Wired for War: The Science and History Behind Why Peace on Earth Will Never Come…and Donald Trump Is Full of B.S.
What 3,400 years of conflict, a four-year chimpanzee war, and a boys' summer camp reveal about the promise you'll hear this election.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,026: Thursday, September 17th, 2026.
At the 2024 Republican National Convention, Donald Trump said: "…we will restore peace, stability and harmony all throughout the world."
He also said: "I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created, including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine... and the war caused by the attack on Israel."
During his second inagural address, he said: "My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier."
I’m going to tell you something today that’s going to make some people very…very uncomfortable.
Maybe even you.
But stick with me. Because by the time you finish reading this, you’ll understand something about the world that 99% of the folks around you will never figure out. And you’ll never look at a campaign speech, a peace summit, or a “historic agreement” the same way again.
Here it is:
There will never be global peace.
Not in your lifetime. Not in your grandkids’ lifetime. Not ever.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Gee, that’s awful cynical.” And…you’re right. It is.
It’s also true. And I can prove it.
Let’s Start With the Scoreboard
Historians Will and Ariel Durant spent decades writing an eleven-volume history of civilization. When they boiled it all down in The Lessons of History (1968), they came up with a number that ought to stop you cold.
Out of roughly 3,400 years of recorded history, they counted only 268 years with no war going on somewhere.
Read that again.
That’s less than 8% of the time. The other 92%? Somebody…somewhere…was killing somebody else over land…god… gold…or pride.
That’s not a bad streak. That’s the game.
“But Surely Things Are Getting Better Now?”
I wish.
The Peace Research Institute Oslo tracks this stuff with data from Uppsala University going back to 1946. Their report on 2024 counted 61 state-based armed conflicts, the highest number in their records.
The highest. In nearly 80 years of counting.
And…the money tells the same story. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that world military spending hit about $2.7 trillion in 2024, the steepest annual jump since the end of the Cold War…and…the tenth straight year of increases.
Friend…nations don’t spend $2.7 trillion on things they don’t plan to use.
We’ve Tried. Oh, Boy, Have We Tried.
Here’s where it gets really interesting.
In 1909, a British writer named Norman Angell published a runaway bestseller called The Great Illusion. His argument? The world’s economies were so tangled together that war had become pointless. Nobody would be dumb enough to start one.
Five years later, World War I kicked off.
So…the world tried again. After that war…we got the League of Nations. It was supposed to end war forever. It couldn’t stop Japan in Manchuria, Italy in Ethiopia, or Germany anywhere.
Then…in 1928, more than sixty nations eventually signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact…a treaty that literally renounced war.
Eleven years later: World War II. The deadliest war in human history.
Then came the United Nations in 1945. And…right on its heels came Korea…Vietnam… Afghanistan…Iraq…Rwanda…Syria…Ukraine…Sudan…Gaza...
See the pattern? Every generation builds a bigger…fancier fence. And…every generation…the wolf gets out anyway.
The Real Reason: It’s in the Wiring
Now here’s the part that the politicians, the professors, and the peace-summit crowd really don’t want to talk about.
The problem isn’t treaties. The problem is us.
Look at our closest living relatives. Jane Goodall, who loves chimpanzees more than anyone alive ever has…watched a chimp community in Gombe split in two in the 1970s. Over the next four years…one group systematically hunted down and killed the males of the other.
A war. Among apes. No flags. No oil. No religion.
Researchers at Ngogo in Uganda later documented chimps killing their neighbors over a decade and then moving right in to take the territory.
Sound familiar?
And…don’t tell me our ancestors were peaceful hunter-gatherers living in harmony. At Nataruk, near Lake Turkana in Kenya…scientists dug up the remains of a group of about 27 people who were massacred roughly 10,000 years ago. Crushed skulls. Arrow wounds. Bound hands. Before farming. Before cities. Before money.
Anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, in War Before Civilization…went through the record of pre-state societies…and…concluded that the overwhelming majority of them fought wars…often with death rates that would make modern nations look downright gentle.
Your Brain Picks Teams Whether You Like It or Not
Psychologist Henri Tajfel ran a famous set of experiments in the early 1970s.
He split boys into groups based on something as silly as which abstract painter they supposedly preferred.
Total nonsense groupings.
And…yet…the boys immediately started favoring their own group…and shortchanging the other one. Even when it cost their own group something.
In the Robbers Cave experiment back in 1954…researchers split a bunch of ordinary 11-year-old boys into two camps. Within days…they were raiding each other’s cabins and burning each other’s flags.
Eleven years old. Two weeks at camp. That’s all it took.
Now…scale that up to eight billion people…thousands of languages…dozens of religions…and nearly 200 nations with armies.
Good luck.
The Trap Nobody Can Escape
Here’s the final nail.
Political scientists call it the security dilemma. When one country builds up its defenses to feel safe…its neighbor sees a threat…and builds up too. Now the first country feels less safe. So it builds more.
Nobody has to be evil for this to happen. Everybody can be acting “reasonably.” And the spiral still ends in a fight.
Thucydides saw it 2,400 years ago. He wrote that the Peloponnesian War was made inevitable by the rise of Athenian power…and the fear it caused in Sparta.
Fear. Power. Rivals.
Swap in any two nations on today’s front page and the sentence still works.
And…by the way…there are still more than 12,000 nuclear warheads sitting in the world’s arsenals…according to SIPRI. Nobody keeps 12,000 nukes around because they believe in world peace. Nobody.
Common Areas of Pushback
I’ve been doing this long enough to know what lands in my inbox after a piece like this. So let’s handle it…right now.
1. “But Jack, Steven Pinker proved violence has been going down for centuries.”
Pinker made that case in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Then two statisticians, Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb…ran 2,000 years of war data through tools built for rare…extreme events.
They found no trend you can bet on…and…they concluded their results clash with the “violence is declining” story. Big wars are rare…so a few quiet decades prove nothing. And 2024…set a record for the number of state-based conflicts. Source: Cirillo & Taleb, On the statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflicts (Physica A, 2016)
2. “But Jack, the big powers haven’t fought each other since 1945. That’s the Long Peace.”
That “peace” was held together by thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at each other. It didn’t change human nature; it just raised the price of a mistake. And…the arsenals aren’t shrinking anymore. SIPRI warned in 2025 that a dangerous new nuclear arms race is emerging while arms control is falling apart. Source: SIPRI Yearbook 2025 press release
3. “But Jack, the Gaza deal worked. The hostages came home.”
Yes, it did, and that matters. But the promise wasn’t “the hostages come home.” It was peace for the region “for all eternity.” Months later, the U.S. and Iran were at war. A ceasefire and a signed memorandum followed…and by…July the fighting was back on. Source: Congressional Research Service, The Strait of Hormuz: Security Developments
4. “But Jack, Trump was joking about ending Ukraine in 24 hours.”
He later said so. But…CNN counted at least 53 times he made that promise on the campaign trail, in serious settings, including both 2024 presidential debates. It was a staple of his prepared remarks. Source: CNN fact check: 53 times Trump said he’d end the Ukraine war within 24 hours
5. “But Jack, Goodall’s chimps only fought because researchers messed with them, like feeding them bananas.”
That theory got tested. A team of 30 scientists pooled five decades of data from 18 chimpanzee communities and 152 killings. Killing rates had nothing to do with human interference. The killings looked like strategy…not stress: males attacking neighbors…with the attackers outnumbering their victims about 8 to 1. Source: Wilson et al., Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts (Nature, 2014)
6. “But Jack, the Nataruk massacre has been questioned by other scientists.”
True. Some researchers argue the injuries could have happened after burial. But Nataruk is one site, and the case doesn’t stand or fall on it. Lawrence Keeley’s survey of prehistoric and tribal societies found warfare was common and often deadlier, per person, than modern war. Sources: Nataruk overview, including the critique and Keeley, War Before Civilization
7. “But Jack, countries that trade with each other don’t go to war.”
That’s exactly what Norman Angell argued in The Great Illusion in 1909. His book was a bestseller that inspired study groups. World War I broke out a few years later, among nations that were deeply tied together by trade. Source: The Great Illusion (Project Gutenberg)
8. “But Jack, we have treaties and international law now.”
We had them in 1928, too. The Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced war as a tool of national policy. It had no enforcement and no penalties…and signers carved out exceptions. Eleven years later…World War II started. Today we have the UN…and PRIO still counted a record 61 state-based conflicts in 2024. Sources: Kellogg-Briand Pact background (World History Commons) and PRIO, Conflict Trends 1946–2024
9. “But Jack, the Robbers Cave boys made peace in the end.”
They did, after the researchers engineered it by giving the groups shared problems they could only solve together. Even the “happy ending” had to be staged by adults in charge. And…a later investigation of the study by researcher Gina Perry suggests the real story…was darker…and more complicated than the official version. Source: Gina Perry, The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment
10. “But Jack, that ‘268 years without war’ number is made up.”
The Durants never footnoted it, and that’s a fair complaint. So forget their math…and use today’s. Modern conflict data from Uppsala University and PRIO goes back to 1946…and it shows armed conflict every year…with 2024 setting a record.Sources: Institute for Policy Innovation on the Durant figure and PRIO press release
So What Do You Do With This?
Here’s my advice, and it’s worth more than you paid for it.
Stop buying the fairy tale.
When a candidate promises to “end war” or “bring lasting peace to the world,” smile…nod…and check your wallet. Because what they’re selling…has never been delivered. Not once. Not in 3,400 years.
The smart question isn’t “How do we get global peace?”
The smart question is “Who’s actually got a realistic plan to keep us safe in a world that will never have it?”
Vote for that person.
#HoldFast
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. If you think I’m being too hard on humanity, try this: name one decade in all of recorded history when every nation on Earth was at peace. Just one. I’ll wait.
P.P.S. Forward this to the friend who still thinks the next summit is going to fix everything. They need it more than you do.
Sources
The historical scoreboard
Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968), source of the “268 years without war” figure. Discussion of the statistic and its origins: We Want World Peace — So Why Is It So Elusive? (Institute for Policy Innovation)
Conflict and military spending today
Siri Aas Rustad, Conflict Trends: A Global Overview, 1946–2024 (PRIO, 2025)
PRIO press release: Conflict at historic high
SIPRI press release: Unprecedented rise in global military expenditure
SIPRI, Nuclear risks grow as new arms race looms (Yearbook 2025 press release)
Kristensen and Korda, World Nuclear Forces, SIPRI Yearbook 2025, ch. 6 (PDF)
Failed attempts to end war
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (Project Gutenberg)
Text of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928 (Teaching American History)
Chimpanzee warfare
University of Michigan: Chimpanzee gangs kill for land, new study shows (Mitani et al., Current Biology, 2010)
Wood et al., Female fertility and infant survivorship increase following lethal intergroup aggression and territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees (PNAS, 2025)
Prehistoric violence
European Research Council: Discovery in Kenya sheds light on the origins of warfare (Nataruk; Mirazón Lahr et al., Nature, 2016)
Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization (Oxford University Press, 1996)
Group psychology
Henri Tajfel and “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination” (Britannica)
Sherif et al., Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (full text, Classics in the History of Psychology)
The security dilemma
Very thought provoking, as usual Jack, thank you. Maybe things would be different if women were in charge? Is there history of outcomes in matriarchal societies?
I highly reccomend "A Terrible Love Of War" by James Hillman.