Most Rivals Loathe Each Other in Peace

Lex Fridman opens with Chris Blattman's new book, *Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace*, and with a definition that refuses to stay inside interstate combat. War, Blattman writes, is any prolonged violent struggle between groups: villages, clans, gangs, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, and nations. Northern Irish zealots, Colombian cartels, European tyrants, Liberian rebels, Greek oligarchs, Chicago gangs, Rwandan génocidaires, English soccer hooligans, and American invaders look nothing like one another. Their origins, he argues, have a lot in common.

He sits at the intersection of economics and political science, with a foot in psychology because he is married to a psychologist and sometimes works with her. Political scientists often make progress by classifying a narrow kind of conflict. Blattman is trying to step back. Individual violence and short bursts of violence get set aside, not because they are unrelated, but because they can be cheap ways to send a signal. Military parades and border skirmishes do the same job countries have always done: communicate toughness without paying the full price.

Napoleon English, a former Chicago gang leader who became a friend through Blattman's work, described going "gangbanging" at fifteen or sixteen. He would shoot at buildings, sometimes at people, not to kill but to show he was fearless. Blattman does not call that war. What he wants to explain is the long, grinding months and years, the violence so costly that everyone is miserable. If you start a gang war you can get killed, kill someone and go to jail, lose soldiers, and watch nobody buy your drugs in a gunfight. Fighting is politics by other means, and the means are inefficient, brutal, and devastating. "War is the thing that we shouldn't be doing."

The incentives not to fight are so strong, Blattman says, that the human and strategic forces which finally produce war have to be powerful before anyone goes there. Most people never hear about the 1994 U.S. intervention in Haiti, because it did not happen. A coup leader refused to let an elected president take power. Colin Powell flew in, was told no, and then played a video of troop planes taking off. It was not live. It had been filmed two hours earlier. The dictator gave up on the spot. That, Blattman argues, is what should happen, and what happens most of the time.

Political scientists count the pairs of nations and ethnic groups that have a dispute and sit next to each other, then watch how many actually fight. Some number like 999 out of a thousand do not. They do not like each other. They loathe in peace, because that is the sensible thing to do. The United States and the Soviet Union did it for decades. India and Pakistan have done it for generations. Two weeks into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan. Most people barely noticed. Pakistan accepted the explanation that it was an accident, stayed angry, and did not start a war.

We overestimate how often sides will fight because history books record Afghanistan and skip the landing that never came. Blattman wants readers to think like doctors. A doctor focuses on the sick while recognizing that health is the normal state. Humans, he says, are deeply cooperative — better at cooperation than at violence, anger, or vengeance. War does beat a little in the heart, but it is not the species' main talent. The job is to identify the diseases that produce warfare, not to treat fighting as what all humans do.

There is a reason for every war and a war for every reason, Blattman says, which is why the subject feels overwhelming. Social science has started to organize the mess into buckets that rhyme. Three are strategic. Unchecked leaders decide without bearing the costs, and may even have a private incentive to fight. Uncertainty can make an attack the best available choice. Commitment problems appear when a coming shift in power gives the currently strong an incentive to strike now. The remaining two are more human: intangible incentives — ideologies, principles, glory, racial purity, liberty — that weigh against material costs, and then the pile of misperceptions, passions, and wrong calculations.

Four of the five are, at some level, easy to think through strategically. Anyone who has bargained for a carpet or talked a dispute with a neighbor out of court already understands the logic. Going to court is the war option: lawyers, delay, and a costly trial you ought to be able to avoid. The fifth bucket, misperception, is harder to formalize. Blattman is not a game theorist; he is channeling colleagues. His claim is that the ideas are not rocket science, and that they bring order to a morass of real reasons.

Fridman pushes back: humanity is not a well-defined engineering problem, and a simple model can fool you into thinking you understand. Blattman agrees it is possible to take game theory too seriously. He thinks that is not the mistake most people make. After Afghanistan or Iraq, or after Russia's invasion, commentators jump to vengeance, blood for oil, nationalist glory, or a leader's madness, and stop. Those things can be true, he says, and they matter — but they only matter once the room for a deal has already been narrowed by circumstances. An elderly person dies of pneumonia. Pneumonia killed them. Pneumonia was able to kill them because the body was already fragile. Strategic forces make the situation fragile. Misperception is the pneumonia.

Fridman asks Blattman to put the war in Ukraine through the framework. A Russian colleague, Konstantin Sonin, tells a story about a visiting Ukrainian professor walking down a Chicago street talking on two cell phones at once. A mugger demands the phones. Because he was Ukrainian, Sonin says in a deadpan, he decided to fight. Putin is the mugger. Most people, faced with a superpower, a tyrant, or a murderous warlord, hand the thing over. That is what empire is: enough people saying they will give up some freedom or sovereignty because the other side is too powerful. Ukrainians said no. The thing was too precious. Blattman puts that in the values bucket, and he does not blame them any more than he would blame Americans for the Revolution.

Fridman reaches for Winston Churchill. France did not fight very hard. Hitler did not say he would destroy Britain, and from a cold calculation Britain looked likely to lose. Churchill still said the country would fight on the beaches and never surrender, before Hitler had taken a major loss, with a terrifying armada coming. Blattman says they are describing the same thing, only he is being more clinical. Standing up is not irrational. It is a set of values, hard to predict, and sadly rare. China does horrible things in Xinjiang, and the world has basically said the country is too powerful to confront. There is no Churchill speech. Most of the time you get neither the principle nor the life. You die. That is why the cases that stand up feel powerful.

If he had to name the fundamental cause of most violence in the world, Blattman would say unaccountable power. Ukrainian democracy was not a threat to an average Russian, nor was NATO or capitalism. It was a threat to the apparatus of political and economic control around Putin and his cronies. They had spent decades trying to keep Ukraine neutral, out of NATO, or under a puppet government by other means. They do bear some costs, including sanctions, but not all of them, and they had a political incentive to make an impossible demand and then invade. Nationalist ideals and a hunger for status may be real. He still thinks the regime saw itself as threatened, and that is why the list of demands was so cruel.

Uncertainty does the rest. The West's unity, Ukrainian resistance, and the Russian military's corruption and ineptitude were each in the realm of possibility. All three at once was among the worst draws Russia could have gotten. Blattman does not know that Putin miscalculated. He thinks Putin expected something in the middle of the probability distribution and got the tail. The poker analogy is the one he wants: both sides have an incentive to bluff, neither has an incentive to show the true cards, and at some point one side calls. A bluff that loses is not proof the player should have folded. It is an optimal gamble in an uncertain world that happened to fail, which is why a short, brutal war can start without glory or madness being required.

In the fog of the invasion, nuclear war started to feel less unlikely than before. The Doomsday Clock sits in the lobby of Blattman's building, shared with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a reminder of how close midnight is supposed to be. He admits he was nonchalant about it until recently, as many people were. The risk is still very low, he thinks, because the costs are unimaginably high. That is the extreme version of his whole argument: most of the time we do not fight because it is so damn costly, and if nuclear weapons were used there would still be an incentive to use them in a restrained way.

That is not much comfort. Several nuclear powers have unaccountable leaders, and the whole reason this mess exists is a Russian elite whose power is threatened by Ukrainian democracy. How far would they go to hang on when push came to shove, especially if they could emerge from the rubble still on top? He does not know. He remembers economists, twenty years earlier, saying the risk of an Argentina-style financial collapse in the United States was vanishingly small — and that this was terrifying, because until recently the answer had been zero. That is how he feels about nuclear war, and about the question of another American civil war. Higher than it used to be should terrify people into trying to make it zero again.

Fridman worries that escalation happens overnight. Blattman answers with selection on the dependent variable: we remember the times it went boom, boom, boom, and not the times it paused after one step or two. Most of human history, as Elon Musk once told Fridman, is farming and ordinary life, not the wars we put in textbooks. Steven Pinker is clearly right that everyday homicide has fallen as states and cultures learned to control it. Intergroup warfare is murkier. Weapons made war more costly, which should make it rarer, and when it happens the wars are doozies. Blattman hopes Pinker is right about a more peaceful world. He is not sure the five fundamentals have actually changed.

Blattman's day job is studying gangs and organized crime, much of it in Medellín, Colombia. Chicago has a violence problem. Medellín has more gangs, and better organized ones, and yet the homicide rate is perhaps half of Chicago's. There have been stretches in the last thirty years when the city was the most violent place on the planet. For the most part, right now, the groups are at peace. Above the neighborhood gangs sit about seventeen shadowy organizations — razones, bandas criminales, mafias — and they have an informal board. Sometimes they call it the office, La Oficina. Sometimes they call it la mesa, the table.

Many of the leaders are in prison, often on the same wings. In a U.S. supermax, a criminal boss cannot run an empire. In Colombia he can. Cutting off the head and leaving the group to hot-headed young men is not always the path to peace. Putting the bosses on the same prison patio reduces imperfect information and gives them a place to bargain. They keep street gangs in line with mediation, enforcement, and sanctions that may be a bullet in the head — more honest, Blattman notes, than sanctions between nations, and serving the same function. The toolkit looks like the U.N. Security Council: sanctions to make unchecked leaders feel costs, mediators for uncertainty, enforcement for commitment problems. It is unequal and imperfect, with something like five nations holding a veto in New York and a handful of mafias holding one in Medellín.

The year before the conversation, homicide had been climbing. Street gangs were fighting, possibly because the higher-ups wanted to feel out relative strength before reapportioning drug corners — skirmishes, not prolonged war. The rate doubled, then rose by the same amount again, approaching something that was in nobody's interest, including the government's. Then, as Blattman tells it, leaders scattered across prisons were transferred on the same day, which put them in one holding area for three days. A trusted mediator on the criminal side got himself arrested and landed in the same spot. A week later the homicide rate was 30 percent of what it had been. Not zero. Back to the normal mode, because a war did not make sense.

Northern Uganda, where Blattman first worked in a conflict zone in 2004 and 2005, was the tail of a twenty-year insurgency. Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed messiah, was not popular, and nobody wanted to join. Public figures often cite a few hundred children kidnapped over a few years. Blattman says the real number, counting even a few hours of abduction, is probably more than 50,000. If you run an armed movement, need troops, and control no territory, a threat to shoot deserters is not credible. The method they settled on was to abduct vast numbers of children, force some of them into acts that made going home feel impossible, and keep the small share who bought the messianic rhetoric as cadres. Terror was a side benefit. The main point was a recruitment problem in an ideologically empty movement.

Why did it last twenty years? Most of Uganda's post-independence political leadership had come from the north — Idi Amin, Milton Obote, and others. Yoweri Museveni, from the south, took power in 1986 after fighting those dictators. Blattman calls him a thug who is still better than the thugs before him, and who did create a freer country in many ways. When some northerners wanted to keep fighting, the new president's attitude, in Blattman's account, was that a crazy insurgency in the old power base was fine. Let it fester. Destabilizing the north helped him consolidate control.

An unchecked leader allowed a lunatic to cause mayhem because it was in his political interest. There is no puzzle. In the middle of it, Blattman did not see that, and he does not think many people did. Looking back, the war was avoidable: the movement was not that skillful, and it could have been shut down. What was missing was political will. The will ran the other way. Unchecked power here is not only failing to bear the cost. It is a private incentive to see the violence happen. "There's no puzzle. It's in some ways that simple and kind of tragic."

Could the Second World War have been avoided? One driver was what Hitler valued, and the autocratic power to convince or suppress everyone else. Western capitulation in places like Denmark and a quick French collapse look, through Blattman's lens, like an acknowledgement of bargaining power. The Allied response looks like a principled stand. Political scientists also see a commitment problem: Germany was temporarily strong, the window would close, and striking now could lock in a terrible bargain. In the First World War the window was Russia's rise and its railways. In the second, Blattman is less sure that story is as persuasive, though German leaders kept talking about a closing window, including a cultural and demographic one wrapped up with racial ideology, plus a moment when neighbors were not ready to fight.

In principle Russia could have said: we know you can invade us now, we know we will be strong later, we promise not to abuse that strength. That promise would have made everyone better off. They could not make it, because nobody would hold them to it. International law, enforceable agreements, a Security Council, a world government — anything that makes the promise stick — is a solution if commitment is the core problem. Medellín's Oficina does a version of the same thing, telling a combo that is strong today not to wipe out the one that will be strong tomorrow. Constitutions do it too. The U.S. Senate's equal votes for states was a deal with places that expected to be weaker later. Two hundred and fifty years on, the commitment is still being honored.

Lebanon tried to freeze power by giving the presidency to one sect, the prime ministership to another, and parliamentary seats by formula, so a temporarily strong minority would not fear the future. The arrangement was unstable because de facto power on the ground drifted too far from the rigid quota. Every post-conflict constitution, Blattman says, is humans' best effort to protect a group that would otherwise have an interest in violence. The tragic equilibrium is that both sides still arm, threaten, and spend a fortune on weapons they hope never to use, because they cannot credibly agree to disarm. Blattman stumbled into this literature as a development economist; a review article with Ted Miguel at Berkeley was an attempt to tell economists that civil war belonged at the center of the field, not the periphery.

Will there ever be peace between Israelis and Palestinians? The contest, Blattman says, has been going on for a century. There were really just ten or fifteen years of pretty serious violence in that span, mostly from 2000 to 2009 and stretching toward 2014. He is not trying to diminish the human cost. He is trying to point out that what is happening, as unpleasant as it is, is actually not war by his definition. It is an uneasy stalemate. Israelis and Palestinians have been fairly good at keeping the conflict at a low scale: repression, terror, counterterror, mass arrests, denying the vote, saber-rattling, and sporadic three-week wars before everyone sees sense.

There is no stable agreement, no amity, no ability to move on from extreme hostility. That may be very far away. It is still a case of rivals who most of the time avoid intense violence, which is what peace often looks like. His worry, returning to Russia and Ukraine, is that it will be very hard to find an agreement both sides can honor out loud. A possible ending is the Israel-Palestine pattern: fighting stops, Russia holds the east and Crimea without full recognition, and thirty years of tension, skirmishing, and violence never quite progress to war. He calls that a sad but maybe possible outcome.

He left contemporary hot spots out of the book so it would not date, then taught a class on them anyway — India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Israel and Palestine, Mexican cartel wars. Israel, he says, is attached to the West, to liberal ideals, to democracy, and to being a Jewish state, and those attachments are not easily compatible. On a personal level he is a liberal democrat whose sympathies in that sense lie in many ways with Palestinians, who are unrepresented and who got a raw realpolitik deal, the kind history is full of. Both sides, as a factual matter, refuse to compromise on certain principles and can construct reasonable self-justifications. That is why he is not very hopeful. He does not see a way for them to resolve those things.

How do the two superpowers avoid a hot war? The second half of Blattman's book is about persistent paths to peace. Two of the fundamental ones are increasing interdependence and more checks on power. In the simple strategic game you want more of the pie, and you only feel your own costs of war; the rival's suffering is worth zero. In reality, groups often care a little about the other side. Economies that are intertwined, families and social ties, even a shared idea of humanity, all raise the price of fighting. The world, and the U.S.-China relationship in particular, is more integrated on those fronts than it has ever been. That is insulation. He would worry more if the insulation started to come off: American economic nationalism, the fallout of sanctions, a closer Chinese alignment with Russia.

China also comforts him relative to Russia because power is more widely shared, not as personalized as Putin's rule, and nothing like a tin-pot dictatorship. Xi Jinping's successful move toward more personal, centralized control worries him for the opposite reason. Anything that widens the circle of people who hold power, including business leaders, is insulation against war. Anything that moves the other way accentuates all five risks. Fridman adds a cultural gap: China and the United States can feel like parallel worlds, harder to read than Soviet-American rivalry, which at least put both superpowers in the same movies. Blattman agrees there is a certain inscrutability and insularity to the politics.

The other side of the ledger is real. Massive Chinese immigration into the United States, and a generation of American businesspeople and politicians who know far more about China than they did thirty or forty years ago, are forms of understanding that did not used to exist. He does not know exactly where the balance sits. He thinks it sits on better understanding than ever before, with a gulf that still has not been totally bridged. Fridman's preferred remedies are the ordinary ones: students, commerce, movies, even a *Rocky* in which both cultures appear in the same story, plus the joke about love and marriage as social cohesion. Contact is the unglamorous fix for misperception.

The book is dedicated to a slow and now defunct internet café in Nairobi, because it set Blattman on the path to meet, work with, and marry Jeannie Annan. Around 2004 he was a development economist who believed industrialization was the way out of African poverty, so he went to Kenya, then one of the most dynamic places for firms, and talked his way onto a World Bank survey. Two charming con artists stole his laptop. Kenya was not yet on the undersea cables; an email took ten minutes to load, and chatting with the person beside you was the local norm. He sat next to an attractive woman. She was a psychologist, a Ph.D. student, and a humanitarian who had been working in South Sudan and northern Uganda with children coming back from Kony's war.

They had a brief week, drifted, and then a conversation with a young professor friend sent him back to the phone. They talked for two or three hours and hatched a plan that still sounds cockamamie: find the names of children born twenty or thirty years earlier in the region, randomly sample a thousand, track them down, and use variation in rebel activity to measure what violence and conscription did to people psychologically and economically, so programs could be designed better. He pulled his old dissertation proposal. The committee met without him, decided the new plan was bonkers, and coordinated to make him defend the old one. It was the first and last time in his career that a gigantic crazy plan worked exactly as intended. His usual shtick is collecting data nobody thought you could collect, and it always goes sideways. This one did not. They have been married fifteen years and have two kids. The psychology in the book comes from those years of working together.

The hardest data, emotionally, was interviewing those children. It was a gut punch every day, and technically it was not hard: the kids were everywhere, people would talk, and nobody had done it in an active war zone. To keep a conscript from running, the group needed him to believe he could never go home. The reliable method was to force him to do something horrible, often to a loved one. Blattman would sit through the story — the most horrible thing that could happen to anyone — and hear a voice in the back of his mind saying he already knew this part and needed to get to the symptoms. That dark professional numbness is how you learn who gets stronger and who gets weaker, and how to help. It helps, he says, to come home to someone who has been through the same thing and is a very good counseling psychologist.

Organized crime has been the hard problem in a different way: years of trial and error to talk to people safely, no public org chart for seventeen mafias, a private wiki shared by researchers and journalists. In Medellín, as in some American prisons, gangs govern everyday life. You can take a debt or a neighbor dispute to the police or to the gang, and Blattman's team had to learn what the services cost, whether people like them, what would move a customer to the state, and how gangs respond when the state improves. He will not have those conversations in Mexico. Journalists there are routinely killed for knowing too much, with no consequences; in Colombia and Chicago, he thinks, groups expect the government to make them pay. Nothing in the work, he jokes, has been as risky as the helmetless scooters in Austin — though Fridman notes that a scooter's risk ends when you get off, and a dangerous interview can follow you.

Fridman asks about mortality. Blattman thinks the reason he can do this work is that he does not think about it a lot. He is an anxious person, obsessive about keeping risk low, and he has never been in a life-threatening situation. He has rock-climbed for years with a rope and a helmet and cannot watch *Free Solo*; Alex Honnold's version of the sport is the opposite of his. On the existential question — this thing just ends — he has an amazing capacity not to think about it, which may be a defense. Jeannie's father, a retired evangelical pastor, asked how he could possibly believe there is nothing afterward. Blattman cannot convince himself otherwise. Anything else seems impossible, and for reasons he cannot explain he is at peace with that. If he were more worried, he is not sure he could do the work.

Advice for young people starts with a path he did not have. He went to the University of Waterloo, loved it, and never got the concentrated career advice that elite colleges hand out, which is one reason he writes pages of it on his blog. Students who come to his office already want a vocation: work they would do for free. That is not the only good life. Plenty of people do a job and find meaning in family, volunteering, and hobbies. He started as an accountant at Deloitte & Touche, was miserable, became a miserable person, and quit. He tried three or four or five careers. The tell was that even while accounting he was reading world history and development in his spare time, and eventually realized he could research those things and write those books. Trial and error until it feels right enough. The hard part was quitting.

Tyler Cowen walks out of a movie after half an hour if he does not like it. Blattman used to finish every book and every film. Living childless in New York, he talked Jeannie into more plays with a rule: leave after the first act if it is bad. She thought it was crazy. Then it was freeing. They took more chances and walked out of things all the time. He realized he had been doing the same thing with jobs. Fridman notes the other half of a commitment problem: sometimes the good stuff is in the second act. Blattman agrees there is a balance. When he met Jeannie he had not had a relationship longer than two or three months in eleven years. She heard a man who was not serious. His account was that two or three months is long enough to know, and he would walk away. With her he decided this was it, and it would work. She did not believe him. Now she does.