NOT CHECKED IN TALKS DEPARTMENT WITH 'AS BROADCAST' SCRIPT

Producer: Anna Kallin

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

by Michael Howard

Recorded: Thursday 19th September 1957
Tape No.: TLO. 38699
Duration: 18 15"

TRANSMISSION: Third Programme Saturday 28th Sep. 1957 8.35-8.55 pm

For nearly five centuries, everyone in Western Christendom except the student of political science, was shocked by the teaching that the real sanction of government was not Divine law interpreted by legitimate authority, but simply power, and that the basis of power was force. It was a notion appalling to the medieval mind; but Bacon did Machiavelli no more than justice when he praised him for showing, for the first time, how men actually did behave in society and not simply how they should.

The same praise is now due to a young American historian, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, whose recent book on *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy* is perhaps the most penetrating and comprehensive work on international affairs to appear since the explosion at Hiroshima announced the advent of the nuclear age. Dr. Kissinger sets out to study the predicament in which American statesmen find themselves in attempting to combat the spread of Communist power; and in doing so he throws overboard all the traditional liberal conceptions about the nature of international relations as cavalierly as Machiavelli disposed of the traditional medieval teaching about the nature of authority. For him the states of the world do not live naturally in a condition of amity and concord disturbed only by the aggression of criminals and maniacs.

2.

They live in a world in which only power counts, and that power involves the possession of force - force of a kind which one is able, and willing, to use.

There is of course nothing new about this teaching. It was on this assumption that the states of Europe - the powers of Europe - conducted their relations until 1914; and one can discern in Dr. Kissinger's writing a certain nostalgia for the days of Metternich, about which he has elsewhere written a discerning account. But it is an assumption as foreign to the traditional American attitude to international affairs as it is repulsive to European liberals. The liberal creed, if I may call it that without any partisan implications, is that man is born at peace but is everywhere at war; and that the war arises not out of the nature of social organisation but from the foolishness of governments, the vested interests of soldiers, the avarice of armaments manufacturers or the criminal ambition of some individual potentate. Wars are caused only by "aggression". If we have to fight we do so as a crusade against evil, which can end only with the overthrow and arraignment of the guilty party; and once that has been done we can disarm and return to our natural condition of peace. For the liberal therefore all wars must be total wars: one does not compromise with criminals.

It is certainly difficult for us, living in our cosy and
compartment well-ordered society, not to believe that peace is the
natural order of things and war is something totally monstrous
and unnatural. But it is just as difficult sometimes
certainly
not to believe that the world is flat - and no more absurd.

We, that is the members of Western society, have by our
energy, our curiosity and our acquisitiveness set on foot
during the past five hundred years the greatest social and
economic transformation that the world has ever seen. How
can we reasonably believe that this transformation has now
been arrested at a point which suits our convenience?
We have precipitated a revolution, the consequences of which
we cannot begin to foresee. Our apparent peace is merely
the resultant of conflicting forces in momentary equilibrium;
and if we are to survive, if we are to preserve what we
value from the past and transmit our beliefs to the future,
we must ensure that the forces favourable to this are strong
enough either to maintain our position or to ensure
that any transformation it undergoes will not be utterly
disastrous. Such strength must include the ability to use
effective force - not the force of a policeman checking
a criminal but the force of powers locked in remorseless
struggle, each firmly believing in its own righteousness, and
No renunciation of force can offer any escape. It merely
eliminates the penalty for intransigence, and, as Dr. Kissinger
writes, "places the international order at the mercy
of its most ruthless or its most irresponsible member."
The experiences of the past twenty-five years should at least
have taught us the truth of that.

But the paradox of our time is that the very magnitude
of the force now at our disposal inhibits us from using
it as an instrument of policy. The western conception
of "aggression" has led us to develop a military policy
designed not so much to forward and protect our own interests
in the most effective possible way, as to meet the most
improbable of all eventualities - an overt and massive attack

In short we must not be afraid of using war as an instrument of policy; but this is only possible in the nuclear age if we clear from our minds all idea of war as something inevitably total, inevitably aiming at the complete defeat of the enemy, and prepare ourselves instead to aim at limited objectives, to adopt a strategy directed at the armed forces of the enemy rather than at his civil and industrial potential, and to offer terms for a settlement which he can be reasonably expected to accept.

I'm afraid that this will be condemned by a lot of people as unnecessary in your chair and mutter about "unrealistic nonsense". But criticism will be an effective supplement to that. And your mutterings are likely to swell when I say that Dr. Kissinger goes on to suggest that such wars might be conducted with nuclear weapons subject to certain mutually agreed restrictions devised to spare the homelands of the belligerents and, so far as possible, cities within the battle zone; and it must be admitted that Dr. Kissinger's discussion of the details of such restrictions carries at first sight about as much conviction as Erskine May's Rules of Parliamentary Procedure would if applied to a tribe just emerging from primitive barbarism. As Sir Hohn Slessor once said of similar proposals advanced in this country, "These are the sort of things that pundits may enjoy debating, but they do not make sense in real life."

But Sir John Slessor's proposition is arguable. All that he or anyone else can say is that they haven't made sense in real life yet. But Nor have we, in real life, had to meet the challenge of the hydrogen bomb. And we have no right to laugh Dr. Kissinger's well-reasoned thesis out of court until we have considered what the alternatives are.

We are dealing with a power - or rather, as Dr. Kissinger shows by his devastating quotations from the works of Mao-tse-Tung, with two powers - which regard peace as the continuation of the struggle by other means, for whom no *detente* is more than a truce, whose strategy is subtle and endlessly patient, and which only by the most crass of miscalculations going to present us with a straightforward *casus belli*. A strategy whose emphasis lies on a deterrent involving mutual annihilation plays straight into their hands. It has now been publicly admitted that we need an infinitely flexible range of weapons for defence and counter-attack. The possibility of limited war has been officially admitted: in Korea and in fact in Korea & India - these cases the major powers showed themselves willing to accept limited defeat rather than raise the stakes any further. In principle there is no reason why we should not continue along these lines, wage our limited wars with conventional forces and keep the distinction between total and limited war identical with the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons. But that is a course of action that we have already virtually abandoned. The Americans, determined to avoid at almost any cost another blood-bath like Korea, have made tactical atomic weapons completely and Mr Dulles has recently made it clear that we, with a conventional part of their armoury. We in Britain, not habitually fed up with the *ennui* and expense of conscription, have whittled down our capacity to fight limited wars and are also turning to nuclear weapons to replace the manpower which we are unwilling to provide. Once we abandoned the attempt to match Russia and China with conventional forces the choice before us was no longer whether to use nuclear weapons or not:

the question is now, whether some effort should be made
to ensure that our use of them for a limited object does not
spark off a total war, or whether we shall simply go ahead,
use them, and blindly hope for the best. It looks at the
moment as if we have adopted the policy of blind hope.
Dr. Kissinger's proposals may seem unrealistic, but this course
of action appears simply suicidal. The burden does not
now lie with Dr. Kissinger to prove that his proposals would
work: it lies with those who condemn him to suggest a
practical alternative.

The whole aim of our military policy should now
surely be this: to support our diplomacy in protecting and
furthering our interests throughout the world, and to do it
so effectively that we can stave off for ever the moment
when some sick and harrassed Prime Minister - or, rather,
President - is forced to choose between the sacrifice of some
interest really vital to the nation and the unleashing of
forces which will not merely destroy the enemy and his own
country, but bring uniwadable disaster to the whole of
mankind and its posterity. This moment can be postponed
indefinitely only if we are able and willing to fight for
peripheral areas, to keep our adversaries in play by resolute
but moderate frontier warfare; and any reduction in our ability
and our willingness to undertake this struggle brings the
moment of decision disastrously nearer. We have got, as it
were, to keep the ball moving away from our own goal; but
at the same time we must not try to score ourselves,
because it is going to
for my threat to the enemy's goal will impose on him the same
agonising choice. And here Dr. Kissinger puts forward
another unconventional view - that we should never leave our
adversaries in any doubt about our intentions. The old
argument, that "it's always a good thing to keep the other
chap guessing" simply does not apply any longer.

We do not want "the other chap" to guess wrong. It would be bad enough if he were to see through our bluff and force us to humiliating surrender; but it would be far worse if he made the opposite mistake and mistook a bluff or a limited action on our part for the prelude to an all-out attack, and decided to get his blow in first. A frank avowal of our intentions is essential if limited war is to be kept limited and anything recognizable as civilization is to survive.

Dr. Kissinger is thus liable to be attacked on two counts. First, on the grounds of his Machiavellian frankness, his open assertion that force is a normal and indispensable weapon of policy. Frankly I believe that the refusal to face this fact has caused us quite enough trouble during the past twenty-five years, and any perpetuation of such an attitude, in the face of two communist powers which harbour no such illusions, will rapidly force us to the point of having to decide between annihilation or surrender. The second line of attack is one with which I must confess much more sympathy: the argument which, while admitting that we have got to be able to conduct limited war, alleges that it simply won't be possible to discriminate between different types of target and different sizes of nuclear weapons at all. But if we don't use nuclear weapons we must be prepared to use conventional forces on a very large scale; and that we are apparently not prepared to do. It looks unpleasantly as if our insistence on maintaining and improving our standard of living and the aversion to the splendours and miseries of military life which are undermining our ability to conduct conventional warfare are bringing the nuclear holocaust appreciably nearer.

If those who oppose the development of nuclear weapons want
to be logical, they should demand that conscription should be
re-introduced.

So I would urge you to read Dr. Kissinger's book, and I read it with patience. It is not easy going: quite frankly a lot of it is turgid in style and repetitiveness in content, and one grows at times a rather impatient with his rather naive distress at the clumsy and illogical way in which high policy is formulated and the affairs of the world are run. But throughout the course of his long and often involved arguments his grasp of two realities never falters - the real nature of the danger offered by Communism, and the full horrors of thermonuclear war. For his suggestions as to how we might steer a course between these two perils the Western world is heavily in his debt.