Transcription
The subject I'm going to talk about today is war and international politics. This is actually a talk I gave only once before, at the Richard K. Betts inaugural lecture at Columbia University this past November. I want to make it clear as I start that when I talk about war and international politics, I'm really talking about great power war. It's important to understand that during the unipolar moment, which ran from roughly 1991, when the Soviet Union went down the toilet bowl, until about 2017, we lived in a world where there was a single great power, which was the United States of America. That's why it was called the unipolar moment. If you live in a unipolar world, you can't have great power politics because there's only one great power. So you can't have great power politics, by definition.
But we now live in a multipolar world. There are three great powers out there: the United States, China, and Russia. We live effectively in a multipolar world, and that means great power politics is back on the table. You can have security competition, and you can have war among those great powers. I think the subject of war and international politics, great power war and international politics, is a subject you want to think long and hard about. It's a lot like nuclear deterrence. When guys like Mike and I were young, we knew all about nuclear war, we knew about nuclear deterrence, and we knew a ton about great power politics because we lived in a bipolar world dominated by the US-Soviet competition. The world that most of you grew up in was the unipolar world. There was one great power; you weren't worried about nuclear war among the great powers. You weren't worried about great power security competition or great power war because it was largely irrelevant.
But that world has gone away, and we're now in a multipolar world, which is quite dangerous, as you have surely figured out, and it's only going to get worse; it's not going to get better. But that's not my subject today.
Now, the perspective I'm going to offer you on war in international politics is a realist perspective. As I'm sure everybody here knows, I'm a realist, and I'm a particular kind of realist. Mike and I have fundamental disagreements about how the world works, even though Mike is a realist. So you should understand that you're getting a particular realist perspective on the subject.
My talk is going to have three themes, and I'm basically addressing three issues. I want to talk first about just the essence of international politics. I want to talk a lot about the essence of politics. Two, I want to talk about the decision to go to war: when great powers decide to go to war, how they think about it. And then third, I want to talk about escalation in war.
Let me just briefly tell you what the three themes are because I'm a big believer that it's very important to have a framework in your mind to begin with that you can then use to keep track of the various detailed arguments that I'm laying out.
With regard to the essence of international politics, my first point is that war is the dominating feature of international politics. It really matters enormously; it matters in terms of influencing how leaders think, and it influences how states interact with each other. Whether you're talking about an actual war or the fact that war is sitting there in the background, it is the dominating feature. Therefore, international politics, I will argue at some length, is an intensely competitive enterprise at its core.
So that's my first theme. My second theme, which actually runs against the conventional wisdom, is, and this is all about the decision to go to war, that war is an extension of politics by other means. This is Clausewitz's famous argument, and it's a tool of statecraft. It has little to do with ethics, little to do with morals, and little to do with international law. States go to war when they think it's in their national interest. This means, very importantly, there are two kinds of wars that are acceptable and to be expected in international politics: preventive war and wars of opportunity. That runs against the conventional wisdom, as I'll explain in great detail, in the United States of America and in the West more generally today, where those two kinds of wars—preventive wars and wars of opportunity—are ruled out of bounds according to just war theory and international law.
Then the third theme has to do with escalation in war. This is an argument that once you get into a war in the modern age, there's a very powerful tendency for wars to escalate to their extreme level, to their absolute level, to get total wars. It's one of the main themes in Clausewitz. We don't have time to talk about this today, but if I gave you a lecture on Clausewitz, this is written all over that book. He understands that tendency to escalate. What happens when you get into a war with that tendency to escalate is that military considerations end up dominating political considerations. Remember, with regard to my second point, I said apropos Clausewitz, war is an extension of politics by other means. That means military factors are subordinated to political considerations. But the escalation argument is that once you get into a war, once you're in it, the powerful tendency that exists to escalate means that political considerations get subordinated to military considerations. My argument is that this is not good under any circumstances, but it is certainly not good in the nuclear era when you want the politicians, the policymakers in charge, to make sure that that war doesn't spin out of control.
So those are the three basic themes that I want to develop in my talk.
Okay, let's start with the first theme, which is that war is at the core of international politics. You want to remember here what we're talking about is the relationship between war and politics. As we go along here, you want to just think in your mind about what war, but more importantly, what politics is all about. You know, I never thought much about politics, and if you would have asked me to define politics anywhere in my life up to the time I was about 68 years old, I wouldn't have known what to tell you. What is politics? How do you define politics? How do you think about politics? You want to think about politics, what it means. You want to think about international politics, and then you want to think about how war and international politics are related. These are big picture issues.
So, again, as you heard me say in my setup remarks, war is the most important feature of international politics, and it influences how leaders think. It's there all the time; it's constantly influencing them, and it influences how states interact with each other. They're greatly influenced by this phenomenon.
Now, my argument is not that we live in a constant state of war; obviously, we don't live in a constant state of war. My argument is that we live, again, we're talking about great powers, in a state of constant security competition. Great powers always engage in security competition. Sometimes it's more intense, and sometimes it's less intense, but they always engage in security competition, and sitting in the background is the possibility of war. The United States and the Soviet Union competed constantly for security during the Cold War, and there was the ever-present danger of war sitting in the background.
Furthermore, there is no question that war is an absolutely destructive and dangerous enterprise. Its horribleness is in good part what makes it so important. So I want to make it clear here: I'm not saying that this is a sport; this is like playing a football game. This is like playing the Super Bowl. This is a completely different kind of phenomenon—incredibly destructive, incredibly horrible. Furthermore, it's not only the fact that lots of damage, lots of destruction is inflicted on you in a war or can be inflicted on you in a war; it's also the fact that the survival of the state is at risk. You never want to underestimate the importance of that dimension of the story. Survival really matters.
But given how destructive war is and given the fact that it threatens the survival of states, unsurprisingly, states have gone to great lengths over time to do away with war, to outlaw war, to figure a way to get rid of it. But you know what? They failed at every turn. They never got rid of it, and they're never going to get rid of it. It's going to be there forever. So the question is, why is this the case? You want to think about this: why haven't we been able to get rid of war? I'm going to make two arguments. The first one has to do with the nature of politics, and the second is it has to do with the architecture of the system: the anarchic nature of international politics.
So it's a two-part argument. This is why you can't get rid of war, why it's an ever-present possibility that sometimes manifests itself in actual fighting. There are two reasons. The first has to do with the nature of politics, and this is what I was imploring you to think about today and think about in the years ahead: just what politics is all about. Politics, as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton said, is a contact sport. It's a nasty business. Politics is all about fundamental disagreements on first principles, fundamental differences about questions regarding the good life. These fundamental differences that individuals, societies, or states have are sometimes so profound that people want to kill each other. Just go back to the religious wars in Europe way back when—Catholics and Protestants killing each other in huge numbers. It just mattered so much to them.
The abortion issue is an incredibly complicated issue. There are lots of people running around in the land who believe in or don't believe in abortion who would like to kill some people on the other side. It's a contact sport. These differences really matter. Look at the fights over Supreme Court appointments. Look at how all these anti-Trump people feel about the possibility of him getting reelected. My wife, who is basically a Republican, mentions the possibility of Trump winning, and she gets mad at me. I said, "What are you getting mad at me? I didn't vote for him last time; I'm not going to vote for him this time." She's just so infuriated at the thought of this guy getting reelected. And by the way, there are lots of people on the other side. You get my brother talking about Hillary Clinton—oh boy!
I'm just saying that what you have to understand is the intensity and the enmity that comes with politics is not to be underestimated, which is why Clinton and Obama both said it's a contact sport. I have a similar quote from Newt Gingrich in there, which makes the basic point. That's why to make politics work, you have to have compromises. You want to understand that there are no solutions to lots of disagreements about first principles. There are just no solutions; there are always these intense disagreements.
The question is, how do you deal with them inside a state? You know, inside the United States of America, inside Japan, inside France, you deal with it by creating a state. That state protects people; it allows them to disagree, but it protects person A from an attack from person B and vice versa. Right? So you have a state. But this gets to my point about the architecture in the international system: there's no higher authority. There's no higher authority to protect these states, which sometimes have fundamental disagreements.
So what this says is you can't take war off the table. You understand? You can't take war off the table. Remember I said politics is all about the fact that you have fundamental disagreements between individuals, between societies, between groups in society, between states. You have fundamental disagreements, and those disagreements are sometimes so profound that A wants to attack B and kill it. Right? You can't take war off the table because there is no higher authority. Inside the state, you could take murder off the table; you could take killing off the table in large part, certainly in those areas where the higher authority has presence. But you can't do that in international politics.
When you add to that the destructiveness of war and the fact that your very survival might be threatened, you can see where that leads you. Right? Politics is naturally an unremittingly competitive and intense enterprise. It's unremittingly competitive and intense, and that's inside the black box—that's inside the state. Then you take it out into the international system, where there's no higher authority, and that competitiveness, that intensity, is ramped up even more.
So this is sort of my basic point to start with: when you talk about war in international politics, you can see how, given the nature of international politics, given the nature of politics as it applies to the international system and the presence of war, you can see how those two things go together. And again, just bring in the survival motive: your survival is threatened as a state. Furthermore, just the destructiveness that's involved.
So let me make my argument crystal clear by making three additional points. First, I'm not saying that cooperation is impossible. You could have cooperation. You can have two states that are great powers that are competing with each other that can cooperate. During the Cold War, my favorite example is on the issue of nuclear proliferation. The United States and the Soviet Union both had a vested interest in making sure that there was zero nuclear proliferation. We took a while, but we eventually created a proliferation regime, really starting in the late '60s. The NPT was 1968, the Nuclear Suppliers Group was formed in 1975, and we basically did a great job—the United States and the Soviet Union cooperating to shut down nuclear proliferation.
Did we continue to compete at the security level? You better believe we did. Did we continue looking for every opportunity we could find to screw the Soviets coming and going? You better believe we did. Were we glad to usher them down the toilet bowl in the late 1980s and early 1990s? You better believe we were. That's the way great power politics works. The United States is a ruthless great power; the Soviet Union was a ruthless great power. We never stopped engaging in security competition, which again is not to say you can't have some cooperation. You can have cooperation, but that cooperation takes place under the shadow of security competition.
Just a quick word about international economics: if you think about international economics and you compare it with international politics, certainly as a realist like me understands international politics, international economics pays no attention to survival, pays no attention to international anarchy. All these terms that we use don't apply there. They're interested in cooperation on a large scale; that's what globalization is all about. The idea is if globalization works, everybody gets richer. Prosperity really matters to them, whereas somebody like me focuses laser-like on the concept of survival. They focus laser-like on the concept of prosperity. Cooperation matters greatly to international economists because they're not paying attention to survival; they're not paying attention to security competition. They could get away with that during the unipolar moment because, again, great power politics was taken off the table. But we're back in a very different world now.
So my argument is that when push comes to shove, international politics trumps international economics when the two are in conflict. My third point: I want to be very clear; I am not making the argument that great power wars are likely. That's not my argument. My argument is that great power war sits in the background most of the time, and great power war nevertheless has a profound influence on how states behave. The reason that great power war is not likely dovetails with another point that I made to you folks, and that is that war is so destructive. War is so horrible. The fact that it is so destructive, the fact that it's so horrible, makes it very difficult to get states to initiate it.
What drives that destructiveness is nationalism, industrialization, and the nuclear revolution, or nuclear weapons. Nationalism makes wars very destructive because you're able to create mass armies, and you're able to motivate those armies to hate the other—the otherness at the core of nationalism. So nationalism makes wars highly destructive. Industrialization—all these weapons that are designed to kill people running around out on the modern battlefield with all these weapons—they're highly sophisticated and maximize the chances they're going to kill you. Right? So very industrialization. And then, of course, nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are called weapons of mass destruction for very good reason.
So nationalism, industrialization, and nuclear weapons make war incredibly destructive, and that makes war less likely. You understand the point? It makes it less likely. But nevertheless, it makes it as important as ever because it sits in the background; it's still a possibility. That's the basic argument that I am making to you.
Okay, let me shift gears now and talk about the decision to go to war. My second theme: remember when the Ukraine war started on February 24, 2022? The Russians clearly invaded Ukraine, and the basic argument is that this war was both unjust and illegal. There's just no question that almost everybody thought that the war was wrong; the initiation of the war was wrong and should be condemned.
Now, why is that the case? It's because of the domination of a non-Clausewitzian view, which says that international law and just war theory should dictate when states can go to war. I believe that almost all of you believe this, and I believe that almost everybody who's reasonably well-educated and has thought about this in the West believes that there are limited times when you can go to war or limited circumstances when you can go to war. Those three circumstances, and this is an argument based on just war theory and international law, are: you can initiate a war if you have good evidence that the other side is about to attack you. This is called a preemptive attack.
Right? Mike is about to attack me; I can see that he has loaded up the shotgun; he's coming after me, and I just get in the first blow. So he's really initiating the war, even though I get in the first blow. That's a preemptive strike; that's okay according to just war theory; that's okay according to international law—most accounts of just war theory.
The second is if we get a UN Security Council resolution. I'm unhappy with what Mike is doing; I go to the UN Security Council; I get approval from the UN Security Council, then I am justified in attacking Mike. Makes perfect sense; fits neatly with international law. So the first case is a preemptive strike; the second case is a UN Security Council resolution.
The third is that you're allowed to initiate a war, intervene, or strike into a country if it's engaging in mass murder or genocide. Right? This is the idea: if you see what's happening in Rwanda and you decide you're just going to send in the 82nd Airborne, you can do that. Right? There, you're acting according to just war theory. This makes perfect sense to all of you.
The two cases, which I've already mentioned before in my setup remarks, where you're not allowed to initiate a war are: number one, a preventive war. This is not preemptive. Remember, I talked about preemptive as where Mike's going to attack me, and I beat him to the punch. That's preemptive; that's okay. A preventive war is where I see Mike is growing more and more powerful, and I want to cut him off at the legs before he becomes too powerful. That's a preventive war.
The second is a war of opportunity. This is a war where you know Mike and I are competitors, and I'm thinking about attacking that person over there as a way of gaining more power so that I improve my position relative to Mike. That's a war of opportunity; it's an opportunity to acquire more power. Right? Those are verboten: preventive wars and wars of opportunity. They're verboten according to just war theory and according to international law.
Now, let's just go back to Ukraine. The conventional wisdom in the body politic in the West is that Putin invaded because he was an imperialist; he was interested in gaining more power for Russia, creating a greater Russia. Right? It was a war of opportunity. The vast majority of people in the West believed that it was a war of opportunity. Right? He was trying to gain more power for Russia, make Russia more powerful, make it a greater Russia. Right? That was the argument. That's verboten, and that's why everybody criticized him.
I argued, on the other hand, and now a number of others, like Jens Stoltenberg, who is the head of NATO, have argued this, that it was a preventive war. My argument is it was a preventive war. He was not going to let Ukraine become part of NATO; he was going to prevent that from happening. So there's, let's call it the John-Yen-Goldenberg argument, and then there's the conventional wisdom. Both arguments are ruled out of court according to just war theory and international law. Right? Neither is acceptable. Right? Both are very Clausewitzian arguments.
So if you think about what's going on here, right, with this non-Clausewitzian argument, remember Clausewitz doesn't talk about whether anything is morally justified or whether it violates international law. It's a tool of statecraft. Clausewitz says if John sees an opportunity to protect himself in the face of this threat from Mike, or Mike sees a threat to protect himself in the face of a threat from John, Mike and John can do whatever they want. War is a tool of statecraft. Let's not get wrapped around the axle about ethics and morals or anything like that. That's the Clausewitzian view.
What you want to understand is that the view that almost all of you, I'm sure, have accepted, and the vast majority in the body politic have accepted, is a non-Clausewitzian view. What's going on here is that we are basically trying to subordinate the conduct of international politics to a moral or legal order. You want to think about what's going on; this is very important. Nobody really puts it in these terms. We are subordinating the conduct of international politics to a set of moral and legal precepts. Right? It's really a radical way of thinking about the initiation of war, and it's fundamentally non-Clausewitzian.
The example I like to use to highlight this is the case of Michael Walzer's famous book on just war theory. I think it's a terrific book; I've used it for years for teaching purposes, even though I'm a realist and the book is an attack on realism from the get-go. If my memory is correct, the first chapter is against realism; that's the title of the chapter. He hates realism. Right? And he would hate what I have said to you over the past 10 minutes, and it's a defense of just war theory. It's, in many ways, a brilliant book, but it has a fundamental flaw in it, which I believe shows you why my logic trumps his logic, why realism trumps Michael Walzer's just war theory.
That is, he, towards the end of the book, makes the case that in a supreme emergency, when you're on the ropes, when it looks like you're going down the tubes, you can abandon just war theory and act like a realist. That's the Walzer argument. Right? And he's fully aware that this is a very dangerous argument for him to make, and I'll make it clear to you in a second why it's a very dangerous argument for him to make.
You see, he's leaving a narrow crack in the door open, and you cannot leave a narrow crack in the door open with somebody like me because I'll go through that door very quickly. Right? So what Walzer is saying is you have to be in really dire straits; you have to be on the verge of being finished off. Right? And the threat has to be really of the most serious nature, and then at the last moment, you can turn yourself into a realist and deal with the problem.
The problem in Walzer's argument is who in their right mind would wait till the last minute? If you're up against a mortal foe, if you're not up against a mortal foe, you just think you might be up against a mortal foe. You've all read Sebastian's work on intentions. Right? Sebastian Rosato will tell you intentions are very hard to divine with a high degree of certainty. To use his rhetoric, how can I be sure what Mike's intentions will be in 20 or 30 years? I can't know. Do I want to wait until he turns into Godzilla? No. Do I want to deal with him now when he's not Godzilla and maybe when he's a bit weaker than me? Right?
So you see the problem that Walzer has. Once you say, "You know, why don't you have a chapter that deals with the subject of supreme emergency?" and you say that in a supreme emergency, you can throw just war theory down the toilet and you can act like a realist, you leave yourself open to the argument that it's better to act like a realist early rather than at the last moment, where if you're dealing with a highly efficient adversary, that adversary will finish you off. Right?
So you see, this is why the conduct of international politics can never be subordinated to a moral or legal order. It just can't happen.
Now, I want to be very clear here: I'm not saying that there's no room for moral considerations in international politics. My comments may be read to lead in that direction; that's not my argument. I believe that we are all realists, including moral human beings. I believe that we all have moral compasses, and I believe those moral compasses influence how we think about the world. Okay? I just want to make that clear. You understand why I placed all this emphasis on basic realist logic, but I believe at the same time we think about the world—or at least people like Mike and I think about the world in realist terms—we also have, each of us, a moral compass.
The interesting question you want to ask yourself is how does that realist worldview mesh with that set of moral precepts that guide your thinking about international politics? My argument is there are three possible scenarios. The first is what the moral compass says you should do and the realist compass says you should do line up, and you have no problem fighting a war, even maybe initiating a war. Right? If the moral compass and the realist compass line up—and they actually do quite often in international politics—you can do things for realist reasons that make sense from a moral point of view. Fighting against Adolf Hitler in World War II, I think, was the morally correct thing to do. Trying to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War, I think, was the morally correct thing to do. I could point to other examples. So the arrows sometimes line up.
There are other cases—this is the second scenario—where realist precepts just don't apply. During the unipolar moment, there's a genocide in Rwanda. You can easily deal with that genocide from a moral perspective because there are no realist considerations involved. It has no effect on the balance of power; it has nothing to do with great power politics. So there are quite a few cases in international politics, certainly during the unipolar moment, but even in a bipolar or multipolar world, where the balance of power is not affected by the use of military force for moral reasons.
Then we come to the third possibility, which is the trick: what happens if moral precepts and realist precepts are at odds with each other? What if your moral compass says do this and your realist compass says do the opposite? Regrettably, you'll do what your realist compass says every time. The reason you will is because of the nature of international politics and the fact that we operate in an anarchic system. We operate in international anarchy, where you have no choice.
So my argument is that just war theory and international law, although they are both noble enterprises and in certain circumstances they make good sense when it comes to questions of war and peace, there's no way that the conduct of international politics can ever be subordinated to them.
Okay, let me go to the third part of my talk, and then I'll stop. Remember I said to you, according to Clausewitz, war is an extension of politics by other means, and this is just another way of saying war is subordinated to politics. Right? Politics is the main driving force, and war is subordinated to it. But, as I said to you in the setup comments, when you actually get into a war in the modern world, there's a very powerful tendency for those two things to be flipped and for politics to become subordinated to military considerations.
This matters greatly for limited wars, and I'll make clear why that's the case in a minute. If you're going to fight a limited war, you want to keep it limited. It's very important that politics be in the driver's seat, that policymakers—civilian policymakers—be in charge and not military commanders. Right? But the tendency pushes in the other direction. When you're fighting limited wars, limited wars tend to escalate. Right?
This really matters in the nuclear world. I think if nuclear weapons are ever used, they will be used in a limited fashion. We can talk more about this in the Q&A if you'd like because I can tell you how I think nuclear weapons would be used if the United States had had to use them in the Cold War. If the Russians used them in Ukraine, they will use them in limited fashion, as we would have used them in limited fashion during the Cold War had the Soviets or the Warsaw Pact more generally overrun West Germany.
So you'll start with a limited nuclear war. Let's hope that never happens, but that's where you'll start, which is a good thing. But once that limited nuclear war starts, you do not want it escalating. You want to do everything you can to shut it down, to be honest. But if you don't shut it down, you want to keep it limited and then shut it down. Right? And for that to happen, politics has to be in the driver's seat, in my opinion.
Okay, now the question is: why is John arguing that you have this tendency for politics to become subordinated to military considerations? There are a handful of reasons. The first has to do with military leaders. It's very important to understand, and this is quite well documented: military leaders like to win decisive victories. This is another way of saying military leaders do not like limited wars. They don't like limited wars for two reasons: they want to go in and win quickly and decisively to minimize the number of their troops who get killed, but also because they are in charge of national security. They are in charge of defending the state; they are in charge of fighting and dying to protect the state. If there's a threat out there, they'd like to finish that threat off once and for all. Winning a limited victory means that you leave your adversary intact. Right?
So military leaders like decisive victories; they don't like limited victories. Furthermore, military leaders do not like civilians telling them how to conduct the war. Military leaders think they are the professionals; they know how the profession of arms works. These civilians are a bunch of ding-a-lings, and they're just going to get us in trouble if they're in charge. The best way to avoid this is that once the war starts, all responsibility is turned over to us military leaders. We'll execute the war; we'll win a decisive victory, and then we'll turn control back over to the policymakers. Right? I have some quotes in the paper where there are actually generals making this argument.
So you see, military leaders, number one, like decisive victories; that cuts against limited war. Number two, military leaders don't like civilians in the decision-making process, and it's civilians or policymakers who keep wars limited. Right? So the military is a big problem here. Well, let's put it in a slightly more cautious way: there's a real tendency for trouble from the military if you get into a war.
The second force that pushes for escalation, which I've touched on already, is nationalism. Nationalism is a huge problem for escalation. This is written all over Clausewitz's track on war. Just go to Book 8 of On War. What nationalism allows you to do is raise a mass army, and it allows you to value-infuse that army in ways where almost everybody hates the other. In fact, inside the broader society at large, people are value-infused to hate the other. Nationalism turns into hyper-nationalism. I'm sure this is easy for all of you to understand. Right?
The reason that France was so hard to beat is that it took roughly six balancing coalitions to finish off France. The war started in 1792; the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars started in 1792, and they ran to 1815. That's 23 years. It took 23 years to finish off the French. This is what Napoleon's writing about in Book 8 of On War. He saw Napoleon up close; he saw the French army up close. It was an army that was built on nationalism. It was the nation in arms. Think about the nation in arms. It was a really powerful force, and it was bent on dominating all of Europe.
This is why Clausewitz is very, very important for making the argument that war's natural tendency is to escalate to the absolute level. I believe this is why Clausewitz says that war is an extension of politics by other means. He wants to make it clear that policymakers should put limits on it because he understood how powerful the tendency was to escalate to absolute war. So nationalism is a huge problem in keeping wars limited.
There are other ideologies that matter. Right? First, well, you get a case where you have Nazi Germany up against fascist Germany against communist Soviet Union. Fascist Germany, Nazi Germany up against the communist Soviet Union. Right? That is going to push the war to escalate. You have nationalism in that case as well. Then you have other ideologies like the United States. Right? The United States is a liberal state; it has a crusader mentality. If the United States is in a world where there are not many checks on its ability to use military force, it'll be running all over the world trying to turn countries into democracies. Right?
And then finally, you get eliminationist ideologies like Nazism. It was an eliminationist ideology. So you can see, in addition to nationalism, you have this other ideological dimension. The point that I'm trying to make to you is that this pushes states to pursue total victory.
Then finally, in come the dynamics of war. Dynamics of war: first of all, if you win a limited victory, you're going to launch a limited war. You win a limited victory; in many cases, you're then infected by the victory disease. The victory disease says, "I did pretty well this first time; let's escalate and do something else." You know, we originally, when we entered the Korean War, our goal was to push the North Koreans back to the 38th parallel. But then MacArthur launched this brilliant offensive that resulted in the landing at Inchon, and we won this stunning victory. He and the Truman administration decided that we should cross the 38th parallel and head up towards the Yalu River. Right? This is the victory disease.
So the point is, talking about the dynamics of war here, that even if you win a limited victory, you sometimes are tempted to expand your success. Then there's the whole question: if you fail, if you launch a limited war and you fail, then there's a powerful incentive to up the ante so that you can rescue the situation. Right?
And then finally, there's the phenomenon that Alex Downes talks about in his brilliant book on civilian victimization in war, which is that when you get into a protracted war, when a country gets into a protracted war, it's not on the verge of winning a quick victory. It almost automatically goes on a rampage and starts murdering large numbers of civilians because the view is that's a good way to get out of this protracted war. That's the solution. Right? To turn to killing large numbers of people. For those of you who haven't looked at Downes's book, you should really look at it because Downes, by the way, concludes that there's no difference between democracies and non-democracies. In fact, he argues that, if anything, democracies are more likely to behave in barbaric fashion than non-democracies.
But the point is, if you're in a war, you're in a modern war, and your side is stalled and you're looking for a way out, what invariably happens is you turn to killing huge numbers of civilians. Just think about the use of the atomic bombs against Japan in World War II. Japan was on its knees in early August 1945; it was kaput. Right? We thought that to get it to finally surrender, we might have to invade the Japanese home islands. The thought of invading the Japanese home islands was so antithetical to American policymakers, both in the military and in Washington, that we dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan. Again, the war was won by August 1945; Japan was on its deathbed. But we couldn't get them to say, "I quit." We couldn't get them to say, "I quit."
And we did not want to invade the Japanese home islands. So to avoid those American casualties—this is Downes's point about protracted wars—to avoid those American casualties, we dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan.
But anyway, my bottom line here is that given the interests of military leaders and how they think about the conduct of war in terms of their views of decisive victories, and civilian interference in the enterprise, given nationalism, given other ideologies, and given the dynamics of war, it is difficult to keep wars limited in the modern age. My argument is that this is of enormous importance when you live in a nuclear world. It's of enormous importance when you live in a non-nuclear world, but it's of even greater importance when you live in a nuclear world because it's important that we keep that war limited.
This is why you want to pay a lot of attention moving forward to understanding the dynamics of escalation, and you want to think about how war ceases to be subordinate to politics in these situations, and that's not a good thing.
My conclusion, very quickly, is that conflict is endemic to politics. Conflict is endemic to politics, and to put it in slightly different terms, war is endemic to international politics. This is John's main message: conflict is endemic to politics; war is endemic to international politics. Once war is endemic to international politics, fear is in the air—fear that your survival is threatened. Remember, fear that your survival is threatened. There's no Leviathan; there's no night watchman. Once survival is on the table, we're at a Clausewitzian world. Don't tell me you can't have preventive wars; don't tell me you can't have wars of opportunity because in a world where survival is under threat, those two kinds of war, however regrettable this is, they are on the table.
Bottom line: war can never be eliminated from international politics, and political considerations will always trump economic considerations, legal considerations, and moral considerations when they are in conflict. Thank you.