It is not resources or land.
On March 20, 2003, the United States launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).” We all know the official narrative — Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.” Apparently, Hussein was cooking up nuclear warheads in his basement like some kind of James Bond villain. We had no choice. We had to invade. The world was at stake.
Except none of that was true.
What there was, however, was George W. Bush with a vendetta. Saddam had once tried to assassinate his daddy, and like any good son of Texas, Bush responded the way anyone would — with a multi-trillion-dollar war and a few hundred thousand body bags. Freud would have had a field day.
The Iraq War isn’t an isolated case. Most people assume wars are about oil, strategy, protecting borders, acquiring land and resources, or simply keeping the bad guys at bay. You know, practical things. Sure, reasons often overlap. When nations go to war, it is never straight-line thinking.
So, Historian Richard Ned Lebow decided to examine those reasons. He found one common thread.
Why Nations Really Go to War?
Historian Richard Ned Lebow analyzed 94 interstate wars since 1648. Surprisingly, he found most wars aren’t about material gain or land.
Lebow found that the most common reasons nations go to war are status, security, and revenge.
Lebow’s research, compiled in Why Nations Fight, found that 58% of wars were primarily motivated by standing or status, 18% were motivated by security, and 10% were fought for revenge. Only 7% of wars were fought over material interests. That means the most common cause of war isn’t oil, land, or fear — it’s ego with a flag.
There’s a fancy Greek word for this: thumos. It’s the part of human nature that craves recognition. It’s what makes a guy buy a Ferrari when he’s going bald or leads a woman to get breast implants when bits start to sag. And sometimes, thumos causes an entire country to say, “Oh, you think we’re weak? We’ll show you weak.”
Now, to be fair, Lebow acknowledges that nations often wrap their wars in logic. They say they’re protecting borders, securing trade routes, or rescuing kittens from tyranny. And sometimes they are. Resources matter. Strategy matters.
However, often these rationales are camouflage.
Take Vladimir Putin. On the surface, his invasion of Ukraine looks like a cold geopolitical calculation. Ukraine is a major energy transit route. Gaining control (or instability) would increase Russia’s leverage over Europe’s gas supplies. Cha-ching.
And sure, that is the wrapping paper. But underneath it all is wounded pride. Ukraine kept flirting with the West, and Putin didn’t like that. It was like watching your ex post pictures with someone taller, richer, and better at democracy.
Now, Putin’s not just playing Risk on a Soviet nostalgia board. He’s trying to be the man who brings Russia back to its “rightful” place. He wants statues, songs, and possibly a cologne named after him. This is what happens when you give a KGB agent with a giant ego a nuclear arsenal and too many shirtless photo ops. You get a man who wants to redraw borders to match the bruises on his wounded pride.
Putin’s ambitions run deep. He wants to be remembered not as the bureaucrat who managed a declining petrostate, but as the man who “restored” Russian greatness. In other words, the ego isn’t just part of the plan — it is the plan.
So yes, war can be about geography. But it’s also about geography’s sexier, more unstable cousin: identity.
Examples of Wars Fueled by Pride and Payback
Institutions and states don’t have emotions. But the people who run them can often be petty, insecure, and ego-driven. And when those people have control of armies, bad things happen. Here are a few examples.
The Peloponnesian War — Athens vs. Sparta, Ego Edition
The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) wasn’t about security. It was about Athens acting like the prom queen and Sparta saying, “Not on my watch, sweetheart.” Athens had turned the Delian League into its personal slush fund and cultural fan club. Sparta, the laconic muscle bro of ancient Greece, got sick of Athens bragging about its democracy and pottery.
When Athens got too big for its britches, Sparta wasn’t having it. This hurt ego led to a 27-year-long war that reduced the Greek world to rubble. Security concerns? Maybe. But mostly, it was a brutal contest for dominance.
What followed was a heck of a lot of backstabbing, sieges, and general nonsense. Thucydides, who literally wrote the book on it, said the real cause was fear — Sparta’s fear of losing status to a rising Athens.
The Spanish Succession: Who Gets to Wear the Fancy Hat?
In 1701, Europe collectively lost its mind over who would inherit the Spanish throne after Charles II died without an heir. The main contenders? The French Bourbons and the Austrian Habsburgs. Both sides feared that if the other won, the balance of power would tilt, leading to a European superpower.
But underneath the diplomatic hand-wringing was the simple question of royal honor. No one wanted their dynasty to be the one that “lost Spain.” So, rather than accept a compromise, they dragged most of Europe into the War of the Spanish Succession — 13 years of battles, burned cities, and baffled peasants.
It ended in 1714 with the Treaty of Utrecht, which settled some territorial disputes but didn’t do much for the real issue: inflated dynastic egos in powdered wigs.
The War of Jenkins’ Ear — Yes, His Ear
Ever heard of this one? Its official name was the War of the Austrian Succession, but that’s a mouthful, so let’s just call it the dumbest war ever.
In 1731, British captain Robert Jenkins claimed Spanish coast guards cut off his ear while searching his ship in the Caribbean. Eight years later, in 1739, Britain declared war on Spain. Why the delay? Because Parliament suddenly needed a good excuse to assert naval dominance and distract from domestic issues.
The ear, which Jenkins allegedly preserved in a jar and showed to Parliament, became the mascot for a conflict that was less about cartilage and more about colonial bragging rights. It was a war about trade, tariffs, and who got to boss around the West Indies. But it was packaged as righteous revenge for one man’s ear.
The Franco-Prussian War — Bismarck’s PR Campaign
In 1870, Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Prussia, wanted to unify the German states under Prussian rule. France, under Napoleon III, was seen as the final obstacle. So Bismarck edited a diplomatic telegram — the Ems Dispatch — to make it sound like the French ambassador had been insulted.
France’s Napoleon III took the bait and declared war because, well, he couldn’t be seen backing down. The result? A humiliating French defeat, the capture of Napoleon himself, and the birth of a unified German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. All because two leaders needed to look tough.
The American Civil War
(Note: Lebow didn’t include civil wars in his analysis of why nations go to war.)
The American Civil War wasn’t just a hissy fit over cotton and human bondage (though, yes, slavery was the economic engine and moral sinkhole at the center of it all). No, beneath the musket smoke and mint julep breath, there was a piping-hot dish of revenge served cold, or, in this case, re-heated over four years of national carnage.
After Lincoln won the 1860 election without carrying a single Southern state, the Southern elite viewed the rise of abolitionism not only as a threat to their plantations but as a personal insult to their manhood, honor, and God-given right to sip lemonade while someone else did the sweating. Sure, the end of slavery posed a real economic panic for plantation owners. (Losing free labor does tend to ruin a business model.) But it was the cultural slap across the face that really lit the cannon fuse. In the South’s eyes, the North had snatched away their social supremacy and paraded it around like a prize hog at a county fair.
So, what did the South do? Like any jilted aristocrat with access to cannonballs, they tried to take it all back. Not just their property, but their pride, place, and peculiar institution.
World War I — A Global Bar Fight
In 1914, a teenager named Gavrilo Princip shot an archduke. That should’ve been a minor diplomatic headache. Instead, it kicked off a global war.
The archduke’s murder cascaded into a standoff. Austria-Hungary couldn’t let Serbia get away with it. Germany wanted to prove it was a big deal. Britain and France wanted to keep Germany in check. It was less about safety and more about, “Oh, you think you can push us around?”
By 1918, over 16 million people were dead, including 9.7 million military personnel and 6.8 million civilians. And what did it solve? Basically nothing. The war ended with a treaty so bitter it created the sequel.
World War II: Versailles, Vengeance, and Very Bad Decisions
World War II is often portrayed as a fight against fascism. True. But not the whole story.
Let’s rewind to 1919. The Treaty of Versailles essentially handed Germany a humiliation sandwich with a side of debt. It forced Germany to accept full blame for World War I, pay reparations equivalent to hundreds of billions today, and surrender territory.
Enter Hitler, who didn’t rise to power by offering economic spreadsheets. He promised revenge, honor, and the restoration of national pride. Nazi propaganda leaned heavily on the theme of verlorene Ehre — lost honor. In 1933, polls showed that Germans supported Hitler’s foreign policy objectives, including rearming the military and defying Versailles.
By the time Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Hitler was playing a high-stakes game of historical payback. Honor wasn’t just a side dish; it was the main course.
“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”― John Steinbeck
Can We Stop Fighting for Stupid Reasons?
Wars aren’t started by rational people thinking through the best way to keep their citizens safe. According to the United Nations, 90% of war casualties are civilians. (Other studies put the average civilian casualties closer to 60%.) Either way, war is bad for the little people.
Can we predict the next war? Probably not. Unfortunately, wars rarely come with a single motivation. But we can at least recognize the warning signs. When a leader starts puffing up his chest, demanding respect and gratitude, or making vague threats about national pride, “retribution” and “poisoning the blood of our nation,” maybe…just maybe, it’s time to sit up and pay attention.
Because here’s the truth: Wars don’t start when tanks roll. They start when one man in power feels small and decides the only cure is to make someone else bleed for it.
So the next time a puffed-up politician demands respect, maybe don’t give him your sons, your daughters, or your taxes. Give him therapy. Or better yet, a very long nap and maybe a shot of that impulse-controlling “fat drug.”
Or, as Steinbeck put it, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”
And yet, we keep building smarter bombs for dumber men.
Comments:
Peter Clark
Elizabeth May, an American born Canadian MP, made a comment during a debate about whether Canada wanted to buy F35s to replace our aging F18s. The price tag was hundreds of billions of dollars. She opined,
“Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more effective to spend just a few million dollars to train decent diplomats and avoid the wars altogether”?
She’s right of course. Most wars don’t actually have a winner, they have two losers. It just one of the losers is less battered than the other one.
