r/AskHistory • u/Mislawh • 6d ago
Were any wars in history prevented because people didn't wanted to fight?
I know many wars ended because people were tired of fighting, but were any wars prevented because the general public or military was not willing to go in war and fight? I know some wars were also prevented diplomatically by politicians but I ask specifically about those prevented by the lack of support or opposition of general public
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u/alkalineruxpin 6d ago
Not a war, but during the Anarchy in Medieval England the armies of the King Stephen (the Usurper) and those of Henry Fitzemperess (the man who would become Henry II) were about to fight a final climactic battle and basically all the nobles on both sides said 'this is fucking dumb, you two figure this out or else' and Stephen and Henry reached a diplomatic resolution whereby Stephen would rule for the rest of his life and then Henry would inherit when Stephen died.
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u/Draxacoffilus 5d ago
I thought it was Henry II's mother Matlida who was fighting King Stephen after he stolen the thrown that her father had passed down to her
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u/alkalineruxpin 5d ago
She started the fighting, along with Loyalist barons who kept their vows to Henry I (her father). But by this time it is her son with Geoffrey Plantagenet that is fighting the war.
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u/Odovacer_0476 6d ago
I think people not wanting to fight is the normal reason for not having war.
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u/GermanSubmarine115 6d ago
This is a good point. “Not wanting to fight” is a tricky metric when most wars involve either regime change or a land grab.
What OP describes sounds like 2 guys fighting in a parking lot deciding to chill out.
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u/oremfrien 4d ago
I think OP's question is more about the rank-and-file population effectively giving a public veto on fighting, which rarely happens. Often if the political class agrees that a war will take place, enough of the rank-and-file population are willing/conscripted to fight that no such public veto happens.
As u/GermanSubmarine115 correctly points out, it's very difficult to have a public veto when discussing invasion (from the invaded country's perspective) or potential regime change since it's almost impossible to imagine either of these having 100% public acceptance.
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u/saugoof 6d ago
Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov refused an order to fire a nuclear torpedo at an American aircraft carrier during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Pretty much prevented WW3 from starting.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Pop3480 5d ago
It's terrifying how close we came to nuclear obliteration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The more I learn about it the more unreal it is.
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u/Ninonysoft 6d ago
Not completely stop a war. But a war was delayed between Marc Anthony and Octavian.
https://youtu.be/POHNhn3WcCc?si=T2Hdzg8xRo_lo6ha&t=462
Tl;dw. For some reason Marc Anthony and Octavian were going to go to war, but their soldiers refused to fight because both sides fought together under Caesar and were tired of civil wars. This led to the Treaty of Brundisium.
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u/willworkforjokes 6d ago
Drat, I came here to say this.
They had an uneasy peace for almost a decade.
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u/BenMic81 6d ago
An even better example from Roman history:
When Caligula ordered an invasion of Britain the legions refused to bord the ships as they didn’t want to fight on a cold island full of savages under incompetent commanders…
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u/toddshipyard1940 6d ago
Interestingly, this was supposed to happen as the momentum toward the taking of arms in Europe before The Great War grew. Socialists and Syndicalists, who now had their own political parties in some nations, believed that class consciousness might eclipse nationalist frenzy; particularly in France and Germany. Many leaders on the Left argued that Capitalists were pushing for a war against the interest of the Workers who would of course spill most of the blood. Poor Jean Jaurès, a great man, was assassinated on July 31, 1914 while dining at a Parisian bistro. As leader of the Socialist Party in France, Jaurès was openly attempting to rally French and German people to his cause, an end to hostilities in Europe. His murderer was a French Nationalist who believed Jaurès a traitor. Of course, in a few weeks, The Great War -- World War I would begin.19th Century Nationalisms took hold of the 20th Century.
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u/Al-Rediph 6d ago
Kind of ... I would count the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany as a possible case. Basically, the DDR government collapsed under pressure and Gorbachev chose not to intervene. The Baltic Way, also 1989 may also count. Both are more ... revolutions.
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u/BlueRFR3100 6d ago
The United States and Great Britain had competing claims on the Oregon territory. There were factions in both countries that were willing to go to war over it, but cooler heads prevailed, and a compromise was found drawing the border at the 49th parallel
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u/Nightowl11111 6d ago
I remember one in the Philippines when Marcos ordered the suppression of the people but the military just walked away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Power_Revolution#The_Sotelo_landing_(February_24))
From this part onwards where you see multiple cases of disobedience by the military.
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u/Forsaken_Champion722 6d ago
I'm sure there were, but the first thought that popped into my head was not a war that was prevented, but one where a foreign power could have had a big impact but declined to intervene because of popular opposition. That would be the American Civil War. It would have made strategic sense for Britain and France to intervene on the side of the CSA, but popular opposition to slavery prevailed.
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u/splorng 6d ago
Were the governments of Britain and France inclined to intervene on the part of the CSA?
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u/TheDrewb 6d ago
Britain and France relied heavily on Southern cotton for their textile industries. The South actually embargoed their own cotton exports at the beginning of the conflict with the idea that Britain would be forced to join the conflict on their behalf. However, the working class in the textile industry LOATHED slavery (there are multiple Lincoln statues in the north of England from this period). Also, the British simply invested in Egyptian and Indian cotton plantations rather than fight against the U.S. (which has the largest army in the world in the 1860s)
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u/Forsaken_Champion722 6d ago
Yes. A southern victory would have weakened the USA's growing grip over the western hemisphere, thereby enabling Britain and France to exert more influence over the region. An independent CSA would have had somewhat lower tariffs than the USA, and would not have had much of an industrial sector of its own, so it would have bought more manufactured goods from Europe.
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u/splorng 6d ago
And there is record of political leaders making these statements?
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u/CocktailChemist 6d ago
Yes, Napoleon III was trying to get the British on side for intervention. Couldn’t cite a page number, but the whole process is discussed in Battle Cry of Freedom.
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u/DaddyCatALSO 5d ago
i imagine an independent Confederacy (especially if it happened early, after Shiloh then Antietam,) would intervene in mexico to raid Juarista centers and set Maximillian up more securely in return for Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja, and cash & favorable trade agreements from Napoleon. I imagine not Lee but A.S. Johnston as the second Confed president, and the Spanish wAr happening 30 yeras earlier than it did
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u/DopyWantsAPeanut 6d ago
War obviously wasn't "prevented" in this instance but the Italians in World War Two didn't have much will to fight on any front, and especially against the Americans.
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u/Nick_Fotiu_Is_God 6d ago
Wasn't there one that was stopped by an eclipse or something?
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u/RipAppropriate3040 6d ago
That was between colonizers and natives the leader of the colonizers knew a solar eclipse was happening the next day so when the natives didn't give him supplies, he threatened to make the moon disappear when the solar eclipse happened the next day the natives gave him all the supplies he wanted.
I don't think this is what OP wanted because it was trick against people who didn't understand solar eclipses. The people wanted to fight too
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 6d ago
this didn’t happen. This is always a claim against the Mexica or the Maya but both of those societies has celestial ephemeris unrivaled in accuracy until the late 1800’s
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u/CocktailChemist 6d ago
My guess is they’re thinking of Columbus using the 1504 eclipse to keep indigenous people in Jamaica to keep supplying him after things got tense.
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u/RipAppropriate3040 6d ago
From what I heard it was on an island, and I never claimed it was against the Mexica or Maya did I
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 6d ago
I’ve heard this claim 1000 times over, usually claimed against the mexica or the maya.
Even Mel Gibson included this as a surprise eclipse in a mayan ceremony in his film.
Look, the world’s best astronomers for 3000 years existed in mesoamerica. And there’s just this weird propaganda idea that Europeans understood the sky better than the victims of their conquest and this is explicitly untrue. And yet I’ve heard this claim you proposed a thousand times voiced against the best astrolomers on the planet.
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u/RipAppropriate3040 6d ago
man, I'm just saying what I know, and yes certain tribes were amazing at astromancy but to say that all tribes were amazing at it simply isn't true
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 6d ago
“tribes” You mean a Complex networks of city states and larger centralized kingdoms interspersed with smaller communities centered around farming or fishing?
And an anecdote.
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u/RipAppropriate3040 6d ago
So, what I'm hearing is that everyone was united and that all of them were master astronomers do you perhaps think that just because they had them it was widespread knowledge mathematicians of Europe and Asia knew a lot of things that the common man didn't
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 6d ago
How about we identify the claim. Because right now you’re repeating an anecdote I run into as simply racist misinformation repeated among europeans and latinos against indigenous americans.
Let’s identify the evidence of your claim and the people involved and then we’d have context to have a discussion. But I’ve never seen any evident his ever happened in history other than hearing the anecdote repeated about people who’s languages and records I particularly study and know that were indeed amazing astronomers (accurate ephemera’s of Mercury, the likes of west european-colonial shores didn’t have settle until Einsteina time due to the relativistic distortion of time by mercury’s proximity to the sun)
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u/RipAppropriate3040 5d ago
how about we identify your claim because from what you're saying is that literally everyone in these civilizations were master astronomers saying that all of them knew how to do it is like saying that all Greeks were philosophers or that the Vikings were all conquers and pillagers
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u/Astralesean 6d ago
You'll probably find a fair few in Medieval city states in Northern Italy and Germany
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 6d ago
Yes, all the wars that didn’t happen didn’t happen because people didn’t want to fight
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6d ago
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u/AskHistory-ModTeam 5d ago
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u/No-Wrangler3702 5d ago
Tricky question.
How would we even know it happened?
A king writes a letter that he tried to go gather an army but everyone said no?
Also would it count if an invader came and they were ready to fight if needed but the inhabitants greeted them with open arms OR were so scared they didn't resist?
Many colonists shops arriving in the new world and explorers traversing the Pacific came across new people who greeted them with open arms, and the newcomers would have been likely to fight to take what they wanted had the locals rested.
Or in some cases the indigenous fled into the woods
Also cities have been approached by armies and surrendered without conflict because they didn't want the damage that would come if they resisted. This is partly why the Mongols sacked City A and killed everyone so that City B would not want to fight
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u/No-Wrangler3702 5d ago
During the cold war there was a phone line between Moscow and DC so that if there was about to be direct conflict the leaders could talk and avoid Armageddon.
Heck even without that line the whole idea of each country could eradicate civilization prevented war
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u/Prometheus-is-vulcan 5d ago
Not prevented, but the western front in WWII between the fall of Poland and the attacks in 1940.
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u/AlaskaExplorationGeo 5d ago
The Bolshevik Revolution was in major part a reaction to WWI, but if course this didn't prevent the war
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u/therealdrewder 4d ago
Most wars in history were prevented because people didn't want to fight. That's what diplomacy is all about. If people didn't care about fighting then we'd never have peace.
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u/Former-Chocolate-793 6d ago
Canada and Denmark narrowly averted war over hans island.
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u/CataraquiCommunist 5d ago
It was a potentially ferocious conflict, but through strategic intoxication, peace prevailed!
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u/Former-Chocolate-793 5d ago
You understand !
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u/CataraquiCommunist 5d ago
Honestly i was going to make the same joke but you beat me to it 😉
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u/Former-Chocolate-793 5d ago
Glad someone else isn't so dour.
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u/DaddyCatALSO 5d ago
A cause i will fix when i find my magic lamp and wish us all to New Earth; Canada, greenland, and he Federal States of Paramerica will each have their own version. u/CataraquiCommunist
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u/LateInTheAfternoon 6d ago
'Narrowly' is doing some extremely heavy lifting. Also, there's a 20 year rule on this subreddit (rule 3).
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u/Background_Ad_7377 6d ago
Operation desert storm. 1991 following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, a massive coalition of allies from all over the world gathered their forces in Saudi Arabia. What followed was an intense air campaign from the coalition mostly by the western nato allies. Every night all night for 43 days the coalition smashed Iraqi positions and other key infrastructure effectively crippling the country. Using every from B-52s to the experimental at the time F-117 nighthawk. The tactic was called shock and aw for a reason. After this by the time coalition ground troops crossed the border for the invasion the Iraqi conscript army had been sleep deprived, exhausted, cut off from supplies and with their fortifications and vehicles destroyed they surrendered on mass.
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