Book Review: A Farewell to Wars by Hans Blix

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This book review first appeared in the Norwegian journal Samtiden, September 2024. This is an AI-assisted translation and is reproduced with the author's permission.                      

Hans Blix, A Farewell to Wars. The Growing Restraints on the Interstate Use of Force, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

A Farewell to Wars is a monumental work about interstate use of force and armed intervention in the domestic affairs of others. The author, Hans Blix, draws long historical lines up to the World Wars, and then concentrates on the period after 1945. His conclusion is that the world is moving away from the crudest forms of warfare. The incentives for interstate use of force are diminishing; the restraints are growing; and conquest of territory has become old-fashioned. Armed interventions are on the decline as well. Instead, states exert pressure and influence by other means, e.g. by sanctions, covert operations and cyber-attacks.

Hans Blix has had a long life as Swedish diplomat and foreign minister, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and of the UN Monitoring and Verification Commission in Iraq (UNMOVIC). He is highly respected and well known worldwide and in a unique position to write about this subject. More than any other of his many books and countless texts, this is his comprehensive summary analysis of issues of war and peace.

The book was completed after Russia attacked Ukraine, but before the war in Gaza. Blix sees the aggression against Ukraine as an erratic phenomenon that does not undermine his conclusion. Presumably, he would say the same about the wars in the Middle East. But his analysis is challenged, particularly because these wars are battles for territory. The future will tell whether they are temporary deviations from the historical trend or the beginnings of a new direction in world affairs.

The book analyses a range of reasons why the scope for use of force has shrunk. Gradually, the state system has taken hold: colonialism has been dismantled, new states have found their place, and the enthusiasm for secessionist movements is weak. Nuclear deterrence calls for caution between the powers, economic interdependence has increased, and the technical possibilities for international communication, transborder opinion formation and time-urgent diplomacy have grown radically. These and other conditions mean that the incentives for use of force have decreased. In most regions of the world, it is the lack of incentives more than the normative restraints that explain the absence of war between states. Having long experience in summarizing complex matters, Hans Blix does it with mastery.

It is primarily in civil wars and interventions that the normative limitations still fail to prevent the use of arms. International law does not permit the use of force for regime change and attacks to stop other countries' nuclear programs, as Israel tried in Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007), are also not permitted. But in the Middle East, many armed interventions nevertheless happen without much of a reaction.

The "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, which was adopted by the UN in 2005, aims at protecting people against gross abuse by their own governments. It builds on the fundamentally important Charter provision that military means are allowed only in self-defence or when authorized by the Security Council. But when SC Res 1973, authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent atrocities, was (mis)used in 2011 in order to remove Gaddafi, i.e. for regime change, it suffered a severe setback. Blix introduces us to the development of international law and the role of the UN system, subjects on which he is eminently qualified.

The analysis of incentives and restrictions is based on factual conditions and prevailing thinking. For sure, there have always been other opinions about important issues—in many cases that goes for Blix, too—but as long as they have not had any decisive impact on international affairs, the book has no space for in-depth discussion of them. The book’s lofty ambition both in time and space means that the analyses are centred on the most important developments One of them, the significance of international opinion formation, is touched upon only sporadically, but is highlighted towards the end. Public opinion—"the public mind”—has been pressing for limitations on states' behaviour for almost 200 years and has become increasingly important over time.

While the incentives to use force have decreased and the restrictions have increased, the great powers have turned to non-military means instead. For example, the US use of sanctions has grown enormously. Economic sanctions have become so common that they are sometimes imposed almost automatically. Secondary sanctions, aimed at third countries to compel them to comply, are an exclusive US domain. Blix could have done more to elaborate on their role in contemporary affairs. If you are branding your opponent, it becomes more difficult to get him to the negotiating table. Sometimes, sanctions are combined with threats of use of force: the clearest example is Iran, which is subject to massive sanctions while labouring under the threat of being bombed.

The same can be said about covert operations where both civilian and military means are included, often in ways that gives the initiator the opportunity to deny involvement. Here, the big powers' track records are long. The biggest of them has the longest list.

Usually, the UN has shied away from softening and weakening the interpretations of Charter rules. It has stayed with the original readings in the hope that they will eventually be accepted. Blix commends the UN for that. Some adaptations have naturally been made over the years, but also some clarifications of a restrictive kind. A relevant example is an authoritative resolution from the General Assembly which clarifies that border violations and armed retaliation—vendettas of the type we are seeing in the Middle East these days—are not permitted. For good reason, because such chain reactions can get out of control and end in major wars. Too often, however, the resolution does not have enough weight to prevent such chain reactions.

Blix emphasizes that those who have broken the rules have tended not to question them per se but have tried to explain that in reality violations have not happened or sought legitimacy for what they have done in some other way. In this connection, there has been a recent tendency to circumvent the rules in new ways. The US, the UK and others who use the term "rules-based order" emphasize human rights, self-determination, territorial integrity, economic cooperation and other values ​​on which international law is based, but not the legal documents that define what the law specifically entails. They content themselves with mentioning the underlying values ​​and not the agreements that flesh out what the obligations mean. This opens a space where double standards can emerge. The EU does the same in joint statements with the USA, but the great majority of European countries still insist that international relations must be based on international law and make that explicit on appropriate occasions.

In his international leadership roles, Hans Blix has made major contributions to a more peaceful world, and the book is an impressive combination of penetrating analysis and personal experiences. Anyone interested in international politics a little beyond the ordinary will benefit from reading it. With the table of contents as a guide, chapters and sections can also be read individually.

Related articles by this author:

NATO, deterrence and the Ukrainian conflict (3-minute read)

Preparations for nuclear-war fighting and the demise of arms control (10-minute read)

Sverre Lodgaard has been a senior research fellow and former director (1997–2007) of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). He is also a former senior research fellow of the Toda Peace Institute in Tokyo.