I wrote only to refute your characterization of the character of the Vietnam War.

But per your request, having read your other piece, I think every war teaches people, because it is different to live through it (in person or through current news stories) than to read it in a history book. But that isn’t enough to end wars.

And, the purpose of war is not to teach. It is to win what could not be achieved by other means.

The Marshall Plan was brilliant, but it worked because it was applied to countries that already had cultures evolved enough to accept it and learn from it. And it was only part of what changed Germany — it also required, after the war, dictatorial powers exercised by the allies for awhile.

More interesting I think was the allied occupation of Japan. Japan’s culture had been captured by racist militarists in a way that exceeded the Nazi indoctrination of Germans, and was consistent with Japanese history — never democratic. Japan had to be nuked and occupied, and it was changed by a military dicatorship headed by McCarthur. It was not rebuilt the way Europe was.— it was a forced restructuring of society, accompanied by a realization by Japanese of the true horror visited upon them. They have yet to really appreciate the horror they inflicted on others, I think. It has been a few decades since I was last in Japan, and nationalist racism(of the same form as current official Chinese racism) was strong there — may still be, although I suspect less so among the young.

Also of interest is South Korea. South Korea is a successful, free democracy, albeit with a bit too much power held by oligarchy of families (chaebols). But when we ended that war (won it in my opinion, in that we returned it to pre-invasion status quo), South Korea didn’t become democratic in spirit or in form. It was a military autocracy until relatively recent times (1987) — more recent than my last visit there. But it evolved into a true democratic state, one which really, really does not want war.

But getting to ending warfare… we tried to help Russia, but it didn’t work. Russia views our efforts very differently, as some sort of imperialism used to keep Russia inferior. But that was not the intent at all. I’d say that well intentioned economy building advice that we gave was simply inappropriate for a society that was relatively primitive in much of the country, had never had a functioning democracy, and was far more used to corruption, especially under the communists, than to the fairness a free market and democracy required.

The difference is Russian history. And Putin has used that to great advantage in creating yet another fascist, imperialist dictatorship. In my opinion, Russia is just not ready for democracy or peace.

And that is true of many cultures. We tried to bring China into the free world, and failed miserably. We enriched them, which only enabled the fascists there to wield more power, especially military power. China is no better today than Nazi Germany, and it would have no qualms about using force to achieve its ends.

War is a natural behavior of humans. Civilization is an overlay on that, in which we try to channel or suppress a number of behaviors that are seen, at least in liberal societies, as wrong or harmful or unproductive.

But we haven’t gotten even close to that as a species. It exists in some countries, with the best histories of liberal democracies mostly in the UK and a number of the former UK colonies (the Anglosphere). It is somewhat more fragile in the EU countries, witness Hungary’s devolution towards fascism, for example, and the corruption inherited from communism in Ukraine, which may have been reduced by the Zelensky government.

So I don’t think we can “end war” until societies evolve towards not wanting to force their will on others by force. I do not know of a way to accomplish that.

In the meantime, I am all for one war: the defense, by force, of Ukraine — a fledgling democracy which was attacked out of pure imperialism and Russian slavic racism.

But war is horrible — the worst solution but sometimes the only one. My Lai was an example of the horror, although one has to be fair: Americans and other Western countries do their best, as individuals and as a professional military, to minimize war crimes and to minimize the deaths of innocents. My Lai was stopped by one officer who risked his life to land his helicopter between the rogue US troops and some civilians they were readying to massacre.. My Lai was an exception. What is happening in the Ukraine is not — those sorts of war crimes are more typical of mankind’s history (look at Japan’s war crimes in China and in WW-II for example).

Sorry for rambling, but it is a complex problem and a complex history!