Likewise, though governments must certainly monitor radical groups and take action to prevent them from gaining control of weapons of mass destruction, they need to balance the fear of nuclear terrorism against other threatening scenarios. In the last two decades the United States wasted trillions of dollars and much political capital on its War on Terror. George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Barack Obama and their administrations can argue with some justification that by hounding terrorists they forced them to think more about survival than about acquiring nuclear bombs. They might thereby have saved the world from a nuclear 9/11. Since this is a counterfactual claim – ‘if we hadn’t launched the War on Terror, al-Qaeda would have acquired nuclear weapons’ – it is difficult to judge whether it is true or not.
We can be certain, however, that in pursuing the War on Terror the Americans and their allies not only caused immense destruction across the globe, but also incurred what economists call ‘opportunity costs’. The money, time and political capital invested in fighting terrorism were not invested in fighting global warming, AIDS and poverty; in bringing peace and prosperity to sub-Saharan Africa; or in forging better ties with Russia and China. If New York or London eventually sink under the rising Atlantic Ocean, or if tensions with Russia erupt into open warfare, people might well accuse Bush, Blair and Obama of focusing on the wrong front.
It is hard to set priorities in real time, while it is all too easy to second-guess priorities with hindsight. We accuse leaders of failing to prevent the catastrophes that happened, while remaining blissfully unaware of the disasters that never materialised. Thus people look back at the Clinton administration in the 1990s, and accuse it of neglecting the al-Qaeda threat. But in the 1990s few people imagined that Islamic terrorists might ignite a global conflict by plunging passenger airliners into New York skyscrapers. In contrast, many feared that Russia might collapse entirely and lose control not just of its vast territory, but also of thousands of nuclear and biological bombs. An additional concern was that the bloody wars in the former Yugoslavia might spread to other parts of eastern Europe, resulting in conflicts between Hungary and Romania, between Bulgaria and Turkey, or between Poland and Ukraine.
Many felt even more uneasy about the reunification of Germany. Just four and a half decades after the fall of the Third Reich, lots of people still harboured visceral fears of German power. Free of the Soviet menace, won’t Germany become a superpower dominating the European continent? And what about China? Alarmed by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, China might abandon its reforms, return to hardline Maoist policies, and end up as a larger version of North Korea.
Today we can ridicule these scary scenarios, because we know they didn’t materialise. The situation in Russia stabilised, most of eastern Europe was peacefully absorbed into the EU, reunified Germany is hailed today as the leader of the free world, and China has become the economic engine of the entire globe. All this was achieved, at least in part, thanks to constructive US and EU policies. Would it have been wiser if the USA and the EU had focused in the 1990s on Islamic extremists rather than on the situation in the former Soviet bloc or in China?
We just cannot prepare for every eventuality. Accordingly, while we must surely prevent nuclear terrorism, this cannot be the number-one item on humanity’s agenda. And we certainly shouldn’t use the theoretical threat of nuclear terrorism as a justification for overreaction to run-of-the-mill terrorism. These are different problems that demand different solutions.
If despite our efforts terrorist groups eventually do lay their hands on weapons of mass destruction, it is hard to know how political struggles will be conducted, but they will be very different from the terror and counter-terror campaigns of the early twenty-first century. If in 2050 the world is full of nuclear terrorists and bioterrorists, their victims will look back at the world of 2018 with longing tinged with disbelief: how could people who lived such secure lives nevertheless have felt so threatened?
Of course, our current sense of danger is fuelled not just by terrorism. Lots of pundits and laypeople fear that the Third World War is just around the corner, as if we have seen this movie before, a century ago. As in 1914, in 2018 rising tensions between the great powers coupled with intractable global problems seem to be dragging us towards a global war. Is this anxiety more justified than our overblown fear of terrorism?
11
WAR
Never underestimate human stupidity
The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. Whereas in early agricultural societies human violence caused up to 15 per cent of all human deaths, and in the twentieth century it caused 5 per cent, today it is responsible for only 1 per cent.1 Yet since the global financial crisis of 2008 the international situation is rapidly deteriorating, warmongering is back in vogue, and military expenditure is ballooning.2 Both laypeople and experts fear that just as in 1914 the murder of an Austrian archduke sparked the First World War, so in 2018 some incident in the Syrian desert or an unwise move in the Korean peninsula might ignite a global conflict.