December 29, 2019  |  View in browser

Welcome to the first edition of The Backstory, a newsletter delivered exclusively to Foreign Affairs subscribers. Every Sunday, we’ll guide you through the debates driving U.S. foreign policy and international affairs using pieces from the Foreign Affairs archives—some of them recent, some of them decades old. You can use the link at the bottom of this e-mail to unsubscribe at any time.

We begin with a topic that has occupied generations of policymakers and scholars: the prospect of a world without war.

There seems to be a growing consensus that humanity is becoming less violent, that we have entered an era of unprecedented peace. But is war really becoming a thing of the past? Tanisha M. Fazal and Paul Poast argued in an essay in our November/December 2019 issue that the prevailing optimism is based on flawed analysis—and that the false sense of security it generates is dangerous.

It would not be the first instance of misplaced confidence about the end of war. In the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, 62 states agreed to outlaw war as an instrument of national policy. As then Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg argued in Foreign Affairs, history had proved the futility of military alliances, leaving the nations of the world to pin their hopes on a new kind of security guarantee.

In the years immediately afterward, the treaty was hailed as marking a “revolution in human thought,” as Kellogg’s successor, Henry L. Stimson, wrote in Foreign Affairs. But then World War II began. And when it was over, world leaders returned to the task of putting an end to war, but with the lessons of the failed previous effort—and a new degree of caution—in mind. Foreign Affairs editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong considered how to give the newly created United Nations the teeth it needed to keep great-power aggression in check—a question that became more urgent with the Korean War underway.

The end of the Cold War marked another moment of optimism—an opportunity to make prevention of war a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy, according to Secretary of Defense William J. Perry—which once again proved short-lived. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder soon noted that countries undergoing democratic transitions were particularly war-prone. Edward N. Luttwak argued that multilateral intervention perpetuated violence rather than curtailed it.

There still has not been a World War III. But, as Fazal and Poast write, that does not mean ours is an age of great-power peace.

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