Causes of Wars and the Developing Global Crisis

Abstract

This paper connects some ultimate causes of wars through history with a set of contemporary problems we have been calling the “Developing Global Crisis” for about 20 years.

Therefore, one first step is identifying what that crisis entails.

Very briefly, the living system that sustains all of our global civilizations is in great distress these days. This leads to many armed conflicts and even “failed states.” Sometimes failed states produce terrorists and large numbers of other desperate people who flee the chaos that results. Former US Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper provides an apt description of the Developing Global Crisis on page 157 of his 2018 memoirs: “Factors like food and water shortages and poor living conditions – increasingly driven by climate change – oppression of political freedoms, corruption by autocratic governments and rulers who had been in place for decades … made them (North African and some Middle Eastern states) extremely unstable. The spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) threatens Everything under Heaven, because many terrorists want WMD and are not deterred by threats of retaliation.

There are at least 40 recurring causes of wars through history, so we cannot consider them all in the time available. Today we will focus on four especially important ultimate causes of wars. They are Population Pressure, Militant Religion, Authoritarian Law, and Corruptions of Governance. The case of contemporary Syria will be examined briefly to illustrate connections between these causes of organized armed conflict and many other problems.

There is also a particular reason why I came to China. This is called “Thucydides’ Trap” which is a theory about great power relations of Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, inspired by an ancient Greek historian named Thucydides. Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War that ended Greece’s dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western civilization about the same time that Sun Tzu wrote his incomparable “Art of War.” Allison’s more recent theory suggests that when one “great power” declines while another great power rises, war between them is almost inevitable.