by Jim Rose in defence economics, politics - New Zealand, war and peace Tags: Cold War, game theory, George Orwell, nuclear free New Zealand, peace movements, war against terror

If the dilettantes at the end of the known world accomplished anything at all by declaring New Zealand nuclear free after 1984, anything at all, it was to prolong the Cold War, embolden Communist Russia and increase the chance of a nuclear exchange. As George Orwell said in 1941

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

There is a strong peace movement in the 1930s that undermined rearmament at every point. Indeed, the then leader of the British Labour Party met with Hitler one afternoon with the aim of persuading him to become a Christian pacifist. He failed.

The slaughterhouse of World War I would certainly rest on the memory but Hitler gave them no choice but to rearm yet some on the Left would not accept this reality. The purpose of British foreign policy in the 1930s was to buy time to rearmament before the inevitable clash.

The pro-fascism of the peace movement continues to this day. To quote Michael Walzer

so many leftists rushed to the defense of civil liberties while refusing to acknowledge that the country faced real dangers–as if there was no need at all to balance security and freedom. Maybe the right balance will emerge spontaneously from the clash of right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing absolutism, but it would be better practice for the left to figure out the right balance for itself, on its own; the effort would suggest a responsible politics and a real desire to exercise power, some day. But what really marks the left, or a large part of it, is the bitterness that comes with abandoning any such desire. The alienation is radical. How else can one understand the unwillingness of people who, after all, live here, and whose children and grandchildren live here, to join in a serious debate about how to protect the country against future terrorist attacks? There is a pathology in this unwillingness, and it has already done us great damage.

With one exception, democracies do not go to war with other democracies. There are plenty of undemocratic countries out there with dictators willing to have it go if they see weakness.

That is before you consider the suspicion that the Communist dictatorships had of other countries. In Tom Schelling’s view, many wars including World War 1 were the products of mutual alarm and unpredictable tests of will.

Robert Aumann argued well that the way to peace is like bargaining in a medieval bazaar. Never look too keen, and bargain long and hard. Aumann argues that:

If you are ready for war, you will not need to fight. If you cry ‘peace, peace,’ you will end up fighting… What brings war is that you signal weakness and concessions.

A nuclear free New Zealand signalled weakness and a willingness to make concessions. The peace movements across all democracies had the same effect.

Disarmament increases the chances of war. Aumann gave the example of the Cold War of how their stockpiles of nuclear weapons and fleets of bombers prevented a hot war from starting:

In the long years of the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union, what prevented “hot” war was that bombers carrying nuclear weapons were in the air 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? Disarming would have led to war.

Peace activists are utterly clueless about what is discussed at peace talks. The ability to negotiate a credible peaceful settlement between sovereign states depends on:

the divisibility of the outcome of the dispute,

the effectiveness of the fortifications and counterattacks with which an attacker would expect to have to contend, and

on the permanence of the outcome of a potential war.

Central to any peace talks is that any peace agreement is credible – it will hold and not will not be quickly broken:

A state would think that another state’s promise not to start a war is credible only if the other state would be better off by keeping its promise not to start a war than by breaking its promise.

Peace talks occur only when there something to bargain about. As James Fearon explained, there must be

a set of negotiated settlements that both sides prefer to fighting

That need for a bargaining range is the fundamental flaw of peace activists. When they call for peace talks, peace activists never explain what will be discussed in a world where everybody is not like them terms of good intentions.

What are the possible negotiated settlements that each both side will prefer to continue fighting? Diplomacy is about one side having some control over something the other side wants and this other side have something you want to exchange. In a war, the attacker thinks he can get what it wants to fighting for it.

If peace activists truly want peace, rather than victory for the other side, they must prepare for war including fortified borders so that the other side doesn’t dare cross them and start a war. A peace settlement depends upon the ability to divide the contested territory with or without fortified borders to make a settlement credible:

…despite the costs and risks of war, if a dispute is existential, or, more generally, if the whole of a contested territory is sufficiently more valuable than the sum of its parts, then a peaceful settlement is not possible. A peaceful settlement of a territorial dispute, and especially a settlement that includes an agreement not to fortify the resulting border, also can be impossible if a state thinks, even if over optimistically, that by starting a war it would be able at a small cost to settle the dispute completely in its favour permanently.