Why War? 

by  Richard Overy 

W. W. Norton & Company 

304 pp., $22.10

In What It Is Like To Go To War, Vietnam War veteran Karl Marlantes—perhaps that conflict’s best writer—speaks of war in a way that much of contemporary society is ill-equipped to fathom. 

“Mystical or religious experiences,” he writes, consist of four basic elements. “Awareness of one’s own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people’s lives above one’s own, and being part of a larger religious community.” 

It is not often recognized by those who have not seen combat, but war features all four. While war is terrible, Marlantes explains, it is also exhilarating. Consider the collective joy of winning, of destroying the foe who is attempting to destroy you, the moral erasure of the self into the collective identity of one’s fellow soldiers. These are elements of martial combat that have and likely always will draw men.

Richard Overy’s new book reflecting on war echoes Marlantes in its consideration of aspects of war that are easily missed by casual onlookers. Overy’s title, Why War?, is cribbed from the memorable 1933 exchange on this topic between Einstein and Freud. There, Freud threw cold water on a hopeful inquiry from Einstein about the possibility of a lasting global peace by painstakingly indicating all the obstacles. We have, the founder of psychoanalysis believed, powerful instinctual drives toward “hatred and destruction.” There is, therefore, little likelihood that we will be able to transcend these aggressive instincts to find global peace. He outlined, without much hopefulness, the necessity for an enlightened leadership caste as the sole way out of this trap of human nature. “An upper stratum of men with independent minds, not open to intimidation and eager in the pursuit of truth,” he wrote. “A community of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason … whose business it would be to give direction to the dependent masses.” 

Overy’s perspective is still more pessimistic than Freud’s. His explanation of the sources of war will further weaken even Freud’s feeble hope for a global leadership that somehow transcends its own human nature to become like gods. In Overy’s analysis, there is no indication whatsoever that humanity can rise above war, nor is there even anything conclusive to convince us that the elimination of war would be an unqualified good. That’s because, in the final analysis, war provides the only effective method for resisting human evil.

The book is an excellent contemporary introduction to the topic. It walks the reader through a list of the central themes in the study of the nature of war. The first four chapters examine the features of human nature and the natural world that cause wars to occur. By beginning with biological and psychological elements of human nature that find expression in war, the book is already at odds with contemporary academic thinking. Many academics peremptorily dismiss Overy’s pessimistic  idea that there might be aspects of our natural behavior that make war both a likely and even a potentially productive outcome. But the evidence is solid that war has been present throughout the life of our species. 

Overy is guardedly sympathetic to evolutionary theory, as a project that is likely the only way to make the sciences of man into true sciences. That is to say, he sees evolutionary theory as a necessary piece of the effort to understand our species. Evolutionary theory gives us explanatory models for understanding how extreme forms of collective aggression and violence in our pre-modern past could have made individuals and groups more fit for survival.

A considerable body of academic scholarship would have it that war is an invention of acquisitive, materialistic societies like those that left our early hunter-gatherer existence for horticultural and, later, full agrarian production. Alas, Overy points out, the evidence of war, and even genocidal war, in the supposedly peaceful world of the idyllic pre-horticultural peoples so beloved by the anthropologists is abundant. The fossil record from our hunter-gatherer ancestors in prehistory shows widespread evidence of skeletal injuries produced by weapons. 

It seems that the inclination to see the world in terms of in-groups and out-groups is ingrained in human nature. Much as we might prefer that it be otherwise, the evidence of our attachment to this way of framing the world is overwhelming. We are exceedingly adept at seeing the world in the friend vs. foe terms given to us by political theorist Carl Schmitt.

Beyond these features of our deep human nature, there are numerous other factors that predictably produce war. Chief among them is the pursuit of power for the sake of power. Overy examines the trio of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler to illustrate the ways in which charismatic and capable leaders present perhaps the single most dangerous potential contributor to war, from the Ancient Greek world to our own. The game of power and war in the late 20^th and early 21^st century has an extensive list of its own cynical protagonists. None of these personally match Overy’s triumvirate in martial capability, energy, or a belief in their own power as providential, but they nonetheless promise and deliver a great deal of bloodshed. Irrational and power-hungry leaders can throw a heavy monkey wrench into even the most sophisticated attempts at prognostication about international relations. 

More rational calculations over matters of border security and struggles to control natural resources provoke a great deal of war. Overy discusses numerous historical and ongoing examples. The struggle to establish and maintain frontiers has long been at the heart of military action and ongoing diplomatic tension in the borderlands separating India, Pakistan, Russia, and China. The fundamental dynamic driving the long-lived hostilities in the Levant is the effort by an Israeli state to shore up its shaky borders, on the other side of which glower regimes and militant groups that explicitly aim to wipe away all the cartographic lines defining a Jewish state. Control over oil and gas deposits and sources of fresh water percolate behind many actual and potential wars throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Overy does a fine job surveying a tremendously complex global picture here in an account sufficiently concise to be read in an hour.

There are a few inexplicable aspects of Overy’s argument. He displays a curious blindness to the magnitude and complexity of the threat from communist governments faced by the West during the 20^th century. He describes the human cost of the war in Vietnam as self-evidently too great for the accomplishment of the meager goal of “just … hold[ing] back communism.” Just holding back communism! As though this were a minor achievement, given the record of nearly unlimited butchery and atrocity of communist regimes. He bends over backward to equally attribute moral responsibility when he characterizes the Cold War as at least as much about Western hostility to communism as about any realistic communist threat of expansion through war and subsequent establishment of murderous totalitarian regimes designed to liquidate large numbers of their own populations.

Unfathomably, Overy sees Islamism, which is at least recognized accurately as a singular threat to peace in the contemporary era, as in significant part an effect of “the persistence of Western violence.” Jihad as a Muslim concept of just war emerges, he tells us, only in response to the Crusades. An editor might have done well to remind the author that Muslim aggression was itself the cause of the Crusades. Overy’s blinkered view here perhaps extends from his general inability to appreciate the compelling logic and reasons that drive at least some religious conflict.

These are failures in the book’s vision of the causes of specific historical conflicts, but they do not derail its overall conclusions about the nature of war in general. The steadfastly realist perspective Overy brings to bear on the topic is a valuable message that sets it apart from others.

It’s also worth noting that the book includes an insightful discussion of the rise and fall of security studies in academia as an effort to rationally think through the likelihood of global conflicts and how to ameliorate them. War and strategic studies have a long pedigree in academic institutions that are connected to militaries. In today’s university, though, peace studies far outflanks security studies both in its presence on campuses and in its ideological reach in broader society. 

The result is that the default stance on war in contemporary higher education is to assume that it cannot ever be legitimate and the only reasonable pursuit is its complete elimination from the human world. Even those universities that lack peace studies departments or programs have international relations departments that are functional equivalents. According to the utopian fantasies preached in these fields, if we can just sufficiently fund international governmental bureaucracies and global courts, war will disappear from the face of the earth. Don’t hold your breath.