Season 2, Episode 6: Christopher Blattman, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Christopher Blattman, to explore the dynamics of war and peace as they discuss Blattman’s, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace.  In his newest book, Blattman argues that violence is not the norm; that there are five reasons why wars break out; and how peacemakers can draw on these reasons to prevent and stop wars.

 Together, they explore the dynamics of war and peace: how communities resolve conflicts, and why such efforts sometimes fail, leading to war. As conflict rages in Ukraine, listen in on this timely and vital conversation to learn more about “Why We Fight" and how we can end wars.

 The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Mao Zedong
• Ukraine War 
• Clausewitz: War as Politics by other Means
• Military History of Russia
• The Rise of Personalist Rule
• Washington as Land Speculator
• French and Indian War
• Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch
• Semi-sovereignty
• Game Theory
• Reversed Industrialization 
• Stalemate
• Thucydides Trap
• The Peloponnesian War
• NATO
• War of Attrition 
• Frozen Conflict 
• Autocrat
• Vietnam War
• Volodymyr Zelenskyy
• United Nations Security Council
• International Criminal Court 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs. Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world. In this episode, I will be speaking with Professor Christopher Blackman, professor at the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts at the University of Chicago, and author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. With more than 20 years researching war and violence across the globe, Professor Blackman explains how groups ranging from street gangs in Chicago and drug cartels in Medellin to nation states use diverse strategies to resolve conflicts and why such efforts sometimes failed, resulting in outright war. Ukraine is one such disaster today, and we discuss the Ukraine war at length. Why we fight examines the root causes and remedies of war, emphasizing that violence is not the norm and that there are indeed paths to peace. And the critical question, Chris, obviously is what are the paths to peace? Why are these wars persisting, or why are they breaking out in the first place? And what can we do to stop that? What's wonderful about your book, Chris, is you start from a basic proposition that I think is an economist proposition, which is we spend a lot of time asking, how do you make an economy grow? War is an activity that destroys, it's a waste, it is inefficient in economic terms. It shouldn't be happening. Why are we wasting, smashing, destroying resources that are so hard to build? And so you start out with an extraordinarily important, basic point. You say people think that we are aggressive species, that we are warlike, but the fact of the matter is, for good reason, most of the time we're actually peaceful. And so maybe you could start off on that organizing principle of the whole book.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Absolutely. I mean, it is an economist's insight, but it's also a military general's insight. Von Klausovich told us that war is just politics by other means and by and they're terrible means. They're the worst means. And Chairman Mao, after when he was fighting his fight, told us that war is just politics with bloodshed. And so they're both strategies for getting what we want, but one of them is obviously much more ruinous and terrible than the other, which is always our starting point. I think we forget that. You know, I remember about two weeks into the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I was scrolling through my phone and the news, and I, of course, had to scroll through about 17 pages of Ukraine news before I stumbled by accident upon this story about how India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan, and peace ensued, you know, as it has most days for decades. You know, I didn't write a book called Why Do We Don't Fight, but I do think it's it's a little bit like being a doctor, right? We we we need to pay attention to the most terminally ill. But we wouldn't want our doctors to forget that most people are healthy, partly because I think we'd be demoralized unnecessarily, and partly because I think we'd be rotten at diagnosis and treatment.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

And I think the uh the the point that I find completely compelling is that just about in any war situation, there's something better potentially for both sides of the war. Right. In other words, that's the that's the the potential gain is there because when you're destroying things, you ought to be able to at least be in a situation where both sides are better off than battering each other and killing each other and destroying each other's economies at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Yeah, you can either split a pie or you can destroy a share of it and then gamble for who gets it. So that's the basic point. Now there's lots of times when we make that terrible choice as a society, or more specifically, our leaders. And that's kind of what the book's about. Every answer to why we fight is a reason that a society or its leaders ignored or overlooked those costs of war. And so I really try to center us on this ruinousness of war and and why it's so central to thinking, you know, everything we know.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

So I loved it for this reason, because I am kind of, are you kidding? We're gonna fight again. And for me, uh, you know, also with Ukraine, I I go back now 30 years. I advised uh President Kuchma in the early years of uh Ukraine's independence, that country needs a lot of building and investment. Now it's all being destroyed daily by the artillery bombardments, and the Ukrainians are saying, well, we're gonna fight back, and it's gonna be a long, long battle, and God knows what Ukraine would look like in the end of this. But you say, not only is that wasteful, thanks goodness, most of the time this doesn't happen. Most of the time, both sides figure out it really isn't good to stumble into an endless war of attrition of all things, which means a war where both sides are deliberately carrying on this war for a long period of time. And then the book in the first half, and very clearly, Chris, so really congratulations, talks about why it is that if it's really better for both sides potentially not to be fighting, why do we fight? And you give five main reasons, and I'd love for you to go one by one through them because this is a masterclass in why what should work breaks down. So this is a kind of pathology. It is a breakdown compared to what is usual and compared to what we want. And by the way, I always wanted to amend Clausewitz by saying that while war is politics with other means, war is also a failure of politics, at least in one sense of politics, the Aristotelian politics of the good. So it's a breakdown, it's a failure, it's a pathology to use your doctor's analogy. So you give five areas. The first one is unchecked interests, as you call them. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Let me use the Ukraine as an example just to illustrate the maybe that initial evasion. And just starting with this idea that most of the time we don't fight is even true in the case of Russia and its neighbors, right? Russia tried every other means possible, many of them insidious, to co-opt Ukraine for 20 years. So war is in some sense Putin's last resort. And he hasn't used invasion, or it hasn't come to violent warfare for Russia to exert influence in its other neighbors, Belarus, most of all, but Kazakhstan and so forth. So for the most part, we've seen politics not always friendly or kind or completely nonviolent, but not pitched battles.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

Yeah, and an excellent point, by the way, because the first thing people say is, well, obviously he started the war because he wants to control Ukraine, but he has a lot of control over other neighbors, but not uh not in this extraordinarily violent way.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Right. And so, like I said, every reason we fight is a reason to ignore the costs. And the idea of unchecked interests is pretty simple. It says if a leader doesn't bear the costs of war, and this is especially true in an autocracy, but it's true in so many societies. They they don't bear those costs, they're not accountable for many of those costs, and so they're much too quick to use violence. And Putin, being a personalized dictator, is in some sense the ultimate form of being insulated from the costs of war.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

You give uh really a stunning, fun, eye-opening example of George Washington in the same context. Now you wouldn't think that Washington and Putin would necessarily be put into the same camp, but could you just run through that? Because it really is a fascinating example.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

I use it on purpose because I didn't want people reading the book to think this is this is something that happens to other people, that this happens to our most iconic and celebrated founding father, and who was profligate, who loved his his riches, who loved his carriages, who loved his dress, and who had a lifetime thirst for land. And it was his thirst for land and other, you know, Virginian elites' thirsts for land that helped lead to what Americans called the French Indian Wars and what the world calls the Seven Years' War, because he essentially helped ignite it with one of the first attacks, in some sense unprovoked attacks on French troops. I think all the stories about Washington being a noble lover of liberty and that being a root of the American Revolution are also true. But let's not forget that most people at the outset of this republic, maybe only one in five, I think, adults, could could actually vote. You know, he wasn't a personalized dictator, but he was unchecked to some degree for a while.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

And he loved, as you say, landowning.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

And also to be reminded he was our richest president, which is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Right. No, I mean he'd be one of the richest men in history if you, you know, count for inflation, and uh he's he's one of the very richest men in American history.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

So wars get waged by despots because they're sending their subjects into battle as fodder, and uh there are long traditions, including uh Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher who wrote in 1795 Perpetual Peace, that if the world were republics rather than principalities, there'd be many fewer wars because they wouldn't have this unchecked interest, this despot leading them like cannon fodder. I want to come back to that later because there is a weird flip side also that even cautious leaders can be pushed into war by public opinion, which is almost the opposite of that. And I think America has a lot of that going in general. So we'll we'll come back to that. But I want to follow your line of argument. Maybe related to that is the second big category. So unchecked interests, you don't have real alignment of the national interest and the one who can start or fight the war, the despot, let's say, or the autocrat. The second big category is what you call intangible incentives, and there's a whole grab bag of those things that lead to violence that maybe they are interests, but they're not material interests. Right. So what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 10:40

It's a whole set of times we're willing to pay the price of war. So we bear the costs of war, but there's some ethereal thing we gain, often ideological. So I usually could have called the chapter ideological incentives for war. And there's two examples, I think, in the current war. One's really obvious to people, and it's all you read about in the newspapers, and the other one's not obvious at all. The obvious one is what you hear about Putin's motivations. The idea that Putin is either motivated by personal glory and a place in history, or the idea that Putin's motivated by maybe nationalist goals and ideas about a greater Russian Empire and accounting for past humiliations and so forth. These are all stories. All of these are just saying that war is costly, but Putin and the elite are willing to pay the costs to achieve these goals, right? Because they ideologically, but they're they're constructed, they're not material. There's another ideological story of this war that I think is equally important, which is the idea that Ukrainians were unwilling to settle for semi-sovereignty. And it takes us back to George Washington, the American Revolution, and the real reason I think the American Revolution was fought. It's not just because our founding fathers were somewhat unchecked, but arguably they were offered semi-sovereignty by a tyrannical superpower. They had little chance of actually winning that war, certainly without foreign help, which they eventually needed. And nonetheless, they said no way. They said that price is so too high. That compromise was repugnant. And so I think there's also an ideological unwillingness to compromise to some degree. We don't know how much, right? Because part of it's a bargaining position, right? Zelensky at least sometimes has to, he has to at least pretend, but he probably sincerely doesn't want to compromise on some of these principles. And if he does, many Ukrainian people do not. So I do think there are ideological incentives to fight in many, many cases. And we're often, it's easier to see the the ones among our enemies than among our allies.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

I would, yeah, and and I think the same way, not only do Ukrainians not want to submit to what they're calling semi-sovereignty, although I think every place on the planet has semi-sovereignty. So I think the idea of a pure freedom of will is never right in statecraft. But there is a feeling also that we're making a stand militarily, and by doing so, we're building a nation. So the military response itself will go down in history, like in Henry V's speech for Agencour and St. Crispin's Day, that we will be ennobled by this fight. Look at how Ukraine is standing up as a nation. They didn't think we were a nation. We are a nation. We're ready to defend ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

And what I'm trying to do in the book is I'm not trying to say my book's right, the other books are wrong, this theory is right, the other theories are wrong. I'm trying to say, let me give you an organizing framework for thinking about every theory, every every story you heard about war, because there's a reason for every war and a war for every reason. And you might find some more persuasive in a particular case or not. The five are actually a way to just organize those reasons in your mind, because otherwise it's this confusing mess. And I think for me there's a lot of clarity here, which is that several of the reasons for for war in this case have to do with people being willing to pay the costs for these ideological objectives, some of which I consider noble, others which I obviously don't.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

The third big category which encompasses a lot of issues, and also in this war, is uncertainty. That the two sides are uncertain about the prospects of the war. Why does that lead to more fighting? And how does that work in terms of why we go to war?

SPEAKER_01 14:17

This is actually where game theory comes in, and where something that political science and economics has given to us, but it's something that sounds complicated, but it's something that I think anyone who's ever played poker can understand. And it's the idea that if you don't know what cards your opponent's holding, you're not quite sure how to play, right? It's there's always a bit of a gamble involved. And you can't completely trust any signals they're sending to you about their true strength and resolve. And your optimal strategy when they tell you or show you their resolve is not to fold every time, nor is it to call every time. And so to sort of apply that to a case like Ukraine and Russia, think about how uncertain it was five months ago. What was the capacity of the Russian army? How plucky, resolved, and capable would Ukrainians be? And how resolved would the West be on sanctions? And the idea that Putin would get a bad draw on all three of these things was always within the realm of possibility, but I don't think anybody predicted he'd get a bad draw on all three. Least of all, Vladimir Putin. And so amidst this uncertainty, the invasion was in part a gamble. And it was a gamble that was accentuated by the fact that all the signals that the West and Ukraine could send about their seriousness and their resolve, particularly Ukrainians, their ideological intransigence, the thing we just talked about that would say we will fight no matter what. Very difficult to know if that's a bluff. Arguably the Ukrainians themselves weren't even sure of their own resolve, nor were we in the West. And so I think that uncertainty gets missed a lot of the time in most wars.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

One of the very interesting points you make in this section, though, is that uncertainties can often resolve quickly. Yeah. And when they do, then your logic of, well, we should uh make a deal should prevail. Here, it's not quite happening yet, uh, it seems. Any thoughts about that?

SPEAKER_01 16:01

I agree, which suggests that maybe some of these other factors were more important or sustaining. I think there's still a fair degree of uncertainty of we don't yet know the Ukrainian offensive capacity. Offense is harder than defense. Trying to, it's been one thing to defend, defend against Russian encroachment, and an entirely different thing, I think, to the sort of retake land occupied by Russia. I think the degree of resolve and financial resources and military parts on the Russian side is also still uncertain. So one of the ways I look at this is that the way this battle for eastern and southern Ukraine is going to play out over the course of a few months, the remaining uncertainty will be resolved at that time. And that may be the moment when a stalemate is more likely, in my mind. So I do think there's some residual uncertainty, but ultimately you're right. It points to maybe some of these other five factors being quite important.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

I think, by the way, certainly some things have uh broken in Putin's direction. I never believed it, by the way, and I wrote from the first day I didn't believe it. But there were people who believed that these sanctions, with their unprecedented comprehensiveness, would immediately lead to uh a deep economic crisis in Russia, collapse of the currency, and other things that you and I have witnessed uh close up. That seems not to have happened, at least from what I can glean from uh from the news uh day to day, not firsthand in Russia, but what seems to be happening in ruble behavior, the economic behavior, and so on.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

The Russian central bank has been really clear and unequivocal in a surprising way of that this is going to be devastating for the economy. And I think they were estimating a 15% drop in national income. Reverse industrialization was the specific phrase they used. So it will be bad, but I think you're right that financially they prepared for this to a certain degree so that they did stabilize the ruble. It's helped that the sanctions and the war have dramatically raised the price of the main thing they're still exporting, which is oil and gas. So, yeah, it hasn't been an effective enough deterrent. And sanctions are, I think, are really effective tools, but with really serious limitations.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

So the fourth area, which is also a very fundamental one in peaceful resolutions of conflicts, is a fascinating one from the point of view of peacemaking, is what you call the commitment problem. Correct, yeah. So could you explain that? Because this is really a fundamental structural issue of relations in general, uh unequality.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

It's one of the deepest and most important ideas, I think, in political science and economics, and it's one of the worst labels that we've invented. I think it's it's it's right. This isn't about dating. It's not about dating, right? It's just the lack of credibility or reliability of your opponent to hold up to the deal. You know, there's an older racky dage that says if you think your opponent's gonna eat you for dinner, you better eat them for lunch. And it has to do with the idea that that if you have a temporary advantage, you might have an incentive to lock in that advantage now by attacking, because you can't really trust your opponent not to use whatever extra strength they have in the future to renege, strength the share of the pie that you get forever. In terms of this war breaking out, I think the commitment problem is maybe the least important of the five for the specific war. But if we think about why this war is going on, there's almost an ideologically driven commitment problem that I see. So Ukrainians and the West are very, very skeptical that Putin would stick to any settlement and not simply use a pause and fighting or stalemate to regroup and try again, because they kind of view this as the try-again after the seizure of Crimea, and they they look at what happened with the first and the second Chechen War as a regroup and try again sort of reputation. And at the same time, to the extent that Ukrainians truly are ideologically opposed to concessions of territory and some of the sacrifices or terrible things that could happen as a consequence of that, it's possibly the case that Russia isn't quite sure that it can rely on the West and the Ukraine to hold up a deal. So I think commitment problems are often sometimes they help wars break out, but they make a lot of wars very, very difficult to end once they do break out.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

So, as you're indicating, there are a couple of different kinds of commitment problems. I actually think that they both are at play here. One commitment problem, as you mentioned, is you go to war because your antagonist is gaining power, but is not yet powerful enough to uh resist your attack. And so this is what has become known as the Thucydides trap, which is you describe it, and it's it has been used recently in a very good book by Graham Allison of Harvard University to describe the threat of war between the US and China, where China's the rising power and the U.S. feels threatened by China's rise. And Thucydides, of course, was the ancient Greek historian who told the story of the Peloponnesian Wars between Sparta, the major power of Peloponnese, and Athens, which was the rising power. And so the question was how they went to war because of this. And it's often told, and you also discussed, Germany launching World War I out of fear that soon Russia would be too powerful for Germany to confront. So better to go to war now than wait for later. The reason that sounds strange that this would be a cause of Putin's invasion, but there is one element that I think is actually at play here, which is that Putin, I believe, has really truly resisted NATO enlargement. And he was feeling that this is happening, actually. The story is, of course, that the US has said someday Ukraine will be part of NATO. Russia, but not just Putin, but especially Putin has said. Don't do that. We don't want you anywhere close to our border with Ukraine. And the United States' attitude or the United States line in public was, no, it's many years off. Don't fight a war over nothing. But the truth of the matter, I think, was that the U.S. was really arming and training Ukraine. That's why they're in part why they're so effective in these first months. And Putin was watching this. And as the foreign minister of Russia said, Loprov, he said, you go to the Defense Ministry of Ukraine, it's swarming with NATO advisors. So it was actually happening from their point of view that they were already on a slippery slope to NATO enlargement, and this was to forestall it. So you could view that a little bit as a Thucydides trap kind of argument.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

I have a version of that that's a little bit different. Here's how I would put it I would say that there are three trends in Ukraine that were alarming, maybe even four, that would have been alarming to Putin and his elite. One of them is this one that you've just described. The other is just the fact that Ukraine was increasing its defensive capacities with or without NATO. So it was acquiring Turkish drones and it was developing its own Neptune missiles. And so even without NATO enlargement, I think Ukraine was only going to get more difficult to invade. The third is that despite whatever efforts of Russia and some Ukrainian politicians, Ukraine was moving in a more and more democratic direction. And arguably, from a relative economic point of view, even though Ukraine was doing terribly economically, more terrible than almost anyone else, Russia's economy has been stagnating. So there was a good chance that Russia was going to sort of economically improve over time. So I just see NATO as one of these four threats that are make, in some sense, giving Russia peak advantage now. But here's the key thing is why is Russia threatened by NATO? And why is Russia threatened by democracy? And why is Russia threatened by this defensive maneuvers? I think it's not because it's these are a threat to the Russian people, they're a threat to the Putin regime.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

I don't quite see it that way. We shouldn't come back and discuss that in a few minutes. I actually think NATO is more threatening uh in general, but uh well I think it's threatening, but let's say you're right.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

It's threatening because it's threatening to an autocratic regime. It's not clear how NATO threatens the average Russian, and it's not clear how Ukraine being an icon of democracy and maybe inspiring a similar color revolution in Russia is a threat to Russians, right? Because that kind of military cooperation, military security, and participation, democracy, I think would be a good thing for average Russians, and probably there are a lot of Russians who agree. I think these were a threat to Putin.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Okay, we'll come back on that, but the the fifth one is misperception.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

And misperception, you hear about this all the time. It's when we go to war by mistake. And every story you hear of Putin being isolated and insulated for institutionalized reasons, that he's getting bad information, or that a leader is psychologically overconfident, which we know is true, right? How would we have CEOs doing mergers and mutual fund management industry if with powerful people couldn't be overconfident time and time again? So we know that leaders make bad decisions, and that's a really dominant story. I think it's probably true to an extent. My view of this particular invasion is that we often leap really quickly to the psychological explanations, especially for our enemies. We leap to the misperceptions, we leap to the ideologies they hold, and I think both are very true in this sense, and then we forget it's their uncheckedness, the uncertainty, and sometimes the commitment problems that really make it possible for these mistakes to matter.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

So let me ask you in this regard, because just today, as we're talking, and we've gone through five different dimensions of why the kind of peaceful compromise to save both parties from the destruction of war breaks down. So the unchecked interest, the intangible incentives, the uncertainty, the commitment problems, the misperceptions. Today, just a fascinating statement, one that I find extremely troubling, actually, but I want to get your take on it more importantly than my take on it. And that is an article today which says Ukraine conflict may, quote, drag on, NATO Secretary General says. So uh Ukraine may face a long war of attrition with Russia, and its allies need to find a way to make their support sustainable over the long term, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday. The NATO leader said in an interview with the Washington Post that the alliance's goal should be to support Ukraine's efforts to achieve a battlefield outcome that would ultimately lead to a negotiated end to the conflict. But he said the fighting could easily drag into an unresolved conflict, with neither side willing to make concessions for any deal. We need to be prepared that this may actually drag on for a long time. So here we are, Chris, with the war on, with several misperceptions, presumably clarified by what has happened in the first few months, terrible destruction, many people dying, huge economic fallout, huge gains that should be shared of this pie, as your book really so nicely graphically puts it. But now one side is saying, well, we've just got to hunger down. This is gonna be a long, long war. By the way, to me, it's irrational. So I wonder what your take is.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

So I think that in the next few months, these battles and this uncertainty, this residual uncertainty will be settled. I think this war is so extraordinarily costly. So the $40 billion from the US will last till September. Russia has almost exhausted its peacetime troops and it has not mobilized the entire economy for war. I think there's a very good chance that this settles into a stalemate, one where the West and Ukraine may refuse to recognize Russia's claims, but where Russia nonetheless holds a significant amount of territory. Maybe the sad but optimistic story is that this is the next Kashmir.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

In other words, the next frozen conflict, not open war day-to-day, but a breakdown of all normal relations. And it's interesting because it's a case where you have partial losses of the size of the pie. You don't have the devastation going on day to day, but you don't have trade. You don't have normal relations. It's not really peace, but thank God it's not outright war.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Right. And and relations might normalize a little bit. You know, maybe instead of maybe there's Iran levels of sanctions on Russia instead of North Korea level sanctions, for example. You know, that remains to be seen. A lot would depend on, I think, the treatment of Ukrainians in Russian-held territory. But the way in which this goes into a long battle and this sort of war of attrition scenario, I think there's a few scenarios. One essentially has to do with a again a strategic calculation that says, well, Russia does have the deeper pockets. And if it thinks that the West's resolve is weak and temporary and Ukrainian economy is just completely throttled, then it actually has an incentive to wear things down. So there is a hawkish but credible argument to be made that says making a really credible and longer-term commitment to back Ukraine at all costs would unravel that war of attrition logic on Russia's side and make this more likely to settle into the stalemate rather than be fought in terms of war of attrition. That's a strategy I think is probably true, but it's obviously hugely risky and it's a grave kind of choice.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

And the logic of the book is Stoltenberg says that, and then Russia says, you know what, okay, let's sit down and negotiate. We'll give you better terms. But we're not sure that's going to happen exactly.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

This is where it gets back to intangible incentives and ideologies. And I don't call it a rationality per se, because what we value is what we value, so I don't want to call that irrational. But it may be the war of attrition scenario I see is one where Ukrainians, on principle, either refuse to concede territory or refuse to concede the humanity of Ukrainians and maybe the suffering or the potentially the war crimes, or not war crimes, the crimes against humanity that they might expect that could occur in those places that they might just decide that's not a price we're willing to pay. And we don't believe Russia will do otherwise. Russia can't seem to credibly commit not to say do that. And then likewise, I think it's possible that if Putin really is as ideologically driven as some commentators say he is, and if he's unencumbered by many of the costs personally, then he may also choose to fight the war for ideological reasons. So I think there's this mixture of ideology and commitment problem on both sides that could keep the war going a long time.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

So what I mean by irrationality is if they had read your book, if they read your book, then they'll sit down and negotiate sooner. Let me put it that way. And and what I mean by that, and this comes to the second part of the book, because the first part of the book is why we fight. The second part of the book is the paths to peace. And what you're arguing, Chris, is, and I think this is really important, and I'd like to put it the following way: there are skills to peacemaking, there are toolkits, there are skills, there are structures. It's not obvious that you find that win-win outcome. That's part of the breakdown, but it is a kind of skill, what the Greeks would call a virtue. I'm using the term irrationality, but I mean a kind of lack of the skill to get this to come out better, faster. So in this, again, the book is very, very logical and very well sequenced and clear. You talk about interdependence, checks and balances, rules and enforcement, and toolkits of interventions, maybe without going one by one. Could you give us a big picture of paths to peace? You're called to mediate this crisis. What do you do?

SPEAKER_01 32:03

Yeah. If this were a civil war or a gang war, where I think our tools and some of these things function better, and that's kind of what I do day-to-day, right? I could talk about this in terms of saying all the things we do, sanctions, mediators, UN Security Council resolutions, peacekeeping missions, all of these things, they often work and they work because they tackle one of the five, right? Sanctions try to punish and change the calculus of an unchecked, ideologically driven leader. The day-to-day job of peacekeepers is resolving uncertainty and holding commitment problems. The day-to-day job of mediators is reducing uncertainty and misperceptions and finding clever ways to make deals, so also helping solve commitment problems. And that's what the whole second half of the book is about. And I think it's kind of optimistic while at the same time saying, you know, a lot of our tools don't work that well, we could do better. The problem with this conflict is that a lot of what we have doesn't work really well when a great power is at war. Now we do have mediators, and the Turks and the Israelis are playing a really important role and good for them because there's potentially a political price for them to pay at home for that. So that's quite, I think, brave and important of them. We have sanctions, and I think that was a deterrent and gave second thoughts and maybe deterrent a lot of other bad behavior. And I think this unified sanctions regime will cause future autocrats, Russian or otherwise, to really rethink hostile invasions. We have a little bit of ammunition left on sanctions. Uh it's it's not going to get us to peace here. So we that's the sad thing. We have a really limited set of tools. And to me, the saddest and worst moment for many reasons were the crimes committed by retreating Russian forces, which may have come from the top or may have just been undisciplined troops at the bottom, which we see all the time. You know, I work in a lot of civil wars. It's very hard to tell. It happened. It was tragic and criminal for the obvious reasons, but I think it was especially sad to me because Zelensky and many Ukrainian politicians spoke very openly about negotiations and settlements. And I think we're quite sensible about what kinds of territories they might have to eventually help their people accept losing. And that position became untenable almost for them. Yeah, the Bluecha. Yeah. So that to me is the saddest thing, not just the loss of these lives, but how it really crippled, I think, a lot of opportunities for settlement. And that's a tough spot right now.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

Chris, it actually raises a point that I wanted to mention earlier, which is that the case of the unchecked interests, you know, where there's an autocrat at the top that pushes is one case. But there is a flip side that's very important in the world, very important in the United States and maybe operating in Ukraine also, and that's public opinion. Not necessarily well-formed public opinion also. But in the US, it's often been the case. Vietnam is probably the quintessential example. Lyndon Johnson knew in the 1960s he had a losing hand. He knew this war was a disaster, but he was scared politically not to pursue it because of public opinion. And so it was the opposite of an autocrat. It was actually broad public saying, go to war, yellow press, pressing onward. And with Ukraine, to the extent that this explanation about the Bucha massacres is an accurate one, I'm not so sure, but to the extent that it is, because lots of things were happening in early April that probably led away from the negotiations. But that would have been driven not by Zelensky, as you say, but by public opinion, public revulsion, we'll never make peace, and so on. And so what about that? About the role of the public and the media and so on in stirring things?

SPEAKER_01 35:52

Yeah, because when I gave those examples of intangible and ideological incentives, a lot of the concrete ones I gave were of the intangible and ideological incentives held by our leaders. But it's also possible that an entire populace is willing to pay a price for war. That's a reasonable description of a large portion of the United States around the time of the American Revolution. Part of that was constructed by a set of very skillful politicians and writers. But John Adams wrote to some of his colleagues about the true revolution was in the minds and the hearts of the people, and that it was the popular unwillingness to accept this semi-sovereignty that led to the American Revolution, even though it was potentially a losing battle, and one that they only won in part by luck and in part through foreign intervention on the part of France. So I agree it's entirely possible that Zelensky, who seems to be a very clever politician, I mean, Ukrainians are very lucky to have someone like him at the helm. Not just an excellent entertainer and good at social media and all the other things that have really helped him win an information war in the West, but I think he's also a very sensible person from everything I've seen and heard and seen written about him. He might at some point want a settlement, and it might be an unwillingness to accept that, you know, and again, one that I am personally sympathetic with that impedes impedes this. Like, but what more often happens is politicians construct this. I think Putin is doing this in his own nation. They try to construct a hatred and a loathing of a compromise with the other side. They do so because it improves their bargaining position. They can say, look, my people won't let me take this deal. And that's actually a trap, not just in this conflict, that a lot of nations find themselves in, that politicians construct these narratives, convince their populations in order to wield more bargaining power, to sort of cut off all the possible deals that are less favorable to them. And then they leave the set of available deals so small that maybe they can't reach them. They kind of let the propaganda and the nationalism and the loathing get out of control. And that's just repeated at all levels all through history.

SPEAKER_00 37:54

I want to come back to two final themes that I find important on these issues. Get your take on them. One is uh simply sitting down with the other side. One of the lessons of game theory in playing so-called games of strategic dilemmas like prisoners' dilemma is that people partly cooperate, but if they're allowed to communicate with each other, the cooperation rates go way up, even though game theory often says communication per se doesn't mean anything because of the commitment problem. But communication makes a big difference. I bemoan the fact that there isn't communication other than through one side yelling at each other rather than talking to each other. So my view is just getting people to sit down at the table, even if they hate each other, can help the situation.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

You know, like I said, my day job is studying all of this exact kind of conflict dynamics at lower levels, and I've run experiments with mediators in negotiation and like villages at each other's throat over ethnic conflicts and land. And so it's true at this level. Now, when it comes to international conflicts, you know, I've learned a lot by talking to, meeting, and also reading a lot of the memoirs of a lot of professional negotiators and mediators. So people have either been on one side or the other of the conflict and negotiated it to an end or mediate these conflicts now. Jonathan Powell comes to mind. He has a great book, I think Terrorists at the Table, or, but his whole point is to say, like, listen, we do have to try to talk to the people we loathe the most. That is the only way. Because all wars will end, all wars end in settlements, we almost never have direct victories. So ultimately we're gonna talk. He does emphasize that most of the time that happens in secret, and it has to, at least in the beginning. So the fact that we hear about a lot of non-secret discussions, so we hear a lot about the leaders of France and Germany having long phone calls with Putin, is good. Yeah. Because at least they can be clear, and that surely means more is happening in secret. Good point. Probably not enough. You know, again, that's this added tragedy of some of these crimes committed by Russian troops, which Ukrainians, I think. Now it's hard to say because I think we get a lot of selective media, but I think the Ukrainians have been very good about being more disciplined and trying to avoid these kinds of things, precisely for this reason. And also because it keeps up their support in the West, right? I think it makes it much harder to have these dialogues in the sense of you know, a politician whose scene is too conciliatory might get turfed out in Ukraine. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

So the last point I want to make, and I want it to be the topic of your next book, not to be presumptuous, but uh is creating international institutions to handle this better. You know, I work uh day-to-day with the UN. I love the UN concept. I believe in the UN as being able to provide, in principle, norms, mediation, peacekeepers, even in principle, committed decision-making, albeit the Security Council has a veto. But it also has the US and Russia and China and France and UK in it as permanent members and ten other countries on a rotating basis. And so I've asked and I've pressed the question: why not have more of an international role to address the challenge like Ukraine's security? Because it's one thing for Putin to say, I'm fighting in part because NATO has provoked me or Ukraine has provoked me. It's another, would be quite different, in my opinion, for there to be a public agreement reached under the UN auspices, and then for it to be flagrantly violated by Putin afterwards. So to my mind, there is the potential of real commitment, even though many people are UN skeptics, but that the UN could serve as a commitment mechanism. Wonder what your take is.

SPEAKER_01 41:57

I think in the long run, we will have to have a better international interest institution than the UN Security Council as currently designed, because it's unequal. It's the veto power of a few superpowers is deeply problematic, most of all when one of those superpowers is trying to achieve an aim in its national interest. Right now that's Russia, but as often it's been the US and China.

SPEAKER_00 42:19

It didn't stop us in 2003 when the Security Council said, don't go to war with Iraq.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

And likewise, I see on the more marginal incremental change, like the International Criminal Court has had real consequences. Maybe not for Putin's calculus. I actually don't know. But I think it's certainly I've had some firsthand and a lot of secondhand feedback from say rebel commanders, whether it's Eastern Congo or Liberia or somewhere else, that they think twice about a lot of things because they know that's there. So I don't know how to fix the Security Council. It strikes me that it might take something cataclysmic to shake the US, Russia, and China out of their positions where they are right now to basically blocking any change. I'm more optimistic that the United States might recognize that as much as it doesn't want to be constrained by something like the International Criminal Court, and by as much as it fears being persecuted in some ways by the International Criminal Court, that there's a lot of other worse actors out there, and it makes more sense than not, despite the risks to join up and short up, rather than undermine it, which they've been doing in such a way that it made Putin's job easier right now. And so I do think there's things on the margin we could do that maybe now's one of the few moments where we could have that discussion. I'm disappointed that's not more of a part of the national discussion right now, that maybe we should subject ourselves to these risks because there's some pretty bad people out there.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

Well, I'm gonna take that as an optimistic endpoint and also as a provocation to our political community globally to see that there is a lot more that can be done. Chris, your book is is wonderful, very clear, very important, very timely. I've been speaking with the Professor Chris Blatman of University of Chicago on his new book, Why We Fight the Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. Thank you so much for being with me on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

Thanks. No, it's so great to spend time with you again.

SPEAKER_00 44:18

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