Dan Reiter

On his book How Wars End

Cover Interview of December 31, 2009

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“How states stop the wars they start.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“War is a fundamentally political act. States start wars to accomplish political goals.”

On the second:

“When belligerents fear that the other side will not abide by a war-ending peace settlement, this fear pushes them to reject negotiations and instead pursue the absolute defeat of their adversary.”

united states / political science / germany / wwii / politics / war / cold war / bush george w / civil war / lincoln abraham /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009