Byline: Prof C Justin Robinson, Pro Vice Chancellor and Principal, UWI Five Islands Campus
As the world’s media focuses on the fragility of the “peace agreement” between Israel and Hamas and the activities around Venezuela and the Pacific, I was moved to reflect on the ancient quote popularised by Tacitus, “Rome creates a desert and calls it peace.” In my lifetime I have seen the following scenario many times. The cable news anchor leans forward. “We cannot stand by,” he says. “Action must be taken.” A former general nods in agreement. The set glows with crisis, and the message is clear: something must be done, and that something involves missiles and troops. The pundits pontificate, the politicians and their PR machinery run victory laps. This is a script we know by heart. We have watched it play across decades, continents, and political administrations. And each time, we tell ourselves this time is different.
An ancient warning
In 83 AD, Roman legions pushed into the Scottish Highlands pursuing what they called pacification. Before the Battle of Mons Graupius, a chieftain named Calgacus — whose name we know only through Roman sources — allegedly addressed his warriors. The Roman historian Tacitus recorded the speech years later, and whether Calgacus actually spoke these words or Tacitus invented them hardly matters. What matters is what was said about the empire and the language used to justify it. Calgacus described the Roman method with brutal clarity. The empire was driven by greed no territory could satisfy. “Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call [the] Empire,” he declared. And then: “They create a desert and call it peace.” Rome claimed to bring civilization — Calgacus saw exploitation. Rome promised security — he saw subjugation. Rome spoke of law and order — he saw villages burned and populations enslaved. The Romans would call their conquest pax Romana. Calgacus saw only the desert left behind. The battle was a slaughter. Rome declared victory and called it peace. Tacitus himself seemed sympathetic to the critique, perhaps because he had seen enough of the empire to recognise the gap between its rhetoric and its reality.
The eternal pattern
What makes these words endure is that they describe a pattern transcending any single empire. The powerful have always dressed up conquest as liberation, violence as order, domination as peace. The genius of the formulation is that it names both the act and the lie. Not just that Rome creates a desert, but that it calls it peace. The destruction is bad enough; the rebranding is insult added to injury. We are not Rome, but we have inherited its playbook. We still create deserts. We still call it peace. And we still seem genuinely surprised when the people living in those deserts fail to thank us.
The promise and the seduction
The pattern begins with a promise: military intervention will be swift and surgical. Smart bombs will find only the guilty. Regime change will bring democracy. The mission will be accomplished. The language is always careful. We speak of “kinetic action” rather than bombing, “precision strikes” rather than explosions that shatter neighborhoods, “collateral damage” rather than dead children, “nation-building” rather than occupation. The euphemisms make the desert harder to see before we create it. Most crucially, we are assured that inaction is impossible. To do nothing militarily becomes synonymous with doing nothing at all, as though diplomacy, sanctions, and international pressure are not actions but merely their absence. Military force becomes the only option that counts as serious.
Why does this work? Because military action looks decisive. A missile launch provides footage; a drone strike offers the satisfaction of a problem eliminated. Negotiation happens behind closed doors over years. When we bomb, at least we’re doing something. Because it’s politically safer than admitting complexity. A leader who launches strikes appears strong; one who pursues patient diplomacy appears weak, even if the diplomacy ultimately succeeds. We have trained ourselves to hear certainty as wisdom. Because the costs are deferred and invisible to decision-makers. The troops who serve are a tiny fraction of our population. The civilians who die are an ocean away. The instability we create becomes someone else’s problem, another country’s forever war. By the time the desert is apparent, we have moved on to the next crisis.
The desert we create
But the desert always comes. Not immediately — not in the triumphant days of “shock and awe.” The desert emerges in the aftermath, when the promised transformation fails and something worse grows in its place. Power vacuums filled by extremists. Infrastructure is destroyed faster than it can be rebuilt. Entire generations radicalised not by ideology but by memory — a wedding party obliterated, a hospital bombed, a father who never came home. Refugee crises that destabilise regions. Enemies we create in the act of trying to eliminate enemies. The desert is a child who grows up stateless and furious. It is a city without electricity or hope. It is the young man who joins the militia because the missile strike killed his brother and someone needs to pay. It is the society that learns power comes from the barrel of a gun because that is what we taught them. We rarely see the desert we create because we stop looking. The cameras pack up and go home. The pundits move on to the next crisis. Years later, when disaster becomes undeniable, we treat it as a separate event, divorced from the intervention that set it in motion. We suffer from collective amnesia that allows us to be surprised, again and again, by the consequences of our actions.
The peace we declare
And yet we call it peace. Because the “dictator” has fallen (and the country is in chaos). Because the terrorist leader is dead (and the organization has metastasised). Because we have withdrawn our troops (and left behind catastrophe). Because the peace treaty has been signed (by one faction and the core issues not addressed). Because, after all, we meant well. The peace we declare is the peace of victors who write the first draft of history, who frame the intervention as noble even as the rubble smolders. It is the peace of those who will not live with the consequences. It is the peace of distance and forgetfulness. “Mission accomplished,” we say. “We gave them freedom,” we say. And already, somewhere, another voice is calling for action, for strikes. Because surely this time will be different.
Breaking the pattern
What if we acknowledged that military force is not a magic wand that transforms complex realities into simple victory? What if we recognised that some problems have no military solutions, and admitting this is wisdom, not weakness? What if we invested a fraction of what we spend on bombs into patient diplomacy? What if we acknowledged that preventing wars is harder than starting them, but infinitely more humane? What if we measured success not by enemies killed but by conflicts resolved, not by regime changes but by functioning societies? Every time we are told military action is necessary, inevitable, the only option, we face a choice: to repeat the pattern or to break it.
The reckoning
Calgacus was describing Roman imperialism, but he was also describing something universal — the human capacity for self-deception, for dressing up destruction as deliverance. His words have survived two millennia because they describe a pattern that recurs whenever the powerful convince themselves that violence is not just necessary but righteous. We keep creating deserts. We keep calling it peace. Not because we are doomed to repeat history, but because we choose to. Because the seduction of military action is powerful and the cost of resisting it is high. Because it is easier to bomb than to understand, easier to destroy than to build, easier to call it peace than to create it. The question is not whether Calgacus was right about Rome. The question is whether we will prove him right about us.
