Uncle Sam as Globocop: Immanuel Kant, Comparative War Aggression, and the Travails of America's Pax Democratica

Uncle Sam as GloboCop:

Immanuel Kant, Comparative War Aggression, and

The Travails of America’s Pax Democratica

By

Gregory Larkin

CHAPTER ONE

The Diminishment of War Aggression since World War II

In the first half of the 20th century, there were two horrifically bloody world wars that took the lives of close to 100 million human beings all across Earth. Yet, since the end of World War II, there has been no World War III. Given that the global population of Homo sapiens has risen from just over 2 billion in 1945 to over 7 billion in the 2010s, there are plenty of peoples living on Earth to come into conflict with other peoples living near and far. Moreover, the capacity of well-organized groups of humans to inflict massive damage and casualties to other groups of humans has only increased over the ensuing decades. Make no mistake, there have been many bloody wars since the end of World War II, but the overall trajectory of state-sponsored violence which is the essence of war aggression has been going down and not up, with each decade seemingly less violent than the previous decade both in total numbers of deaths and in per capita terms. This has not escaped the notice of many observers; among the notable recent examples of such arguments is Stephen Pinker’s 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

It must be acknowledged that this is not the impression that most people have of the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. For instance, if a person simply turned on the TV and watched the broadcast news over these past few decades, the exact opposite impression would be the uppermost image in most people’s thoughts, but that may have more to do with the vastly increased ability of the global media to transmit images of violence happening anywhere on Earth far more rapidly rather than with the amount of actual violence being committed. Perhaps, the ever-expanding global reach of social media does have the overall effect of shaming some humans into killing each other less. It is a fact that the most brutal and tyrannical regimes in the world – most notably, North Korea – are also incredibly obsessive about controlling and limiting their subject’s access to any real news. However, it is a bit ridiculous to give any chief credit to the media for these phenomena of less mass violence.

Another explanation that must be dismissed immediately for the decrease in the rate of overall war and violence is that humans have evolved in a genetic sense somehow into less atavistic animals. In point of fact, however, there is no evidence that humans in 2014 are in any way genetically distinguishable from humans in 1914 when the First World War, the war to end all wars, erupted. Or for that matter, that 21st century humans are in any way different from humans who lived 500 or 5000 years ago. Human beings circa 2015 are just as prone to wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, gluttony and good ol’ fashioned spite as humans were centuries or millennia ago. There has been no emergence of a peace gene that is spreading among the seven billion and growing population of Homo sapiens. Nor is it remotely likely that a peace gene is ever going to emerge within the human genome any time soon. Peace is something that history has absolutely demonstrated must be socially and politically constructed.

The Impact of Nuclear Weapons

One factor that has often been viewed as critical to the prevalence of war aggression, especially among the great powers, is the emergence of nuclear weapons in the summer of 1945 with the dropping the atomic bombs by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing the Second World War to an astounding end. Almost all of the world’s great powers since 1945 have developed an incredible variety of nuclear weapons. It turns out that there is no practical way to stuff the nuclear genie back into its proverbial bottle, just as there is no way to completely stop a country from getting a bomb short of invading that country if getting a nuclear bomb is the primary military priority of the regime in power. The early 21st century list of states with nuclear weapons is eight: the United States of America, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Israel, and Pakistan. Moreover, there are a number of countries that developed nuclear weapons since 1945 but subsequently scrapped them for a variety of reasons which includes Canada and South Africa (which jointly conducted nuclear weapons tests with Israel in the late 1970s when the Apartheid regime was in power). There are at the very least a dozen other countries that have at their disposal the ability to build some type of nuclear weapons device on very, very short notice which are sometimes referred to a latch key nuclear weapons states such as Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The actual status of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state is a subject of much speculation.

The impact of nuclear weapons on the prevalence of war has been deceptively stark: war between two states that both have nuclear weapons has thus far been zero. The simple reality of nuclear weapons is that engaging in any kind of conventional war aggression against a nuclear weapons state is, by any measure, an insanely risky proposition. There are at least two obvious reasons for this: (1) nuclear weapons expose the ruling political elites to almost immediate annihilation in a way that conventional warfare never historically did, and (2) the massing of conventional armies on the borders of an adversarial state makes such armed forces incredibly vulnerable to destruction by so-called tactical nuclear weapons. Hence, mutually assured destruction – the so-called MAD doctrine which is one the modern era’s most ironic and accurate acronyms – have had the effect of freezing the conventional armed forces of the great powers in place.

A standard argument of the Cold War has been that nukes kept the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union exceptionally frigid and thus frozen in place. There is an unmistakable logic to this dynamic because the thought of a political leader starting a war that could easily end in one hour with that person’s (as well as everybody else who might be standing within several miles) total incineration is likely to make that leader profoundly less likely to engage in war aggression. It is, of course, difficult to speculate in terms the what-ifs of history, but in the absence of nuclear weapons, it is quite difficult to believe that the ultimate great power major war in the late 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, especially somewhere in the heavily contested central European region, could have been avoided. This hypothetical World War III is very likely to have been an outcome of that bitter American-Soviet rivalry even if, as was clearly the case, neither the USA nor the USSR had the slightest conventional military prospects of actually compelling the political surrender or capitulation of the other superpower. Neither the Soviet Union nor any of its alleged allies ever had any hope whatsoever of ever invading the United States. The 1980s-era movie Red Dawn in which Cuban and Soviet troops were running amok all over the mountains of Colorado was nothing but a purely delusional cinematic hallucination. By glaring contrast, perhaps the most accurate statement of America’s strategic vulnerability to external conventional war aggression and possible subjugation was made by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who stated on the evening of December 7, 1941 in a nationwide radio broadcast: We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America. Moreover, the possibility that the United States could have ever rolled American tanks into Red Square and overthrown the Soviet regime by armed force may have been a far-fetched option in some fanciful simulated war game played in some deeply recessed room of the Pentagon, but such a proposition was never ever going to come to pass muster in any sort of practical policy option.

In point of fact, however, the United States and the Soviet Union, despite having vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, did fight a number of what were often termed proxy wars (wars between close allies of the US and the USSR) in Asia, Latin America and Africa during the Cold War that cost the lives of millions of people. These include but are not limited to the Korean War (1950-1953), the Vietnam War (1947-1975), Nicaragua (1979-1989) and Angola (the early 1960s to the early 1990s). What all of these wars have in common is they remained truly limited to the contested territory where nuclear weapons were very unlikely to be introduced. What can be asserted with some forbearance from these cases is that nuclear weapons are no panacea for deterring all military conflict but rather that they are a critical military factor in keeping any particular limited conflict in one contested territory from escalating into other fronts and thus turning those wars into another world war. Where nuclear weapons were directly present on both sides as in central Europe from 1949 onwards, the threat of the outbreak of war was incredibly dangerous, but an eruption of war did not ever actually happen. This includes conflicts between the USA and the USSR over Berlin Germany and much of the rest of central Europe on either side of what Winston Churchill famously termed the Iron Curtain. Moreover, the case of the Cuban Revolution demonstrates how nuclear weapons can profoundly influence state behavior. When Fidel Castro’s rebels overthrew the American-backed Batista regime in Havana in January 1959, the United States quickly started to plan for the overthrow of Castro’s regime. In 1961, the newly inaugurated Kennedy administration gave the go-head to the profoundly ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of southern Cuba by several thousand CIA-trained Cuban counter-revolutionaries who were quickly routed by the armed forces of Castro’s Cuba before ever getting off the beach. In the aftermath of that debacle for the United States, Fidel Castro could only come to the conclusion that the next attack on Cuba would be by overwhelming American military forces which Castro’s regime had no realistic hope of defeating. As a result of this calculation, Castro pleaded for the Soviet Union to send nuclear weapons to Cuba in order to deter the United States. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, complied and smuggled some nuclear missiles into Cuba via Soviet cargo ships; in October 1962, the United States soon discovered those weapon bases via aerial surveillance and President Kennedy, ordered the American naval quarantine of Cuba. After two very tense weeks of a naval nose-to-nose stand-off, both sides agreed to a deal. The Soviet Union pulled its nuclear missiles out of Cuba, and the United States promised not to invade Cuba and pull American missiles out of Turkey a few months later. Castro correctly surmised that in the absence of nuclear weapons, his regime could not possibly withstand any concerted American military invasion, and he used Soviet nuclear weapons to freeze out that possibility.

The introduction of nuclear weapons has proven to change the calculus of war even between some of the most impoverished states in the world as the case of the bitter internecine conflict between India and Pakistan demonstrates. From the late 1940s through the early 1970s, India and Pakistan fought three extremely bloody wars which included intense episodes of sectarian persecution and mass ethnic cleansing. In 1947, Britain as the imperial power partitioned the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent and granted independence to India and Pakistan, war immediately broke out between the two states complete with millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs being forced by mass rioting, mass rape, and mass murder to abandon their homes and flee into their allegedly correct state – the Hindu-majority India or the 98%-Muslim Pakistan. In 1965, India and Pakistan fought another conventional war all along their border from Kashmir to the Indian Ocean which cost each side several thousand dead. Then in 1971, Bangladesh (East Pakistan) declared its own independence from (West) Pakistan which started another war in which India intervened to secure Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan and another partition of the Indian subcontinent. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians lost their lives in that war. Then in 1974, India conducted what it described as a peaceful nuclear test of its bomb, complete with a name derived from a Hindu god of cosmic-level ultimate destruction. Pakistan responded by declaring that it would eat grass (do ANYTHING!) in order to get its own nuclear bomb to counter India’s atomic bomb which Pakistan was finally able to accomplish in the late 1990s. Yet, once both India and Pakistan began competing to build their own nuclear weapons, conventional war between the two states ceased. Only the occasional shelling of each other’s military outposts in the highest spots of the Himalayan Mountains in their disputed territory of Kashmir continues with very minimal damage to either side. The animosities between the two countries remain quite bitter. India has flooded its state of Kashmir and Jammu with tens of thousands of Indian soldiers to clamp down on any Muslim-based Free Kashmir insurgency there. Pakistan regularly sponsors various terrorist groups that often strike within India resulting in many horrific civilian casualties. Yet, neither India nor Pakistan has dared start another full-fledged war since the 1970s. Such is the power of nuclear weapons to deter outright conventional conflict even where countries involved have such intense animosities so fundamentally centered upon such allegedly irreconcilable religious differences and disputes.

For those who want to ban the bomb or advocate for a world without nuclear weapons, it is impossible not to confront the reality that any such move would almost certainly result in the likelihood of far more conventional warfare in many parts of the world. It is one of the great ironies of human history that nuclear weapons have probably saved more lives from death in war than any other military invention. This is not an argument for every country getting a nuclear bomb: that would certainly raise all sorts of possibilities for an irrational leader starting some sort of nuclear war as a kind of horrifically suicidal last-man-in-the-bunker scenario. Fortunately, actually building any type of nuclear weapon is such an incredibly expensive and technically difficult proposition that most countries have deemed it too daunting to carry out and prefer either to free ride on the American nuclear umbrella, or take their chances that nobody with any ability to use nuclear weapons wants to drop any such weapons on them. Moreover, the simple fact is that both the United States and Russia each have over seven thousand nuclear weapons – far more than is necessary to blow up the world dozens of times over: it is also far too many beyond the level necessary to sustain the mutually assured destruction (MAD) balance of nuclear terror. Both America and Russia could dismantle the vast majorities of their weapons without any change to the present strategic nuclear situation. Nonetheless, having a few nuclear weapons hidden away somewhere in the basement is likely to remain a remarkably effective form of a security insurance policy against any one country from attempting to invade their neighbors in order to get whatever advantage they might wish but could never achieve through other coercive means. Can this respect for nuclear weapons be taken too far? Obviously, YES! However, one does not have to turn nuclear weapons into a sacred totem for worship which was one of the more perverse plot lines in the 1970s post-apocalypse movie Planet of the Apes in order to recognize the counterintuitive positive impact that nuclear weapons have had on deterring the frequency of major wars between the world’s great powers, which history demonstrates are by far the most deadly conflicts.

The Spread of Democracy since World War II

While the importance of nuclear weapons in deterring world war among the great powers may be difficult to overstate and it may be also difficult for any country to be considered to be a great power in the post-World War II era without having the means of producing nuclear weapons, there are critical limits to the utility to using the factor of nuclear weapons for explaining the wide variety of many other critical political outcomes in the international arena since World War II. Nuclear weapons have proven that they can deter certain specific types of direct conventional war aggression by potential adversaries – they have fixed certain exceptionally powerful parameters of military options such a direct invasion of the territory of a nuclear weapons state that no state has yet dared to trespass. Nonetheless, nuclear weapons are simply not the be-all and end-all of international relations and they have proven to be only tangentially important in terms of expounding upon the actual course of most types of disputes and are obviously utterly useless at explaining even the most minimal forms of cooperation. Nuclear weapons have proven to have no positive impact on, for instance, negotiating an international trade agreement. The trade-with-me-on-my-terms-or-KABOOM simply does not get anybody anywhere as a negotiating stance in international economic relations. And yet in terms of economic trade and cultural exchange among the peoples of the world’s 200+ independent countries, the overall level of tangible international cooperation is far greater today than at any time in the past. In order to account for this rising cooperation among most countries and societies, it is obvious that some factor other than the so-called yield or payload of this A-bomb or that H-bomb must be identified.

It is the central contention of this treatise that the major factor for a more peaceful world since World War II has not been the invention and spread of nukes but rather the gradual but unmistakable spread of democratic political institutions into almost every part of the world under what can only be demarcated as American hegemonic auspices. In 1945, the number of democracies in the world could be counted on one human’s fingers and a couple of toes: the United States and Canada in North America; Britain, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden as well as the newly liberated countries of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway in Western Europe; Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific. These 13 countries amounted to about ten percent of humanity. By the early 1960s, India had proven that it could maintain itself as a (far-from-perfect) democracy and the former fascist states of Italy, West Germany, Austria, and Japan were reinvented as functional and sustained democracies after several years of American military occupation. Several other much smaller states had also democratized: Finland had miraculously kept the Soviet Union at bay during World War II and then threw off its wartime alliance with Nazi Germany and come out the other side as an independent democracy; Costa Rica disbanded its army, and relied instead on a small police force for purely domestic security, and became the most outstanding example of genuine democratic governance in Latin America. The population of all of these democratic countries in total in the 1960s accounted for about one-third of humanity; that was where the number of the world’s democracies basically stayed for next two decades, even though many countries in Africa achieved independence from their colonial masters in the 1960s but almost none of those countries could maintain any type of democratic governance.

Then in the 1980s, seemingly like a dam bursting, there was a wave of democratization in every part of the world. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall (a heavily fortified barrier to stop mass flight of people trying to escape from Communist East Germany to get to democratic West Germany which was erected right through the streets of the divided city of Berlin) fell which led to the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. In a very short period of time, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania all overthrew and rejected Soviet-backed Communist Party authoritarianism and became recognizably democratic countries. In South America in the 1980s, Brazil, Argentina and Chile also threw off their right-wing military juntas and established democratic governments. In East Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines made the transition to governments elected by its people rather than self-perpetuating dictatorships. And in Africa, the white-only Apartheid regime in South Africa opened negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC) leading the way for the elections in which all humans regardless of skin color in that country could vote for its political leaders; in doing so, the specter of a race war was lifted. Yet, in point of fact, almost all wars are fought between peoples who live nearby and thus are closely related in terms of ethnicity. By the mid-1990s, for the first time in human history, more than half of humanity – an actual majority of human beings on Earth, lived in countries that could be reasonably described as democratic. It was a heady time for proponents of democracy. For example, Francis Fukuyama [The End of History and the Last Man, 1992] declared an end to history by which he meant that liberal democracy and capitalism had triumphed ideologically over all other philosophical contenders for how to organize countries, societies and economies in the modern world.

Unfortunately for those people still living in the world’s dictatorships, many dictators and their henchmen did not get the memo that their regimes were all doomed to the dustbin of history and they should just concede power, because since the 1990s, the number of countries that can be objectively classified as democratic has not changed significantly. One aspect of this persistence of dictatorships is that a variety of regimes from an ideological perspective have become ever more adept at pretending to conduct democratic political processes. For example, Vladimir Putin and his cronies staged a palace coup d’état in Moscow in 2000 and since then have ruled Russia with a proverbial iron fist, crushing any potential rival political leaders and stifling any significant popular dissent. Yet, Putin’s Russia has conducted regularly scheduled elections, trying to maintain some type of Potemkin pretense of democratic legitimacy. Other countries that are fundamentally dictatorships also have conducted national elections that are either purely staged events or so restricted by the ruling regime that the winners of these elections are quite tainted: examples of this include Iran, Myanmar, and Thailand. There are even countries such as Mexico and Turkey where elections are conducted and widely contested yet the traditional authoritarian power structure of the country is so entrenched and socially reactionary that it is incredibly daunting to actually make any real liberalizing changes to any aspect of the political or economic policies of the country. One political lesson of the most recent decades is that holding an election does not make a country a democracy and thus sustaining democracy even in a world where democratic countries are the majority turns out to be a whole lot more difficult than it might be expected at first glance or hoped for in the longer run. Politically, the countries of the world in the second decade of the 21st century can be classified in an overly simplistic manner as follows: (A) about one-third of the world’s population live in established liberal democracies where enfranchised citizens are accorded a wide variety of human rights and personal freedoms, including the right of their vote to actually determine their political rulers; (B) another one-quarter to one-third of humanity (depending on how one may distinguish some countries as Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Mexico, and Turkey) are flawed or semi-democratic states; and (C) the other one-third of humanity live in autocratic dictatorships of varying degrees of tyrannical domestic repression. This strategic balance of power has never been so favorable to the world’s democracies, yet, and this is a big YET, the prospects for more democratization in the world’s remaining dictatorships can only be described as rather bleak. For instance, the inability of Egypt to maintain any sort of democratic practices after its Arab spring of 2011 is a poignant case of the difficulty of sustaining a liberalizing political process.

In order to assess the prospects for further positive development of democracy around the world, it is essential to offer a coherent and comprehensive explanation of how the world’s great power democracies of Britain, France, and especially the United States arrived at their present strategic position. Firstly, there is one inescapable reality of politics: political order is not natural in any way, shape, or form. One very old adage about politics is that nature abhors a vacuum. Yet, this maxim is completely misleading. In point of fact – for humans and every other life form on Earth, the state of nature consists only of anarchy, a struggle of each against all. Political order by contrast must be constructed painstakingly at every turn, brick by brick, person by person, society by society. There is nothing natural about any community rule, any code of conduct, any social grace or etiquette that has ever been conjured up among people in their social groups whether large or small to regulate the behavior of their fellow humans. This is only more true of international relations. The political order that has arisen since World War II is not the result of some inevitable or overdetermined mix of factors. Rather, it is a result mainly of one dominant factor – namely, the United States of America has played the role of the world’s democratic policeman since World War II. There is such a thing as international law which in the past two hundred years or so has become a remarkably elaborate set of protocols, many of which are meticulously spelled out in a variety of internationally ratified treaties among almost all of the world’s recognized independent states. But in the absence of any true enforcer, all laws - no matter how well intentioned - are merely words blowing in the wind, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

America as GloboCop

The United States of America, as the world’s leading power since World War II, has done more to enforce the global order that has emerged than any other power or alliances between other powers. This is not to infer that all of America’s actions have been positive or beneficial. It would be truly remarkable if that had been the case, but in point of fact, various American administrations of both Republican and Democratic presidents have made lots of mistakes and miscalculations, particularly the military interventions in Vietnam in the 1960s and in Iraq in the 2000s. The purpose of this work is not to list all or even most of the foreign policy errors of the United States over the past century during its rise to becoming a modern superpower. (I am far too much of a tree-hugger to even try to do that.) Moreover, many if not most of the successes that America has achieved over the decades since the Second World War have been qualified at best and in several cases secondary or even unintentional byproducts of other policy objectives. What can be said with some degree of confidence is that American policymakers have sometimes learned from their trials and errors and that American democracy with its freedom of speech and open debate have had the effect of arriving at policies and strategies that have served American interests fairly well in terms of both promoting economic prosperity and global security for most of the rest of world’s countries, especially America’s enduring alliances with many other democracies.

The United States has clearly pursued many of its most important policy objectives either directly by using force or by an implied threat of coercion and/or sanction. This is not surprising – if the United States did not have any capacity for coercive enforcement, then it could not actually play the crucial role of a kind of GloboCop as the world’s de facto policeman. In this sense, the United States is not and cannot be described as some sort of an international umpire or referee: that would imply that policymakers of various American administrations were somehow disinterested in the outcome of the tug-of-war with and between other countries. The United States, like every other state in the global arena, has a key stake in the game and carefully monitors its actions to further what has been identified as its interests – however defined. Uncle Sam on the world stage is thus more akin to a cop, district attorney, judge and jailer rolled into one rather than any sort of neutral arbitrator. Without any ability to compel some degree of enforcement, then the United States would be essentially on par with Switzerland or Sweden which are countries that have been very successful in terms of lifting up the living standards of their people but their ability to influence international events basically relies upon moral suasion or other forms of so-called soft power (such as the Nobel Prizes or immense popularity of the Swedish pop music group ABBA in the 1970s) as their primary tool of their grand strategy. Moral suasion is certainly no meaningless trifle because even the most rudimentary inspection of how humans actually behave in their daily lives clearly demonstrates that most humans go to considerable lengths in order to demonstrate that they are good in some sense or at the very least give the impression that they are indeed moral creatures who are trustworthy. However, moral suasion has never been, is not now, and is not likely to be in the foreseeable future anywhere near sufficient for enforcing any order, let alone a basis for peaceful international relations.

Of course, those instances where the United States has used force in the international arena have been rife with controversy both from both domestic criticism and international outrage, sometimes taking the form of cries of American imperialism. Some such criticisms have actual merit; but other denunciations of American actions have made by tyrannical regimes whose records of human rights abuses have been so egregious that their rhetoric against American foreign policy actions end up sounding like something out of George Orwell’s Animal Farm or 1984 in terms of hypocrisy rather than a reasoned critique of American failings. Such outcomes have to be seen as part of the price that the United States must pay for being the world’s primary enforcer of international order. There is ultimately no way for American policymakers to avoid such consequences as they are part and parcel of acting as the world’s policeman. There are, for instance, times when the United States applied far too much force in the international arena, most obviously during the Vietnam War (1965-1973) and during the Iraq War (2003-2010), with disastrous results. There have been times when the United States demurred from using its coercive capabilities and this permitted some otherwise very weak group or faction to perpetrate incredibly horrific acts that could have been easily deterred to go on for far too long: the inability of the Clinton administration to take any meaningful actions during the Rwandan genocide of 1994 may be one of the best examples of this. That, in a nutshell, is the American dilemma in its present status in the 21st century. When should the United States use its truly formidable array of armed forces to compel other actors in the world to stop doing something truly awful, and how much force is necessary to achieve those ends? There are no easy or stock answers to these questions. Each international crisis is its own phenomenon that must be dealt with sui generis.

The intended purpose of this work is to provide a comprehensive framework for explaining the importance of the growth of democracy as the foremost factor in in explaining the degree and propensity of war aggression among the world’s states and the consequently political constraints and dilemmas that American administrations, as the world’s democratic superpower, have unavoidably confronted and grappled with. In doing so, I will identify definite lessons that can be drawn from specific cases that, if heeded, might help to avoid some of the dilemmas that obviously are so front and central to American policymakers as well as the leaders of other democratic countries around the world in the foreseeable future. This composition is organized into the following chapters.

Chapter Two focuses on the questions that surround the theory of pan-democratic pacifism and how the insight concerning the remarkable lack of war aggression between the world’s democracies can be best analyzed and understood as a real phenomenon in international relations based upon very practical political deliberations emanating from within democratic states. Special emphasis will be paid to the ideas proposed by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 landmark treatise, Perpetual Peace, which proffered many (but not all) of the critical contours of democratic war aggression, especially to the importance of the ultimate costs and horrors of war which are the considerable loss of human lives. These concepts remain entirely relevant to any comprehensive understanding of international relations and war in the 21st century. These ideas will be critically evaluated in regard to those particular historical cases of the rise and retreat of democratic imperialism which offer specific insights into the exacting limits of war aggression of democratic political regimes. Special emphasis will be placed on how those nascent male-only democracies utilized only mercenary militaries in the 19th century to engage in global imperialist binge, to conquer many peripheral societies, and to establish vast colonial empires in much of Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Subsequently, it will be shown precisely how the extensive use of military conscription in democracies in the 20th century profoundly restrained the political use of such armed forces in optional imperialist conflicts and thus ultimately obliged the complete retreat from formal empire by Western democracies. The key cases demonstrating the validity of these ideas are Britain in the Boer War and the Irish War of Independence, France in the Indochina War and the Algerian War, and the United States in the Vietnam War. The implications of this threshold of the use of conscription to democratic war aggression are essential to understanding why democracies have only very rarely used any significant level of coercion against other democracies.

Chapter Three examines, compares, and ascertains the degree to which there are differing levels of democratic and autocratic war aggression. Autocratic regimes do, as a matter of demonstrable empirical fact, have manifestly greater propensity for war aggression, especially with mass-conscripted militaries, than democracies. This is true for the only two significant cases of autocratic imperialism in the periphery, which are Japan in East Asia and Portugal in Africa, are compared to the most costly cases of democratic imperialism by Britain, France and the United States. It is also true for the much more dangerous cases of major war between great powers, as there have been six such wars since 1789: the Wars of the French Revolution, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. The historic record is definitive on this point because autocracies have been the exclusive initiators of major war aggression against other great powers whereas great power democracies have shown nothing but great hesitation in the face of major war. There are several critical implications for grand strategy of great power democracies that can be discerned from such divergent levels, especially that the world’s great power democracies must be ever vigilant against the propensity of sneak attacks that the world’s remaining dictators may be scheming to unleash.

Chapter Four is an examination of the process by which the United States forged its strong international alliances with almost all of the world’s other democracies, especially NATO in Europe, and how that has achieved a significant degree of global hegemony and sustained a stable peace among the world’s great powers since the mid-20th century as a type of Kantian-inspired Federation of Free States. Moreover, America’s as the Leader of the Free World, with its many benefits and obligations, is a vital role that the United States must continue to play for many decades to come if a more stable and peaceful world is to be sustained. By contrast, American attempts to forge lasting alliances with dictatorships have been mostly notable failures, more often than not producing neither stability nor peace. That means that American supremacy as the world’s key democratic superpower alliance partner is a condition that almost all other democracies are bandwagoning with and certainly not balancing against. This enduring hegemony of democracies cannot be discounted in any significant way and discredit any such notions of America's purported relative decline. The soft power grand strategies of small neutral democracies have also demonstrated how the Kantian imperative for fostering international solidarity can take many necessary forms and useful practices.

Chapter Five is focused on the political implications that can be discerned from the persistence of dictatorship in the two remaining prominent cases of autocratic great powers: Russia and China. Both of these enduring autocracies were subjected to revolutionary seizure of state power by the armed forces of communist functionaries. Where these Leninist vanguard communists have prevailed via a domestic insurgency, the subsequent regimes in virtually every instance have persisted in power as modernizing autocracies. Such communist regimes, and even after such dictatorships have abandoned their ideological pretensions as is the case of Russia under its present autocrat Vladimir Putin, have in practice profoundly blocked and repressed virtually all rival political movements internally. This is particularly true of stifling the ability of rival democratizers from within their own societies to organize effectively for any degree of political liberalization. Thus, due to the coercive proficiency of these Leninist dictatorships in resisting any impetus towards democratization, the threat of these two autocratic great powers will remain the most significant obstacle to international stability, security, and peace for decades to come.

Chapter Six assesses the nitty-gritty track-record of the most prevalent and destabilizing problems and hazards that countries have confronted in their attempts to make the difficult transition to democracy. There is particular emphasis on two issues that the breadth of the historical record has revealed to bedevil the development of stable democratic institutions. First, the problem of overcoming the pronounced danger of demagogues in newly founded democracies to profoundly subvert the protection of human and civil rights that is the basis of any enduring social solidarity that is necessary for sustainable democracy; specific and pronounced cases of this include Andrew Jackson’s presidency in the 1830s America, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Weimar Germany, and the reign of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Second, the abuses of power in stunted democratic polities when sectarian forces gain political supremacy and thereafter maintain themselves in power by means of rampant political persecution of other disenfranchised segments of their country and thereby completely undermine the democratic promise for genuine human progress. Cases of this political phenomena are the Jim Crow American South, French Algeria, Apartheid in South Africa, the Orange Order in Northern Ireland, and finally Zionism in Palestine. The extent of the democratic reforms that have proven to be heretofore necessary to counteract the menaces of demagoguery and sectarianism are defined.

Chapter Seven looks at the lessons that can be learned and admonitions that can be deduced from American military overextension in its two most imprudent attempts at nation building in Asia – the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. These two cases are the United States of America’s most tragic strategic blunders since World War II, and both were on the Asian mainland where the potential for exceedingly dangerous conflicts, both between states and within states, remains extremely high for the foreseeable future. These two debacles of American security strategy raise critical questions that American policymakers should be particularly cognizant of in order to avoid repeating such mistakes in the challenges and conflicts that will be inevitably confronted. Three significant lessons that American policymakers would be well advised to comprehend are detailed. First, given that the militaries in almost all of the world’s democracies are presently recruited in a voluntary and professional manner, there is a clear political imperative for much greater legislative oversight and restraints on executives in order to insure greater democratic accountability and to prevent senseless deployments for narrow partisan purposes. Second, American must walk a very fine line in Asia between avoiding becoming entangled in Asian land wars and yet still playing the role of the off-shore balancer to deter war aggression on that critical continent. Third, the most notable proposition is that building mutual solidarity with other democratic states around the world has proven to be of far greater enduring usefulness for promoting American fundamental strategic interests in international peace and stability than the much more problematic and daunting task of attempting to use the American military to turn dictatorships into democracies. The strength and prowess of American military might has proved to be a necessary political instrument to deter and curb the level of the war aggression by a wide variety of autocracies around the world since the end of the Second World War. Yet, it is also evident that the actual deployment of the American armed forces in any attempt to resolve the world’s most difficult and dangerous security problems must be a decision implemented if and only if all other options have been completely exhausted. The historical record teaches and clarifies that when democracies demonstrate great hesitation in utilizing their armed forces against their most despotic adversaries, such a policy is not a sign of weakness but rather the essential basis of the patient fortitude that has proven to be vital to long-term success such as triumphing in the Cold War without spilling a drop of blood in an actual military confrontation.

CHAPTER TWO

The Limits of Democratic Imperialism and the Military Basis of Democratic Peace

There are two posited truisms in the study of modern international relations that, taken together, are in such profound contradiction that they very much demand some sort of reconciliation. First, it is a fundamental