“Peace through strength”. It wasn’t true for Hitler, was it?
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Should we concede the necessity of war because “people are violent and vicious”? Our standard of living depends on a level of economic development that doesn’t countenance barroom passions. We’ve weaved systems that work despite human stupidity, that’s the definition of development. That’s what wealth and division of labor, law and so forth accomplish.
Likewise, war has been industrialized. You can’t just go brawl out a battle. There might be a place for that at the margins of modern warfare, but most missile systems either work or they don’t. There are other systems that defeat them or they don’t. The other side runs out of money and soldiers first, or you do.
Fists can’t fight nuclear weapons.
War can be subjected to the same civilized norms as everything else in the economy: in other words, abolished as too costly to be worth it. And the brawlers can be dealt with the same way we do with any other criminal.
