Understanding
Global Security
Peter Hough
C h a p t e r 2
Military threats to
security from states
Prelude to the present order 22
A new world order? 28
New world disorder? 40
An end to ‘high politics’? 50
Key points 58
Notes 59
Recommended reading 59
Useful web links 59
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Once the expenditure of effort [in war] exceeds the value of the political object the object
must be renounced and peace must follow.
Carl von Clausewitz in On War (Clausewitz 1976: 92)(See Box 2.1.)
War between states has always been central to the study of International Relations
and widely accepted as an inevitable feature of state to state relations. This is understandable
given that this form of conﬂict, historically, has been so prominent and so
costly in lives. The Realist model of powerful states vying for supremacy, restrained
only by the countervailing power of other states, is borne out by considering the scale
and nature of the major wars in history. Most of the conﬂicts listed in Table 2.1 were
‘clashes of the Titans’ involving the world’s premier military powers. The four biggest
clashes had a catalytic effect on international relations beyond their direct human
and governmental impact in the states directly involved. These wars were infernos
in which new international orders, normatively altering state relations, were forged.
The Korean and Vietnamese wars, however, were only indirect clashes of the Titans
and, in fact, great power collisions have not been seen since the ultimate of such
clashes in 1939–45. That the potential ‘mother of all’ clashes of the Titans, the Cold
War, should end with a peaceful transition to a new order, rather than military victory,
served to challenge the ascendancy of Realism in the study of military security.
Incidences of inter-state war, in general, have also receded over recent decades. The
spectre of this sort of war, however, still looms large over much of the conduct of
government foreign policies.
Prelude to the present order
Two issues, very much global in their scope, dominated international relations in the
latter part of the twentieth century: the Cold War and the process of decolonization.
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Table 2.1 The ten bloodiest inter-state wars in history
War Years Deaths
1 Second World War 1939–45 20 000 000
2 First World War 1914–18 8 500 000
3 Thirty Years War 1618–48 2 071 000
4 Napoleonic War 1803–15 1 869 000
5 War of the Spanish Succession 1701–13 1 324 300
6 Korean War 1950–53 1 200 000
7 Vietnam War 1965–73 1 200 000
8 The Crusades 1095–1272 1 000 000
9 Iran–Iraq War 1980–88 850 000
10 Seven Years War 1755–63 500 000
Source: White (2001).
Both issues were largely resolved by the early 1990, but their legacy lives on in many
aspects of the contemporary global political system and in the conceptualizing of
their military security by states. The biggest Cold War alliance still exists, some Cold
War conﬂicts still persist and the extraordinarily deadly means of prosecuting wars
devised in this period continues to threaten the security of the whole world.
Decolonization extended the state system to the whole world for the first time,
transforming the make up of that once exclusive club of sovereign states into the
diverse membership that characterizes it today while legitimizing independence
struggles, many of which continue to resonate.
The Cold War
The term ‘Cold War’ entered popular parlance in the USA in 1946–47 to describe the
tense hostility that had set in in relations with their recent wartime allies the USSR.
The politician Bernard Baruch, writer Walter Lipman and journalist H.B. Swope have
each been credited with coining the phrase but its origins are, in fact, far older. The
Spanish writer Don Juan Manuel ﬁrst used the expression in the fourteenth century
to describe a state of relations between countries that is not characterized by actual
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Box 2.1 Carl von Clausewitz
Clausewitz’s On War remains the most revered book on military strategy ever written
and a standard text on contemporary reading lists for Security Studies students and
military ofﬁcer trainees, despite being written in the 1830s and never ﬁnished by the
author. Clausewitz wrote the book while serving as the head of a Prussian military
academy in Berlin. He had previously served as an ofﬁcer in the Prussian army after
joining as a cadet at the age of 12 and had seen action from a young age in the
Napoleonic War. Clausewitz died in the cholera epidemic that swept Europe in 1831
before completing the book, but it was published posthumously by his widow in 1832.
As a result of this, On War contains a number of gaps and has frequently been
misinterpreted. In particular, Clausewitz’s insistence on seeing war as a facet of politics
has often wrongly been understood as the gloriﬁcation of war. Clausewitz shared
Machiavelli’s pessimism about human cynicism in politics but, as the quote that opens
this chapter indicates, advocated war only when absolutely necessary and justiﬁable.
The uncertainties inherent in battle, or the ‘fog of war’, make any decision to initiate
conﬂict a gamble which should only be undertaken when the odds are stacked in your
favour.
Over a hundred years after his death Clausewitz’s rational approach saw him
lauded by International Relations Realists as ‘one of their own’ but, such is his insight,
other approaches have come to claim inspiration from his work. Wyn Jones, a
Constructivist critic of Realism, comments: ‘I doubt very much that Clausewitz, with his
speculative bent and his interest in Hegelian dialectics, would have ever made the
grade in traditional security studies’ (Wyn Jones 1999: Chapter 5).
war but which is, nonetheless, extremely hostile. Manuel was describing relations
between Spain and the Moslem world but the ideological confrontation between the
Communist world, led by the USSR and the USA-led capitalist world, which was being
played out in the late 1940s, ﬁtted the description well.
The period of hostility and rivalry between the two coalitions of states, led
by the USA and USSR from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to 1990, was
unlike any other phase of history. The two sides avoided outright military conﬂict with
each other but fought out many proxy wars, whereby one side would ﬁght an enemy
sponsored by the other side (such as with the US war in Vietnam or the USSR’s
invasion of Afghanistan) or both sides would sponsor rivals in a conflict whilst
cheering on from the sidelines (as for example with the Arab-Israeli dispute). Whilst
this era cannot be said to be one of peace when it contained two of the bloodiest
wars in history, in Korea and Vietnam, direct war between the major protagonists was
avoided by a the maintenance of a balance of terror, whereby both sides were deterred
from such action by the massive scale of each others military capabilities. The key
variable that made this such a distinct phase of history was, of course, the advent of
atomic/nuclear weapons which served to make war something that threatens not
only hostile states but the entire population of the Earth.
Why the wartime allies came to divide into two such antagonistic opponents so
shortly after the Second World War is hotly disputed by historians of the period.
Three broad schools of thought have emerged: the Traditionalists, the Revisionists
and the Post-Revisionists.
Traditionalists lay the blame for the Cold War on the USSR. Writers such as
Feis and Schlesinger argue that the confrontation occurred because, shortly after the
ending of the Second World War, the USSR behaved in a manner which suggested
they wanted to expand their inﬂuence over Europe and, at the same time, rebuffed
American gestures of support and cooperation (Feis 1970, Schlesinger 1967). The
USSR was slow to withdraw troops from East Europe and Northern Iran after
victory had been achieved in the Second World War, turned down the offer of
American economic aid (the Marshall Plan) and also rejected their offer to scrap
their own arsenal of atomic weapons in exchange for a UN inspection system to
prevent any state procuring such weapons (the Baruch Plan). From this perspective
the USA were entitled to interpret Soviet intentions as being hostile and respond
accordingly.
Revisionists take the opposite viewpoint, with writers, such as the Kolkos and
LaFeber, pinning the blame for the Cold War on US aggression towards the USSR
(Kolko and Kolko 1972, LaFeber 1991). The hostility of western capitalist states to
Communism can be dated back as far as the Russian Civil War when a number of
states, including the USA, actively supported the Monarchists against the Bolsheviks,
who had assumed power following the 1917 revolution. In light of this, cooperation
in the Second World War was merely a marriage of convenience and the decision of
the USA to detonate atomic weapons in Japan in 1945 was as much a show of strength
towards the USSR as a means of ending Japanese resistance, it is claimed. Revisionists
argue that the USSR’s dominance of the ‘Eastern Bloc’ after 1945 was merely a
defensive measure to create a buffer against American dominance of Europe and
ideological hostility to Communism. Hence the revisionist view is that US rather than
Soviet hostility prompted the Cold War.
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Post-Revisionists emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with a different take on the
causes of the Cold War. Writers such as John Lewis Gaddis, instead of blaming either
side for initiating hostilities, take a more detached, Realist view which argues that
both sides acted expansively in an inevitable process of ﬁlling the power vacuum
that had been created in Europe (Gaddis 1997). The decline in power of Germany,
France and the UK after the Second World War transformed the political landscape
of the world with two superpowers outside the European heartland now ruling the
roost. Those two superpowers, acting in accord with the logic of power politics,
competed for the mastery of Europe. The USSR did so in a traditional manner, by
colonizing neighbouring countries in Eastern Europe. The USA did so in a more
subtle manner, by linking themselves to the countries of Western and Southeastern
Europe, militarily through NATO and economically through the Marshall Plan and
other agreements. Hence, from this perspective, the Cold War was a classic balance
of power struggle like many others throughout history, only this time conducted on
a bilateral rather than multilateral basis
Whichever perspective on the Cold War is taken, it is clear that American
foreign policy underwent a profound shift in the late 1940s. The isolationist stance
that had characterized US policy from the 1920s, entering the Second World War
only after being invaded, was swept aside by a new approach to become known as
the Truman Doctrine. President Harry Truman announced in 1947 that ‘it must
be the policy of The United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation
by armed minorities or outside pressures’. The ‘armed minorities’ referred to
were Marxist revolutionaries and ‘outside pressures’ was code for the USSR. This
represented a shift from the previous president Franklin Roosevelt (who died in
1945), who had been more tolerant of the USSR and consented to the principle of
a Soviet sphere of inﬂuence in Eastern Europe at the Moscow Conference of 1944
(although he was not present at the meeting). The Moscow Conference conﬁrmed
an earlier, unofficial agreement made over dinner in London between UK Prime
Minister Churchill and USSR leader Stalin when the two famously carved up Eastern
Europe on a map sketched on a napkin.
The change in US strategy can be explained in part by a change in president,
but also by the coming to light of apparent evidence of Soviet expansionist intentions.
Truman’s declaration was greatly inﬂuenced by the so-called ‘long telegram’ of 1946
sent to the White House from Moscow by the US deputy-ambassador to the USSR,
George Kennan. Kennan had closely analysed speeches of Stalin and concluded that
Communist expansion was more than the Marxist rhetoric others assumed it to be
and was a real threat to the capitalist world. Kennan was switched to a job as head of
a State Department policy-planning unit and elaborated on his views for the future
direction of US foreign policy; ‘the main element of any United States policy towards
the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term patient but ﬁrm and vigilant containment
of Russian expansive tendencies’ (Kennan 1947: 575).
Most now consider that talk of Communist world revolution was more Soviet
rhetoric than reality but the threat was taken seriously and the USA’s response was
certainly more than rhetorical. American containment was put into practice with the
signing of a series of bilateral and multilateral military alliances in the late 1940s and
1950s between the USA and countries of Asia and Europe located close to the USSR.
The support for ‘free peoples’ heralded by Truman was put into practice in 1950 with
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the armed intervention by the USA and a number of allies in South Korea to aid their
resistance struggle against invasion by Communist North Korea.
The Cold War went through distinct phases where hostility between East
and West became more or less intense. Writers differ in the precise dating of these
periods of a thawing or freezing in Cold War relations but there is broad agreement
on three main phases (see Table 2.2).
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Table 2.2 Phases of the Cold War
First Cold War 1945–69
1945–49 Onset The Cold War could be said to have begun with the declaration of the
Truman doctrine in 1947 but hostilities in US–USSR relations can be
traced back to the closing stages of the Second World War and even
before.
1949–53 Confrontation In 1949 the USSR developed the atom bomb and NATO was formed,
setting the parameters for two armed camps and a massive arms build
up. The Berlin blockade brought the two sides near to war when the
USSR challenged the US–UK–French control of West Berlin. China
underwent Communist revolution in 1949 and the following year
fought with the North Koreans against the USA and her allies.
1953–62 Slight thaw The death of Stalin and ending of the Korean War (in stalemate) in
1953 heralded a lessening of tension. The 1955 Geneva Summit was
the ﬁrst attempt at Arms Control talks between the USA and USSR.
An acceptance of spheres of inﬂuence by both sides was again
evident; the USA did not come to the aid of Hungary when the USSR
intervened in 1956 and the USSR did not assist Communist Cuba in
resisting a US-sponsored intervention in 1960. Confrontation was not
ended however; the Warsaw Pact was formed in 1955 by the USSR
as an East European military alliance to rival NATO and the USA
and USSR came as close as they ever did to war in 1962 with the
Cuban Missile Crisis when the USSR attempted to station warheads
on the island.
1963–69 Coexistence The Cuban missile crisis was resolved with a deal whereby the USA
removed missiles from Turkey in exchange for USSR not stationing
weapons on Cuba. The very real possibility of nuclear war in 1962
prompted improved dialogue between the two superpowers. Arms
Control agreements were initiated and the logic of deterrence set in
to US–Soviet relations, with both sides recognizing the other’s right to
parity in military terms as a means of guaranteeing peace through
the balance of terror. There was still military conﬂict in the Cold War,
however, as evidenced by the US role in the Vietnam War from 1961
to 1975 supporting South Vietnam against Communist North Vietnam.
Decolonization
At around the same time as the Cold War was coming to an end, another prolonged
global struggle, erupting in periodic bursts of violence, was receiving its curtain call
on the world stage. In 1990 Namibia ﬁnally achieved independence from a colonial
power, South Africa, in the throes of democratic revolution. Although this was not
the world’s last colonial struggle, the end of the 24-year armed campaign was
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Table 2.2 (continued)
Détente 1969–79
1969–79 Détente A major improvement in relations between the USA and
USSR occurred after the accession of Nixon as US president.
Extensive Bilateral Arms Control deals were agreed and
the 1975 Helsinki Accords saw the East and West blocs
agree on various forms of political cooperation. The USA
recognized Communist China for the ﬁrst time in 1979.
Some tensions remained, such as in the support for
opposing sides in the Arab–Israeli disputes from 1973,
but there was optimism that the Cold War might be coming
to an end.
Second Cold War 1979–90
1979–85 Confrontation The USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 ended détente.
The USA did not consider this a tolerable incursion into a
country in the Soviet sphere of inﬂuence and a period of
renewed intense antagonism between East and West
occurred. President Reagan increased military expenditure,
abandoned arms control agreements and cut many
economic links with what he termed ‘the evil empire’.
1985–90 Ending of the Reagan’s aggression succeeded in upping the ante to a
Cold War point the USSR could not match, particularly with the ‘Star
Wars’ Space Defence Initiative (SDI). Gorbachev came
to power in the USSR in 1985 and, in order to save his
country from economic ruin, embarked on a policy of
rapprochement with the West, pulling out of Afghanistan
and signalling a withdrawal from Eastern Europe.
Gorbachev and US President Bush declared the Cold
War to be over at the 1989 Malta Summit as Communist
governments fell in the six countries of the Eastern Bloc.
A 1990 Paris Treaty ofﬁcially ended the 45-year power
struggle.
important symbolically because it left the African continent free of European and
European settler rule. In 1945 there were only three independent states in Africa:
South Africa (independent from the UK since 1910), Ethiopia (liberated from Italian
rule in 1941) and Liberia (the only African state never to be colonized). Revolutions
rarely happen in isolation and the process whereby Africa and large swathes of Asia
threw off colonial rule can be viewed as a global phenomenon.
That this wave of decolonization (a previous wave had swept Latin America in
the nineteenth century) should occur at the same time as the Cold War is not merely
a quirk of history. The same balance of power shift that saw Western European
powers fall behind the USA and USSR in the global pecking order and contributed
to the Cold War, gave the colonies of France, the UK and other states the opportunity
to turn the pre-1945 order on its head. This was most explicitly demonstrated
in Vietnam, where anti-colonial war against France was directly succeeded by
Communist war against a new external foe, the USA. In addition, Marxist ideology
saw colonialism as a symptom of capitalism and hence the struggle against colonizers
as something to be encouraged. This appeared to be conﬁrmed in 1961 when Soviet
President Khruschev announced that the USSR would support ‘wars of national
liberation’ throughout the world. This perception of Soviet and Chinese inﬂuence
prompted US involvement in Vietnam. In general, however, it was post-colonial power
struggles rather than the overthrow of European rule, which tended to be transformed
into Cold War conﬂict. In Angola the USSR, along with Cuba, gave backing
to leftist guerillas, while the USA supported the anti-Communist faction. That China
should ﬁnd themselves on the same side as the Americans in this conﬂict, however,
gives some credence to the post-revisionist assessment of the Cold War as more of
a plain power struggle than an ideological confrontation.
Indeed, decolonization was applauded not only by governments of the left. The
USA used its position of mastery over the old powers of Europe to assert its moral
support for the principle of self-rule for colonies. One of the few things the two new
superpowers could agree on in the late 1940s and early 1950s was that the age of
colonialism was a part of the old European order which should be swept away. This
was, of course, a somewhat hypocritical view given the USSR’s recent acquisition of
six satellite states in Eastern Europe and the USA’s colonial rule of Puerto Rico and
suzerainty over South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, but it was
clear that the world had entered a new phase of international relations in 1945 in
more ways than one.
A new world order?
President George Bush (senior) is generally credited with having popularized
contemporary usage of the term ‘New World Order’ in a series of speeches in 1990
and 1991 to signify that the UN-backed and US-led allied force sent to Kuwait to drive
out invading Iraqi forces was indicative of a very different world than that seen up until
the end of the Cold War. ‘What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big
idea – a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause
to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the
rule of law’ (Bush 1991). With the dark shadow of Cold War lifted there was optimism
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that the USA, Russia, China and other great military powers could free the UN
Security Council from its Cold War straitjacket and cooperate to punish aggression,
such as that exerted by Iraq, in a way not seen in the twentieth century or, to any real
extent, at any previous time in history.
Such optimism for a brighter future while basking in the afterglow of a
triumphant victory is nothing new in international relations. The defeat of Napoleon
Bonaparte in 1815 at Waterloo was achieved by a coalition of European powers ending
12 years of conflict and followed up by the Congress of Vienna which heralded
a period of great power cooperation known as the ‘Concert of Europe’. For a period
of nearly 40 years there was peace in Europe assisted by a loose system of diplomatic
co-management of the continent between five countries: Britain, Prussia, Russia,
Austria-Hungary and, novelly, their defeated but not estranged enemy France. The
outbreak of the Crimean War of 1854, when Britain and France fought together with
Turkey against Russia, ended the Concert and Europe eschewed any attempt at
collective policing until after the next epoch-making conﬂict, the First World War.
The 1919–20 Paris Peace Settlement following the First World War ushered
in a new attempt to construct a better world order, led by the Idealists, most clearly
articulated with the creation of the League of Nations. Idealist is a term that came
to be applied to statesmen of the age, such as US President Woodrow Wilson, and
academics, such as the UK’s first professor of International Relations Alfred Zimmern,
who advocated that states should forgo the selﬁsh pursuit of national interest and
conduct their foreign affairs with a greater emphasis on international cooperation,
morality and diplomatic openness. The world had been plunged into a war far more
devastating than anything seen previously because states had aggressively pursued
their own interests to the disregard of other states, bar those they had aligned
themselves with in secretive military alliances. Hence the League of Nations sought
to provide an arena whereby states could resolve disputes openly in conference or
through the rulings of an international court (the Permanent Court of International
Justice) and where protection for states could come from a global guarantee (collective
security) rather than through constructing covert military pacts.
As with the Concert of Europe, the League of Nations ultimately collapsed
amid a new great power collision. Idealism came to be derided by a new generation
of statesmen and scholars, the Realists, as being dangerously naïve and utopian. The
Realists advocated a return to the order of the Concert of Europe on a global scale,
with peace maintained by the great powers while respecting a balance of power
between them. In this view the Crimean War only occurred because Russia had upset
the balance and the Concert should have been restored after they had been defeated.
Balance had been noticeably lacking in international relations for the ﬁrst half of the
twentieth century, with the great powers generally divided into two armed camps
and their expansions of power left unchecked. Idealism was not destroyed by the
Realist backlash, however, and the construction of a new world following the Second
World War did not abandon its ideas so much as temper them with a heavy dose of
Realism.
The 1945–90 world order, in character, in many ways can be said to have been
a hybrid of both the Concert and the League systems. The League of Nations was
revamped in the guise of the United Nations and open diplomacy and international
cooperation again encouraged. At the same time, however, a Realist version of
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collective security was devised to be at the heart of the UN with a ‘concert’ of ﬁve great
powers entrusted to manage the system. These great powers, the USA, UK, USSR,
China and France, enjoyed the spoils of being on the winning side in the Second
World War but the new system learned the lesson of the Concert that was ignored
by the League and sought to keep the vanquished on board. Germany and Japan thus
became key players in the new system (albeit economically rather than militarily)
rather than being dangerously ostracized. Japan had been on the winning side in the
First World War but felt excluded by the other victors at the Paris peace settlement
when the spoils were shared out, while Germany’s harsh treatment is widely
acknowledged as a factor behind the rise of Nazism.
The optimism of 1945 was shorter lived than in either 1815 or 1920, as a new
conﬂict cast its shadow over the world almost immediately after the worst conﬂict in
human history came to an end. However, 1990 saw reawakened optimism, particularly
since the Cold War had ended with the leading protagonists on good terms and
seeming to share a common vision for the future of the world.
Democratization
The most profound suggestion of what the ending of the Cold War meant for
international affairs and global security was the widely cited view of US academic
Fukuyama that the West’s victory marked the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992).
Fukuyama reasoned that the ideological triumph of Liberalism over Communism
was an ultimate victory that had set the world on a course for a new future, in which
like-minded Liberal democratic states conducted their relations in peace. This thesis
reversed the Hegelian dialectic of Marxist theory and married it to the long
established liberal principle that ‘democracies don’t go to war with each other’. Kant
proposed this as far back as 1795 in his magnum opus ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant 1970)
and it has been a consistent normative and empirical claim of Pluralist International
Relations scholars over the last half-century. Most notably, Deutsch in the 1950s
developed the idea of regional ‘security communities’ which develop as a result
of greater cross-border social communication as people discover their common
interests (Deutsch 1957).
It is important to remember that the Cold War was more of a struggle between
Communism and ‘non-communism’ than totalitarianism and democracy. The western
alliance were happy to prop up numerous dictatorships in the cause of deterring
Communism and the US even assisted in snufﬁng out democracy in Chile (1973)
and Guatemala (1954) when elections delivered leftist governments on their
doorstep. The West’s victory over the Soviet Union and its ‘allies’ did, though, serve
to accelerate the progress of democratization on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Although power politics can be seen to have played a signiﬁcant part in ‘breaking’
the Soviet empire, the West’s victory undoubtedly had an ideational dimension.
The 1989 revolutions which swept away the six ‘Eastern Bloc’ Soviet satellite states,
and effectively brought the Cold War to an end, occurred because ordinary East
Europeans wanted to live like West Europeans. The USSR’s subsequent transformation
has been less complete but all but one of its 15 successor states (Belarus)
have, at least partially, embraced democracy. Western democracies have assisted
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the new states through the painful process of social, economic and political transition
and, freed from Cold War constraints, their tolerance of intolerance has receded.
The USA in the 1990s switched from the Truman Doctrine to the ‘Clinton Doctrine’
in which promoting the spread of democracy became an explicit foreign policy aim.
NATO has followed suit in insisting to the lengthy queue of prospective new members
to its victors club, that only states with impeccable democratic and human rights
credentials be allowed in. This had not been a precondition in earlier times when
Greece, Turkey and Portugal had been recruited without such stipulations.
The proposition that democracies do not go to war with each other is wellsupported
empirically, so the fact that more and more states in the world have
embraced democracy in recent years has given scope for optimism in the realization
of Kant’s vision. Kant, in fact, proposed that it was the trinity of democracy, trade and
international cooperation were the basis for a peaceful world and these three factors
are all more prominent today than at any point previously in history. Over two
centuries after its promulgation, the Kantian peace proposition has been rigourously
tested by Pluralists for its applicability to the contemporary global political system.
Russet and Oneal’s Triangulating Peace, for example, draws on over a decade of
statistical analysis with each of these three corners of the ‘peace triangle’ examined
in turn to show how they mutually reinforce each other over time in ‘virtuous
circles’ (Russett and Oneal 2001). Democracies trade with each other more and form
common organizations more, both of which are phenomena also demonstrably contributing
to paciﬁc relations. Democracies in dealing with other democracies more
easily ﬁnd non-military means to resolve inevitable clashes of interest that arise in
their relations and increasingly realize that their interests are not served by violent
confrontations. Democratic peace is a political theory with uncharacteristically solid
empirical foundations if we consider that: ‘[e]stablished democracies fought no wars
against each other during the entire twentieth century’ (Russett and Starr 1996: 173).
If we also consider that the number of democratic states in the world increased
from 66 (out of 164) in 1987 to 121 (out of 192) in 2002 (Freedom House 2002) the
future prospects for perpetual peace look good also. Both of these sets of ﬁgures are
challengeable, but the overall trends they indicate are not.
[T]hrough careful statistical analysis, the chance that any two countries will
get into a serious military dispute can be estimated if one knows what kinds of
governments they have, how economically interdependent they are , and how
well connected by a web of international organizations.
(Russett and Oneal 2001: 9)
Collective security
As referred to in the section on the prelude to the present order, the optimism
generated by the end of the Cold War soon appeared to have some foundation when
the two former chief protagonists were able to agree to sanction UN-sponsored
military action against Iraq for the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In reaching this
agreement the world’s two premier powers were activating a long-cherished Idealist
dream which had not only seemed impossible during the Cold War but had never in
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history been realized. Pierre Dubois, writing in the early fourteenth century,
advocated the idea of the international community cooperating to keep the peace
and the Liberal philosophers Kant and Bentham revived the notion, as an alternative
to the balance of power, in the nineteenth century. The idea is also mentioned in the
Holy Qur’an (49:9). Under this system acts of aggression prompt collective responses
against the aggressors by the whole international community, rather than just by the
attacked state and its allies or other states who consider their interests to be affected
by the action. It was not until the League of Nations, however, that a system was put
in place to make this idea a reality. The League enshrined collective security in its
covenant, stating in Article 16 that a state waging war declared unjust by its member
states would be, in effect, waging war against the organization itself. A 15-member
Council of the League of Nations would make such judgements on behalf of the wider
membership.
As already discussed, the League’s peacekeeping mechanism failed and
collective security was never activated. The outbreak of the Second World War was,
of course, the clearest indication of this failure but by this time the League was an
irrelevance anyway, having failed to act against blatant acts of aggression by its
member states on a number of occasions throughout the 1930s. The 1931 Japanese
invasion of Manchuria, 1935 Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and German
military re-occupation of the Saar prompted some condemnations, but no military
response. Soviet, German and Italian interventions in the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War
were similarly ignored and although the USSR were expelled from the League in
1939 for the invasion of Finland, this was too little too late.
The League failed to implement collective security for two key reasons.
1 It did not represent the whole international community: The League of Nations
was handicapped from the start by not being a truly ‘global’ organization. The
emerging superpower, the USA, never took up membership despite the fact
that its President Woodrow Wilson had at the Paris Peace settlement been
its chief advocate. The USA, instead, retreated into its shell after the First World
War, not to emerge until 1940 when the world had become a very different
place. The other emerging superpower, the USSR, only joined the League in
1934, while Germany, Japan and Italy withdrew their memberships in annoyance
at the token criticism they had received for their military adventurism.
Collective security rests on a genuinely collective commitment to upholding the
peace and this is unlikely to be found if militarily powerful states are unwilling
to contribute to this process or act against it.
2 Its decision-making procedure was unworkable: Shorn of any involvement by
the USA and any real commitment to peace from Germany, Japan, Italy and the
USSR, the League was left dominated by just two of the powerful states of
the day, France and Great Britain. These two countries held permanent seats
in the Council (as did the USSR during their membership) and represented
the only serious military antidote to violations of the League’s covenant. The
French and British however, having recently emerged from the bloodiest war
in their histories and now embroiled in economic depression, did not have the
stomach to become ‘world policemen’. The two governments’ policies towards
aggression from other great powers was at the time one of ‘appeasement’ rather
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than confrontation, with the hope that granting some concessions to their
rivals may be the best means of averting another catastrophic war. Hence
the British and French governments went out of their way to ensure that
condemnations of Japan for the horrific Manchurian invasion were not too
severe and that economic sanctions levied against Italy for the seemingly
motiveless annexation of Abyssinia were cosmetic. The Council’s voting system
rested on unanimity which meant that Britain and France could always dictate
the system, as could any of the other 13 temporary member states during their
stay in the spotlight. Unanimity in an international organization, even among
a sub-group of 15, is hard to ﬁnd at the best of times and the 1930s was far from
the best of times.
UN collective security
The United Nations, in taking over the mantle of global peacekeeping from the
League, did not abandon collective security but sought to learn from its predecessor
in devising a new more realistic and Realistic system. The UN from the start set about
ensuring that its membership was as universal as possible, in spite of a deep division
in the international community from the global conflict just passing and the new
one beginning to emerge. It maintained the idea of a 15-member sub-group to decide
on peacekeeping strategy but was more explicit in granting privileges to the most
powerful states. Unanimity was replaced with a voting system in which only ﬁve of
the UN’s Security Council Members would have the power to veto agreements (UK,
France, USA, USSR and China). Those same five states would enjoy permanent
membership of the Council with the other ten members periodically elected from the
rest of the UN membership and denied the power of veto.1
These ﬁve states from
the winning side in the Second World War were considered the great powers of the
future and would, therefore, be essential in the implementation of collective security
since there would be no standing UN army for such operations.
For the Security Council to act against threats to peace, whether to implement
collective security or a lesser joint response, nine ‘yes’ votes are needed from the 15
government representatives present at its venue in New York. Those nine afﬁrmative
votes, however, must include the assent of the ‘permanent five’. Hence even 14
against one would not be enough to secure agreement for an action if the ‘one’ is a
permanent member. Those ﬁve countries, in effect, represent a sub-system within
a sub-system, since their agreement is a precondition for action on behalf of the
near-universal UN membership. Security Council members can elect to abstain
rather than vote for or against a resolution which, for the permanent ﬁve, does not
represent a veto and would permit action if nine other votes are accrued. China chose
this option in voting on the 1990 Resolution triggering the Gulf War (Resolution 678),
in order to distance itself from military action against Iraq but not be seen to block
the will of the other Security Council members and the international community at
large.
The Gulf War stands as one of only three occasions when collective security
has been enacted. The ﬁrst occasion was during the ‘hottest’ of the Cold War proxy
conﬂicts, the Korean War. In 1950 the UN Security Council authorized international
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military action against North Korea for the invasion of South Korea. This ﬁrst ever
realization of a centuries-old Liberal dream was, however, very much a ﬂuke event
never likely to be repeated during the Cold War. The Soviet Union and China did
not use their vetoes to avert action against their Communist ally because neither of
them were present in the Security Council when the vote was taken. Communist
China had not been able to take up their seat in the UN, and with it their permanent
place in the Security Council, because the USA had refused to grant diplomatic
recognition to the new regime following the 1949 revolution. In protest at this the
USSR boycotted a session of the Security Council allowing the USA to opportunistically
push through a resolution that would otherwise certainly have been vetoed.
The USSR never repeated this form of protest and the Security Council
remained paralysed until 1990 by the fact that the permanent five (including
Communist China from 1979) were unable to find unanimity to sanction any full
military action against acts of aggression violating the UN Charter. The veto had
been envisaged as a rare option of last resort for the permanent ﬁve, necessary to keep
them on board for the maintenance of international peace, but became a routinely
used tactic to protect Cold War allies. In the ﬁrst Cold War it was the USSR that made
most use of the veto and in the second, when the changing UN membership began
to deprive them of guaranteed support, it was the USA. This placed out of bounds any
action against both countries’ own military adventurism in Vietnam and Afghanistan
or in response to the interventions of their ‘client states’ such as Israel (in the
Lebanon) and Cuba (in Angola).
Collective security, covered by Article 7 of the UN Charter, is not the only
peacekeeping option open to the Security Council and other, lesser, measures
aiming to keep the peace were utilized during the Cold War. Article 6, which calls on
states to resolve disputes peacefully where possible, has been used as the basis for
many Council resolutions sending in multilateral teams of UN monitoring troops to
uphold ceaseﬁre lines while diplomatic solutions are sought. Such UN forces were
sent into Kashmir and Palestine in 1948 to assist in resolving the Arab–Israeli and
Indo-Pakistani territorial disputes. The fact that both these conﬂicts are still far from
resolved today gives an indication of the limitations to this UN peacekeeping strategy.
The realization that UN-assisted mediation was a limited means of restoring
peace and that collective security was hamstrung by Cold War politics, prompted
efforts outside the Security Council in the 1950s to try another approach to peacekeeping.
UN Secretary General of the time, Dag Hammarskjöld and the General
Assembly, in which all UN members are represented equally, were central to this
process. The 1950 ‘Uniting for Peace’ General Assembly resolution, sponsored by the
USA, aimed to pre-empt the inevitable presence of a veto-wielding USSR in a future
scenario similar to the Korean War. Uniting for Peace gave the General Assembly
a role in security issues, previously considered the exclusive domain of the Council.
A special session of the Assembly could be called and be able to recommend international
action in the absence of a Security Council agreement. There are no vetoes
to be wielded at the General Assembly and every UN member is present, so the
required two-thirds majority for a Resolution is far more likely than at the Security
Council. Hammarskjöld put this new power into practice when he became a far more
active Secretary General than his predecessor on taking over the job in 1953. A UN
Emergency Force was sent in to supervise the withdrawal of British, French and
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Israeli troops from Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis, despite the fact that the UK
and France had prevented the Security Council authorizing any response to their
invasion. Hammarskjöld, as well as seeking to circumvent Security Council paralysis,
pioneered the idea of ‘preventive diplomacy’ based on a more proactive deployment
of UN peacekeeping forces than the manning of ceaseﬁre lines. Preventive diplomacy
went beyond the ‘paciﬁc settlement of disputes’ conﬁnes of Article 6 but was less
contentious, and hence less likely to invoke a veto, than the collective security of
Article 7. Hence Hammarskjöld referred to such measures as ‘Article six and a half’
of the Charter.
Preventive diplomacy was ﬁrst clearly put into practice in 1960 when a brutal
civil war in the Congo, following its independence from Belgium, prompted a rare
display of solidarity between the Cold War protagonists on the Security Council.
A UN force, made up of troops from a number of impartial countries, was sent in to
the Congo not just to keep warring factions apart but to create the conditions for
peace, using force where necessary. Some temporary calm was achieved by the
UN intervention but optimism was punctured by the public decapitation of some
Irish soldiers and the USSR’s loss of appetite for such an extended UN role as the
conﬂict unfolded. Hammarskjöld died in an aeroplane crash over the Congo in 1961,
prompting numerous conspiracy theories, and the idea of preventive diplomacy
appeared to have died with him. The USA from the 1960s became far less enthusiastic
about ﬁnding ways to get around the problem of Security Council vetoes since it was
an option they increasingly wished to ulilize. Hence, UN forces that were dispatched
to trouble spots over the next 30 years conﬁned themselves more to forming ‘thin blue
lines’ of largely inactive troops stationed between the protagonists.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali revived the spirit of Hammarskjöld in the 1990s
when it became clear that even the post-Cold War world would feature a frequently
immobilized Security Council. The increased number of civil wars was making both
Articles 6 and 7 insufficient for the job and prompting the threat of Chinese and
Russian vetoes, not now in support of ideological brothers in arms but for the principle
of sovereignty. Boutros-Ghali revamped preventive diplomacy in his ‘Agenda for
Peace’ initiative, paving the way for the Security Council sanctioning expansive
operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Somalia in the early 1990s. As with the Congo,
however, these operations were not major successes. The failure of UN troops to
protect Bosnian Moslem citizens from Serb nationalist violence forced them,
humiliatingly and symbolically, to hand over the mantle of peacekeeping to NATO.
In Somalia there were strong echoes of the Congo, when a US force sent in to bring
stability to a complex civil war pulled out amid accusations of having exacerbated the
conﬂict and with televised images of their dead troops being dragged through the
streets being beamed around the world.
Such images were still fresh in the minds of public and political opinion when
an even ﬁercer internal conﬂict in Rwanda erupted in 1994 and, this time, there was
no preventive diplomacy. When, ﬁve years later, violence erupted again in Yugoslavia
it appeared as though the Security Council was still operating in the ‘old world order’
when Russian and Chinese vetoes proscribed collective security in spite of the
obvious lesson from up the road in Bosnia that preventive diplomacy was not enough.
Again NATO stepped in to fill the global void but this time with a full-scale and
successful military operation. Although UN collective security was invoked for a third
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time to legitimize the US war against Afghanistan in 2001–2 this was more of an act
of symbolism since the world’s most powerful state did not need military support to
defeat one of the world’s weakest. When the USA and UK then acted without either
UN (or NATO) authorization in going to war with Iraq in 2003, collective security
appeared to becoming, once again, a distant dream.
Just war
One of the chief sources of optimism that marked the onset of the ‘New World
Order’ was that the ending of the Cold War might also bring to an end the era of
total war, which so characterized the twentieth century. The Gulf War, as well as
recapturing the seemingly lost dream of collective security, witnessed a revival of
another old doctrine of international affairs thought consigned to history during the
three world wars, ‘just war’. Just war doctrine dates back as far as the fourth century
when Christian theologians, led by St Augustine, sought to move away from absolute
paciﬁsm and accommodate the idea that war might be morally acceptable in certain
circumstances. In the seventeenth century the undisputed ‘father of international
law’, Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, gave the doctrine a secular and legalistic footing
amid the backdrop of the Christian in-ﬁghting of the Thirty Years War tearing Europe
apart (Grotius 1853). Grotius set out to codify universally applicable principles by
which it could be judged that going to war was morally acceptable, Jus ad bellum, and
accompanying principles for judging the moral prosecution of a war, Jus in bello. The
separate doctrines emphasize the key point that a war deemed just at the outset can
become unjust if prosecuted in an immoral way. Precise interpretations of just war
vary but, by the late twentieth century with writers such as Ramsey (1968) and Walzer
(1978) re-packaging Grotius’ work, the key principles of the twin doctrines could be
distilled down to the following:
• Jus ad bellum (justice in going to war):
a must be waged by a sovereign authority;
b must be a just cause for the war; self-defence or the enforcement of human
rights;
c peaceful means of resolving the dispute must have been exhausted;
d must be likely to succeed.
• Jus in bello (justice in the conduct of war):
a means used should be proportionate to the wrong being rectiﬁed;
b unavoidable killing of non-combatants should be avoided;
c wounded troops and prisoners of war should not be killed.
Aspects of Jus in bello became codiﬁed in the laws of war, particularly in the
numerous Geneva and Hague Conventions, which evolved through the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Jus ad bellum during this period, however, tended not
to amount to much more than principle (a) as the Westphalian notion of sovereignty
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crystallized into a form that legitimized whatever the state felt was necessary for
its security or aggrandizement. Wars of colonial expansion presented perhaps the
clearest departure from the notion of justice but justiﬁcations for such campaigns
were made on the basis that the vanquished peoples would benefit from being
‘civilized’. Perhaps the most extreme articulation of this came from Gentili, who
declared the genocidal Spanish campaign against native Americans in the sixteenth
century to be a just war since the victims were cannibals (Gentili 1933).
The concept of total war in the twentieth century did most to set back the
just war tradition. The idea that the whole of society was directly involved during
war, rather than just the professional apparatus of government, had developed from
the nineteenth century, with the growth of military conscription and state-promoted
nationalism, but became fully realized in the era of the World Wars. From the
perspective of any of its participants, the First World War exceeded any notion of
proportionality and was entered into without much regard to diplomatic alternatives
to ﬁghting. The Second World War, from the perspective of the allied forces, satisﬁed
the conditions of Jus ad bellum but possibly not principle (a) and most certainly not
principle (b) of Jus in bello. The arguments offered by the governments of the UK,
USSR and USA in defence of ignoring non-combatant immunity in the war against
Germany and Japan seemed to illustrate that the moral judgements facing governments
in the twentieth century were far starker than in previous ages. The British
blanket bombing of German cities brought criticism from some clerics in the Church
of England, but was generally deemed acceptable, since the enemy had done the
same thing, and necessary, since the just defeat of Germany required not only military
victories but the diminution of their war-making capacity. Soviet violence against
German invaders in driving them back to where they came from was horriﬁc but
generally viewed in the same way since it was not disproportionate to what they had
suffered. The US atomic strikes on Japan were indiscriminate but maybe ultimately
saved lives since they ﬁnally brought to its knees an enemy apparently determined
to ﬁght on well beyond any realistic hope of winning the war. In an age when the
means of waging war were so much greater than before it appeared that moral
niceties had become subsumed by necessity.
The Cold War institutionalized this amoral necessity into everyday international
politics. Nuclear deterrence rested on the notion that whole societies were legitimate
and realistic military targets which, in itself, must negate any notion of proportionality
as well as non-combatant discrimination. The rectification of what sort of
wrong could justify the annihilation of the whole population of a country, or even the
world?
The recession of such a scale of nuclear threat in the 1990s saw a concerted
effort to recapture all aspects of the just war tradition in the western-led wars of
the New World Order. During the Gulf War the US-led coalition limited itself to the
realization of its UN-authorized aims and did not seek to topple the Iraqi regime,
despite military and political pressure to do so. Saddam Hussein was forced out of
Kuwait but not out of ofﬁce. The war was also conducted along lines which sought
to minimize civilian casualties through the use of ‘smart’ weaponry better able to
target military and official state sites than in bombing campaigns of earlier eras.
Similar sorts of campaigns were waged by NATO against Yugoslavia in 1999 and by
the USA and UK against Afghanistan in 2001–2 and Iraq in 2003. The 1999 Kosovan
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War, in particular, marked a revival of morality in military conduct since it was in
aim, principally, a humanitarian intervention.
Grey areas still remain in terms of deeming when a war is ‘just’. Cynics have
contended that the ‘smart’ bombing-led wars of recent years are as much a device for
sanitizing war for domestic public consumption as showing compassion for civilians.
Bombing from afar saves the lives of the bombers more than it does the civilians
living near targeted sites. Few would contend that the US and their allies deliberately
struck civilian targets in any of the four above-mentioned wars but civilian deaths
did occur in all conﬂicts. Just war doctrine acknowledges that accidental ‘collateral
damage’ does not de-legitimize a war, but were the civilian deaths in Iraq, Yugoslavia
and Afghanistan avoidable? It has been suggested that a ground campaign against
Yugoslavia, rather than an almost entirely aerial battle, would have endangered fewer
Yugoslav civilians since ground troops are better equipped with their own eyes to
discriminate between combatants and non-combatants than aircrew kitted out with
even the ‘smartest’ of computerized sightings (Mandelbaum 1999, Robertson 2000:
414–417). This argument is believed to have been aired within NATO ranks but
US reluctance to be embroiled in ‘another Somalia’ favoured the option eventually
taken.
Further ambiguities remain with putting non-combatant discrimination into
practice. The dilemma ignored in the Second World War and the Cold War about who
is and who is not a legitimate target in the modern era is still there. Large proportions
of non-military personnel contribute to the war effort of a country in some way.
Munitions workers might be an obvious extension from servicemen, but what about
other sections of society supporting a targeted government? The Kosovan and Iraq
(2003) wars saw journalists supporting the enemy deliberately targeted. In both of
these cases it was state-run television companies, which were government propagandist
machines, that were openly struck but non-Iraqi journalists also died in the
latter conﬂict. ‘Al Jazeira’, an inﬂuential Arab nationalist satellite television service
based in Qatar, had their Baghdad ofﬁces bombed in a strike ofﬁcially described as
a mistake but which raised suspicions beyond the Arab world. Another ‘mistake’
which aroused great suspicion occurred in 2002 when an Israeli jet released a one
tonne bomb on a Palestinian residential bloc in Gaza killing 15 civilians, including nine
children. One Hamas leader and known Israeli target inhabited the bloc.
The New World Order wars also raised questions of proportionality. Did NATO
air strikes against Yugoslavia prompt Serb nationalists to step up the campaign
against Kosovar Albanians, leading to more suffering than would have occurred if no
military action had been taken? Did more Afghani citiziens die (albeit accidentally)
in US strikes than the 3000 New York and Washington residents killed in the 2001
al-Qa’ida strikes which prompted the response? An even more problematic moral
quantiﬁcation emerged in 2003. Was the 2003 Iraq War justiﬁed on the basis that it
pre-empted future threats from that country?
Straight answers to these questions are difficult to find. As with much of
humanitarian international law and custom, just war is grey area in which inconsistent
interpretation and application is inevitable. Owing to what Clausewitz called the
‘friction’ of war it is impossible to be entirely accurate in predicting the outcome
of a military campaign or to ﬁght a perfect battle free of mistakes. Should, though,
the response to an imperfect system of rules be to have none at all? The questions
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posed about the recent wars could also be countered by clearer international
legal guidelines. Yugoslavia and NATO could simultaneously point to UN Charter
articles to support their positions that the other side was at fault in the 1999 war.
A retreat from total war and the strengthening of a legal and ethical framework
for ﬁghting future wars in the human interest is surely something to be welcomed.
The International Criminal Court provides some evidence that this is the way the
international community is evolving (see Chapter 5).
Conﬂict resolution
A central feature of the New World Order was an increased commitment by the
international community to work towards resolving violent conﬂicts. There was scope
for optimism in the 1990s that the open sores that were the late twentieth century’s
‘proxy wars’ could be allowed to heal now that the superpower interest in their
maintenance was removed. Additionally, it was hoped that the ‘peace dividend’ of the
East–West thaw could now be allocated to restoring order to militarized disputes
unrelated to the Cold War. The results of this have been quite impressive. Research
suggests that twice as many conﬂicts based on self-determination (both inter-state
and civil) were resolved in the 1990s than in the whole Cold War era, with 14 such
conﬂicts being ‘contained’ and 17 ‘settled’ in the New World Order era as opposed
to six and nine, repsectively, between 1945 and 1990 (Gurr et al. 2001: 17). A more
proactive UN and the determination of the USA to utilize their power in order to
play the world policeman role in a diplomatic context have been key factors. US
presidents played pivotal roles in the negotiation of settlements for the resolution
of the Yugoslav wars of secession (in 1995 at Dayton), Northern Ireland ‘troubles’
(in 1998 at Belfast) and the ultimately unsuccessful Oslo Accords (1993) aiming to
resolve the Palestinian–Israeli conﬂict.
Post-1990 conflict resolution has not, however, just been about a revival of
collective security and superpower policing – less powerful actors and more subtle
techniques have been an additional feature. Less powerful states have played arbitration
roles, such as the government of Norway, which has played a role in
encouraging peace in the inter-state conﬂicts between Israel and the Arab states,
India and Pakistan and civil wars in the Philippines and, most notably, Sri Lanka.
Humanitarian pressure groups have become an increased factor in promoting
negotiation and compromise. International Alert have been prominent in instigating
peace processes in many conflict areas and the Norwegian government have
developed partnerships with groups such as the Norwegian Institute of International
Affairs to lend assistance to the resolution of persistent armed conﬂicts such as in the
Congo. Pressure groups cannot bring force to resolve disputes but stand a better
chance than governments of being considered as impartial by those embroiled in
conflict and can use their expertise to suggest innovative solutions to complex
disputes.
Post-Cold War conﬂict resolution has been marked by the use of strategies
going beyond straight mutual compromise. ‘Conflict transformation’, in which
common ground is found among warring parties by encouraging them to redeﬁne
their interests, is an increasingly prominent strategy, promoted by the UN and
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pressure groups such as the Alliance for Conflict Transformation. The Caucasus
region, for example, where conﬂicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan and ethnic
civil unrest in Georgia marked the early 1990s, has been stabilized partly by concerted
governmental and non-governmental action stressing the incentives inherent to all
sides in pursuing peaceful relations. The US and Russian governments have given
promises of increased trade links and aid as a carrot while the general beneﬁts of
increased tourism and trade within the region have been stressed by NGOs.
New world disorder?
Realist caution against optimism that the passing into history of the Cold War would
herald a new, uniquely paciﬁc era of international relations could be considered borne
out by certain developments since 1990 which have not enhanced the military
security of the world’s states or people.
Is it really over? The persistence of Cold War disputes
In a 1998 article in a Russian academic journal, the prominent foreign policy analyst
Sergei Kortunov asked ‘Is the Cold War really over?’ (Kortunov 1998). Similarly
British academic Prins has posited: ‘Is the end of the Cold War, therefore, only
the end of Part I, just as Star Wars, the movie, promises?’ (Prins 2002: 46). That the
Cold War has not ended might initially appear an absurd suggestion when we cast
our minds back to the momentous changes that occurred at the end of the 1980s. The
images of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain being dismantled while the leaders of
the two Cold War superpowers publicly declared the conﬂict to be over portrayed
peace in as explicit terms as ever seen in history, but consider the evidence.
Korea
The Korean peninsular remains ﬁrmly frozen in the Cold War era, divided into two
ideologically deﬁned states precisely as it was at the point of East–West stalemate
after the war in 1953. Communist North Korea’s relations with the West remain
practically non-existent while it maintains political links with its war ally, China.
US–Chinese relations
Relations between the USA, and most other western states, with their second major
Cold War foe have remained frosty in the years since 1990. Economic cooperation
has blossomed through mutual interest but diplomatic and military tensions
remain. No equivalent to the 1989 Malta Summit or 1990 Paris Treaty occurred in
Sino-American relations and a number of issues remain wholly unresolved. Most
prominently, the status of Taiwan remains a source of tension and the island remains
in a non-sovereign limbo, being claimed by China but still assured by the USA of
its independence. Tensions boiled over again in 2001, in a clash which had all the
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hallmarks of the Cold War, when a US spy plane near the south coast of China was
downed in a confrontation with Chinese ﬁghter planes.
US–Cuban relations
All forms of political relations between the USA and Cuba since 1990 have remained
as hostile as they were in the previous three decades. The US have maintained an
economic boycott of its leftist island neighbour which has had far more impact in the
post-Cold War years since Cuba has lost the economic support of the USSR.
US–Russian relations
While undoubtedly more cordial than during the Cold War and smoother than with
those countries who have not abandoned Communism, US–Russian relations since
the 1991 collapse of the USSR have not been exactly harmonious. The Kosovan War
of 1999 was a bitter humiliation for Russia since to them it appeared to demonstrate
western contempt for their long-cherished foreign policy goal of ‘pan-Slavism’, in
which Eastern Europe was understood as part of their sphere of inﬂuence.2
Having
stopped the UN from taking action against Yugoslavia, the Russian government failed
to dissuade NATO from acting in its place. A desperate attempt to claw out some role
in Kosovo saw Russian troops unilaterally dispatched to Prisitina, where NATO forces
were gathering in a post-war peacekeeping force. A desperate scramble ensued
as Russian troops secured Pristina airport in advance of the British in an incident
which came close to producing a direct skirmish between the two sides not seen
during the Cold War.3
Russia secured a role in the peacekeeping process but, in a sign
of how things had changed, were unable to maintain sole control of the airport since
support troops were blocked from ﬂying over former allies Hungary or Romania due
to western pressure on their new allies.
The persistence of NATO
The encroachment of the US and their allies into their backyard in Russian eyes was
conﬁrmed, when in the same year as the Kosovan War, NATO expanded its membership
to recruit three of their former Warsaw Pact allies; Poland, Hungary and the
Czech Republic. Far from exiting the stage after 1990, a Cold War alliance had not
only played on but extended its role and moved closer to its original object of
containment. NATO have repeatedly assured Russia that their containment is not
its game anymore and, while expanding eastwards, gave them a guarantee that no
east-facing missiles would be sited in the territories of the new member states. The
fact remained, however, that this was an alliance set up to counter Russian (Soviet)
power and it was still there.
Re-working the famous explanation of its ﬁrst Secretary-General, Lord Ismay,
50 years earlier, as to what the purpose of the organization was, Schweller in 2001
stated that ‘NATO essentially serves the same purposes today that it always has: to
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keep America in, Germany down and Russia out’ (Schweller 2001: 182). Despite
momentous changes in the international environment some of that logic still persists.
The 1999 expansion extended NATO’s reach into Russia’s traditional sphere of
inﬂuence and, in the eyes of those countries, guaranteed that they would be free from
the shadow of the ‘bear’.
The even more complete westward integration of East Germany, through
German reuniﬁcation, brought fear to the British and French governments over the
effect on their power in Western Europe. A bilateral meeting between the heads of
the British and French governments, Thatcher and Mitterand, was held in 1989, prior
to reuniﬁcation, after which the former commented; ‘we both had the will to check
the German juggernaut’ (Benjamin 2000). It is often forgotten that it was the fear of
Germany rather than the USSR that sowed the seeds of NATO. France, the UK,
Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1948 founded the ‘Brussels Pact’,
which was a defence community centred on a ‘trigger clause’ in which each state
guaranteed to support the others in the event of an armed attack. The prospect of a
revival in German nationalism that prompted this agreement, however, was overtaken
by events as the more apparent threat posed by former ally the USSR became the
focus for a similar, but much larger and more powerful, defence community. West
Germany was soon brought into the NATO fold, contained not through deterrence
but through the friendly restraint of new allies.
Franco-British fears in 1989 were political and economic rather than military
but most certainly present, and prompted distinct foreign policy approaches. The
French response was to reactivate their enthusiasm for deeper European Community
integration to ‘tie down Gulliver’, re-adopting their pro-federalist line of the 1950s
formulated for much the same reasons. This included reviving the idea of European
defence cooperation for the ﬁrst time since that era when their initiative had been
scuppered by British indifference and the rise of NATO. For the UK, and other
‘Atlanticists’ like Denmark, the response to German reuniﬁcation was to take strides
to ensure that, with the receding of the Russian threat the other two components
of Lord Ismay’s maxim were not forgotten. The British, aware that the USA could
conceivably revert to pre-Cold War form and keep out of European military affairs
unless absolutely necessary, redoubled their commitment to the ‘special relationship’,
unconvinced that the newly revamped European Union offered a credible alternative
source of military security. Significant voices in the USA advocated a return to
isolationism but, mindful of the recent historical consequences of distortions in the
European balance of power, the desire to project their inﬂuence rather than hold it
back for emergencies held sway.
Well, is it?
The Cold War ‘hangover’ offers a vindication of the post-revisionist view that the
conﬂict was, in essence, just another balance of power struggle. The balance has
tilted but elements of the struggle remain. Clark, in 2001, argued that the Cold War
had not yet been fully resolved because the process of peacemaking (as opposed to
an event such as the Malta Summit or Paris Treaty) had not been completed (Clark
2001: 6–11). The lack of a systematic attempt to mould a genuinely New World Order
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in the 1990s can be explained in a number of ways, Clark posits. First, the fact that
this was a cold rather than ‘hot’ war served as a disincentive to the protagonists
to encourage a thaw. ‘Since the Cold War was not a proper war it is ﬁtting that it
should be brought to an end by a peace that is not a proper peace’ (Clark 201: 4). The
originator of the term Cold War, Don Juan Manuel, noted this problematic phenomenon
half a millennium earlier. ‘War that is very strong and very hot ends either with
death or peace, whereas cold war neither brings peace nor gives honour to the one
who makes it’ (Halliday 1986: 2). Second, the Cold War was also an unusual war in
that it was resolved through negotiation and a voluntary, rather than imposed, climb
down by one side. The fact that fruitful negotiations between warring parties preceded
rather than proceeded the conﬂict served to make them appear superﬂuous later on.
Third, even ‘normal’ multilateral wars are rarely ended at a stroke. Complete harmony
is unlikely to succeed the hostility and certain unresolved issues are likely to live on.
Prins’ own answer to his question on whether the Cold War could be replayed is
that a sequel is indeed possible, but is ‘unlikely to be cast with the same team of
actors’(Prins 2002: 48). Clark makes a convincing case that there is often a certain
‘time lag’ following major multilateral conﬂict before real peace is achieved but could
it be that the Cold War will not so much fade away as metamorphose into another
global conﬂict?
This view was most notably articulated by the US Realist Huntington in his
inﬂuential ‘Clash of the Civilizations’ thesis (Huntington 1993). Huntington contends
that transnational cultural conﬂict is now where the logic of the security dilemma
can best be applied, rather than inter-state rivalry. Major antagonism between democracy
and Communism may be over but there is no ‘end of history’ and the civilization
of Liberal democracy faces other challenges to its hegemony, particularly from the
‘civilization’ of Islam. The notion of a ‘green peril’ replacing the ‘red peril’ attracted
great interest in both the ‘civilizations’ cited as irreconcilable, particularly with the
rise of anti-western Islamic fundamentalism led by al-Qa’ida and ‘Islamaphobia’ in
some western countries.
Democratic war?
While the idea of cultural conﬂict has risen in prominence, a corollary to this is that
not everyone is convinced that democratization is the route to ‘perpetual peace’.
Although it may be true that democracies do not ﬁght each other, they are equally
prone to be embroiled in war as non-democracies and have a propensity to fight
autocracies. The restraint shown by democracies in resolving disputes with states
with similar political systems is frequently not exhibited in resolving disputes with
non-democracies. Indeed evidence can be found to suggest that some democracies
are predisposed towards violent resolutions of disputes when dealing with dictatorships.
Supportive cases include the 1956 Suez dispute, when France, Israel and the
UK invaded Egypt, Israeli incursions into the Lebanon and the twenty-ﬁrst century
US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Democratic peace evangelists Russett and Oneal
admit that two autocracies are more likely to have peaceful relations that one
democracy and one autocracy (Oneal and Russett 1997: 283). In addition, democratizing
states have been shown to be more prone to conﬂict than stable autocracies
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due to the nationalistic zeal which typically accompanies revolution (Snyder 2000,
Zakaria 1997). Social Constructivists have highlighted the phenomenon of ‘warlike
democracies’ to demonstrate how ideas and perception undermine the logic of
democratic peace. ‘[D]emocracies to a large degree create their enemies and their
friends – “them” and “us” – by inferring either aggressive or defensive motives
from the domestic structures of their counterparts’ (Risse 1999: 19–20). Risse does,
however, concede that democracies are overwhelmingly peaceful in their relations
with other democracies. Perpetual peace, then, might only become a reality when
there are only ‘us’ and no ‘them’ in the world. This ‘end of history’ is not yet with us.
From balance to an imbalance of power
The chief cause of Realist caution or fear for the ‘New World Order’ was that it
threatened a central tenet of their recipe for world order, the balance of power. The
unipolar world that has emerged, according to orthodox Realist logic, should prove
unsustainable and prompt other states to topple the USA’s pole position. This has
not happened, of course, but the fear persists among some statesmen and Realist
commentators that American preponderance is bound to breed resentment and be
a source of general global instability. Some western governments have voiced
concern over the implications of US freedom to manoeuver on the world stage with
French statesmen and commentators, in particular, making reference to the dangers
inherent in there being a world ‘hyperpower’. Kagan, an American academic with
strong political connections to the State Department, has articulated the concern that
a hyperpower is reﬂexively drawn to an aggressive foreign policy.
A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a
tolerable danger, because hunting it with a knife is riskier than lying low and
hoping it never attacks. The same man armed with a riﬂe, however, will likely
make a different calculation.
(Kagan 2003: 2)
This becomes problematic when the man takes to shooting at targets just in case
they turn out to be a bear. These concerns came to greatest prominence in 2003
when the USA sidestepped both the UN and NATO in prosecuting war against Iraq.
Other states, in no way aligned to the USA, have been more vitriolic than the French
in their criticism of their foreign policy. President Bush’s assertion in the aftermath
of the Afghanistan war in 2002, and lead-up to the Iraqi war, that Iran was part of an
‘axis of evil’ prompted Iranian Foreign Minister, Kamal Kharazi, to state that ‘[t]he
world will not accept US hegemony’ (Theodoulou 2002). US preponderance is such
that their hegemony looks unchallengeable but there is little doubt that it has bred
resentment in some parts of the world that threatens to puncture the idea of post
Cold War peace.
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Back to the drawing board: arms control
The clearest manifestation of the dangers considered by many to be inherent in the
breakdown of the Cold War bipolar balance of power has been the strain put on global
arms control agreements by the new alignment. The balance of power has been
explicitly recognized in multilateral treaties among the great military powers going
back to the 1920s, but was most institutionalized into the relations of the two Cold
War nuclear superpowers, despite the level of hostility that existed between them.
Post-First World War Idealism spawned an attempt to outlaw the recourse to war
altogether in the 1928 General Treaty for the Renunciation of War (Kellogg-Briand
Pact) but this period also witnessed the birth of more Realist-minded arms control
agreements between the great powers. The Washington Conference of 1922 sought
to avoid the sort of tension created by the spiralling of the ‘naval race’ between Great
Britain and Germany which contributed to the Great War by setting legal parameters
for the legitimate build-up of naval power. Explicit recognition of the importance of
the balance of power, even in an age of apparent collective security, was evident
in the terms of the conference which limited the world’s main naval powers not in
absolute terms but relative to each other. The ﬁve major naval powers (Germany was
by now severely militarily restrained by the terms of the Versailles Treaty) agreed
to limit their military naval development relative to each other according to the
following numerical ratios UK (5), USA (5), France (3), Japan (1.75) and Italy (1.75).
The remarkable rise in military power of Germany and the USSR in the 1930s
made the Washington Conference an irrelevance but, when the Second World War
ended, the notion of giving legal rigour to the balance of power logic was revisited.
A combination of bilateral and multilateral arms control agreements involving much
of the international community contributed to the bipolar ‘balance of power’ that
marked the Cold War and have persisted since its declared end, despite the onset of
unipolarity. The Cold War balance was only achieved from the 1960s when the USSR’s
nuclear arsenal began to match that of the USA’s and paved the way for agreements
reminiscent of the Washington Conference, based on the cold logic of the nuclear
‘balance of terror’. Nuclear weapons by then had come to serve a different role in
superpower strategy and diplomacy than they had in the 1940s and 1950s. The fact
that the USSR had caught up meant that the USA could no longer use its superiority
for diplomatic ‘compellance’ and that these unprecedented power capabilities would
be deployed in a more defensive manner, to deter the Soviet Union.
Deterrence, like arms control, was not new to the Cold War period but took
on an added dimension to displays of ‘gun boat diplomacy’ in earlier ages, because
of the sheer scale of the threat now being projected. Both superpowers had the
capability to annihilate the other state and its people, necessitating the added
ingredient of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD) to keep the balance. MAD,
which did indeed appear mad to many at the time, nevertheless gave meaning to
nuclear deterrence. Both superpowers to be deterred from attacking the other
needed to know that initiating war would be futile since they, as well as the their
enemy, would face annihilation. For the logic of MAD to operate, both the USA and
USSR needed to have a ‘second strike capability’, to be able to respond to any attack
by the other. In other words, both sides needed to be in a position where they could
not only obliterate the other in a ﬁrst strike but also do so in response to the other
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side initiating hostilities. Hence, in spite of improved Soviet–US relations in the
aftermath of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the gradual acceptance of military
parity by both sides, the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems
accelerated until the end of the decade. By the 1970s, however, the Strategic Arms
Limitation Talks (SALT) of 1972 and 1979 established the ﬁrst meaningful bilateral
arms control agreements with ceilings placed on the production of a range of
weaponry.
As well as maintaining an equilibrium between the superpowers, the balance
of terror rested on keeping the balance biploar, since MAD logic would be lost in a
multipolar system. Hence multilateral arms control agreements keeping the ‘nuclear
weapons club’ an exclusive one formed an equally important dimension of Cold War
military security diplomacy. The 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty prohibited the overground
testing of nuclear weapons by the then three nuclear powers, USA, USSR
and UK. By the signing of the 1968 Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty
(NPT) two other nuclear powers, France and China, had joined the club and agreed
to the NPT’s key rule constraining its members, like magicians in the ‘Magic Circle’,
from revealing their secrets to outsiders. The same five states that made up the
disharmonious concert of permanent members in the Security Council found it
far easier to reach accord in nuclear diplomacy since, like magicians, they may be in
competition with each other but could all lose out from openly showing how anyone
could pull a rabbit out of their hat.
The end of the Cold War permitted the two principal protagonists to greatly
scale down their armaments in bilateral accords: the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks
(START), a decade after SALT II had been abandoned by the USA in the ﬁnal phase
of the conﬂict. Both sides, persuaded that they no longer had the need for a second
strike capability against the other, agreed to massive cuts in their arsenals safe in the
knowledge that they would still have enough ﬁrepower to deter any other military
threats that existed in the world.
While bilateral arms control initially prospered in the post-Cold War afterglow,
the multilateral regimes became strained by the new military power conﬁgurations
of the 1990s. Non-proliferation had been one thing the ﬁve ofﬁcial nuclear powers
could agree on during the Cold War, but now their commitment began to waiver.
Chinese state officials, by now focusing their concerns on the Asian rather than
global balance of power, are widely suspected of having assisted the Pakistani
government in developing nuclear weapons to counter India’s unofﬁcial though wellknown
nuclear capability. Throughout the 1990s the nuclear club became far less
exclusive. Pakistan and India openly tested their new weapons and, in doing so, the
latter denounced the ‘nuclear apartheid’ of the NPT in privileging the ‘big ﬁve’ (Singh
1998). The break-up of the USSR saw some of its nuclear arsenal apparently go
missing when a recount was taken after 15 new states had succeeded the superpower.
A protocol to START tidied this up by giving incentives to get Belarus, Ukraine and
Kazakhstan to agree not to be nuclear states but the nightmare scenario emerged
that some Soviet nuclear material could have got onto the global black market (see
Chapter 10).
By the 1990s it was also apparent that Israel and North Korea, too, were nuclear
powers and that Iraq and Iran were on the way to following suit. The NPT offers
the incentive to non-nuclear states of aid for peaceful nuclear power production in
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exchange for not developing military uses for this resource. This, however, was not
an incentive for India or Pakistan to sign up, and joining the nuclear club was widely
greeted with jubilation among the peoples of the sub-continent. Not all western
military strategists were alarmed at this particular breach of the magicians’ code.
The cause for greater reﬂection in the recourse to nuclear rather than conventional
weapons might bring some stability to Indo-Pakistani relations, many reasoned. More
worryingly for the old order was that North Korea and Iraq, who were signatory to
the NPT, had managed to evade detection and gone down the road of developing the
weapons unbeknown to the world. The Koreans trumpeted their achievement in an
exercise of mini-compellance aimed at securing aid concessions from an alarmed
West, and Iraq’s progress was stumbled across by invaders during the Gulf War.
These developments showed up a central problem of the NPT, and of arms
control in general, that of implementing and verifying agreements. Counting naval
destroyers in the 1920s was relatively straightforward but modern Weapons of Mass
Destruction (WMD) are more easily kept out of sight even in an age of satellite
observation. The NPT limps on with some successes, such as South Africa’s unilateral
disarmament of 1991, but other contemporary multilateral regimes look increasingly
irrelevant. The USA has failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT),
the successor to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and it has yet to come into force. Other
non-nuclear WMD regimes are limited in their effectiveness. The Biological Weapons
Convention came into force in 1975 but has no formal veriﬁcation system and looks
unlikely ever to achieve any effective veriﬁcation since biological weapons are far
harder to detect than the nuclear weapons which evaded detection in North Korea
and Iraq. Chemical weaponry arms control dates back to the 1925 Geneva Protocol
which, in the aftermath of its use in the First World War, prohibited the military
application of poison gas. Today, international legal force is centred on the 1993
Chemical Weapons Convention which bans all forms of military chemical applications
and commits ratifying countries who stockpile such weapons to destroy them. The
regime does feature an inspection system but has been patchily implemented by the
key parties and main chemical weapons holders, the USA and Russia, and not ratiﬁed
at all by the possible chemical weapons states of North Korea, Iraq, Israel, Libya,
Egypt and Syria.
The world’s sole superpower has, in recent years, embarked on a far more
unilateralist WMD strategy, in line with its preponderance of military power. As well
as snubbing the CTBT and showing limited interest in developing the biological
and chemical weapons regimes, the USA has also changed direction in bilateral
agreements with its former Cold War foe. START II in 1993 was due to deepen the
cuts of Russian and US nuclear weapons but was abandoned by the Americans
and eventually replaced with a lesser agreement, the Strategic Offensive Reduction
Treaty (SORT), in 2002. SORT marked a mutual acceptance of the gulf in military
power between the two former rivals and abandoned the notion of parity with Russia
accepting the notion of US ‘ﬂexibility’, in which bilateral ceilings can be exceeded by
bringing weapons out of storage in an emergency (this power is also open to Russia
but is of much more value to the US since they will have far more weapons in storage).
US nuclear strategy has moved into a new era with hopes based on the potential
for physical defence rather than on psychological deterrence in the form of a missile
shield. The idea of deploying satellite-based interceptors to protect the US (and
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potentially its allies) from attack was ﬁrst mooted in the 1980s with SDI and did much
to break the USSR in the arms race, even though the capability was not really there
at the time. US pursuance of missile defence has divided opinion across the world.
Many statesmen and commentators are horrified at the prospect of effectively
abandoning 40 years of carefully constructed, if imperfect, agreements limiting the
spread of deadly weapons. In a prescient lead article just days before the September
11th 2001 al-Qa’ida strikes on the USA, the normally pro-American Economist
newspaper voiced its concerns over missile defence:
concentrating on the possibility of future missile threats seems to be blinding
the Bush team to other dangers. There are plenty of other ways to deliver a
nuclear, chemical or bug bomb. . . . What folly for America to spend billions on
missile defences, while unraveling the rules which limit the weapons that may
someday get through or around them.
(The Economist 2001)
US proponents of missile defence have argued that the Cold War logic underpinning
existing arms control agreements has no application in the contemporary system
and thus offers little basis for enhancing international security. Enthusiasm for
the US initiative does not come only from American unilateralists, the avowedly
multilateral British Liberal politician, Paddy Ashdown, has added his support; ‘the
world is no longer bi-polar. It is a disobedient, fractured and splintering place. And it
is the fractures and splinters, not the giants, who now threaten the peace’ (Ashdown
2001).
Some are sceptical as to whether there really was a superpower consensus
on MAD during the Cold War and others have suggested that, even if there was, it
was as much by luck as design that a peace of sorts was maintained for 45 years. The
USSR, while talking in terms of parity and agreeing ceilings on established weaponry,
developed new forms of missile in the late 1970s and continued to consider that
superiority was possible through technological innovation. The fact that the Warsaw
Pact countries put far more emphasis on conventional forces and central European
battle preparations than NATO implies that the Soviet government was less
convinced than their US counterparts by the logic of deterrence. Within the US too
there were signiﬁcant dissenting opinions on the applicability of MAD. The USSR’s
weapons developments of the late 1970s and invasion of Afghanistan prompted a
new strand of thinking in military security circles that began to speak of ‘Nuclear
Utilization Theory’, which envisaged pre-emptive limited nuclear strikes to stop
inevitable Soviet aggression (Kennan 1984). Additionally, historical research on the
Cold War has uncovered evidence that the world was brought closer than anyone
even imagined to the brink of global nuclear war. In 2002 it emerged that a Soviet
nuclear submarine sailing near Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis had a depth
charge dropped on it by a US destroyer, which did not realize the vessel’s capability.
A decision on whether to launch a nuclear strike in response required the consensus
of all commanders on a submarine and, in the vote which followed the American
action, one of the three Soviet commanders on board vetoed such a strike (Rennie
2002). Did Commander Arkhipov save the world? Similarly, even in the absence of
a ‘real’ crisis as a backdrop the 1983 NATO military exercise ‘Able Archer’ nearly
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provoked a nuclear response when it was initially interpreted by the Kremlin as a
genuine attack (Prins 2002: 32–34).
People make mistakes and it is in this context that the rationality of deterrence
maybe breaks down. With the proliferation of balances of terror around the world
(India versus Pakistan over Kashmir, Israel versus Iran or Syria over Palestine, China
versus USA over Taiwan, North Korea versus USA over South Korea) the possibility
of accidental war has multiplied, even if one were to accept the logic of nuclear
deterrence and posit that deliberate war is less likely. The logic of deterrence is
shakier still if the potential threat of WMD held by non-state actors is taken into
consideration. The suicide bombers who inﬂicted the gravest external military strike
on mainland USA in its history in 2001 could not have been deterred or stopped by a
missile shield and they possessed only pocket knives and ingenuity. At the same
time, though apparently unconnected, anthrax was being distributed throughout
the USA by a domestic letterbomber and conventional notions of military security
appeared to be crashing down.
Where do you draw the line?
The persistence of territorial disputes
In considering the optimism generated by the decline in number of conflicts
since 1990, it is worth bearing in mind that this is a relative decline from an all-time
high of over 150 conﬂicts a year at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s
(Gurr et al. 2001). Border disputes remain very much a feature of today’s world.
As already referred to, some explicitly Cold War disputes linger on more than
a decade after the apparent end of that conflict, while other disputes subsumed
by the global struggle persist in spite of changes in the global political backdrop.
Arab–Israeli peace remains far from certain and the conﬂict retains a one-sided proxy
element to it with continued US support for Israel, even in the absence of a Cold War
dimension.
Some conﬂicts have emerged or worsened because of rather than in spite of
improved Russo-American relations. The rise in the 1990s of the phenomenon of
‘failed states’, where domestic sovereign control breaks down indeﬁnitely, provides
the clearest cases of this. In some parts of the world superpower competition
for inﬂuence was succeeded from the end of the 1980s by disinterest. The fate of
Afghanistan epitomized this with a 1980s proxy war transformed into an ignored
1990s civil war, only to be internationalized again in 2001 when superpower interest
for non-Afghani reasons was re-ignited. War between Ethiopia and Eritrea and
internal strife in Somalia and Sudan, although less explicitly post-Cold War conﬂicts,
also bore the hallmarks of ‘New World Order’ global indifference.
A particular source of instability in the contemporary world is the seeming
intractability of some conﬂicts. The longer a war persists the more difﬁcult peacemaking
becomes and ‘perpetual war’ seems a more apt description for some parts of
the globe than the onset of perpetual peace. Indo-Pakistani rivalry over the status
of Kashmir is as old as both countries and the conﬂict is now more insoluble than
ever given that it has now taken the form of a ‘Cold War-esque’ nuclear rivalry. The
internationalized civil war in the Congo shows no sign of abating over 40 years
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after the end of appalling colonial rule by Belgium and a brief but fruitless display of
Cold War internationalism left behind, perhaps, the world’s ﬁrst ‘failed state’.
Virulent nationalism has enjoyed something of a revival in Europe since 1990,
prompting the view that the Cold War might actually have kept the lid on a number
of conflicts now free to boil over. ‘[T]he Cold War period might be seen as an
aberration from a story that is now, in some respects being resumed’ (Clark 2001: 24).
The Yugoslav secessionist wars of the 1990s in many ways did appear to be a revival
of the Balkan Wars which preceded the First World War and the civil war, which
occurred alongside the Second World War. Similarly, old scores left unsettled by
their grandparents were taken up by nationalists as ethnic strife re-emerged in
Chechenya, Moldova, Romania and Georgia and between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The more things change the more they stay the same. (See Table 2.3.)
An end to ‘high politics’?
Military threats to security have certainly not gone away in the years since the demise
of East European Communism. However, although it persists in a number of forms,
the Cold War’s ultimate security threat of global nuclear Armageddon has receded
and this has transformed defence policy in many states of the world. Whereas it could
be said to be ‘business as usual’ in much of Asia and Latin America and ‘a change
for the worse’ in much of Africa, military security policies have changed in the states
most affected by the Cold War, those of Europe and North America. In Eastern
Europe the former Communist states have either switched to the winning side or
become preoccupied with new internal threats from secessionists. The western Cold
War allies’ response to the successful avoidance of that war has been to show a far
greater preparedness to get embroiled in new wars essentially of their choosing.
These ‘New World Order Wars’ and lesser military incursions have been prompted
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Table 2.3 Indicators of contemporary state military power
(a) Proportion of GDP spent on defence (2000) (%)
Top ranked Selected others Bottom ranked
Eritrea (22.9) Pakistan (4.5) Luxembourg, Kazakhstan,
Angola (21.2) Russia (4) Ireland, El Salvador (0.7)
Saudi Arabia (11.6) USA (3.1) Zambia (0.6)
Oman (9.7) France (2.6) Honduras (0.6)
Jordan (9.5) United Kingdom (2.5) Mexico (0.5)
Ethiopia (9.4) India (2.4) Moldova (0.4)
Kuwait (8.2) China (2.1) Gabon (0.3)
Israel (8 ) Germany (1.5) Mauritius (0.2)
Brunei (7.6) Canada (1.2) Costa Rica (0)
Syria (5.5) Japan (1) Iceland (0)
Source: UNDP (2002).
not by national interest, but justice and the maintenance of regional order. At least
for part of the world, the idea that war is an option of last resort and all-subsuming of
other concerns is eroding. For many states the resort to force is not being eliminated
from foreign policy, it is becoming a more pragmatic, mainstream part of it, in line
with Clausewitzian thinking.
From deterrence to the management of security?
As Rasmussen has persuasively argued, the changing nature of military threats is
resulting in the means–ends rationality of traditional state security policy in some
countries being gradually replaced by a ‘reﬂexive rationality’. ‘Risk is becoming the
operative concept of Western security’ (Rasmussen 2001: 285). Deterring or being
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(b) Size of full-time armed forces (2000)
Top ranked Selected others Bottom ranked
China (2.81 million) France (0.29 million) Antigua & Barbuda, Solomon Islands,
Russia (1.52 million) Brazil (0.29 million) Comoros, Costa Rica, Dominica,
USA (1.37 million) Japan (0.24 million) Grenada, Haiti, Iceland, Mauritius,
India (1.30 million) Germany (0.22 million) Maldives, Vanuatu, Panama, St Kitts &
South Korea (0.68 million) UK (0.21 million) Nevis, Seychelles, Saint Lucia,
Pakistan (0.61 million) Saudi Arabia (0.20 million) Sao Tome and Principe, Saint Vincent
Turkey (0.61 million) Eritrea (0.2 million) & the Grenadines, Swaziland
Iran (0.51 million) Israel (0.17 million) (below 1000)
Vietnam (0.48 million) Canada (59,000)
Egypt (0.45 million) Ireland (12,000)
Source: IISS (2001).
(c) Size of nuclear arsenal
State No. of weapons
1 USA 10 640
2 Russia 8 600
3 China 400
4 France 350
5 UK 200
6 Israel 100 (approx.)
7 India 30 (approx.)
8 Pakistan 24 (approx.)
9 North Korea ?
Source: NRDC (2002).
ready to respond to massive military threats is no longer a sufﬁcient basis for the
construction of many states’ defence policy. As the Cold War has receded into history
a more subtle strategy has been both necessary and possible for governments
operating in relative peace. The management of security entails seeking to limit the
risks likely to be encountered in the future as well as tackling imminent problems.
NATO’s transformation since 1990 exempliﬁes this approach. As Forster and
Wallace comment: ‘NATO is becoming more of a European-wide security organization,
less of an alliance’ (Forster and Wallace 2001: 107). The enlargement of NATO,
and its wider extension through the Partnership for Peace programme with nonmembers,
has not been inspired by the organization’s desire to become even more
powerful, it is about the ‘management of the future’ and stabilizing Eastern Europe
(Rasmussen 2001: 289). NATO has also become increasingly involved in non-military
security activities, such as facilitating relief in cases of natural disasters (see Chapter
8). It is, indeed, increasingly doubtful whether NATO is much of a military alliance
at all. The ﬁrst and only time the organization’s collective defence ‘trigger clause’,
Article 5, was enacted was in 2001 in response to the September 11th al-Qa’ida strikes
in the USA. This was purely a symbolic act of solidarity as the USA made it clear
that the organization was not needed in the subsequent war in Afghanistan. When
NATO could not agree on a collective response against Iraq in 2003 it was sidestepped
by the USA and UK in much the same way as NATO had sidestepped the UN in
the 1999 Kosovan War. The Kosovan War stands as the only military engagement
by NATO but the solidarity was, again, more symbolic and diplomatic than a case
of military necessity. The USA, and their erstwhile ally in the informal ‘alliance of
English speaking nations’ the UK, do not need NATO in a military security sense but
the organization still serves their interests as a means of institutionalizing a wider
security community in Europe.
The ‘alliance of English speaking nations’ (including Australia)’s invasion
of Iraq itself represented a dramatic attempt at managing the future, risking the
antagonism of some of their partners in the European security community, and their
own casualties, in order to pre-empt bigger future risks from arising. Iraq did not
present a ‘clear and present danger’ to any of the three invading states but it was
reasoned by them that, if military action was avoided, the country could pose a major
security threat through the development of weapons of mass destruction. The
overthrow of Saddam Hussein was also seen as a means to stabilize the Middle East
and contribute long term to the mitigation of risks associated with anti-western
sentiment in the region. The US missile shield project and the rise of non-military
‘national security’ initiatives from the State Department (for example tackling AIDS
and transnational crime) in recent years, too, suggest that a longer game of state
security is increasingly being played.
Not all states enjoy the luxury of being able to attempt to manage their and
their people’s security but it is an observable trend in some parts of the world. NATO,
from the outset, sought to keep members like Greece and Turkey from ﬁghting each
other but this became more pressing once the Cold War was over and such countries
were stripped of a common enemy. The Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE) sought to build bridges between NATO and the Warsaw Pact
states in the era of détente and looked, brieﬂy, as if it might take on the mantle of
keeping order in Europe at the end of the Cold War, before NATO revamped itself.
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The European Union was forged by the need to manage the future of German
relations with her European neighbours and its expansions have sought to stabilize
the continent, though it too has been superceded in this regard by NATO.
The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has cooperative
peacekeeping mechanisms predating the end of the Cold War but, like NATO, sought
to both deepen and widen security cooperation in the 1990s. The ASEAN Regional
Forum and Councils for Security Cooperation in the Asia Paciﬁc were developed to
build bridges with China, maintain US interest, and generally reduce future uncertainty
in the region. US troops have taken part in the ‘Cobra Gold’ joint military
exercises with Thailand and Singapore, with Chinese ofﬁcials present as observers,
and cooperation on non-military security issues such as piracy and environmental
pollution has been developed (Simon 2002). In Africa the Economic Community of
West African States (ECOWAS) has sought to ﬁll the void of Northern indifference
prompted by the end of the Cold War by enhancing regional stability through the
Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution, Peacekeeping
and Security established in 1999.
Military conﬂict should no longer automatically be seen as ‘high politics’ and
something resorted to when ‘national security’ is threatened. Humanitarian interventions
and missions to maintain general order without ‘national interests’ being
obviously at stake, such as in Kosovo and East Timor, are becoming more common
(see Chapter 5). Wars are increasingly fought for other, less fundamental foreign
policy aims. This was most clearly illustrated by the 2003 Iraq War, prosecuted
ostensibly on the war aim of better implementing an arms control agreement. The
Iraq War also served to show how wars have become ‘routinized’. Despite months
of diplomatic build-up to the conﬂict and in-depth media coverage, it was not clear
when the war had actually started. Since the UK and USA had been bombing Iraq for
12 years, and attracting relatively little political interest in doing so, the boundaries
between war and diplomacy were barely evident.
Other states have decided to spend the post-Cold War peace dividend on nonmilitary
concerns. Most European states’ military expenditure has reduced and at
such a rate in countries like Belgium and Germany that concerns have been raised
within NATO about a ‘free-rider’ problem developing, with countries enjoying the
security provided by collective defence without contributing much to it themselves.
Iceland has not possessed its own armed forces either during or since the Cold War,
allowing the US to simultaneously protect and utilize the island for its geopolitical
value. Costa Rica abandoned its armed forces after a civil war in 1949 (save for
some state paramilitaries used for border controls and internal security) and has
managed to remain an oasis of peace in an otherwise volatile region. Other states have
resorted to calling up private, freelance military forces in time of emergency rather
than incur the costs of building up and constantly modernizing their own armed
forces. Some of the Arab Gulf states adopted such a strategy in the 1990s to improve
defences against potential Iraqi aggression, while the governments of Sierra Leone,
Ivory Coast and Papua New Guinea have recruited from specially designed ﬁrms
such as ‘Sandline International’ and ‘Executive Outcomes’ to help them deal with
civil insurgencies (Singer 2001).
There are few states in the world where the military security agenda is
dominated by a major, imminent threat posed by another state’s military forces.
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Maintaining internal order against the threat of insurgency and/or contributing to
regional or global order or justice is more the order of the day.
Is war inevitable?
The question as to whether human beings are inherently aggressive and war,
therefore, an inevitable manifestation of this, has dogged philosophers, psychologists
and ethologists (scholars of animal behaviour) for centuries. The paradigms of
International Relations are similarly divided.
Realists
Notwithstanding some improvement in the last decade, wars have become more
frequent and more deadly as time has proceeded, contradicting the idea that
humankind has become less savage as it has evolved. From this Realists conclude
that violent conflict is an inevitable feature of international politics. They laud
Clausewitz for his famous dictum that war is ‘a continuation of political intercourse,
with the addition of other means’(Clausewitz 1976: 605) and argue that it should not
be treated as an aberration but as a rational foreign policy option. This position is
not necessarily, as it is sometimes painted, that of the warmonger. The gloriﬁcation
of warfare on the grounds of its usefulness for ‘nation building’, or even for humanity
as a whole by a twisted application of the Darwinian notion of ‘survival of the ﬁttest’,
has permeated Fascism and virulent strains of nationalism but this is not
Clausewitzian Realism. The conviction of the Realists is that war is a last resort but
still very much a resort. According to this view, war is sometimes necessary and its
occurrence cannot be wished away. War, according to Betts, should be viewed as a
‘rational instrument of policy rather than mindless murder’ (Betts 1997: 8). It should
only be resorted to judiciously, and managed through respect for the balance of power
system. When, then, for Realists is war a rational foreign policy option? Aside from
self-defence, Wight famously suggests that the rational basis for initiating war can
be distilled down to three basic motivations: gain, doctrine and fear (Wight 1978:
136–143).
Gain is the most obvious root cause of war. Territorial expansion and conquest
initiated the Second World War, the Napoleonic War and contemporary wars such
as the Gulf War. In these instances, of course, the aggressor overstepped the mark
and, ultimately, did not gain. A war which enhanced the power of the state initiating
the conﬂict, without upsetting the balance of power to a dangerous extent, would
better ﬁt the bill as a Realist war of gain. Clausewitz’s legacy no doubt inﬂuenced his
successors in the Prussian military to prosecute successful wars against France,
Denmark and Austria-Hungary in the 1860s and 1870s, which created a powerful
German state but did not antagonize Britain or the other great powers of the day. The
wars of European imperial expansion also clearly come into this category.
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Doctrine
Doctrine, rather than the explicit acquisition of land, resources or other power
capabilities, is a secondary explanation offered for the initiation of a rational war. The
Cold War, and more particularly its subsidiary conﬂicts fought by the superpowers,
provides a clear example of this, viewed from either the traditional or revisionist
perspective (post-revisionists would classify it as gain). The religiously inspired
Crusades between the Islamic world and Christendom represent a pre-Westphalian
example. Believers in the war of the civilizations thesis consider this sort of intangible,
idealistic conﬂict to be with us today. Aside from clashes of ideology and faith,
humanitarian interventions, such as the 1999 Kosovan War, represent another form
of war of doctrine, fought for moral principles rather than material gain.
Fear is considered by Wight to be a third and distinct cause of war. This is
a fear not of imminent invasion but of the longer-term consequences for the power
of the state in not resorting to armed conﬂict. Wight uses the example of Japan’s
provocation of the USA in the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941 to illustrate this. The
Japanese government wanted war with the USA, not to conquer Hawaii but because
they feared being marginalized and economically dominated by them if they
remained outside the Second World War. More recently, the 2003 Iraq War provided
a new instance of war provoked by ‘a rational apprehension of future evil’ (Wight
1978: 139). The governments of the USA, the UK and Australia concluded that the
best way to disarm the Saddam Hussein regime and diminish its capacity for future
evil was to remove it by force.
Marxists
For Marxists the 2003 Iraq War was initiated for rational reasons but for gain rather
than fear. The idea that it was the economic spoils to be had from implementing
‘regime change’ in one of the world’s most signiﬁcant oil producing countries that
prompted the war was, in fact, cited as an explanation by many beyond the conﬁnes
of the far left. Unlike Realism, however, the Marxist/Structuralist approach considers
economic gain to be the underlying cause of most wars. Lenin famously argued
that the First World War was a war of imperialism with the rival factions from Europe
and the USA seeking to achieve mastery of each other’s colonial possessions. In this
view it is the inherent expansionist tendency of capitalism that prompted European
imperial expansion and then US-led anti-Communist aggression and economic ‘neoimperialism’
in the twentieth century. Contemporary neo-Marxists put particular
emphasis on the influence of the military–industrial complex in pushing states
towards the use of force to secure economic gains. Wars can be a proﬁtable exercise
and it is in the interests of the armed forces and arms industry, two highly inﬂuential
government lobbies, that war remains a foreign policy option. Hence, in this analysis
there were twin economic motivations behind the 2003 Iraq War. Unexpected support
for this proposition can be found in the words of US Republican President Eisenhower
at the height of the Cold War:
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In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted inﬂuence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist.
(Eisenhower 1961)
Pluralists
Pluralists dispute the Marxist proposition that war is an inevitable feature of
international politics in a capitalist world, and the Realist proposition that war is an
inevitable feature of international politics in any sort of world. The brutishness
of human nature in the Realist analysis or the irrelevance of human nature in the
Marxist analysis is rejected and a more optimistic assessment made on the likelihood
of war to remain a central feature of political life in the future. Just as many people
lead blameless lives, so many states avoid violent conﬂicts (for example Switzerland
and Sweden) and, although conﬂict is sometimes unavoidable for the preservation
of justice in the world, it could be consigned to the history books given political
change. To Pluralists the lack of progress of humanity in curbing the resort to war
is more nurture than nature. The arbitrary division of the world into competitive
units has seen the populations of these states dragged into wars by self-interested
governments, particularly non-democratic ones. This serves to exacerbate disputes
beyond what is necessary or rational and leads to wars being prompted by misperception
of an adversary and/or the likely gains to accrue from attacking them.
If war were truly rational every state that initiated conﬂict would win which, of course,
has not been the case. Hence, for Pluralists, a cure exists to rid humanity of the cancer
of war: the removal of its root cause through the erosion of state sovereignty.
Interdependence and, to a greater extent, integration serve to diminish war by revealing
that the mutual gains inherent in cooperation outweigh the spoils of individual
gain and reduce the likelihood of misperception causing unnecessary wars. The
improbability of a new Franco-German confrontation, after three major wars in the
course of a human lifespan, is the classic case used to uphold this view.
Conclusions
The ‘ending’ of the Cold War has not changed the military security threats to the
states or peoples of many states, including those still affected by it (for example
Korea or Cuba) or to those for whom it was never the principal concern (for example
India or Israel). However, the lifting of the over-arching threat posed by that conﬂict
and the nature in which it (at least partially) ended has brought into question a
number of long-held assumptions about the study and conduct of military security
policy.
Most in need of reappraisal is that most well established and still inﬂuential
Realist theory, the balance of power. There is a strong case to be made that the
preservation or restoration of a balance of power did maintain order in previous
phases of history, but this is not sufficient reason to believe that a contemporary
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imbalance will lead to global disorder. Many of the states just down the military
pecking order have no interest or desire to topple the USA, since that country does
not threaten them and they share many of its general aspirations for the world. Even
those among that ‘second tier’ of military powers not as closely aligned to the USA
as the UK, such as France and Russia, enjoy sufﬁciently strong ties to render war
unthinkable. US military hegemony has prompted adventurism that alarms much
of the world, such as in the 2003 war against Iraq, but George Bush Junior, for all his
faults, is not Napoleon or Hitler. The balance of power theory does still have some
applicability at the regional level, such as in the stand-off between India and Pakistan,
but when applied to the global political stage, is falsiﬁed by the much harder evidence
provided by the Kantian peace thesis.
Kantian peace also stands up well to the recent advance of the ‘Clash of
the Civilizations’ thesis. Russett and Oneal, for example, convincingly dismantle
Huntington’s theory by clearly demonstrating that no correlation can be shown
between recent conﬂicts and the apparent civilizational setting of the states concerned
(Russett and Oneal 2001: 239–270). Islamic and western states, on past evidence, are
no more likely to resort to war than any other combination of countries. Huntington
could contend that his thesis was a prediction for the future that can not be falsiﬁed
by empirical analysis of the past, but the speculative and sensationalist nature of his
writing stands in stark contrast to these Pluralists’ more rigorous, reasoned and
optimistic view of the way in which the world is likely to evolve.
The three peace prescriptions of Kant, and his proteges like Russett, appear to
have passed a number of trials but should not, however, be mistaken for panaceas.
Kantian peace does appear to account for the demise of inter-state war but its logic
does not explain the persistence of a number of civil wars. Democracy, trade and
common political institutions have not deterred Basque, Corse, Sikh or some Irish
nationalists from pursuing conﬂict to achieve their aims. In addition it is democracies,
including those not predisposed to ﬁght themselves, who do much to fuel conﬂicts
in the undemocratic world through the lucrative trade in arms, usually justiﬁed on
the national interest grounds of economic expediency. In noting this, however,
neither can we conclude that Marxist economic determinism is the catch-all
explanation it purports to be, even for explicitly imperial wars. In invading the
Falkland Islands in 1982 the Argentinian junta were seeking to acquire a British
possession which had long been an economic burden to its colonial ruler. It was
symbolism which prompted the invasion and principle which prompted the campaign
to recapture the islands.
Theories need to change when they are no longer supported by the facts. The
balance of power has largely lost its applicability on the global stage. The clash of
the civilizations thesis has never had any since its proclamation. Even theories largely
supported by the facts need to be taken with a pinch of the Social Constructivist’s salt.
The ‘struggle for power’ shorthand of Realist analysis is not redundant, as evidenced
by the continued use of the ‘national interest’ justification of the unjust by many
governments, but it is in need of increasing qualification as time goes on. War is
still often considered a rational foreign policy choice for some governments but it is
not resorted to by others, even if there are tangible gains to be had from them doing
so. Germany has not risen again in a quest for military supremacy as much because
its government and people have never wished to as because of its containment. The
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recognition that ideas and culture inform decision making when it comes to
the ultimate decision usually to face a government predates the rise of the Social
Constructivists in the post-Cold War era. Mueller, in arguing for ‘the obsolescence
of major war’, demonstrated that the historical pattern of cyclical war between the
great powers was not being maintained. The nuclear revolution was clearly a factor
in this, making such wars irrational, but Mueller posited that an added (and related)
dimension to this was a normative change towards seeing war as an unacceptable
means of pursuing gain. Slavery had been a proﬁtable venture for many states for a
number of centuries but was eventually consigned to history because compassion
triumphed over economic gain (Mueller 1989). Might war similarly pass into history
as a major political phenomenon?
War waged by states has not disappeared but it has become less frequent and,
at the same time, a more ‘mainstream’ political option for some. Other options for
resolving disputes are increasingly open to governments but limited tactical wars
are also an increasing option for some states. Clausewitz was right to say that war
was a form of politics, but this afﬁrmation need not cause us to conclude that armed
attacks are as inevitable as the differences of opinion that constitute politics.
Assessment of the risks of war is not in the end a matter of predicting the
inevitable or recognizing the fated, but rather of re-emphasizing the fundamental
link between war and politics: politics, which cause war, can equally be
used to prevent it.
(Halliday 2001: 58)
Key points
• The twin global issues of the Cold War and decolonization dominated the
conduct of international relations in the latter half of the twentieth century and
help explain the preoccupation of states today with externally focused military
security.
• The ‘resolution’ of the Cold War and decolonization in the early 1990s brought
optimism that a ‘New Word Order’ would usher in more peaceful inter-state
relations and a greater commitment to globally coordinated peacekeeping.
• Not all analysts shared the optimism generated by the apparent New World
Order. The legacies of the Cold War and decolonization remain prominent and
many neo-Realists contend that the disappearance of the Cold War balance of
power brought with it new, and more destabilizing, military threats.
• Realists consider that war is an inevitable feature of international relations,
containable by respect for the balance of power between states. Marxists
consider war to be inevitable so long as the world remains predominantly capitalist.
Pluralists contend that the spread of democracy and interdependence,
hastened in the post-Cold War world, offer hope for the eradication of inter-state
war, which is becoming less common.
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Notes
1 The other ten Security Council members are elected for two years, by General Assembly
vote subject to Security Council approval, on the basis of geographical quotas. Five are
chosen from Africa and Asia combined, two from Latin America, one from Eastern
Europe and two from ‘Western Europe/others’.
2 Russian pan-Slavism predates the Cold War and can be seen as a common theme of
Russian foreign policy dating back to the Czarist era of the nineteenth century when
support for Serb nationalism was demonstrated.
3 Reports suggest that NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark wanted British troops to
confront the Russians but was ignored by General Michael Jackson, leading the British
contingent (Tran 1999).
Recommended reading
Clark, I. (2001) The Post Cold War Order. The Spoils of Peace, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clausewitz, C.V. (1976) On War, edited and translated by M. Howard and P. Paret, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, London: Hamish Hamilton.
Gaddis, J. (1997) We Now Know – Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford: Clarendon.
Halliday, F. (2001) The World at 2000. Perils and Promises, New York: Palgrave.
Huntington, S. (1993) ‘The Clash of the Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72(3): 22–49.
Kegley, C. and Wittkopf, E. (1999) World Politics. Trend and Transformation, 7th edn, New
York: St Martin’s/Worth (Part IV).
Kennan, G. (‘X’) (1946) ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs 25(4): 566–582.
Prins, G. (2002) The Heart of War. On Power, Conﬂict and Obligation in the Twenty-ﬁrst Century,
London & New York: Routledge.
Rasmussen, M. (2001) ‘Reﬂexive Security: NATO and International Risk Society’, Millennium
Journal of International Studies 30(2): 285–309.
Russett, B. and Oneal, J. (2001) Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence and
International Organisations, New York: Norton.
Stern, G. (2000) The Structure of International Society, 2nd edn, London: Pinter (Chapter 13).
Walzer, M. (1978) Just and Unjust Wars, London: Allen Lane.
Wight, M. (1978) Edited by H. Bull and C. Holbraad, Power Politics, Leicester: Leicester
University Press.
Useful web links
White, M. (2001) ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century’, Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-list.htm
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI): http://www.sipri.se/
United Nations ‘Peace and Security’: http://www.un.org/peace/index.html
NATO: http://www.nato.int/
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