Strategic Rivals II

Brad Delong has a post up on the US China "rivalry". It contains a lot of good stuff, including examples of where accomodation worked and failed. He argues:

The most important point, however, is that both Germany's and Japan's decisions to go to war were catastrophic mistakes. They lost. Moreover, Norman Angell was right: the decision to risk war was overwhelmingly stupid. They would still have been catastrophic decisions even had Germany or Japan won: nothing Germany could have gained from victory in World War I or Japan from victory in World War II would have been worth the suffering.

Worth it to whom is always the question. For most of human existence, a major cause of premature adult death has been homicide. There is plenty of anthropological and zoological evidence that warfare is a basic instinct of humans and their close relatives, the chimpanzees.

Economics uninformed by biology and anthropology can't explain warfare. For various reasons modern warfare may be less evolutionarily advantageous than in the past, but consider one data point. In all the lands conquered by Genghis Khan, about 8 percent of the population can trace it's male ancestry directly to him or his close male relatives. Genetically speaking, he hit the jackpot - leaving about 800,000 times as many progeny today as his average contemporary. Much more recently, Ibn Saud, who conquered and unified Arabia in the last century, already has probably several thousand times as many descendants as his average contemporary.