PARADIGM LOST?

TRANSITIONS AND THE SEARCH FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER

David Jablonsky

Professor of National Security Affairs

U.S. Army War College

July 1995
*******

The views expressed in this report are those of the author

and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of

the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the

U.S. Government. This report is approved for public release;

distribution is unlimited.

*******

Comments pertaining to this report are invited and should be

forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army

War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013-5050. Comments also may

be conveyed by calling the Conference Organizer, Dr. Gary L.

Guertner, commercial (717) 245-3108 or DSN 242-3108.

*******

This study was originally presented at the U.S. Army War

College Fourth Annual Strategy Conference held February 24-25,

1993, with the assistance of the Office of Net Assessment. The

Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish the paper as

part of its Conference Series.

*******

My thanks to Colonel Bruce B.G. Clarke, Colonel (Ret) Arthur

F. Lykke, Jr., Colonel James S. McCallum, and Professor Michael

G. Roskin for their comments on this paper. Particular thanks go

to Colonel McCallum who also provided solid advice, good

references and just the right amount of tea and sympathy. Thanks

also to Colonel Ralph L. Allen, Chairman, Department of Military

Strategy, Planning, and Operations, and Colonel John J.

O'Connell, Jr., Chairman, Department of Command, Leadership, and

Management, for the use of their department conference rooms to

write this study.
FOREWORD

After every momentous event, there is usually a transition

period, in which participants in the events, whether individuals

or nation-states, attempt to chart their way into an unfamiliar

future. In the United States in this century, there are three

such transitions, each focused on America's role in the

international arena. After World War I, the American people

specifically rejected the global role for the United States

implicit in Woodrow Wilson's strategic vision of collective

security. In contrast to this "return to normalcy," after World

War II the United States moved inexorably toward international

leadership in response to the Soviet threat. The result was an

acceptance of George Kennan's strategic vision of containing the

Soviet Union on the Eurasian landmass and the subsequent bipolar

confrontation of the two superpowers in a twilight war that

lasted for over 40 years.

Sometime in the penultimate decade of the 20th century, the

United States and its allies won the cold war. Once again in the

current transition period, the primary questions revolve around

the management of power and America's role in global politics.

Once again there are the issues of change and continuity. In

terms of change, the cold war set in train a blend of integrative

and disintegrative forces and trends that are adding to the

complex tensions of the current transition. The integrative force

that increasingly linked global economies in the cold war, for

instance, also holds out the spectral potential of global

depression or, at the very least, nations more susceptible to

disintegrative actions, as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

demonstrated. In a similar manner, the advances in communications

and transportation that have spread the results of medical and

scientific discoveries around the world are countered by the

malign transnational results of nuclear technology, the drug

trade, terrorism, AIDS and global warming.

All that is a reminder of the value of continuity in a

Hobbesian world still nasty, brutish and anarchic. The realist

paradigm, in other words, still obtains: nation-states are still

the primary international actors; power is still the coin of the

realm. In such a milieu, American government elites must

convince an electorate, increasingly conscious of the domestic

threats to national security, of the need to continue to exercise

global leadership in the management of power. The answer, as this

study demonstrates, is a strategic vision that incorporates a

multilateral, great power approach to international relations.

WILLIAM A. STOFFT

Major General, U.S. Army

Commandant
CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

We are never completely contemporaneous with our

present. History advances in disguise; it appears on

stage wearing the mask of the preceding scene, and we

tend to lose the meaning of the play. Each time the

curtain rises, continuity has to be re-established. The

blame. . .is not history's but lies in our vision,

encumbered with memory and images learned in the past.

We see the past superimposed on the present, even when

the present is a revolution.

Regis Debray1

"WAR IS PEACE," the Ministry of Truth proclaims in George

Orwell's profoundly pessimistic prediction of the future in

1984.2

 And so it was with the cold war. The irony is that one

year after Orwell had expected the Western world to be under the

complete control of Stalinism, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived on the

world scene, setting in train all the events that would reverse

the trends inaugurated at the Finland Station so many decades

before.3

The sudden end to the cold war was similar to the manner in

which World War I ended on the Eastern Front in 1918 with the

internal breakdown and unconditional withdrawal of a major

belligerent. As in 1918 with imperial Russia, no one expected to

see the end of the Soviet empire in Europe, the dissolution of

the Soviet state, and the repudiation of communism itself

throughout that disintegrating state. "In understanding the

collapse of communism and the Soviet state," Ronald Steel has

pointed out in this regard, "the strategists in government, at

universities, and in the well-financed limbo in between have been

virtually irrelevant."4 To be sure, in the most basic of all cold

war texts, George Kennan described in 1947 the possibility of

such an occurrence with a literary analogy:

Observing that human institutions often show the

greatest outward brilliance at a moment when inner

decay is in reality farthest advanced, [Thomas Mann]

compared the Buddenbrook family, in the days of its

greatest glamour, to one of those stars whose light

shines most brightly on this world when in reality it

has long since ceased to exist. And who can say with

assurance that the strong light still cast by the

Kremlin on the dissatisfied peoples of the western

world is not the powerful afterglow of a constellation

which is in actuality on the wane?5

But he did not anticipate a peaceful metamorphosis. "Strange

things have happened," Kennan wrote in 1951 when examining the

possibility of Soviet toleration of its own collapse, "though not
much stranger."6

The general surprise at the sudden and relatively quiet

outcome of the long twilight struggle was due, in part, to the

Orwellian mix of peace and war. For just as war was to Clausewitz

the continuation of policy by other means, so was the cold war

warfare by other, for the most part, nonlethal means.

Nevertheless, it was still conflict--a struggle that lasted for

two generations with massive stakes that included a geopolitical

rivalry for control of the Eurasian landmass and ultimately the

world, and an ideological one in which philosophy in the deepest

sense of mankind's self-definition was very much at issue. The

end of the cold war, then, represents a victory at least as

decisive and one-sided as the defeat of Napoleonic France in

1815, or of Imperial Germany in 1918, or of the Axis in 1945. In

terms of the actual capitulation, that moment may have come at

the November 19, 1990 Paris summit when Gorbachev accepted the

conditions of the victorious coalition by describing the

unification of Germany that had come about completely on Western

terms as a "major event"--a description that Zbigniew Brzezinski

has termed the functional equivalent to the acts of surrender in

the railroad car at Compiègne in November 1918 and on the USS

Missouri in August 1945.7

The defeat of the Soviet Union settled the remaining issues

left over from World War II with the exception of a divided Korea

and the Russian occupation of the Kurile Islands. After both the

major wars of this century, it took some time for the

international order to settle into what proved to be a relatively

stable period until overturned by the next war (or war

equivalent). A similar process is currently underway throughout

the world in this third major transition period for the United

States in the 20th century. Moreover, the victors of the cold

war, like their predecessors in 1918 and 1945, are proclaiming a

new world order in which, as President Bush described it,

"nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and

justice. . .where the strong respect the rights of the weak."8

The success of this or any other world order will depend on

the role of the United States, as it did in the transition

periods after 1918 and 1945. That role in the current transition

is usually addressed in terms of change ranging from a

diminishment of military threats to an increase in global

interdependence. And in fact the unabridged Webster Dictionary

defines change in terms of "transition"--a "passage" in

historical context, "from an earlier to a later form with the

blending of old and new features. . . ."9 The added emphasis in

the definition, however, also highlights the importance of

continuity along with change in any transition period. Stressing

this continuity, James Rosenau has pointed out, "serves as a

useful reminder that even the most pronounced changes have

antecedents, that the past cannot be ignored, and that there is

always a danger of mistaking the appearance of upheaval for the

dynamics of transformation and, thus, exaggerating the depth and
breadth of change."10

How analysts think about change and continuity shapes what

they look for; and what they look for affects what they find. It

is in this sense that Thomas Kuhn's idea of "paradigm" can play

an important role. A paradigm is a group of fundamental

assumptions that form for the scholar a picture of the world--a

shared framework that provides instruction on how to view the

object of inquiry. It is both broad and nebulous, certainly

broader than a conceptual framework since concepts derive from

paradigms. It also has much less specificity than a theory or a

model, both of which are organized propositions that relate the

concepts that are found in a paradigm. In this regard, Kuhn

emphasized, a paradigm does not provide answers; it is not

knowledge itself. Instead, it holds out the promise of answers,

pointing the way to knowledge by providing "a criterion for

choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted,

can be assumed to have solutions."11

When the paradigm is not taken for granted, however, when

there is a growing sense that existing institutions no longer are

adequate to meet the problems posed by an environment that they

have in part created, then there occurs what Kuhn has called a

paradigm shift. Major shifts of the Copernican, Newtonian and

Einsteinian variety come about because of a profound awareness of

anomaly which has lasted so long and penetrated so deeply that "a

state of growing crisis" is created.12 Ptolemaic astronomy, for

example, was in a scandalous state long before Copernicus

appeared. When that paradigm was first developed during the last

two centuries before Christ, it was extremely successful in

predicting the changing positions of planets and stars. But

predictions under the Ptolemaic system never quite conformed with

the best available observations. Solutions to these relatively

minor discrepancies were sought over the centuries by Ptolemy's

successors. By the early 16th century, an increasing number of

astronomers recognized that the old system was not sufficient--a

recognition of a growing crisis state that was a prerequisite to

the rejection by Copernicus of the Ptolemaic paradigm and his

search for a new one.13

Major shifts such as this are difficult. So long as the

tools provided by a paradigm are capable of solving the problems

it defines, those tools will continue to be used. Just as it is

in manufacturing, Kuhn pointed out, "retooling is an extravagance

to be reserved for the occasion that demanded it. The

significance of crises is the indication they provide that an

occasion for retooling has arrived."14 Such an occasion arrived

in Europe in the 17th century at the end of the Thirty Years War.

A sense of crisis had been growing for centuries concerning the

hierarchical, universalist, medieval paradigm of international

relations, as emerging dynastic states began to exercise the

rudiments of national sovereignty.15 The destructive chaos of the

Thirty Years War provided the culminating catalyst for the shift

at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to an anarchic, state-centric,
realist paradigm that has dominated approaches to change and

continuity in international relations ever since.16

A similar sense of crisis with the realist, "Westphalian"

paradigm has been evolving in the intervening years, particularly

in this century of total wars which has given new urgency to the

need for the management of power. Efforts to meet that need have

been tied inextricably with the attempts by the United States to

define its international role in the wake of both world wars. The

current post-cold war transition period, which began some time in

the penultimate decade of the 20th century, is no exception. As a

result, the United States faces the same question posed with

negative results after 1918 and left unanswered after 1945

because of the cold war: Should this transition period be the

occasion described by Kuhn for retooling? Is it time, in other

words, for a major shift from the realist, state-centric paradigm

of international relations?

The purpose of this study is to provide a general answer to

this question. The first step is to describe the realist paradigm

and trace its evolution through major post-war transition periods

in European and world history up through the brief transition

after World War II for the United States. The cold war, which

influenced that post-1945 transition period, is the key to the

assessment. For it is this twilight struggle's domination of the

American national consciousness for over four decades that will

determine ultimately the U.S. approach to world politics and the

realist paradigm in the current transition period.

It is here that Kuhn offers additional conceptual help by

pointing out that lesser, multiple paradigms can cause or inhibit

shifts from one dominant paradigm to another.17 As a second step,

this study will create two such lesser paradigms for viewing the

U.S. experience in the cold war. They are frameworks that George

Orwell would appreciate. One is that of a "long peace"; the other

that of a "long war." Together, these two perspectives of

America's recent past form the basis for analysis concerning the

question, in this third major transition period for the nation in

the 20th century, of change and continuity in the larger realist

paradigm of international affairs.
CHAPTER 2

THE ENDURING PARADIGM

We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual

enemies. Our interests are eternal, and those interests

it is our duty to follow.

Lord Palmerston, 184818

In 1648, Pope Innocent X stated that the Peace of Westphalia

was "null, void, invalid, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane,

empty of meaning and effect for all time."19 It was an

understandable reaction to a treaty which not only confirmed the

Lutheran schism in central Europe, but significantly reduced the

political authority of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. In

place of the centralized, hierarchical universalism embodied in

those two great symbols of Christian unity, the Westphalian peace

provided legitimacy to the concepts of sovereignty and dynastic

authority, thus creating a framework for a paradigm that would

sustain Europe's political fragmentation. Conversely, the peace

withdrew legitimacy from the medieval structure as well as any

other mode of centralized control to include all forms of

hegemony.

In this way, Westphalia sanctified centrifugal forces in

Europe that resulted in both an anarchial international system of

sovereign states and the internal consolidation of those units.

The approach represented a western political tradition going back

to Thucydides' Melian dialogue in which the Athenians contended

"that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and

the weak accept what they have to accept."20 The tradition was

renourished with the birth of the modern state system in Western

Europe in 1648. That state-centric, "realist" paradigm has

generally dominated efforts to conceptualize and theorize about

world politics and the management of power ever since.

Power is the key to the three fundamental assumptions of the

paradigm. To begin with, nation-states are the basic actors that

account for behavior in international relations--in Hans

Morgenthau's words, "the ultimate point of reference of. . .

foreign policy," since they alone are sovereign and can thus

marshal the necessary power for interactions in global

politics.21 Second, political life is divided into "domestic" and

"international" arenas, each one subject to its own laws. On the

domestic side, only the government has sufficient power to

regulate the activities of all other societal entities in order

to maintain order and stability. In the international arena,

there is no such leviathan, and anarchy reigns.

The final assumption rests on the previous two. Because of

anarchy in the international system, each state must maintain or

increase its power or succumb. "The Realist," Robert Osgood has

pointed out in this regard, "because he is skeptical of the
ability of nations to transcend their self-interest, sees the

struggle for national power as the distinguishing characteristic

of international relations."22 Or as Cicero asked in an earlier

age: "What can be done against force without force?"23

The question was not immediately addressed after 1648. The

norms of the old hierarchical, centralized paradigm had been

destroyed. The conceptual framework of the new paradigm did not

appear to require international attempts at management of power.

As a result, war was only proscribed in terms of changing the

1648 settlement. And in fact the negotiations at Westphalia were

more concerned with the past than with the future, producing a

static balance that did not foresee the rise of Louis XIV, the

expansion of the European state system into the conflict for

colonies, the sudden decline of Sweden, and the rise of Russia

and Prussia. These and even more pronounced changes in the

ensuing centuries, particularly in terms of the nature of war,

would begin a process, reflected in the pattern of post-war

settlements over the years, that increasingly focused on the

management of power while concomitantly bringing some of the

underlying assumptions of the realist paradigm into question.

1713 and 1815.

The War of the Spanish Succession marked the last bid by

Louis XIV for hegemony in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

After that long and exhausting conflict, the Utrecht settlements

of 1713-15 were designed primarily to resolve the issue of

hegemony by excluding both the French Bourbons and the Austrian

Hapsburgs from the Spanish dynasty. This meant, in turn, that

some type of decentralized balance of power, instead of some form

of centralized hierarchical control, would continue to dominate

as the system for managing power. At the same time, however, this

exclusion also set a precedence for a nascent centralizing

tendency of the powers acting in concert to determine the

dynastic issues of each state--a tendency confirmed in the

recognition by the Utrecht settlements of Frederick William,

Elector of Brandenburg, as King of Prussia. Equally important,

this precedence was established further at Utrecht in the socalled "British Plan" to move beyond the unilateral intervention

device initiated at Westphalia to one that incorporated the

general idea of a community of powers as a means of settlement

enforcement.24

All that notwithstanding, the Utrecht settlements were

essentially mired in the past, solving a problem posed by France

and Spain, but failing to address fully the more fundamental

problems associated with the paradigm shift that had left a

system of independent states driven by dynastic ambitions. The

primary reason was a lack of urgency. Warfare simply did not

require a more centralized control of power. And in fact, because

of the limited nature of conflict between Westphalia and Utrecht,

war was generally perceived as a practical instrument of policy.
In the post-Utrecht era of the 18th century, warfare became

even more circumscribed, involving carefully modulated maneuvers

for incremental gains--all in accordance with the balance and

elegance of the Age of Reason, as well as the desire not to

damage costly professional forces. This restraint, in marked

contrast to the conduct of the Thirty Years War, also extended to

the civilians, who were increasingly isolated from campaigns in

keeping with Frederick the Great's ideal that they should not

even be aware at the time of conflict that a state of war

existed. An important consequence of all this was that even if

they were not always satisfied with their own position in the

state system created in 1648 and reconfirmed in the Utrecht

settlements, the aristocrats and dynasts who comprised the major

18th century leadership in Europe were content with the system

itself. As a result, the great powers in that era developed very

little capacity to act together in terms of managing power, with

the exception of the Polish partitions which were perceived, at

least by Frederick the Great, as a concerted great power plan to

secure the peace of Europe. For these leaders, the international

anarchy implicit in the realist paradigm was barely perceptible

in the classical balance of power age.25

All that changed in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic

Wars with the creation of French national armies, which grew ever

larger and more unconstrained in response to the public passions

and perceptions of the nation in danger. These larger standing

forces could not subsist on French territory and increasingly

were assigned abroad as the wars continued, their maintenance

borne by the occupied states. As a consequence, means began to

dictate ends--the obverse of strategy--with France acting less

because of defined interests and more in terms of what was

possible. The careful calculation of means and ends that had

marked the period after the Utrecht settlements thus gave way to

almost continual conflict, much of it often without any apparent

objective other than that of enriching France.26

By 1814 the allies managed to form a permanent coalition

against Napoleon, but only after 22 years of incessant warfare

and revolutionary upheaval, recurrent assaults on the principles

of dynastic legitimacy, unparalleled casualties and destruction,

and enormous economic strains on all states. Even then it took

herculean efforts on the part of Clemens von Metternich, the

Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, and Robert Castlereagh, the

Foreign Minister of Great Britain, before the Treaty of Chaumont

was signed in March of that year, stipulating that the alliance

was to continue in effect for 20 years and providing mutual

guarantees against possible French attempts to undo the

forthcoming peace treaty. There was no question that Chaumont was

not designed for general enforcement of the peace. Nevertheless,

the move back toward centralization of power within the overall

realist paradigm was unmistakable, particularly when the allied

leaders declared publicly after signing the wartime treaty that

"they did not come to the conference as mere envoys of the four
courts,. . .but as men entitled to treat for Peace with France in

the name of Europe, which is but a single entity."27

This great power role was further elaborated in June 1815 at

the First Peace of Paris which called for the Vienna Congress to

establish "the relations from whence a system of real and

permanent balance of power in Europe is to be derived, [and]

shall be regulated at the Congress upon the principles

determined. . .by the Allied Powers amongst themselves."28 Those

principles evolved the following November in the Quadruple

Alliance which created a league to enforce the peace against

France. Once again like Chaumont, however, the great powers did

not devise a system to govern Europe or to resolve general

conflict. There was no formal mechanism for collective action and

enforcement. Such action would emerge only through negotiations

based on consensus by all five powers. But the alliance did

incorporate Castlereagh's idea of a permanent mechanism for

monitoring compliance with the peace settlement, by holding

periodic great power meetings "for the consideration of the

measures which shall be considered the most salutary for the

repose and prosperity of nations and for the maintenance of peace

in Europe."29

"Repose" was the operative word for the great powers during

this transition. There was general agreement among them that the

revolutionary social system spawned by the French Revolution had

caused war and that conversely war had itself created conditions

of social dissolution. As a consequence, they concluded that if

war could be prevented, social change could be regulated. To this

end, each of the great powers exercised restraint within the

system they created and at least occasionally subordinated their

national interests to the European context of order and

prevention of conflict. "Politics is the science of the vital

interests of States, in its widest meaning," Metternich wrote in

this regard.

Since, however, an isolated State no longer exists. .

.we must always view the Society of States as the

essential condition of the modern world. The great

axioms of political science proceed from the knowledge

of the true political interests of all states; it is

upon these general interests that rests the guarantee

of their existence. The establishing of international

relations on the basis of reciprocity under the

guarantee of respect for acquired rights. .

.constitutes in our time the essence of politics.30

This ostensible change in the realist paradigm of

international relations was actually based on continuity, since

it created a static formula for enforcing the peace in a static

world. But because that world could not be restored, the formula

for peace enforcement had to change; and this in turn threatened

to lead to a shift in the overall realist paradigm that Great

Britain and many lesser powers could not accept. Castlereagh held
to the traditional concept of a casus foederis, arguing

throughout the series of allied congresses after the Vienna

settlements that great power action could only be in response to

an overriding external danger. The Quadruple Alliance, he argued

in 1820, was never intended "as a union for the Government of the

World, or for the Superintendence of the Internal Affairs of

other states. . . ."

The principle of a state interfering by force in the

internal affairs of another. . .is always a question

of the greatest possible. . .political delicacy. . .

.[To] generalize such a principle and to think of

reducing it to a System, or to impose it as an

obligation, is a Scheme utterly impractical and

objectionable.31

For Metterich and the other continental leaders, the cause

for intervention was any revolution anywhere--joint action, in

other words, before a disturbance could take an externally

aggressive form. Their "crucial battle," Henry Kissinger has

pointed out, "was the first not the last; their effort was to

prevent an overriding danger from materializing."32 All this

culminated in the November 19, 1820 Troppau Protocol which, over

Britain's objection, stipulated that any revolution that

threatened Europe's tranquility would be dealt with by either

individual or collective action. Britain had agreed to the

original concept of the concert which had required some

modification of the realist paradigm in order to provide some

measure of security for individual states. But the Troppau

Protocol proposed to accomplish this by violating national

sovereignty, the fundamental foundation for domestic security in

the state-centric Westphalian paradigm, not so much to preserve

the peace, but to save a narrow class-defined system of order.

1919.

The Concert of Europe began to erode almost from its

inception. To begin with, there was the partial isolation of

Great Britain which remained unwilling to endorse a policy of

great power intervention in the internal affairs of European

nations. In addition, new ideological divisions began to break up

the moderate conservatism of 1815. In 1830, revolution

transformed France from the reactionary monarchy of Charles X to

a liberal state on its way to the bourgeois triumph of Louis

Phillipe. In Britain, the catalyst was the 1832 Great Reform Act

which brought the middle class centrally into British politics.

The result was an increasing dichotomy of liberal Great Britain

and France and the more conservative trio of Russia, Prussia and

Austria--an alignment reinforced by the developing West-East

pattern of the Industrial Revolution. Finally, the 1848

revolutions demonstrated that war did not automatically occur

from such upheavals and that in fact, as the next two decades

were to prove, military force could stave off revolutions and war
could actually protect unreformed domestic institutions.33

In any event, the concert clearly was in operation until the

outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854. And even after that conflict

and through the smaller wars of 1859, 1866 and 1870, the great

powers continued to exercise some of the restraint established at

Vienna and embodied in the 19th protocol of the 1831 conference

on the Belgian issue which stated that "chaque nation a ses

droits particuliers; mais l'Europe aussi a son droit."34 As the

century wore on, however, fewer and fewer observers attributed

the relative peace to the European Concert as a device for

managing international relations. Instead, the "long peace" was

generally perceived as a result of "progress," the growth of

civilization embodied in almost continuous advances in industry,

commerce and science. Despite the more pessimistic outlook of

those who decried the growth of materialism and decline of

morality, most people took social, political and aesthetic

progress as self-evident concomitants to those advances.35

Equally important, these trends had a major effect on

general attitudes toward war. There were, to be sure, popular

anti-war activists like Baroness Bertha von Suttner. Her 1899

novel, Die Waffen Nieder, describing an Austrian woman's

revulsion against war after the death of her husband in the 1859

Franco-Austrian War, was printed in 37 editions in over a dozen

languages. And there was Norman Angell's bestselling The Great

Illusion (1910), which argued that war was irrational on economic

grounds since the destructiveness of war was incompatible with

commerce and would thus bring modern industrial nations to ruin.

But there were many who agreed with one critic's characterization

of von Suttner as "a gentle perfume of absurdity."36 Moreover,

there were those who either agreed with or would bear out George

Bernard Shaw's observations in Major Barbara. "Well, the more

destructive war becomes," a Latin teacher asks an arms

manufacturer in that 1905 play, "the sooner it will be abolished,

eh?" "Not at all," the arms maker replies. "The more destructive

war becomes, the more fascinating we find it."37

In any event, in the years prior to World War I, there was

the general expectation that any future great power conflict

would be, in Michael Howard's description, "brief--no longer,

certainly, than the war of 1870 that was consciously or

unconsciously taken by that generation as a model."38 That

expectation was reflected in the evolution of offensive military

doctrines on the part of most great powers prior to 1914 as well

as in the general perception that protracted conflict would lead

to economic collapse--the latter demonstrated in Andrew

Carnegie's confident assertion that if war should occur, "we

won't give them any money."39 In addition, as the long period of

relative tranquility passed into the 20th century, there was an

increased tendency to see peace as decadent, corrupt and

materialistic with war--noble, uplifting, and glorious--as the

only anodyne. "How I long for the great war!" Hilaire Belloc

commented. "It will sweep Europe like a broom."40 Warfare had
thus come to be considered prior to 1914 almost universally as an

acceptable and for many people an inevitable if not a desirable

way of settling international differences. "The plain truth,"

William James observed, "is that people want war."41

The result of all this was that in the closing decades of

the "long peace," there were few vestiges left of the urgency

felt by the statesmen at Vienna to centralize the management of

power within the realist paradigm. War, the result of the

fundamental international condition of anarchy in that paradigm,

generally was no longer perceived as a major systemic problem. As

a consequence, the management of power increasingly devolved into

a decentralized balance of power system with results far removed

from the clocklike regularity that governed the limited conflicts

of the 18th century. By 1914, Europe was literally divided into

two armed camps with a balance that not only failed to prevent

war, but actually formented it. "The alliances were neither

strong nor credible enough to face down resolute action by the

adversary," one analyst has pointed out; "they were just strong

enough to drag reluctant participants into military conflict.

Instead of deterring war ex ante, they actually brought it on ex

post."42

And when that war came, it was a horrific surprise for all

participants, washing away the previous misconceptions in a tide

of blood, leaving an indelible mark across an entire generation.

The reaction of that generation was captured by the protagonist

in Tender is the Night when he revisits the Somme battlefield

after the war. "This western-front business couldn't be done

again," he explains, "not for a long time."

The young men think they could do it but they couldn't.

. . .This took religion and years of plenty and

tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed

between the classes. . . .You had to have a wholesouled sentimental equipment going back further than

you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and

postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancee, and

little cafes in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den

Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the

Derby, and your grandfather's whiskers. . . .This kind

of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne

and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling

and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the

back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was

a love battle--there was a century of middle-class love

spent here. This was the last love battle.43

The reaction of Woodrow Wilson to the Great War was no less

emphatic. He had brought a traditionally isolationist United

States into World War I by representing it as a great crusade, as

a means to create a better world. And when that conflict ended,

he continued the crusade with a vision for a new system of

managing power. That vision was a reaction to the balance-of-
power system, "that old and evil order" with its "ugly plan. .

.of alliances, of watchful jealousies, of rabid antagonisms,"

which Wilson perceived as the primary cause of the war.

Ultimately, that war had to be fought to "do away with the old

order and to establish a new one, . . .the center and

characteristic of the old order [being] that unstable thing we

used to call the 'balance of power'."44

The new system was collective security. In its pure form,

what Inis Claude calls ideal collective security, it is a system

for managing power that requires the participation of every state

in the world under a legally binding and codified commitment on

the part of these states to respond to aggression anytime and

anywhere it might occur.

The scheme is collective in the fullest sense; it

purports to provide security for all states by the

action of all states, against all states which might

challenge the existing order by the arbitrary

unleashing of their power. . . .Ideal collective

security. . .offer[s] the certainty, backed by legal

obligation, that any aggressor would be confronted with

collective sanctions.45

The new approach, like that of the concert, still had

attributes that could be explained using the assumptions of the

realist paradigm.46 Collective security was, after all, a statecentric system for managing power, focused as it was on using

states as principal actors to preserve state sovereignty. And the

methods for that preservation certainly did not shrink from the

application of force. Under Wilsonian collective security, peace

would not be based upon a precarious, unstable equilibrium with

its minimal capacity for deterrence, but upon an overwhelming

preponderance of power automatically and universally applied by a

central organization, the League of Nations, against any

aggressor nation. "Mere agreements will not make peace secure,"

Wilson emphasized.

It will be absolutely necessary that a force be

created. . .so much greater than the force of any

nation now engaged or any alliance hitherto formed or

projected that no nation, no probable combination of

nations, could face or withstand it. If the peace

presently to be made is to endure, it must be a peace

made secure by the organized major force of mankind.47

Despite all this, the full implementation of Wilsonian

collective security required a shift from the realist paradigm in

order to be accepted and thus fulfill the traditional claim in

such a shift of solving the problems that had led the old

paradigm to crisis. For while it was true that collective

security continued to focus on a world of nation-states, those

states in the Wilsonian paradigm had to be democracies founded on

the principle of nationality if the new world order was to work.
In this regard, Wilson represented a new early 20th century

belief in the linkage of authoritarianism within a nation with

aggressive behavior towards other states. Moreover, this was

explicitly linked to his perception of the uniqueness of the

American political experience. For Wilson, there was a thin line

between domestic reform in the shape of the American progressive

tradition and foreign policy. And this in turn was linked to what

he perceived as a unique historical mission with Americans acting

as the "custodians of the spirit of righteousness, of the spirit

of even-handed justice, of the spirit of hope which belies in the

perfectibility of the law and the perfectibility of human life

itself."48

Equally fundamental to the paradigm shift were the

principles of automaticity and universality involved in the

application of power against any transgressing state and

guaranteed by universal treaty obligation to enforce peace

regardless of whether it was in any individual state's immediate

interest or not. Only in the new paradigm could Wilson's linkage

of domestic law enforcement to a system for managing power in the

international arena be understood. For unless states were

required to act collectively on legal principles and not on selfinterests in a specific case, and unless neutrality was forbidden

in the face of aggression, the new concept would not add anything

significant to the traditional collective defense of alliances

and balance of power and thus would not require a paradigm shift

in order to be accepted. This problem, fundamental to any such

shift, was captured by Charles Darwin the previous century in

Origins of Species. "Although I am fully convinced of the truths

of the views given in this volume. . .," he wrote, "I by no means

expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are

stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long

course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to

mine."49

And so it was in the debates over a new world order in the

post-World War I transition period. Viewed through the prism of

the realist paradigm, the Wilsonian proposals for that order were

a series of contradictions. Nations would renege on the

automaticity in the system because the idea of "no more war,"

which was the animating motive for constructing the system, was

in tension with the "no more aggression" imperative necessary for

the system to function when challenged. The former reflected

abhorrence of war, but the latter called for going to war even if

short-term self-interest ruled against it. But even if the system

could overcome that basic tension, there was no comfort without a

paradigmatic shift. "By the very logic of its assumptions," Hans

Morgenthau has pointed out in this regard, "the diplomacy of

collective security must aim at transforming all local conflicts

into world conflicts. . .since peace is supposed to be

indivisible. . . .Thus a device intent on making war impossible

ends by making war universal."50

Negotiations based on different conceptual frameworks
produced increasingly acrimonious proceedings. "I offer my

apologies to the memory of Attila and his congeners," Georges

Clemenceau concluded in disgust as the Versailles discussions

dragged on, "but the art of arranging how men are to live is even

more complex than that of massacring them."51 Opponents in the

United States argued that the League, in contravention of the

American tradition of avoiding entangling alliances, was in fact

such an alliance, whose charter contained "clauses which

threatened the very existence of the United States as an

independent power."52 Moreover, it was argued, the system tended

to preserve the status quo regardless of merit. To attempt to

freeze for all time the distribution of power and territory,

Elihu Root pointed out, "would not only be futile; it would be

mischievous."53 Wilson, however, would not consider reservations

that he believed might mutilate Article X of the League Covenant,

with its commitment "to respect and preserve as against external

aggression the territorial integrity and existing political

independence of all members of the League."54

The result was an impasse that Wilson attempted to

circumvent by appealing directly to the American people. The key

to the success of a new international order, he repeatedly

stressed, was America's role as a leader of nations. As a

consequence, he had made this leadership a key condition for U.S.

participation in the global system just as he was making American

involvement in international politics conditional upon the

reformation of the system. If the United States did not accept

the responsibility thrust upon it by historical events, he

warned, there would occur an even more terrible conflict than

World War I. In this regard, as Wilson biographer Arthur Link has

pointed out, Wilson represented a higher realism, "higher because

more perceptive, more in accord with ultimate reality."55

That reality included the recognition that while the United

States could not ignore a leadership role in the new

international order, that role had to be based on values that

would continue to claim American allegiance. But to undertake

that role alone, as Wilson well realized, would transform the

very nature of American society. The alternative to the League

for American security in an increasingly interdependent world, he

reminded the public, would be a garrison state requiring the

United States "to have the biggest army in the world."

There will have to be universal conscription. There

will have to be taxes such as even yet we have not

seen. There will have to be a concentration of

authority in the Government capable of using this

terrible instrument. . . .You will have to have a staff

like the German staff, and you will have to center in

the Commander in Chief of the Army and the Navy the

right to take instant action for the protection of the

nation.56

In essence, from Wilson's perspective, very little was being
asked of the American people except a leap of faith that he had

already made in terms of the League's efficacy. In return for

that faith, he emphasized throughout his whistle-stop tour of the

country, America would not only escape a dismal future, but be

assured of political and economic global advantage. In any event,

U.S. forces would not be required for every case of collective

action under the League. "If you want to put out a fire in Utah,"

the President concluded one speech, "you do not send to Oklahoma

for the fire engine."57

This was hardly a clarion call to sacrifice. In the end,

Wilson did not fail, as frequently maintained, because he

demanded too much from the American people. He failed despite

asking so little of them while holding out the promise of so

much. Ultimately that failure had to do with the difficulties in

making a fundamental shift in the realist paradigm during the

euphoria of a victorious post-war transition period. In the wake

of World War I, there was the demand by industry and agriculture

to end wartime controls matched by the widespread popular desire

to cut the budget and reduce taxes. The Republican Party won the

1920 election by promising to fulfill those expectations. As a

consequence, the new administration accelerated the pace of

industrial demobilization and laid the foundation for large

budget cuts, particularly those in defense, facilitated for the

most part by a massive naval disarmament program. Those cuts led

to a peace dividend, which Secretary of the Treasury Andrew

Mellon promptly provided to the American people in the form of

lower taxes.

This return to what Warren Harding termed "normalcy" proved

 to be extremely popular. But ultimately it deprived the United

States of the means required to deal with many of the key

international issues in the post-war era. To begin with, the

government lacked the military power to take a role in the

enforcement of the peace treaty. Moreover, "normalcy" meant that

the United States would not forgive Allied war debts owed to

America, which in turn caused difficulties for those nations in

terms of reducing German reparations. At the same time, financial

retrenchment meant that there would be no major American role in

reconstructing the European economy.

The result was that the United States emerged from a

transition period that was supposed to have led to a new world

order without committing its power either to the achievement of

that order or to the effective maintenance of the status quo.

That neither objective was considered an urgent matter as America

returned to "normalcy" was demonstrated in President Coolidge's

1926 State of the Union Address:

The American people are altogether lacking in an

appreciation of the tremendous good fortune that

surrounds their international position. We have no

traditional enemies. We are not embarrassed over any

disputed territory. We have no possessions that are
coveted by others; they have none that are coveted by

us. Our borders are unfortified. We fear no one; no one

fears us.58

1945.

The League of Nations failed because the preconditions for

that organization's effectiveness to manage power were destroyed

in the interwar period. It was absolutely essential, for example,

that war prevention be the goal of all the great powers, dominant

over any one's sectarian national interests. But Italy in the

1920s and Germany and Japan in the 1930s undermined the dominance

of that goal. In addition, just as it had been with the Concert

of Europe, there could be no breakdown into ideological conflicts

between the great powers in the League if a return to the fully

decentralized balance-of-power system was to be avoided. But the

economic crises made many of the liberal governments of the 1920s

vulnerable to fascism, socialism and communism. Communism, in

particular, caused not only an ideological rift between Russia

and both Britain and France, but also a belief in the West that

an anti-Soviet stance was common grounds for cooperation with

National Socialist Germany.

Ultimately, as the European Concert had demonstrated, it was

also crucial that no great power return to isolation. The absence

of the United States meant that the League was still-born, since

only strong international leadership by all great powers could

have made effective the threat in the League Covenant concerning

the application of preponderant power. The withdrawal of America

into isolation and then neutrality did much to dissipate the

international consensus for more centralized management of power

that had been forged in reaction to the first total war in the

modern industrial age. The result was the familiar, dismal litany

of diplomatic events in the interwar years which ushered in the

second half of what Winston Churchill called this century's

Thirty Years War.

Early in World War II, much as President Wilson had done

throughout the previous conflict, President Roosevelt turned his

attention to the management of power in a post-war period.

Originally, Roosevelt had justified U.S. participation in the war

in idealistic, reformist terms. The Atlantic Charter, for

instance, was written in a context redolent of Wilson's Fourteen

Points. Nevertheless, there was an underlying realism to

Roosevelt's approach that was firmly anchored in the Westphalian

paradigm: his idea of forming a great power condominium to bring

order out of international anarchy. The so-called "Four

Policemen--the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union,

and China--would have the responsibility, as the President

described it, to "impose order on the rest of the post-war world,

bombing anyone who would not go along."59

By the time the San Francisco conference convened in 1945 to
establish the United Nations, however, there was also a growing

recognition of the need to address the basic problem of great

power aggression and antagonism, the major cause of the recently

ended cataclysm. The result was the veto power given to the

permanent members of the United Nations Security Council--a vital

move from the realist perspective. For that decision was made not

in the idealistic belief that the great powers would continue to

live in peace and that the veto would never be used, but with the

expectation that there would be occasions on which it would be

used to avoid great power confrontation. That the final result

was less than the ideal vision was best expressed by the Mexican

delegate, who noted that the conference was "engaged in

establishing a world order in which the mice could be stamped out

but in which the lions would not be restrained."60

For the United States, these adjustments within the realist

paradigm were no greater than the powers at Vienna had made in

terms of the Concert of Europe. The veto provision ensured that

America retained the same freedom of action (or inaction) in

matters of collective enforcement on which it had insisted in the

past. As a consequence, there was no repetition in the 1945

Senate of the fight that had been waged there in 1919 over the

approval of an earlier charter. In joining the United Nations,

there was no assumption that the United States had compromised

its freedom to determine under which circumstances it would

employ American power.61

And that power as well as material wealth was enormous in

1945 in absolute and relative terms. The United States possessed

two-thirds of the world's gold reserve; and its GNP had increased

by more than half since 1939 in a period when all other

industrial economies were in ruins. In addition, there was

America's global prestige bolstered by armed forces deployed in

Asia and Europe as well as by atomic monopoly. All in all, it was

truly an extraordinary global situation. "Of the great men at the

top," A. J. P. Taylor once noted, "Roosevelt was the only one who

knew what he was doing; he made the United States the greatest

power in the world at virtually no cost."62

Power notwithstanding, the transition period began much like

that after World War I with the Republican Party, ascendent in

the 1946 Congress, voicing a general public demand for industrial

and military demobilization. As a result there was a dramatic

cutback in both economic controls and the military establishment,

which in turn led to arguments over how to spend the second peace

dividend of the century. These arguments were resolved by

congressional approval of a major Republican tax cut that capped

domestic spending and forced even deeper cuts in an already

modest defense budget. Almost unheeded was the concern of the

Council of Economic Advisors that "a drastic reduction in public

outlays plus the rapid demobilization of our armed forces, would

lead to heavy unemployment and business dislocation for a

substantial period of time."63
The domestic background only highlighted the extraordinary

decision by the United States in the post-1945 transition period

to set aside the long and hallowed tradition defined by

Washington in his farewell address and accept the

responsibilities rejected after 1918. That decision, in fact,

came about almost external to American politics and economics, as

the government responded to the increasing Soviet threat by

filling the power vacuums created by World War II with economic

and military commitments.64 The result was what Stanley Hoffmann

has called "America's guasi-Immaculate Conception as a world

leader."65 Most great powers had "risen through the ranks" by

means of long apprenticeships of international involvement and

conflict. America, on the other hand, turned to world involvement

in the second transition period with all the notions, habits and

practices developed during a national existence focused on

separation from that world. Unlike Great Britain or the Soviet

Union, the United States became a global superpower almost

without training and preparation.

All this had important consequences. There was, for

instance, the natural inexperience of the tiny group of American

foreign policy and governmental elites. The world, contrary to

American belief, was not a tabula rasa; it was the United States

in terms of world involvement that was almost a tabula rasa. Moreover, within these elites, there was a general feeling that

there must be no repetition of the interwar years' behavior. As a

result, there was an exhilarating sense of purpose that pervaded

the writings and actions of the so-called "Wise Men" and the

growing American "establishment"--a focus on global activism to

make up for the passivity of the past. And what better way to

compensate for the previous lack of understanding concerning a

great nation's need for power than for that establishment to turn

to the realist paradigm with a will. Having deserted the world

in 1919 and having failed it in the 1930s, these elites were

ready to combine a world role with adequate power and the will to

use it.66

That power, the American establishment quickly came to

realize, must be focused on the Soviet Union--a fact recognized

by George Kennan and incorporated in his strategic vision through

the realist prism for the management of power. Beginning with his

famous "long telegram" to the State Department from his Moscow

post in 1946 and continuing in the next year with speeches and

articles, Kennan outlined a vision squarely focused on the Soviet

threat. That threat was not going to go away, he emphasized,

because Soviet legitimacy was based on the fiction of an external

American menace. As a consequence, the United States must give up

idealistic visions such as making the world safe for democracy.

Instead, American efforts should be focused on creating a

balance-of-power world in order to contain Soviet expansionism

until such time as citizens throughout the USSR insisted on major

domestic reforms, thus moderating Soviet foreign policy. "The

United States has in its power," he elaborated in 1947,
to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet

policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far

greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it

has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to

promote tendencies which must eventually find their

outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing

of Soviet power.67

Despite the clarity of this approach within the realist

paradigm, the suddenness of U.S. involvement in world affairs, as

the domestic fight over the peace dividend indicated, would also

require the sense of mission that was firmly rooted in the

national ethos with linkage from Jefferson through Wilson to a

purveyor of the "American Century" like Henry Luce. "Because

America alone among the nations of the earth was founded on ideas

which transcend class and caste and racial and occupational

differences," Luce wrote in 1942, "America alone can provide the

pattern for the future."68 After 1945, reformist impulse

dominated the imperative to preserve the United States from

European "contamination," precisely because the latter had

prevailed in the first transition and the decades after with such

poor results. As a consequence, American enthusiasm in the second

transition was incorporated into a vision for the world with

origins not in intellectual dogma, as was the case with MarxistLeninism, but in an idealized conception of the American national

experience--a combination of political and moral beliefs.69

With this moralism and glorified history came an enormous

self-confidence that allowed Americans to see in the sudden

acquisition of great power both a reward for the virtues of their

national beliefs and purpose and a tool for spreading those

virtues. This perception marked a major difference between the

two transition periods. During the first period, the United

States became a key player because of involvement in a conflict

viewed as resulting from the sordid and squalid intrigues of

cabinet diplomacy. The second transition, on the other hand,

simply became with very little letup a continuation of the

American response to one ideological Leviathan, represented by

the Fascist repudiation of the Enlightenment, with the response

to another, also in the totalitarian mold, the Communist heresy.

The result was adoption by the Truman administration of Kennan's

sweeping realist vision of world order combined with an equally

sweeping vision of a world free from aggression, in which free

people could determine their own destinies with the help of the

United States. "I believe," President Truman declared in the

March 1947 doctrine named for him, "that it must be the policy of

the United States to support free peoples who are resisting

attempted subjugation. . . .I believe that we must assist free

people to work out their own destinies in their own way."70

This apparent open-ended commitment of ends would not be

matched by military means until the Korean conflict, long after

the cold war had begun. But the adoption of Kennan's strategic

vision concerning the Soviet threat was the turning point.
Because that threat became apparent so rapidly to governmental

elites and the American people, there really was very little time

for transition before the United States embarked on the cold war.

The goal of containment enshrined rhetorically in the Truman

Doctrine was reaffirmed by November 1948 in NSC 20/4 as the

overall national security objective, concluding that "Soviet

domination of the potential power of Eurasia, whether achieved by

armed aggression or by political and subversive means, would be

strategically and politically unacceptable to the United

States."71 Most important, because that threat was to endure for

over 40 years with varying degrees of intensity, global

management of power was frozen in a bipolar configuration of that

most fundamental concept of management systems in the realist

paradigm: balance of power.
CHAPTER 3

THE SUBORDINATE PARADIGMS

Men and women a century from now will very likely find

the Cold War as obscure and incomprehensible as we

today find the Thirty Years War. . . .

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.72

The very word "war" has become misleading. It would

probably be more accurate to say that by becoming

continuous, war has ceased to exist.

George Orwell, 1984

In 1947, like 1917 or 1940-41, the United States made a

decision to go to war because it was not in America's interest to

have Europe come under the domination of a single hostile power.

No one could anticipate how long that conflict would last; but

most agreed with the author of containment that an early

denouement in the nuclear era was neither likely nor desirable.

"I would rather wait thirty years for a defeat of the Kremlin

brought about by the tortuous and exasperatingly slow devices of

diplomacy," Kennan wrote in 1949, "than to see us submit to the

test of arms a difference so little susceptible to any clear and

happy settlement by those means."73 The result was a long drawnout twilight conflict in which a succession of U.S. cold war

administrations experimented with ways and means to achieve the

overall national security objective-- experimentation that

rendered the containment process less efficient than it might

have been. Nevertheless, that process was ultimately successful.

"The post-Cold War world resembles what the 'wise men' hoped the

world after 1945 would be," John Lewis Gaddis concluded in this

regard. "Containment was a long detour, but it did not, in the

end, prevent arrival at the intended destination."74

In looking back over the years consumed by that detour,

analysts have tended generally to view the cold war in two

different ways. McGeorge Bundy, not surprisingly, saw it as a

wartime era of danger and survival.75 And Arthur Schlesinger has

called it "this curious episode in modern history,. . .a long,

costly, dark, dreary, and dangerous affair," in which an old

fashioned geopolitical rivalry grew "into a holy war so intense

and obsessive as to threaten the very existence of human life on

the planet."76 On the other hand, there is another group that

views the cold war as a time of protracted stability. "The period

since 1945," one such proponent concluded, "arguably represents

the longest period of great-power peace since the birth of the

modern world system. . . ."77

Long war or long peace? "Change a name," Crane Brinton

observed in his seminal work on revolutions, "and you change the

thing."78 The notion of peace, of course, can describe an
enormous range of relationships from complete accord to outright

hostility just short of war. For instance, peace was used to

describe American relations with both Canada and the Soviet

Union, although the two relationships had very little in common.

War, on the other hand, can describe hostilities that fall short

of actual fighting or that have escalated into all-out total

conflict. America and the Soviet Union have never been formally

at war, even during the Russian Civil War when the United States

intervened with troops in western Russia and Siberia.

Nevertheless, each side after 1947 used force, normally through

subversion or surrogates, to challenge the other's interests.79

Considerations of the cold war as either a "long peace" or a

"long war" form two different subordinate paradigms from which to

examine and draw lessons for the future effectiveness of the

overall realist framework in the post-cold war era. The major

question in using these two paradigms concerns the levels of

analysis. Certainly, as David Singer noted as early as 1961, this

is a key problem in the study of international relations.80

Kenneth Waltz in his 1979 Theory of International Politics

focused on the level of the structure of the international

system in a study much admired for its parsimonious approach in a

field in which analytic variables abound.81 Some critics

complained that this focus on only one level of analysis failed

to account for change.82 Others pointed out that the state and

the individual were important levels of analysis that should not

be disregarded and that in fact over time could modify systemic

structures.83 In an earlier work, in fact, Waltz examined the

causes of war under three analytical headings or images: "within

man, within the structure of the separate states, within the

state system."84 These levels of analysis, he pointed out, were

fundamentally interrelated.

The partial quality of each image sets up a tension

that drives one toward inclusion of the others. With

the first image the direction of change. . .is from men

to societies and states. The second image catches up

both elements. Men make states and states make men; but

this is still a limited view. . .for states are shaped

by the international environment as are men by both the

national and international environments.85

This relationship is shown by the arrows in Figure 1.

The figure also illustrates the approach to what is

essentially a first cut at examining the impact of the cold war

on the United States at these three levels from the perspective

of that twilight conflict, first as a "long peace" and then as a

"long war." At the first level of "man," the general focus is on

the American public, particularly in terms of attitudes toward

national security formed during the cold war. At the "state"

level, the focus is on the evolution of the structure of the U.S.

Government--an evolution affected directly by the cold war and

indirectly by the effects of that war in terms of the first
image, the American public. Finally, there is the "international

system" and the implications of that system's transformation

during the cold war for the United States and its citizens.

Man.

War and the Use of Force. For the average American citizen

who lived through the cold war, the term "long peace" might seem

to stretch the phrase to its semantic limit. Certainly, from the

"long war" perspective, the cold war was, in fact, an often

violent conflict that endured because of the evolution of two

critically and associated rules of international behavior: no use

of nuclear weapons anywhere and anytime and no direct U.S.-Soviet
military conflict. The maintenance of these two rules throughout

the long twilight war was certainly no mean achievement, although

hardly what Kant envisioned in describing perpetual peace.

Those rules, however, were not self-apparent when examined

through the prism of the cold war as a "long war." It was all

very well for a Bernard Brodie to conclude that regardless of

culture or overall military strength, the possession of nuclear

weapons rendered impossible the Clausewitzian concept of war as

an extension of policy. But unlike earlier military technological

breakthroughs, the full consequences of using the atomic bomb

became apparent at Hiroshima just when the American people became

aware of the new weapon's existence. The invention of the machine

gun, for instance, inspired no concomitant vision of the horrific

slaughter of the Somme; nor did that of poison gas reflect an

appreciation of the effect produced by the first dusty, lethal

cloud at Ypres.86

The result after 1945 was a general perception of a

pervasive threat that was reflected not only in public support of

governmental programs such as those dealing with bomb shelters,

but in a more lasting form through the popular culture. Movies in

the Eisenhower years of massive retaliation, for instance, often

were concerned with atomic mutants such as giant ants in "Them"

or "The Fifty Foot Woman." And audiences were able to muster at

least nervous laughter several years after the Cuban missile

crisis in response to Stanley Kubrick's savage film, "Dr.

Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,"

which concludes with the destruction of the world by atomic

explosions backed by a sound track of Vera Lynn singing her World

War II hit: "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when.

. . ."87 That this public perception continued to play an

important role in the long war was illustrated by the phenomenal

success of the ABC movie, "The Day After," in the 1970s.

Viewed from the paradigm of the "long peace," however, this

bipolar culture took on a more optimistic outlook.88 The basic

assumption of containment, after all, was that it is sometimes

better to learn to live with adversaries than to attempt to

destroy them. Added to this was a perception of how irrationally

close the bipolar peace had come to being broken during the

crises over Quemoy and Matsu and, more seriously, over the Soviet

missiles in Cuba. The result was public support in the last

decades of the cold war for arms control negotiations and the

establishment of crisis management tools such as the "hot line"

between the two superpowers.89

There was, as a consequence of all this, a reinforcing

effect between the two paradigms in terms of the American

public's attitude toward war. Certainly, there was no return to

the earlier intellectual approach that equated war with progress.

Only Harry Lime, the villainous third man in the film of that

title, could be allowed the speech he delivers on the great wheel

at the Prater in Vienna, when he advises his friend not to be so
disapproving of his illegal activities:

After all, it's not that awful--you know what the

fellow said . . .In Italy for thirty years under the

Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed--

they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the

Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love,

five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did

that produce . . .? The cuckoo clock.90

Equally important, the paradigms reinforced a general

perception concerning what John Mueller has described as the

"obsolescence" of great power war. Mueller argued, however, that

the near-term effects of the nuclear technology had been confused

with a long-term trend toward ending great power conflict, caused

in part by the public reaction to two world wars. Nevertheless,

when viewed from either paradigm, it is hard to deny that, at the

very least, nuclear weapons have reinforced at all three levels

of analysis a tendency on the part of the great powers not to

fight each other. "These new technologies of war," Carl Kaysen

pointed out, "have amplified the message of this century's war

experiences by many decibels, and set it firmly in the minds of

the wide public as well as those of political and military

leaders."91 How firmly that message has been received was

illustrated in 1987 when the entertainer, Michael Feinstein, was

performing a series of songs by Irving Berlin in the Oak Room of

the Algonguin Hotel in New York City. As he rendered the 1911 hit

"Alexander's Ragtime Band," Feinstein stopped on the line that

explains the way the band plays a bugle call is "so natural that

you want to go to war," struck by the anachronistic sentiment.

"It's an old song," he remarked.92

There was another important reinforcement between the two

paradigms that affected the American public's perception of power

and force. In order to maintain a long war in peacetime, there

had to be an extended perception of national mobilization. Other

great powers in history had mobilized their military and economic

resources, while leaving foreign policy generally to the

diplomats and soldiers. But only in totalitarian societies have

popular energies been mobilized for protracted external actions.

The United States took an original approach to the problem. The

result, on the one hand, was a kind of mental mobilization that

went well beyond the limits of the military and foreign policy

experts. On the other hand, much of civilian life was largely

untouched by the great struggle abroad.93

The exceptions were the limited wars on the periphery in

Korea and Vietnam, both of which resulted from the peace in war

redundancy of the two paradigms focused on the overall bipolar

confrontation at the center. Vietnam taught the American public

the limits of military power by demonstrating not so much the

cost of committing aggression, as the cost of resisting it. At

the same time, the economic rise of Germany and Japan in sharp

contrast to the ruinous "guns and butter" efforts of the United
States added to the sophistication of the average American

concerning the concept of power. Most important, the Vietnam

conflict demonstrated to the public, ironically in America's

longest hot war, that struggles on the periphery, just because

they could take place without disturbing the "long peace," were

not necessary to prosecute the "long war." Credibility, in other

words, was no longer sufficient as an interest in itself when the

cost in blood and material was so apparent. "To leave Vietnam to

its fate," President Johnson vainly pointed out, "would shake

the confidence. . . in the value of the American commitment, the

value of America's word. The result would be increased unrest and

instability, and even wider war."94

National Security and the Global Role. From a "long war"

perspective, the Soviet threat was the basis for a 40-year

strategic consensus by the American people, providing the United

States, in Ronald Steel's description, "with a global

vocation."95 On the geopolitical side, there was a growing public

perception, as Hans Morgenthau pointed out, of a "worldwide

balance of which the United States and the Soviet Union are the

main weights, placed on opposite scales. . . ." Within that

framework, other regions had "become functions of the new

worldwide balance, mere 'theaters' where the power context

between the two great protagonists is fought out."96

Ideologically by 1950, the American people were becoming

accustomed to the framework of a "long war" waged in a Manichean

struggle against a pervasive global and evil empire and reflected

officially that year in NSC-68:

What is new, what makes the continuing crisis, is the

polarization of power which now inescapably confronts

[a] slave society with the free. . . .The assault. .

.is world wide, and in the context of the present

polarization of power a defeat. . .anywhere is a defeat

everywhere. . . .97

This overall strategic consensus meant that for the first

time in their nation's history, Americans perceived an enduring

national security role outside U.S. borders. In the context of

the "long war," the public and governmental elites began to think

of a security system as one that functioned from day to day.

Reliable peace in that paradigm was nonexistent, which in turn

led to a clarity of alignments and planning against identified

threats. The result was a system for an insecure world that

included the emergence of NATO and other multilateral regional

alliances, growing defense budgets, large "peacetime" military

forces, and episodic combat in the Third World.

Equally important, the "long war" accustomed the public to

global leadership while at the same time imparting the virtues of

patience and cooperation. The fact that the nuclear weapon had

only a deterrent role that was lacking any positive productivity

meant that Americans grew used to a protracted struggle without a

clearly defined end. Concomittantly, there evolved a much greater
general appreciation of the intractability of many issues.

Certainly, the establishment of "rules of the game" between the

two powers, despite the ideological chasm separating them, was an

important manifestation of this development. Equally significant,

the American tendency to "solutionism" gave way generally in the

public mind over the decades of the "long war" to a realization

of the need, in an expression often used by Francois Mitterrand,

to "give time to time."98

But time in the context of the "long war" also meant money 

to the American taxpayer. And massive amounts expended in pursuit

of absolute security, as George Kennan and President Eisenhower

were the first to realize, could actually prevent the achievement

of that goal in terms of economic damage to American society. In

this regard, the "long war" demonstrated that the American people

were not willing to support "risk minimizing" strategies in

national security affairs, because such strategies tended to

drive up costs even while they attempted to provide insurance

against a wide spectrum of potential threats. From this

perspective, nuclear weapons were particularly important since

they provided at key points in the cold war (1945-50, 1953-61,

and less overtly, 1969-80) a means to minimize costs by paying

with some increase of risk. Without those weapons, the defense

establishment and the underlying foundations of the Military

Industrial Complex might have been much larger than they were

during the "long war." As a result, there might have been public

revulsion to such massive costs, producing isolationism and

abrogation of global responsibilities reminiscent of the 1920s.99

The aspect of cost in terms of national security was

reinforced for the American public by the Vietnam experience in

the context of the "long peace" paradigm, since it represented

such a protracted and increasingly forceful break for the United

States within that framework. The "guns and butter" economy

produced in that "limited" war, for instance, set in train many

of the social and economic problems that would cause the American

people to broaden their definition of national security affairs

in the following decades to include domestic as well as foreign

policy. Moreover, as the bipolar struggle began to fade into the

shade of detente and into an increasingly dominant "long peace"

framework in the wake of Vietnam, the sense of purpose and

direction that had permeated the mobilization of minds and

energies in a national consensus began to dissipate. The result

was an adverse synergism combining the decline of both a common

doctrine and a common enemy, which produced in turn a massive

void for a nation used to perceiving global politics as crusades

to save humanity from an overwhelming bully. The consequent

strategic uncertainties demonstrated in the revamped containment

policies of the Carter and Reagan years spilled over into

America's third great transition of this century.100

Those uncertainties were reinforced by a growing "declinist"

view directly tied to the "long war" paradigm and represented in

the national debates generated by the 1987 publication of Paul
Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.101 From the

standpoint of the public with its general sense of American

exceptionalism, nothing appeared quite so disturbing as the

declinist assertions that the United States might soon share the

"fall" common to every hegemon of the past. Nor was the blow

softened by a growing realization, reflected in the debates, that

the successful development of American political institutions and

economic systems in the major axis powers of World War II might

well play a major role in that decline. The result was ironical

from the perspective of either paradigm, with the idea of a more

modest future being generally rejected by the public at the same

time that a disposition not to pay for America's position in the

world was increasing in the Reagan years.102

By that time, in any event, the American public was ready to

jettison the "long war." This was due, in part, to the fatigue

factor associated with that particular framework. Moreover, there

was the hope of improved relations with the Soviet Union as

Gorbachev's initiatives began to take effect, coupled with the

growing awareness of American domestic problems, also generally

perceived as an outcome of the "long war." Opinion polls

indicated that from 1985 on, the nation increasingly was

convinced of the need to turn from that "war" and focus on

domestic issues, which were perceived more and more as the major

threat to U.S. national security. This readiness of the public to

turn inward occurred long before the national mood began to sour,

frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the political system.103

The lessons and habits from the extended global role in the

"long war" are also reflected in the same opinion polls, which

demonstrate that the public desire to focus on urgent domestic

concerns is predicated on a firm commitment to internationalism:

 a general conviction on the part of the majority of Americans in

the current transition that, in terms of national security, the

United States "must take an active part in world affairs."104 The

result is a thoughtful and stable commitment to internationalism

that, as one prominent pollster has pointed out, "is one of a

handfull of issues about which citizens have carefully considered

the consequences of their views and have come to accept

responsibility for them--the defining characteristic of mature

public judgment."105

Nevertheless, the sense of limitations acquired from the

perspectives of both paradigms will color the public's perception

of that commitment. In the Third World, early American hopes for

speedy economic development based on the U.S. national experience

have been replaced by resigned pragmatism tinged with

disappointment. In addition, there are the lessons concerning the

limitations of military power, no matter how massive, that

resulted from violent interruptions of the "long peace" ranging

from Vietnam to Lebanon. Moreover, the mixed results from

attempts to devise sweeping human rights doctrines and

nonproliferation policies are reminders that what finds favor in

American eyes is not always so obvious to other nations. Finally,
as both the coalitions of the "long war" and the growing economic

linkages of the "long peace" demonstrated to the American people,

U.S. global leadership must be provided in a multilateral

context.106

In terms of national security, this multilateral focus is

most understandable in the "long war" context. In this regard,

enthusiasm for some form of collective security has emerged in

the current transition just as it did in 1918 and 1945, because

the end of an epochal conflict gives peace the air of normalcy.

But after two generations of the "long war," the American public

still remains psychologically disposed to think of a security

system operating on a daily basis, focused on a specific threat.

At the same time, the apparent victory of liberalism provides a

renewed appeal to the idea of collective security, a concept in

its idealized form that is oriented on general, nonspecific,

abstract threats to security. The answer may lie with the United

Nations, about which the public is still ambivilant, particularly

if it considers the relatively minor role of that organization in

the post-1945 era when viewed from either paradigm. Nevertheless,

as opinion polls indicate, there is a latent willingness to

support a growing role for the United Nations:

If Americans do not want the United States to do the

job unilaterally--yet feel some responsibility for

indeed getting it done-- the United Nations is the most

credible candidate for the task. Americans are willing

to be sold on this proposition, to have their questions

and resistances addressed, and their enthusiasm

sparked. This will not happen spontaneously. It will

require active leadership. The potential nonetheless

exists, if America's leaders wish to take advantage of

it.107

All this means that governmental elites will have to work

harder in the current transition period to build a strategic

consensus among the American people concerning the increasingly

more complex concept of national security. The task is made

easier because of both paradigms. Patience, perserverence and

endurance in the face of protracted conflict without prospects of

clear victory is assuredly a lesson of the "long war." On the

other hand, the "long peace" demonstrated that absence of

conflict does not necessarily mean tranquility, certainty, or

predictability. The cold war showed at times that it can also

mean chaos, uncertainty and unpredictability. As a result, there

is a growing awareness on the part of the American people that

the United States faces a situation in the post-cold war

transition period similar to that which, in Edward Luttwak's

description, confronted the Roman Empire in its later stages:

The Romans did not face a single enemy, or even a fixed

group of enemies, whose ultimate defeat would ensure

permanent security. Regardless of the amplitude of

Roman victories, the frontiers of the empire would
always remain under attack, since they were barriers in

the path of secular migration flows from north to

 south and from east to west. Hence Roman strategy

could not usefully aim at total victory at any cost,

for the threat was not temporary but endless. The only

rational goal was the maintenance of a minimally

adequate level of security at the lowest feasible

cost.108

Change and Continuity. From the "long war" perspective,

there was an enduring ideological high for the American people,

who generally came to regard the Soviet Union during much of the

cold war as a conspiracy disguised as a state. President Wilson

had helped create this aspect of U.S. foreign policy by

presenting the American entry into World War I as a great crusade

that would make the world "safe for democracy," with its tacit

assumption that Germany was the enemy because it was undemocratic

and thus autocratic. And when he incorporated that assumption in

the demand contained in the Fourteen Points for the overthrow of

the Hohenzollern Monarchy, he created an enduring association for

the American people between the form and the behavior of

governments. That linkage resurfaced after 1945, resulting in an

official U.S. position throughout much of the cold war that

adherence to Marxist-Leninism produced governments that were not

only internally repressive, but through their presumed

subordination to Moscow, a threat to the global balance of power

as well.109

Most important for continued American public support of the

"long war," the linkage was also made specifically with the

proselytizing of U.S. values and methods. As the Truman Doctrine

demonstrated, the geopolitical reality was never stronger than

when it coincided at the ideological level with the defense of

freedom and the diffusion of such American virtues as freedom of

speech, belief and enterprise. Without such underlying idealism,

the post-1945 transition might have occurred more slowly or not

at all. For if the American people were to embark on a "long war"

with no clearly defined end, it was essential for government

leaders to appeal to a tradition as long as the Republic's

existence in which, as Thomas Jefferson had described it, the

United States was to be "a standing monument and example for the

aim and imitation of other countries."110 It was this "city on the

hill" tradition that accounted for the American reaction even

from the "long war" perspective to such revelations as the power

politics of the Yalta Conference, the espionage of the U-2

incident, or the covert action of the Bay of Pigs.

It is this tradition in the current transition that

accounted for the attempts by the Bush administration to maintain

the cold war equation between particularist security and

universalist freedom as the basis for consensus in the Persian

Gulf conflict. The result was that the vital U.S. interest of

unimpeded access to Persian Gulf oil was subsumed in a

resurrection of the "Munich lesson" that aggression anywhere if
not stopped would endanger world order and thus American

security. This was an approach much more satisfying to the

American people, but bound to lead to confusion, as the U.S.

reaction to aggression in Bosnia has demonstrated. Moreover, this

idealism is still tied to the sense of American exceptionalism

that was reinforced by the course and outcome of the long war.

The problem, as Stanley Hoffmann has pointed out, is that this

tendency is not suited for America's third transition period:

It is dangerous. . .to believe in a kind of moral

uniqueness or superiority (whose other side, when 

things turn out badly, is a tendency to blame one-self

for all the world's ills, which is just as absurd as

the belief that one is predestined and morally fit to

cure them), in a special role either as the world's

policeman or as the propagator of human rights,

especially when the deference of others is shrinking,

when the contrast between such ambitions and domestic

achievements is glaring and when the direction of

'Manifest Destiny' is anything but manifest.111

The current transition also reflects other aspects

concerning the American public revealed by the two paradigms.

From a "long war" perspective, the growth of the national

security state made that public increasingly aware of defense

costs. This was accentuated when viewed through the "long peace"

framework by the expansion of other governmental programs, which

only raised public perceptions that those programs were generally

diminished by defense needs. The result has been public

expectations of a peace dividend not unlike those in the previous

two transition periods.

At the same time, both paradigms reveal, however

speculatively, an adverse confluence of trends. From a "long war"

perspective, there are the buildup of tensions over the decades

and the concomitant "live for the moment" approach that dovetail

with the materialism viewed through the "long peace" paradigm.

These offer disturbing comparisons with the self-indulgent

decades at the end of the extended peace terminated by World War

I. From both perspectives, there is the popular culture dominated

by selfishness and short-sightedness and the tendency to put

personal wishes and demands ahead of societal obligations. A

concomitant to this is what John Lewis Gaddis calls "a curious

unevenness in the willingness to bear pain."112 In this regard,

the United States has been generous, even profligate with its

military forces, but almost irresponsibly selfish in terms of

issues affecting lifestyle and pocket book.

Once again, both paradigms are instructive, since this last

tendency goes back at least to President Johnson's peace in war

refusal to ask for sacrifices in the American home front during

the Vietnam war even as he built up the "guns and butter" economy

to service both that conflict and the "Great Society." Moreover,

as the "long war" declined in the 1980s and with it the public
consensus, President Reagan attempted to restore his domestic

basis by convincing the American people that the United States

might aspire to great ends without enduring hardships in

conjuring up the means. In the end, as Robert Tucker has pointed

out, the Reagan years "transformed what had been a disposition

not to pay for the American position in the world into something

close to a fixed resolve not to do so."113

In the wake of the cold war, the American people generally

perceive the U.S. Government as a bloated and incompetent

gridlocked manifestation of both the "long war" and the "long

peace." "Nowadays," George Will has pointed out, "government

looks to most Americans like an overbearing and overreaching

underachiever that is suspect regarding both its competence and

motives."114 Paradoxically, this collapse of the prestige of

government comes just as the American people, increasingly

sophisticated in their approach to both the domestic and

international aspects of national security, desire more

leadership. That leadership, however, will have to develop in

this third transition period within a vastly constrained

environment, reminiscent more of the first rather than the second

transition, if it is to be effective in calling forth sufficient

effort and sacrifice by the American people.

State.

The National Security State. Ernest May has described what

happens when form and function grow apart in capitals of nationstates as a result of historical change:

In Westminster, the houses of Parliament and Buckingham

Palace--both structures of the Victorian era--and the

Georgian and Regency offices along Whitehall are

buildings for a seat of empire, not for the capital of

a middle-ranking member of the European Community. The

drab, modest government office blocks of Tokyo and Bonn

seem equally ill-suited, given that they serve the

second and third ranking powers of the economic world.

None of these capitals vies with Vienna, where the

magnificent Hofburg is the seat of government for a

republic smaller than Indiana. . . .115

The "long war" caused a militarization of the U.S.

Government that to some extent has produced a similar mismatch

between form and function in the current transition period. Only

in the context of the "long war" is it possible to understand why

power, money, prestige and public influence were conferred on old

and new agencies oriented on the Soviet threat and the people who

ran them. The result is a vast national security apparatus. In

terms of the Executive Branch, that apparatus stretches from the

Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, to the

plain new State Department Building on 21st Street, across the

Potomac to the Pentagon where over 25,000 workers man the tip of
the defense iceberg, to the Central Intelligence Agency further

out in Virginia. On Capitol Hill, the members of Congress and

their staffs work on myriad committees that oversee the military,

intelligence and diplomatic establishments dealing with national

security. Finally, outside the government, there is another set

of interested participants ranging from arms manufacturers,

politicians, and professors, to publicists, pontificators and

demagogues, who also invested careers and fortunes in the "long

war."116

The evolution of a post-World War II government with

national security concerns dominant and a military establishment

transcendent was not preordained. In fact, the major focus in the

global arena after 1945 was primarily on economics as the United

States began its familiar postwar pattern of demobilization. So

rapid was the pace that one month after the end of the war, the

Joint Strategic Survey Committee reported that "a year or more

would be required to reconstitute our military position at a

fraction of its recent power."117 As a result of that pattern,

there was increasingly acrimonious competition among the

services. The 1947 National Security Act settled little in this

regard, particularly when President Truman began to cut military

spending back to an avowed goal of the 1938 level. Even the Key

West meeting the following year that hammered out service

functions failed to stop interservice bickering and rivalry.

Despite those agreements, for instance, the Navy lunged

immediately for a part of the strategic bombing role, setting off

the so-called 1949 "Revolt of the Admirals," which soon spilled

over in unseemly fashion into Congress and thus to the American

people.118

By that time, the focus of the government had shifted to the

military, primarily because of a series of crises, famous in the

litany of early cold war events. Moreover, the best allied

intelligence available indicated a large Soviet buildup that

included by 1950, 175 divisions, several hundred new bombers

capable of striking any part of the Mediterranean or the British

isles, large and improving tactical air forces, and over 300

submarines capable of extended underwater operations in the

Atlantic. Added to this were the two seminal events of 1949: the

explosion of a Soviet nuclear device and the victory of the

People's Republic of China in the Chinese Civil War. The result

in the spring of 1950 was NSC-68 which called for a substantial

increase in military forces--all unlikely to have been achieved

if not for the Korean War, which seemed to bear out the principal

assumptions of the document. Because of that conflict,

congressional leaders in a groundswell of bipartisan support

joined President Truman in massively increasing the permanent

American military establishment in order to prepare the country

for an indefinite "period of acute danger."119

The transformation of the American government occurred

rapidly thereafter. In FY 50, the military budget accounted for

less than one-third of government expenditures and less than 5
percent of GNP--much of that due to residual World War II

obligations. By FY 53, the military represented more than 60

percent of the government outlays and more than 12 percent of

GNP. In the years ahead, despite a downward trend in military

spending when compared to a more rapidly rising GNP, the military

establishment that emerged from the Korean War remained the

dominant consumer of governmental discretionary funds. At the

same time, defense and defense-related agencies employed for much

of the "long war" between 60 and 70 percent of all Federal

personnel.120

1950 was also a dividing line for diplomacy. For even from a

"long peace" perspective, the State Department after that year

also shifted its focus more and more to military security. As a

consequence, American Secretaries of State spent an increasing

amount of time in the ensuing decades on issues concerning levels

of and arrangements for forward deployed U.S. military forces;

amounts of military aid authorized for client states; and, in

the last half of the cold war, arrangements for nuclear arms

control.121

There were similar developments at the White House in terms

of increasing structure and organizational precedence oriented on

political-military issues, primarily through the development of

the National Security Council (NSC). In the early Truman years,

that organization was merely one part of the Executive Office of

the President, only sparingly used by the Chief Executive. After

1950, the NSC became the government's principal steering

mechanism, with real decisionmaking invariably involving the

assistants to the president for national security affairs. That

post increased exponentially in importance during the Kennedy

administration, reaching new peaks in the Nixon and Carter years

when the national security advisers often brushed aside the

secretaries of state. By the end of the "long war," the business

hours of the presidents were occupied primarily with the problems

vetted and brought to them by means of the NSC system. And in

fact, as Ernest May has pointed out, by that time "the main

business of the United States government had become the

development, maintenance, positioning, exploitation, and

regulation of military forces."122

The Change in Government. Walter Lippmann early on foresaw

the growth of collectivism brought on by the economic problems of

the Great Depression which were forcing governments to replace

the market place as arbiter of international and national

economic relations. Those pressures, he concluded during the

Depression, "will enormously increase the scope of government and

greatly intensify the dependence of the individual upon

government."123 In this, he was partially correct. It is true, of

course, that welfare and social security payments as well as

guaranteed price supports for farmers emerged in the 1930s in

response to the Great Depression. But because those programs only

benefited minorities at the expense of the public majority, they

could not command universal support or reach as large a scale as
defense expenditures would in response to the "long war."124

It was in the context of the "long war" paradigm that

military outlays came to provide a major impetus for the

increased role of the American government in redistributing

economic resources among the citizenry. It was also in that

context that those outlays came to be perceived as serving the

common good. As a consequence, there was never concerted

opposition to the special interests concerned with contracts for

new military weapons and equipment that emerged and grew over the

decades. Military expenditures thus increased steadily in

response to the needs of the "long war," with governmental

purchases of arms from a "long peace" perspective becoming, in

William McNeil's phrase, "a stabilizing flywheel for the American

economy."125 The result was a peacetime economy generally immune

to business cycles, because the demand and production of weaponry

and equipment came over the life of the cold war to be governed 

by political not financial considerations.

It was in this sense that the arms race with the Soviet

Union allowed in diluted form and with very little break the

continuation of the deliberate management of the American economy

that had worked so well in World War II when arms production

finally eliminated the Great Depression. The exigencies of that

conflict required such drastic and unpopular political

intervention in the market place as rationing. In the "long war,"

however, it was enough to exert softer political management

focused on arms expenditure and the deliberate manipulation of

tax and interest rates to sustain a protracted era of prosperity.

During that era, when viewed from a "long peace" perspective, it

was also the generally rising standard of living that diminished

complaints about growing welfare expenditures and farm subsidies,

thus contributing to the smooth functioning of the American

economy. In the end, both paradigms are essential to understand

the primary stimulus for the remarkable political management of

the U.S. economy throughout the cold war and how without that

combination of peace in war, a different basis for American

prosperity would certainly have evolved, as it did for Germany

and Japan.

The paradigms play a similar role in examining the evolution

of governmental politics and the political culture. From the

"long war" perspective, for instance, the overall strategic

consensus concerning containment made possible a degree of

presidential hegemony, previously only achieved in external or

civil war. The rise of the imperial presidency backed by the

Supreme Court would last as long as Congress was willing to fall

patriotically in line with the Chief Executive's strategic

priorities and his budgetary requests. Above all, there were the

actions designed to provide more freedom of maneuver, ranging

from the use of executive agreements to the crafting of

resolutions beginning in the Eisenhower administration that coopted Congress into approving unspecified presidential moves in

advance--a development that reached its logical denouement in the
wake of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

From the standpoint of both paradigms, the second and most

prolonged American encounter with the complex concept of limited

war explains the decline of this executive dominance. To begin

with, limited war theorists had generally seen such conflicts as

antiseptic encounters, primarily political in nature and thus

manageable as part of the "long peace." The logical concomitants

to such an approach were the lack of relevance of military

considerations and the unimportance of domestic politics, both of

which were prescriptions for ultimate disaster in Vietnam. The

former led to the use of military actions primarily in the

political sense of "signalling" which in turn had the more

pernicious effect of gradualism. The fallacy of the latter belief

was exposed by the combination of that gradualism with the

communication revolution which brought the increasing human cost

of the war to the American people on a daily basis. Ultimately,

limited war in Vietnam failed because the chief executives of the

United States could not convince their citizens that such a

savage break in the "long peace" could serve the overall

objectives of the "long war."126

As a result, Congress began to reassert its authority in

foreign affairs, particularly in the matter of war powers,

understandably the most contentious issue when viewed through the

combined prism of the two paradigms. In the wake of the cold war,

the balancing mechanisms built into the Constitution have

returned, functioning as they were originally intended. On the

other hand, the strategic consensus that provided the presidency

with so much power during the "long war" has disappeared. And

although that consensus was directed externally, the increased

linkage of foreign policy with domestic policy in terms of

national security affairs has generated a perception of general

executive-legislative gridlock by a public grown accustomed to

over four decades of the imperial presidency.

Change and Continuity. From the "long war" perspective, the

militarization of the American government made eminent sense as a

creative response to unprecedented challenges. Given the

pervasive Soviet military threat and the rapid evolvement of

nuclear and other military technologies against the enduring

backdrop of widespread global insecurities, the consequences for

the world would have been much different if the United States had

not structured itself to deal primarily with military issues.

Certainly in terms of international stability, an American

government organized to emphasize domestic or international

economic affairs could hardly have acted, for example, as a

credible foundation to build a collective defense structure like

NATO. Nevertheless, the "long war" has left the United States

with a government that will be increasingly ill-suited for the

new era. The NSC, for instance, is hardly the mechanism for

formulating policy options dealing with the environment, trade,

population, hunger, or disease. And both the defense and

intelligence establishments ultimately will have to make changes
and reorganizations as the post-cold war world emerges.

No one expects Washington to return to the Cincinnatian

capital of the 1930s in which the State, War, and Navy

departments were all housed in what is now the Old Executive

Office Building. At the same time, however, there is the clear

necessity to design new institutions for the new era. In the

previous transition period, the task was easier since the United

States had so little international affairs machinery and

experience, and thus could build from a fresh base that allowed

its newly emerging policy elites to be "present at the creation."

There is, to say the least, no comparable void in Washington

during the current transition. Moreover, the emphasis on national

security during the "long war" has left the departments that

manage domestic affairs as largely moribund, somewhat upgraded

spinoffs of New Deal agencies. Infusing new life into the

Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, and the Interior

will also be a major task in the new era as will transforming the

Department of Energy from its status as a barely remodeled Atomic

Energy Commission.127

The economic choices will be no easier for the United States

in the current transition period, particularly if the post-1945

era is viewed through the "long war" paradigm. From that

perspective, the cold war is a reminder that America has hardly

ever demonstrated in this century a capacity to resolve key

economic problems in peacetime. Defense spending in both World

Wars as well as throughout most of the cold war stabilized the

economy at crucial moments. In fact, except for the exuberant

thrust of the "roaring twenties," a period that contained the

seeds of the Great Depression, the American economy has not

prospered for an extended length of time in the 20th century

except in periods of war.128

A major problem in all this emerges from the combination of

the two paradigms. Belligerent states usually aim to return to

peace through victory or compromise and as a consequence make

plans both for reconverting their economies and for shaping the

post-war order. But the "long peace" accustomed two generations

of statesmen to a reversal of Clausewitz's dictum, with politics

becoming a method of conducting war by other means. As a result,

the United States was not prepared for "victory."129

From the "long war" perspective, that lack of preparedness

was reflected in the actions of the Reagan administration to

postpone the full economic impact of the decline in military

spending as a percent of GNP that accompanied the winding down of

the cold war. To begin with, the government simply increased

military spending, while devaluing the dollar in an attempt to

stimulate exports. Finally, the administration used tax cuts and

extreme deficits to stimulate the economy. The economic problems

that ultimately ensued and have spilled over into the current

transition are not ones generally faced by the American

government during the full flush of military Keynesianism in the
"long war." The result is a political system that appears

fundamentally stalemated in its approach to economic issues.130

The basic problem in the current transition period is one of

choices concerning the reallocation of resources without causing

large-scale disruption and unemployment. Political consensus will

be extremely difficult, particularly for expenditures that

benefit some segments of society more than others. And yet there

is no going back, no real choice that can undo the government

intervention in the exchange of goods and services that has

affected the daily life of the American people in a unique peacein-war environment for over two generations. It is up to the

government, then, to create some new balance among all the

special interests and social groupings in American society. That,

in turn, will call for a political process much like the one that

redefined the role of the Federal government in the last

transition period. At that time, the domestic impact of foreign

aid and rearmament was submerged in the debate over what the

United States was required to do overseas to contain communism.

Government elites in the current transition will have to focus on

domestic policy while tempering without relinquishing American

global involvement brought on by a 40-year "war," the very

duration of which was legitimized through the prism of the "long

peace."131

An important aspect of that global involvement has to do

with change and continuity in the American military. In terms of

the "long war" perspective, the most striking result of events

after 1945 was the emergence of a huge standing military force

which ultimately provided the United States a balanced global

reach unlike that of any great power in history. The current

joint air, land, sea effectiveness of American forces, for

instance, stands in sharp contrast to the situation at the zenith

of the Royal Navy's rule of the sea under the Pax Britannica, when Bismarck noted that if the British army should land on the

coast of Prussia, he would have the local police arrest it. The

vastness of the force required for preserving the "long peace"

while prosecuting the "long war" on a global scale was captured

by Zbignew Brzezinski at the height of the cold war when he noted

that there were:

more than a million American troops stationed on some

400 major and almost 300 minor United States military

bases scattered all over the globe. [There were] more

than forty-two nations tied to the United States by

security pacts, American military missions training

 the officers and troops of many other national armies,

and the approximately two hundred thousand United

States civilian government employees in foreign posts

all makes for striking analogies to the great classical

imperial systems.132

All that has changed with the end of the cold war.

Downsizing is a fact of life for the U.S. military in this
transition period as it was from the wartime perspective after

the other two great conflicts of this century. The principal

reason, like that at the conclusion of any war, is that the

overarching threat has virtually disappeared. But in vanquishing

that threat, the American public and governmental elites have

come to realize that changes had occurred in the military element

of power as well. As a conflict extended within the "long peace,"

the cold war prolonged the traditional view of national security

as a predominantly military matter, even as a changing world both

at home and abroad demanded a more sophisticated, eclectic

approach.

Part of the change had to do with the erosion of the 500-

year old linkage between military and economic strength, the

"self-reinforcing cycle," in William McNeil's words, as a

symbiotic means of producing predominance in world politics.133 By

the 1980s, there was a general perception that there was a price

to pay for emphasizing military security over solvency, that the

40-year quest for military advantages from the wartime

perspective had done nothing to protect the United States from

economic decline and social disequilibrium within the extended

peace paradigm, and in fact in many cases had exacerbated those

problems. That perception was reinforced by the massive

economically-induced implosion of the Soviet Union that ended the

cold war. Added to that was the recognition that the "long war"

for both superpowers had truly been a "long peace" for Germany

and Japan, precisely because, like the tiny nation in the film,

"The Mouse that Roared," their defeat in war had allowed them to

separate economic growth from military capability.134

The major problem remaining for the U.S. military in the

current transition period is to incorporate these changes in such

a way as to make rational the traditional post-war American

pattern of demobilization. From the perspectives of both

paradigms, the Department of Defense (DOD) is vastly more

prepared to do this than in 1947. Thanks to reforms ranging from

National Security Act amendments to the Goldwater-Nichols Act,

DOD has evolved into a sophisticated, coherent entity in terms of

both directing war and coordinating with the myriad government

agencies concerned with national security. Nevertheless, there

are some formidable challenges.

In the first place, as Senator Nunn has pointed out, the

transition should not produce merely a smaller copy of the cold

war force, replete with miniaturized versions of the

inefficiencies and redundancies that emerged over the decades

since the service roles and missions were created in the Key West

conference of 1948. It will require a delicate balance. On the

one hand, there is the need to reduce the duplication and

redundancy of forces and weapons in order to have an affordable

military capable of performing strategic and operational

missions. On the other hand, as a matter of operational surety,

some redundancy has a genuine place in the national military

strategy if flexibility and combat survivability are not to be
severely reduced. What does not have a place if congressional and

public support for the downsizing military is to be maintained

are the protectionism and interservice territoriality that marked

the last transition. In the CNN age, a public in search of peace

dividends will simply not tolerate a "Revolt of the Admirals."135

The most important task, however, and one that also affects

the roles and missions issue, is to slow down the process of

military downsizing--to "give time to time" in order to arrive at

a proper mix of military change and continuity within the U.S.

national security strategy. That strategy will not evolve quickly

in the current transition period. Nor should it. The world has

grown too complex to allow a cut and paste approach to the new

era.

As the strategy at the national level develops, the key

mission for the U.S. military is to ensure that a disconnect does

not develop between it and the national military strategy. In the

first transition period, the inwardly focused national strategy

that emerged had disastrous results for the United States as

well as the international community. But it did have the virtue

of a logical linkage with its subordinate and equally disastrous

military strategy. In the second transition period, on the other

hand, national leaders made sweeping commitments matched by an

equally sweeping diminishment of American military power. Task

Force Smith is instructive in this regard not so much as a symbol

of unpreparedness, but as an illustration of what can happen when

a gap is allowed to develop between national security strategy

and one of its subordinate strategies. It is true, of course,

that the concept of national security is more complex in the

current transition. Nevertheless, the experiences of the last

half of this century viewed from both subordinate paradigms

suggest that the world is not yet ready for an overall shift in

the realist paradigm and that consequently national military

power will continue to play a vital role in that concept.

From the vantage point of that realist paradigm looking out

over a world still nasty and brutish in the post-cold war era,

there is comfort in the continuity provided by a two generational

war-in-peace mentality. But that continuity is only possible in

the current transition if changes in the concept of national

security are acknowledged--if, in other words, U.S. domestic,

social and economic needs are not sacrificed to the exigencies of

the permanent Hobbsian struggle as they were to some extent in

the hybrid war that recently ended. For the military this means

becoming more efficient and less costly, more relevant to

domestic issues, and more willing to focus on multilateral

military approaches. Most significant, it means finding new ways

to address radically new threats to national security--an effort

given bureaucratic impetus by Secretary Aspin's recent

restructuring of DOD in which offices were created to address new

security problems ranging from nuclear security and

counterproliferation to economic and environmental security. In

all such efforts, major adjustments will be necessary, not just
in the Department of Defense, but in the entire government and

with the consent of the American people. It is a process, as

Ronald Steel has pointed out, that is never easy in the best of

times.

For the American economy, distorted by a half-century

of reliance on military spending, for American

political elites, who had come to believe that they

were "born to lead," and for an American public,

deprived of an enemy to justify its sacrifices, the

experience will be a wrenching and possibly threatening

one.136

The International System.

The Bipolar Legacy. During the cold war, the industrial and

postindustrial nations somehow managed a dedicated extended

preparation for war almost without precedence in history, while

at the same time keeping the grimmest of the apocalyptic horsemen

at bay. The reason was the evolution of a bipolar distribution of

great power after 1945 between the United States and the Soviet

Union. At the height of the cold war, that system was viewed

primarily through the "long war" paradigm as a destabilizing

influence on international relations. "A bipolar world loses the

perspective for nuance," Henry Kissinger noted in this regard;

 a gain for one side appears as an absolute loss for

the other. Every issue seems to involve a question of

survival. The smaller countries are torn between a

desire for protection and a wish to escape big-power

dominance. Each of the superpowers is beset by the

desire to maintain its preeminence among its allies, to

increase its influence among the uncommitted, and to

enhance its security vis-a-vis its opponent.137

Over the last decades of the "long peace," however,

bipolarity, whether considered as either balance of power or

hegemonic stability within the overall realist paradigm, took on

a new luster. To begin with, the reduction of key actors to two

superpowers simplified communication, thus avoiding the problems

experienced by the five Great Powers of Europe in the summer of

1914. Moreover, as the "long peace" came to demonstrate,

bipolarity could tolerate defections from coalitions. In this

regard, the Sino-Soviet dispute and the subsequent U.S.

rapprochement with the People's Republic of China stood in sharp

contrast to the two Moroccan crises prior to World War I, both

precipitated by attempts to maintain control over coalitions.138

The "long peace" paradigm is also instructive concerning the

formation of international systems. The cold war demonstrated

that peace does not necessarily emerge from a transition period

dominated by formal negotiating processes that produce an agreed

upon international structure as occurred in 1919. In fact, the
Versailles system barely lasted half as long as that which

emerged from a transition after 1945 that produced no peace

conference and only a minimum of formal structure and

organization to perpetuate the system. Nevertheless, the bipolar

system endured primarily because, as Kenneth Waltz has pointed

out concerning the superpowers, "two states, isolationist by

tradition, untutored in the ways of international politics, and

famed for impulsive behavior, soon showed themselves--not always

and everywhere, but always in crucial cases--to be wary, alert,

cautious, flexible and forebearing."139

Those attributes were demonstrated early in the long war-inpeace. Despite the goal of universalism explicit in both the 1941

Atlantic Charter and the 1942 United Nations Declaration, both

superpowers after World War II used alliances to create

demarcation lines around areas considered of vital interest along

the western and northeastern Eurasian strategic fronts. It was,

in short, nothing more than the Westphalian principle cuius

regio, eius religio (whose the region, his the religion) applied

to the territories liberated from Axis control, as at least one

national leader realized. "Whoever occupies a territory," Stalin

declared, "imposes on it his own social system. . .as far as his

army can reach."140

Those so-called "alliances of position," such as NATO and

the Warsaw Pact, were simple, unambiguous, recognizable, and 

conspicuous dividing lines that were useful in establishing rules

of the game for prosecuting war in peacetime. Less useful were

the "alliances of movement," the geographic extension of those

systems, beginning with the "pactomania" on both sides in the

Eisenhower and Khruschev years, as each nation attempted to

outflank the other. The perceived zero-sum bandwagoning effect

that motivated the American thrust was summarized by President

Kennedy: "If the United States were to falter, the whole world

would inevitably move toward the Communist bloc."141 Nevertheless,

despite periodic nods to the ideological concept of roll back,

each nation continued to cooperate for the most part concerning

primary spheres of influence.142

Much of that cooperation had to do with nuclear weapons.

Without those weapons, bipolarity would still have emerged in the

second transition period because of the collapse of the

multipolar system brought on by the "Thirty Years War" of 1914-

45. But it is unlikely that cooperative efforts of any duration

would have been possible without what Joseph Nye has called

"nuclear learning," the vital common ingredient of the two

subordinate paradigms. From both perspectives, it was the

consideration of the consequences of nuclear weapons and

doctrines that led to attempts to provide some structure and

coherence to interstate relations that involved the risk of war.

The result was the acceptance of formal and informal norms as a

basis of guidelines for behavior and rules of engagement. In

terms of nuclear weapons, these included the development of

Permissive Action Links (PAL) on nuclear weapons, second strike
nuclear capabilities, intrusive verification systems, and tacitly

tolerated satellite reconaissance. All this eventually allowed

the establishment of stable security regimes which encouraged

both powers to put long-term mutual considerations above shorter

term self-interests.143

Despite the redundancy of the two paradigms, the

conventional wisdom in the early years of the cold war was that

arms control served only utopian or propaganda purposes or both.

When SALT negotiations began in the late 1960s, the intellectual

dispute centered on those who saw arms control as a disaster for

the United States and those who considered the process as the

last best hope for mankind. By the end of the cold war, the

principle of arms control had come to be accepted not only as an

integral part of the East-West relationship, but as a useful

adjunct to the realist management of power in the international

system. At the same time, this evolution also encouraged the

isolation of dangerous and destabilizing areas of military

competition by means of agreements between the superpowers,

ranging from the Antarctic and Outer Space treaties to those

focused on the Seabed and Biological Weapons.144

The evolution of arms control and other rules of the game

between the superpowers flowed into detente and strengthened the

"long peace" perspective in the closing decades of the cold war.

One result was a "loosening" of bipolarity in which centrifugal

forces began to play on the western treaty regime. At the

beginning of the cold war, that regime stressed the inviolability

of obligations in accordance with the norm pacta sunt servanda

(treaties are binding). By the last decade of that conflict,

there was increased support for the legal doctrine of rebus sic

stantibus, which terminated agreements if the circumstances at

the time of the signing no longer obtained. This change in the

international system was demonstrated in the 1980s with the U.S.

severance of its formal promise to protect Taiwan and its

"strategic divorce" with New Zealand over the issue of docking

American ships carrying nuclear weapons.145

Such changes, however, were effected on a two-way street.

For over 40 years, U.S. political influence with its allies had

been increasingly bound up with the specific Soviet threat in the

context of the "long war." It was that threat that caused the

Europeans and the Japanese to place their security in American

hands and thus defer both economically and politically to

American leadership, whether in the form of trade concessions,

financing of the U.S. treasury deficits or purchases of U.S.

military equipment. With the ascending of the "long peace"

paradigm, those defense dependencies began to fade and with them

the threat-induced deference. At the same time, the rise of West

Germany and Japan only emphasized the lack of congruence between

the primary military and economic rivalries. The peaceful end of

the "long war" further demonstrated the growing importance of

economic power and increasingly brought into question the utility

of force as the ultima ratio of state relations, at least among
the major developed nations.146

No such "de-belated" status occurred in the so-called Third

World, a categorization of nation-states that even owed its

origins to the bipolar nature of the international system. In

that world, the absence of superpower war was not synonymous with

global peace; nor was the absence of system transformation

through war translated into global stability. Instead, recurrent

violence in an unstable "peripheral" system occurred alongside a

stable "central" system, with an estimated 127 wars and over 21

million war-related deaths taking place in the developing world

during the cold war.147

From the "long war" perspective, the bipolar struggle

distracted from the post-World War II decolonization of the

planet, often leading to abrupt actions by the great powers that

caused the absence of viable, indigenous state structures. Most

important, the "long war" caused both sides to perceive that

there were important interests engaged almost everywhere in the

world. One result was global militarization, in which the Third

World served as an important outlet for the massive amounts of

increasingly more sophisticated arms produced in the developed

world. Moreover, despite superpower cooperation on the NonProliferation Treaty, the exigencies of the "long war" caused

both sides to ignore the problem in states considered

strategically important. As a consequence, with the exception of

South Africa, which was isolated because of its racial--not its

nuclear--policies, nuclear proliferation occurred during the long

war with "surprisingly few diplomatic costs."148

Interdependence. Both paradigms help explain why the United

States used its economic dominance in the second transition

period for international economic reconstruction and why that

dominance eventually eroded. In one sense, the post-1945 policy

was created in an economic context that foresaw prosperity and

peace as a result of the reconstructed economies of Western

Europe and Japan within an overall interdependent framework of

free trade and monetary stability. The resultant prosperity,

American planners believed, would not only constrain the divisive

forces of nationalism that had been so destructive in the first

half of the 20th century, but also set the geopolitical stage for

containing the Soviet Union while providing the global economic

growth necessary for Third World development. The consequences of

that economic vision were the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall

Plan, and the dependency of the Third World on the industrial

nations for capital and markets.149

This growing interdependence was given added impetus by

dramatic advances in communication, transportation and technology

that emerged from the symbiosis of war-in-peace. One result, as

John Herz pointed out with the advent of ICBMs in the Eisenhower

years, was that the "hard shell" of national boundaries had been

rendered "permeable."150 Added to this, was the fact that force

and military power increasingly came to appear less useful during
the "long peace" as tools to deal with complex economic problems

and social crisis. As a consequence, the traditional bond between

such power and the organizing legitimacy that had emerged from

Westphalia began to weaken. That legitimacy was based on the

state's ability to shield the citizen from the capricious

violence in the international community. In return, the

inhabitants of states took on citizenship which normally

included, at the very least, the payment of taxes and

participation, if required, in the common defense of the state.

But if the state could no longer be depended upon to provide a

defensive shield for its citizenry; or if the state had in effect

become a contributor to the problems of a society, then the

ancient agreement forged at Westphalia was destroyed: "the roof,"

as Herz noted, would be "blown off" the historic shelter provided

by the nation-state since the end of the Thirty Years War.151

To this refocus on the viability of the nation-state was

added the changing nature of conflict brought on by the peaceful,

bipolar great power stalemate of the "long war." Modern war, as

it emerged in that stalemate, was no longer the sole preserve of

the state in the sense that it had established norms, rules, and

etiquettes, as well as standardized strategies. In that context,

during the cold war, declarations were rarely exchanged, the

identity of warring parties could not always be established, and

many military actions did not conform to the traditional concept

 of two or more national armies fighting each other. The result,

as Brian Jenkins predicted, was that the use of force for

political purposes has come to range from intifadas, terrorism

and insurgent conflicts, through peacekeeping and peacemaking

operations to "conventional" set warfare between the organized

armed forces of nation-states:

With continuous, sporadic armed conflict, blurred in

time and space, waged on several levels by a large

array of national and subnational forces, warfare in

the last quarter of the twentieth century may well come

to resemble warfare in the Italian Renaissance or

warfare in the early seventeenth century before the

emergence of national armies and more organized modern

warfare.152

These trends culminated in the mid-1970s with the rise of

"interdependence" studies, which criticized the state-centric

"realist" tendency to reduce all international relations to a

struggle for power in the face of emerging multicentric

transnationalism, particularly in the area of economics. Global

interdependence, those studies concluded, was altering the nature

of traditional geopolitical rivalries. Integration and

cooperation were becoming at least as important as balance of

power, since global networks were evolving apart from traditional

military and ideological alliances. The new trend was toward

mutual security in an interdependent world based on an

international system that was functioning less and less on a

"self-help" basis. The traditional security game, in short, could
be conducted as much with the logic of Adam Smith as Thucydides.

Nevertheless, even the earliest proponents of the new school were

not prepared for a major shift in the realist paradigm.

We must. . .be cautious about the prospect that rising

interdependence is creating a brave new world of

cooperation to replace the bad old world of

international conflict. As every parent of small

children knows, baking a larger pie does not stop

disputes over the size of the slices.153

The realist response to the concept of interdependence was

to acknowledge the socioeconomic transformations that had

occurred during the cold war, while denying any significant

impact of those changes on the state-centric paradigm focused on

the maximization of power in an anarchic world. Kenneth Waltz,

for instance, pointed out that transnational processes and nonstate actors acquired significance only in the context of a

state-controlled international environment. Those states, he

argued, "may choose to interfere little in the affairs of nonstate actors for long periods of time"; nevertheless, they "set

the terms of the intercourse. . . .When the crunch comes, states

remake the rules by which other actors operate." As a consequence

of the continuing structural predominance of states, the realist

paradigm remained firm: no new theories were needed. "A theory

that denies the central role of states," Waltz concluded, "will

be needed only if non-state actors develop to the point of 

rivaling or surpassing the great powers, not just a few minor

ones. They show no sign of doing that."154

In effect, this so-called "neorealist" approach was an

update of the realist paradigm without an alteration of its basic

premises: a synthesis of that paradigm's assumptions and the

modern realities of the post-industrial era. One variant of that

approach was the examination of states and transnational entities

together in the context of "international regimes," where they

could deal with each other through non-hierarchical processes

based on agreed sets of principles and procedures that operated

in particular issue areas. Despite the added focus on new actors

and transnational processes, however, regime theory remained

essentially within the realist paradigm, grafting institutions

and procedures onto the state-centric system. That system, as

Waltz also pointed out, was flexible enough to allow in a passive

sense "informal rules to develop," a flexibility that also

permitted states to intervene "to change rules that no longer

suit them."155

The neorealist approach does not suffice for those theorists

who emphasize the rise of a transnational, multicentric system of

international relations within the security provided by the

bipolar war-in-peace framework of the cold war. At the same time,

they are unable to postulate a complete shift from the realist

paradigm. James Rosenau, for instance, sees the new multicentric

world as neither superordinate nor subordinate to the historic
state-centric world. The result is a framework of coexistence

that posits sovereignty-bound and sovereignty-free actors as

inhabitants of separate worlds, but interacting in such a way as

to ensure their continued existence. That interaction, however,

is sustained by circumstances in which the state is increasingly

inadequate and yet, as Rosenau admits, also indispensable.

All of these doubts notwithstanding, it is difficult to

ignore the present capacity of states to control the

instruments of coercive force and the publics needed to

support their use. The range of issues on which these

instruments can be used effectively has narrowed

considerably in recent decades, but not yet to the

point where it is reasonable to presume that states and

their world are dissolving into the multicentric

environment. Instead, states must be regarded as still

capable of maintaining the norms and practices of their

own international system. . . .156

Change and Continuity. The demise of the bipolar

international system is the most obvious change in the post-cold

war era. One of the poles in that system simply ceased to operate

and then ceased to exist. A major reason for the end of the

Soviet Union was that there could be no rational military victory

as that bipolar relationship evolved in the long war. The result

was that military competition between the two superpowers was

prolonged for over 40 years in the "long peace." For the USSR,

the extended preparation for conflict delayed modernization 

while wasting resources--all to a point that finally brought down

not only the 70-year-old Soviet regime, but the 300-year-old

Russian Empire as well.157

There are other important legacies of the bipolar war-inpeace system. The dramatic cold war scientific and technological

advances set in train a curious blend of integrative and

disintegrative forces and trends that are adding to the complex

tensions of the current transition period. The integrative force

that increasingly linked global economies in the "long peace,"

for instance, also holds out the spectral potential of global

depression or, at the very least, nations more susceptible to

disintegrative actions, as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

demonstrated. In a similar manner, the advances in communications

and transportation that have spread the results of medical and

scientific discoveries around the world are countered by the

malign transnational results of nuclear technology, the drug

trade, terrorism, AIDS and global warming.158

At the same time, those advances also led to the

unprecedented flow of ideas--truly a development that confirmed

Friedrich Schiller's ideal in his poem, "Die Gedanken Sind Frei."

Those ideas, combined with the integrative forces of democratic

politics and market economies, ultimately brought about the

disintegrative sweep of revolutions throughout Central and

Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989.159 The two-edged sword of this
transnational force continues to dominate the current transition

period. From this viewpoint, Marshall McLuhan's image of a

communications-induced "global village" does not take into

account the power of information to reinforce nationalism and

move nations away from a global political identity. Instead of

one global village, as Joseph Nye has pointed out, "there are

villages around the globe more aware of each other."160

From the "long war" perspective, the bipolar contest between

two ideologies hid this basic strength and durability of

nationalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Europe where

that contest had moderated centuries-old animosities, such as

those between France and Germany and between Greece and Turkey.

At the same time, the Soviets had suppressed similar differences

in the East, whether between Czechs and Poles or Hungarians and

Romanians. In the current transition period, there are daily

reminders of that "new religion" in the Irish question, the

Basque problem in Spain, or the disputes between the Waloons and

Flemings in Belgium. And in the former Yugoslavia, nationalism

has reemerged in an area that Bismarck once said was not worth

the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier, but which nonetheless

brought on the maelstrom of the Great War. That area is just one

of many examples of how unqualified support for the integrative

force of national self-determination in the wake of the long

ideological war can contribute to enormous global disorder and

disintegration, particularly in a world populated by at least 170

states, less than 10 percent of which are ethnically

homogeneous.161

All this serves as a reminder that challenges to the statecentric paradigm are not new in international affairs. As one

historian has pointed out, the 19th century Great Powers were far

more integrated than their more recent counterparts--creating in

that age of borderless commerce and travel, "the belle epoque of

interdependence."162 Observing that state of affairs, as we have

seen, Norman Angell argued prior to World War I in The Great

Illusion that the level of economic interdependence in Europe was

so high that war was not a cost effective proposition. And after

World War II, there were those who argued that specific functions

could be taken over by varied entities that would ultimately

supersede individual states.163

Nonetheless, the nation-state continues to endure. The North

American Free Trade Agreement, for instance, is a current example

of the continued precariousness of interdependence at its basic

economic level as well as the residual strength of nationalism.

Moreover, as the debates and referenda over the Maastricht

Agreement demonstrated, even a Europe poised to establish a

regional common market is not about to make the state system

obsolete. "The development of regional integration," Joseph Nye

has acknowledged, "outstripped the development of regional

communities."164

In any event, neither the change nor the continuity embodied
in the concept of interdependence appears likely to increase the

stability of the international system in the current transition

period. In terms of change, the new forces of integration will

continue to generate those of disintegration. As for continuity,

even translating the basic economic underpinnings of

interdependence into the geopolitics of the state system presents

fundamental problems. The classic liberal argument, for instance,

is that the more contact between states and their populations,

the less danger of conflict. But, in fact, as the example of

Norman Angell illustrates, historically those nations with the

most contact have most frequently gone to war with each other.

Moreover, the "long peace" is a reminder that it was fear of a

hot war, not the desire for profit, that brought about superpower

cooperation.165

A concomitant to all that is a need for continuity with the

traditional concepts of military power and war in the current

transition, even as the stock of other elements of national power

rises in an increasingly complex world. Nowhere was this more

dramatically illustrated than in the Gulf War. "The notion that

economic power inevitably translates into geopolitical influence

is a materialist illusion," Charles Krauthammer noted in this

regard. "Economic power is a necessary condition for great power

status. But it certainly is not sufficient, as has been made

clear by the recent behavior of Germany and Japan, which have

generally hidden under the table since the first shots rang out

in Kuwait."166

And while it is true that the "long peace" reinforced a

tendency by the developed industrialized nations to discredit war

between themselves, there was no such tendency in the Third

World, increasingly militarized as the "long war" took on global

dimensions. In fact, there was a general perception that war and

violence could improve situations, primarily because many of the

developing nations achieved statehood through armed struggle

during the years of the cold war. And although there may have

been some lessons for Third World nations concerning the futility

of such prolonged struggles as the Cambodian upheaval or the

Iran-Iraq war, the majority of those countries developed no

apocalyptic visions of war similar to those which developed in

the West in response to both World Wars and the cold war. How

different this outlook on war could be was illustrated by the

Ayatollah Khomeini in 1984:

War is a blessing for the world and for all nations. It

is God who incites men to fight and to kill. . . .A

prophet is all-powerful. Through war he purifies the

earth. The mullahs with corrupt hearts who say that all

this is contrary to the teachings of the Koran are

unworthy of Islam.167

Weapons proliferation in the Third World will continue to

augment these tendencies in the current transition period,

because the legacy of the "long war" lives on in both the East
and the West in the form of bureaucratic, industrial and research

infrastructures oriented on the design, procurement and

production of military weapons and equipment. It is, in short,

extremely difficult to turn off the military-industrial spigot,

particularly when the health of national economies after 40 years

of chronic preparation for war is tied up, at least in part, with

foreign military sales. Added to this is the problem of nuclear

proliferation. From the "long peace" perspective, the lesson from

the cold war might seem to be that the possession of large

numbers of nuclear weapons creates a sense of responsibility on

the part of nations, thus diminishing the temptation to take

risks, regardless of differences in history, culture or

circumstances. That is, of course, hardly a comforting lesson

based on recent experiences with such rogue states as Libya and

Iraq. The basic fact remains in the current transition that the

proliferation of nuclear and conventional weapons, particularly

to regional hegemons, will continue to exacerbate the uneven

growth of power among states, identified long before the end of

the cold war as the principal problem in international

relations.168

As a consequence of all this, there is still a strong sense

of continuity with the overall realist paradigm. Change in the

form of growing interdependence is, of course, a fact of life.

But world politics is still dominated by the state-centric

system, which in fact requires more realism and power in the

current transition period in order to balance the integrative and

disintegrative forces spawned by that interdependence. For

interdependence promotes insecurity and competition without

providing the means for mitigating that insecurity and for

placing bounds on that competition. Moreover, even if

interdependence is beneficial to all players, those benefits may

vary to the extent that the perception of those marked

disparities may become a new source of conflict. It is, in short,

a phenomenon that creates the need for greater order without

providing assurance that the need will be met.169

The hegemonic stability imposed on the forces and trends

unleashed by interdependence disappeared with the cold war. But

there is much to be learned from the cooperative efforts that

emerged from a long militarized peace combined with a long

peaceful militarization. The creation and evolution of NATO, for

instance, has many lessons for solving the problems posed by the

coexistence of integrated supranational military forces with

national military units. Equally important, in this regard, are

the projects for managing power from the second transition

period, abandoned as the cold war began. Among them was

Roosevelt's grand design of the victorious powers acting in

concert as part of his "World Policemen" scheme, with its

associated plan to create an Anglo-American-Soviet "air corps"

for global patrols.170

Such great power combinations are traditionally viewed as

negative imperialism and hegemonic dominance, a tendency
reinforced by the long bipolar configuration of the international

system during the cold war. Over the years, as an example, the

Yalta and Potsdam accords have received bad press in both the

West and the East. But it should not be forgotten that those

agreements also reflected the willingness of the great powers to

take responsibility for maintaining the international order, a

responsibility best expressed in the Charter of the United

Nations. It is this great power responsibility that furthers the

linkage between those regime theorists and neorealists who see

international institutions as a means to regularize cooperation

and provide support for multilateral policies in an anarchic and

uncertain world. In the end, since states cannot be forced to

choose international over national interests, a sense of global

responsibility among the most powerful international actors must

provide the consensual leadership for international regimes

within the realist paradigm.171

This is not enough for the critics of that paradigm. "When

the Emperor's clothes are tattered," one concluded, "many a

tailor will be found working on new robes."172 But while those

garments may be in better condition, if change is allowed to

obscure the very real continuities from the past in this current

transition period, the new robes will also be ill-fitting. The

rate and direction of global change should not be exaggerated.

"[T]o be prematurely right in international affairs," Owen

Harries has pointed out, "to anticipate a trend too early and to

act on it, can be as fatal as being dead wrong."173
CHAPTER 4

BROTHER CAN YOU PARADIGM?

Tesman: "But, good heavens, we know nothing of the

future."

Lovborg: "No, but there is a thing or two to be said

about it all the same."

Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler

Today its critics have branded realism obsolete, a

relic of the days of courts and princes, an approach

out-of-sync with a world of borderless economies,

peace-loving democracies, and global crises like the

greenhouse effect.

Fareed Zakaria174

The cold war reflected two countertraditions in U.S.

history. On the one hand was the idea of exceptionalism, that

America stood for something new, destined to lead the old world

from a discredited international system to a new order. This was

embodied in Jeffersonian diplomacy, focused on grand objectives,

which because of the force of the American "City on the Hill"

example, would not require the use of force for achievement. That

tradition was carried on and expanded by Woodrow Wilson, the

articulator of American ideals, aspirations and, particularly,

the nation's reason of state, the expansion of freedom. On the

other hand was the Hamiltonian tradition used to great effect by

Henry Cabot Lodge in the debates over the new world order during

the first transition period. That approach eschewed grand

ambitions, retaining a belief in military force and preparedness

while pursuing a foreign policy tied to limited national

interests.175

Both traditions were indispensable to the strategic

consensus that animated U.S. national security policy throughout

the cold war. Simply put, that consensus came about because the

threat could be expressed in terms of both realist concerns with

American security and idealist concerns with the defense of order

and free institutions. Thus, there was the concept of containment

squarely in the Hamilton-Lodge tradition with its emphasis on the

avoidance of war by preparedness, moderation of diplomatic

ambition, and, above all, balance of power by means of an

enduring alliance system. At the same time, the JeffersonWilsonian influence was evident as early as the Truman Doctrine

with its image of free people working at their own destinies in

their own way. That image combined the distinctly Wilsonian

equation of a peaceful, orderly world with a truly democratic one

that could only be achieved through U.S. leadership.

The Vietnam experience did considerable damage to the
strategic consensus. Nevertheless, the link between establishing

order and freedom and ensuring U.S. security did not break. And

in fact the promotion of freedom and order became the basis for

restoring domestic consensus in foreign policy in both the Carter

(human rights) and Reagan (the Democratic Revolution)

administrations. Nor was the linkage absent in the Gulf War, in

which President Bush embarked on a new world order that appeared

to be a functional equivalent of global containment for the new

transition period. On the one hand was the realist perception of

world order as the product of a stable distribution of power

among the major states. On the other was the Wilsonian tradition

of the indivisibility of peace, reflected in the President's

declaration at the beginning of the Gulf War that "every act of

aggression unpunished. . . strengthens the forces of chaos and

lawlessness that, ultimately, threaten us all."176

At the conclusion of that war, President Bush informed the

nation that the "specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in

the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula."177 But in some very

important ways, the Bush administration had returned the United

States in the Gulf to a role that Americans ultimately had

rejected a generation earlier in Vietnam. At that time, President

Johnson had also defended the commitment to world order as being

inseparable from U.S. security, with the American intervention

repeatedly justified in terms of freedom and self-determination.

In that context, the Johnson administration contended, a refusal

to play policeman would place world order in jeopardy and with it

American security. "We can be safe," Dean Rusk commented, "only

to the extent that our total environment is safe."178

In a similar manner, the Gulf War seemed to bear out the

argument that international stability required a continuity of

role by the world's most powerful and trusted nation. But a major

part of containment for the United States had been the role of

custodian of freedom against a specific adversary. Now, in the

new transition period, it appeared America was to become the

principal custodian of stability against any state threatening

the international order. The shift presented difficulties. To

maintain a fragile peace that remained unstable required

something more like a policeman than a leader of a coalition

working against an identifiable, hostile adversary. But a nation

that throughout its history, and particularly in the long war-inpeace, had grown accustomed to perceiving itself as the exemplar

and defender of freedom, was bound to find the role of policeman

much less appealing.179

As a consequence, the equation of world order with American

security has become far less compelling in the current

transition. Added to this are the difficulties in keeping the

ideals of order and freedom together in a changing world where

disintegrative forces unleashed by the end of the cold war appear

to be, at least temporarily, in the ascendancy over those of

integration. "If I had to choose between justice and disorder on

the one hand," Goethe once noted, "and injustice and order on the
other, I would always choose the latter."180 This is a bit strong,

but not so easily dismissed when considering whether Yugoslavia

is better off today than under Tito, or whether Somalia improved

its lot in the wake of the overthrow of its most recent dictator.

"America's moral fervor, always close to the surface," one

pollster recently concluded, "will be rechanneled from

anticommunism to a new era of American patriotism centered on

improving the quality of America's goods and services--an

uninspiring vision, perhaps, for Cold Warriors but not for the

hard-pressed American public."181

Such a conclusion may be premature. After all, the forces

and trends set in train during and after the cold war have not

yet played out in the current transition. But certainly for great

powers in the past after long wars, there was a tendency for

excesses of domestic introversion to follow the excesses of

international conflict. The concomitant to that pattern was

normally the rebirth of a balance-of-power system as

nationalistic issues gained priority over the cooperative

necessities of reducing power conflicts. The result for the

United States in such a milieu could be a retreat into

parochialism and insularity just when increasing interdependence

renders such a state destabilizing; and just when American

leadership and resources are required for an anarchic world, made

more so by the disintegrative forces of interdependence.

An alternative to all that in the current transition is a

return to the "higher realism" of Woodrow Wilson. That realism

required the United States to accept a leadership role in world

affairs based on values that would claim the enduring allegiance

of the American public. At the same time, Wilson warned that a

policeman's solitary lot was not a happy one; and that by

attempting such a role alone, the United States could become a

militarized garrison state and thereby destroy the values and

ideals that formed the distinctive nature of American society.

Much of that came to pass at times during the cold war. But the

impact of the "long war" and "long peace" as shown in all three

levels of analysis has also set the stage for a third attempt in

this century at the management of power under a systemic

framework of collective security.

The Management of Power.

In the current transition period, the concept of collective

security has emerged almost by default, rather than on its own

merit. Unilateralism for the United States appears increasingly

ineffective or illegitimate because of the forces and trends

still swirling in the domestic and international arenas as a

result of the cold war. And alliances without an adversary seem

anachronistic and empty, lacking, as Richard Betts has pointed

out, that "animating originality that revolutionary political

changes seem to mandate."182 The result has been an invocation of

collective security as the way to manage power in the post-cold
war era that at times appears more as a celebration of peace than

as a way to enforce it. This tendency to see peace as the premise

of a security system rather than its product was captured at the

height of the cold war by Arnold Wolfers:

Promotion of the idea of collective security has

created a psychological situation in which the United

States cannot turn its back on the concept, not because

of what collective security can accomplish. . .but

because of what millions of people. . .believe it may

accomplish in time. Collective security has come to be

the chief symbol of hope that. . .a community of

nations will develop in which there will be no more

war.183

Despite all this, the Wilsonian ideal type of collective

security is no more possible in the current transition than it

was in 1919 or 1945. The prerequisite shift in the overall

paradigm of international relations has simply not occurred,

leaving realism, in E. H. Carr's description, as "the impact of

thinking upon wishing."184 That realism was evident during the

second transition in the founding of the United Nations, which

assumed a multipolar distribution of power with the five great

powers, protected by their vetos, enforcing collective security.

But cold war bipolarity hobbled that more realistic version of

Wilson's institutional approach. As a consequence, the superpower

veto became a staple of the U.N. in the coming decades; and the

organization was reduced to more modest peacekeeping roles, in

which the multilateral forces could be brushed aside at any time

the belligerents wished to resume conflict, as they were, for

example, in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War.185

Only when the Soviets temporarily boycotted the U.N.

Security Council in June 1950 was there the multilateral response

to major aggression envisioned in the U.N. charter. And even

then, while it was symbolically important for other nations to

join in collective action, only American military participation

was vital to the outcome of the Korean War. In a similar manner,

collective security emerged in the Gulf War, because the United

States asserted itself as a hegemon in place of the bipolar

balance of power to draw in the U.N. Ostensibly, interests such

as access to oil were not the reasons for the American response.

Nor was democracy at stake since the ruling family oligarchy

reclaimed Kuwait at the end of the conflict. The primary

explanation by the Bush administration was opposition to

aggression as a matter of principle. It was that universality

with its implied automaticity that brought the concept of ideal

collective security into the post-cold war equation--an

unrealistic development that has only confused the major issue of

power management, as responses to the situation in the former

Yugoslavia demonstrate.186

Ironically, the Gulf War actually demonstrated that global

circumstances now resemble those which the founders of the U.N.
envisaged in 1945. At that time, the great power directorate of

the Security Council was created based on the principle that

power must be commensurate with responsibility. As a consequence,

what emerged in the United Nations during the second transition

period was a system that could only work against smaller powers--

hardly a significant guarantee, the critics at the time

emphasized, for maintaining international peace and stability. In

the post-cold war world, what was once perceived as a grave

defect has emerged almost as a virtue, particularly in the wake

of the Gulf War. For the major threats in this new era appear to

be posed only by smaller powers that have not yet reconciled

their aspirations and level of development with the norms of

conventional statecraft. As a result, the U.N. may emerge in the

current transition as the best means to express the community of

great powers that Wilson had attempted to find in the League.187

In any event, the concept of a great power condominium is

the logical way for the United States to achieve Wilson's "higher

realism" in the current transition period. Ironically, the model

for the concept is the 1815 Concert of Europe, scorned a century

later by Wilson when he promulgated pure collective security as

the best way to manage power. But in a world still dominated by

the realist paradigm, that ideal type at one end of the

collective security continuum is simply not feasible. A concert,

on the other hand, is situated on the opposite end of that

continuum and:

represents the most attenuated form of collective

security. Though predicated on the notion of all

against one, membership in a concert is restricted to

the great powers of the day. A small group of major

powers agrees to work together to resist aggression;

they meet on a regular basis to monitor events and, if

necessary, to orchestrate collective initiatives. A

concert's geographic scope is flexible. Members can

choose to focus on a specific region or regions, or to

combat aggression on a global basis. Finally, a

concert entails no binding or codified commitments to

collective action. Rather, decisions are taken through

informal negotiations, through the emergence of a

consensus.188

To be successful, any such concert that emerges in the

current transition period will depend, as it did in 1815, on

involvement by all great powers. This would include, at the very

least, the addition of Germany and Japan to the five great powers

serving as the permanent representatives of the Security Council.

Such involvement, however, is not preordained in the post-cold

war era. In the former Soviet Union, for example, economic reform

may prove so onerous as to preclude a stable and active foreign

policy for a self-absorbed Russia, which like Japan after World

War II, may need a period without international responsibilities

in order to reestablish a growing economy. And even the United

States will have to deal with the effects of the "long war." Like
the 1920s, there will certainly be strong incentives to put

domestic priorities ahead of everything else--a tendency as

Richard Rosecrance has observed, toward "a disastrous

reconcentration on the American umbilicus."189

Ideological solidarity and renunciation of force are other

obvious preconditions for a successful concert of powers, as they

were at Vienna. The long peace-in-war made force by the great

powers against each other virtually unthinkable. Inducements

evolved during the cold war for those states to resolve

peacefully, or even tolerate, accumulated grievances that prior

to 1945 might have led to major conflict. The appeal, of course,

was more to fear than logic. Nevertheless, behavior patterns born

of fear can, over time, come to seem very logical. As a

consequence, the cold war has already created, in the day-to-day

interaction of the great powers, the habits and mechanisms for

managing power in an anarchic world.190

This does not translate, however, into consistent great

power cooperation in pursuit of the collective or public good.

That is why the concert system can function within the realist

paradigm. It is in this sense that the Concert of Europe is most

instructive: the ideas of the common good did not always triumph

over competition; war was always a possibility; the maintenance

of peace was often at the expense of the weaker powers and of

justice; and the great powers often defended their interests

narrowly. The Concert, in fact, was always relatively fragile;

but it was that very fragility that was a source of strength.

Because the statesmen of the 19th century believed that the

Concert could not survive major shocks, they were circumspect in

their behavior, fearing that if they were not, the Concert could

collapse, leaving the management of power to normal balance-ofpower politics.191

The major criticism of any concert today would be the same

as in the 19th century: the elitist nature of the system. But the

basic fact of life in international relations is that some

cooperation among the great powers is a prerequisite for world

order within the state system. Great powers simply will not

disappear. The issues of peace or war, security or insecurity in

the world political system are largely determined more by these

powers than by others. It is also a fact of life viewed from the

realist perspective that when great powers work together to

further global interests, they also may be promoting special

interests of their own, whether it is preserving the political

status quo or guarding their ascendancy within their own spheres

of influence. And it may even be that without such special

interests, collaboration either would not occur or would not

progress.192

For all these reasons, the middle and smaller powers of the

world will keep a vigilant watch on any emerging concert of great

powers in the post-cold war era. Such a concert can mitigate much

of the suspicions by such measures as refraining from making its
role too explicit or co-opting leading secondary powers for

particular purposes. In any event, all political systems, and

particularly international regimes, have some dissatisfied

elements that will not necessarily undermine the foundation of

the system. But unless a concert of great powers addresses the

fundamental aspirations and the rising expectations of the

developing world, the system will only exacerbate the growing

bipolar nature of North-South relations. The "have nots" of that

world represent a majority of the population and the states in

international society. Moreover, weapons proliferation has the

potential to bring future military challenges from those states,

at least at the regional level, to a point not too dissimilar to

that which occurred in the 1930s when Britain and France,

representing the League of Nations, confronted the revisionist

states of Germany, Italy and Japan. At that time, the "have not"

nations represented one of the two principal concentrations of

military power in the world; and the alternative to any type of

peaceful change that would have appeased their demands was war.193

The alternative to a concert of powers in the state-centric

realist paradigm is the decentralized balance-of-power system

that resulted in both world wars of this century. Other systems

for managing power will require a paradigm shift. One example is

to return full circle to the hierarchical medieval paradigm in

which war in the sense of organized violence between sovereign

states does not exist, because sovereign states do not exist.

But, as we have seen, the 17th century shift from that paradigm

to the realist framework came about because of crisis in the form

of ubiquitous violence and insecurity.

And while concepts such as ideal collective security and

world government still deal with nation-states, their

implementation requires paradigm shifts made unnecessary by the

new assumptions. The ideals of universality and automaticity in

pure collective security are based on covenants between all

states and a central organization. In a similar manner, world

government by contract is a system by which all sovereign states

subordinate themselves to that government. The basic case for

both concepts is the need to manage power in a Hobbesian world.

But if states do exist in a Hobbesian state of nature, the

covenants by which they are to emerge from it cannot occur. For

if, as Hobbes maintained, "covenants without swords are but

words," this will also be true of covenants directed toward the

establishment of a collective security organization or a

universal government.194

To make a paradigm shift in these circumstances will not

help. The advocate of world government, for instance, can

demonstrate the feasibility and desirability of his scheme only

by shifting to a new paradigm, the basic assumption of which is

that international relations do not resemble a Hobbesian state of

nature. Covenants in that framework are more than words,

providing as they do the basis for collaboration between

sovereign states. But to make that basic assumption is to weaken
the imperative for bringing the international state of nature

under control by means of a shift from the realist paradigm.

World government theorists are thus stranded in a world which,

viewed through a realist paradigm, makes their propositions as

utopian as that envisioned by Alfred Lord Tennyson in "Locksley

Hall," 150 years ago:

Till the war-drums throbb'd no longer,

and the battle flags were furl'd

In the Parliament of man, the

Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall

hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber

lapt in universal law.195

The concept of a great power concert has no such utopian

image. Instead, it provides a "realistic" way to manage power

that will satisfy the American public grown accustomed in the

"long war" to the day-to-day operation of a security regime. Most

important, the move toward multilateral great power cooperation

will allow the United States to continue a leadership role in

world affairs without an overwhelming financial burden even as it

refocuses on domestic threats to national security and responds

to the demands of an increasingly interdependent world. There is

a story, in this regard, of a man who was lost in Scotland and

asked a farmer for directions to Edinburgh. "Oh sir," the farmer

replied, "if I were you, I shouldn't start from here."196 The idea

that the state system does not provide the best starting point to

explore the management of power has something of this quality.

The fact is that it is within the state system in the current

transition period that the "higher realism" of Woodrow Wilson can

emerge successfully in a concert of great powers.

Strategic Vision.

"Where there is no vision," the book of Proverbs concludes,

"the people perish." Vision, however, is not enough. As history

has consistently demonstrated, there is a symbiotic relationship

between strategic vision and decisive authority. Without such

authority to implement the vision, there remains only the sterile

utterances of the prophet. On the other hand, decisive authority

without vision, particularly at the highest levels of government,

will produce politicians awash in a sea of expediency. But

combine the insight of the prophet with the authority of the

politician, and the result is the statesman at the national

strategic level capable of achieving strategic vision.

It is by means of strategic vision that the statesman shapes

and controls projected change instead of simply reacting to the

forces and trends that swirl without direction into the future.

He accomplishes this by dint of imagination and creativity and by

balancing idealism with realism. Opportunism in this regard does
not diminish statesmanship. Anyone desiring to shape events,

whether politician or statesman, must be opportunistic to some

degree. But the politician merely adjusts his purposes to fit

reality, while the visionary statesman attempts to shape reality

in terms of his purpose or the change he desires. "When technique

becomes exalted over purpose," Henry Kissinger has pointed out in

this regard, "men become the victims of their own complexities.

They forget that every great achievement in every field was a

vision before it became a reality. . . .There are two kinds of

realists: those who use facts and those who create them. The West

requires nothing so much as men able to create their own

reality."197

Such leaders in times of upheaval and great change can

inspire, challenge, and educate in terms of their image of the

future. Education is particularly important, since statesmen have

to bridge the gap between their vision and the experiences of

their people, between their intuition and national tradition. It

is not an easy process. As a result, there are few periods in

history in which the confluence of strategic vision and decisive

authority has lasted for very long.

Nowhere, as we have seen, is this dilemma better illustrated

 than in the efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh to form a

Concert of Europe after 1814. Metternich is an example of a

statesman who limits his vision to the current experiences of his

people and thus ultimately dooms his policy to sterility. In his

case, it was a vision of the status quo, of the preservation of

the multinational Austrian Empire in a time of great rising

nationalism. Castlereagh, on the other hand, is an example of a

statesman whose vision so far outruns the experience of his

people that he fails to achieve the necessary domestic consensus

for decisive authority, however wise the vision. That vision

concerned the involvement of traditionally insular Great Britain

in peacetime Continental politics in order to ensure equilibrium

among the Great Powers.198

In the 20th century, each of the post-World War transitions

for the United States were marked by strategic visions for

managing power. Like Castlereagh, Wilson's vision of ideal

collective security went far beyond American national experience.

The result was an impasse that he attempted to circumvent by

appealing directly to the public for the authority to implement

his strategic vision. During his whistle-stop tour of the

country, an exhausted Wilson suffered a massive stroke and was

incapacitated for the remainder of his presidency. In the end, it

hardly mattered. The Wilsonian vision required a shift from the

realist paradigm which itself was not fully understood by a

nation and a people poised for a return to the soft incubus of

isolationistic "normalcy."

In the second transition period, George Kennan's strategic

vision of containing the Soviet Union was rooted squarely in the

realist paradigm. The orientation of that vision on the Soviet
threat was significant. As that threat became more apparent in

the opening years of the cold war, the orientation insured the

acceptance of that vision, first by governmental elites and then

by the American people. Moreover, because that threat was to

endure for 45 years with varying degrees of intensity, the entire

succession of U.S. Presidents in the cold war from Truman to

Reagan enjoyed the historically anomalous coincidence of a

coherent strategic vision and overall decisive authority.

The current transition period is not one in which a

strategic vision that would balance foreign with domestic policy

can easily play a major role. This is one of the ironic legacies

of the long war-in-peace. For in the successful pursuit of the

overall strategic vision in that twilight conflict, successive

administrations set in motion military, social, and economic

forces that increased the tension between these contradictory

elements of U.S. national security policy. To that misfortune,

largely in reaction to this tension, were added the political

effects of a resurgent Congress. There is, of course, a natural

adversarial process between the congressional and executive

branches implicit in the U.S. Constitution. But that process was

largely dormant between Pearl Harbor and Tet '68. The massive

congressional reentry into foreign affairs since Vietnam has

hindered and will continue to hinder the confluence of a balanced

vision with authority in the executive branch.

Further complicating the problem is the changing nature of

the threat. In recent years, the American people have become

increasingly aware of the domestic threats to their national

security, whether in the form of illicit drugs, inner city rot,

the savings and loan fiasco, or the national debt. At the same

time, the successful realization of the strategic vision that

animated Western strategy throughout the cold war has also

diminished a public perception of international menace. In

foreign affairs, the threat now seems more speculative, certainly

less urgent, whether it be the fragmentation of Yugoslavia or the

prospect of Russia metamorphosing into another Weimar, sullenly

nursing its grudge in the wake of its cold war defeat.

Nevertheless, there are potential threats in the

international arena that should be addressed along with domestic

threats in any new strategic vision if that vision is to achieve

the credibility that will eventually result in decisive

authority. To begin with, there is the proliferation of mass

destruction weapons. "By the year 2000," former Secretary of

Defense Cheney has noted, "it is estimated that at least 15

developing nations will have the ability to build ballistic

missiles--eight of which either have or are near to acquiring

nuclear capabilities. Thirty countries will have chemical weapons

and ten will be able to deploy biological weapons as well."199

Added to this concern is the emergence of nations marked by

resentment against the West and the status quo with the

capability and the inclination to use these weapons of mass

destruction. These are revolutionary powers whose principal issue
is not adjustment within the international system, but the system

itself. They not only feel threatened, a regular feature of the

realist state system, but they also can never be reassured short

of absolute security, a precondition for the absolute insecurity

of their opponents.

Equally important in this regard are threats posed by an

increasingly interdependent world. There is, for example, the

growing recognition that planet Earth is a very fragile ship

hurtling through space--that separate events ranging from the

destruction of rain forests to depletion of the ozone layer may

be the ultimate threats to national security. Or, as another

example, there is the growing disparity between the North and the

South, the developed and developing countries of the world. The

South has watched the North fight three great internecine wars in

this century: the two world wars and the cold war. Now, fueled

not only by latent industrial revolutions but those of

transportation, technology, and communications- information as

well, the Southern nations are ready to take their place in the

sun. An American strategic vision in the new era must acknowledge

these rising expectations, since a vision of a brave new world

within the realist paradigm that does not take into account the

human condition worldwide is fundamentally at odds with American

values. In the long run, such a vision will stand no more chance

of garnering decisive authority than will a vision that ignores

the human condition on the domestic front.

In all this a new strategic vision must ultimately come to

grips with the management of power. Once again, the proper mix of

change and continuity will be the key. In terms of continuity, of

course, there is the enormous leverage that the United States

possesses because of the victory in the cold war. America simply

cannot afford to ignore that situation. In the game of cricket,

after a successful "at bat," a team with good defensive

capabilities can voluntarily relinquish its bat to the opposing

side with the expectation of winning the game. International

relations will not likely provide such an option for the United

States in the current transition period. The game will thus

continue without relief against a new succession of opponents,

each with bowlers and batmen never encountered before.200

But the long war-in-peace has also brought about major

changes for the United States in terms of all three levels of

analysis. As a result, any vision for managing power that remains

fixed on a completely dominant, cold war-like American role in

the international arena will eventually lose decisive authority

to implement that vision as the current transition continues.

Such a vision could also trigger a reaction that either ignores

the realist paradigm by retreating into some form of isolationism

and protectionism, or causes a premature shift of that framework.

The realist paradigm, however, is still viable. The solution is

to convince the American people that the threat in the

international arena requires a centralization in the management

of power within that paradigm, much like that which occurred in
1815. A vision that incorporates a great power concert will allow

the United States to address its domestic problems and thus keep

American values intact, while continuing to provide leadership in

global politics. It is a vision that Castlereagh, Wilson and

Kennan would understand.
CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

The commonest error in politics is sticking to the

carcasses of dead policies. When a mast falls overboard

you do not try to save a rope here and a spar there in

memory of their former utility; you cut away the hamper

altogether. And it should be the same with a policy.

But it is not so. We cling to the shred of an old

policy after it has been torn to pieces; and to the

shadow of the shred after the rag itself has been

thrown away.

Lord Salisbury 201

In the life of societies and international systems

there comes a time when the question arises whether all

the possibilities of innovation inherent in a given

structure have been exhausted. At this point, symptoms

are taken for cause; immediate problems absorb the

attention that should be devoted to determining their

significance. Events are not shaped by a concept of the

future; the present becomes all-intrusive. However

impressive such a structure may still appear to

outsiders, it has passed its zenith. It will grow ever

more rigid and, in time, irrelevant.

Henry Kissinger 202

We playwrights who have to cram a whole human life or

an entire historical era into a two-hour play, can

scarcely understand this rapidity [of change]

ourselves. And if it gives us trouble, think of the

trouble it must give political scientists who have less

experience with the realm of the improbable.

Vaclav Havel 203

A student one time questioned Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky's

biographer, concerning Deutscher's assertion that Trotsky was an

extremely far-sighted person. Not one of Trotsky's predictions,

the student argued, had come to fruition. "Not yet," Deutscher is

reported to have replied, "which shows you just how far-sighted

he really was."204 The anecdote demonstrates just how important

reference points can be. It also illustrates the type of

rationalization used by many international relations theorists as

they look for alternatives to the realist paradigm.

In this regard, Thomas Kuhn has described three types of

phenomena about which new theory might be developed. The first is

already well explained by existing paradigms. There is thus

neither motive nor need for new theory construction. At the other

extreme are the phenomena of recognized anomalies which cannot be
assimilated by existing paradigms and, as a consequence, require

framework shifts in order to be explained. Somewhere between are

the phenomena whose nature is indicated by existing paradigms,

but whose details require further theory articulation in order to

be understood fully.205

It is in this middle category that the phenomena resulting

from an increasingly complex and interdependent world belong in

terms of the realist paradigm. Theories of change abound, of

course, to explain those phenomena. But as Kuhn pointed out, a

paradigm "is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is

available to take its place."206 And few theorists are ready to

make that claim in terms of the state-centric realist framework.

"What is occurring in the world is not a serious demise of states

as the central actors in the system," one critic concluded, ". .

. but rather their acceptance that they have to work together in

controlling a variety of interdependencies."207

Any such cooperation will take place within the realist

paradigm. For the interdependence that emerged in the

international system during the cold war has unleashed a variety

of disintegrative as well as integrative forces. The task for

American statesmen in this transition period is to convince the

people of the United States that the dangers and potentials of

these forces are great enough to require continued American

involvement and leadership in international affairs. At the same

time, that leadership must include a major role in moving the

other great powers toward a consensual condominium that can

realistically centralize the management of power in a self-help,

anarchical world. All this will require a strategic vision that

creates a picture of this desired continuity and change, credible

enough to achieve authority for implementation.

Oddly enough, statesmen in the current transition period can

take heart in this difficult endeavor from the experience of the

Viscount Castlereagh who, in the wake of the Vienna Congress,

lost the authority to implement his strategic vision. The British

statesman is proof nonetheless that men become myths not because

of what they know, not even because of what they do, but because

of the tasks they set out for themselves. For Castlereagh, that

task was to bring insular Great Britain into the peacetime

Continental political dialogue in order to preserve a European

equilibrium of force. To this end, between 1815 and 1820 the

British statesman was instrumental in inaugurating a series of

congresses at which all the great powers assembled to discuss

ways to maintain the European balance. Toward the end of that

period, however, the conservative eastern powers began to use

those forums to legitimize interference in newly emerging liberal

regimes in Europe. As a consequence, there was a public outcry in

England against Castlereagh and his policy so strong that he was

driven from office. Shortly thereafter he committed suicide. But

his strategic vision lived on. For the Great Powers, including

Great Britain, had become accustomed through the congress system

to periodic meetings for resolving differences. The eventual
result was the Concert of Europe, which helped produce a century

of relative peace among the great powers of Europe.208

For American statesmen, a similar success in achieving the

implementation of a strategic vision to guide the United States

through this third major transition of the 20th century will

require that they successfully issue a new call to greatness to

the American people. This time, however, there will be no clarion

calls for stirring crusades against fascism and communism.

Instead, the call must be focused on creating stability in the

international order, on averting chaos in an anarchical world.

The problem is that while equilibrium is a necessity for that

stability, it does not constitute a sufficient purpose for the

American people, with their historic sense of mission. Peace must

be presented as more than the absence of conflict. Stability must

be perceived as a bridge to the realization of human aspirations,

not an end in itself.

In the final analysis, American statesmen must create an

image of desired change within the realist paradigm that inspires

their citizens to efforts at least as great and for goals at

least as grand as those that marked the 40-year war-in-peace. It

is a picture that the great Ulysses could paint to his comrades,

even at the end of 10 years of warfare followed by a decade

spent in fruitless efforts to return home to his beloved Ithaca:

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. . . .

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
ENDNOTES

1. Kalevi J. Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and

International Order 1648-1989, New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1991, p. 335.

2. George Orwell, 1984, New York: The New American Library

of World Literature, 1961, p. 7. In describing this kind of

thinking, Orwell coined a word which has become a part of modern

vocabulary: "doublethink." "Doublethink means the power of

holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously,

and accepting both of them. . . .This process has to be

conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient

precision. But it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring

with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt." Ibid., p. 264.

3. No pun intended. Theodore S. Hamerow, From the Finland

Station: The Graying of Revolution in the Twentieth Century, New

York: Basic Books, 1990. See also John Lewis Gaddis, The United

States and the End of the Cold War: Implications,

Reconsiderations, Provocations (hereinafter referred to as Cold

War), New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 64.

4. Ronald Steel, "The End and the Beginning," The End of the

Cold War. Its Meaning and Implications, ed., Michael J. Hogan,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 105. As will be

demonstrated, there is a major difference in whether the cold war

is examined in terms of being a "long war" or a "long peace." See

for example, Robert W. Tucker, "1989 and All That," Sea Changes:

American Foreign Policy in a World Transformed, ed., Nicholas X.

Rizopoulos, New York: Council of Foreign Relations Press, 1990,

p. 217, who finds no historic parallel of a hegemonic conflict

being terminated by the default of one side "in time of peace."

Emphasis added. On the perception of the suddenness of the event,

see General Powell's September 27, 1991 comments to the Senate

Armed Services Committee: "We have seen our implacable enemy of

40 years vaporize before our eyes." R. J. Jeffery Smith,

"Initiative Affects Least Useful Weapons," The Washington Post, September 28, 1991.

5. "X," George F. Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct,"

Foreign Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 2, July 1947, p. 580.

6. Change "without violent breaks in the continuity of

power." George F. Kennan, "America and the Russian Future,"

Foreign Affairs, Vol. 29, April 1951, p. 368. See also Paul

Kennedy's similar assessment over a quarter of a century later:

"Those who rejoice at the present-day difficulties of the Soviet

Union and who look forward to the collapse of that empire might

wish to recall that such transformations normally occur at very

great cost, and not always in a predictable fashion." The Rise

and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military

Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York: Random House, 1987, p. 514.

Kennan, of course, was remarkably accurate about the internal
disintegration of the Soviet state. See also John Lewis Gaddis,

"International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War,"

International Security, Vol. 17, No. 3, Winter 1992/93, p. 56.

7. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "The Cold War and its Aftermath,"

Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 4, Fall 1992, pp. 31-49. See also

Gaddis, Cold War, p. 135. At the Paris summit, President Bush

certainly made the end official. "The Cold War is over," he

proclaimed. David Reynolds, "Behind Bipolarity in Space and

Time," The End of the Cold War, p. 215.

8. George Bush, "Toward a New World Order," September 11,

1990 address before a joint session of Congress, U.S. Department

of State Dispatch 1, No. 3, September 17, 1990, p. 91. See also

Gaddis, Cold War, p. 147, and John M. Mueller, "Quiet Cataclysm:

Some Afterthoughts on World War III," The End of the Cold War, p.

39.

9. Emphasis added. Webster Dictionary.

10. James N. Rosenau, "Global Changes and Theoretical

Challenges: Toward a Post-International Politics for the 1990s,"

Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges. Approaches to World

Politics for the 1990s, eds., Ernst-Otto Czempill and James N.

Rosenau, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989, p. 17.

11. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 37. See

also Ibid., pp. 80 and 174-175; Richard W. Mansbach and John A.

Vasquez, In Search of Theory. A New Paradigm for Global Politics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. xiv and 4; Robert

K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed., New

York: Free Press, 1965, pp. 12-16; and John Gerard Ruggie,

"International Structure and International Transformation: Space,

Time and Method," Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges, p.

32.

12. Kuhn, pp. 67. The shift itself is, of course, also

subjective, with paradigm changes being perceived only by those

affected. For outsiders, these changes may seem like the Balkan

revolutions in the early 20th century: part of a normal

developmental process. For astronomers, as an example, the

discovery of X-rays did not affect their paradigm and could be

accepted as a mere addition to knowledge. For someone like

Roentgen, whose research dealt with radiation, X-rays necessarily

destroyed one paradigm as they created another. Ibid., pp. 92-93.

13. Ibid., pp. 68-69. See also Thomas S. Kuhn, The

Copernican Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1957, pp. 135-143.

14. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 76.

15. The awareness of a "state of crisis" in the universalist
medieval paradigm was apparent as early as the Council of

Constance which met from 1414 to 1418. Adda B. Bozeman, Politics

and Culture in International History, Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1960, p. 504. But see Joseph Strayer, On the

Medieval Origins of the Modern State, Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1970, p. 57, who concludes that "by 1300, it

was evident that the dominant political form in Western Europe

was going to be the sovereign state. The Universal Empire had

never been anything but a dream; the Universal Church had to

admit that defense of the individual state took precedence over

the liberties of the Church or the claims of the Christian

Commonwealth."

16. C. V. Wedgewood estimated in 1938 that Germany's

population declined from 21 million to less than 13.5 million. C.

V. Wedgewood, The Thirty Years War, London: Jonathan Cape, 1938,

p. 516. S. H. Steinberg, The Thirty Years War and the Conflict

for European Hegemony 1600-1660, New York: Norton, 1966, Chapter

3, points out that losses in the conflict were exaggerated. See

also Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years War, London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 211, who estimated a decline in population

from 20 million to approximately 16 or 17 million. See also John

Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday. The Obsolescence of Major War, New York: Basic Books, 1989, p. 8.

17. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolution, p. 150.

18. Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston, London: Constable, 1970,

p. 334.

19. Holsti, p. 25.

20. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex

Warner, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd.,

1987, p. 402.

21. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle

for Power and Peace, 4th ed., New York: Knopf, 1967, p. 10. See

also Mansbach and Vasquez, p. 5.

22. Robert E. Osgood, Ideas and Self-Interest in America's

Foreign Relations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p.

9. See also Mansbach and Vasquez, p. 5.

23. Kenneth W. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical

Analysis, New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, p. 159.

24. Charles Doran, The Politics of Assimilation: Hegemony

and Its Aftermath, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,

1971, pp. 119-122 and Holstei, pp. 72-76.

25. John U. Nef, War and Human Progress, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1972, p. 165; Geoffrey Treasure, The

Making of Modern Europe 1648-1780, London: Methuen, 1986, p. 207;
Holstei, pp. 102-103; and Michael Howard, War in European

Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 72.

26. Holstei, p. 105; Geoffrey Best, War and Society in

Revolutionary Europe, Suffolk: The Chaucer Press, 1982, pp. 92-

93; Howard, p. 82; and Kyung-won Kim, Revolution and

International Systems, New York: New York University Press, pp.

91-92 and 94-95.

27. G. A. Chevallez, The Congress of Vienna and Europe, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1964, p. 123. See also Henry Kissinger, A

World Restored, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1977, Chapter VIII.

28. Charles K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna, London:

Bell, 1934, p. 45.

29. Holsti, p. 129. For the informality and flexibility in

the understanding between the great powers, see the October 1818

British Memorandum submitted to the Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle

which concluded: "There is no doubt that a breach of the covenant

[of the territorial system of Europe] by any one State is an

injury which all the other States may, if they shall think fit,

either separately or collectively resent, but the treaties do not

impose, by express stipulation, the doing so as matter of

positive obligation." René Albrecht-Carrié, The Concert of

Europe, New York: Walker, 1968, p. 37.

30. Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna, London:

Constable, 1946, p. 39. See also Richard Rosecrance, "A New

Concert of Powers," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 2, Spring 1992,

pp. 72-73.

31. Harold W. Temperley and Lillian M. Penson, eds.,

Foundations of British Foreign Policy: Documents Old and New, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938, pp. 47 and 61. It

was the method, not the objective to which Castlereagh was

objecting. The immediate objective of the various Vienna

settlements, he wrote in December 1815, was "to inspire the

States of Europe. . .with a sense of the dangers they have

surmounted by their union,. . .to make them feel that the

existing Concert is their only perfect security against the

revolutionary embers more or less existing in every state of

Europe. . . ." Hans G. Schenk, The Aftermath of the Napoleonic

Wars, London: Kegan Paul, 1947, p. 117.

32. Kissinger, p. 228.

33. Rosecrance, pp. 72-73. The Concert existed in name until

1914. Most studies agree that the Concert was in operation at

least up until the beginning of the Crimean War. See for example,

Paul Schroeder, "The 19th Century International System: Changes

in the Structure," World Politics, Vol. 39, No. 1, October 1986,

pp. 1-26; Richard Elrod, "The Concert of Europe: A Fresh Look at

an International System," World Politics, Vol. 28, No. 2, January
1976, pp. 159-174; and Robert Jervis, "Security Regimes,"

International Organization, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring 1982, pp.

173-194.

34. Holsti, p. 166. There were 25 meetings of great power

representatives between 1830 and 1884 under the periodic summit

provision in Article VI of the Quadruple Alliance. Two of those

were congresses (Paris 1856, Berlin 1878) attended by heads of

states and foreign ministers. F. H. Hinsley, "The Concert of

Europe," Diplomacy in Modern European History, ed., Lawrence W.

Martin, New York: Macmillan, 1966, p. 53. But see W. N.

Medeicott, Bismarck, Gladstone, and the Concert of Europe,

London: Athlone Press, 1956, p. 18, who believes there were many

factors that constrained the great powers: "As long as Europe

remembered the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars it remained for the

most part at peace, and therefore in concert; but it was peace

that maintained the Concert, and not the Concert that maintained

peace."

35. Holsti, pp. 140-142, lists 31 armed conflicts from 1815

to 1914 that had an impact on the independent European security

system--one war every 3.3 years, up from one every 2.8 years for

1714-1814. After 1871, discounting the Russo-Japanese War of

1904-05, there were no great power conflicts until World War I.

36. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, pp. 30 and 37. See also

Gaddis, Cold War, p. 168, and J. D. B. Miller, Norman Angell and

the Futility of War: Peace and the Public Mind, New York: St.

Martin's, 1986. After the war, Angell reiterated these points,

emphasizing that he had never claimed that war would not occur,

just that it was irrational. James Lee Ray, "Threats to

Protracted Peace: World Politics According to Murphy," The Long

Postwar Peace: Contending Explanations and Projections, ed.,

Charles W. Kegley, Jr., New York: Harper Collins, 1990, p. 320.

Nevertheless, Angell also demonstrated considerable optimism

about the impact of war's economic futility on the incidence of

conflict when he asserted that "not only is man fighting less,

but he is using all forms of physical compulsion less. . .because

accumulated evidence is pushing him more and more to the

conclusion that he can accomplish more easily that which he

strives for by other means." Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A

Study of the Relationship of Military Power in Nations to Their

Economic and Social Advantage, London: William Heinemann, 1910,

pp. 268-269.

37. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, p. 220.

38. Michael Howard, The Causes of War and Other Essays, 2nd

ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 9.

39. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, p. 50. See also Steven

E. Miller, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Stephen Van Evera, eds.,

Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
40. Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The

Intellectuals and 1914, Lawrence, KS: Regents Press of Kansas,

1982, p. 11; Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, p. 43; and Neff,

Chapter 19.

41. Original emphasis. William James, Memories and Studies, New York: Longmans, Green, 1911, p. 304. See also Howard, Causes

of War, p. 9; Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, pp. 38 and 46; and

James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, New York:

Longman, 1984, p. 203, who points out that "the protagonists in

1914 often felt that they were the victims of objective forces

which they could not control."

42. Rosecrance, pp. 67-68.

43. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, New York:

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934, p. 57.

44. All quotations are from Ray S. Baker and William E.

Dodd, eds., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, War and Peace, New

York: Harper, 1927, Vol. I, p. 342, and Vol. II, pp. 234-35. In

his later attempts to sell his vision to the American people,

Wilson pointed out that collective security "is the only

conceivable system that you can substitute for the old order of

things which brought the calamity of this war upon us and would

assuredly bring the calamity of another war upon us." Ibid., Vol.

II, p. 51.

45. Inis L. Claude, Jr., Power and International Relations, New York: Random House, 1962, pp. 110 and 168. See also Charles

A. Kupchan and Clifford A. Kupchan, "Concerts, Collective

Security, and the Future of Europe," International Security, Vol.

16, No. 1, Summer 1991, p. 119; Arnold Wolfers, Discord and

Collaboration, Chapter Twelve, Baltimore: John Hopkins University

Press, 1962; Marina Finkelstein and Lawrence Finkelstein, eds.,

Collective Security, San Francisco: Chandler, 1966; Inis Claude,

Jr., Swords Into Plowshares, New York: Random House, 1956,

Chapter 12; and Frederick H. Hartmann, The Conservation of

Enemies, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982, Chapter 13.

46. Because a concert operates on the notion of all against

one and relies on collective action to resist aggression, it

falls into the collective security family. Robert Jervis refers

to a concert as a "nascent collective security system." Robert

Jervis, "From Balance to Concert: A Study of International

Security Cooperation," World Politics, Vol. 38, No. 1, October

1985, pp. 58-59, 78. Paradoxically, Wilson attributed many of the

problems of the 19th century diplomatic experience to the men who

had created the European concert. The new order, he insisted,

must have "no odor of the Vienna settlement." Arthur Walworth,

America's Movement, 1918: American Diplomacy at the End of World

War I, New York: Norton, 1977, p. 95.
47. James Brown Scott, ed., President Wilson's Foreign

Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1918, p. 248. See also

Claude, Power and International Relations, pp. 96-97.

48. Arthur S. Link, The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson and

Other Essays, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971, p.

78. See also Gaddis, Cold War, p. 40; Robert Dallek, The American

Style of Foreign Policy, New York: Knopf, 1983, pp. 62-91; and

Baker and Dodd, Vol. III, pp. 147-148, for Wilson's

identification even prior to World War I of American ideals and

aspirations with people throughout the world.

49. Kuhn, Structure, p. 151. See also Richard K. Betts,

"Systems for Peace or Causes of War? Collective Security, Arms

Control, and the New Europe," International Security, Vol. 17,

No. 1, Summer 1992, pp. 9 and 16-17.

50. Morgenthau, p. 412. See also Betts, p. 17.

51. Holstei, p. 175.

52. Claude, Power and International Relations, p. 140.

Wilson's opponents were known as the "irreconcilables," the

"bitterenders," and the "battalion of death." Alexander DeConde,

A History of American Foreign Policy, 2nd ed., New York:

Scribner, 1971, p. 479, and Selig Adler, The Isolationist

Impulse: It's Twentieth Century Reaction, New York: AbelardSchuman, 1957, pp. 102-105. See also Michael J. Hogan, "Foreign

Policy, Partisan Politics, and the End of the Cold War," The End

of the Cold War, p. 231.

53. Arthur S. Link, Wilson the Diplomatist, Baltimore: John

Hopkins University Press, 1957, p. 136. See also Betts, p. 17.

Root considered Article X of the Covenant "a vague universal

obligation." Robert W. Tucker, "Brave New World Orders," The New

Republic, February 24, 1992, p. 32.

54. Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1958, p. 184. Lloyd George of Great Britain

summarized the problem with Article X in terms of the realist

paradigm when he argued that:

the probable effect of including in the constitution of

the League of Nations obligations to go to war in

certain conditions will be to make it impossible for

any nation to join the League, for no nation will

commit itself in such a vital manner except by the free

decision of its own Government and of its own

Parliament, and no Government and no Parliament can

come to such a decision except after an examination of

the facts at the time when the decision has to be made.

The attempt to impose obligations of this kind. . .will

either end in their being nugatory or in the

destruction of the league itself. The thing that really
matters is that the nations should remain in continuous

consultation under a system which enables them to come

to prompt decisions on world problems as they arise

from day to day.

George Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of

Nations, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,

1978, p. 122.

55. Link, Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, p. 130. Tucker,

"Brave New World Orders," pp. 26-27.

56. Baker and Dodd, Vol. II, p. 392. Before America's entry

into the war, interventionists had warned that a German victory

might force the United States to build up its armaments which

might, in turn, as Wilson's advisor, Colonel House warned,

"change the course of our civilization and make the United States

a military nation." Arthur S. Link, et al, eds., The Papers of

Woodrow Wilson, Vol. III, Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1966, p. 37. For a study of Wilson as a realistic idealist, see

August Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, New York: Charles Scribner's

Sons, 1991.

57. Baker and Dodd, Vol. II, p. 351. See also Hoover, pp.

256-257 and Baker and Dodd, Vol. I, pp. 555 and 611-613.

58. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Imperial

Temptation. The New World Order and America's Purpose, New York:

Council of Foreign Relations Press, 1992, p. 181. See also Ibid., p. 60; Tucker, "Brave New Worlds," p. 30; and Hogan, p. 235.

59. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical

Appraisal of Post-War American National Security Policy, New

York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 10, and Cold War, p. 40.

See also Dallek, pp. 321 and 533-534. For the general views of

the Roosevelt administration on cooperation with the Soviet Union

and the establishment of the United Nations, see Daniel Yergin,

Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National

Security State, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, pp. 47-48; and

John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold

War, 1941-1947, New York: Columbia University Press, 1972, pp.

28-31.

60. Documents of the United Nations Conference in

International Organization, New York: United Nations, 1945, XI,

p. 474. The majority at the conference recognized that the veto

provision "meant that if a major power became the aggressor the

Council had no power to prevent war. In such case the inherent

right of self-defense applied, and the nations of the world must

decide whether or not they would go to war." Ibid., p. 514;

Claude, pp. 158, 165.

61. Tucker and Hendrickson, pp. 61-62.
62. Warren E. Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The

Complete Correspondence, Vol. III, Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1984, p. v. See also Gaddis, Cold War, p. 7,

and Stanley Hoffmann, "America's Heritage," Adelphi Paper No.

256, London: International Institute for Strategic Studies,

1990/1991, p. 3.

63. Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins

of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal

Security, 1946-1948, New York: Knopf, 1985, p. 49. See also

Hogan, p. 236, and Richard J. Barnet, "A Balance Sheet: Lippmann,

Kennan and the Cold War," The End of the Cold War, p. 122.

64. For this post-revisionist view, see Gaddis, The United

States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, and Melvyn P.

Leffler, A Preponderence of Power: National Security, the Truman

Administration and the Cold War, Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1992.

65. Hoffmann, p. 5. Some historians perceive the American

shift toward internationalism as beginning in the 1930s due to

changes not only in the international system, but also in the

structure of politics and the economy in the United States. See,

for example, Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America,

Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

66. Hoffmann, pp. 5-6, and Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas,

The Wise Men, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

67. "X," Kennan, p. 582.

68. Dallek, pp. 141-142.

69. This idealization, of course, had a long history in

popular culture. See for example, Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their

Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, New York: Anchor/Doubleday,

1989, which demonstrates how central European Jewish immigrants

like Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn produced an idealized

picture of the United States in their films that influenced

generations of American moviegoers. The great film director, John

Ford, summed this approach up in his movie, "The Man Who Shot

Liberty Valance." When one protagonist, played by Jimmy Stewart,

returns to a small western town years after the shooting captured

in the film's title in order to set the facts straight, he meets

resistance from the town's newspaper editor. "This is the West,

sir," the editor points out. "When the legend becomes fact, print

the legend." Andrew Sinclair, John Ford. A Biography, New York:

Frederick Ungar, 1984, p. 197.

70. Harry Truman, March 12, 1947, Message to Congress, A

Decade of American Foreign Policy. Basic Documents 1941-49, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1950, p. 1256. See also Hoffmann, pp.
6-7. Most historians view the post-World War II transition period

as very brief, with 1947 in most cases marking the beginning of

the cold war. Moreover, there is renewed appreciation that that

conflict was not simply a consistent whole extending over four

decades. There is increased use, in this regard, of the term "the

first cold war" in discussing the period from 1947 to Stalin's

death in 1953. See, for example, Fred Halliday, The Making of the

Second Cold War, 2nd ed., London: Verso, 1986, and Reynolds, p.

245.

71. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 57.

72. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Some Lessons from the Cold

War," The End of the Cold War, p. 59.

73. Gaddis, Cold War, p. 30. For another key player's

inability to anticipate how long containment would take to work,

see Paul H. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of

Decision, New York: Grove Werdenfeld, 1989, p. 52.

74. John Lewis Gaddis, "How Wise Were the Wise Men?", The

Atlantic, February 19, 1992, p. 102. See also Gaddis, Strategies

of Containment, pp. 352-357.

75. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the

Bomb in the First Fifty Years, New York: Random House, 1988.

76. Schlesinger, p. 54. See also Mueller, "Quiet Cataclysm:

Some Afterthoughts on World War III."

77. Charles W. Kegley, Jr., "Introduction," The Long Postwar

Peace, p. xi. See also Gaddis, Cold War, pp. 215-245.

78. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, New York:

Prentice-Hall, 1952, p. 189. See, for example, Kuhn's description

in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 118, of the

revolution in chemistry in which Lavoisier saw oxygen where

Priestley had previously seen only dephlogisticated air and where

others had seen nothing at all.

79. Joseph Kruzel, "Arms Control, Disarmament, and the

Stability of the Postwar Era," The Long Postwar Peace, p. 250.

80. David J. Singer, "The Level-of-Analysis Problem in

International Relations," The International System, eds. Klaus

Knorr and Sidney Verba, Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1961, pp. 77-92.

81. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, Reading, MA: Addison-Welsey, 1979, pp. 93-99.

82. See, for example, John Gerard Ruggie, "Continuity and

Transformation in the World Polity," pp. 142-152, and Robert O.

Keohane, "Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and
Beyond," pp. 169-173--both in Neorelism and its Critics, ed.

Robert O. Keohane, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. But

also see Robert G. Gilpin, "The Richness of the Tradition of

Political Realism," Ibid, pp. 301-321.

83. Gaddis, "International Relations Theory and the End of

the Cold War," pp. 31 and 34. See also Kenneth A. Oye, ed.,

Cooperation Under Anarchy, Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1986; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Nuclear Learning and U.S.-Soviet

Security Regimes," International Organization, Vol. 41, No. 3,

Summer 1987, pp. 371-402; Alexander L. George, Philip J. Farley,

and Alexander Dallum, eds., U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation:

Achievements, Failures, Lessons, New York: Oxford University

Press, 1988; and Stephen Krasner, ed., International Regimes,

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Waltz never claimed that

structure accounted for everything that happens in international

relations. "To explain outcomes one must look at the

capabilities, the actions and the interactions of states, as well

as the structure of their systems. . . .Causes at the national

and the international level make the world more or less peaceful

and stable." Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 174-

175. See also Kenneth N. Waltz, "Reflections on Theory of

International Politics: A Response to My Critics," Neorealism and

its Critics, pp. 327-329 and 342-343.

 84. Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 12.

85. Original emphasis. Ibid., p. 230.

86. Kruezel, p. 250, and Gaddis, Cold War, p. 109. Bernard

Brodie, Michael D. Intriligator, Roman Koepowicz, eds., National

Security and International Stability, Cambridge, MA:

Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1983, p. 12.

87. Gene D. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick, A Film Odyssey, New

York: Popular Library, 1975, p. 125.

88. This bipolar focus was also reflected in the

historiography of U.S. foreign relations, as demonstrated in the

"orthodox," "revisionist," or "postrevisionist" schools of

diplomatic history. John Lewis Gaddis pointed out in 1983 that 20

percent of U.S. doctoral dissertations in diplomatic history for

the previous four years had dealt with some aspect of the early

1945-50 cold war era. "The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on

the Origins of the Cold War," Diplomatic History, Vol. 7, Summer

1983, p. 171. See also Reynolds, p. 250.

89. Colin S. Gray, The Geopolitics of Superpower, Lexington:

The University Press of Kentucky, 1988, p. 70. See also George,

et al, U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation.

90. Graham Greene and Carol Reed, The Third Man, New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1968, p. 114. Orson Wells added these lines

for his role of Harry Lime. The conversation is with Lime's old
friend, Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton.

91. Carl Kaysen, "Is War Obsolete? A Review Essay,"

International Security, Vol. XIV, Spring 1990, p. 61. See also,

Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, pp. 220-221; Gaddis, Cold War, pp. 105-118; Bundy, pp. 463-516; and Michael Mendelbaum, The

Nuclear Revolution: International Politics Before and After

Hiroshima, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

92. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, p. 52.

93. Hoffmann, p. 8.

94. Lyndon B. Johnson, "Address at John Hopkins University:

Peace Without Conquest," April 7, 1965, Public Papers of the

Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, Vol. I,

Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966, p. 395.

95. Steel, p. 107.

96. Morgenthau, p. 149.

97. "NSC-68, A Report to the National Security Council,"

April 14, 1950, Naval War College Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 6,

May/June 1975, p. 56.

98. Hoffmann, p. 14; see also Betts, p. 13.

99. On the risk minimizing, cost maximizing pattern, see

John Lewis Gaddis, "Containment and the Logic of Strategy," The

National Interest, No. 10, Winter 1987/1988, pp. 27-38. See also

Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 352-353, and Cold War, pp.

115-116.

100. Hoffmann, pp. 16-17.

 101. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. See also

Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth,

Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1982; Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Great Britain

and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905, Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1988. For the debate, see Peter

Schmeisser, "Taking Stock: Is America in Decline?" New York Times

Magazine, April 17, 1988, pp. 24-27, 66-68, 96; Joseph S. Nye,

Jr., "Understating U.S. Strength," Foreign Policy, No. 72, Fall

1988, pp. 105-129; Samuel P. Huntington, "The U.S.--Decline or

Renewal?", Foreign Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 4, Winter 1988/89, pp.

76-96; Paul Kennedy, "Can the U.S. Remain Number One?", New York

Review of Books, March 16, 1989, pp. 36-42; Henry R. Nau, The

Myth of America's Decline: Leading the World Economy into the

1990s, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990; Joseph S. Nye,

Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, New

York: Basic Books, 1990; and Paul Kennedy, "Preparing for the

21st Century: Winners and Losers," The New York Review of Books,
Vol. XL, No. 4, February 11, 1993, pp. 32-44.

102. Tucker and Hendrickson, pp. 4-5. On other cyclic views

of history, see George Modelski, ed., Exploring Long Cycles, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1987; Robert Gilpin, War and Change in

World Politics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981;

Joshua A. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the

Modern Age, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; and William

R. Thompson, On Global War: Historical-Structural Approaches to

World System Analysis, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina

Press, 1988. The cold war from this cyclic view "was a brief,

unsuccessful, and not even particularly interesting challenge by

the Soviet Union to the hegemonic position the United States

established for itself in world politics after 1945." Gaddis,

"International Relations Theory," p. 49.

103. David Yankelovich, "Foreign Policy After the Election,"

Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 4, Fall 1992, p. 5.

104. 71 percent Gallup Poll, September 1991, Ibid., p. 6.

105. Ibid., p. 7. The American public in terms of its

commitment to internationalism "has made the long voyage from

casual opinion to thoughtful consideration." Ibid., p. 6.

106. Ibid., and Hoffmann, p. 14.

107. Yankelovich, p. 10; see also Betts, p. 13.

108. Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. 137.

109. Christer Jonsson, "The Ideology of Foreign Policy,"

Foreign Policy: USA/USSR, eds., Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Pat

McGowan, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982, p. 103;

Gaddis, Cold War, pp. 11-13; and David Allan Mayers, Cracking the

Monolith: U.S. Policy Against the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949-

1955, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1986. "There probably

never was any real possibility," Ernest May noted, "that the

post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on

conflict." "The Cold War," The Making of America's Soviet Policy, ed., Joseph S. Nye, Jr., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984,

p. 204.

110. Merrill Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings, New

York: Library of America, 1984, p. 1084.

111. Hoffmann, p. 21. See also Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "What New

Order?", Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 2, Spring 1992, p. 83;

David C. Hendrickson, "The Renovation of American Foreign

Policy," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 2, Spring 1992, p. 55. "As

in 1917, as in 1941," Louis J. Halle pointed out in terms of the

cold war, "it was still not possible to tell the American people

what the real issue was. . . ."The Cold War as History, 2nd ed.,
New York: Harper & Row, 1991, p. 121.

112. Gaddis, Cold War, p. 207. See also William H. McNeil,

"Winds of Change," Sea Changes, p. 176. Alexander Hamilton once

warned that a national propensity to run ceaselessly into debt in

peacetime could lead to "great and convulsive revolutions of

empire." Hendrickson, p. 58.

113. Robert W. Tucker, "Reagan's Foreign Policy," Foreign

Affairs, America and the World 1988/89, Vol. 68, No. 1, p. 27.

See also, James Chace, Solvency: The Price of Survival, New York:

Random House, 1981, p. 15. As early as 1978, one observer noted

that the "kind of broad consensus. . .obtained during the postwar era and which became a shibboleth of American foreign policy

may no longer be possible to resurrect short of war. American

interests are too diverse and American power much less

predominant. . .and the President will have to look for support

for his foreign policies much as he might seek to do for his

domestic programs." James Chace, "Is a Foreign Policy Consensus

Possible?," Ibid., Vol. 57, No. 1, Fall 1978, pp. 15-16.

114. George Will, "Change Not Overly Momentous," The

Carlisle Sentinel, January 21, 1993.

115. Ernest R. May, "The U.S. Government, A Legacy of the

Cold War," The End of the Cold War, p. 217.

116. Ibid., and Schlesinger, p. 56.

117. Samuel P. Huntington, The Common Defense, Strategic

Programs in National Politics, New York: Columbia University

Press, 1961, p. 36. See also May, p. 219.

118. Paul Y. Hammond, Super Carriers and B-36 Bombers, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963, and Phillip S. Merlinger, "The

Admirals' Revolt of 1949: Lessons for Today," Parameters, Vol.

XIX, No. 3, September 1989, pp. 81-96.

 119. NSC 114/1, August 8, 1951, U.S. Department of State,

Foreign Relations of the United States 1951 (FRUS), Washington:

U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977, Vol. I, pp. 127-157. See

also Huntington, Common Defense, pp. 47-61, and May, p. 221.

120. May, pp. 225-226, and Dennis S. Ippolito, Uncertain

Legacies: Federal Budget Policy from Roosevelt Through Reagan, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990, Chapters 4

and 5.

121. In 1949, only 7 percent of the more than ten thousand

pages of Foreign Relations of the United States was located in

sections with titles containing the words "security" or

"military." In 1951 for the thirteen thousand pages of the FRUS, the figure was 28 percent. May, pp. 226-227.
122. Ibid., p. 227. For the evolution of the NSC, see Karl

F. Inderfurth and Loch K. Johnson, eds., Decisions of the Highest

Order. Perspectives on the National Security Council, Pacific

Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1988.

123. Walter Lippmann, "Ten Years: Retrospect and Prospect,"

Foreign Affairs, Vol. 11, October 1932, pp. 51-53.

124. The cold war in effect relegitimized capitalism

politically after the blows rendered by the years of the Great

Depression and World War II to its basic ideological and

institutional foundations. Lloyd C. Gardner, "Old Wine in New

Bottles: How the Cold War Became the Long Peace," The Long

Postwar Peace, p. 129. See also McNeil, p. 180.

125. Ibid.

126. Stephen P. Rosen, "Vietnam and the American Theory of

Limited War, International Security, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 1982,

pp. 83-113. See also Hoffmann, p. 10.

127. May, pp. 218 and 228. "Institutions for service to

empire continue onward with a clanking automaticity, in spite of

the dramatic changes in the world or strong constituencies

calling for an end to empire. Made to fight old wars, the systems

call for the new ones." Bruce Cumings, "The Wicked Witch of the

West is Dead. Long Live the Wicked Witch of the East," The End of

the Cold War, p. 90.

128. Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird, "The Fading of the Cold

War--and the Demystification of Twentieth-Century Issues," The

End of the Cold War, pp. 209-210.

129. Stanley Hoffmann, "A New World and Its Troubles," Sea

Changes, p. 275, and Gaddis, Cold War, p. 135.

130. Barnet, p. 124, and Alperovitz and Bird, p. 210.

131. McNeil, pp. 181-182.

132. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role

in the Technotronic Era, New York: Viking, 1970, p. 34. See also

Tucker and Hendrickson, p. 14.

 133. "Europe, in short, launched itself on a selfreinforcing cycle in which its military organization sustained,

and was sustained by, economic and political expansion. . . ."

William H. McNeil, The Pursuit of Power, Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1982, p. 143. See also Kennedy, Rise and Fall of

the Great Powers, p. xvi, original emphasis: "The history of the

rise and later fall of the leading countries in the Great Power

system since the advance of western Europe in the sixteenth

century. . .shows a very significant correlation over the longer

term between productive and revenue-raising capacities on the one
hand and military strength on the other."

134. Gaddis, Cold War, pp. 157-158, and Kennedy, Rise and

Fall of the Great Powers, pp. xx-xxi. See also Walter Lippmann's

definition of solvency: "If its expenditures are safely within

its assured means, a family is solvent when it is poor, or is

well-to-do, or is rich. The same principle holds true of

nations." U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, Boston:

Little, Brown, 1943, p. 10.

135. Sam Nunn, "Roles and Missions in the Department of

Defense," Congressional Record, Vol. 138, No. 98, July 2, 1992,

pp. S9959-S9565. See also Business Executives for National

Security, "After the Cold War, How Much Defense Is Enough?

Shaping Military Roles and Missions to Secure the Newly Won

Peace," Issue Brief, No. 4, October 1992, and Barton Gellman,

"Services Moving to Protect Turf," The Washington Post, January

28, 1993.

136. Steel, p. 112. See also R. Jeffrey Smith, "Defense

Policy Posts Restructured," The Washington Post, January 28,

1993.

137. Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy. Three Essays, New York: Norton, 1969, pp. 56-57. For definitions of bipolarity,

see Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 132-138 and 163-

182, and Kenneth Waltz, "The Stability of a Bipolar World,"

Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 3, Summer 1964, pp. 881-909. Other

definitions included: "(1) a condition in which states are

polarized into two hostile coalitions; (2) a condition in which

there are only two states capable of a strategy of global

deterrence; (3) a system of only two states. . . ." R. Harrison

Wagner, "What was bipolarity?", International Organization, Vol.

47, No. 1, Winter 1993, p. 89. Wagner believes that bipolarity in

these definitions as well as in that of Waltz, "is either

undefined, irrelevant to post-World War II international

politics, or implies behavior that is inconsistent with the

behavior it is supposed to explain." Ibid.

138. J. David Singer, "Peace in the Global System:

Displacement, Interregnum, or Transformation," The Long Postwar

Peace, p. 84. On balance of power vs. hegemonic stability

theories, see Jack S. Levy, "Long Cycles, Hegemonic Transitions,

and the Long Peace," Ibid., p. 148: "Whereas balance-of-power

theory hypothesizes that the threat of hegemony is a sufficient

condition for a counter-coalition of other great powers and

therefore for a general war, hegemonic theory hypothesizes that

hegemony is a sufficient and perhaps necessary condition for the

absence of a major war." On bipolar stability, see Oye,

Cooperation Under Anarchy; Waltz, Theory of International

Politics, pp. 132-138, 163-176, and 192; Stephen Van Evra,

"Primed for Peace. Europe After The Cold War," International

Security, Vol. 15, No. 3, Winter 1990-91, pp. 33-40; and Gilpin,

War and Change in World Politics, p. 46.
139. Waltz, Theory of International Relations, p. 173. See

also Gaddis, Cold War, pp. 151-152, and Steel, p. 110, who points

out that despite costs, the cold war provided something for all

major parties as it developed into "an eminently workable

international system. It was predictable, economically

manageable, politically useful, and militarily unthreatening." On

the early use if not the first use of the term "superpowers," see

Reynolds, p. 248, and William T. R. Fox, The Superpowers: The

United States, Britain and the Soviet Union--Their Responsibility

for Peace, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944. Fox's criteria still

applies to the United States which demonstrated in the Gulf War

"great power plus great mobility of power." Ibid., p. 21.

140. Milovan Djilas, Conversations With Stalin, trans.

Michael B. Petrovich, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961, p.

114.

141. Seyom Brown, The Faces of Power, New York: Columbia

University Press, 1968, p. 217. On the two categories of

alliances, see Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Gregory A. Raymond,

"Alliances and the Preservation of the Postwar Peace: Weighing

the Contribution," The Long Postwar Peace, p. 277-278.

142. During the tenure of such a quintessential hardliner as

John Foster Dulles, for example, the East German and Hungarian

revolts occurred without American action. The two notable

exceptions were Korea and Cuba; but mixed signals certainly

played a major role in both cases: the former because of the 1949

drawdown of American troops and the famous Dean Acheson speech to

the National Press Club the following year; the latter because of

U.S. inaction in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion.

143. "Nuclear weapons did not cause the condition of

bipolarity; other states by acquiring them cannot change the

condition." Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 180. Nye,

"Nuclear Learning and U.S.-Soviet Security Regimes," pp. 371-402.

See also Alexander L. George, "Factors Influencing Security

Cooperation," U.S.-Soviet Cooperation, pp. 655-678; Robert

Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1989; and Michael Mandelbaum, The

Nuclear Revolution: International Politics Before and After

Hiroshima, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

144. Joseph Kruzel, "Arms Control, Disarmament, and the

Stability of the Postwar Era," The Long Postwar Peace, pp. 266-

267, and George, Farley and Dallum, passim.

145. On loose bipolarity, see Alexei Filitov, "Victory in

the Postwar Era: Despite the Cold War or Because of It?", End of

the Cold War, p. 82. Kegley and Raymond, p. 285.

146. Tucker and Hendrickson, p. 6; Steel, p. 111; and

Cumings, p. 87. On the linkage of U.S. domestic attitudes,
institutions and perceptions to the recreation of Germany and

Japan, see Dallek, pp. 146-150. John Mueller has noted of Japan:

"Without benefit of missile or bazooka it has obtained status,

influence, respect and admiration; and it inspires emulation,

envy and genuflection. If that's not power, who needs it?",

Retreat from Doomsday, p. 223.

147. Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social

Expenditures 1989, Washington: World Priorities, 1989. See also

Charles W. Kegley, Jr., "Explaining Great-Power Peace: The

Sources of Prolonged Postwar Stability," The Long Postwar Peace,

p. 8; Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, "International

Crisis and Global Instability: The Myth of the 'Long Peace',"

Ibid; and Eliot Cohen, "Distant Battles: Modern War in the Third

World," International Security, Vol. 10, No. 5, Spring 1986, p.

186.

148. Leonard S. Spector, The Undeclared Bomb, Cambridge, MA:

Ballinger, 1988, p. 4. See also Reynolds, p. 248.

149. James A. Nathan and James K. Olwer, United States

Foreign Policy and World Order, Boston: Little, Brown, 1986, p.

453. See also Gaddis, Cold War, pp. 196-197, and Strategies of

Containment, pp. 28-29 and 59-61.

150. John H. Herz, "Rise and Demise of the Territorial

State," World Politics, Vol. IX, 1957, pp. 473. Herz elaborated

on this in International Politics in the Atomic Age, New York:

Columbia University Press, 1959, and then reconsidered a decade

later. "For the time being, or so it appears, it is not

internationalism, 'universalism,' or any other supranational

model that constitutes the alternative to the territorial, or

nation-state, system, but genuine, raw chaos." John H. Herz, "The

Territorial State Revisited: Reflections on the the Future of the

Nation-State," International Politics and Foreign Policy. A

Reader in Research and Theory, ed., James N. Rosenau, New York:

Free Press, 1969, p. 88.

151. Herz, "Rise and Demise of the Territorial State," pp.

473-474.

152. Brian Jenkins, New Modes of Conflict, Santa Monica, CA:

Rand Corporation, 1983, p. 17. See also Holsti, p. 272.

153. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Jr., Power and

Interdependence, 2nd ed., New York: Harper Collins, 1989, p. 10.

For the specific comparison of the ideal type of complex

interdependence with the realist paradigm, see Ibid., Chapter 2.

See also Gaddis, "International Relations Theory," p. 41.

154. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 94-95. The

problem, Waltz emphasized, "is not to say how to manage the

world, including its great powers, but to say how the possibility

that great powers will constructively manage international
affairs varies as systems change." Ibid., p. 210. See also Ibid.,

chapters 7-9; Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics, pp. 244-245;

James E. Thomson and Stephen D. Krasner, "Global Transactions and

the Consolidation of Sovereignty," Global Changes and Theoretical

Challenges, pp. 195-197; and Fareed Zakaria, "Is Realism

Finished?" The National Interest, No. 30, Winter 1992/93, p. 28.

155. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 94. See

also James N. Rosenau, Turbulence and Change in World Politics: A

Theory of Change and Continuity, Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1990, p. 15; Krasner, International Regimes, p. 2; and

Robert O. Keohane, "Realism, Neorealism, and the Study of World

Politics," Neorealism and Its Critics, p. 15. For an attempt to

create a theory of institutions with liberal implications based

on premises that are consistent with those of political realism,

see Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in

the World Political Economy, Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1984.

156. Rosenau, Turbulence and Change in World Politics, p.

247. See also James N. Rosenau, "Interdependence and the

Simultaneity Puzzle: Notes on the Outbreak of Peace," The Long

Postwar Peace, pp. 309-313. In 1989, Rosenau termed the

multicentric system as "complementary" rather than an "emergent

new world order." Transitions, he conceded, must have continuity

as well as change. "Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges,"

p. 12; and Werner Link, "Reflections on Paradigmatic

Complementarity in the Study of International Relations," Global

Changes and Theoretical Challenges, pp. 99-116.

157. Brzezinski, "Cold War and Its Aftermath," p. 47, and

Hoffmann, "A New World and Its Trouble," p. 276.

158. See Gaddis, Cold War, Chapter 11, for the concept of

what he refers to as the forces of "Integration" and

"Fragmentation," and Rosenau, "Global Changes and Theoretical

Challenges," p. 8, who develops a similar concept which he refers

to as "Centralizing" and "Decentralizing" tendencies.

159. Hamerow, pp. 210-225 and 300-309; Zbigniew Brzezinski,

The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the

Twentieth Century, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989, pp.

254-255; and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing

Nature of American Power, New York: Basic Books, 1990, p. 188.

160. Nye, "What New Order?," p. 85. See also Brzezinski,

Between Two Ages, p. 19, who believes that the more helpful image

is von Laue's one of the "global city"--"a nervous, agitated,

tense and fragmented web of interdependent relations. . .better

characterized by interaction than by intimacy."

161. Ibid., p. 91, and Gaddis, Cold War, p. 199.

162. Asa Briggs quoted in Zakaria, p. 28.
163. Ibid. See also Thomson and Krasner, p. 195.

164. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Neorealism and Neoliberalism,"

World Politics, Vol. XL, January 1988, p. 239. But also see Nye,

"What New World Order?", p. 88.

165. Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State:

Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World, New York: Basic Books,

1986, pp. 78-79 and 212-213. As Robert Jervis has pointed out,

there is almost a circular logic in the liberal argument, with

interdependence developing in part because of expectations of

peace, while the economic benefits of close economic

interdependence make peace more likely. "A Useable Past for the

Future," The End of the Cold War, p. 260; Waltz, Theory of

International Politics, pp. 138-139; Gaddis, Cold War, p. 183;

Gaddis, "Theories of International Relations," p. 42; and George,

"Factors Influencing Security Cooperation," pp. 655-678.

166. Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign

Affairs: America and the World 1990/91, Vol. 70, No. 1, Winter

1990/91, p. 24.

167. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, p. 257. See also

Holsti, pp. 283 and 328. For the tendency to romanticize

revolutionary violence, see Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake:

The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, New York: Vintage,

1972, pp. 589-590, in which she looks forward to the day when

"the narrow flame of revolution" will "cleanse the lake of

Vietnamese society from the corruption and disorder of the

American War."

168. Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, p. 230, and

A.F.K. Organski, World Politics, 2nd ed., New York: Knopf, 1968,

Chapter 14. As early as 1981, Kenneth Waltz advocated the

proliferation of nuclear capabilities to smaller powers as a key

way to help them coexist in a self-help world. "The Spread of

Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better," Adelphi Paper No. 171,

London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, 1981. In

1990, he continued to advocate the gradual proliferation of

nuclear weapons as a way to reinforce stability. "Nuclear Myths

and Political Realities," American Political Science Review, Vol.

LXXXIV, September 1990, pp. 733-734. That same year, John

Mearsheimer asserted that Europe could be stabilized with a

"limited and carefully managed proliferation of nuclear weapons."

"Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War,"

International Security, Vol. XV, Summer 1990, p. 54. For the idea

of making Germany a nuclear power, see Richard Uleman, "Enlarging

the Zone of Peace," Foreign Policy, Fall 1990. See also Gaddis,

Cold War, p. 111, and Robert C. Johansen, "Do Preparations for

War Increase or Decrease International Security?", The Long

Postwar Peace, pp. 236-238.

169. Tucker, "1989 and All That," p. 228; Thomson and
Krasner, p. 216; and Keohane and Nye, p. 249, who emphasized that

they made no assumption that interdependence would lead to

increased cooperation or have benign consequences.

Interdependence, they pointed out, did not make power obsolete.

170. On the persistence of hegemony even after the demise of

the original conditions that gave rise to it, see Keohane, After

Hegemony, pp. 182-216. But see Susan Strange, "The Name of the

Game," Sea Changes, pp. 253-255 and 258, who believes that

American hegemony is not in decline, that there is, instead, a

shift in the basis of American power, but not a loss of that

power. See also Filitov, pp. 84-85.

171. Regimes are defined as "sets of implicit or explicit

principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around

which actors' expectations converge in a given area of

international relations." Krasner, p. 2. See also Filitov, p. 86;

Zakaria, pp. 28-29; and Kupchan, p. 131, who concludes: "When

inter-state cooperation has already begun to emerge because of

shifts in elite beliefs, and the Realist assumptions of a

competitive self-help world are thus relaxed, a fertile ground

exists for institutions to play a much more prominent role in

shaping state behavior." But see Tucker, "1989 and All That," p.

229, who points out: "While a hegemonic power, if determined to

do so, can impose a solution on the conflicts arising from

interdependence, partners can only disagree."

172. Katzenstein, p. 292.

173. Owen Harries, "Fourteen Points for Realists," The

National Interest, No. 30, Winter 1992/93, p. 109. See also

Thomson and Krasner, pp. 196-197, and Susan Strange, "Toward a

Theory of Transnational Empire," Global Changes and Theoretical

Challenges, pp. 161-176.

174. Zakaria, p. 21.

175. Hendrickson, p. 55, and Tucker and Hendrickson, p. 190.

176. Tucker, "Brave New World Orders," p. 26. See also

Tucker and Hendrickson, pp. 185-187, and Nye, "What New Order?",

pp. 83-84.

177. A radio address. Tucker and Hendrickson, p. 152. To a

smaller group, the President remarked: "By God, we've kicked the

Vietnam syndrome once and for all." Ibid.

178. Ibid., p. 55. In Vietnam and in the Gulf War,

credibility also came to be perceived as an interest in itself in

terms of overall stability. After the Gulf War, for instance,

President Bush declared:

I think because of what's happened we won't have to use

U.S. forces around the world. I think when we say
something that is objectively correct--like don't take

over a neighbor or you're going to bear some

responsibility-- people are going to listen. Because I

think out of all this will be a new-found--let's put it

this way: a reestablished credibility for the United

States of America.

@ENDNOTENOINDT = "Excerpts from Bush's News Conference on

Postwar Moves," The New York Times, March 2, 1991.

179. Tucker and Hendrickson, pp. 25-27. See also Gaddis,

Cold War, p. 208, for realist impatience with the ideological

strains placed on geopolitics.

180. Zakaria, p. 31.

181. Yankelovich, p. 12.

182. Betts, p. 15.

183. Wolfers, p. 197. See also Betts, p. 23. "The

achievement of orthodox status is very often fatal to the

integrity of a concept. When it becomes popular and respectable.

. .men are strongly tempted to proclaim their belief in it

whether or not they genuinely understand its meaning or fully

accept its implications." Claude, Swords Into Plowshares, p. 246.

184. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An

Introduction to the Study of International Relations, New York:

St. Martin's Press, 1939, p. 10.

185. Other examples include the Greek Cypriot coup and

Turkish invasion in 1974 as well as the 1982 Israeli invasion of

Lebanon. Betts, p. 25, and The Blue Helmets: A Review of United

Nations Peace-Keeping, New York: U.N. Department of Public

Information, October 1985.

186. Betts, p. 26; Tucker and Hendrickson, pp. 51-52; and

Nye, "What New Order?", p. 90.

187. In the League of Nations, the great powers of the

Council operated under the unanimity provision of the Covenant

which did not apply to Council members who were party to the

dispute. The veto power of the U.N. Security Council permanent

members, on the other hand, prevented the U.N. from addressing

great power disputes. Claude, Power and International Relations, pp. 159-165. See also, Hoffmann, America's Heritage, p. 21;

Tucker and Hendrickson, p. 63; Kupchan, p. 122; and Holstei, p.

248.

188. Kupchan, p. 1120. "The story of international politics

is written in terms of the great powers of an era." Waltz, Theory

of International Politics, p. 72. See also Betts, p. 27, who

believes that the result of the 19th century concert was a
security that was selectively collective and thus condominium.

But see Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in

World Politics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, pp.

225-226, who believes "concert" is a better term than

"condominium."

189. Rosecrance, "A New Concert of Powers," p. 76.

Rosecrance envisions a five-power concert with the European

Community subsuming Great Britain, France and Germany. Ibid., p.

65.

190. Gaddis, Cold War, pp. 211-212.

191. Jervis, "A Useable Past for the Future," pp. 263-264.

192. Zakaria, pp. 29-30, and Bull, p. 299.

 193. Holsti, p. 138; Bull, pp. 300-301; and Nye, "What New

Order?", p. 93.

194. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed., Michael Oakeshatt,

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952, p. 109. World government

by conquest, of course, is very much in the realist tradition.

During the last 500 years, the modern state system has come close

to being transformed by conquest into a universal empire owing

allegiance to a single supreme government. Bull, pp. 262-263. See

also, Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn, World Peace Through World

Law, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960; Robert

Hutchins, et al., Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947; and Wesley Wooley,

Alternatives to Anarchy: American Supranationalism Since World

War II, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

195. Tennyson's visionary future as expressed in this poem

was a favorite of Winston Churchill, who liked to recite the more

bloodthirsty predictions of future warfare, and of President

Truman, who wrote these lines on a scrap of paper he carried with

him for over 50 years. Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill, Vol.

VI: Finest Hour, 1939-1941, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983, p.

1038; and John Hersey, Life Sketches, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1989, pp. 245-246. See also, Bull, pp. 262-263. Much of the

modern impetus for world government stemmed from the cataclysms

of the two World Wars. "Only the creation of a world government,"

Albert Einstein wrote in this regard, "can prevent the impending

self-destruction of mankind." Albert Einstein, Einstein on Peace, eds., Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, New York: Simon and Schuster,

1960, p. 482. And Bertrand Russell reflected the fundamental

problem of moving back and forth between two paradigms when he

wrote: "It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which

great wars can be permanently prevented and that is the

establishment of an international government with a monopoly of

serious armed force." Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch,

eds., The Atomic Age: Scientists in National and World Affairs, New York: Basic Books, 1963, p. 124.
196. Bull, p. 295.

197. Henry Kissinger, The Troubled Partnership: A

Reappraisal of the Atlantic Alliance, New York: McGraw-Hill,

1965, p. 251. See also Henry Kissinger, "The White Revolutionary:

Reflections on Bismarck," Daedalus, Vol. 97, Summer 1968, pp.

909-910. "It can never be the task of leadership to solicit a

consensus, but to create the conditions which will make a

consensus possible. A leader, if he performs his true function,

must resign himself to being alone part of the time, at least

while he charts the road." Henry Kissinger, "American Policy and

Preventive War," Yale Review, Vol. 44, April 1955, p. 336.

198. Kissinger, A World Restored, p. 329.

199. Secretary Cheney's statement before the Senate Armed

Services Committee in connection with the FY 1992-93 Budget for

the Department of Defense, Washington, February 21, 1991.

200. Graham Allison, "National Security Strategy for the

1990s," America's Global Interests, A New Agenda, ed., Edward K.

Hamilton, New York: W. W. Norton, 1989, p. 211.

201. Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert Marquis of

Salisbury, London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1921, Vol. 2, p.

145.

202. Kissinger, The Troubled Partnership, p. 249.

203. President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia, Address to

U.S. Congress, February 1990.

204. Bruce R. Kuniholm, "The End of the Cold War in the Near

East: What It Means for Historians and Policy Planners," The End

of the Cold War, p. 167.

205. Kuhn, p. 97.

206. Ibid., p. 77. See also Ibid., p. 145.

207. Mark W. Zacher, "The Decaying Pillars of the

Westphalian Temple: Implications for International Order and

Governance," Governance Without Government: Order and Change in

World Politics, eds., James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 67.

208. Kissinger, A World Restored, pp. 322-323.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVID JABLONSKY is a Professor of National Security Affairs at

the U.S. Army War College. He holds a B.A. in European History

from Dartmouth College; an M.A. in International Relations from

Boston University; and an M.A. and Ph.D. in European History from

the University of Kansas. Dr. Jablonsky has held the Elihu Root

Chair of Strategy and is the author of numerous monographs and

articles as well as The Nazi Party in Dissolution: Hitler and

the Verbotzeit 1923-1925 (1989) and Churchill, the Great Game,

and Total War (1991).
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General William A. Stofft

Commandant

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STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

Director

Colonel John W. Mountcastle

Conference Organizer

Dr. Gary L. Guertner

Author

Dr. David Jablonsky

Editor

Mrs. Marianne P. Cowling

Secretaries

Mrs. Rosemary E. Moore

Ms. Rita A. Rummel

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Cover Artist

Lawrence C. Miller

Composition

Mrs. Mary Jane Semple