The US at war 93% of its existance?

 I found an interesting blog post on Freakonometrics regarding the US and the amount fo time it has been at war since 1776, the year that the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Freakonometrics is edited by Arthur Charpentier. Through some research to gauge reliability, I found that he is a professor of Actuarial Science at the University of Quebec. Charpentier has a PhD in applied mathematics and has co-authored two textbooks on mathematical models of nonlife insurance, as well as being published in a number of peer-reviewed journals. 

In this blog post, Charpentier tested the statistic that 'America has been at war 93% of the time- 222 out of 239 years- since 1776.' To do this, he used computer code to extract information from tables on Wikipedia to see which years the US was engaged in war.

For the US, the following graph was generated:

Periods of US at War

The areas in red are the years that the US was engaged in conflict during that year, and the areas in green are conflict-free years. The computer code found that the length of the years at war amounted to 222 years, proving that at least from the information on Wikipedia, the statistic is true.

He went on to also check the same period of time for France, generating the following graph:

Periods of France at War since 1775

This amounted to 185 years with war, so not as much as the US but still a significant amount of time to be at war. He also checked France since 1337, which is when the Hundred Years' War began, generating this graph:

France years at war since 1337

Within this time period, there were 174 years where France was not engaged in a single war.

Finally, he also takes a look at Canada, which resulted in this graph:

Periods of Canada engaged in war

Compared to the United States and France, there is a lot more green on this graph, showing that Canada has had a much more peaceful existence in comparison. However, no exact number of years Canada was at war were provided by Charpentier. 

I thought that this is a very interesting finding, and relates closely to what we are looking at for our research reports. The US has been a democracy since the declaration of independence was signed, and yet has been involved in conflict 93% of the time since. France, while a democracy today, has not always been a democracy, and yet the graph reveals that it has been involved in a lot of conflict since the end of their previous regime in 1789. Therefore this brings about interesting questions as to whether democracies are more peaceful, and whether the fact that power these states have been great powers (although France is unlikely to still be labeled as one today) skews the statistics on the amount of conflict they have been engaged in. Canada has not been engaged in nearly as much conflict, although it became a state in 1867, much later than either France or the US, and it has not been a great power. i think this shows that when considering if certain regimes are engaged in more conflict, it may not be the regime that is the defining factor, but perhaps the age and the status of the state. However, this blog post is not the most authoritative source, as it uses data from Wikipedia, which is not recognized as an academic source, and the blog post was produced more as an interesting exercise rather than proper detailed research. Therefore, before using this as reliable evidence, much more research and corroboration would be required. 

Sources:

Charpentier, Arthur. (March 19, 2017). The U.S. Has Been At War 222 Out of 239 Years. Freakonometrics. Retrieved October 9, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ov76

Charpentier, Arthur. (2016) Computational Actuarial Science with R. CRC Press. https://books.google.co.nz/books/about/Computational_Actuarial_Science_with_R.html?id=WRhKvgAACAAJ&source=kp_author_description&redir_esc=y

Crook, Malcolm, 'Elections and Democracy in France, 1789–1848', in Joanna Innes, and Mark Philp (eds), Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750-1850 (Oxford, 2013; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669158.003.0007, accessed 9 Oct. 2024.