This article largely comes from chapter 6 of my book America in Crisis which I wrote over 2019-21. I appended an update reflecting events that have happened since then.
Historian Quincy Wright (1942) proposed the existence of fifty-year cycles in great power wars that appeared to be related to the Kondratieff waves (Goldstein p99). These cycles are illustrated in Figure 1 as periodic fluctuations in war deaths from great power wars. Peaks in war intensity are spaced about fifty years apart like creedal passion periods. The war cycle broke down with the onset of WWII in 1939 which was 180 degrees out of phase and completely contrary to the pattern of previous great power wars. The next war peak, associated with the Vietnam War, fell back into the pattern.
Figure 1. War deaths in great power wars over 350 years. (Goldstein p396-7)
Wright cites psychological factors, among others, as a possible explanation for these cycles: “the warrior does not wish to fight again himself and prejudices his son against war, but the grandsons are taught to think of war as romantic” (Goldstein p102). This idea suggests that outbursts of war may have emerged from alternating martial and pacifist social moods. Such a relation would make the war cycle explainable using the social contagion theory. I previously presented the idea of social contagion, cycles of radicalization arising from periodic epidemics of infectious radical memes. In this application the radical “mind virus” would confer “war fever.” Figure 1 shows a social contagion model output describing outbreaks of war fever that closely correspond to war cycles as measured by war deaths for 7 of 8 of the war clusters. Table 1 shows war phases from this model. These are the war-fever periods when the radical fraction was above average; the intervening eras when it was below average are the peace phases.
Frank Klingberg (1952) described a fifty-year cycle of extroverted versus introverted moods in American foreign policy. His extroverted eras match up well with the peaks in war fatalities (see Table 1), suggesting that Klingberg’s extroverted mood is more-or-less the same thing as the war phases (at least up to the time of time of Klingberg’s study). Also shown in Table 1 are the Kondratieff waves, fifty-year economic cycles mostly clearly shown by monetary measures. As Wright noted, they correspond closely with the war cycles defined by war deaths.
Table 1. War eras, extroverted eras, war phases and Kondratieff upwaves 1600-present
Economic Kondratieff dating from Goldstein p67. Stock market dating from author.
Klingberg’s cycle extended past 1952 by political scientist Ted Goertzel.
According to the social contagion model, the social mood in 1939 should have been pacifistic, with relatively few pro-war radicals active so shortly after the end of the previous war phase. Yet, a major war started in that year. A newly emergent group of nationalist radicals, the fascists, had seized power in the Axis countries. They sought war regardless of what most elites may have preferred. This forced war on the Allied powers, who were less prepared for war because of their pacifist mood. The end of the war was followed by the onset of the Cold War and the Korean War, all of which happened during a period when major war should be unlikely according to the social contagion model.
War fever had arrived by the end of the Korean War and America never demobilized. WWII was the last American war from which the country demobilized. Military spending averaged about 1% of GDP from 1900 to 1916, about 7% from 1917 to 1921 and then fell back to about 1½% from 1922 to 1940. War spending was more than 20% of GDP over 1941-46, and then fell to back to 5% over 1947-50. For both world wars, spending fell to less than a fourth its wartime value once the war ended, showing the impact of demobilization. This changed with the Korean War — war spending rose from the 5% postwar level to about 11% from 1950 to 1954, however spending hardly declined after the war (average level of 9% over 1955-1963). Americans, who had opposed war in the 1930’s, were now comfortable with a permanent war footing during peacetime. Historically, fighting wars required the mobilization that followed declaration of war. With permanent mobilization, there was no longer a need for a war declaration. Under such conditions, it was inevitable that the US would soon be enmeshed in another large-scale war, which came in 1964. The social contagion model applied to war can explain why elites of both parties supported fighting a pointless war in Vietnam, while the same mechanism, applied to political and cultural radicalism, explains the sixties counterculture during the same period.
According to the model, elevated war mood continued all through the Vietnam War, the Carter Doctrine and the beginning of the Carter-Reagan military buildup. After 1982, when the model predicts lower enthusiasm for war, the United States demonstrated a few examples of restraint. Terrorist attacks in 1983 on American targets in Beirut resulted in the deaths of 370 people, 258 of them Americans. This event provided a strong pretext for an American invasion of Lebanon. But there was no such war; the remaining US military forces withdrew the following year. Eight years into the pacific half of the cycle (1983-2008), the US became involved in a war against Iraq, a country which the US had backed in their recent war with Iran. The American president was very assiduous in making the war as costless as possible: casualties were light (146 compared about 58,000 for Vietnam) and allies financed over 80% of the war cost.
After the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War in 1991, the country had relative peace over the next decade, during which military spending fell by a third. In the wake of the World Trade Center attack, the country embarked on a war in Afghanistan notable for the inadequacy of the forces employed. Two years later came another war, this time with Iraq. This war was also notable for the paucity of forces employed (less than half of those employed for the Gulf war). Nevertheless, these two doomed enterprises drove military spending back up to 1991 levels. When a Democratic president who had opposed the Iraq war took office in 2009, many people hoped for a reduction in American war-making. Spending did decline to (almost) where it had been in 2003 by the end of his term, but war-making (on a smaller scale) continued, with new interventions in Yemen (2010), Libya (2011), Syria (2014) and Iraq (2014). According to the war cycle, a new period of war fever began around 2009. Despite decades of failed wars, the American leadership class, gripped in war hysteria, seems to have an insatiable appetite for endless war. According to the model, this newest episode of war fever will last to the mid-2030’s.
Since the development of nuclear weapons, large-scale great power wars have become obsolete. A more relevant measure of the war cycle, at least with respect to America, might be the number of conflicts in which the U.S. is involved. So far during the current war phase (2009-21), the U.S. has been involved in an average of 5.7 conflicts, compared to 1.9 during the prior 1982-2008 peace phase, and 2.8 during the prior 1954-1982 war phase.
Events since 2021 have strengthened the case that we are living through a time of war fever in the great power system. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 a number of commentators have suggested we are entering into a new Cold War. Economics blogger Noah Smith writes “But in any case, despite my wishes, the world is probably entering an era of intense geopolitical competition, the likes of which haven’t been seen at least since the 1970s and probably since the 1930s.” He further expands on this theme in another article:
The Ukraine war means that we are now definitely in a long-term Cold War type struggle with Russia. And the substantial chance of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan sometime in the next few years — as highlighted by the furor over Nancy Pelosi’s planned Taiwan visit — means that there’s a high likelihood that we’ll also soon be enmeshed in a contest with China as well.
I’ve noted that according to Modelski and Thompson’s hegemonic cycle theory, a Global War period emerge is predicted for the mid-2020’s. Global War periods feature intense great power competition from which a new international order emerges. Such periods are preceded by the Coalition Building period, during which the “sides” for the coming Global War take form. China has pursued a military buildup since around 2005 and has developed closer relations with Russia, both of which are characteristic of the Coalition Building period. These developments also support the idea that we are now in a period of war fever.