War is on the decline
Less than a century removed from the World Wars, it can be hard for people to believe that war is on the decline. But in the long run, deaths from organized political violence are falling, as Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature details. "The rate of documented direct deaths from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide and warlord militias) in the past decade is an unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point," Pinker wrote in an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal.
It's not just Pinker either: analysts like John Mueller, Joshua Goldstein, and John Horgan have persuasively argued that the end of war is in sight. "War is merely an idea," Mueller writes. "Unlike breathing, eating, or sex, war is not something that is somehow required by the human condition or by the forces of history. Accordingly, war can shrivel up and disappear, and it seems to be in the process of doing so."