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The italics in Gat's "true state of peace" highlight not just the datum that the number of wars between developed states happens to be zero but a change in the countries' mindsets. The ways that developed countries conceptualize and prepare for war have undergone sweeping changes.

A major feeder of the increasing deadliness of war since 1500 (see figure 5-16) has been conscription, the stocking of national armies with a renewable supply of bodies. By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, most European countries had some form of a draft. Conscientious objection was barely a concept, and recruitment methods were far less polite than the telegram dreaded by young American men in the 1960s that began: "Greetings." The idiom pressed into service comes from the institution of press gangs, groups of goons paid by the government to snatch men from the streets and force them into the army or navy. (The Continental Navy during the American Revolutionary War was almost entirely rounded up by press gangs.) Compulsory military service could consume a substantial portion of a man's life -- as much as twenty-five years for a serf in 19th-century Russia.

Military conscription represents the application of force squared: people are coerced into servitude, and the servitude exposes them to high odds of being maimed or killed. Other than at times of existential threat, the extent of conscription is a barometer of a country's willingness to sanction the use of force. In the decades after World War II, the world saw a steady reduction in the length of compulsory military service. The United States, Canada, and most European countries have eliminated conscription outright, and in the others it functions more as a citizenship-building exercise than as a training ground for warriors. Payne has compiled statistics on the length of military conscription between 1970 and 2000 in forty-eight long-established nations, which I have updated for 2010 in figure 5-19. They show that conscription was in decline even before the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. Only 19 percent of these countries did without conscription in 1970. The proportion rose to 35 percent in 2000 and to 50 percent in 2010, and it will soon exceed 50 percent because at least two other countries (Poland and Serbia) plan to abolish the draft in the early 2010s.

Sources: Graph for 1970-2000 from Payne, 2004, p. 74, based on data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), The Military Balance, various editions. Data for 2010 from the 2010 edition of The Military Balance (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2010), supplemented when incomplete from The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 2010.

Another indicator of war-friendliness is the size of a nation's military forces as a proportion of its population, whether enlisted by conscription or by television ads promising volunteers that they can be all that they can be. Payne has shown that the proportion of the population that a nation puts in uniform is the best indicator of its ideological embrace of militarism. When the United States demobilized after World War II, it took on a new enemy in the Cold War and never shrank its military back to prewar levels. But figure 5-20 shows that the trend since the mid-1950s has been sharply downward. Europe's disinvestment of human capital in the military sector began even earlier.

FIGURE 5-19: Length of military conscription, 48 major long-established nations, 1970-2010

Other large countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, and China, also shrank their armed forces during this half-century. After the Cold War ended, the trend went global: from a peak of more than 9 military personnel per 100,000 people in 1988, the average across long-established countries plunged to less than 5.5 in 2001. Some of these savings have come from outsourcing noncombat functions like laundry and food services to private contractors, and in the wealthiest countries, from replacing front-line military personnel with robots and drones. But the age of robotic warfare is far in the future, and recent events have shown that the number of available boots on the ground is still a major constraint on the projection of military force. For that matter, the roboticizing of the military is itself a manifestation of the trend we are exploring. Countries have developed these technologies at fantastic expense because the lives of their citizens (and, as we shall see, of foreign citizens) have become dearer.

FIGURE 5-20: Military personnel, United States and Europe, 1950-2000

Another indication that the Long Peace is no accident is a set of sanity checks which confirm that the mentality of leaders and populaces has changed. Each component of the war-friendly mindset -- nationalism, territorial ambition, an international culture of honor, popular acceptance of war, and indifference to its human costs -- went out of fashion in developed countries in the second half of the 20th century.

Sources: Correlates of War National Material Capabilities Dataset (1816-2001); http://www. correlatesofwar. org, Sarkees, 2000. Unweighted averages, every five years. "Europe" includes Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia/USSR, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, U. K., Yugoslavia.

Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. -- UNESCO motto

Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or institutional status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, nonself-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

The first signal event was the 1948 endorsement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by forty-eight countries. The declaration begins with these articles:

Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.

It's tempting to dismiss this manifesto as feel-good verbiage. But in endorsing the Enlightenment ideal that the ultimate value in the political realm is the individual human being, the signatories were repudiating a doctrine that had reigned for more than a century, namely that the ultimate value was the nation, people, culture, Volk, class, or other collectivity (to say nothing of the doctrine of earlier centuries that the ultimate value was the monarch, and the people were his or her chattel). The need for an assertion of universal human rights had become evident during the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, when some lawyers had argued that Nazis could be prosecuted only for the portion of the genocides they committed in occupied countries like Poland. What they did on their own territory, according to the earlier way of thinking, was none of anyone else's business.

The era's repudiation of counter-Enlightenment ideology was made explicit forty-five years later by Václav Havel, the playwright who became president of Czechoslovakia after the nonviolent Velvet Revolution had overthrown the communist government. Havel wrote, "The greatness of the idea of European integration on democratic foundations is its capacity to overcome the old Herderian idea of the nation state as the highest expression of national life."

Another sign that the declaration was more than hot air was that the great powers were nervous about signing it. Britain was worried about its colonies, the United States about its Negroes, and the Soviet Union about its puppet states. But after Eleanor Roosevelt shepherded the declaration through eighty-three meetings, it passed without opposition (though pointedly, with eight abstentions from the Soviet bloc).

One paradoxical contributor to the Long Peace was the freezing of national borders. The United Nations initiated a norm that existing states and their borders were sacrosanct. By demonizing any attempt to change them by force as "aggression," the new understanding took territorial expansion off the table as a legitimate move in the game of international relations. The borders may have made little sense, the governments within them may not have deserved to govern, but rationalizing the borders by violence was no longer a live option in the minds of statesmen. The grandfathering of boundaries has been, on average, a pacifying development because, as the political scientist John Vasquez has noted, "of all the issues over which wars could logically be fought, territorial issues seem to be the one most often associated with wars. Few interstate wars are fought without any territorial issue being involved in one way or another."

Israel is an exception that proves the rule. The serpentine "green line" where the Israeli and Arab armies stopped in 1949 was not particularly acceptable to anyone at the time, especially the Arab states. But in the ensuing decades it took on an almost mystical status in the international community as Israel's one true correct border. The country has acceded to international pressure to relinquish most of the territory it has occupied in the various wars since then, and within our lifetimes it will probably withdraw from the rest, with some minor swaps of land and perhaps a complicated arrangement regarding Jerusalem, where the norm of immovable borders will clash with the norm of undivided cities. Most other conquests, such as the Indonesian takeover of East Timor, have been reversed as well. The most dramatic recent example was in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait (the only time since 1945 that one member of the UN has swallowed another one whole), and an aghast multinational coalition made short work of pushing him out.

The political scientist Mark Zacher has quantified the change. Since 1951 there have been only ten invasions that resulted in a major change in national boundaries, all before 1975. Many of them planted flags in sparsely populated hinterlands and islands, and some carved out new political entities (such as Bangladesh) rather than expanding the territory of the conqueror. Ten may sound like a lot, but as figure 5-21 shows, it represents a precipitous drop from the preceding three centuries.

FIGURE 5-21: Percentage of territorial wars resulting in redistribution of territory, 1651-2000

Source: Data from Zacher, 2001, tables 1 and 2; the data point for each half-century is plotted at its midpoint, except for the last half of the 20th century, in which each point represents a quarter-century.

The psychology behind the sanctity of national boundaries is not so much empathy or moral reasoning as norms and taboos (a topic that will be explored in chapter 9). Among respectable countries, conquest is no longer a thinkable option. A politician in a democracy today who suggested conquering another country would be met not with counterarguments but with puzzlement, embarrassment, or laughter.

The territorial-integrity norm, Zacher points out, has ruled out not just conquest but other kinds of boundary-tinkering. During decolonization, the borders of newly independent states were the lines that some imperial administrator had drawn on a map decades before, often bisecting ethnic homelands or throwing together enemy tribes. Nonetheless there was no movement to get all the new leaders to sit around a table with a blank map and a pencil and redraw the borders from scratch. The breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia also resulted in the dashed lines between internal republics and provinces turning into solid lines between sovereign states, without any redrafting.

The sacralization of arbitrary lines on a map may seem illogical, but there is a rationale to the respecting of norms, even arbitrary and unjustifiable ones. The game theorist Thomas Schelling has noted that when a range of compromises would leave two negotiators better off than they would be if they walked away, any salient cognitive landmark can lure them into an agreement that benefits them both. People bargaining over a price, for example, can "get to yes" by splitting the difference between their offers, or by settling on a round number, rather than haggling indefinitely over the fairest price. Melville's whalers in Moby-Dick acceded to the norm that a fast-fish belongs to the party fast to it because they knew it would avoid "the most vexatious and violent disputes." Lawyers say that possession is nine tenths of the law, and everyone knows that good fences make good neighbors.

A respect for the territorial-integrity norm ensures that the kind of discussion that European leaders had with Hitler in the 1930s, when it was considered perfectly reasonable that he should swallow Austria and chunks of Czechoslovakia to make the borders of Germany coincide with the distribution of ethnic Germans, is no longer thinkable. Indeed, the norm has been corroding the ideal of the nation-state and its sister principle of the self-determination of peoples, which obsessed national leaders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The goal of drawing a smooth border through the fractal of interpenetrating ethnic groups is an unsolvable geometry problem, and living with existing borders is now considered better than endless attempts to square the circle, with its invitations to ethnic cleansing and irredentist conquest.

The territorial-integrity norm brings with it numerous injustices, as ethnic groups may find themselves submerged in political entities that have no benevolent interest in their welfare. The point was not lost on Ishmael, who mused, "What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish?" Some of Europe's peaceful borders demarcate countries that were conveniently homogenized by the massive ethnic cleansing of World War II and its aftermath, when millions of ethnic Germans and Slavs were forcibly uprooted from their homes. The developing world is now being held to higher standards, and it is likely, as the sociologist Ann Hironaka has argued, that its civil wars have been prolonged by the insistence that states always be preserved and borders never altered. But on balance, the sacred-border norm appears to have been a good bargain for the world. As we shall see in the next chapter, the death toll from a large number of small civil wars is lower than that from a few big interstate wars, to say nothing of world wars, consistent with the power-law distribution of deadly quarrels. And even civil wars have become fewer in number and less damaging as the modern state evolves from a repository for the national soul to a multiethnic social contract conforming to the principle of human rights.

In 1979 the United States responded to two affronts in quick succession -- the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the government-indulged takeover of the American embassy in Iran -- with little more than an Olympic boycott and a nightly televised vigil. As Jimmy Carter said later, "I could have destroyed Iran with my weaponry, but I felt in the process it was likely that the hostages' lives would be lost, and I didn't want to kill 20,000 Iranians. So I didn't attack." Though American hawks were furious at Carter's wimpiness, their own hero, Ronald Reagan, responded to a 1983 bombing that killed 241 American servicemen in Beirut by withdrawing all American forces from the country, and he sat tight in 1987 when Iraqi jet fighters killed thirty-seven sailors on the USS Stark. The 2004 train bombing in Madrid by an Islamist terrorist group, far from whipping the Spanish into an anti-Islamic lather, prompted them to vote out the government that had involved them in the Iraq War, an involvement many felt had brought the attack upon them.

Together with nationalism and conquest, another ideal has faded in the postwar decades: honor. As Luard understates it, "In general, the value placed on human life today is probably higher, and that placed on national prestige (or 'honor') probably lower, than in earlier times." Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union during the worst years of the Cold War, captured the new sensibility when he said, "I'm not some czarist officer who has to kill himself if I fart at a masked ball. It's better to back down than to go to war." Many national leaders agree, and have backed down or held their fire in response to provocations that in previous eras would have incited them to war.

Neither side wanted war over Cuba, we agreed, but it was possible that either side could take a step that -- for reasons of "security" or "pride" or "face"-- would require a response by the other side, which, in turn, for the same reasons of security, pride, or face, would bring about a counterresponse and eventually an escalation into armed conflict. That was what he wanted to avoid.

The most consequential discounting of honor in the history of the world was the resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Though the pursuit of national prestige may have precipitated the crisis, once Khrushchev and Kennedy were in it, they reflected on their mutual need to save face and set that up as a problem for the two of them to solve. Kennedy had read Tuchman's The Guns of August, a history of World War I, and knew that an international game of chicken driven by "personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur" could lead to a cataclysm. Robert Kennedy, in a memoir on the crisis, recalled:

Khrushchev's wisecrack about the czarist officer shows that he too was cognizant of the psychology of honor, and he had a similar intuitive sense of game theory. During a tense moment in the crisis, he offered Kennedy this analysis:

They untied the knot by making mutual concessions -- Khrushchev removed his missiles from Cuba, Kennedy removed his from Turkey, and Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba. Nor was the de-escalation purely a stroke of uncanny good luck. Mueller reviewed the history of superpower confrontations during the Cold War and concluded that the sequence was more like climbing a ladder than stepping onto an escalator. Though several times the leaders began a perilous ascent, with each rung they climbed they became increasingly acrophobic, and always sought a way to gingerly step back down.

And for all the shoe-pounding bluster of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, its leadership spared the world another cataclysm when Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the Soviet bloc, and then the Soviet Union itself, to go out of existence -- what the historian Timothy Garton Ash has called a "breathtaking renunciation of the use of force" and a "luminous example of the importance of the individual in history."

You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter this knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut.

This last remark reminds us that historical contingency works both ways. There are parallel universes in which the archduke's driver didn't make a wrong turn in Sarajevo, or in which a policeman aimed differently during the Beer Hall Putsch, and history unfolded with one or two fewer world wars. There are other parallel universes in which an American president listened to his Joint Chiefs of Staff and invaded Cuba, or in which a Soviet leader responded to the breach of the Berlin Wall by calling out the tanks, and history unfolded with one or two more. But given the changing odds set by the prevailing ideas and norms, it is not surprising that in our universe it was the first half of the 20th century that was shaped by a Princip and a Hitler, and the second half by a Kennedy, a Khrushchev, and a Gorbachev.

Yet another historic upheaval in the landscape of 20th-century values was a resistance by the populations of democratic nations to their leaders' plans for war. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw mass demonstrations to Ban the Bomb, whose legacy includes the trident-in-circle peace symbol co-opted by other antiwar movements. By the late 1960s the United States was torn apart by protests against the Vietnam War. Antiwar convictions were no longer confined to sentimental aunts of both sexes, and the idealists who went about in sandals and beards were no longer cranks but a significant proportion of the generation that reached adulthood in the 1960s. Unlike the major artworks deploring World War I, which appeared more than a decade after it was over, popular art in the 1960s condemned the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War in real time. Antiwar advocacy was woven into prime-time television programs (such as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and M*A*S*H) and many popular films and songs:

"Alice's Restaurant" • "Blowin' in the Wind" • "Cruel War" • "Eve of Destruction" • "Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" • "Give Peace a Chance" • "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" • "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" • "If I Had a Hammer" • "Imagine" • "It's a Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall" • "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" • "Machine Gun" • "Masters of War" • "Sky Pilot" • "Three-Five-Zero-Zero" • "Turn! Turn! Turn!" • "Universal Soldier" • "What's Goin' On?" • "With God on Our Side" • "War (What Is It Good For?)" • "Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy" • "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"

As in the 1700s and the 1930s, artists did not just preach about war to make it seem immoral but satirized it to make it seem ridiculous. During the 1969 Woodstock concert, Country Joe and the Fish sang the jaunty "Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag," whose chorus was:

Catch-22 • Fail-Safe • Dr. Strangelove • Hearts and Minds • FTA • How I Won the War • Johnny Got His Gun • King of Hearts • M*A*S*H • Oh! What a Lovely War • Slaughterhouse-Five

And it's One, Two, Three, what are we fighting for?

It's easy to dismiss this cultural moment as baby-boomer nostalgia. As Tom Lehrer satirized it, they won all the battles, but we had the good songs. But in a sense we did win the battles. In the wake of nationwide protests, Lyndon Johnson shocked the country by not seeking his party's nomination in the 1968 presidential election. Though a reaction against the increasingly unruly protests helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968, Nixon shifted the country's war plans from a military victory to a face-saving withdrawal (though not before another twenty thousand Americans and a million Vietnamese had died in the fighting). After a 1973 cease-fire, American troops were withdrawn, and Congress effectively ended the war by prohibiting additional intervention and cutting off funding for the South Vietnamese government.

Don't ask me, I don't give a damn; next stop is Vietnam!

And it's Five, Six, Seven, open up the Pearly Gates.

There ain't no time to wonder why; Whoopee! We're all going to die.

In his 1967 monologue "Alice's Restaurant," Arlo Guthrie told of being drafted and sent to an army psychiatrist at the induction center in New York:

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin' up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin' up and down with me and we was both jumpin' up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

The United States was then said to have fallen into a "Vietnam Syndrome" in which it shied away from military engagement. By the 1980s it had recovered well enough to fight several small wars and to support anticommunist forces in several proxy wars, but clearly its military policy would never be the same. The phenomenon called "casualty dread," "war aversion," and "the Dover Doctrine" (the imperative to minimize flag-draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base) reminded even the more hawkish presidents that the country would not tolerate casualty-intensive military adventures. By the 1990s the only politically acceptable American wars were surgical routs achieved with remote-control technology. They could no longer be wars of attrition that ground up soldiers by the tens of thousands, nor aerial holocausts visited on foreign civilians as in Dresden, Hiroshima, and North Vietnam.

The change is palpable within the American military itself. Military leaders at all levels have become aware that gratuitous killing is a public-relations disaster at home and counterproductive abroad, alienating allies and emboldening enemies. The Marine Corps has instituted a martial-arts program in which leathernecks are indoctrinated in a new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior. The catechism is "The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others." The code is instilled with empathy-expanding allegories such as "The Hunting Story," recounted by Robert Humphrey, a retired officer whose martial bona fides were impeccable, having commanded a rifle platoon on Iwo Jima in World War II. In this story, an American military unit is serving in a poor Asian country, and one day members of the unit go boar hunting as a diversion:

It wasn't long before one American in the truck said, "This place stinks." Another said, "These people live just like animals." Finally, a young air force man said, "Yeah, they got nothin' to live for; they may as well be dead."

This village was very poor. The huts were made of mud and there was no electricity or running water. The streets were unpaved dirt and the whole village smelled. Flies abounded. The men looked surly and wore dirty clothes. The women covered their faces, and the children had runny noses and were dressed in rags.

But just then, an old sergeant in the truck spoke up. He was the quiet type who never said much. In fact, except for his uniform, he kind of reminded you of one of the tough men in the village. He looked at the young airman and said, "You think they got nothin' to live for, do you? Well, if you are so sure, why don't you just take my knife, jump down off the back of this truck, and go try to kill one of them?"

They took a truck from the motor pool and headed out to the boondocks, stopping at a village to hire some local men to beat the brush and act as guides.

What could you say? It seemed true enough.

[A soldier] asked him what we Americans, with all our wealth, could do to prove our respect for the peasants' human equality despite their destitution. The sergeant answered easily, "You got to be brave enough to jump off the back of this truck, knee deep in the mud and sheep dung. You got to have the courage to walk through this village with a smile on your face. And when you see the smelliest, scariest looking peasant, you got to be able to look him in the face and let him know, just with your eyes, that you know he is a man who hurts like you do, and hopes like you do, and wants for his kids just like we all do. It is that way or we lose."

There was dead silence in the truck…

The sergeant went on to say, "I don't know either why they value their lives so much. Maybe it's those snotty nosed kids, or the women in the pantaloons. But whatever it is, they care about their lives and the lives of their loved ones, same as we Americans do. And if we don't stop talking bad about them, they will kick us out of this country!"

The code of the Ethical Warrior, even as an aspiration, shows that the American armed forces have come a long way from a time when its soldiers referred to Vietnamese peasants as gooks, slopes, and slants and when the military was slow to investigate atrocities against civilians such as the massacre at My Lai. As former Marine captain Jack Hoban, who helped to implement the Ethical Warrior program, wrote to me, "When I first joined the Marines in the 1970s it was 'Kill, kill, kill.' The probability that there would have been an honor code that trained marines to be 'protectors of all others -- including the enemy, if possible' would have been 0 percent."

To be sure, the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first decade of the 21st century show that the country is far from reluctant to go to war. But even they are nothing like the wars of the past. In both conflicts the interstate war phase was quick and (by historical standards) low in battle deaths. Most of the deaths in Iraq were caused by intercommunal violence in the anarchy that followed, and by 2008 the toll of 4,000 American deaths (compare Vietnam's 58,000) helped elect a president who within two years brought the country's combat mission to an end. In Afghanistan, the U. S. Air Force followed a set of humanitarian protocols during the height of the anti-Taliban bombing campaign in 2008 that Human Rights Watch praised for its "very good record of minimizing harm to civilians." The political scientist Joshua Goldstein, in a discussion of how policies of smart targeting had massively reduced civilian deaths in Kosovo and in both Iraq wars, comments on the use of armed drones against Taliban and Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009:

Where an army previously would have blasted its way in to the militants' hideouts, killing and displacing civilians by the tens of thousands as it went, and then ultimately reducing whole towns and villages to rubble with inaccurate artillery and aerial bombing in order to get at a few enemy fighters, now a drone flies in and lets fly a single missile against a single house where militants are gathered. Yes, sometimes such attacks hit the wrong house, but by any historical comparison the rate of civilian deaths has fallen dramatically.

So far has this trend come, and so much do we take it for granted, that a single errant missile that killed ten civilians in Afghanistan was front-page news in February 2010. This event, a terrible tragedy in itself, nonetheless was an exception to a low overall rate of harm to civilians in the middle of a major military offensive, one of the largest in eight years of war. Yet, these ten deaths brought the U. S. military commander in Afghanistan to offer a profuse apology to the president of Afghanistan, and the world news media to play up the event as a major development in the offensive. The point is not that killing ten civilians is OK, but rather that in any previous war, even a few years ago, this kind of civilian death would barely have caused a ripple of attention. Civilian deaths, in sizable numbers, used to be universally considered a necessary and inevitable, if perhaps unfortunate, by-product of war. That we are entering an era when these assumptions no longer apply is good news indeed.

As big as the change in American attitudes toward war has been, the change in Europe is beyond recognition. As the foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan puts it, "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus." In February 2003 mass demonstrations in European cities protested the impending American-led invasion of Iraq, drawing a million people each in London, Barcelona, and Rome, and more than half a million in Madrid and Berlin. In London the signs read "No Blood for Oil"; "Stop Mad Cowboy Disease"; "America, the Real Rogue State"; "Make Tea, Not War"; "Down with This Sort of Thing"; and simply "No." Germany and France conspicuously refused to join the United States and Britain, and Spain pulled out soon afterward. Even the war in Afghanistan, which aroused less opposition in Europe, is being fought mainly by American soldiers. Not only do they make up more than half of the forty-four-nation NATO military operation, but the continental forces have acquired a certain reputation when it comes to martial virtues. A Canadian armed forces captain wrote to me from Kabul in 2003:

Goldstein's assessment was confirmed in 2011 when Science magazine reported data from WikiLeaks documents and from a previously classified civilian casualty database of the American-led military coalition. The documents revealed that around 5,300 civilians had been killed in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2010, the majority (around 80 percent) by Taliban insurgents rather than coalition forces. Even if the estimate is doubled, it would represent an extraordinarily low number of civilian deaths for a major military operation -- in the Vietnam War, by comparison, at least 800,000 civilians died in battle.

During this morning's Kalashnikov concerto, I was waiting for the tower guards in our camp to open fire. I think they were asleep. That's par for the course. Our towers are manned by the Bundeswehr, and they haven't been doing a good job… when they're actually there. I qualified that last comment because the Germans have already abandoned the towers several times. The first time was when we got hit by rockets. The remaining instances had something to do with it being cold in the towers. A German Lieutenant with whom I spoke about this lack of honour and basic soldier etiquette replied that it was Canada's responsibility to provide heaters for the towers. I snapped back by mentioning that it was Germany's responsibility to provide warm clothing to its soldiers. I was tempted to mention something about Kabul not being Stalingrad, but I held my tongue.

The German army of today is not what it once was. Or, as I've heard mentioned here several times: "This ain't the Wehrmacht." Given the history of our people, I can make the argument that that's a very good thing indeed. However, since my safety now rests upon the vigilance of the Herrenvolk's progeny, I'm slightly concerned to say the least.

In a book titled Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (and in Britain, The Monopoly on Violence: Why Europeans Hate Going to War), the historian James Sheehan argues that Europeans have changed their very conception of the state. It is no longer the proprietor of a military force that enhances the grandeur and security of the nation, but a provisioner of social security and material well-being. Nonetheless, for all the differences between the American "mad cowboys" and the European "surrender monkeys," the parallel movement of their political culture away from war over the past six decades is more historically significant than their remaining differences.