The End of War

In 2022, one hundred million people were forcibly displaced — more than at any point since World War II. In the same year, military spending worldwide exceeded two trillion dollars for the first time. The instinct of most observers is to treat this as sad, inevitable, and beyond the reach of institutional design. It is not.

War is not a natural state of human affairs. For most of our evolutionary history, organized intergroup violence of the kind we call war was rare or absent. The forms of warfare that have killed hundreds of millions over the past century — industrial-scale state-organized killing — are recent inventions, enabled by specific institutional failures. Specific institutional failures can be corrected.

Why Wars Happen

Wars are not caused by human nature. They are caused by decision-making structures in which the people who bear the cost of war — soldiers, civilians — have no effective veto over the decision to start one, while those who bear little cost — leaders, ideologues, arms manufacturers — often do.

This is an agency problem. The solution to agency problems is to align the interests of decision-makers with those who bear the consequences of their decisions.

A Proposal

No head of state should be permitted to declare war without personally deploying to the conflict zone. No legislator who votes for a war authorization should be exempt from the draft for their own children. The principle is simple: those who decide must share the risk.

This is not utopian. Ancient Athens required generals to lead their armies in battle. The Roman practice of the triumph required the general to have personally commanded. The removal of skin from the game of leadership — the insulation of decision-makers from the consequences of their decisions — is a modern pathology, and it is curable.

Beyond skin in the game, a robust international framework for compulsory arbitration — with genuine enforcement mechanisms — could address most interstate conflicts before they escalate. The institutions exist. The political will has repeatedly failed. But political will is not fixed; it responds to incentives. And incentives can be redesigned.

The Cost of Inaction

War kills, obviously. But its subtler costs are less discussed: the diversion of talent and capital from productive uses; the environmental devastation; the generational trauma that reshapes politics for decades; the destruction of the social trust that makes cooperation possible. These costs are borne not just by combatants but by everyone who inhabits a world made poorer by the choice to fight.

The end of war is not inevitable. But it is possible. It requires treating war not as fate but as a design failure — and then designing better.