War rhetoric is everywhere in our volatile politics: from Ukraine to the resurrection of the war on terror in Gaza, from the ‘wars’ on human smugglers, drugs and crime, through to more metaphorical culture wars, ‘war on motorists’, on a virus – even on climate change. Keir Starmer accuses Rishi Sunak of prosecuting a ‘one-man war on reality’ while ‘anti-woke’ campaigners decry a war on Christmas. Some of these wars are spurious (last time we looked, Christmas is still happening). Others are all too real.

What’s clear is that war rhetoric is attractive either to rally one’s troops or to smear one’s opponents. No surprise: war mobilises. If a politician were to proclaim ‘a mild push on climate change’ or ‘a moderately important attempt to curtail migration,’ they’d get few plaudits from the ranks. But, as my colleague Ruben Andersson and I found in our book Wreckonomics, our addiction to waging (or announcing) war on everything has brought underhand benefits for politicians and massive problems for the rest of us.

In all the war talk lurks the danger of crying wolf

For a start, politicians frequently use the spectacle of war to direct attention away from their deeper failures. Israel’s Gaza onslaught, after major security failings, may be a notable example. In the more metaphorical war on smugglers, we might think of Sunak’s renewed noises over small boats in face of record immigration figures. Diversionary tactics abound. Just two weeks after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld suggested: ‘Look, as part of the war on terrorism, should we be getting something going in another area, other than Afghanistan, so that success or failure and progress isn’t measured just by Afghanistan?’ The Iraq invasion followed, with New Labour support. Amid the subsequent quagmire, one former Foreign Office worker told me of pressure to ensure things were seen to be working in Afghanistan so as to provide a distraction from things going so badly in Iraq.

Another problem rears its head here: war – whether in rhetoric or practice – tends to create more enemies. When politicians sought to frame measures against Covid-19 as a just war of sorts, opponents reacted and belligerence grew. As for real war, figures from the Global Terrorism Index show that in the context of the multi-trillion dollar global war on terror, the number of terrorist attacks rose rapidly: from around 3,300 in 2000 to almost 30,000 by 2015. Israel would do well to heed the warning.

War creates rich opportunities for those who want to game it for purposes of their own. The classic case is Vietnam, where American General William Corson observed that the South Vietnamese government’s power was ‘based on the US presence, and since that in turn is based on the level of violence it is to their advantage to orchestrate the war at the appropriate level.’ More recently, regimes from Syria to Sri Lanka and China have used the idea of a ‘war on terror’ as convenient cover for repressing their own populations. Meanwhile, from Gaddafi’s Libya to Turkey and Niger, ‘partner states’ have been able to use the threat of mass migration to leverage aid money and to carve out immunity for repression.

To these perverse incentives, we can add one more: the ease with which its costs can be exported to others. In 1935, another US general, Smedley Butler, denounced war as a racket ‘in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.’ Consider the war on drugs, which in the words of one report, has generated ‘mass incarceration in the US, highly repressive policies in Asia, vast corruption and political destabilisation in Afghanistan and West Africa, immense violence in Latin America, an HIV epidemic in Russia, an acute global shortage of pain medication and the propagation of systematic human rights abuses around the world.’ And all this at huge expense to the public purse.

War ushers in a self-righteousness that quashes dissent and constrains debate over its real costs. For years, the staggering failure in Afghanistan and Iraq was effectively hidden away. ‘We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,’ admitted Douglas Lute, the Afghan war czar under the Bush and Obama administrations. For too long, no one dared call the emperor naked while he was leading his troops into battle. We see a similar pattern in rhetorical wars too – including in the fight against Covid-19 via lockdowns, whose highly unequal distribution of costs worldwide was frequently seen as beyond the scope of civilised discussion. ‘Net zero’ risks reproducing this, fuelling an unsavoury politics of grievance. Both those on the left and right would do well to dial down their righteousness and listen.

More insidious than the quashing of dissent is the manipulation of the information environment that war invites. In the war on terror, beating Isis became a ‘win’ – even though Isis owed its existence to the war itself. In the war on drugs, policymakers reel off metrics on narcotics intercepted and smugglers arrested, but the trade keeps growing. At the borders, each crackdown (at Calais, in the Mediterranean) promises a political pay-off but also stores up future trouble (the small boats, the Atlantic crossing). When wars are declared, politicians need to point so a ‘win’, but all too often this means we frequently end up in a hall of mirrors where underlying problems are renewed and where failure becomes a peculiar kind of success.

In all the war talk lurks the danger, too, of crying wolf. When a real war happens, whether in Ukraine or the Middle East, we may not fully recognise it for what it is — not least when it comes to the dangers of escalation and the quashing of dissent.

We must wean ourselves off the war fix. By opening our eyes to the real costs and ill-gotten benefits from both rhetorical and real wars, we have a chance to ditch the addiction. That will help us to focus on the more peaceful solutions that only emerge when dissent and debate are allowed a proper place in politics.

Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything, by Ruben Andersson and David Keen, is out now