Like the mythic warriors Caenus, Cygnus, and Achilles, Athens had acquired the boon of invulnerability: The Long Wall, running from the citadel to the sea, linked the great city to its ports at Phalerum and Piraeus, ensuring its grain supplies and navy could survive even an endless siege. Among Athens’ allies in the just-concluded war against Persia, the Spartans, the walls caused discomfort. The wealth and maritime power of Athens was growing dramatically, and the walls would hold back the ranks of Sparta’s feared Hoplite infantry. The balance of power in the Aegean sea was at risk.
Two and a half thousand years ago, so the historian Thucydides recorded, envoys from Sparta proposed to restore deterrence through mutual vulnerability, and argued for tearing down the walls of all the cities of Greece. The Athenian statesman Themistocles engaged Sparta in negotiations, stalling for time as his city secretly completed the wall.
Like so many which followed it, the first arms-control negotiations in recorded history had collapsed amidst suspicions and deceit, political scientist Karl Walling has written. The Athenians’ own myths warned them that all three warriors finally fell: The stage had been set for a war which would tear apart the Aegean, and end in the destruction of the city that hoped to become the sole superpower.
This week, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that the world’s nation-states spent a staggering $2,440 billion on their militaries last year—the highest in six decades. The biggest spenders by far were, perhaps unsurprisingly, the United States, which accounted for 37% of the spending, and China, with 12%. All five regions in the world showed significant increases—a sign of the deepening insecurity descending across the world.
Even though the figure isn’t as dramatic as it seems—at 2.3% of global GDP, it hovers close to the norm of many nations for defence spending in peacetime—it shows in stark relief that the sharp decline in military spending after the Cold War has been decisively reversed.
And, as historians have shown, where arms races begin, wars often follow. Leaders of the three superpowers—US, China, and Russia—could do worse than read the story of the tragic fall of Athens.
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The arms race and the Industrial Age
From his elegant chateau at La Brède, the ageing aristocrat, philosopher and judge Charles de Montesquieu bleakly recorded that “a new disease has spread across Europe; it has smitten our rulers and makes them keep up an exorbitant number of troops.” “The disease has its paroxysms and necessarily becomes contagious,”, he wrote in his memoirs, published in 1748, as wars raged across the continent, “for as soon as any one power increases its forces, the others immediately increase theirs, so that nobody gains anything by it except common ruin.”
Archaeologists have since given reason to suspect the problem was somewhat older. Evidence from skeletons found at Jebel Sahaba in Sudan establishes that, some 13,000 years ago, two groups of our ancestors—one short, another tall—used spears and arrows with transverse distal cutting edges to maim each other. The killing was indiscriminate, extending to women and small children.
Five thousand years later, humans had learned to fight their battles with aerodynamically-efficient slingstones, which were even mass-produced in the southern Levant.
European history through the medieval period, historians like Terrance Wise demonstrate, can among other things be read as a colossal arms race, with fortification designers seeking to outthink siege engineers, longbow manufacturers pitting themselves against armourers, and commanders inventing new mobile-warfare tactics.
France and Burgundy competed, between 1465 and 1477, to produce the best mobile siege guns, while England and Spain vied in warship construction through much of the next century.
The coming of the industrial age, though, created the tools for true arms races: Large-scale production, organised scientific research, and nation-states with the resources to fund them. The competition for domination of Europe and new colonies across the world created the enabling circumstances for nineteenth-century arms races. France and Britain engaged in a naval arms race in 1859-1860, Germany and Britain from 1898–1914, and others involving Russia, Japan and the United States.
Even though governments also understood the competition was mutually damaging, historian David Stevenson has shown efforts to contain it led nowhere. Tsar Nicholas II called First Hague Peace Conference in 1899, hoping to head off an arms race in quick-firing field guns, but came away with nothing. For a time, it seemed military competition could be safely managed.
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Lessons from wars
The first shots of the First World War weren’t, as pop history now has it, heard around the world: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Duchess Sophie on the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo. British newspapers, Britain, focussed on conflict in Ireland, paid little attention to the regicide. The United States had long retreated into isolation. France had—what else—a sex scandal on its mind. Weeks later, jaunty marching bands were cheering on soldiers headed into a war that would end in the death of 10 million soldiers and seven million civilians.
Enabled by the arsenals they had amassed, Europe’s great powers marched into the abyss, certain their arsenals would ensure a rapid conclusion to hostilities. Europe was riding a great wave of prosperity that had stretched for over a century; its markets were better-integrated than ever before—and yet, poor political judgments led to carnage.
Looking back at the hideous carnage of 1914-1918, the moral seemed clear to British foreign secretary Edward Grey: “The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity and fear caused by them—it was these that made war inevitable.” “Great armaments,” Grey ruminated, “lead inevitably to war. If there are armaments on one side, there must be armaments on other sides.”
As historian Paul Kennedy has thoughtfully argued, the arms races weren’t the problem: Each of these was, rather, the result of failures of political decision-making to address insecurities and tensions. Leaders, he observed, needed to determine that the economic, social and strategic costs of going to war were not worth bearing.
Following the First World War, an elaborate system of arms control was put in place—but leaders in London and Washington failed to respond to its violation by Nazi Germany, misunderstanding the strategic threat.
Seeking to avoid the risk of again being surprised by their adversaries, both the superpowers stockpiled nuclear and conventional weapons through the course of the Cold War. Even hawks like President Ronald Reagan realised that the expansion of arsenals had led both sides to a dead-end. The end of the Cold War seemed to promise an end to the arms races that had sapped resources worldwide.
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A world of growing risks
Through the rear-view mirror, it’s obvious that is not how events unfolded. The political scientist Joseph Nye, in a prescient essay published in 1989, noted the bipolar world was giving way to a more amorphous order, in which great powers are “less able to use traditional power resources to achieve their purposes because private actors and smaller states have become more important in many issues.” Even as the United States sought to establish itself as a global hegemon—before encountering painful lessons in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11—its actions sparked deep concerns among its competitors, as well as smaller states.
The war in Ukraine, as well as the growing crisis in the Taiwan Straits, are fuelling new competition among the three superpowers. Elsewhere, the growing anarchy in the global order is leading regional powers and smaller nations to arm themselves, fearing threats from their neighbours, or internal dissidents.
Likely, preventing a war between the great powers will require them to engage in meaningful political dialogue on the limits of their ambition. Expansionist territorial claims, of the kind Russia is pursuing in Ukraine or China threatens Taiwan with, need to end. The United States, in turn, will have to accept that its competitors have legitimate security interests in their immediate periphery. “They need to act like sated powers,” Walling pithily observes, “as Athens should have been, not what it was.”
There is an overwhelming good reason for the Great Powers to avoid skipping toward war and the opportunity for them to do so. The time available, though, is not infinite.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)