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Argument: Powerful democracies are frequently aggressive and violent

Issue Report: Democratic peace theory

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James Ostrowski. “The Myth of Democratic Peace: Why Democracy Cannot Deliver Peace in the 21st Century”. LewRockwell. Spring 2002 – Imagine you are visiting an aquarium that features a large shark tank. There are 100 sharks in the tank. Ninety-five of the sharks are either docile or too small to injure a human. There are, however, five hungry great whites. Certainly, the overwhelming majority of the sharks are harmless, but would you swim in that tank? Similarly, we should not ask, are democracies peaceful?, but is the United States peaceful? Are the other militarily powerful democracies – United Kingdom, France, India, Israel, peaceful? History shows they are not. See, Figure No. 6. As Gowa writes, “Theory suggests and empirical studies confirm that major powers are much more likely than are other states to become involved in armed disputes, including war.”

Another factor which skews the analysis is the definition of war used for statistical analysis by researchers: any conflict with more than 1,000 combat deaths. It is absurd to lump all such wars together for statistical analyses as if they were people, apples, or coins. The better way to proceed is to ask which were the most violent conflicts and which wars caused the most long-term damage to civilization. Certainly, the two most destructive wars in the last 100 years were World War I and World War II. The American Civil War was one of the bloodiest wars of the 19th century with 620,000 combat deaths and thousands of civilian war-related deaths. As Rummel observes, the Civil War was the most violent war involving western states between the Napoleonic wars and World War I.18