War or Peace: What history tells us about the true cost of war

From the human toll to the economic wreckage, history shows that war leaves ordinary people paying the price

Now that death-dealing rockets are flying all over the Middle East once again, it might be a good time to ask what is the point of wars?

There’s quite a few going on right now – big ones in Ukraine, Iran and Lebanon, smaller sporadic ones in Palestine, Sudan and Myanmar, and gang’s war-like violence in Haiti, Mexico and Ecuador. Pakistan and Afghanistan are at each other’s throats once again. And Syria continues to be ravaged by revenge and sectarian-related violence.

We can look at the effects of war in several ways, but loss of life is a good start.

Quite apart from the misery of having destruction all around you, in 2025 alone 280,000 civilians died in various conflicts, according to war-tracking research.

The human cost of war

It’s always ordinary people who suffer the most.

Historians of China’s civil wars over the centuries have added up the numbers and concluded that in the 60 years of the Three Kingdom’s battle for supremacy between three dynasties in 220-280AD about 40 million died and China’s population collapsed from 56 million to 16 million. In the seven-year Lushan Rebellion in the mid-700s, at least 13 million lost their lives in a disastrous depopulation. The Qing Conquest of the Ming Dynasty in the 17^th century saw off about 25 million amid a terrible famine.

During roughly the same period as America’s Civil War when about 750,000 soldiers died (and an unknown number of civilians), the Taiping Rebellion accounted for anywhere between 20-100 million deaths in a killing spree by armies on the march.

Here’s a little-known fact dredged up by historians of Genghis Khan and his successors. It wasn’t until the middle of the 20^th century that the population of Asia, eastern Europe and Middle East caught up to the levels prevailing before the Mongol Conquests 700 years earlier.

The economic cost of war

Economically, wars are invariably disastrous except for the military industrial complex that feeds them.

Napoleon’s campaigns ruined the French treasury. Kaiser Wilhelm’s invasion of France in 1914 ended up by impoverishing Germany as it ran out of food, oil, money and, of course, soldiers before leading to the workers’ rebellion that forced him to flee to the Netherlands. Hitler’s war repeated the feat by bankrupting the Fatherland and killing over five million of its young men, all to no avail.

In Asia, between 1950-1953 the much-ignored three-year Korean War left economies of the north and south threadbare. North Korea was saved by Soviet capital while US aid rescued South Korea – but where would you rather live now?

The 20 years of war in Vietnam impoverished a once-flourishing agricultural economy that took decades to rebuild.

And finally, the Iraq war. Distinguished economists like Joseph Stiglitz estimate that it cost the US alone between $1-2 trillion dollars counting interest payments and veterans’ medical bills. The Iraqi economy was of course smashed.

And today? The state of the Russian economy mirrors what’s happening in all these war-wrecked countries. As Putin taxes businesses to the hilt to pay for his war and pays generous signing-on bonuses to recruits so he fills the fatal pipeline to the front, neglects vital infrastructure such as bridges and metros, and is forced to rescue oil companies (instead of the other way around), the country is in what impartial economists describe as an unstoppable slide.

History tells us a lot. In all of these conflicts, the unravelling follows a familiar pattern. Launched with powerful propaganda that stirs up gullible people to embrace a glorious mission, it soon descends into the awful reality of mass deaths, economic hardship and widespread suffering.

In the long run everybody loses.

The historic problem remains: how to wage peace?

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