For the past almost 16 years, the United States has been systematically destroying a region of the globe, bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, not to mention the Philippines. The United States has "special forces" operating in two-thirds of the world's countries and non-special forces stationed in three-quarters of them. This is the "period of unprecedented peace" that Hathaway and Shapiro describe as threatened by Russia, China, and ISIS. ("Even as [the Pact's] bright promises have been fulfilled, other darker threats have rushed into the void." Guess who those are!)
Quite obviously one cannot fit everything tangentially related to the topic of a book into a book. But to write about the problem of war without mentioning the U.S. dominance of the field is a bias. There is a reason that most countries polled in December 2013 by Gallup called the United States the greatest threat to peace in the world. But it is a reason that eludes that strain of U.S. academia that first defines war as something that nations and groups other than the United States do, and then concludes that war has nearly vanished from the earth, or is on its way out, and that the greatest threats of war come from China, Russia, and ISIS.
Ironically, a brilliant analysis giving the Kellogg-Briand Pact its due could probably only have been written by Americans -- the rest of the world viewing U.S. actions on war and peace with too much cynicism and resentment. But anything written by Americans comes with American baggage.
The Lusitania was attacked by Germany without warning, we're told, despite Germany literally having published warnings in New York newspapers and newspapers around the United States. These warnings were printed right next to ads for sailing on the Lusitania and were signed by the German embassy. Newspapers wrote articles about the warnings. The Cunard company was asked about the warnings. The former captain of the Lusitania had already quit -- reportedly due to the stress of sailing through what Germany had publicly declared a war zone. Meanwhile Winston Churchill is quoted as having said "It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany." It was under his command that the usual British military protection was not provided to the Lusitania, despite Cunard having stated that it was counting on that protection. Much of Hathaway and Shapiro's book is devoted to the pre-1928 responsibilities of neutral nations to remain neutral. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned over the U.S. failure to remain neutral. That the Lusitania was carrying weapons and troops to aid the British in the war against Germany was asserted by Germany and by other observers, and was true. Of course sinking the Lusitania was a horrible act of mass-murder, as was loading it up with weapons and troops to ship to a war. Behavior on all sides was reprehensible. But the authors only provide one side, only slightly mitigated by a footnote.
Occupations are meant to be temporary we're told, despite the unlikelihood that the authors would dare make such an assertion in Kabul. The U.S. military now has approximately 8,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, plus 6,000 other NATO troops, 1,000 mercenaries, and another 26,000 contractors (of whom about 8,000 are from the United States). That's 41,000 people engaged in a foreign occupation of a country over 15 years after the accomplishment of their stated mission to overthrow the Taliban government. The Department of so-called Defense has informed the U.S. Congress that it will soon produce yet another new plan for "winning" in Afghanistan. No plans for ending the occupation have been forthcoming or even requested. When the U.S. occupation of Iraq "ended," troops and mercenaries remained. That they were invited back by the Iraqi government hardly excuses their actions, including the destruction of Mosul this past summer.
The single biggest threat to the peace on earth that was established in 1928 turns out to have been, according to Hathaway and Shapiro, the 2014 vote by the people of Crimea to re-join Russia -- an action that of course involved zero casualties and has never been repeated because poll after poll shows the people happy with their vote. The authors produce no written or oral statement from Russia threatening war or violence. If the threat was implicit, there remains the problem of being unable to find Crimeans who say they felt threatened. (Although I have seen reports of discrimination against Tartars during the past 3 years.) If the vote was influenced by the implicit threat, there remains the problem that polls consistently get the same result. Of course one of the many U.S.-backed coups unnoticed by this book had just occurred in Kiev, meaning that Crimea was voting to secede from a coup government. The United States had supported the secession of Kosovo from Serbia in the 1990s despite Serbian opposition. When Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia, the U.S. did not urge any opposition. The U.S. (and Hathaway and Shapiro) support the right of South Sudan to have seceded from Sudan, although violence and chaos reigned. U.S. politicians like Joe Biden and Jane Harman even proposed breaking Iraq up into pieces, as others have proposed for Syria. But let's grant for the sake of argument that the Crimean vote was problematic, even horrendous, even criminal. Its depiction in this book as the single biggest threat to peace on earth would still be ludicrous. Compare it to a trillion dollars a year in U.S. military spending, new missiles in Romania and Poland, massive bombing of Iraq and Syria, the destruction of Iraq and Libya, the endless war on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S.-Saudi devastation of Yemen and the creation of famine and disease epidemics, or the explicit threats to attack Iran. I'm sure your average American would rather visit "liberated Mosul" than "annexed Crimea," but should we deal with facts or slogans?
Hathaway and Shapiro give S. O. Levinson and the outlawrists of the 1920s their due for what they accomplished, but the authors view the world as 2017 CNN consumers. They favor "defensive" wars. They fault Trump for suggesting that NATO be scrapped. They maintain silence on NATO's aggressive expansion, as well as on U.S. military bases ringing the globe. In fact they make this blatantly false statement: "The United States, United Kingdom, and France . . . took no new territory after the war."
During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho'alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated. In 1942, the U.S. Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. Those practices did not end in 1928 or in 1945. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.
On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the U.S. Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and -- in 2003 -- to stop bombing the island. On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s. The Navy is right now looking at the island of Pagan as a possible replacement for Vieques, the population already having been removed by a volcanic eruption. Of course, any possibility of return would be greatly diminished.
Beginning during World War II but continuing right through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia -- where land and money were promised but not delivered.
In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return.
Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia, rounding people up and forcing them onto boats while killing their dogs in a gas chamber and seizing possession of their entire homeland for the use of the U.S. military.
The South Korean government, which evicted people for U.S. base expansion on the mainland in 2006, has, at the behest of the U.S. Navy, in recent years been devastating a village, its coast, and 130 acres of farmland on Jeju Island in order to provide the United States with another massive military base.
None of this is mentioned in Hathaway and Shapiro's book, or of course in the database called Correlates of War that they drew data from. The U.S. role as dominant military force on earth is simply missing. The arms trade in which the U.S. leads the way and a half dozen nations dominate the arming of the globe makes no appearance. But China's efforts to claim islands in the South China Sea are as threatening to the authors as to Hillary Clinton at a Goldman Sachs event, if not more so.
Shapiro and Hathaway might argue that "forced expulsions" are a product of hard borders, which are a product of outlawing war. Tony Judt wrote: "At the conclusion of the first world war it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception, boundaries stay broadly intact and people were moved instead." But niether this nor anything else I've seen constitutes a serious claim or evidence that forced expulsions were fewer or nonexistent prior to 1928. What of the forced expulsion of so many Native Americans? But, increased or decreased or continuing at a steady pace, these crimes, these acts of war, these conquerings of territory, do not make it into the book. Instead we're falsely told that the United States takes no new territory. Tell that to the residents of Vicenza, Italy, or any of dozens of towns around the world where U.S. military bases are forcibly expanded against the will of the people living there.
As a result of the authors' exceptionalist view of the world, and perhaps a focus on written law, Hathaway and Shapiro find shortcomings in the Kellogg-Briand Pact by looking at its words rather than looking at our failure to comply with them. They believe the Pact leaves open (does not provide permission but simply fails to address) the option to wage war over territorial disputes, as well as the option for non-state actors to wage war. The former depends on the idea that the Pact only banned aggressive war, rather than all war -- decidedly not what the Outlawrists intended. They -- the originators of outlawry -- intended to ban war entirely, with no exception for the common excuse of territorial disputes. The latter, the ability of non-state actors to wage war, depends on irrational fear mongering around enemies, such as ISIS, generated by the counterproductive, blowback-producing, routine violation of the Pact by S.O. Levinson's own nation, the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.
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