessors: “If my history be judged useful by those who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to understanding the future—which in the course of human affairs must resemble if it does not reflect it—I shall be content.”2 As the original “applied historian,” he shared the view later captured by Winston Churchill’s quip: “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.” From Thucydides, my second-year classmates and I learned about the long peace that preceded the great war between Athens and Sparta. We read about Athens’s precious experiment in democracy and its unprecedented surge of creative achievement in every field. These ancient Greeks essentially invented philosophy, drama, architecture, sculpture, history, naval warfare, and more; what they did not create themselves, they took to heights never seen before in human history.

A subtle but concentrated effort to accentuate the contradictions at the core of Chinese Communist ideology and the Party’s attempt to exert authoritarian control over citizens’ increasing demands for freedom could, over time, undermine the regime and encourage independence movements in Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. By splintering China at home and keeping Beijing embroiled in maintaining domestic stability, the US could avert, or at least substantially delay, China’s challenge to American dominance. Negotiate a Long Peace If it were negotiable, the US and China could agree to take a quarter-century hiatus that imposes considerable constraints in some areas of their competition, leaving both parties free to pursue advantage elsewhere. From the Thirty Years’ Peace that Pericles signed with the Spartans in 445 BCE to the US-Soviet détente in the 1970s, rivals throughout history have found ways to accept intolerable (but temporally unchangeable) circumstances in order to focus on more urgent priorities, particularly their own domestic affairs.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

Without much difficulty, they looked into the likely character of a future war and decided that this was not one they could survive. Observing this in 1985, the historian John Gaddis coined the term ‘the Long Peace’ to describe the years since 1945. This was a period in which millions had died in violent conflicts. The great powers were often involved, but there was comfort to be drawn in the absence of war directly between them.2 Perhaps by reaching such horrific peaks of destructiveness, great-power war had almost abolished itself. Optimism on this score grew in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. The Long Peace continued, leading to speculation that perhaps humankind had learnt something about war. The historian John Keegan wondered whether: ‘War… may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents.’3 The political scientist John Mueller had long taken a similar view: ‘like duelling and slavery, war does not appear to be one of life’s necessities’.

Berlin, 1–2 Feb. 2010, pp. 1 and 18–21. Available: http://www.diw.de/sixcms/detail. php?id=diw_01.c.338475.en. NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995). 2. John Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (London: Oxford University Press, 1989). This first appeared as ‘The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System’, International Security 10.4 (1986). 3. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993) 59. 4. John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989) 13. 5.

New York: Free Press, 1992. . State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Fuller, J. F. C. The Decisive Battles of the Western World and Their Influence Upon History. Vol. 1–3. London: Eyre & Spotiswood, 1963. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. London: Oxford University Press, 1989. . ‘International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War’. International Security 17.3 (1992/93): 5–58. . The Cold War. London: Penguin, 2007. Gagnon, V. P. ‘Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict’.


Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, full employment, Howard Zinn, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, long peace, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York, 1982, viiin), his emphasis; The Long Peace, 43. 3. Wm. Roger Lewis, Imperialism at Bay: the United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945 (Oxford, 1978, 481). On Grand Area planning, see Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust. For remarks on this and competing models, and applications in the Far East, see Bruce Cumings, introduction, in Cumings, ed., Child of Conflict (Washington, 1983). 4. Lewis, op. cit., 550; Christopher Thome, The Issue of War (Oxford, 1985, 225, 211). 5. Gaddis, The Long Peace, 10-11, 21; Andy Thomas, Effects of Chemical Warfare (SIPRI, Taylor & Francis, 1985, 33f.), reviewing newly released British state archives. 6.

Thomas Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat (Oxford, 1988, 82-83), quoting a Truman official and political scientist Gabriel Almond. 6. Melvyn Leffler, “Adherence to Agreements: Yalta and the Experiences of the Early Cold War,” International Security, Summer 1986. 7. Robert W. Tucker, “Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, “America and the World 1988/89,” Winter 1989, featured lead article. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace (Oxford, 1987, 129). The effort to liberate Indochina from the U.S.-backed French forces was in part a civil war, as is generally true of struggles against foreign occupation and colonial rule—the American revolution, for example. It should be clear that this fact adds no credibility to the bizarre notion that the U.S. was “deterring aggression” by aiding the French effort to reconquer Indochina, even contemplating the use of nuclear weapons for this purpose. 8.

Gaddis, The Long Peace, 10-11, 21; Andy Thomas, Effects of Chemical Warfare (SIPRI, Taylor & Francis, 1985, 33f.), reviewing newly released British state archives. 6. Gaddis, The Long Peace, 37, 11. 7. In earlier years, military spending was selected as the major device to overcome the “dollar gap” of the U.S. allies and to ensure that they would remain securely within the U.S.-dominated world system, after the failure of aid programs to achieve their ends. See Borden, Pacific Alliance, for extensive discussion of these themes, which were given their first comprehensive analysis by Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power (Harper & Row, 1972). 8. A closer examination shows that the figures were misrepresented to exaggerate the impression of Soviet military expenditures and Western weakness, also a familiar pattern over the years. 9.


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On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis

British Empire, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, invisible hand, joint-stock company, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Ronald Reagan, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway

Kennan: An American Life The Cold War: A New History Surprise, Security, and the American Experience The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2018 by John Lewis Gaddis Penguin supports copyright.

The Athenians executed the ringleaders of the revolt, pulled down the walls of the city, seized its ships, and expropriated property. This was far less, though, than what Cleon demanded. 44. Ibid., 5:84–116, pp. 350–57. 45. Ibid., 3:82, p. 199. 46. For more on this, see John Lewis Gaddis, “Drawing Lines: The Defensive Perimeter Strategy in East Asia, 1947–1951,” in Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 71–103. Taiwan was not included, because the Chinese Nationalists had fled there. Defending them, the administration feared, would be seen as intervention in the Chinese civil war, which it had hoped to avoid. 47.

., 147, 148 Wilson, Woodrow, 116, 286, 298–99, 309 as failing to align means with ends, 271 “Fourteen Points” of, 271, 274, 275, 305 as hedgehog, 289–90 League of Nations and, 274, 275 neutrality policy of, 267–70 “Peace Without Victory” speech of, 273 Russian Revolution and, 272 Wood, Gordon, 167 Woolf, Virginia, 122, 129 World War I, 256, 276 capabilities as outrunning intentions in, 263–64, 273 outbreak of, 263, 273 U-boat attacks in, 268–69, 270 U.S. and, 266–67, 281–82 World War II, 180–81, 305 German Blitzkrieg in, 284 outbreak of, 283–84 U.S. and, 267–68, 287–89, 291–93, 297–302 Xerxes, king of Persia, 1–2, 35, 44, 58, 65, 309 as failing to align means with ends, 204, 215 Greek invasion of, 1–3, 6–8, 10–14, 24, 25, 30 as hedgehog, 6–8, 10, 12–14, 19, 20, 215 Yale University, author’s strategy seminar at, 61–62 Year of Decision, The: 1846 (DeVoto), 291 Yorktown, battle of (1781), 166 ABOUT THE AUTHOR JOHN LEWIS GADDIS is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University and was the founding director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. His previous books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War; Strategies of Containment; The Long Peace; We Now Know; The Landscape of History; Surprise, Security, and the American Experience; and The Cold War: A New History. Professor Gaddis teaches courses on Cold War history, grand strategy, biography, and historical methodology. He has won two undergraduate teaching awards at Yale and was a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.


pages: 1,149 words: 141,412

The Intelligence War Against the IRA by Thomas Leahy

disinformation, long peace, operational security

John Hume, Personal Views: Politics, Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland (Dublin: Town House, 1996), p. 109; see similar comments by Sean Farren, ‘The SDLP and the Roots of the Good Friday Agreement’, in Michael Cox, Adrian Guelke and Fiona Stephen (eds.), A Farewell to Arms? From ‘Long War’ to Long Peace in Northern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 52. 13. Martin Mansergh, ‘The Background to the Irish Peace Process’, in Cox, Guelke and Stephen (eds.), A Farewell to Arms?, pp. 12–14. 14. Albert Reynolds with Jill Arlon, My Autobiography (London: Transworld Ireland, 2009), pp. 215, 236, 280. 15.

The British Army in Northern Ireland (London: Weidenfeld Military, 1997). Donoughue, Bernard. Downing Street Diary: With Harold Wilson in No. 10 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). Farren, Sean. ‘The SDLP and the Roots of the Good Friday Agreement’, in Michael Cox, Adrian Guelke and Fiona Stephen (eds.), A Farewell to Arms? From ‘Long War’ to Long Peace in Northern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Fulton, Kevin with Nally, Jim and Gallagher, Ian. Unsung Hero: How I Saved Dozens of Lives as a Secret Agent Inside the IRA (London: John Blake Publishing, 2008). Geraghty, Tony. The Irish War (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000).

MacStiofáin, Seán. Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Edinburgh: Gordon and Cremonesi, 1975). Major, John. The Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1999). Mansergh, Martin. ‘The Background to the Irish Peace Process’, in Michael Cox, Adrian Guelke and Fiona Stephen (eds.), A Farewell to Arms? From ‘Long War’ to Long Peace in Northern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Mansergh, Martin. ‘Mountain-Climbing Irish-Style: The HiddenChallenges of the Peace Process’, in Marianne Elliott (ed.), The Long Road to Peace in Northern Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002). Matchett, William.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Chernobyl, episode 5, “Vichnaya Pamyat,” directed by Johan Renck, HBO, June 3, 2019. 121. Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 312. 122. Ibid., 344. 123. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 230. Gaddis first published his speech as a 1986 journal article, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System,” International Security, Spring 1986, 99–142. 124. Our World in Data, “Battle Related Deaths in State-Based Conflicts Since 1946,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-since-1946-by-world-region. 125.

“It seems inescapable that what has really made the difference in inducing this unaccustomed caution,” he said in 1986 speech, “has been the workings of the nuclear deterrent.”123 The intensity and scale of major wars had risen in fits and starts for 500 years from the wide-scale introduction of firearms and artillery in the 1400s, until the death toll from battles and wars peaked in World War II at tens of millions of military and civilian deaths. And then from a post-war peak of more than 500,000 deaths in 1950, battle deaths in 2016 were 84 percent lower despite a tripling in the world population.124 Even if one gives no credit to nuclear weapons for the “Long Peace,” it must be acknowledged that the apocalyptic fears about nuclear have been unrealized, and that we are further from global nuclear war now than at any other point in the last seventy-five years since the invention and use of the bomb. After the Cold War, many experts in the West feared nuclear war between India and Pakistan.


pages: 568 words: 174,089

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Alan Wolfe

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Asilomar, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, full employment, Ida Tarbell, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, one-China policy, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto

At various times and places, of course, military men had been the servants of civilian decision, but this trend—which reached its climax in the nineteenth century and lasted until World War I—seemed then, and still seems, remarkable simply because it had never before happened on such a scale or never before seemed so firmly grounded. In the twentieth century, among the industrialized nations of the world, the great, brief, precarious fact of civilian dominance began to falter; and now—after the long peace from the Napoleonic era to World War I—the old march of world history once more asserts itself. All over the world, the warlord is returning. All over the world, reality is defined in his terms. And in America, too, into the political vacuum the warlords have marched. Alongside the corporate executives and the politicians, the generals and admirals—those uneasy cousins within the American elite—have gained and have been given increased power to make and to influence decisions of the gravest consequence. 1 All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.

Even if the ultimate form of power is coercion by violence, all power contests within and between nations of our tradition have not reached the ultimate point. Our theories of government have assumed and our constitution has led to institutions in which violence has been minimized and subjected to efficient checks in the balance of civilian dominance. During the long peace of the modern west, history has been referred more to the politician, to the rich and to the lawyer than to the general, the bandit, and the admiral. But how did that peace come about? How did civilians rather than men of violence become dominant? In his discusion of the military, Gaetano Mosca1 makes an assumption which we do not share, but which does not disturb our acceptance of his general line of reasoning.

Accordingly, at the top of this structure, the power elite has been shaped by the coincidence of interest between those who control the major means of production and those who control the newly enlarged means of violence; from the decline of the professional politician and the rise to explicit political command of the corporate chieftains and the professional warlords; from the absence of any genuine civil service of skill and integrity, independent of vested interests. The power elite is composed of political, economic, and military men, but this instituted elite is frequently in some tension: it comes together only on certain coinciding points and only on certain occasions of ‘crisis.’ In the long peace of the nineteenth century, the military were not in the high councils of state, not of the political directorate, and neither were the economic men—they made raids upon the state but they did not join its directorate. During the ‘thirties, the political man was ascendant. Now the military and the corporate men are in top positions.


pages: 133 words: 31,263

The Lessons of History by Will Durant, Ariel Durant

long peace, mobile money, plutocrats, profit motive, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Malthus, trade route

It is pitiful (says the general) that so many young men die in battle, but more of them die in automobile accidents than in war, and many of them riot and rot for lack of discipline; they need an outlet for their combativeness, their adventurousness, their weariness with prosaic routine; if they must die sooner or later why not let them die for their country in the anesthesia of battle and the aura of glory? Even a philosopher, if he knows history, will admit that a long peace may fatally weaken the martial muscles of a nation. In the present inadequacy of international law and sentiment a nation must be ready at any moment to defend itself; and when its essential interests are involved it must be allowed to use any means it considers necessary to its survival. The Ten Commandments must be silent when self-preservation is at stake.


pages: 465 words: 124,074

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Timothy Naftali. 2006. Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary. New York: Norton. Gaddis, John Lewis. 1974. “Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point?” Foreign Affairs 52(2) January: 386–401. ______. 1982. Strategies of Containment. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 1987. The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 1992. The United States and the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 1997. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 1999.

Schlesinger, James. 1967. On Relating Non-Technical Elements to Systems Studies. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, P-3545 (February). Schneier, Bruce. 2003. Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. New York: Copernicus. Schroeder, Paul W. 2006. “The Life and Death of a Long Peace, 1763–1914.” In The Waning of Major War: Theories and Debates, ed. Raimo Väyryen. New York: Routledge, 33–63. Schuman, Howard, Jacob Ludwig, and Jon A. Krosnick. 1986. “The Perceived Threat of Nuclear War, Salience, and Open Questions.” Public Opinion Quarterly 50(4) Winter: 519–36. Seitz, Russell. 2004.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Brenner, in Aston and Philpin, Brenner Debate, 277ff., 40ff. Stavrianos, Global Rift, cbs. 3, 16; Feffer, Shock Waves, 22; Shanin, Russia (quoting historian D. Mirsky). Zeman, Communist Europe, 15-16 (citing T. Masaryk), 57-8. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness. 2. Leffler, Preponderance, 359. Gaddis, Long Peace, 10. 3. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, 146, 150. Du Boff, Accumulation, 176, citing Kuznets. 4. See FRS, 51-2, for details on Indochina. Wood, 177, on Guatemala; US and Fascism-Nazism, Mexico, DD, chs. 1.3-4, 11. Sklar, Washington’s War, and a substantial further literature on Nicaragua. 5.

Shock Waves: Eastern Europe After the Revolution (South End, 1992) Fitzgerald, Tom. Between Life and Economics (1990 Boyer lectures of the Australian Broadcasting Company, ABC, 1990) Franklin, Bruce. M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America (Lawrence Hill, 1992) Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment (Oxford, 1982) —The Long Peace (Oxford, 1987) Garthoff, Raymond. Détente and Confrontation (Brookings, 1985) —Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Brookings, 1987) George, Alexander, ed. Westem State Terrorism (Polity, 1991) Gerschenkron, Alexander. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Harvard, 1962) Ginger, Ann Pagan, and David Christiano, eds.


Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Ever since its first creation in the late seventeenth century, the British debt has followed a simple pattern. It has spiked dramatically with every war, and then gradually been paid back down in the years of peace that followed. By the end of the Napoleonic wars debt had peaked at 268 per cent of GDP.36 The long peace that followed gave Britain enough room to pay down the debt, until by 1914 it was only 26 per cent of GDP.37 The two world wars took debt back up to 250 per cent of GDP. This was once again paid down, until in 2001 debt stood at 29.7 per cent of GDP. Even after the financial crisis, the UK’s debt is expected to peak at no more than around 80 per cent of GDP in 2015.38 A Tale of Two Nations 21 The trajectory of the debt seems to bear little relationship to the short-term deficit.


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Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

“The Group of Friends of the Secretary-General: A Useful Leveraging Tool.” In Jean Krasno, Bradd C. Hayes, and Donald C. F. Daniel. Leveraging for Success in United Nations Peace Operations. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003b: 171–200. Krech, Shepard III. “Genocide in Tribal Society.” Nature 371, Sep. 1, 1994: 14–15. Kriesberg, Louis. “Long Peace or Long War: A Conflict Resolution Perspective.” Negotiation Journal, April 2007: 97–116. Krippner, Stanley, and Teresa M. McIntyre. “Overview: In the Wake of War.” In Stanley Krippner and Teresa M. McIntyre, eds. The Psychological Impact of War Trauma on Civilians: An International Perspective.

State of the World’s Mothers 2003: Protecting Women and Children in War and Conflict. Westport, Conn.: Save the Children, 2003a. Save the Children. U.S. Congress Should Put Women and Children First in Setting Priorities for Humanitarian Assistance in War Zones. [Press Release.] October 14, 2003b. Schroeder, Paul W. The Life and Death of a Long Peace, 1763–1914. In Raimo Väyrynen, ed. The Waning of Major War: Theories and Debates. London: Routledge, 2006: 33–63. Seybolt, Taylor B. Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Conditions for Success and Failure. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Shanker, Thom. “Gates Warns Against Wars Like Iraq and Afghanistan.”


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

He is the author or editor of eleven books, including Restless Empire and The Global Cold War, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Harrington Award, and the Akira Iriye International History Award. Westad lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notes WORLD MAKING 1. See for instance John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Although I agree with many of Gaddis’s points about what kept superpower war from breaking out, I strongly disagree with the “long peace” designation. 2. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3. Marx/Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1969), 1:26. 4.

The very fact that the Cold War confrontation between the Superpowers ended peacefully was of course of supreme importance: With enough nuclear weapons in existence to destroy the world several times over, we all depended on moderation and wisdom to avoid an atomic Armageddon. The Cold War may not have been the long peace that some historians have seen it as being.1 But at the upper levels of the international system—between the United States and the Soviet Union—war was avoided long enough for change to take place. We all depended on that long postponement for survival. HOW SPECIAL, THEN, was the Cold War as an international system compared with other such systems in history?


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

The root cause for the secular decline of slavery, dueling, and war is the same, i.e., the advent of rational recognition. 14 Many of these general points are made by Carl Kaysen in his excellent review essay of John Mueller, “Is War Obsolete?” International Security 14, no. 4 (Spring 1990): 42-64. 15 See for example John Gaddis, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System,” International Security 10, no. 4 (Spring 1986): 99-142. 16 Of course, nuclear weapons were themselves responsible for the most serious U.S.-Soviet confrontation of the Cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, but even here the prospect of nuclear war prevented the conflict from moving to actual armed conflict. 17 See for example Dean V.

Harvard Theological Review 21: 163-191. Furtado, Celso. 1970. Economic Development of Latin America: A Survey from Colonial Times to the Cuban Revolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Fussell, Paul. 1975. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford University Press, New York. Gaddis, John Lewis. 1986. “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International Situation.” International Security 10, no. 4 (Spring): 99-142. Galston, William. 1975. Kant and the Problem of History. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gellner, David. 1982. “Max Weber: Capitalism and the Religion of India.” Sociology 16, no. 4 (November): 526-543.


The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947 by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, long peace, South China Sea

Mao was equally grand: “The entire people of our country should feel grateful and loudly shout, ‘long live cooperation between China and the United States.’ ” The afternoon before, searching for this airstrip, Marshall’s pilot had gotten lost in a tangle of gullies where a wrong turn could end against the side of a mountain. The remoteness was not incidental. Mao’s Communists had come to this “mountain fastness,” as Marshall described it, to take refuge and rebuild after the Long March. Most came to know the place as the “cradle of revolution,” but its name, Yenan, meant “long peace.” Marshall’s arrival in Yenan was to have signaled that the Communists’ time in the wilderness was over. When the plane landed, its pilot spotting the 1,000-year-old pagoda that marked a hill above town, a large crowd was waiting, 6,000 people by the count of Yenan’s Emancipation Daily, summoned by Mao.

General Marshall, We Communists Honor You 1 “I can tell” Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, 102; “The entire people” Li Tien-Min, Chou En-Lai, 261–262. 1–2 lost Gillem diary, 4 March 1946, Alvan Gillem Papers, MHI; side of a mountain Memoirs of Ivan D. Yeaton, 120, Ivan D. Yeaton Papers 1, Hoover; “long peace” Alexander V. Pantsov, Mao, 305. 2 6,000 people Emancipation Daily 5 March 1946. 2 five hundred Emancipation Daily 5 March 1946; “Oh! General Marshall” Li, Chou, 261–262. 2 “sits and masks” Gillem diary, 4 March 1946, Alvan Gillem Papers, MHI; “All were satisfied” Emancipation Daily 5 March 1946; He had sat Gillem diary, 4 March 1946, Alvan Gillem Papers, MHI; fail to notice Transcript of GCM comments, Conference on Problems of United States Policy in China, Secretary’s Files 152/4, HST Papers, HSTL; model of vehicle Katherine Marshall, Together, 60; Mao would ride JHC letter, 23 March 1946, JHC Papers 2/8, GCMRL. 3 “armies called” Ed Cray, General of the Army, 515. 3 “strong, united” FRUS 1945 Vol. 7, 770. 3 a miracle Marshall cable, 25 January 1946, GCM Papers 24/1, GCMRL; Benjamin Franklin New Yorker 16 March 1946; “a new stage” Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters, 32. 4 “god of peace” Marshall cable, 25 January 1946, GCM Papers 24/1, GCMRL; “peace will” GCM to HST, 16 January 146, Naval Aide Files 8/9, HST Papers, HSTL. 5 “next war” Papers Vol. 5, 273. 1.


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The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

Albert Einstein, estate planning, long peace, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, twin studies

We are overwhelmingly relational creatures, and this is true all the way back to our primate ancestors. Jane Goodall says the chimpanzees she observed in Gombe “have a rich repertoire of behaviours that serve to maintain or restore social harmony. . . . The embracing, kissing, patting and holding of hands that serve as greetings after separation . . . The long, peaceful sessions of relaxed social grooming. The sharing of food. The concern for the sick or wounded.” And so without our primordial attachments to others, what would we be? Evidently, we would be the players of a game, one that resembled a giant chess match, with our fellow human beings as the rooks, the knights, and the pawns.


pages: 225 words: 11,355

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

Baring Brothers raised the money for Jefferson to buy Louisiana from Napoleon and helped finance Latin American independence. Later the Rothschilds advanced the money for Britain to buy the Suez Canal. The great London merchant bankers also financed the huge expansion of world trade and the building of railroads and factories around the globe that marked the long peace of 1815 through 1914. The number one destination for all this London money was the United States, not Britain or her empire. America was growing in territory, population, and industry at breakneck speed. It had a bottomless appetite for credit and money. What it didn’t have, for reasons we will address in the next chapter, was serious banks or financial markets.


pages: 305 words: 97,214

Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century by Jonathan Sacks

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, Socratic dialogue, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, zero-sum game

This told the story of a people that once made history as a nation in its land, then disappeared from history, living in suspended animation for two thousand years, before coming to life again in the twentieth century. In the 1960s, after the Eichmann trial brought the Holocaust into Israeli discourse, came the story of Shoa u-Gevurah, destruction and rebirth. As Israel began the long peace process of Oslo, yet another voice began to be heard, that of post-Zionism, meaning an Israel without Jewish identity, a liberal democracy with procedures but no traditions. The one voice that might have supplied an enduring narrative, Judaism itself, was more or less ruled out in principle, because Judaism is a religion, and Israel is a secular state.


pages: 850 words: 224,533

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

Raimo Vayrynen (London: Routledge, 2006); Nils Petter Gelditsch, “The Decline of War—The Main Issues,” International Studies Review 15, no. 3 (2013): 397–99; Lawrence Freedman, “Steven Pinker and the Long Peace: Alliance, Deterrence, and Decline,” Cold War History 14, no. 4 (2014): 657–72; John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 32. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, 3. 33. Freedman, “Steven Pinker and the Long Peace,” 658. 34. Ibid. 35. One of the frequently used datasets, Peter Brecke’s “Conflict Catalog,” http://www.cgeh.nl/data, includes 3,708 conflicts, with data on parties, fatalities, date, and duration.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

Alan Tonelson, New York Times Book Review, 25 December 1988. 36. Lansing and Wilson cited in Lloyd Gardner, Safe for Democracy (Oxford, 1987). Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (University of Illinois, 1997). 37. Cited by Melvin Leffler, A Preponderance of Power (Stanford, 1992), p. 78. 38. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace (Oxford, 1987), p. 10. 39. Mark Laffey, Review of International Studies 29 (2003), a critical account of the convention. Chapter 4: DANGEROUS TIMES 1. Michael Krepon, strategic analyst at the Henry L. Stimson Center, cited by Faye Bowers and Howard LaFranchi, Christian Science Monitor, 31 December 2002.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Montesquieu’s phrase for the calming effect of trade on human violence, intolerance and enmity was ‘doux commerce’ – sweet commerce. And he has been amply vindicated in the centuries since. The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved. Think of the Dutch after 1600, the Swedes after 1800, the Japanese after 1945, the Germans likewise, the Chinese after 1978. The long peace of the nineteenth century coincided with the growth of free trade. The paroxysm of violence that convulsed the world in the first half of the twentieth century coincided with protectionism. Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does Syria suffer from a surfeit of commerce?


pages: 401 words: 122,457

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

British Empire, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, invention of movable type, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, the eighteenth-century Frenchman said to be the first food journalist, claimed that cheese was a salty snack for drinking. “For those who need to provoke thirst Roquefort cheese deserves more than any other the epithet of the drunkard’s biscuit.” THE BASQUES LEARNED how to make hams in their long war with the Celts and then learned to market them in their long peace with the ham-loving Romans. Jambon de Bayonne, Bayonne ham, was never made in Bayonne but was shipped from the Basque port of Bayonne at the mouth of the Adour River. It has never been clear, however, if the ham is Basque, though the Basques surprise no one by insisting that it is. Modern France has defined the famous jambon de Bayonne, which was first written about in the sixth century, as a product made in the watershed of the Adour, an area including all of French Basque-land and bits of the neighboring regions of Landes, Béarn, and Bigorre.


pages: 377 words: 121,996

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission by Steve Gibson

Adam Curtis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, John Nash: game theory, libertarian paternalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, unbiased observer, WikiLeaks

That Russia no longer targets its nuclear warheads at any of the Nato countries is comforting but irrelevant. Both sides now have sight of, and a voice in, each others decision-making process and most importantly, the first tangible and meaningful effort to introduce trust back into the equation has been taken. This is the end of the Cold War and hopefully the beginning of a ‘long peace’ in Europe. Reflections I have said it before, and I say it again; it is the purest delusion to suppose that because an idea has been handed down from time immemorial to succeeding generations, it may not be entirely false. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)1 This additional chapter was written in the summer of 2011, some twenty-two years after the iconic fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.


pages: 1,261 words: 294,715

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Have People Really Gotten Less Awful? This has been very contentious. Pinker offers the sound bite “We may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” The fact most driving this optimism is that, except for the Balkan wars, Europe has been at peace since 1945, the longest stretch in history. For Pinker, this “Long Peace” represents the West coming to its senses after the ruin of World War II, seeing how the advantages of being a common market outweigh those of being a perpetually warring continent, plus some expanding empathy thrown in on the side. Critics characterize this as Eurocentrism. Western countries may kumbaya one another, but they’ve sure made war elsewhere—France in Indochina and Algeria, Britain in Malaya and Kenya, Portugal in Angola and Mozambique, the USSR in Afghanistan, the United States in Vietnam, Korea, and Latin America.

Most important, such wars have been made bloodier because the West invented the idea of having client states fight proxy wars for them. After all, the late twentieth century saw the United States and USSR arm the warring Somalia and Ethiopia, only to switch to arming the other side within a few years. The Long Peace has been for Westerners. The claim of violence declining steadily over the last millennium also must accommodate the entire bloody twentieth century. World War II killed 55 million people, more than any conflict in history. Throw in World War I, Stalin, Mao, and the Russian and Chinese civil wars, and you’re up to 130 million.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

Flamingo, London, 1998 Furet, François (trans. Deborah Furet), The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL, 1999 Gaddis, John, The Cold War. Allen Lane, London, 2006 ———, George Kennan: An American Life. Penguin, New York, 2011 ———, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. Oxford University Press, New York, 1984 ———, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford University Press, London, 1997 Gellately, Robert, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013 Gieseke, Jens (trans.


pages: 415 words: 136,343

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul

Anthropocene, assortative mating, coronavirus, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Earth, jitney, long peace, low earth orbit, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, off grid, phenotype, quantum entanglement, SpaceX Starlink, the scientific method

“Maybe we shouldn’t act so chummy, guys,” I said quietly out of the corner of my mouth, as the seemingly endless photo session continued. “Is there a problem?” Peter asked. “Think, British Army in northern Ireland,” I said under my breath, as his grin crumpled. There is plenty of tension on both sides. Despite a decades-long peace process, the Rifles continue to battle Maoist insurgents that filter across the porous Myanmar border. Just a week or two before our arrival, the Indian military claimed to have killed 40 militants who had crossed the border less than 50 kilometers from the area we were visiting. We finally extricated ourselves, anxious for a chance to clean up and eat a very late breakfast.


Wool Omnibus Edition by Hugh Howey

back-to-the-land, clean tech, confounding variable, hydroponic farming, invisible hand, long peace

It startled Knox, this sudden link to a mysterious past. And it wasn’t that terribly long ago, was it? Less than two hundred years? He imagined, if someone lived as long as Jahns had, or McLain for that matter, that three long lives could span that distance. Three handshakes to go from that uprising to this one. And what of the years between? That long peace sandwiched between two wars? Knox lifted his boots from one step to another, thinking on these things. Had he become the bad people he’d learned about in youth? Or had he been lied to? It hurt his head to consider, but here he was, leading a recreation of something awful. And yet it felt so right.


pages: 497 words: 153,755

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Not a single episode in the history of gold or money recounted so far in this book could have been of much)help. Nothing like the war of 1914-1918 had ever occurred before, in terms of scope, casualties, cost, or pain. It was natural to seek a return to the structure that most people believed had held the world together during the long peace and rising living standards of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Disraeli's warning notwithstanding. In addition, experience had shown that mistrust in the value of money can have a powerful and destructive impact on social structures, the established order of property ownership, and economic progress.


pages: 469 words: 145,094

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady

anti-communist, Charles Lindbergh, El Camino Real, illegal immigration, index card, long peace, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, Socratic dialogue

When, on the heels of Harper’s, widely read British magazine Chess published the article in full, Bobby turned livid and screamed: “Those bastards!” Bobby insisted that most of the article had twisted what he said and used his quotes out of context. For example, he never told Ginzburg that he had to “get rid of his mother.” It’s true that Regina Fischer left the apartment to go on a long peace march, met a man, got married, and settled in England. She did say that Bobby, a highly independent adolescent, was probably better off without her living with him; like many mothers, she was doting and continually trying to help her son, sometimes to the point of exasperating him. She and Bobby both realized that living alone gave him more time to study according to his own time and pace, but Ginzburg’s negative interpretation of their relationship was totally incorrect.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

It also goes a long way towards explaining the phenomenon of Live Aid, which offered the young a way to be involved in one of the great issues of the time, without being divisive or dull. In 1980, the developed world was cut in two by the military border that ran through Germany, between the communist and capitalist blocs. They had learnt to coexist, but no one knew how long peaceful coexistence could last. The capitalist system was more dynamic and more successful economically than its rival, but once communism took hold of a country, it seemed that nothing could turn it back. No established communist system had ever been dismantled or overthrown from within. People expected this contest between rival systems to continue indefinitely.


pages: 692 words: 189,065

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

Minoa, a Bronze Age civilization on the island of Crete, was renowned for a tranquil culture of merchants and artisans.15 Yet even the population of Minoa, serene in its heyday, must have come together, in this case before historical records, by force. The same is true of the modern-day people of such long-peaceful states as Luxembourg and Iceland, when their history is traced back far enough. Just as chiefdoms swallowed tribes and then each other, the pattern of the expansion of the nations and empires that ensued stayed the same. Throughout recorded history conquering was followed by consolidation and control, repeated ad infinitum.


pages: 637 words: 199,158

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

But the United States did not fight to make peace in either world war. Instead, it fought to prevent a dangerous foe from achieving regional hegemony. Peace was a welcome byproduct of those endeavors. The same basic point holds for the Cold War: American military forces were in Europe to contain the Soviet Union, not to maintain peace. The long peace that ensued was the happy consequence of a successful deterrence policy. We find a similiar story in Northeast Asia. The United States did not intervene with force to shut down the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), nor did it send troops to Northeast Asia in the 1930s, when Japan took the offensive on the Asian mainland, conquering Manchuria and large portions of China in a series of brutal military campaigns.


pages: 685 words: 203,431

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant

George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, music of the spheres, Plato's cave, plutocrats, science of happiness, Socratic dialogue, the market place, the scientific method

“There be three points of business” in government: “the preparation; the debate or examination; and the perfection” (or execution). “Whereof, if you look for dispatch, let the middle only be the work of many, and the first and last the work of a few.”37 He is an outspoken militarist; he deplores the growth of industry as unfitting men for war, and bewails long peace as lulling the warrior in man. Nevertheless, he recognizes the importance of raw materials: “Solon said well to Crœsus (when in ostentation Crœsus showed him his gold), ‘Sir, if any other come that hath better iron than you, he will be master of all this gold.’”38 Like Aristotle, he has some advice on avoiding revolutions.


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

See also Murray’s afterword in the 1996 paperback edition. 54.Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001; Jones, 2001; Kahneman & Tversky, 1984; Thaler, 1994; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974. 55.Akerlof, 1984; Daly & Wilson, 1994; Jones, 2001; Rogers, 1994. 56.Frank, 1999; Frank, 1985. 57.Bowles & Gintis, 1998; Bowles & Gintis, 1999. 58.Gintis, 2000. 59.Wilkinson, 2000. 60.Daly & Wilson, 1988; Daly, Wilson, & Vasdev, 2001; Wilson & Daly, 1997. Chapter 17: Violence 1.Quoted by R. Cooper in “The long peace,” Prospect, April 1999. 2.National Defense Council Foundation, Alexandria, Va., www.ndcf.org/index.htm. 3.Bamforth, 1994; Chagnon, 1996; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Ember, 1978; Ghiglieri, 1999; Gibbons, 1997; Keeley, 1996; Kingdon, 1993; Knauft, 1987; Krech, 1994; Krech, 1999; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996. 4.Keeley, 1996; Walker, 2001. 5.Gibbons, 1997; Holden, 2000. 6.Fernández-Jalvo et al., 1996. 7.FBI Uniform Crime Reports 1999: www.fbi.gov/ucr/99cius.htm. 8.Seville, 1990. 9.Ortega y Gasset, 1932/1985, epilogue. 10.New York Times, June 13, 1999. 11.Paul Billings, quoted in B.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

In time free from farming, men make rope and rush mats and other articles by hand; and women work in the salt fields from the third to the eighth month and during the rest of the year devote themselves exclusively to weaving cotton cloth, not even taking time to cut firewood and gather grass for compost [traditional female work].10 The importance of non-agricultural production in the countryside follows on from the assertion that it accounted for 40 to 50 per cent of regional production, although ‘farmers’ comprised around 90 per cent of the population of each domain.11 It is no coincidence that this labour-intensive path of economic development surged in Tokugawa Japan. After centuries of civil wars, two key political changes occurred with direct consequences for working Japan. Firstly, the Samurai were now concentrated in cities under direct supervision of the government. This initiated a period of centuries-long peace, but also of rapid urbanization. In 1600, only 3 per cent of the population lived in cities of more than 10,000 residents; 50 years later, this was already more than 13 per cent, and in 1700, 15 per cent. Some of these cities were very large: Edo (Tokyo), the seat of the government, had a million inhabitants; Osaka and Kyoto each had half a million; and several provincial cities recorded 100,000 residents.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

As a general account of the Cold War, I have mainly used a splendid French account, Georges-Henri Soutou’s La Guerre de Cinquante Ans (2001), but another French book, André Fontaine’s Après eux le Déluge, de Kaboul à Sarajevo (1995), covers the last decade or so of Communism, very readably. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (2005), is a very efficient survey, and his The Long Peace (1987) bears re-reading, but see also David Reynolds, One World Divisible (2000). The world of arms negotiations was covered in admirable and dogged fashion by Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era (1998). For the world of 1945, Tony Judt, Postwar (2005), and William I. Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe (2003), complement each other.


pages: 1,002 words: 276,865

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

If these were sacred islands, part of their sacredness must have consisted in a rule that they were unapproachable, inhabited only by native Maltese in the service of the Great Goddess, who was represented not just in the statues and figurines the Maltese carved, but in the very shape of the temples, with their billowing exterior and womb-like internal passages. The end of this culture is as perplexing as its creation. The long peace came to an end by the middle of the sixteenth century BC. There is no sign of a decline in the temple culture; rather, there was a sharp break, as invaders arrived, lacking the skills that had created the great monuments, but possessing one advantage: bronze weapons. Judging from finds of clay whorls and of carbonized cloth, they were spinners and weavers, who arrived from Sicily and south-eastern Italy.16 By the fourteenth century they had been replaced by another wave of Sicilian settlers.


Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss

anti-communist, British Empire, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, full employment, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Businessmen who backed McKinley for President in 1896 implored him to do something to stop the uncertainty about Cuba, where there was about $50 million (about $1.5 billion today) of American investment. In March 1897, on the night before McKinley’s inauguration, the departing President, Grover Cleveland, warned him that within the next two years, he would inevitably be hauled into war with Spain. McKinley did not wish to end the nation’s long peace since Appomattox. Trying to fix the Cuba problem, he offered to buy the island, but the Spanish turned him down flat. McKinley sent a personal envoy, his friend William Calhoun of Illinois, to Weyler’s Cuba. Calhoun reported back that the island was “wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation.”


pages: 939 words: 274,289

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H. W. Brands

California gold rush, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, industrial cluster, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, retrograde motion, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway

A great commander like Sherman or Sheridan even then might have organized and put down the rebellion in six months or a year, or at the farthest two years. But that would have saved slavery, perhaps, and slavery meant the germs of a new rebellion. There had to be an end to slavery.” “It was a long war, and a great work well done. I suppose it means a long peace.” “I believe so.” Grant had left America in part to give Hayes the opportunity to establish his own presidency. “I propose to stay away till after the exciting scenes that will surround the test of Mr. Hayes’s policy, for the reason that if I were at home I would be charged with having a hand in every kind of political maneuvering,” he told William Copeland, a colleague of John Young’s at the New York Herald.


pages: 1,477 words: 311,310

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

And, as the preceding chapter showed, the British government had long known how to exploit its credit in the banking and stock markets. But developments in the financial realm by the mid-nineteenth century were both qualitatively and quantitatively different from what had gone before. At first sight, it is the quantitative difference which catches the eye. The long peace and the easy availability of capital in the United Kingdom, together with the improvements in the country’s financial institutions, stimulated Britons to invest abroad as never before: the £6 million or so which was annually exported in the decade following Waterloo had risen to over £30 million a year by midcentury, and to a staggering £75 million a year between 1870 and 1875.


pages: 1,330 words: 372,940

Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson

Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, Great Grain Robbery, haute couture, Herman Kahn, index card, Khyber Pass, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, oil shock, out of africa, Plato's cave, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Socratic dialogue, Ted Sorensen, Yom Kippur War

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948. ———, ed. The Philosophy of Kant (includes “Perpetual Peace”). New York: Random House, 1949. Frost, David. I Gave Them a Sword. New York: Morrow, 1978. Frye, Alton. A Responsible Congress: The Politics of National Security. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Long Peace. New York: Oxford, 1987. ———. Strategies of Containment. New York: Oxford, 1982. Garthoff, Raymond. Détente and Confrontation. Washington: Brookings, 1985. Gelb, Leslie, and Richard Betts. The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked. Washington: Brookings, 1979. Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Norton, 1991.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

Only in the 1990s, with Germany reunited and the Soviet empire in a state of collapse, could the people of Europe resume the natural course of their development so rudely interrupted in that beautiful summer of 1914. In this scenario, therefore, the years between 1914 and 1945 appear as the time of Europe’s troubles, which filled the space between the long peace of the late nineteenth century and the still longer peace of the ‘Cold War’. They may be likened to the slipping of a continental plate, and to the resultant season of earthquakes. They encompass the initial military quakes of 1914–18, the collapse of four empires, the outbreak of communist revolution in Russia, the emergence of a dozen new sovereign states, the armed truce of the inter-war decades, the fascist take-overs in Italy, Germany, and Spain, and then the second, general military conflagration of 1939–45.