If you must do an enemy an injury, do him a great one, from which he will not recover.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
The purpose of war is peace. This is known once you observe that wars end. Only a lunatic or a communist could desire eternal struggle. But the purpose of a particular war is a particular peace. Peace without victory is a temporary truce. Victory means a war you don’t have to fight again. It means a lasting peace.
But how does one make a lasting peace? How does one defeat an enemy so thoroughly that he does not attempt to return to combat? How, in the modern age, is such even possible?
One thing we must admit, at this date, does not work, is the Draconian Peace. A peace cruelly enforced on a defeated enemy does not create peace; it creates the next war.
Such was once the common wisdom about the Versailles Treaty of 1919, that ended the First World War. It’s a very simple argument:
The Germans were not expecting a draconian peace in 1918 when they agreed to an armistice.
The Allies imposed a Draconian peace in the Versailles Treaty.
The Germans resented the Treaty.
As soon as a government willing to ignore the treaty arose, another war occurred.
In recent years, however, there has been an argument to the effect that the Germans were just being crybabies. After all, hadn’t they imposed a cruel peace on the defeated Soviets just that year at Brest-Litovsk? Hadn’t they imposed a cruel peace on the French not fifty years before? What right had they to complain?
And if we were talking about the same German regime that had done so, they might have a point. But we aren’t.
What made the Versailles treaty an Allied diplomatic folly to match the German military folly of the Schlieffen Plan is the simple fact that the German government they had been fighting for four years was no longer there. The Allies had, by the simple fact of defeating the Kaiser’s army, sent the Kaiser away into exile. A Revolution had followed, creating a republic. Like all new regimes, especially Republican regimes, it came to power hoping to achieve new social goals and bring peace and plenty to the masses. Like all new regimes, they wanted to break with the old and start fresh.
Instead, the Weimar Regime came into life saddled with the consequences of a war it did not start. Its legitimacy was forever tainted. It survived by the disorganization of its many enemies, and with helpful infusions of American capital. As soon as these dynamics ceased, the Republic was utterly destroyed, the Treaty it signed followed soon after, and few in Germany was sorry to see either go.
That this was counterproductive to the security goal of the Allies and Europe in general needs hardly be said. The Versailles Treaty did not create a lasting peace. Therefore, it failed in its ontological purpose.
And, to be intellectually honest, so did the armistice the Prussians imposed on France in 1871. France had to pay a two-billion franc indemnity, surrender Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Empire, and endure a victory parade in its capital. This did not create a lasting peace, but a forty-year cry for Revanche, which warped the politics of Europe around it. So absolute was French intransigence that the Germans did not even bother waiting for a declaration of war before invading her again in 1914.
Both of these peaces attempted to terrify an enemy into submission, while allowing it to grow strong again. Both of them had the opposite effect. The Allies recognized the stupidity of this in the Second War, when they insisted on unconditional surrender, followed by military occupation. The Allies did not treat with Germany a second time; they conquered it. The aforementioned Machiavelli had insight on this as well:
The Romans, in order to hold Capua, Carthage, and Numantia, ravaged them, but did not lose them. They wanted to hold Greece in almost the same way as the Spartans held it, leaving it free and under its own laws, but they did not succeed; so that they were compelled to lay wasted many cities in that province in order to keep it, because in truth there is no sure method of holding them except by despoiling them.
-The Prince, Chapter IV
Absolute conquest is an alternative to diplomatic humiliation, a possible solution to the question of making a lasting peace. But it cones with a cost - the butcher’s bill of conquest, followed by the political difficulties of occupation. As Big Serge observes:
The inevitability of German defeat was certainly a reality, but the war was anything but over. In fact, 1944 and 1945 formed the bloodiest and most cataclysmic years of the war by far. The Wehrmacht was losing the war, to be sure, but it still maintained millions of men in the field, and it increasingly propped itself up by mobilizing volunteers from around Europe. In its dying death rage, as it vainly protested its own Götterdämmerung, the Wehrmacht would both kill and die in astonishing numbers.
-“Götterdämerung in the East”, Big Serge Thought
The highest casualties of both the European War and the Pacific War, for both sides, were during 1944-45, when Axis victory was impossible. The civilian casualties would also be enormous. These are the wages of Unconditional Surrender. On top of that, a conquered nation must be ruled. Machiavelli advised a conquering prince to go and live in his new lands, to directly oversee administration. Such a thing is not practicable in Current Year for a variety of reasons. In the 1940’s the United States found it practicable to spend billions rebuilding the economies they had just spend billions destroying. This was the better tactic for the Global American Empire, which must act in the shadow of benevolence to allies rather than securing provinces. This is the Imperial Discourse.
But it points in the direction of a third option, an option requiring care and discipline, but also the easiest to implement. This option I call the Equal Treaty. They are rare, but they are effective.
Americans, barely understanding their own history (and currently having it badly taught to them), know very little about the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. They know that the Southwest was acquired that way, and they know the phrase “Manifest Destiny”, of which I have written about before:
Which is to say, most people have a vague idea of how the war started, and nothing of how it ended. Ask the average American for the terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and you will get uncomfortable stares, followed by self-effacing taco jokes.
By 1848 The American Army had advanced on all fronts into Mexican territory. They had seized control of the major settlements of what became the American Southwest, and taken the Mexican Capitol. By all reasonable accounts, the Americans had won. Military operations ceased in March, and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was ratified two months later.
In the treaty, the United States recieved what history books call The Mexican Cession: the territories of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico (and parts of other states). Mexico renounced all claims to this land as well as Texas, whose border was set at the Rio Grande. This is in the history textbooks. This is What We Know.
But Mexico also gained from the Treaty. Specifically, these things:
$15 million in gold (the equivalent of $510 million today)
The assumption of another $3.25 million that the Mexican government owed U.S. Citizens
The safety and property rights of Mexican citizens living in the Cession, who were granted the right to American citizenship, if they chose.
Land grants by the Mexican government in the Cession were to be respected
Obligated the United States to punish raids by Indians from the Cession into Mexico, prevent American citizens from acquiring property taken in such raids, return kidnapped Mexicans taken in such raids to Mexico, and provide restitution for failure to do so.
Far from being a mere ratification of conquest, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo sought to establish equitable relations between hostile powers. Mexico was not treated as a permanent enemy, a hated tribe to be punished, but as a neighbor country with whom diplomatic business was being conducted. The United States had a particular, limited goal it wanted to accomplish, and sought to secure it without further conflict.
In this, the United States succeeded. The Mexican-American War is the last international war on the North American Continent. Despite taking a territory many times the size of Alsace-Lorraine, Mexican revanchism has been limited, and retaking the lands of the Cession has never been a policy of any Mexican government. A few short years after the Treaty, the two governments negotiated another land deal, the Gadsden Purchase, which finalized border in its present form. Even when Germany offered military aid and support for a war, the Mexican government declined the offer. Despite strained relations and the chaos surrounding the Mexican Revolution, peace remained.
Obviously there are other reasons for this. Military and population advantages remained in the hands of the United States. Mexico has undergone internal chaos. But these can also be reasons for further conflicts, Second and Third Mexican-American Wars. This did not happen. Instead, both countries have been careful to avoid direct conflict, seeking mediation with other powers when necessary. A reasonable treaty created the conditions for a lasting peace.
What is the lesson? What is the application? What are the odds that either of the wars currently occupying social media (strange is it not, how despite the infinity of users, we all tend to fixate on the same phenomena? We might has well have stayed with network television) are going to end with an equal treaty of any kind? Israel has been taking a head for an eye and a jaw for a tooth for decades; and Palestine has been screaming to cleanse the land in blood just as long. They aren’t going to make peace of any kind. There’s going to be war, and more war, until one of them loses. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
And Ukraine? The aformentioned Big Serge has argued that Russia is currently engaged in democide in Ukraine:
In the debate between Moltke and Bismarck, Putin has chosen to follow Moltke’s lead, and wage the war of extermination. Not - and again we stress this - a war of genocide, but a war which will destroy Ukraine as a strategically potent entity. Already the seeds are sown and the fruit begins to bud - a Ukrainian democide, achieved through battlefield attrition and the mass exodus of prime age civilians, an economy in shambles and a state that is cannibalizing itself as it reaches the limits of its resources.
“The End of Cabinet War,” Big Serge Thought
This has occurred because Ukraine is not capable of negotiating an equal treaty. More powerful western states, and the hegemon behind it all, will not allow it. Ukraine has been transitioning from a Province of the Soviet Empire to a province of the GAE. The war cannot end until it completes this metamorphosis or becomes a scorched frontier state, slowly returning to the Eastern orbit.
We have become addicted to Absolute Victory, to Unconditional Surrender. We are terrified to let the other side have anything. A century of Total Struggle has left us incapable of the kind of honorable peace that were once the norm. The aristocracy has gone, and with it, its restraint.
"I fear that … I may be held presumptuous … But since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. Many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation. For a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good." NIccolo Machiavelli
“The purpose of war is peace.”
Er, no. Of course not.
War is killing and destruction to achieve a goal.