The Roman historian Livy tells us that Numa Pompilius built and dedicated the Temple of Janus in Rome c. 710 BC. He ordered that the doors of the temple be kept open in time of war and were only to be closed when Roman armies were not fighting anywhere and Rome was at peace. Since that time to the time when Livy wrote in about 27BC the doors had only been closed twice, once at the end of the First Punic War and again after the victory of Augustus at the Battle of Actium.
I was a little surprised at first. Almost seven hundred years of continuous war? Then I began to wonder if that was so unusual.
If the US had built a Temple of Janus at the time of its inception, when and for how long a period would its doors have stood open in its history since that date?
This is one of those questions that people are going to nitpick to death because of the impossibility of defining being “at war.”
Do you count the military against the Indians after the Civil War? The countless Marine takeovers of Central American countries in the first part of the 20th century? The sea battles against Barbary pirates in the beginning of the 19th century? The landing on Granada by Reagan? The whole Cold War?
As long as there’s a military, they’ll be used for something somewhere. Whether you call that “war” or not is a whole 'nother issue.
American Revolutionary War, 1775 - 1783
War of 1812, 1812 - 1815
First Seminole War, 1817 - 1818
Black Hawk War, 1832
Second Seminole War, 1835 - 1842
Mexican-American War, 1846 - 1848
War with Costa Rica, 1856 - 1857
Third Seminole War, 1855 - 1858
American Civil War, 1861 - 1865
Snake War, 1864 - 1868
Modoc War, 1872 - 1873
Red River War, 1874 - 1875
Black Hills War, 1876 - 1877
Spanish-American War, 1898
Philipines-American War, 1899 - 1913
World War I (US involvement), 1917 - 1918
World War II (US involvement), 1941 - 1945
Korean War, 1950 - 1953
Vietnam War, 1954 - 1975
Invasion of Grenada, 1983
Bombing of Libya, 1986
Invasion of Panama, 1989 - 1990
Gulf War, 1990 - 1991
Invasion of Afghanistan, 2001 - present
So - to answer the question, there are fifteen periods when the US has been at peace for more than a year:
Bosnia was a NATO action, Somalia was a UN action. The USA, as a nation, wasn’t in conflict with either Yugoslavia or the Somalian rebels. However, I accept that this sort of definition is always debatable - we’ll need rigourous definitions of “war” and “peace” to produce a definitive list.
Nitpick: The Barbary Wars (US vs. the Barbary States, primarily Tripoli) and the Quasi-War With France both occured during this time period.
The Barbary Wars are where the Marines get the line “to the Shores of Tripoli” in their song. Seriously, read about it, it would make a great adventure/war movie, involving fighting pirates in the Mediterranean, sneaking in under cover of darkness to attack ships protected by an enemy fort, and even an exiled prince leading an army to retake his throne from a trecherous brother.
The Quasi-War With France was basically the French siezing our shipping because they claimed we were trading contraband with the British, telling our ambassador in more polite words to perform an anatomically impractical action, and the US Navy (with the tacit support of the Royal Navy, who had been at war with France at the same time) sailing down into the Carribean and shooting up whatever French ships they could find until the French decided to come back to the table with us.
The US got involved in various police actions in Latin America and the Carribean (mostly involving the Marines) durign this time period, interdicting on the Latin nations’ behalf to keep the Europeans from using military force to get repayments on various debts. IIRC, the natives of those Latin American and Carribean countries were less than enthusiastic about us jumping in to help.
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Oh I guess I should have read over the link a little better. The last I had heard Ridley Scott was still listed as the director and IIRC, Russell Crowe was attached to star. Still sounds like it would make a good flick.
