Essay · Section A3 October 2026

It takes more courage to end a war than to begin one.

On 13 September 1993 Yitzhak Rabin stood on the White House lawn and shook the hand of Yasser Arafat, a man he had spent most of his life fighting. Rabin had commanded Israel’s army in the war of 1967; nobody could call him soft. That day he said: “We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough!” Two years later, on 4 November 1995, he was shot dead at a peace rally in Tel Aviv, not by an enemy soldier but by an Israeli who believed that making peace was treason. Anwar Sadat, who flew to Jerusalem in 1977 and signed the Camp David Accords, had been killed by his own countrymen in 1981. Starting a war has rarely cost a leader his life at the hands of his own people. Ending one often has.

That is the argument of this essay. Beginning a war usually needs anger, a grievance and a crowd that applauds. Ending one needs a leader to admit that the goal will not be fully won, to face the families of the dead, and to sit across the table from people his own side has been taught to hate. The first is swept along by emotion; the second has to stand against it. War, in that sense, is the easier decision.

History shows why the exit is so hard to find. Once a war begins, every death becomes an argument for continuing, because stopping seems to say that the earlier deaths were for nothing. Economists call this the sunk-cost fallacy; generals and politicians experience it as honour. Robert McNamara, who as Defense Secretary helped escalate the Vietnam War, admitted in his memoir In Retrospect (1995) that he and his colleagues had been wrong, yet the war ran for years after the doubts were known inside the government, because nobody wanted to be the leader who lost. The First World War was expected to be over by Christmas 1914; it lasted four years. The poet Wilfred Owen, who called the patriotic Latin line about dying for one’s country “the old Lie”, was killed on 4 November 1918, one week before the Armistice. The machinery of war, once running, does not stop by itself.

Ending a war well is harder still, because a ceasefire is not yet a peace. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 ended the fighting but humiliated Germany; John Maynard Keynes resigned from the British delegation and warned in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) that such terms would breed the next disaster. The Korean War stopped with an armistice in July 1953, and because no peace treaty followed, the peninsula remains technically at war more than seventy years later. Peace that lasts requires the winner to give something up as well. After the Second World War the United States chose the Marshall Plan over revenge, and today’s European Union grew out of a coal and steel community meant to make another Franco-German war impossible.

India’s own record contains both kinds of courage. In 1971, after the Pakistani army surrendered in Dhaka on 16 December, Indira Gandhi announced a unilateral ceasefire on the western front, effective the next day, though some urged her to press on. At Simla in July 1972 India returned territory and, eventually, more than 90,000 prisoners of war; critics still argue about whether too much was given away for too little. The clearest Indian example came in Mizoram. For twenty years the Mizo National Front fought the Indian state. In June 1986 Rajiv Gandhi signed the Mizo Accord with its leader Laldenga, who laid down arms and became Chief Minister. Both men took political risks: one was accused of rewarding rebels, the other of betraying the cause. Mizoram has been among the most peaceful States in the North-East since. The Mahabharata, our oldest war story, makes the same point in reverse: Krishna went to the Kaurava court asking for only five villages to avert the war, and Duryodhana’s refusal to give up even a needle-point of land led to a slaughter that left almost no one to rule.

Science supplies the starkest version of the argument. In 1955, ten years after Hiroshima, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, joined by other leading scientists, issued a manifesto that asked: “Shall we put an end to the human race: or shall mankind renounce war?” Seven years later, in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev each overruled advisers who wanted to escalate. Khrushchev withdrew missiles from Cuba; the United States quietly agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey. Neither looked heroic to his hardliners; both saved millions of lives, and the Partial Test Ban Treaty followed in 1963.

The counter-position deserves to be taken seriously. Sometimes the urge to end a conflict is not courage but fear. At Munich in 1938 Neville Chamberlain bought what he called “peace for our time” by handing part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler; within a year Europe was at war. In May 1940, when some in the British cabinet wanted to explore terms with Germany, it was Churchill’s refusal to negotiate that took courage. Ceasefires can also freeze injustice: an aggressor may keep what it has seized while the victim is pressed to accept it in the name of peace. Eisenhower, a general who knew war better than most, reminded the world in 1953 that every weapon is “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed”, yet he did not pretend that a nation could disarm while it was being attacked.

These objections sharpen the claim instead of defeating it. Munich did not end a war; it postponed one by sacrificing a third country, and Churchill’s courage lay in refusing a peace that would have meant surrender. The courage the prompt speaks of is something else: the willingness to stop when the just aim of a war has been secured or can no longer be secured by fighting, and to offer the enemy terms he can live with. That takes three things that war itself does not require: honesty about what force can achieve, the generosity to let the other side keep its dignity, and the nerve to face one’s own supporters. Colombia showed how hard this is. In 2016 its voters narrowly rejected the peace accord with the FARC rebels; President Juan Manuel Santos renegotiated rather than give up, and the revised agreement was ratified that year. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 survived in Northern Ireland because leaders on both sides accepted less than they had once demanded.

A war can be started by a single order. Peace has to be built against grief, pride and the voices of those who have profited from the fighting. As diplomats today weigh competing proposals to end the war in Ukraine, India among them, the question is not who can show more strength on the battlefield but who can show more courage at the table. The leader who begins a war is remembered for a day. The leader who ends one justly, and pays the price at home for doing so, deserves to be remembered for much longer.