A Small test of E. H. Carr

When I was doing this week’s assigned reading a quote in Joseph Grieco’s “Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism” struck me. Grieco quotes E.H. Carr’s suggestion that “the most serious wars are fought in order to make one’s own country militarily stronger of, more often, to prevent another from becoming militarily stronger.” I am an ROTC cadet so I could not help but be intrigued by this observation and I spent nearly the rest of my reading of Grieco thinking about it. One of the first things that I felt after reading that line was a need to test Carr’s suggestion. So I decided to apply Carr’s idea to World War II as that is the most serious war in mankind’s history.

I tested Carr’s premise on the major players of WWII, that is the US, UK, Germany, Russia, and Japan. Germany fits Carr’s suggestion because Germany was motivated to fight the war by a desire to establish the Third Reich which would rule for a thousand years. Obviously such a longevity of rule would require military supremacy over Europe which Germany hoped to achieve by invading neighbors and taking on world powers like the US and Russia. Japan attacked the US in simple terms out of a desire to become militarily superior to the United States in the Pacific Theater. The colonial actions and attempts to control oil of the US in Japan’s side of the Pacific were moves that hurt Japanese military strength and influence and so the Japanese attack in the hopes of asserting military supremacy in the Pacific. Russia fought because it was invaded and there is no greater act of asserting military supremacy over another state then to invade it. Russia lost 20 million citizens in WWII reflecting Carr’s assertion that states will fight serious wars to protect their military power. The US fought in WWII first of all because it was attacked by Japan, and the US needed to battle Japan in order to stop it from gaining military supremacy of the US in the Pacific. The US also fought Germany because the US as a state simply could not allow a militarily superior Germany to control Europe as Carr would suggest. The UK also fought Germany for much the same reason. The UK could not allow Germany to have military control over mainland Europe and thus military supremacy of the UK. The major states involved in WWII all saw it necessary to defend and/or assert their military power over or in relation to other states. E. H. Carr would suggest that as a result this would be a “most serious war,” and with death estimates as high as 71 million it certainly was a most serious war. This supports the suggestion of E. H. Carr that states will go to their greatest lengths militarily to pursue or protect their military strength.