Zealotry Destroys Peace

Monsters can’t be bargained with, the zealots tell us, so the fight must continue no matter what.

Stephen Walt discusses how zealotry makes peace harder to achieve:

Unfortunately, political leaders routinely frame disputes with other countries in highly moralistic terms, thereby turning tangible but limited conflicts of interest into broader disputes over first principles. As Anderson University’s Abigail S. Post argued in an important article in the journal International Security last year, leaders engaged in international disputes use moral language to rally support at home and abroad and to enhance their bargaining position vis-à-vis their adversaries. When they do, disagreements over potentially divisible issues (such as disputed territory) turn into zero-sum conflicts between competing moral claims. Unfortunately, moral principles are hard to abandon or relax without inviting accusations of hypocrisy and charges of betrayal. Once governments use moral arguments to justify their positions, cutting a deal becomes much harder, even when it would be in everyone’s interest.

We can see this zealotry on display in many conflicts today. Hardliners will insist on total victory and they will set maximalist goals when defining what victory means, and they call anything that falls short of that failure and humiliation. The hardline insistence on such victory rarely leads to military success, but it is effective in prolonging and intensifying conflicts when they could have been ended much sooner by settling for less. Zealots are never satisfied with peace, because eventually every peace agreement requires some concessions to the other side and because peace permits the other side to continue existing.