Summary: Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything by Ruben Andersson and David Keen

Key Takeaways

• Security is one of the most important and challenging issues in the 21st century. It is the ability to protect and promote the well-being and dignity of people and communities, and to prevent and resolve conflicts and threats. But what does security really mean? And how can we achieve it in a complex and uncertain world? In this article, we will review the book Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything by Ruben Andersson and David Keen, two professors of international development and experts on conflict and security. The book is a critical and provocative analysis of why various wars and security interventions have persisted and prospered despite their disastrous failures and costs, and how we can end the war on everything and create a more peaceful and prosperous world.
• If you want to learn more about security and development, and how to challenge and change the destructive policies and practices that fuel the war on everything, you should read this book. It will give you a new and holistic perspective on security and development, and help you find effective and ethical ways to address the complex and interrelated challenges and opportunities that we face in the world.

Recommendation

War is hell, the saying goes. For professors Ruben Andersson and David Keen, the truism evokes a different kind of hellscape. In this insightful analysis, they dissect the “war on everything,” by which they mean misguided fights against problems like terror, illicit drugs and illegal immigration. In every case, the warriors oversimplify the threat, use bogus metrics to measure their progress and then duly claim victory where none exists. Andersson and Keen focus not just on the hypocrisy of political leaders but also on the unintended victims of these wars. You’ll find that their thought-provoking work casts many of society’s issues in a new light.

Take-Aways

• “Wreckonomics” is a perverse process by which a misguided policy targets an intractable problem.
• Wreckonomics policies consist of five parts that describe the process.
• The Cold War set the stage for decades of unwarranted wars.
• The War on Terror played on fears while botching the broader mission.
• Wreckonomics policies create their own destructive momentum.
• The fight against illegal immigration contains echoes of the other wars.
• The War on Drugs is the longest of the wreckonomics misadventures.
• Four strategies can help make wreckonomics policies less devastating.

Summary

“Wreckonomics” is a perverse process by which a misguided policy targets an intractable problem.

In recent decades, Western governments have embarked on a variety of well-funded fights against various scourges. There was a War on Drugs and a War on Terror, along with fights against illegal immigration. But the cures proved worse than the diseases. These wars created unintended consequences without fixing the underlying problems. Despite the obvious failures of these wars, politicians keep fighting them and finding new enemies. Indeed, politics in the United States seem to be dominated by a never-ending search for new foes and a demand from the warriors that everyone become more indignant.

“This habit of waging ‘war on everything’ has spread from the early days of the war on Communism and the war on drugs to ‘fights’ against crime, terrorism, migration and many more complex political problems.”

One theme in these wars is that they underestimate the complexity of the challenge at hand. Politicians view themselves as crime scene investigators – they’re looking for the single culprit responsible for the problem. That mindset led to the manhunts for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In wreckonomics, the good guys need one evil actor to blame, even if the underlying issue has many protagonists. In truth, any social issue is multifaceted and difficult to fix.

“One way of summing up this habit of wreck-and-fix is the old saying ‘If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.”

That leads to another common theme: Wreckonomics policies often are championed by right-wing politicians. While conservatives aren’t entirely to blame for wreckonomics policies, the right has specialized in simplifying and weaponizing complicated issues.

Wreckonomics policies consist of five parts that describe the process.

The wreckonomics ethos can be summed up with the acronym WRECK:

• W is for “war fix” – Warriors sell the miracle of the kill shot. In every wreckonomics policy, an ill-conceived notion that the targeted threat is simple and can be remedied through force dominates. Hitting the problem with a magic bullet will neutralize the threat, the warriors promise. Wreckonomics also provides a fix in that the misguided actions soon become addictive. Once the war starts, stopping it is nearly impossible.
• R is for rigged – Wreckonomics policies are gamed to benefit certain players. In the war on everything, the fix is always in. No one ever comes out and says it, of course, but those crucial players speaking most loudly against the threat at hand are the ones who benefit most from the focus on it.
• E is for externalization – Wreckonomics policies are expensive in terms of blood and treasure, but the interventions never hit the powerful as hard as they hit everyone else.
• C is for cascade – The first three letters of WRECK set the stage for unexpected, unpredictable results. Just as an avalanche starts small and escalates quickly, the wreckonomics cascade is a result of the unacknowledged complexity of the task at hand. Costs quickly balloon, as do the opportunities for players to further corrupt the process.
• K is for “knowledge fix” – Once the war is under way, its proponents set about twisting the truth: Any victories are exaggerated, any setbacks are downplayed. The distortions include overlooking the true costs of the intervention, and ignoring failures and unintended consequences.

The Cold War set the stage for decades of unwarranted wars.

The Cold War wrote the script for the wreckonomics policies that followed. The globe’s two great powers were embroiled in nonshooting wars against the other. Gaming became endemic. In the United States, huge sums flowed to defense contractors. The Soviet Union also ramped up its own armaments industry. Like all wreckonomics policies, the Cold War launched with a real conflict and sincere intentions: Two great powers aimed to spread their divergent ideologies. However, things quickly spiraled. Over the decades, the Cold War turned hot in proxy wars, perhaps most notably in Vietnam, but also in El Salvador, Indonesia and Angola. The specter of colonialism loomed over many of these hot spots, adding complexity to the system. What’s more, the architects of the Cold War lived in Washington, DC, and Moscow, places unburdened with the high body counts that were racked up in shooting wars in the developing world. One US infantry officer wrote the memoir Kill Everything That Moves, a title that summed up how a poor person living in Vietnam experienced the Cold War.

“Seen as a whole, the Cold War involved a very particular – and very skewed – distribution of costs”

As the Cold War sprawled across the globe, propaganda took over. Neither side gave an honest accounting of its victories and defeats; instead, both turned to spin and obfuscation. What’s more, America and the USSR assembled allies who were gaming the Cold War agenda not out of ideological purity but for their own advantage. The end of the Cold War underscored the addictive nature of wreckonomics: Optimists hoped for a “peace dividend” in the 1990s as the huge sums funneled toward arms, soldiers and spies could be redirected to schools and health care. Instead, the United States and Europe continued to spend heavily on their militaries, with the argument that cutting defense budgets amounted to a surrender to global threats.

The War on Terror played on fears while botching the broader mission.

The post-September 11, 2001, fight against global terrorism quickly devolved into a particularly effective version of wreckonomics. A defining feature of this policy was its appeal to emotion, particularly fear. Terror warriors became adept at manipulating public emotions to get what they wanted. The emotional appeal serves as an inoculation against uncomfortable questions – if the war pits good versus evil, then no right-minded person would question how it’s being waged or how widely it’s proliferating. The US War on Terror turned into an all-encompassing effort, as evidenced by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, a bureaucracy that fought not just terror but also drug trafficking and border security.

“In our wars and fights, strong emotions have also effectively been stirred up and manipulated by political and security actors.”

The Cold War created the prime conditions for the War on Terror that followed. A hot war in Afghanistan sowed the seeds of future insurgency. Then, when the Cold War ended and communism faded as an enemy, terrorism moved into the role. Terrorism didn’t become Public Enemy No. 1 until the 9/11 attacks. Then, the war machine sprang into action, with the United States invading Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Wreckonomics policies create their own destructive momentum.

Neither invasion was clearly supported, but both illustrated a reality of wreckonomics: The wars perpetuate themselves. A clear goal of the 9/11 terrorists was to provoke the United States into a heavy-handed response, which then served as evidence that America really was the iron-fisted power that the terrorists had portrayed all along. Afghanistan and Iraq, meanwhile, saw spikes in terror attacks after US troops arrived, acts that only seemed to reinforce the rationale for the American invasion and ongoing presence. As Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said of George W. Bush, “Iraq was not even close to the center of the War on Terror before the president invaded it.”

“Many of the state actors we have considered – in Washington, Moscow, Damascus and Colombo – can cynically claim their wars have been ‘won’.”

As billions flowed into Afghanistan, the country remained unstable. A task force headed by General David Petraeus estimated $360 million in US aid had wound up in the pockets of the Taliban or Afghani criminals. To the credit of the terror warriors in the United States, one goal has been achieved: No attacks have occurred on US soil since 2001. But to hold up this fact as the only measure of success is to miss the broader failures. These include massive spending and a globally disruptive wave of violence not just in Afghanistan and Iraq but in Syria, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

The fight against illegal immigration contains echoes of the other wars.

For decades, the United States had been trying to stem illegal immigration across the Mexican border. Brazen incursions across the frontier near San Diego in the 1990s led American authorities to build fences, which then pushed migration paths into more remote, hazardous terrain. Similarly, in the 2000s, an influx of illegal migrants into Spain led that country to build more fences. The migrants in turn took even more circuitous and dangerous routes to Europe. In true wreckonomics fashion, developing nations bordering wealthy powers figured out how to make money from their geographic position. Mexico partnered with the United States to crack down on illegal entries through Mexico’s southern border. Mauritania accepted investments from Spain, while Libya partnered up with Italy.

“Libya emerged from the international cold thanks in no small part to Gaddafi’s migration maneuvers.”

For opportunists south of the border, the fight against immigration is a lucrative leverage point. Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi grasped Europe’s fears of African migrants streaming in, and he threatened to allow Europe to “turn black” unless he received compensation. The gambit worked. Libya received billions in European aid. One scholar even labeled the strategy “weapons of mass migration.” As the Arab Spring and the Syrian war spurred a crisis, the wreckonomics playbook was in full force. Conservative policymakers embraced overly simplistic solutions that were doomed to fall short. Meanwhile, shrewd actors in the developing world figured out how to make the wreckonomics policies work for them. In Libya, for instance, a militia leader exacted a toll from each boat heading north. Those who declined to pay would be “rescued” at sea – and the boat’s occupants sent to prison camps. The spoils weren’t just for strongmen. Frontex, Europe’s border patrol agency, saw its annual budget soar, going from less than $22 million in 2006 to more than$750 million by 2022.

The War on Drugs is the longest of the wreckonomics misadventures.

In wreckonomics, the protagonists of the misguided policy invariably focus on the wrong measurements of success. In the Vietnam War, the US military leadership concentrated on body counts. In the drug war, the short-sighted focus is on arrest numbers. In both cases, the putative leaders of the policy initiatives are like gambling addicts pulling the lever over and over on a slot machine that’s rigged against them: They believe they’re on the verge of victory, even as the defeats pile up. In other words, the drug warriors themselves are addicted – not to narcotics but to the never-ending cycle of fighting a losing war. The Philippines provides an especially macabre version of the drug war. In 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte urged his citizens to kill drug addicts. In Duterte’s first six months in office, Amnesty International estimated, his regime killed some 7,000 people for drug offenses. In a bizarre twist, Duterte himself was addicted to fentanyl.

“The incentives of the environment in which the drug warriors operate keep pushing them toward compulsive behavior.”

Duterte upped the ante, claiming he wanted to unleash a holocaust that would kill millions of addicts. He paid bounties to police officers who murdered drug users. In a bromance between strongmen, US president Donald Trump praised Duterte’s “unbelievable job.” Duterte’s simplistic, brutal fight took a page from the early days of the drug war in the United States. Policymakers and law enforcement made no effort to understand why some people became addicted or why others entered the drug trade. Instead, they focused on mass arrests and heavy-handed tactics, often racially tinged. It was Richard Nixon who coined the phrase “War on Drugs” in 1971, a thinly disguised jab at his predecessor Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. A decade later, Ronald Reagan doubled down. The result was soaring levels of incarceration, particularly for Black Americans. The uneven penalties for crack cocaine, seen as a drug favored by Black users, were clearly racist.

Four strategies can help make wreckonomics policies less devastating.

The wars on everything are costly. Here’s how to mitigate the damage:

• Encourage dissent – A society on a war footing has a clear enemy, and no space for dialogue nor room for debate. But in the war on everything, the enemy is never clear-cut. That’s why it’s crucial that warriors make way for dissenting voices. Policy debates shouldn’t be stifled by an environment that mimics martial law.
• Honestly assess the true costs – Those who fight wars on everything relish confusion and obfuscation. The “hall-of-mirrors” effect makes it difficult to tell how the war is progressing. To combat this syndrome, societies need robust and honest analyses of who’s really winning and losing in any given war.
• Broaden the inputs – In Colombia, policymakers have shifted that nation’s costly war on drugs only after decades of experience and a willingness to listen to various voices, ranging from drug users and coca producers to academics and intellectuals. Groupthink and willful ignorance are part of wreckonomics; bipartisan solutions are a way to create “coalitions against complicity.”
• Acknowledge complexity – As part of its rhetoric, every misguided policy war boils down the enemy to one overly simplistic factor. Never mind that drug addiction and mass migration are complicated, systemic issues. The warriors want to make it simple and then ignore every factor outside their narrow view.

About the Authors

Ruben Andersson is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of No Go World and Illegality, Inc. David Keen is a professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Benefits of Famine and Useful Enemies.

Genres

Nonfiction, Politics, International Relations, Security, Development, Sociology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Ethics

Review

The book Wreckonomics is a critical and provocative analysis of why various wars and security interventions have persisted and prospered despite their disastrous failures and costs. The authors, Ruben Andersson and David Keen, are both professors of international development and experts on conflict and security.

They examine four cases of long-running and futile wars and fights: the Cold War, the war on terror, the fight against migration, and the war on drugs and crime. They argue that these wars and fights are not only ineffective and harmful, but also profitable and advantageous for various actors and interests, such as politicians, corporations, media, NGOs, and even criminals and terrorists.

They show how these actors and interests have exploited and manipulated the fears, emotions, and incentives of the public and the policymakers, and have created a system of feedback loops, distortions, and games that sustain and justify the wars and fights.

They also show how these wars and fights have eroded the values and principles of democracy, human rights, and justice, and have undermined the prospects of peace and development. They call for a radical change in the way we think and act about security, and propose a four-step approach to end the war on everything: 1) recognizing the costs and benefits of the wars and fights, 2) breaking the cycles of fixation and gaming, 3) creating space for dissent and dialogue, and 4) building alternative coalitions and solutions.

Wreckonomics is an insightful and compelling book that covers a wide range of topics related to security and development. The authors write in a clear and engaging style, using anecdotes, examples, and metaphors to illustrate their points and make them relevant and relatable to the reader. They also write in a balanced and nuanced manner, acknowledging the complexity and diversity of security and development issues, and avoiding simplistic or prescriptive solutions.

The book is well-organized and well-researched, with references, notes, and a glossary at the end. The book is not only a valuable and authoritative source of information, but also a motivating and empowering story of how we can challenge and change the destructive policies and practices that fuel the war on everything.

The book is suitable for anyone who is interested in learning more about security and development, whether they are students, professionals, or curious readers. The book is also a useful resource for anyone who wants to understand the broader social and economic issues and trends that affect and shape security and development.