By Joseph Mazur 

Is going to war a biological necessity in order to pursue feuds against those whom we dislike? Or could it just be a regrettable invention imposed by sociological inevitability? Will there ever be an end to all wars? Joseph Mazur explores the issues around these difficult questions.

– William Shakespeare: Excerpt from
“Not marble nor the gilded monuments”
(Sonnet 55) 

Why do we think the world is in a bleak and dark place? If we study war, we should know that from the time of the Trojan War (yes, there was a nonfictional war going at or near the time when Homer wrote an epic poem about a violent war including gods, victims. and victors) to the end of the bloodiest wars of the twentieth century, the world has never been as peaceful is it is today. Hey, you say, what about the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan? They are so bloody and cruel. Those are wars we know from a wide range of media outlets that highlight those wars. Yes, they are brutal and ugly. They are wars we watch in real time and, by watching, we feel uncomfortable because we are seeing our own species killing our own species. And there are plenty of ongoing armed conflicts to choose from – 48 and counting. But when we assess the long historical list of wars, we find that the number of deaths from combat is enormous compared with those that are ongoing today. Though the numbers are high, the number killed in wars and conflicts is continuously dropping. When the number of civilian deaths from three wars in this century has passed 71,200 in Gaza, over 13,883 in Ukraine, and over 3,384 in Darfur, we sense those numbers to be high; however, compared to wars before 1945, they are not. ^[1] They are far too high for this century, a century that brings us together through instant human communication connections. At the dawn of this century, humans have come closer to each other than ever before. Besides witnessing live news reports from battlefields that make us numb to killing, there are also concerns about high death numbers, since we are far more attached to each other than we have been for centuries. Though our geographical coordinates are far apart, our online news, music, film, and information communication connections are closer than ever.

Something happened after the deaths of Hitler and Stalin that turned the world out of the darkness of brutal violence in war and peace into a bright possibility that rational nations – at least in the most highly developed countries – are shifting from being barbarous to humane, not fully humane but at least more humane than ever before. The present constant daily news shows widespread suffering and deaths from homicides, explosions, political nastiness, and the gruesome pictures of wars, so we tend to think the world is shifting from being humane to barbarous. When we study the history of barbarism from ancient human societies to the present day, we begin to see how far we have come from slavery, pogroms, lynchings, human sacrifice, death penalties, execution by torture, genocide, known political assassinations, confrontations with human rights violations, and war brutality. Er… hold on… we still have slavery and human trafficking, but none sanctioned as they were before by responsible governments. All those horrors of humanity that shaped the history of our existence are now publicly and governmentally condemned, at least by the advanced countries, even those under authoritarian rule.

According to Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor at Harvard University, “Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.” ^[2] He began his article in the New Republic in 2007 with an example of how far we have come from the sadism of the 16th century, when cat burning was a popular form of entertainment in Paris. He quotes the British and Polish historian Norman Davies, saying, “[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” We don’t do cat-burning anymore in advanced countries, and it would be unthinkable in most of the world, at least not with kings and queens laughing at roasting felines.

The word “probably” is used by Pinker to pitch a moment of acceptance to his point. It may be misleading, because the number of wars is now close to 48, higher than ever, because weapons can be quickly and easily sold and shipped to almost any group with purchasing power. The number of wars does not translate into the number of violent actions nor the number of deaths. We kill in large numbers, yes, but those numbers do not compete with the history of war-related deaths, century by century. The decline of violence over long stretches of history is valid when we consider the pre-World War II long list of wars and violent actions; however, numerous counter-studies disagree and call Pinker’s view an exaggeration. ^[3]

Pinker’s article was published 18 years ago, since when much has changed. Still, think of the violence and discord that our parents and grandparents lived through in the past century – world hunger during the great depression, violent race- and religion-inspired segregations, the damaged reputations caused under McCarthyism (such as my father’s), and a world war that was responsible for an estimated 70 to 85 million deaths (not counting the Korean and Vietnam Wars).

Go back one more century, and war violence is not much better. Approximately 37- 45 million people died fighting in wars, not including civilians. ^[4] There is no accuracy for these numbers, but given a million more or less, it is an indication that past wars had high death numbers.

Who are we and where did we come from?

– Jane Goodall, in Famous Last Words

Who were the creatures behaving in dark, aggressive, brutal ways? Why, chimpanzees, of course. But those chimps share 98.7 per cent of DNA with us, and so, Goodall says, we humans have propensities of aggressive, brutal behavior. Just like chimps, we forcefully protect our territory by fighting. “Well,” she says, “we get, interestingly, two types of alphas. One does it all by aggression. And because they’re strong and they fight, they don’t last very long. Others do it by using their brains, like a young male will only challenge a higher-ranking one if his friend, often his brother, is with him. And… you know, they last much, much longer.” ^[6]

Human aggressiveness is not a recent swerve from a state of being dovish, though the evidence of chimp behavior is documented in Goodall’s papers. In a previous TWFR article, I included two military historians who agreed with Goodall – William Hovgaard and Friedrich Adams Julius von Bernhardi. Hovgaard was an academic, whereas von Bernhardi was a Prussian general. “War is a biological phenomenon,” Hovgaard wrote, “being part of the struggle for existence common to all organic beings in the wild state of nature.” He saw war as an instinct for control over defending and controlling resources and lands that provide the subjectively best possible living conditions. Von Bernhardi wrote that war “is a biological necessity … the natural law, upon which all the laws of Nature rest, the law of the struggle for existence.” ^[7] He felt that the primordial impulse would always be with us, along with the good, bad, and acceptable human urges that brought us to this stage of existence. Within the question of biological necessity, though, there would be a group of necessities emanating from points of evolutionary struggle for either survival or ambitions of power that drives the lust for territorial expansions.

The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead had a different angle. In her article “Warfare Is Only An Invention—Not A Biological Necessity,” she begins by asking the question, “Is war a biological necessity, a sociological inevitability, or just a bad invention?” But soon she answers that war is simply an invention, like “writing, marriage, cooking our food instead of eating it raw, trial by jury or burial of the dead, and so on.” ^[8] As a cultural anthropologist, she knew so much more clearly than we do that not all cultures bury their dead, and that there are cultures that know no war. Her example is the Inuit, amiable people with no characteristics of warfare aggressiveness, even when they are faced with hunger and threats of annihilation. To take another example, consider the pygmy people, hunters and gatherers of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean, or Australian Aboriginals who search the desert outback for water holes, wanderers with no permanent homes. Like the Inuit, they are not mild or weak, and though many are troubled and tempestuous, as a culture, they do not fight wars. Yet if we look for wars among indigenous peoples, especially those like the Inuit who in the past owned no land, you might find rare and short defensive wars. Mead brings evidence that war is an invention based on examples witnessed 85 years ago that have significantly changed, but her point remains, for it is timeless. If war is a cultural invention, it has the potential to disappear, to be replaced by alternative inventions in favor of turning armed conflicts into sympathetic, constructive treaties.

The moral equivalent of war ^[9]

Whenever we ask questions about how wars start and end, a new question arises: why is it that every time one war ends, another begins?  Some leaders must calculate the odds of the inevitable surrender versus victory and calibrate the cost and price of infrastructure destruction and the morals of killing and wounding. Without expectations, and mistakes that are sometimes uncorrectable or uncontrollable, or plans for closing a war, the planners should plan not to start. That puts the above questions squarely within the moral principles and ethical dilemmas of societal behavior. Now, please do not take that as a naïve position suggesting that leaders balance moral and ethical decisions before going to war.

They should. Some do, but most don’t. Yet some know that the goals of war are to balance arguments with concessions and settlements that bring peace and prosperity to both sides. “Otherwise,” as I wrote in my previous TWFR article, “we will always be at war with one another; of the 195 countries that share the resources of this one planet, some will be winners that eventually become losers, and losers that later become winners in a cycle of power changes that continues until the sun becomes a white dwarf.” ^[10]

From natural greed to habitual hostility

Is the inevitability of frequent, persistent wars in any way connected to human genetic systems of ambition or a cultural invention? Or is it simply a psychological mind growth that starts from biological survival instincts – acquisition of food or shelter – that move to aggressive tactics for material gain and then to habitual hostility? Acquiring food and shelter emboldens the notion of wealth, and that wealth ultimately emboldens one in the search for power. Along the mind-growth journey, hunting for food turned into growing selfish desires. Some humans take that path; most do not. But soldiers are those with mind growth that turn to serve, and some of them turn to lead. A duke is by ilk, heritage, and position one who needs an army to secure his dukedom, for there are always neighboring princes who never have enough territory or resources to be satisfied. And so, the power grows and, hence, so do armies.

Mead told us that all cultural inventions have evolutionary roots, whether they involve abrasive solutions to conflicts or concessionary resolutions to arguments. That does not mean that some wars are predetermined and inevitable. There are some allies that are so linked to each other that war between them would never be accepted, though “never” is a strong word. Recall that at the turn of the 19^th century, many of the sovereigns of 17 European states were cousins and semi-allies, and yet some fought against each other in 1914. It’s hard to imagine the US invading Canada, Denmark invading Norway, or Spain invading Portugal, though any one of those aggressions could happen.

For the answer to the title question, we should know how international wars start. The answer is simple and not so simple: when one nation, in dispute with another, cannot resolve counter-issues through compromises, or detente breaks, war is the answer. The not-so-simple answer is that sometimes disputes are rather ambitious contests of power that do not yield to resolution. Looking back over the centuries, kings, dukes, and mad, overconfident leaders had only bellicose solutions to unsolvable problems. Armed conflicts were their answer. And so, some wars started through psychopathic opportunism and others through a cockiness of previous war achievements. In past centuries, high-ranking soldiers saw advances in war as a social celebration of heroism with a chance of acceptance in nobility; if they survived the battlefield without losing a limb, they could go to formal balls wearing stripes, medals, epaulets, and uniforms of splendid colors to show glory that spurred longing for more wars.

War is a gamble but, unlike chancing games where losers are compelled to gamble again in more risky ways, the suffering of defeat is so destructive that either revenge (as was the case of Germany in 1933 or the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001) brings on another chance at war or one of the parties becomes pacifist (as was the case of Japan after WWII following the dishonor of its defeat).

Accidents and misunderstandings

Aside from the common causes of war, there is the question of miscalculations, misunderstandings, and accidents that arise either on the battlefield or in preparation for armed conflict. Without clear communications with potential enemies, an accident, such as might arise from US and China war-exercises close to the Taiwan Strait, could lead to war.

We are at a crossroads of international law that, for me, brings in an imagined scenario, along with the hope that a US war with a neighboring country will not happen. In February 2025, just a month into his second term in office as president, Donald Trump said, “I’d like to see Canada become our 51st state.” That’s a somewhat benign comment because it will never happen. Trump uses such provocative comments as diversions from the critical news of his catastrophic policies. But then, just a month later, he linked that statement to another: “We need [Greenland] really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it.” Trump sees only cooperation or conflict. “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” We have not heard much about that threat lately, likely because he is so busy destroying his own country with tariffs, ending foreign aid, attacking climate science, health security, and foreign aid, deportations of people seeking better lives, autocratic restrictions on free speech, and blundering into a military action against neighbors in the Caribbean and the Pacific by murdering Venezuelans and Colombians. Will Trump take Greenland by force? Will he militarily attack Venezuela and Colombia as a foil for taking over other places closer to home after trying to end far-away wars? “One war ends for another to start” has been the principal military wisdom for millennia. So, we must imagine and reason the sanity of stopping wars in Europe and the Middle East and insanely attacking neighbors, drug trafficking or not, that have not threatened the security of the United States.

The US now has over 750 military bases in 80 countries and territories, 38 of which are in Europe alone. With that “level of military supremacy and its secure international order, it has prevented explosive conquests and national border skirmishes that could threaten the realignments of states and territories.” If we dig for a reason why the US has so many bases, we come to the wishful thinking of deterrence, a notion that has been positive for 80 years. However, the war in Ukraine has set a new precedent: Russia is trying to upset the balance of power in Europe. If the West accedes to the transfer of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine as Putin wishes, deterrence will end – then what? I suspect the possible next step would be to go for more. The Donbas is not enough. Soon after concessions, we should be watching what will happen to Moldova, a relatively small independent country that is not a member of NATO. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are members, but that does not mean Putin will not try to go after one of those smallish states. Nuclear powers might be deterrents, but they could also be timid and rational enough to calculate the odds and calibrate the cost of how far they would go to test the balance of concessions of territory over a nuclear winter. The American political scientist John Joseph Mearsheimer, a proponent of the “offensive realism school of analysis of world affairs,” tells us that most great powers act rationally and are “likely to react violently to perceived threats to their security.” ^[11] Mearsheimer claims that NATO is to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “NATO’s expansion into Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, including its overtures to Ukraine,” is the cause of the war in Ukraine. That might happen; however, the flip of that claim is that those Eastern Bloc states – living through 45 years under Soviet control – courted NATO for protection, believing that non-NATO members would not survive their independence.

Deterrence can become the problem. Not every leader comes with military smartness. That is why smart leaders have advisors who spend their time devoted to analysis of military futures for ending wars, not perpetuating them.

The US National Defense budget for 2026 is expected to be over a trillion dollars, so the Pentagon could modernize weapon systems, missile defense, F-47, and the B-21 bombers. It follows a trend of budget boosting. Such escalating expenses are the basics of why wars can be blamed on the institution of military spending and war preparation. The entire world’s annual military budget is over $2 trillion. With that amount of expense dedicated to death and destruction, the economy pots for humanitarian resources that could serve the needs of the world are drained. With budgets expressed in numbers having 12 zeros, the lure of war becomes immeasurable, so war itself becomes, perhaps not inevitable, but surely boosted by a tailwind that thrusts the decree to go to war closer to the brink.

Stronger than the tailwinds against humanitarian needs, there are the gale forces of arms production, sales, and trade from people and companies that benefit from wars, the arms dealers, manufacturers, politicians, and public investors. Wars are driven partly because profitable weapons industries have a powerful influence. The industries themselves do not encourage the start of wars, but their profits and shareholders, some with lobbying power, do. When military agencies are pumped with unfathomable funds, the temptation is to buy weapons. Once those weapons are stocked, there is a push to use them, because the drivers of arms dealing – very influential people – want to show off their products in battlefield performance. 

Do some leaders have a propensity for aggression and thereby have a need to thrash their opponents, or are they simply part of a hawkish human culture? It is a difficult question that has a weak answer. Some people and corporations favor toughness in disputes, others in compromises, and still others bicker in greed, religion, orthodoxy, ideology, or simply revenge. When it comes to self-defense, there is no choice other than bargaining or fighting. Or is it simply the madness of nature? To that, there is no straightforward answer.

So, will there ever be a time when there are no more wars?

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Excerpt of “Locksley Hall”

Two answers. Both are frightening.

1. At some point, individual geopolitical economies will implode, leaving a few dominant nations or perhaps just one. We see this happening now, with China and the US in a technology race, and we can be sure that others will attempt to either move in that direction or become dependent on the winners. Referring to that race, Vladimir Putin in 2017 asserted, “The one who becomes the leader in this sphere [AI] will be the ruler of the world,” to which Elon Musk retorted, “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”^[12] Essentially, there will be one or very few independent governments without the need for aggression against other powers. Surely those governments (or the sole winning one) will be deeply totalitarian with a need to control its civilians through surveillance and lockdowns. China already has over a billion surveillance cameras – one for every 2.4 citizens – installed on streets, offices, and housing complexes. ^[13]

With that security, China, like most other authoritarian countries, does have a relatively small civil unrest problem, but nothing like so many other countries without such a massive, dense social surveillance climate. In a race for allies that could support threats for the sake of deterrents after building a massive army that every other country, including the United States, will be frightened of, it aims to alter the control of technology by its AI superiority, control, and dominance of 17 rare-earth minerals. This is not hyperbole. We do not know how the technology race will turn out, but several distinguished political historians, economists, fiction writers, scientists, diverse characters, and even US presidents believe that global governance of a universal state living in uninterrupted peace is inevitable. ^[14] Is that fantasy or omen?

Such a warning would put us in a Huxleyan world that accepts the kind of citizen custody that ignores rights and mandates the silence of wishes. There is no doubt that such a revised social contract will be hard to accept. Any global government will eventually become a hegemonic kleptocracy, unless the highly unlikely happens: a philosopher king takes the throne. Highly unlikely? Yes, anyone with virtue, truth, knowledge, reason, and justice, benevolently caring for civilian well-being, someone insulated with high integrity and honesty, would not take a job that torments one with the wisdom that power leads to corruption. History lists dead benevolent leaders, a list so small that the odds of another appearing are no better than that of a messiah.

2. We are now in a situation of having nine countries possessing nuclear weapons. In the next half-century, that number will grow. Moreover, there will be rogue states and terrorist groups that will gain possession of some lower-grade nuclear weapons, bought or stolen. Suppose that the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), a treaty aiming to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, is not fully ratified by all nuclear states. Suppose nuclear weapons spread. What then are the risks concerning deliberate attacks or miscalculations, and accidents?

– Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, referring to the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo’s global impact through sharing their story of the atomic bombing.

Either by accident or by the power of an insane leader, a nuclear bomb will be used again. “Someday, we will wake to the news that half a million people in one city will either be dead or severely burned, causing anger that will surely turn to revenge. And what will be the plan? To quickly retaliate against the retaliator and jump into the chaos of the moment?” ^[17] A 2010 simulation experiment estimates that after a nuclear war, a global climate disorientation will happen and last at least five years, likely nine. If such a war gets out of control, two years later, the number of fatalities from radiation exposure and the number of civilians starving would wipe out most of the world population: “Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery, and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection.” ^[18]

A stop-and-think moment ^[19]

– Excerpt from President John F. Kennedy’s address before the United Nations General Assembly, September 25, 1961. 

Listen to the whole speech by clicking here.

At the time of Kennedy’s warning, the Doomsday Clock, set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was showing 7 minutes from midnight. Today it is at 89 seconds to midnight. That clock is a metaphorical prediction, based on collected nuclear-advanced information that warns about the possible nuclear threats to global existence. The smallest atomic war will bring enormous destruction to life and infrastructure, but any nuclear war will undoubtedly escalate to unintended devastating consequences that could cause billions – not millions – of deaths and casualties, along with famine and a sunless black winter that will cool the earth enough to hinder habitation and likely procreation.

What then? Likely, after the cycle of warfare madness ends, if enough humans remain alive, there will be a chance to reboot civilization with a wiser, more experientially suffered understanding of how war devastates humanity. Then, for that short, short time before humans inevitably again fall into the cycle of aping Goodall’s chimp contagious dark aggression, there will be no wars.

About the Author

Joseph Mazur is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Emerson College’s Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Bogliasco, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the author of eight acclaimed popular nonfiction books. His latest book is The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time (Yale).

Notes

^[1]Estimates vary widely but the information I give comes from the Human Rights Office of the United Nations High Commissioner.

https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Number-of-civilians-killed-and-injured-in-Ukraine-reaches-three-year-monthly-high-in-July-2025-UN-human-rights-monitors-say#:~:text=The%20HRMMU%20also%20says%20that:%20*%20**July,**Aerial%20bombs**%2067%20killed%20and%20209%20injured

^[2] https://newrepublic.com/article/77728/history-violence

^[3] Arquilla, John. December 3, 2012. Rational Security The Big Kill.Sorry, Steven Pinker, the world isn’t getting less violent. Foreign Policy

^[4] Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, and Max Roser (2024) – “War and Peace” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

^[5] Jason Lyall, Project Mars (2020) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Civil wars” [dataset]. Jason Lyall, “Project Mars” [original data].

^[6] Famous Last Words (Netflix Original); An interview with Brad Fulchuk, American television writer.

^[7] Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (Toronto: Presidio Press, 2004) p. 12-13.

^[8] Margaret Mead’s article was initially published in 1940 in the American Anthropological Association by Asia Vol. 40 Issue 8, pp 402-405 (which I could not find), but the full piece is now available in: Richard K. Betts, Conflict After the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005) pp. 244-48.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Conflict_After_the_Cold_War/QNSPCgAAQBAJhl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Warfare+Is+Only+an+Invention%E2%80%94Not+a+Biological+Necessity%22&pg=PA244&printsec=frontcover

^[9] https://constitution.org/2-Authors/wj/meow.htm

^[10] Enter the URL here for the latest TWFR article that I had submitted “Diplomacy’s Narrow Bridges To Peace.”

^[11] https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf

^[12] https://hir.harvard.edu/artificial-intelligence-china-and-the-international-stage/

^[13] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-billion-surveillance-cameras-forecast-to-be-watching-within-two-years-11575565402

^[14] Alexander Wendt, “Why a World State Is Inevitable,” European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 4 (2003), pp. 491–542.

^[15]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/3/33/How_would_a_nuclear_war_between_Russia_and_the_US_affect_you_personally%3F_-_Future_of_Life_Institute.webm/How_would_a_nuclear_war_between_Russia_and_the_US_affect_you_personally%3F_-_Future_of_Life_Institute.webm.480p.vp9.webm

^[16] https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/press/press-releases/press-release#:~:text=The%20Hibakusha%20help%20us%20to,war%20in%20nearly%2080%20years

^[17] https://worldfinancialreview.com/nuclear-weapons-are-they-deterrents-goads-or-risks/#_edn1

^[18] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0

DOI:10.1038/S43016-022-00573-0

^[19] https://worldfinancialreview.com/nuclear-weapons-a-last-try-for-abolition-before-it-is-too-late/#_edn26

^[20] https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/united-nations-19610925