A) Foreign policy gets coopted by industry and resource wars

The pivotal assumption of the theory is that war is the result of conflicting economic interests. By economic interests I refer to the acquisition of natural resources, the control of the routes through which these resources are transported, the expansion into new markets, the establishment of monopolies and the maximization of profits in general. Ethnic, religious and cultural differences, the spread of democracy and human rights, ideology in general have often been cited as the reasons behind warfare. To my view, these are pretenses used to justify and legitimize war, not the real causes of it. The primary players in the strategic game of safeguarding economic interests are private corporations. The word private here means that these companies are under the control of individuals and serve their interests alone.4 The word "corporation'1 encompasses the following: enterprise, company, business. As a result these words can be used interchangeably without altering the meaning of sentences. State-owned companies also constitute strategic players but their importance in the game of securing economic interests is significantly limited due to the following reasons. First, their nature is not the same with that of private companies. Their purpose is not to maximize profits but rather to redistribute wealth through taxes, since their often loss-making operations are aimed at providing inexpensive basic goods and are funded by tax revenues. Second, their number is significantly lower since states directly control a very limited number of companies (mostly public utilities companies). An exception is centrally planned economies which are admittedly few. The thesis of what I call the capitalist war theory is that private companies are the cause of wars. The causality is simple and runs in the following way Corporations exert considerable influence over governments (T. Green. 2012: S. Amin, 2010). Their main strategic goal is to maximize their profits and thus they must secure as many economic interests as possible. In order to do so the use of government institutions is both cheap and efficient. Consequently, they use their influence over these institutions to shape both domestic and foreign policy of capitalist states. The first step is the assumption of a plutocratic form of governance in capitalist societies and is taken as granted/ The second is also taken as granted (I expect that few would disagree on that claim). The third point needs elaboration. A corporation has two ways of gaining influence over government. The first is by buying it: in most cases through the legitimate process of financing electoral campaigns and less often through various forms of bribery. The second is through the revolving doors phenomenon: the same individual is an official of the state and also holds a post in the private sector (not necessarily at the same time). The assumption that both of these ways (and especially the second) are both very cheap and very effective is not a radical one to make. Through a war corporations obtain access to natural resources previously owned by competitors. This is always cheaper than using the market to obtain them (especially in the case of rare resources). If the above three points are true, then the fourth necessarily follows. The last requirement is that the capitalist state is also a developed one. Economic development is inseparable from industrial development which is a necessary requirement for the existence of sustaining military capabilities. More importantly, economic power contributes to the rise and survival of powerful corporation which are also, by definition, a requirement for the existence of a plutocratic system. Thus war can be understood as conflict between states that are under the influence of a number of individuals serving their own interests. I would like to make clear at this point that I do not claim conflict of capitalist economic interests to be the sole cause of war. It is simply the most important. Moreover, it is not capitalism in its broadest sense of free, unregulated markets that causes wars. Rather, it is the combination of capitalist and plutocratic practices that do so. Although theoretically these two concepts are different, in practice they go hand in hand The accumulation of capital brings with it immense economic power which is used in turn to amass even more of it. The explanatory power of the capitalist peace theory can be demonstrated by looking at the foreign policy of the U.S.A. during the cold war period. The U.S.A. intervened extensively in almost every country of Central and South America. A region rich in natural resources, it constitutes a valuable target for any government under the influence of corporations. The economic interests of U.S. companies would be greatly harmed if regimes unfriendly to the interests of private capital established themselves in Latin American countries. Socialist regimes constitute such unfriendly regimes since their policy when it comes to the exploitation of resources is the establishment of state-owned enterprises. Through military intervention the U.S.A. did not acquire new territories, they established regimes friendly to U.S. corporate interests (with the Pinochet regime being the most infamous one). Another more recent example is the war of Iraq. The U.S.A. intervene to rearrange ownership of natural resources from the hands of the Iraqi capitalists to those of the U.S. Keep in mind that it is perfectly rational for one capitalist state to attack another since it is not a matter of ideology but one of economic interests. If capitalist states do not attack each other it is not because they share the same norms and values. It is merely because it is in their interest: they are allies (e.g. NATO states), or it would be mutually destructive (think of the U.K. attacking France).