THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (169 page)

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A target or threat-based strategy depends upon retaliating against enemy assets. The threat of retaliation against known targets keeps the peace. A vulnerability-centered strategy employs various defenses to keep the peace when the targets for retaliation are unknown.

†
Intrawar deterrence can dampen escalation, as parties already at war nevertheless refrain from aggressive acts that would lower the costs of retaliation for those acts to the retaliator.

*
By
State
I mean a political community that bears international status, like Germany or India, not a subdomain or province like Hesse or Bengal (or Texas). By
nation
I mean an ethno-cultural group.

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This is the true import of Clausewitz's celebrated remark that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”

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A great power is a state capable of initiating an epochal war, that is, a conflict that threatens the constitutional survival of the leaders of the society of states. Attacks by lesser states can be swiftly rebuffed (as Iraq learned in the Gulf War). Even a state whose forces can be decisive in a particular campaign—like North Viet Nam's—can neither initiate nor terminate an epochal war. Its attacks are insufficient to call the constitutional survival of its adversary into question or to settle such questions when they are posed by others.

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Even a thoughtful commentator can succumb to this fallacy, as when Michael Mandelbaum asserted that the NATO mission had failed because the people of the Balkans “emerged from the war considerably worse off than they had been before.” James Steinberg, “A Perfect Polemic,”
Foreign Affairs
(November/December 1999): 129.

*
Written before September 11, 2001; see the epilogue.

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This development is discussed in more detail in
8
.

†
“The emergence of the German empire (in 1871) as a result of three short successful wars provided no final settlement of the problems in Central Europe. [Far from it, for] the unification of Germany gave great impetus to nationalist movements throughout the Continent. The means by which it was brought about afforded a dangerous, yet fatally easy pattern for others to follow. Since Germany had been united by force and through union had achieved a predominant position in Europe, other nationalities aspired to attain a greater preeminence than they enjoyed, and to reunite their people in the state by similar means.” Nicholas Mansergh,
The Coming of the First World War, 1878 – 1914: A Study in the European Balance
(Longmans, Green, and Co., 1949).

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“It seemed clear that whatever else they had achieved, Fischer and his school had finally laid to rest the legend that in 1914 all the Great Powers had, in Lloyd George's now hackneyed phrase, ‘slithered all over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war.’” Roger Fletcher, “Introduction,” in Fritz Fischer,
From Kaiserreich to Third Reich: Elements of Continuity in German History, 1871 – 1945
(Allen & Unwin, 1986).

*
See Chapter
22
.

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Including the uprisings in the Low Countries that were part of the War of Spanish Succession. This incorporation of civil and interstate conflicts is also a theme in Thucydides.

*
Nor are these various explanations incompatible with the claim of one long war; see, for example, Taylor,
Origins of the Second World War
, who ends his book with the words “Such were the origins of the second World War, or rather of the war between the three Western Powers over the settlement of Versailles; a war which had been implicit since the moment when the first war ended” (278).

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As well as Tojo, by the way.

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Much as in our day the similar vision animating the U.N. has been discredited by its performance in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and elsewhere.

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Indeed Hitler despised capitalism because the State does not control free markets.

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And Hitler was sustained in power by a broad base of popular support, based on fulfilling the fascist assumption of the nation-state social contract. Only Nazi Germany, of all the Western states, eliminated unemployment during the depression years of 1933 – 1938. Moreover, contrary to conventional assessments, this was done not by means of rearmament but in order to enable rearmament. See Dan Silverman,
Hitler's Economy: Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933 – 1936
(Harvard, 1998); see also R. J. Overy,
The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932 – 1938
(Cambridge, 2d edn., 1996).

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The revolution in 1868 replaced a regime similar in many ways to the princely states of Europe that were succeeded by kingly states, as will be discussed in Part II. The Tokugawa had no standing army, no centralized bureaucracy embracing the various territorial components of the state, no permanent legations. David L. Howell, “Territoriality and Collective Identity in Tokugawa Japan,”
Daedalus
127 (Summer 1998): 105.

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The term was suggested to Roosevelt by Churchill, who quoted the following stanza from Byron: “Thou fatal Waterloo/Millions of tongues record thee, and anew/Their children's lips shall echo them, and say—/ ‘Here, where the sword united nations drew, / Our countrymen were warring on that day!’/ And this is much, and all which will not pass away.” (
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 3
, stanza 35.)

†
As Philip Bell has put it, “In the perspective produced by the Cold War, it became easy to think of that alliance as consisting of the Americans and British over against the Soviet Union; but this was a false picture of events at the time. The truth was of a meshing of interests and a criss-cross of disputes; not a clear divide, but a sort of cat's cradle of tangled threads. Roosevelt sought to work closely with Stalin, and so did Churchill. Each was prepared to do so, on occasion, against the other.” P.M.H. Bell,
The Origins of the Second World War in Europe
(Addison Wesley Longman, 1986).

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“Our presence in West Berlin, and our access thereto, cannot be ended by any act of the Soviet Government… The [Western Alliance] had been built in response to challenges:… European chaos in 1947; of the Berlin blockade in 1948; of Communist aggression in Korea in 1950.” Broadcast by President John F. Kennedy, July 25, 1961.

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By contrast, the Soviet deployment presaged a shift in the correlation of nuclear threats, opening up the future possibility of accurate, ground-launched weapons minutes away from the U.S. offensive sites, and potentially under the control of a satellite state.

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Thus, “[a]rmies in Europe by the later eighteenth century thus concerned themselves predominantly with problems of siegecraft, fortification, marches, and supply… Most of their time was passed in profoundest peace.” Michael Howard,
War in European History
, 72.

*
Chief Soviet expert and the Counselor of the U.S. Department of State; later U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

†
Head of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State (1950 – 53), and principal author of the highly influential National Security Council document (NSC-68) that provided a blueprint for Allied resistance to the Soviet Union.

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And for this reason, the communist leadership of the People's Republic has the most to fear from internal dissent.

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Roberts was criticized for slighting developments in naval warfare and charged with underestimating the continuing impact of siege warfare throughout the century, overestimating the impact of Gustavus Adolphus's reforms and ignoring altogether the similar, parallel changes made in the French, Dutch, and Habsburg armies. See Geoffrey Parker,
The Military Revolution
(Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1 – 2, citing among others David Parrott, “Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years War: The Military Revolution,”
Militargeschichtliche Mittelungen XVIII
2 (1985): 7 – 25 and John Lynn, “Tactical evolution in the French army, 1560 – 1660,” XIV
French Historical Studies
14 (1985): 176 – 91. See also David Parrott, “The Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe,”
History Today
42 (1992): 21 – 27; and John A. Lynn, “The Trace Italienne and the Growth of Armies: The French Case,”
Journal of Military History
55 (1991): 297.

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Although the ecclesiastical electors were usually cardinals within the Church, their status as electors was derived from their authority as archbishops of the sees of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier.

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This was also true of British intellectual life; one has only to think of von Hayek, Gombrich, Popper, Pevsner, among others.

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As John U. Nef put it, “[t]he early founders, whose task had been to fashion bells that tolled the message of eternal peace… contributed unintentionally to the discovery of one of man's most terrible weapons.” Quoted in Bernard and Fawn Brodie,
From Crossbow to H-Bomb
(Indiana University Press, 1973), 48.

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The impact on the constitutional shape of the State of these intricate, often elegant fortress designs is a matter of some scholarly dispute
²⁸
but even the most eloquent of Parker's critics concedes that “war compelled the state to grow in power if it was not to perish. France's 17th century conflicts became wars of attrition, during which the Bourbons fielded ever larger forces. In such contests, when victory depended upon the ability to maintain huge armies in the field for years on end, resource mobilization held the key. Greater armies demanded greater quantities of funds, food, and fodder so the existing state apparatus scrambled to mobilize them. Despite its efforts, the state fell short of satisfying the army's appetite and was forced into a turbulent but necessary transformation in order to muster and maintain its troops. The process brought into being the centralized bureaucratic monarchy.”
²⁹

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Which is to say a multiethnic army; throughout I will use the term
nation
as referring to a cultural, ethnic group that may or may not have a state. The Kurds, for example, constitute a nation though they as yet have no national state; the state of Aruba is composed of only a fragment of a nation, even though it is a member state of the United Nations. The Hebrew nation long antedates the founding of Israel and survived Roman occupation. The Cherokee nation never had a state.
Nationalism
is a political movement of peoples, not states. Recall Jonah's cry, “Of what nation are you?”

*
“I was not invested with the imperial crown in order to take over yet more territories, but to ensure the peace of Christendom and so to unite all forces against the Turks for the glory of the Christian faith.” Charles V in 1521, quoted in Jacques Barzun,
From Dawn to Decadence
(HarperCollins, 2000), 93.