Essay - Creating Your Ideal State

Required Resources Read/review the following resources for this activity:

· Textbook: Chapter 15, 16, 17

· Lesson

Instructions Your country just overthrew its dictator, and you are the newly elected President. Unfortunately, due to the divisions in the country and the years of war, economic, military, and political structures are non-existent. A group of loyalists to the old dictator have been detonating bombs, murdering civilians, assassinating leaders, and terrorizing towns with help from a neighboring country's dictator.

Create a comprehensive plan for your new government. While creating this government identify 1) the governing style of your government and the principles that govern your leaders (see rubric); 2) the functions of various branches of government; 3) how to maintain public good in domestic areas through at least two programs; 4) an economic structure that is most beneficial to your citizens; 5) ways to create national unity; 6) ways to combat terrorism and violence; and, 6) international organizations to join.

See rubric for specific ways to meet the requirements of the paper.

Paper headings: (Use of APA paper format with headings required!)

· Introduction (1 paragraph)

· Introduce your country

· Briefly outline all of the parts of the paper

· Domestic Concerns (1-2 pages)

· Identify governing style and principles that correlate to this style

· Identify the branches of government and its functions

· Development of two public good domestic programs and how they will meet the public good

· Economic structure and reason why this should be used

· Socializing citizens is noted with rationale for how it creates national unity

· Foreign Concerns (1-2 pages)

· Two international organizations are noted, one for economics and one for security

· Descriptions of both organizations

· Rationales for joining these organizations

· Steps to joining

· Two ways your country will combat the neighboring country's terrorist threat and the domestic threat

· Two ways these will be effective

· Conclusion (1 paragraph)

· Summarize information

Writing Requirements (APA format)

· Length: 3-4 pages (not including title page or references page)

· 1-inch margins

· Double spaced

· 12-point Times New Roman font

· Title page

· References page (minimum of 2 scholarly sources)

Grading

Chapter 15. War Politics by Other Means

Learning Objectives

· 1Identify and discuss three theories on the causes of war (Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke).

· 2Contrast World Wars I and II with previous wars in history.

· 3Explain how and why war has fundamentally changed since World War II.

· 4Identify the different types of war most relevant in world politics now, and explain one or two in detail.

· 5Expand on the “just war” theory.

· 6Explain the role of ethics and morality in the conduct of modern warfare.

· 7Make a case for or against the relevance of international treaties on rules and limits in war.

War is the central problem of world politics. In the famous words of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” If anarchy is the absence of government and the rule of law, then world politics is an arena where anarchy reigns. Small wonder that state actors are always conscious of war as an ever-present possibility and view peace as a precarious and perilous condition.

When people think of war, they usually have in mind interstate wars—that is, conflicts between two or more nation-states. Civil wars are conflicts within a single country; they have become more common than international wars today. Guerrilla warfare is a low-tech form of fighting usually waged in rural areas by small, lightly armed mobile squads (often fed and sheltered by sympathetic villagers). Guerrillas typically carry out selective acts of violence, primarily against the army, the police, and the government, in an attempt to weaken or topple the ruler(s). Low-intensity conflicts, a fourth category, occur when one state finances, sponsors, or promotes the sporadic or prolonged use of violence in a rival country (by hiring mercenaries or underwriting guerrillas, for example).

In terms of lives lost, property damaged or destroyed, and money drained away, war is undeniably the most destructive and wasteful of all human activities. One recent study of conflict in today’s world found that 13.4% of global GDP ($14.3 trillion) went into fighting wars in 2014, while 180,000 people were killed in various conflicts (compared with 49,000 in 2010).* Estimates of the war dead in the last century alone fall in the range of 35 million, including 25 million civilians.* General William Tecumseh Sherman knew firsthand the horror of war. As a military leader, he had, in fact, been a fearsome practitioner of it. In a speech delivered fifteen years after the American Civil War, Sherman declared, “There is many a boy who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is hell.”

But not everyone sees war the way an older and wiser General Sherman did. Some of history’s most illustrious (or infamous) personalities have reveled in the “glory” of war or acknowledged its perverse attractions. In the eighth century BCE, the Greek poet Homer noted that men grow tired of sleep, love, singing, and dancing sooner than they do of war. In his poetry, he celebrated the self-sacrifice and courage war demanded. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing some five hundred years later, listed courage as the first, though not the foremost, human virtue. To Aristotle, courage in battle ennobled human beings because it represented the morally correct response to fear in the face of mortal danger—danger that, in turn, imperiled the political community.

Perhaps no writer in modern times rationalized war better than the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who argued, “If states disagree and their particular wills cannot be harmonized, the matter can only be settled by war.” Hegel argued war is necessary because “corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual’ peace.” During times of peace, Hegel reasoned, society too easily grows soft and contentious: “As a result of war, nations are strengthened, but peoples involved in civil strife also acquire peace at home through making war abroad.”*

Hegel contended that “world history is the world court.” For Hegel, the measure of a nation is not some abstract moral standard, but power and prowess. It’s a small step from that notion to the belief that might makes right.

Similarly, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) disdained conventional morality in general and despised the Christian ethic of humility in particular. Thus, Nietzsche celebrated the will to power and praised the curative effects of war on nations and civilizations.*

This theme would be revived with a vengeance half a century later by Adolf Hitler and his ally, Benito Mussolini. Like Hegel and Nietzsche, Mussolini scoffed at pacifism. Said the father of Italian fascism, “War alone brings to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.”*

Although war is a constant in human affairs, it has evolved over time. Technology has transformed its ways and means without mitigating its lethal effects or destructive consequences—indeed, quite the opposite. Today, old forms of guerrilla warfare coexist with ultra high-tech robots, drones, and cyberwar.

This ever-present reality of war persists side by side with the dream of a world without war. Throughout the ages, philosophers and theologians have pondered the possibility of perpetual peace. But if war is ever to be eradicated, we must first isolate its causes.

The Causes of War

Why war? There is no simple answer. An observer living in Europe or the Middle East in the twelfth century would probably have attributed the frequency and ferocity of war at that time to religious zealotry. The Crusades, which began at the end of the eleventh century and continued for two hundred years, were marked by the kind of unmerciful slaughter that, paradoxically, has often accompanied the conviction that “God is on our side.”

But while religion did help fuel many regional and local wars, it played only a minor role in most of the major wars of the twentieth century. Many observers attribute the outbreak of World War I to nationalism run amok. Others stress it was the arms race that preceded that war. Still others blame imperialism—the mad scramble for colonial territories in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Ideology was a factor in World War II, but the main “ism” behind the aggressive policies of Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II was ultranationalism, or what scholar Hans J. Morgenthau called nationalistic universalism. The Korean Conflict (1950–1953) and the Vietnam War (1963–1975) were fought for both geopolitical reasons, or reasons of state, and ideological reasons. Some historians have seen this mix of pragmatism and idealism as a factor in determining the outcome of both of these wars because strategic military decisions were distorted by a crusading anticommunism that defined U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War.

Philosophers and theologians have long sought to discover war’s root causes in hope of finding a cure. After World War II, the most destructive war in history, political scientists used statistical and mathematical models to try to learn more. John Vasquez, a leading advocate of this approach, claimed that philosophy had yielded no breakthroughs: “A substantial advancement in our understanding came only with the development and application of the scientific method.”* In this view, mathematical rigor has “helped refine thinking about war and raised serious questions about existing explanations of war.”*

Other political scientists are not so sure.* James Dougherty and Robert Pfaltzgraff conclude, “Despite the proliferation of statistical studies of war (both inductive and deductive), … [most] are more likely to be relegated to footnotes [in the long run] than regarded as classics.”* Another scholar, Greg Cashman, argues that “social scientific research has not been completely fruitless.” He concedes such studies “have not culminated in the creation of a single, unified theory of war” but thinks they have “certainly added greatly to our understanding.”*

Clearly, there is no simple explanation for war. To probe deeper, we turn to three broad theories of causation. One emphasizes flaws in human nature. A second stresses defects in society and its institutions. A third sees scarcity as the cause of conflict.* After examining each, we look at the findings of several quantitative studies to corroborate or refute them.

Christianity—notably the idea of original sin—has had a profound influence on Western political thought through the ages. According to Saint Augustine (354–430), an early Christian theologian, war is a product of our corrupt nature. Many secular thinkers display a similar pessimism, without citing original sin as the cause. The Greek philosopher Plato attributed wars, at least in part, to the human passion for worldly possessions and creature comforts. The sixteenth-century Italian thinker Niccoló Machiavelli painted an equally depressing picture of the interaction between human nature and politics. In The Prince, he asserted that political success and moral rectitude are often inversely related: rulers tend to prosper in direct proportion to the dirty politics they practice for the sake of self-gratifying political ends.

Whereas some have looked to religion and others to philosophy for an explanation of aggressive human tendencies, still others have turned to psychology. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, believed human beings are born with a “death wish,” or innate self-destructive tendencies, that they redirect into other activities most of the time. During times of conflict, Freud theorized, combatants direct these destructive tendencies against each other. Thus, wars serve a psychotherapeutic function: They offer an outlet for otherwise self-destructive impulses. Critics argue this theory is too clever by half—the soldiers who do the fighting and killing are not the ones who decide to go to war, and the decision makers, careful to stay out of harm’s way, are not the ones who fight. Most soldiers kill because they have a job to do and because they do not want to be killed, not because they are violent or destructive by nature.

Other psychologists have called aggression an innate human drive constantly seeking an outlet, a normal human response to frustration, or the same “territorial imperative” that supposedly accounts for aggressive behavior in the animal kingdom. According to the territorial imperative theory, latent aggressions are lodged deep in human nature (see “Politics and Pop Culture”), and threats to an individual’s or group’s territory (property, loved ones, and so on) can trigger aggressive action.

Politics and Pop Culture War: Coming to a Theater Near You

The term “war theater” denotes a real place where armed conflict takes place. One popular dictionary, for example, defines it as “the entire land, sea, and air area that is or may become involved directly in war operations.” But war often comes to theaters of a different kind too—theaters that have box offices and movie screens.

War is hell, but films about war can be heavenly for movie studios. Gone with the Wind, released in 1939 and set against the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction, was the highest-grossing film ever for a quarter of a century. Adjusted for inflation, it would still be at the very top.

An epic war film about World War II, Saving Private Ryan, grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide and was the second most profitable movie released in 1998. Saving Private Ryan was notable for its grim realism. It gave Steven Spielberg a second Academy Award for Best Director—one of five awards it won. In 2014, the National Film Registry declared it worthy of preservation in the Library of Congress.

Gallipoli (1981) is another equally true-to-life war film—this one set in World War I. The Allies’ failed Gallipoli campaign in 1915 was a killing field in which more than 113,000 soldiers died and 123,598 were wounded in just eight months and two weeks of fighting. The film stars Mel Gibson and Mark Lee as two Australian sprinters who join the army despite being underage.

War is also a popular theme in science fiction films. At its peak, Star Wars was the second highest-grossing film of all time, and it still makes the Top 20. James Cameron’s 2009 science fiction film, Avatar, the biggest box office success of all time, is a story about love and war, a kind of antiwar allegory. In fact, Cameron admits that his intent was to raise questions about the U.S. resort to war after 9/11 and the use of “stand-off” weapons (drones, for example) that separate the person pulling the trigger from the target of the attack: “We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don’t know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America.”

Historically, war is second only to romance in the film industry. Of course, the role of war in popular culture is not confined to movies. If you want learn more about this subject, check out the War and Pop Culture websites at the end of this chapter.

· If war is hell, what does it say about human nature that many of the most popular war movies present realistic depictions of the blood and gore of battle? Think about it.

(Hint: Read “The Neuroscience of Aggression: Why Humans Are Drawn to Violence” and “What Attracts People to Violent Movies” in ScienceDaily at www.science-daily.com.)

Still other observers find the ultimate cause of war not in the human soul or psyche but rather in the brain. People are neither depraved nor disturbed but obtuse—too stupid to understand the futility of war. In the words of a prominent pacifist writing between World Wars I and II:

The obstacle in our path … is not in the moral sphere, but in the intellectual…. It is not because men are ill-disposed that they cannot be educated into a world social consciousness. It is because they—let us be honest and say “we”—are beings of conservative temper and limited intelligence.*

Human Nature

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), living during the Puritan Revolution in England, had a different, but hardly more flattering, explanation for war. He was, above all, a realist who sought to understand human nature as it is, not as it ought to be. The only way to know what people are really like, Hobbes believed, is to look at how they would behave outside civil society as we know it—that is, as brutes of limited intelligence in a state of nature. The conclusions he drew from this exercise are fascinating and continue to influence how we think about politics, war, and the possibility of peace even today.

According to Hobbes, life in the state of nature would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Human beings, like other earth-bound creatures, are governed by a keen instinct for self-preservation. They fear death above all and especially sudden, violent death. This fear does not, however, result in meekness or passivity; on the contrary, aggression and violent behavior are the norm. Hobbes identified “three principal causes” of war:

First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory. The first maketh man invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation. The first cause [men to turn to] Violence to make themselves Masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattell; and the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, at a word, a smile, a different opinion, and other signe of undervalue.*

The state of nature, for Hobbes, is a state of war—what he famously called a “war of every man, against every man.”

Hobbes applied this same logic to international politics in his own time, which was a perpetual state of war. Just as individuals in the state of nature are governed by base motives and drives, he declared, leaders with similar motives and drives govern nations. And just as the state of nature lacks a government to protect people from each other, so the international system lacks a government to protect nations from each other.

Hobbes theorized that three kinds of disputes correspond to the three defects in human nature: aggressive wars, caused by competitive instincts; defensive wars, caused by fears; and agonistic wars, caused by pride and vanity. Through this compact theory, Hobbes sought to explain not only how human beings would act outside the civilizing influence of society and government (human beings constantly at each other’s throats if not for government-imposed law and order) but also why nations sometimes go to war over issues that make no sense to outsiders.

The Hobbesian Legacy

Hans Morgenthau, like Hobbes, argued forcefully that human beings are deeply flawed. According to Morgenthau, “Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover these laws,” and “politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.”* The key to understanding the operation of these laws is the “concept of interest defined as power.” This means human beings are motivated by self-interest, which predisposes human behavior toward an eternal “struggle for power.” Morgenthau made this point particularly clear when he stated, “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.” Like Hobbes before him, Morgenthau rejected the idealist view that “assumes the essential goodness and infinite malleability of human nature.” Instead, he embraced the realist view “that the world, imperfect as it is from the rational point of view, is the result of forces inherent in human nature.”*

According to Morgenthau and the realist school of political theory his writings inspired, human nature and the drive for self-aggrandizement are leading, if not the leading, causes of competition and conflict. Compelling, though not flattering, this view of humankind is not the only plausible explanation of why wars are fought.

Society

Not all political thinkers attribute war to the human psyche or human nature. Some blame modern society in general, organized into a state (an exclusive or “members only” political association), while others contend that particular kinds of political states pose disproportionate dangers to peace. In this section, we examine the different approaches of political theorists and leaders who blame society or the state (the political framework of society) for war’s destructiveness.

Rousseau

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” With this attack on the modern nation-state, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) began the first chapter of his classic Social Contract (1762), in which he directly challenged Hobbes’s assertion that human beings are naturally cunning and violent. Rousseau started from the premise that human beings are naturally “stupid but peaceful” creatures, quite capable of feeling pity for those who are suffering. Hobbes simply erred, in this view, in attributing ambition, fear, and pride to human beings in the state of nature. Rousseau was convinced these are attributes of social man, not natural man (here the term man is used in the classic sense to mean all humans, irrespective of gender). Antisocial behaviors, paradoxically, have social causes; they are sure signs of human corruption. Society, not human nature, is to blame. Rousseau is quite explicit on this point: “It is clear that … to society, must be attributed the assassinations, poisonings, highway robberies, and even the punishments of these crimes.”*

Indeed, Rousseau believed society is the cause of all kinds of problems, including war. Specifically, he blamed the institution of private property—a preoccupation of all eighteenth-century European societies—for the miseries that have beset the human race since it abandoned its natural innocence for the false pleasures of civilization. Property divides human beings, he argued, by creating unnecessary inequalities in wealth, status, and power among citizens within particular nations and, eventually, among nations:

The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared by some-one who, uprooting the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow-men: Beware of listening to this imposter, you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and the earth to no one.*

Specifically, Rousseau postulated that just as the creation of private property led to the founding of the first political society, that founding mandated the creation of additional nation-states. And because each of these nations faced all the others in a state of nature, great tensions arose that eventually led to the “national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals, which make nature tremble and shock reason.”* With the “division of the human race into different societies,” Rousseau concluded:

The most decent men learned to consider it one of their duties to murder their fellow men; at length men were seen to massacre each other by the thousands without knowing why; more murders were committed on a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the entire race of the earth.*

Rousseau’s view that private property is the root of all evil has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. Even political thinkers who reject his specific diagnosis of the nation-state have widely accepted his general theory that “man is good but men are bad.” Several twentieth-century variations on this theme have appeared. As we shall see, each differs in substantial ways from the others, but all assume the fatal flaw leading to war resides in society rather than in human nature.

Nationalism and War

Many modern thinkers hold that war is inherent in the very existence of separate societies with sovereign governments. The manifestation of these potent separatist tendencies is nationalism, the patriotic sentiments citizens feel toward their homeland (sometimes referred to, in its most extreme forms, as jingoism or chauvinism). According to one authority:

Each nation has its own rose-colored mirror. It is the particular quality of such mirrors to reflect images flatteringly: the harsh lines are removed but the character and beauty shine through! To each nation none is so fair as itself…. Each nation considers (to itself or proclaims aloud, depending upon its temperament and inclination) that it is “God’s chosen people” and dwells in “God’s country.”*

Small wonder that nationalism has been called an idolatrous religion. Although it may foster unity and a spirit of self-sacrifice within a society, between societies it has led, directly or indirectly, to militarism, xenophobia, and mutual distrust.

Nationalism can be manipulated in support of a war policy, and warfare can be used to intensify nationalism. The chemistry between them is sufficiently volatile to have caused many internationalists, or theorists favoring peace and cooperation among nations through the active participation of all governments in some sort of world organization, to single out nationalism as the main obstacle to achieving peace and harmony in the world.

To the extent that nationalism is an artificial passion—one socially conditioned rather than inborn—political society is to blame for war. This type of reasoning has led some to suggest a radically simple formula for eliminating war: Do away with the nation-state and you do away with nationalism; do away with nationalism and you do away with war. Others have sought more practical remedies—fix the nation-state rather than abolish it.

Tyranny and War: Wilson

Many identify nationalism as the major cause of modern conflict, but others blame despotism for the two calamitous world wars of the last century. President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) championed this notion and actually tried to build a new world order on its conceptual foundations.

After World War I, Wilson sought to secure lasting peace through a treaty based on his Fourteen Points—principles he hoped would lead to a world without war. The cornerstone of this proposed new world order was the right of national self-determination, or the right of people everywhere to choose the government they wished to live under. Wilson expected self-determination to lead to the creation of democracies, which he viewed as being naturally more prone to peace than dictatorships.

But why should democracies be any more reluctant to go to war than dictatorships? The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) first provided the explanation, one that appears to have deeply impressed Wilson. So germane are Kant’s writings to Wilson’s ideas that one authority suggested, “Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were a faithful transcription of both the letter and spirit of Kant’s Perpetual Peace.”*

Kant postulated that to remain strong, nations must promote education, commerce, and civic freedom. Education, he theorized, would lead to popular enlightenment, and commerce would produce worldwide economic interdependence, all of which would advance the cause of peace. Most important, through expanded political freedom, individual citizens would become more competent in public affairs. And because liberty is most pronounced in republican regimes, such governments would be the most peace loving by nature. The reason is simple: in republics—unlike monarchies or aristocracies—the citizens who decide whether to support a war are the same citizens who must then do the fighting. In Kant’s own words:

A republican constitution does offer the prospect of [peace-loving behavior], and the reason is as follows: If … the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide whether there should be war or not, nothing is more natural than that those who would have to decide to undergo all the deprivations of war will very much hesitate to start such an evil game…. By contrast, under a constitution where the subject is not a citizen and which is therefore not republican, it is the easiest thing in the world to start a war … as a kind of amusement on very insignificant grounds.*

Kant envisioned an evolution, through steady if imperceptible progress, toward a peaceful world order as governments everywhere became increasingly responsive to popular majorities. Eventually, he felt, war would become little more than a historical curiosity.

Kant’s linking of republicanism and peacefulness became Wilson’s political credo. Both Kant and Wilson looked to the reconstruction of the nation-state as the key to a world without war. More specifically, both called for the global extension of democracy, education, and free trade to promote peace. Wilson, in particular, placed enormous faith in the morality and common sense of the ordinary person; he became convinced the ideal of national self-determination would be the key to humanity’s political salvation. He also believed if the world’s peoples were allowed to choose among alternative forms of government, they would universally choose liberal democracy and peace. Finally, if democratic institutions existed in all nations, Wilson felt the moral force of both domestic and world public opinion would serve as a powerful deterrent to armed aggression.

Capitalism, Imperialism, and War: Lenin

Among those who did not agree with Wilson was his contemporary, V. I. Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution and the first ruler of the former Soviet Union. Lenin was as violently opposed to bourgeois democracy as Wilson was enthusiastic about it. Although both supported national self-determination, they held very different interpretations of it. Wilson assumed any nation would choose democracy over any other system. In contrast, Lenin assumed that given a choice between capitalism and Communism, any nation should choose Communism. For Wilson, the pursuit of power was an end in itself and both a necessary and sufficient cause of war; for Lenin, as a follower of Karl Marx, wars were waged solely in the interest of the monopoly capitalists.

In a famous tract titled Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin advanced the Marxist thesis that Western imperialism—the late-nineteenth century scramble for colonial territories—was an unmistakable sign that capitalism was teetering on the brink of extinction. Imperialism, according to Lenin, was a logical outgrowth of the cutthroat competition characteristic of monopoly capitalism. Lenin theorized (correctly) that capitalists would always seek foreign markets, where they can make profitable investments and sell (or dump) industrial surpluses. Thus, through their financial power and the political influence that accompanies it, monopoly capitalists push their societies into war for their own selfish purposes. In Lenin’s words:

When the colonies of the European powers in Africa, for instance, comprised only one-tenth of that territory (as was the case in 1876), colonial policy was able to develop by methods other than those of monopoly—by the “free grabbing” of territories, so to speak. But when nine-tenths of Africa had been seized (approximately by 1900), when the whole world had been divided up, there was inevitably ushered in a period of colonial monopoly and, consequently, a period of particularly intense struggle for the division and the re-division of the world.*

In sum, Lenin held that because war is good business for the capitalists of the world, capitalists make it their business to promote war.

Lenin’s analysis of the causes of war seems far removed from the Wilsonian thesis that tyranny leads inevitably to international conflicts, and yet the two views coincide at one crucial point. Lenin and Wilson both believed a particular defect of a certain type of nation-state produces wars—the form of government for Wilson, the economy and resulting social structure (classes divisions) for Lenin. If it could be eradicated, lasting world peace would ensue. Change is the key.

The Environment

Other theorists argue that war is caused by scarcity and the insecurity brought by fear of cold, hunger, disease, snakes, storms, and the like. This view accords with the ideas of philosopher John Locke.

Locke

In his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), Locke argued forcefully that wars reflect conditions inherent in nature that place human beings in do-or-die situations and make conflict inevitable, rather than defects in human nature or society. Like Hobbes before him, Locke saw the imperfections in human beings and believed self-preservation was the most basic human instinct. At this point, however, the two thinkers diverged. In the words of one authority:

Locke’s state of nature is not as violent as Hobbes’s. If, as it seems, force will commonly be used without right in Locke’s state of nature, it is not because most men are vicious or savage and bloodthirsty; Locke does not, as Hobbes does, speak of every man as the potential murderer of every other man. The main threat to the preservation of life in the state of nature lies not in the murderous tendencies of men but rather … in the poverty and hardship of their natural condition.*

Locke believed poverty and hardship are inevitable in the state of nature because great exertions are required to provide for our daily needs. Then we still have to protect our property, coveted by neighbors who have less and by others who are hungry and poor. Locke thus saw circumstances rooted in scarce resources as the principal cause of human conflict.

Locke’s views on human beings, society, and nature have great bearing on the issues of war and peace. If the origins of war lie within human beings, as Hobbes believed, we can eradicate war only by changing the “inner self.” If the problem lies in society, as Rousseau and Lenin contended, the solution is to reconstitute society (or the state) to remove the particular defects giving rise to aggressive behavior. If the problem lies neither in humans nor in society but in nature, the solution must be to transform nature.

The transformation of nature was precisely how Locke proposed to end human conflict in domestic society. Civil government, he asserted, must create the conditions to encourage economic development. Through economic development, a major cause of social tension—that is, the natural “penury” of the human condition—would be greatly eased. At the same time, if the formal rules of organized society replaced the uncertainties of nature, the need for every human being to constantly guard against the depredations of others would be lessened. Human beings would thus finally leave the state of nature, with all its anarchy and danger.

But in leaving one state of nature, humanity ironically found itself inhabiting another—the often-brutal world of international politics. Although Locke did not apply his theory of politics to the realm of international relations, his reasoning lends itself readily to such an application. Before the invention of government, human beings lived in domestic anarchy; likewise, in the absence of an effective world government, nations exist in international anarchy. In this sense, the relationships among nation-states differ little from relationships among individuals before the formation of civil society. The international state of nature, no less than the original, is a perpetual state of potential war. Thus, each nation-state behaves according to the dictates of self-preservation in an environment of hostility and insecurity, just as each individual presumably did in the state of nature.

One of the most common spoils of war is territory. From all appearances, the desire for more land and resources—property, in the Lockean sense—is one of the most common objectives of war. Recall that Lenin attributed the European scramble for colonial territories toward the end of the nineteenth century to the search for new markets, cheap labor, and raw materials—that is, property. Significantly, Lenin held that the propensity to accumulate capital (money and property) that Locke described was directly responsible for imperialism, which Lenin predicted would lead inevitably to war. Even if Lenin overstated the case against capitalism, one thing is certain: Territoriality has always been associated with war, and it always will be.

When Locke wrote, plenty of land in the world remained unclaimed by Europeans and uncultivated. He noted that even in the state of nature, human relations were probably fairly harmonious, so long as no one crowded anyone else. It stands to reason, however, that as growing populations begin to place ever-greater pressures on easily available resources, the drawing of property lines becomes progressively more important. If, as Locke’s analysis suggests, prehistoric people felt threatened by the pressures of finite resources, imagine how much greater those pressures have become in modern times.

Nature’s Scarcity: Malthusian Nightmares

Many contemporary writers have elaborated on the theme of resource scarcity propounded by Locke and, later, by Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) in his famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Richard Falk, for example, identified “four dimensions of planetary danger,” including the “war system, population pressures, resource scarcities, and environmental overload.”* According to Falk, these are interrelated aspects of a single problem that must be treated as a group.

Falk’s assumptions about the causes of international conflict are consistent with Locke’s political understanding:

International society is, of course, an extreme example of a war system. Conflicts abound. Vital interests are constantly at stake. Inequalities of resources and power create incentives to acquire what a neighboring state possesses.*

Just as humans were constantly vulnerable to the depredations of others in the state of nature, so predatory neighbors continually threaten nation-states. Throughout history, then, violence has played a vital role in the conduct of foreign affairs, because, Falk argued, conditions beyond the control of individual nation-states compel them to regard their own security as directly proportionate to their neighbors’ distress.

Hence, even after the unprecedented destruction wrought by World Wars I and II, “many efforts were made, often with success, to moderate the scope and barbarism of war, but no serious assault was mounted to remove the conditions that cause war.”* What exactly are these conditions? Professor Falk argued that access to food and water supplies had a great bearing on the earliest wars. These considerations remain relevant in the modern world:

Given the present situation of mass undernourishment (more than two-thirds of the world population), it is worth taking account of the ancient link between war and control of food surplus, as well as the age-old human practice of protecting positions of political and economic privilege by military means.*

The population explosion exacerbates problems of food and water in the least developed countries (LDCs). Population pressures underlie the entire crisis of planetary organization, especially in light of what we now know about the linkages between economic development and urbanization, urbanization and pollution, and pollution and global warming. Nor are the LDCs the only (or primary) source of the problem.

Developed countries, led by the United States, are by far the biggest global polluters. China and India, both emerging economic giants, have a combined population of 2.4 billion, roughly three times that of the United States and the European Union put together, and China and India are exempt from the carbon-emission limits established under the Kyoto Protocol (see Chapter 13). Under such conditions, no nation, no matter how powerful, feels terribly secure in our times. The 2008–2009 world financial crisis served as a dramatic reminder of the vulnerability of even the richest and most powerful countries. Not only oil, but also many other raw materials, such as bauxite, copper, and tin, are unequally distributed and in short supply. At the same time, the poorest countries continue to experience shortages in the most basic of all raw materials—food.

In Search of a Definitive Theory

The three alternative views on the ultimate causes of war identified in this chapter are based on one of the most fundamental concepts in Western political philosophy: the role of the individual in society, the role of society in shaping individual behavior, and the role of nature in shaping the individual and society. All three theoretical approaches have some validity, and together they point to a multilevel theory on the origins of war. Individually or together, they help explain why war or the threat of war hangs over every nation like a dreaded sword of Damocles. As long as war continues to plague humankind, the search for solutions and for a definitive theory will continue.

Beyond Politics

It seems reasonable to assume that, all else being equal, nations exhibiting intense nationalism are more warlike than are politically apathetic nations. But all else is seldom equal. Indeed, explanations that depend on nationalism “have done a relatively poor job in explaining the incidence of war.”*

But what about the Wilsonian view that democracies are naturally peaceful, and tyranny is the primary cause of war in the modern world? Through the ages, political thinkers have stressed the relationship between dictatorial rule and belligerent or aggressive behavior. Aristotle called tyrants warmongers who plunge their nations into war “with the object of keeping their subjects constantly occupied and continually in need of a leader.”* Some modern writers, such as Hannah Arendt, argue that totalitarian governments are inherently aggressive.* Two major modern conflicts—World War II and the Korean War—were initiated by totalitarian dictatorships. Stalin in the 1930s, Hitler in the 1940s, Mao in the early 1950s, and Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979 all waged war in the form of bloody purges and mass murder at home. These episodes of lethal state behavior strongly suggest totalitarian rulers are prone to coercive force.

Dictators also exercise absolute control over the armed forces, police, and instruments of propaganda. They have often been war heroes who rode to power on the wings of military victory—successful soldiers who take over governments are rarely squeamish about the use of force. For them, war can provide a popular diversion from the tedium and rigors of everyday life; it can act as an outlet for pent-up domestic hostilities that might otherwise be directed at the dictator; it can help unify society and justify a crackdown on dissidents; and finally, it can rejuvenate a stagnant economy or an uninspired citizenry.

But these observations do not prove despotism often or always causes wars. The Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations blamed the Vietnam War on communist aggression. Critics of U.S. foreign policy, however, blamed it on misguided or provocative U.S. actions in Southeast Asia. Thus, depending on the evidence we accept, the Vietnam War can “prove” either that dictatorships are more prone to war than democracies or that democracies are no more immune to crusading militarism than are dictatorships.

Democracies have not been notably successful at avoiding war. In the second half of the twentieth century, for example, India, the world’s largest democracy, waged several bloody wars against Pakistan, and the United States fought major wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. More recently, the United States spearheaded large-scale military actions against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). Nor have democratic nations always been unwilling participants in war. The United States did not go out of its way to avoid fighting the Spanish-American War of 1898. And it is difficult to overlook U.S. intervention in the Mexican Revolution in 1914, when President Wilson ordered U.S. Marines to seize the Mexican port of Veracruz and later sent a punitive expedition into Mexico against the forces of Pancho Villa.

Research shows democratic nations are not less warlike than either authoritarian or totalitarian states.* In fact, democratic nations engage in military action about as often as other types of government; some evidence suggests they may start wars less frequently but join them more often.* In one respect, however, the Kantian-Wilsonian prodemocracy, antidictatorship theory of war does hold true: In the so-called paradox of democratic peace, democratic states rarely, if ever, fight one another.* There has not been a real war between democracies in more than a century and a half.* One explanation for this paradox goes as follows:

Expectations of war and threats of war between democracies are almost certainly reduced by the presence of a common political culture, by a mutual identity and sympathy, by stronger people-to-people and elite-to-elite bonds, by the ability of interest groups within these countries to form transnational coalitions, by more frequent communication, and by more positive mutual perceptions.*

Public opinion comes into play because government is limited in constitutional democracies, political power is more-or-less widely distributed, popularly elected leaders are inclined to emphasize compromise over confrontation, and constitutional democracies generally respect the individual’s rights. All these factors tend to promote the peaceful resolution of political disputes between democracies.

When democracies go to war, they fight nondemocratic states. This suggests that the degree of political difference (or distance) between governments, as well as economic and cultural differences, may be important.* Such findings support Wilson’s conclusion that dictatorial regimes are the natural enemies of democracies, as well as Lenin’s view that capitalist and communist nations are incompatible. As one study of Latin American politics noted, “The more similar two nations are in economic development, political orientation, Catholic culture, and density, the more aligned their voting in the UN” and the less conflict there will be between them. By the same token, “The more dissimilar two nations are in economic development and size and the greater their joint technological capability to span geographic distance is, the more overt conflict they have with each other.”*

Beyond Economics

If politics provides only a partial and limited explanation for conflict, Lenin’s theory that wars are caused by economic factors, particularly capitalism, explains even less. One problem with this proposition is that wars preceded both capitalism and imperialism, proving that capitalism is certainly not the only cause of war.* Furthermore, there is little in the historical evidence to support Lenin’s economic theory that capitalist states (as opposed to socialist or communist states) are particularly warlike. Although some wars can be explained by national economic motives such as imperialism, most cannot.*

The relationship between capitalism and imperialism is not clear or consistent. Some capitalist states have practiced imperialism and waged war, while others, like Sweden and Switzerland, have avoided both. Lenin’s economic theory has difficulty accounting for such differences or explaining why some socialist states have engaged in unprovoked armed aggression. Examples include the Soviet invasion of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland in 1939; North Korea’s attack on South Korea in 1950; the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979); and China’s attack on Tibet (1956), India (1962), and Vietnam (1979).*

There is little doubt that economics is a cause of specific wars, if not war in general. For instance, the U.S.-led coalition in the Iraq War was driven in part by economic motives: to protect the vast oil fields of Arabia and to keep the vital lifelines linking the Middle East with Europe, Asia, and North America from Saddam Hussein’s control. But other motives are almost always present as well. In the Iraq War these were the belief (false, as it turned out) that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), that he was aiding and abetting international terrorists, that he represented a clear and present danger to Israel, and so on.

There is surprisingly little evidence to support the thesis that one kind of economic system or a country’s particular stage of economic development or economics in general is decisive in motivating nations to fight wars. When academic studies point to economics as a contributing cause of war, they often rely solely on a statistical correlation between economics and war, which, as every scientist knows, does not prove causality.

Since World War II, wars have been fought within the territory of developing states. Does this mean countries with less-advanced economies are more warlike? Not necessarily, because it also appears these wars have often been instigated or even fought by industrialized nations. Post–World War II examples of such conflicts include those fought in Suez, Algeria, the Congo, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Falkland Islands, and Iraq. Although we cannot make a strong correlation between economic development and the frequency of military conflicts, some evidence suggests nations with more-developed economies actually have greater warlike tendencies than countries with less-developed economies.*

The Danger of Oversimplification

Simplistic theories of war abound. Some quantitative theorists have described in fine detail recurring patterns that often lead to war-making military alliances, which are then followed by military buildups, the making of threats, a series of crises, and so on.* Such studies have also shown that certain actions political leaders take in an effort to reduce the possibility of war (for example, making alliances) may actually increase its likelihood.* However, none of these studies proves that making or joining military alliances or any of the other steps associated with the pattern leading to war actually causes war. Fear of war, for example, causes countries to join alliances, but joining alliances does not inevitably lead to war. Thus, virtually all Western democracies joined the NATO alliance and all Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe joined the Warsaw Pact, but NATO and the Warsaw Pact never fought a war. Furthermore, the “typical” pattern is itself somewhat limited, as it represents only those conflicts fought between major states of approximately equal power.*

Most war theorists have long believed large states are more inclined to war than are small states,* and powerful states more inclined to fight than weak ones. That nations confident of winning are most inclined to fight wars makes intuitive sense.* However, defining a state’s power is difficult; political leaders may overestimate their own strength and underestimate the adversary’s (the Vietnam War is a sterling example).* Nations experiencing internal violence are also more likely to be war prone for several reasons. A war may help unify the nation, or internal conflict may make it an easy target.* Nations headed by risk-takers are also more likely to go to war.

Another relevant factor is common borders, particularly when there are many or when they are shared by long-standing rivals.* Nations with large and growing populations, limited access to necessary resources, and a high level of technology have an obvious environmental incentive to pursue expansionist foreign policy, whereas sparsely populated countries tend to fight fewer wars regardless of technology or access to natural resources. When these latter countries do fight, they tend to be victims rather than aggressors.* In sum, a large, powerful nation with a rapidly expanding population and advanced technology, that shares many borders with neighboring states or one border with a traditional enemy (or both), and is governed by a risk-oriented leader is a prime candidate for aggressive war, especially if it faces civil strife or armed rebellion.

Many of the factors we’ve discussed, from human nature to scarce resources, and many of the characteristics associated with war, including population size, economic development, and border problems, are difficult or impossible to change, especially in the short run. The humorist Will Rogers once suggested that world peace could be advanced if nations—like people—could move, but they can’t (although populations can, and do, migrate).

In fact, the false belief that we can eradicate conflict or trace it to a single factor may increase the possibility of war. As European history from 1919 to 1939 illustrates, concentrating solely on rearranging the international system while ignoring the role of human nature can have the unintended effect of clearing obstacles from the path of megalomaniacs bent on aggression.* Had U.S., French, and British leaders in the 1930s heeded Churchill’s warnings about the threat posed by Hitler and stood up to him earlier, they might have been able to defeat Nazi Germany quickly or prevent the war altogether. World War II had multiple causes, which does not mean it was inevitable.

An understanding of the complex causes and factors of war can modestly improve the international system of conflict management by dispelling illusions about the prospects for peace. In such important matters, simple solutions can be worse than no solutions at all; some of history’s foremost political simplifiers have also been among the foremost contributors to war.

Total War: Wars Everybody Fights

Total war is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. It is different from the limited wars of the distant past in several crucial respects. First, it is unlimited in that one or more of the belligerents seek total victory and will stop at nothing short of unconditional surrender. Second, total war is unlimited as to means. States use advanced technology to enhance the range, accuracy, and killing power of modern weapons. Third, total war is unlimited as to participation: whole societies engage in the war effort.

The Napoleonic Wars are the prototype of total war and the first such war ever fought. Napoléon waged an all-out drive for hegemony that recognized no limits on ends or means. He sought total domination of Europe, and he possessed all the resources available to a modern, centralized state at that time. Of course, there were then no weapons of mass destruction, except conventional armies that could be used to this end once the enemy was defeated. Thus, Napoléon’s forces burned much of Moscow, including the Kremlin, to the ground after Russia’s defeat. Most important, Napoléon introduced the idea of mass conscription, drafting thousands of young men into the modern world’s first people’s army. (Prior armies had consisted of professional soldiers and paid mercenaries.) Napoléon also used nationalism, propaganda, and patriotic symbols to mobilize the entire society behind the war effort. These innovations were all harbingers of the future: We can consider the total wars fought in the first half of the twentieth century a single event with an interlude between two incredibly violent spasms—the horrific culmination of processes set in motion more than a century earlier.

After World War II, the concept of total war took on an even more ominous meaning due to major advances in the science and technology of war-fighting capabilities. The advent of the nuclear age utterly transformed both the strategy and tactics of war, the logic of military force and the battlefield. Like the new face of war itself, this transformation was total.

Accidental War: Wars Nobody Wants

We like to think our leaders always know what they are doing, especially when it comes to matters of war and peace. But accidents do happen. What if a Pakistani arms smuggler were passing through India with a package containing “weaponized” anthrax? What if the spores were released in the center of New Delhi, the capital of India, when the Kashmiri taxi driver ran a red light and collided with a truck at a busy intersection? And what if that happened during a crisis with Pakistan? Might India think Pakistan was launching an all-out war? Pakistan had nothing to do with the incident, but India might decide to retaliate immediately and ask questions later (waiting would be extremely risky in such a situation). In this scenario, an all-out nuclear war could result from accident and misperception, rather than from any rational choice on either side.

War by misperception, or war resulting from the misreading of a situation, is perhaps the most common kind of war nobody wants. accidental war is another possibility. An incorrect translation, a message not delivered, a diplomatic signal missed or misinterpreted—accidents of this kind precipitated unintended wars well before the advent of space-age weapons systems. In a technological era dominated by nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, the danger of war by accidental means has gone up dramatically, as have the stakes. Nuclear war by escalation could begin as a limited (and presumably localized) conflict between two nations in which neither side originally intended to use its most destructive weapons. But as casualties mount and battlefield reverses occur, one side (most likely the one losing) could be tempted to up the ante by introducing more powerful weapons, which the other side would have little choice but to match. If both sides possess nuclear weapons, the dynamics could move them toward nuclear war.

Catalytic war can also generate violence and destruction well beyond any nation’s intention. Historically, such wars reflected alliance arrangements. If one member of the alliance was attacked, the other(s) sprang to its defense, enlarging the war. Nowadays, a catalytic war might originate as a localized conflict between, say, two developing countries that have powerful allies. Local wars have always had the potential to turn into regional or even global wars (as happened in both world wars). Or a saboteur or madman might somehow manage to “pull the nuclear trigger.” All such scenarios—sabotage, misperception, accident, escalation, or a catalytic event—show how war can occur without any premeditation or intent.

Nuclear War: Wars Nobody Wins

Weapons of mass destruction have been used only once. The United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. President Truman waited for Japan’s High Command to surrender after the first bomb leveled Hiroshima. When three days later they had not, he gave the order to drop the second bomb. This time Japan surrendered. But it would be a mistake to try to repeat that winning strategy. The reason is very simple. When the U.S. president decided to “go nuclear” in 1945, there were only two atomic bombs in the world, and they were both in the U.S. arsenal. Truman did not have to risk massive retaliation (a response in kind) from Japan or any other country. The United States had a (short-lived) nuclear monopoly.

The former Soviet Union quickly developed its nuclear weapons program. By the end of the 1950s, it had an arsenal of mass-destruction armaments and was even building long-range rockets called intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Moscow actually beat the United States into outer space by launching Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, in 1957. During the 1960s, the United States lost not only its nuclear monopoly (if it had not already been lost a decade earlier), but also its aura of invulnerability. The era of massive retaliation and brinkmanship—reliance on nuclear weapons to intimidate adversaries—was superseded by the era of mutual assured destruction (MAD), or mutual deterrence, in which both superpowers had the ability to withstand a nuclear first strike and still be capable of delivering a second strike that would result in unacceptable damage to the aggressor.

Neither superpower spared any effort to get (or stay) ahead in the nuclear arms race. By the early 1970s, both sides had a tremendous overkill capability; that is, each had enough weapons of mass destruction to destroy the other many times over. Even more alarming, both sides had built nuclear submarines to act as mobile platforms for launching ICBMs and were putting multiple warheads—called multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs)—on both land- and sea-based ICBMs (technically known as submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). But whereas both sides wanted to win the arms race, neither wanted to lose a war with the other, and both knew there would be no winners if deterrence ever failed. This almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1963); it was a close call. As a result, the two sworn enemies quickly established the now-famous hotline—a direct communications link between the White House and the Kremlin—to avert a future calamity, one that might just happen by accident.

Proxy Wars: Wars Others Fight

Civil wars and guerrilla wars typically pit established governments on one side against rebels or insurgents on the other. During the Cold War, the two superpowers frequently intervened directly or indirectly in civil wars or insurgencies in Third World countries. Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s and Afghanistan in the 1970s are two notable examples. In Vietnam, the United States intervened directly with military forces, and the Soviet Union intervened indirectly by sending massive amounts of military and economic aid. In Afghanistan, it was the other way around—the Soviet Union launched a military invasion, and the United States backed the freedom fighters (the mujahideen). Similarly, the Soviet Union intervened in Angola’s civil war in the 1970s, and the United States intervened in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s. These conflicts were sometimes called proxy wars because the superpowers would each back one side while relying on indigenous forces to do the fighting with the help of U.S. or Soviet “advisors.”

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, only one superpower remained, and the ideological rivalry that fueled the Cold War became a thing of the past. Whether a proxy war will occur again is an open question; if so, it will be in a very different context and, in all likelihood, for different principles.

Just Wars: Wars Others Start

So far, we have been looking at war primarily from the standpoint of the perpetrators of aggression. But what about the victims? Few observers would dispute that nations have the right to resist armed aggression. When national survival is at stake, self-defense is morally justified. So, despite Benjamin Franklin’s assertion that “there was never a good war or a bad peace,” some wars may be both necessary and proper, but which ones? Who is to say? And how can we know for sure?

The Just War Doctrine

The venerable doctrine of the just war holds that, under certain circumstances, a war can be “good”—not pleasant or intrinsically desirable, but serving the welfare of a nation and the cause of justice. This concept was advanced by early Christian theologians such as Saint Augustine and refined by medieval philosophers. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and other natural law theorists later reformulated it.

Those who favor the concept of just war unanimously agree defensive wars are justified. A nation that suffers an unprovoked attack is justified in waging war against its assailant. Some theorists further give third-party nations the right to interfere on behalf of hapless victims of military aggression. The 1991 Persian Gulf War, preceded by Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait, is a case in point.

Earlier writers did not always limit the just war doctrine to defensive wars. Saint Augustine abhorred war in all its guises, but he justified even aggressive wars under some circumstances, as when a state “has failed either to make reparation for an injurious action committed by its citizens or to return what has been appropriated.”* Another early Christian theologian, Saint Ambrose (339–397 CE), argued that nations have a moral obligation, not simply a right, to wage aggressive war for the sake of higher principle. “Man has a moral duty,” he wrote, “to employ force to resist active wickedness, for to refrain from hindering evil when possible is tantamount to promoting it.”* Ambrose was aware of the need for limitations on this kind of war. Aggressive wars, he declared, should be fought only for a clearly just cause.

The just war doctrine has five postulates. First, war must be the last resort of a legitimate government; there must be no other effective political alternatives available. Second, the conflict must be just, fought only for deterring or repelling aggression or righting a wrong. Third, the war cannot be futile; there must be some probability the nation undertaking it can succeed. Fourth, the war’s purpose must justify the cost in money and lives; the means employed must be appropriate to the reason the war is fought. Finally, a just war must minimize injury and death to civilians.

In contrast to the simplistic nationalism represented by such slogans as “My country right or wrong,” the just war concept suggests a standard of moral responsibility that transcends narrow national interest. Early Christian theologians based their notions of justice on theological doctrines and scriptural teachings. Modern versions of the doctrine are grounded in a natural-law philosophy holding there are self-evident truths about human welfare that, taken together, point toward the true meaning of the ideal of “justice for all.”

Evaluating the Just War Doctrine

Of the criticisms leveled against the just war doctrine, we focus on three of the most substantial: that the doctrine represents moral relativism, that it embodies an ethnocentric bias, and that it is politically unrealistic.

Moral Relativism

Some critics contend the concept of the just war is based on highly subjective, and hence unverifiable, value judgments. Because governments rarely admit to starting wars and almost always blame the other side, any attempt to assign moral responsibility is bound to reflect the opinions of the observer more than the often uncertain facts of the situation. The only way to avoid this moral relativism is to confine ourselves to describing what happened before and during wars, sticking to accurate and verifiable facts.

Ethnocentric or Nationalistic Bias

Critics also say Western just war theorists reflect only their own culture, ignoring justifications for war advanced by other cultures or ideologies—an accusation of ethnocentric bias. For instance, the traditional Islamic concept of a jihad (“struggle” or “holy war”) against temptation, evil, apostasy, or “infidels” offers a moral rationale for aggressive war rarely acknowledged by Western proponents of the just war doctrine. Just war theorists were similarly criticized for rejecting an interpretation advanced until recently by the former Soviet Union—that just wars are waged by the working class against their oppressors, wars of “national liberation” fought by colonized peoples of the Third World against Western “imperialists,” and wars waged to prevent the overthrow of socialist governments in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Political Naiveté

Several opponents of the just war doctrine raise the practical objection that even a universally accepted standard governing them would be extremely difficult to apply fairly. Just as individuals are not good judges in their own cases, it is argued, so nations are not competent to pass judgment on controversies involving their own interests and well-being. Without an impartial referee, critics contend, the just war doctrine remains a sham advanced by aggressor nations to justify self-serving policies and military interventionism.

Landmarks in History The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials

Following World War II, in history’s most famous attempt to apply moral standards to wartime conduct, Nazi leaders were charged in Nuremberg, Germany, for several types of crimes. First, they were accused of crimes against peace, because they had waged aggressive war in violation of international treaties and obligations. Second, they were charged with war crimes, which encompassed violations of the accepted rules of war, such as brutality toward prisoners of war, wanton destruction of towns, and mistreatment of civilians in conquered lands. Third, they were accused of crimes against humanity, including the persecution and mass murder of huge numbers of noncombatants. Crimes against peace and war crimes were categories widely accepted under the just war doctrine; the category of crimes against humanity was designed to deal with a specific instance of genocide, the Holocaust.

The decision to punish Nazi leaders for genocide was prompted by an understandable desire for retribution. German actions could not be justified by the exigencies of war (which, of course, Hitler had started). The crimes against humanity concept provided firm support for the just war doctrine (and vice versa).

The Nuremberg trials were justifiable, but it is no simple task to apply the crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity labels to concrete and often unique situations. The death camps of the Holocaust violated all standards of law, justice, and decency, (see Figure 15.1). But what about the Allied firebombing of Dresden and many other German cities? Or the brutalities against German civilians tolerated (if not encouraged) by the Soviet army? Or the American firebombing of Japanese cities and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? These acts, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, were not covered under the war crimes labels. Critics argue this fact illustrates an important point: the victors write the history of a war. By the same token, the victors alone decide what is and what is not a war crime.

The United States is quick to label auto-genocide in Cambodia or “ethnic cleansing” (a euphemism for genocide) in Bosnia or genocide in Rwanda and Sudan as war crimes. On the other hand, when U.S. drone attacks targeting Taliban fighters in villages along the Afghan-Pakistan border kill civilians, it is labeled “collateral damage”—which makes it legal. Critics of the Bush administration have argued that the methods used in the war on terror—“extraordinary rendition” (seizing suspected terrorists on foreign soil), leaving detainees in legal limbo by creating a new classification of “illegal combatants,” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding—were war crimes.

As a candidate for the presidency, Barack Obama criticized the harsh methods President Bush approved in carrying out his war on terror. But as Bush’s successor, President Obama disappointed many of his most ardent supporters by failing to close the infamous “Gitmo” detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And in the spring of 2011, Obama backed off another key campaign pledge when he decided to resume military trials for terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Defenders of the just war doctrine point out that moral judgments concerning the conduct of wars have long been thought both natural and necessary: natural in the sense that “for as long as men and women have talked about war, they have talked about it in terms of right and wrong,”* and necessary because without them, all wars would have to be considered equally objectionable (or praiseworthy). Admittedly, we cannot prove scientifically that aggressive wars are any worse than preemptive or preventive wars; nor do we need to prove cold-blooded murder is more reprehensible than killing in self-defense—a distinction both criminal law and common sense support.

In the real world, heads of state often engage in moral talk and immoral behavior. The idea of the just war is worth keeping, therefore, if not as a means of controlling that behavior, then as a method of evaluating it (see “Landmarks in History”).

A War on What? The Politics of Hyperbole

The Bush administration’s response to 9/11 was to declare a “war on terror” (see Chapter 16). But terror is not a state—not a place on the map. Waging “war” on terror is thus not like waging traditional war. In fact, calling it war raises major conceptual and strategic problems. President Bush was not the first U.S. commander-in-chief to use the term war loosely. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy declared a “war on organized crime” in 1961, and every president since John F. Kennedy (Robert’s brother) has embraced the “war on crime” as his own. President Lyndon Baines Johnson waged a “war on poverty.” LBJ’s successor in the White House, Richard Nixon, declared a “war on drugs,” calling drug abuse “public enemy number one in the United States.” These and other domestic “wars” arguably made war appear a kind of permanent condition in a perilous world rather than an extreme step taken only in the most extreme circumstances.

The war on terror identified a subversive organization—al Qaeda—as the source of all evil and a single individual—Osama bin Laden—as the mastermind behind it. Al Qaeda thus became the functional equivalent of world communism, and bin Laden was the new Stalin.

The Bush administration further linked several existing governments—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—to this conspiratorial organization and branded these states the “axis of evil.” (In the 1980s, President Reagan famously called the Soviet Union the “evil empire.”) In addition, the war on terror, like the Cold War before it, would be open-ended. Unlike wars of the past, it would go on for generations, possibly forever. Finally, this new “war” was cast as a contest between good and evil, thus turning it into a religious-ideological crusade in much the same way as the Cold War was cast as a struggle between freedom and capitalism, and totalitarian tyranny and Communism.

The means for fighting the war on terror are also reminiscent of the Cold War, including a major military buildup, a soaring defense budget, and a wholesale reorganization of the nation’s intelligence, police, and defense establishment. The “national security state” was transformed by creating a new Department of Homeland Security. The central idea of this new department was to integrate the operational procedures of agencies, especially the FBI and CIA, which had operated independently or even competitively during the Cold War.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, what began as a surgical military operation to wipe out terrorist training camps in Afghanistan became a new global crusade pitting the United States and its allies against the so-called Axis of Evil—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Arguably, the prudent course of action was a limited response aimed at a finite evil and a specific target.

Not surprisingly, different observers interpreted the war on terror in very different ways. Conservatives were much more likely than liberals to accept the reasons given for launching an all-out “war” after 9/11, especially for the controversial decision to invade Iraq. But, in fairness, the war was not opposed by leading Democrats in Congress, and even liberal politicians, such as then-Senator Hillary Clinton, supported it. It was only after the occupation turned into a civil war that politicians of all stripes began to jump ship.

What are the lessons of this war? What does it tell us about war in general?

First, the Iraq war combined aspects of various war scenarios discussed earlier in this chapter—inadvertent war (war resulting from misperception, misinformation, or miscalculation), accidental war (war touched off unintentionally), catalytic war (war that starts small and gets bigger as other powers are drawn in), and ABC war (a war involving atomic, biological, or chemical weapons, otherwise known as weapons of mass destruction). The concept of a just war also came into play because the attack on Iraq was (wrongly) linked to 9/11. Thus, the war was rationalized as a righteous way to punish an aggressor or to avenge a heinous act.

Second, the invasion of Iraq was conceived of as part of a larger war; a war not against a specific enemy but against a disembodied “ism.” Terrorism, like poverty or crime, is a condition, a fact of life. It does not have a beginning or an end and therefore cannot be eradicated by military means. At best, it can be managed or brought under control. Whether the military as presently constituted is the best instrument for dealing with this type of threat is debatable. In Iraq, traditional military instruments—fighter-bombers, tanks, artillery, and the like—proved highly effective in defeating the Iraqi army but virtually useless in dealing with the guerrilla-style insurrection that followed.

Third, during the course of this war, the Bush administration switched enemies and changed the rationale for fighting. The real enemy was a secretive organization known as al Qaeda rather than another state. To the extent that this enemy had a face, it was the face of Osama bin Laden. For all its military might, the United States was unable to defeat al Qaeda by invading Afghanistan or even to bring the renegade bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 attacks, to justice for a decade until a U.S. Navy Seal team finally killed him in 2011. Instead, the Bush administration shifted the focus of attention from Afghanistan and bin Laden to Iraq and Saddam—in other words, from an elusive enemy who could not be defeated militarily to one who could, or so the architects of the Iraq war believed.

That belief proved to be false, as was the evidence that Saddam harbored WMDs, which had been the reason given for launching the war in the first place. As the fighting dragged on and the death toll mounted, the Bush administration changed the rationale for the war once again. Clearly, the original objective—to locate and destroy Saddam’s WMD labs and stockpiles—disappeared when no such weapons were discovered. The reason for ousting Saddam then became nation-building, to promote freedom and democracy in the world. Later, as the civil war raged, the reason was simply to stabilize the region because a hasty withdrawal would, it was argued, leave a dangerous power vacuum. What no one in Washington was saying, however, was what nearly everyone outside Washington was thinking all along: the real reason for invading and occupying Iraq was oil, still the world’s most important strategic resource.

On the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula, Iraq’s petroleum reserves are second in size only to Saudi Arabia’s. The possibility—indeed, the likelihood—that energy security (represented by Iraqi oil) played a major role in shaping the Bush administration’s antiterrorism strategy points to one final “lesson learned.” The pursuit of security in the modern world is too complex to be reduced to a simple formula or submitted to quick fixes. Any attempt to do so risks producing the opposite effect—that is, greater insecurity.

Weapons of Mass Disruption: Cyberwar

In 2002, the U.S. Department of the Navy created the Naval Network Warfare Command, known as NETWARCOM. A key element of its mission is information operations (IO), “a warfare area that influences, disrupts, corrupts, or usurps an adversary’s decision-making ability while protecting our own.” NETWARCOM’s “five core integrated abilities” include electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception, and operational security.*

In November 2006, Chinese hackers attacked the U.S. Naval War College computer network, effectively forcing it to shut down for several weeks. Apparently, the attack was aimed at gleaning information about naval war games being developed at the Newport, Rhode Island, facility. The U.S. Navy estimates that hackers try to penetrate its computer systems, which are protected by the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command, an average of 600,000 times per hour.

In May 2007, Estonia (see Figure 15.2) was the target of an all-out cyberwar attack—the first ever against a sovereign state, but almost certainly not the last. The source of the attack was unknown, but Estonian authorities believed it was ordered by the Kremlin or launched by Russian nationalists in retaliation for Estonia’s decision to move a World War II bronze statue of a Soviet soldier from a park in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, the previous month. Angry ethnic Russians living in Estonia staged street demonstrations that led to violent clashes with Estonian riot police. The Kremlin denied any involvement in the subsequent cyberattacks, directed against the executive and legislative branches of Estonia’s government, as well as its mobile phone networks, banks, and news organizations.*

Although Estonia is a small country, electronic warfare is a big deal no matter what state happens to be the target. When the intended victim is a NATO member and the source of the hostile action implicates Russians (and perhaps Russia), the possibility of a good outcome is not high. Not surprisingly, the cyberwar against Estonia was a matter of intense interest to defense planning agencies, intelligence services, and computer security specialists the world over.

Finally, in the summer of 2009, the Obama administration unveiled a plan to create a new Pentagon “cyber command” as the centerpiece of its strategy for defending against a future attack on the nation’s computer networks. The plan, still in its infancy, raised major privacy issues, as well as diplomatic questions. President Obama sought to allay fears of “Big Brother” watching what citizens were doing at home, saying the plan “will not—I repeat, will not—include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic.” But a major architect of the new cyberstrategy was not so reassuring on this point: “How do you understand sovereignty in the cyber domain?” General James E. (“Hoss”) Cartwright asked. “It doesn’t tend to pay a lot of attention to geographic boundaries.”*

Another complication raises a delicate diplomatic question: How does the U.S. military respond to a cyberattack initiated in another country without violating international law by invading that country’s space? Otherwise put: Does the concept of sovereignty apply in cyberspace?

Clearly, the danger of cyberwar exists in today’s world. But key questions have to be answered before adequate defenses can be designed and deployed.

War and Democracy

Democracies are by nature peace-loving; authoritarian states are warlike. At least that’s what most Americans believe. Facing an isolationist Congress, President Woodrow Wilson justified America’s (late) entry into World War I by saying that it was necessary to make the world safe for democracy. There is a widely held belief, not without some foundation, that democracies don’t go to war against each other. In 1999, scholar Rudolf Rummel published an essay in Peace magazine arguing that “democracy is a general cure for political or collective violence of any kind.”* Pairs of nations had waged war against each other 353 times between 1816 and 1991, said Rummel, and not one of these conflicts was between two democracies. Is this true? Are democracies antiwar? Are they inherently resistant to organized violence? It all depends:

· (1)

on how democracy is defined,

· (2)

on who’s counting, and

· (3)

on what counts as war.

One thing is certain—democracies can and do fight.

Why Democracies Fight

Often the most vocal patriots are also the most avid defenders of democracy. Typically, when leaders tell citizens and citizens tell each other that war or military intervention is necessary, they say it is to defend freedom or to defeat tyranny. That is sometimes true, but not always. It was clearly true in World War II, for example, but it is now generally conceded that it was not true in Vietnam.

Fear is most definitely a factor when democracies go to war. Fear and prejudice often combine to make a citizenry susceptible to war propaganda. Since World War II, Americans have repeatedly been told that the United States faces grave threats that can only be met with military force. Such an assertion requires careful scrutiny because the consequences of war are always costly and sometimes catastrophic.

Several factors in the modern world work against this kind of “careful scrutiny.” One is propaganda, a tool developed into a major instrument of mass manipulation in the last century. Another is television, a “hot” medium that lends itself to hyperbole—or “hype”—and emotional appeals rather than reason. A third is money.

Democracies by definition have market economies that embrace capitalism and the profit motive as necessary and proper. Many scholars who have studied war agree that greed and profit often play a role in boosting military budgets and fostering public attitudes that favor military attitudes over diplomacy.

Superpower or “Chickenhawk Nation”?

Author James Fallows argues that the United States has become the world’s leading “chickenhawk economy.” popularized the term “chickenhawk nation” and reopened long-festering wounds in American politics: namely, why the military fights unnecessary wars it can’t win, and why society doesn’t care.* The question the article raised was emblazoned on the cover: “Why do the best soldiers in the world keep losing?”

Political satirist Stephen Colbert captures the essence of what it means to be a “chickenhawk” in politics with this statement: “I will do anything in my power to support our military, short of enlisting.”

A chickenhawk, as Fallows uses the term, is a person in a position of public prominence or power who displays two traits:

· Aggressive support for military force as a primary instrument of foreign policy.

· A documentable lack of combat experience (usually despite having the opportunity to fight, or even actively dodging it).

Fallows argues that millennials—the generation of Americans born after 1980—are characterized by a near-total separation from the reality of war and the sacrifices that attend it. Compared with preceding generations, far fewer people born in the years after Vietnam—and after the draft was abolished in January 1973—have a soldier in the family or a close friend in the military. He argues there is now a dangerous disconnect between a society that respects and supports the military but does not serve, and the actual institution itself.

The United States spends as much on defense as the next ten nations combined—three to five times as much as China—and 50% more than during the Cold War and Vietnam. Boasting an annual budget of nearly $600 billion and another $200 billion for pensions and veterans benefits in 2014, the Pentagon is wide open to waste, inefficiency, and mismanagement. But unlike other parts of the government, Fallows observes, the military establishment is not held accountable for its expenditures or its failures either by Congress or the American people.

The upshot is a country mired in endless wars, (Afghanistan being the longest in American history), with soldiers in the field (the “grunts”) given abundant lip service but little public attention. Fallows contends the situation won’t change unless Congress brings back the draft and the people start paying attention again—and the latter won’t happen without the former.

Voices raised in recent years in favor of mandatory military or national service include comedian John Stewart and Congressman Charlie Rangel. They are joined by a growing number of savvy social media political activists who believe that without some kind of draft the United States will continue to find itself embroiled in wars the military can neither win nor end.

War and Diplomacy

In a world of sovereign states, war is not only the absence of peace but also the failure of diplomacy. Finding a way to keep the peace without compromising one’s vital interests or basic principles is the acid test of diplomacy.

Conflict is endemic in international relations, as in everyday life. The mark of a great power is not how many wars it fights and wins but how many conflicts it wins without a fight. The importance of an enlightened foreign policy is the focus of the next chapter.

Summary

Avoiding war is not always an objective of state policy. Some leaders—for example, Italy’s fascist dictator Mussolini—have actually glorified it.

We can divide theories of the causes of war into three categories, those that blame human nature, society, or an unforgiving environment. Thomas Hobbes thought war was a product of human perversity; Jean-Jacques Rousseau maintained that human beings are basically good but society corrupts them; John Locke attributed human aggression to scarcities in nature, including hunger and famine, disease, storms, and droughts (that is, circumstances beyond human control).

All simplistic theories fall short of explaining the variety of factors that cause war—social, political, economic, and psychological. A large, powerful nation that shares boundaries with several neighboring states, is ruled by a risk-oriented leader, has access to modern technology, is experiencing (or expecting) internal conflict, and has a rapidly expanding population is likely to be predisposed toward war.

Under conditions of high tension, war may occur even if none of the principals wants it. Such unintended wars may erupt because of misperception, misunderstanding, accident, escalation, or a catalytic reaction and make it difficult to assign moral responsibility. Often when war occurs, it is not clear who or what actually caused it.

Using war as an instrument of state policy violates international law and morality, but not all wars are equally objectionable. The just war doctrine holds that self-defense and the defense of universal principles are legitimate reasons for going to war. This doctrine is frequently criticized on the grounds of moral relativism, cultural ethnocentrism, and political realism.

International lawyers at Nuremberg developed a new category of war crimes—crimes against humanity. Although the trials were justified, such proceedings contain inherent pitfalls and must be approached with extreme caution.

Chapter 16. Terrorism: War, Crimes, or War Crimes?

Learning Objectives

· 1Trace the origins of terrorism.

· 2Discuss the various ways terrorism can be perceived (e.g., heroic, cowardly, an act of war), and explain how one could see it as anything other than a crime.

· 3Evaluate the war on terror as a general policy, and critique the strategy adopted in pursuit of this policy.

· 4Describe (or prescribe) a sound policy for fighting terrorism effectively.

In February 1993, long before Osama bin Laden became a household name, a yellow Ryder rental van containing a 1,200-pound bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, blasting a 200-foot crater in the basement. More than a thousand people were injured, and six died. Shocked citizens struggled to grasp the idea that a devastating terrorist attack had taken place against a symbol of U.S. economic might and one of the largest and most famous buildings in the world.

Eight and a half years later, on September 11, 2001, the United States watched in horror as the World Trade Center towers were hit again, this time by hijacked commercial airliners loaded with highly volatile jet fuel. The towers burned for a short time and then imploded with an incredible force that rocked downtown Manhattan, killing thousands of people still trapped inside the towers, creating a firestorm of debris, and sending a huge cloud of smoke, dust, and ash skyward that lingered over the city like an eerie, foul-smelling pall for many days.

No one knew in 1993 whether the first World Trade Center bombing was an isolated act or a sign of things to come. Now we know the answer: Terrorist attacks would become a grim reality of life nearly all across the globe in the coming decades (see Table 16.1).

Table 16.1.

Twenty-Five Year Terrorism Timeline—1983–2008.

Twenty-Five Year Terrorism Timeline—1983–2008.

April 18, 1983	Suicide bombing of U.S. embassy in Beirut kills 63.
October 23, 1983	Suicide truck bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut kills 241.
December 21, 1988	Pan Am flight 103 explodes over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, including 11 on the ground.
February 26, 1993	Bomb in a van explodes beneath the World Trade Center in New York City, killing 6 and injuring more than 1,000.
March 12, 1993	13 coordinated bomb explosions in Mumbai (Bombay), India, kill 257 people and injure some 700.
June 23, 1993	Federal investigators break up a plot by Islamic radicals to bomb the United Nations and two Hudson River tunnels.
March 20, 1995	Members of Aum Shinrikyo release deadly sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in five coordinated attacks, killing 12, severely injuring 50, and causing temporary vision problems for many others.
April 19, 1995	A truck bomb destroys the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 and wounding more than 600. Two Americans were charged and convicted.
November 13, 1995	A car bomb explodes outside a U.S. Army training office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 7, including 5 Americans, and wounding 60 others.
April 3, 1996	The FBI arrests Theodore J. Kaczynski, a Montana hermit, and accuses him of an eighteen-year series of bomb attacks carried out by the “Unabomber.”
June 25, 1996	A truck bomb explodes outside an apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and wounding hundreds more.
July 1, 1996	Federal agents arrest 12 members of the Viper Militia, a Phoenix, Arizona, group accused of plotting to blow up government buildings.
July 17, 1996	A pipe bomb explodes at a concert during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, killing 1 and wounding more than 100.
August 7, 1998	The U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are bombed, killing 224 people, mostly Kenyan passers-by, in the capital of Nairobi.
August 15, 1998	A large car bomb explodes in the central shopping district of Omagh, Northern Ireland, killing 29 people and injuring 330.
September 8, 1999	Bombs explode in an apartment block in Moscow, Russia, killing 94 and injuring 152, part of a series of bombings over a two-week period that altogether killed nearly 300 people.
October 12, 2000	A speedboat bomb attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, kills 17.
September 11, 2001	Four commercial jet airliners are hijacked from East Coast airports: two are crashed into the World Trade Center towers; one is crashed into the Pentagon; and the fourth one crashes into a field in Pennsylvania. Thousands are killed or injured.
October 12, 2002	Bomb blast in a Bali resort, blamed on militant Islamic group linked to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, kills an estimated 202 people.
August 8, 2003	Car bomb at Jordanian embassy in Baghdad kills at least 11 people.
August 19, 2003	Terrorist bomb attack destroys UN headquarters in Iraqi capital of Baghdad, killing 22, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top UN envoy in Iraq.
November 15 & 20, 2003	Suicide bombers in Istanbul attack two synagogues, a British-based bank, and the British consulate, killing as many as 50 people and injuring more than 600.
March 11, 2004	Ten bombs explode at train stations in and around Madrid during morning rush hour, killing 198 and wounding many more in Spain’s worst-ever terrorist incident.
July 7, 2005	A series of bombs is detonated in three crowded subway trains and aboard a London bus during peak rush hour, killing at least 191 people and injuring some 1,755.
July 11, 2006	Seven bomb blasts kill 209 people on the Suburban Railway in Mumbai (Bombay), India; another 700 are injured.
September 17, 2008	Al Qaeda in Yemen carries out attack on U.S. embassy in Sanaa, killing 18 people.
November 26–29, 2008	A wave of ten coordinated bombing attacks in Mumbai (Bombay), India, kills at least 173 and injures more than 300; allegedly carried out by Pakistani militants.

SOURCES: Wall Street Journal, July 29, 1996, p. A14; The Economist, September 15, 2001, p. 18; Country Reports on Terrorism, U.S. Department of State 2006, 2007, 2008; author’s updates.

Between 2010 and 2015, terrorist attacks continued worldwide. Many of the worst ones resulted in multiple deaths and injuries and occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In recent years, Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities (including Fallujah, Karbala, Kut, Kirkuk, Najaf, and Tikrit) have suffered frequent car bombings, suicide bombings, and armed attacks. In Afghanistan, three cities—Kabul, Kandahar, Lashkar Gah (the capital of Helmand province)—have been favorite targets of terrorists. In December 2014, a Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, claimed the lives of 132 children and 13 adults.

Of course, terrorism is not confined to any single country or continent. January 2015 was a harsh reminder that Europe, too, is vulnerable. Barely a month after the tragedy in Peshawar, twelve people were killed in a commando-style terrorist attack on the Paris headquarters of a satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. The attack was in retaliation for the paper’s unsparing criticism of Islam and a vulgar caricature of the Prophet Muhammad. France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim minority population and also to the extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant National Front, France’s fastest growing political party. Predictably, this religiously motivated act of mass murder directed against the editor and staff of a secularist French newspaper—and carried out by “foreigners”—triggered a new wave of angst and anger directed at Arabs in France and fed rising anti-Islamic sentiments elsewhere in Europe as well. (Relatively unnoticed on the same day, a suicide bomber killed thirty-seven people and injured sixty-six more in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen.)

In Pakistan, dozens of innocents have died in attacks in remote border regions of North Waziristan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as in Islamabad, Bannu, Hangu, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, and other cities. On December 25, 2010, a female suicide bomber blew herself up in the middle of a crowd at a United Nations food aid center in northwest Pakistan, killing 46 people and injuring more than 100 others.* By mid-November 2014, Pakistan alone recorded 332 major terrorist incidents that claimed the lives 3,283 victims and left another 1,898 injured.

Terrorism is a global problem in today’s world; it can happen anywhere and does happen nearly everywhere. In July 2011, for example, a lone gunman killed 77 people and injured 242 in Norway. In a “manifesto” published electronically the day of the attacks, a right-wing blogger named Anders Behring Breivik expressed extreme antipathy toward Islam as a religion, immigrants in general, Muslims in particular, and “multiculturalism.” In August 2012, a court in Oslo found Breivik sane and guilty of mass murder.

The terrorism contagion in the post-WWII era had its origins not in Islam or the Middle East but in Europe, where Christianity, with its roots in Roman Catholicism, has long been the predominant religion. In the United Kingdom, Irish Republican Army (IRA) ultranationalists conducted a terrorist campaign against British control of Northern Ireland (also known as Ulster) starting in the late 1960s. In Spain, Basque separatists known as the ETA (Basque Homeland and Freedom) have conducted a long-running terrorist campaign against the Madrid government. In Russia, two female suicide bombers wearing explosive belts detonated the devices on the Moscow Metro system on May 29, 2010, at the peak of the morning rush hour, killing 40 and injuring more than 100.

In May 2009, New York City police arrested four ex-convicts allegedly engaged in a plot to blow up two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down a military aircraft. Among the weapons they had locked away in a storage container was a surface-to-air missile. In 2011, a decade after the war on terror was launched, the United States still faces terrorist threats at home while continuing to fight two post 9/11 wars abroad.

What Is Terrorism?

Despite its prevalence, terrorism remains an elusive concept. Some definitions emphasize terrorism’s use of violence in the service of politics. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, terrorism is “the use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate, and subjugate, especially such use as the political weapon or policy.” Another source defines terrorism as “the deliberate attack on innocent civilians for political purposes.”* Terrorism has been defined in many ways, but most definitions take into account several factors, including violence, desire for publicity, political motive, and intimidation aimed at civilian populations.* As we will see later in the chapter, our definition of terrorism implies both a strategy and tactics (see “Ideas and Politics”).

Ideas and Politics Terrorism: Five Definitions

Terrorism, by nature, is difficult to define. Acts of terrorism conjure emotional responses in the victims (those hurt by the violence and those affected by the fear), as well as in the practitioners. Even the U.S. government cannot agree on one single definition. The adage “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” is still alive and well. Listed here are several definitions of terrorism.

· “Terrorism is the use or threatened use of force designed to bring about political change.”—Brian Jenkins

· “Terrorism constitutes the illegitimate use of force to achieve a political objective when innocent people are targeted.”—Walter Laqueur

· “Terrorism is the premeditated, deliberate, systematic murder, mayhem, and threatening of the innocent to create fear and intimidation in order to gain a political or tactical advantage, usually to influence an audience.”—James M. Poland

· “Terrorism is the unlawful use or threat of violence against persons or property to further political or social objectives. It is usually intended to intimidate or coerce a government, individuals, or groups, or to modify their behavior or politics.”—Vice President’s Task Force, 1986

· “Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”—FBI Definition

· In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States declared a “war on terror,” yet none of the five definitions listed here describes terrorism as an act of war. Why not? What is terrorism? Who decides? Why does it matter? Think about it.

(Hint: Ponder whether torture is ever justified as an instrument of the state, or why “Gitmo” detainees are not treated as POWs in the “war on terror.” Research the Third Geneva Convention of 1949.)

SOURCE: http://www.terror.com

Terrorism comes in many forms. Some experts attempt to designate terrorist activities according to whether they

· (1)

are state controlled or directed or

· (2)

involve nationals from more than one country (see Figure 16.1).

Figure 16.1.

Classifying Terrorism.

State terrorism occurs when a government perpetrates terrorist tactics on its own citizens, such as occurred in Hitler’s Germany. In contrast, international terrorism, sometimes called state-sponsored terrorism, happens when a government harbors international terrorists (as the Taliban government in Afghanistan did in the case of Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda organization), finances international terrorist operations, or otherwise supports international terrorism outside its own borders.

During the Cold War, the United States frequently accused the Soviet Union of underwriting anti-U.S. terrorist groups around the world with money and arms. The Soviet Union responded that the U.S. government did the same when it was in its interests to do so. Iran, Libya, Sudan, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba have all been on the United States’ list of suspected state sponsors of terrorism for many years (see Figure 16.2). Afghanistan and Iraq were also on this list prior to the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Libya was taken off the list when leader Muammar el-Qaddafi promised to scrap Libya’s weapons research programs and open the country to international arms inspections in December 2003. In 2011, he again became a pariah in the eyes of the West when he turned his security forces against his own people in an attempt to resist the tide of democratizing reform—the so-called Arab Spring—sweeping across the region. With UN and NATO backing, President Obama ordered air strikes against the Qaddafi regime on humanitarian grounds (to protect the civilian population, especially in parts of the country, mainly in eastern Libya, known to be rebel strongholds). In the end, rebels caught and killed the deposed tyrant in October 2011.

Domestic terrorism is practiced within a single country by terrorists with no ties to any government. The Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks in 1995, the Madrid commuter train bombings in 2004, and the Mumbai Suburban Railway bombings in 2006 (refer to Table 16.1) are examples of this type of terrorism. The aim of domestic terrorism is typically to strike fear and sow seeds of discord in society and to discredit or overthrow existing political institutions. Unlike the United Kingdom, Spain, and several other Western countries, the United States has been largely exempt from such acts but with notable exceptions, including numerous bombings of abortion clinics, the Oklahoma City federal office building bombing in 1995, the summer 1996 bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta, and the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombings that killed 3 people and injured 264 others.

Transnational terrorism arises when terrorists or terrorist groups not backed by any established state and operating in different countries cooperate with each other, or when a single terrorist operates in more than one country. Examples include the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the World Trade Center attacks in 1993 and 2001, and the London subway bombings in 2005 (refer to Table 16.1). The global nature of terrorism today has blurred the distinction between domestic and international forms of terrorism.

Domestic terrorism is often directed against the state. Groups seeking to regain control over their homelands, such as Basques in Spain, Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Sikhs in India, and Chechens in Russia, are motivated by nationalist or separatist aims. This type of terrorism is usually confined to a specific nation, although its practitioners may receive arms, money, and support from other radical groups, private donors abroad, or even foreign governments. But the distinction between domestic terrorism and violent crime is blurred when multiple killings of innocent civilians occur, as it did in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.

Groups seeking to destabilize society in the name of some abstract belief are often inspired by ideological or utopian motives. The specific ideology is less important than the fanatical behavior it encourages. Terrorism is a hallmark of fascism and anarchism, as well as distorted versions of Marxism and Islam.* Examples include the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Shining Path in Peru, the Islamic Jihad in Egypt, Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda (the Base), and certain far-right militia groups in the United States. Often such groups also have international links.

Some terrorist organizations defy simple description. Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), for example, which has violently opposed peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) over the future of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, won a surprise victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 2006. Hamas is a nationalist-separatist movement that seeks the destruction of Israel and the establishment of a radical Islamic state. But it is also motivated by ideology, namely, a brand of Islamic fundamentalism that stresses militancy and jihad (holy war). Classifying terrorist groups may be useful as a tool of analysis, but it is not always easy.

The Origins of Terrorism

There is clearly a link between terrorism and religious fundamentalism; Islamic extremism is an obvious case in point. However, many terrorists are not religious, and few religious fundamentalists engage in acts of terrorism. Still, terrorism appears to have its roots in religion—specifically, in obscure religious sects, the names of which have entered into our vernacular.*

The Thugs, a Hindu sect that was finally destroyed in the nineteenth century after having operated for many centuries in India, were highway ambushers who secretly killed thousands of other Hindus, apparently out of a perverse sense of religious duty. An extremist Jewish group known as the Zealots killed outsiders and helped provoke rebellion against pagan Rome in 66–73 CE. Beginning in the eleventh century, a Shi’ite Muslim sect, the Assassins, murdered outsiders in a campaign to “purify” Islam. Toward the end of the Middle Ages and later during the Reformation, violent sects arose within Christianity as well.*

Modern-day revolutionary terror is usually traced to more secular roots, often to the French Revolution or the writings and deeds of nineteenth-century Russian anarchists.* Some experts contend that the type of contemporary terrorism we see on the nightly news sprouted from seeds planted in the late 1960s; a few even cite 1968 as the year of its inception. The confluence of turbulent and unsettling events in the late 1960s included racial strife in the United States, an escalating conflict in Vietnam, and the Arab-Israeli Six Day War of 1967. The year 1968 brought these portents:

· Three Palestinian terrorists seized an Israeli El Al airliner and forced its crew to fly the plane to Algeria, one of the first of many acts of air piracy.

· The Baader-Meinhof gang announced its presence in West Germany by torching a Frankfurt department store.

· Yasir Arafat, an advocate of armed struggle against Israel, became the leader of the PLO.

· The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. precipitated an outbreak of domestic violence in the United States by such groups as the Black Panthers and the Weathermen.*

· At least three longer-term historical forces helped create a climate conducive to terrorism. First, direct military confrontations and conflicts became infinitely more dangerous in the nuclear age; what starts as a conventional war between two countries (India and Pakistan, for example) might escalate out of control. Therefore, nations whose interests coincided with certain terrorist objectives sometimes provided moral, financial, or military support to these groups. In this manner, terrorism became a kind of proxy for violence between nations. Second, European colonialism had drawn to a close, leaving many newly formed nations to work out a host of unresolved territorial, national, and religious disputes. The result was a variety of low-intensity wars, many punctuated by terrorist activity, within and between these nations. Third, reverence for life and concern for the individual, common to democratic societies, combined with dramatic “up close and personal” worldwide television news coverage to make terrorist incidents major media events. Consequently, the impact of such incidents—the publicity “payoff” from the terrorist’s point of view—has been greatly magnified since the 1960s.

· But it was in the 1970s that terrorism and counterterrorism, or opposing terrorism, became major growth industries. According to one estimate, the number of terrorist incidents multiplied ten-fold between 1971 and 1985.* The level of terrorism remained high throughout the 1980s. Precise figures vary widely and reflect, among other things, differences in how terrorism is defined. Risks International, for example, put the total number of terrorist incidents in 1985 at slightly more than 3,000, but the U.S. government conservatively counted fewer than one-fourth that number.*

· The international terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland culminated in the 9/11 attacks. Both before and after 2001, terrorism plagued Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America far more than it did the United States. Surprisingly, at the end of the 1990s, terrorism was less common in the Middle East than in any other region of the world except North America. However, that changed dramatically after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) reported no fewer than 62,805 worldwide terrorist attacks during the years 2005 to 2009, of which roughly one-third occurred in a single country—Iraq. Given these numbers, it is clear that the war on terror, far from solving the problem, has coincided with a steep rise in terrorism across the globe.

· The Logic of Terrorism

· Why do terrorists act as they do? Terrorist acts are often designed to undermine support and confidence in the existing government by creating a climate of fear and uncertainty. Terrorists use violence as a form of psychological warfare on behalf of an “overvalued idea” or cause. Terrorists are fiercely anti–status quo and despair of peaceful methods; they seek to bring about change or chaos, the latter either as an end in itself or as a prelude to change. They often aim not so much to spark an immediate revolution as to provoke the government into acts of repression, to make it look weak or inept, and to prepare the way for revolution.

· Terrorism strikes at vulnerable societies, not necessarily unjust ones. Indeed, one expert on terrorism noted, “Societies with the least political participation and the most injustice have been the most free from terrorism in our time.”* By logical extension, democratic societies like the United States and the United Kingdom, with long traditions of respect for civil rights and the rule of law, have both been potential and actual targets of terrorist attacks.

Terrorist Tactics

Terrorism has often been described as the weapon of the weak against the strong. Typically, individuals or tiny groups lacking resources act against defenseless targets. Terrorism requires little money and can be funded by actions normally associated with common crime, such as armed robbery and drug trafficking.

Terrorists’ weapons of choice are often crude and cheap (small arms and dynamite). However, as we now know, they can also be highly sophisticated (passenger airplanes used as guided missiles or a particularly lethal form of anthrax). Even before 9/11, terrorism had become a worldwide phenomenon, as news stories of attacks in airports and crowded train terminals, kidnappings of wealthy business executives, and hijacked airliners grew all too familiar.

Although terrorism is usually directed at innocents, it has been blamed for many assassinations of world leaders, including Italy’s former prime minister Aldo Moro (1978), Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten (1979), Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat (1981), Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi (1984), her son the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (1991), and more recently, Pakistan’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto (December 27, 2007). Terrorists have also attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II (1981), former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1984), and her successor John Major (1991). It is possible the White House was one of the intended targets of the September 11 attacks. If so, the conspirators probably hoped to kill the U.S. president.

The relationship between terrorist tactics and objectives is revealed in the Brazilian terrorist Carlos Marighella’s chilling but incisive Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, a forty-eight-page do-it-yourself handbook for aspiring terrorists and revolutionaries. It spells out how to blow up bridges, raise money through kidnappings and bank robberies, and plan the “physical liquidation” of enemies. The book offers a range of practical advice: learn to drive a car, pilot a plane, sail a boat; be a mechanic or radio technician; keep physically fit; learn photography and chemistry; acquire “a perfect knowledge of calligraphy”; study pharmacology, nursing, or medicine. It also stresses the need to “shoot first” and aim straight. In general, terrorists champion violence above all other forms of political activity. Furthermore, revolutionaries such as Marighella glorify violence, not as a necessary evil but as a positive form of liberation and creativity.* According to Marighella, terrorism succeeds when strategies and tactics come together:

The government has little or no alternative except to intensify repression. The police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people, make life in the city unbearable. [The government appears] unjust, incapable of solving problems…. The political situation is transformed into a military situation, in which the militarists appear more and more responsible for errors and violence…. Pacifists and right-wing opportunists … join hands and beg the hangmen for elections.*

Rejecting the so-called political solution, the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without mercy to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act.* An urban guerrilla group called the Tupamaros terrorized Uruguay from 1963 to 1972, seeking to overthrow the government. The Tupamaros became the very embodiment of Marighella’s revolutionary principles and have since served as an inspiration for terrorists and extremists throughout the world. Significantly, the insurgency in Uruguay ended only after most of the guerrillas were murdered in a brutal government crackdown. Today, Uruguay is a peaceful, democratic country.

Acts of Terrorism versus Acts of War

The al Qaeda operatives who hijacked four commercial airliners on September 11, 2001, were carrying out a terrorist act by definition and an act of war only by inference or interpretation. When Japanese kamikaze pilots flew fighter planes into U.S. warships anchored in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and sank most of the Pacific fleet, it was an act of war first and an act of terror only incidentally, if at all. In war-fighting jargon, this attack was a classic example of the preemptive strike. However heinous and treacherous it appeared to U.S. citizens at the time (and still does), it was extremely successful as a single strategic event.*

The 9/11 attacks and Pearl Harbor are often compared, but the comparison is inapt. Pearl Harbor was the result of a decision made by the government and military high command of an established state with which the United States had diplomatic relations at the time. It was without question an act of war. Moreover, it was directed exclusively against military targets—the kamikaze pilots could have hit civilian targets in Hawaii but did not. Finally, the attacks were designed not to overthrow or destabilize the U.S. government or any other government, but rather to cripple U.S. naval power in the Pacific and thus forestall U.S. interference with Japan’s imperialist designs in Asia.

The 9/11 attacks contrast sharply on all three points. They were not undertaken by an established state (although Afghanistan harbored al Qaeda network’s top leaders and many of its fighters); they were directed mainly at civilians who had nothing to do with making U.S. foreign policy or with the armed forces; and they were clearly aimed at exposing the vulnerability of the United States, embarrassing the government, and undermining U.S. economic might, while tarnishing the Pentagon’s image both at home and abroad. Even more to the point, these attacks were designed to rally support for bin Laden’s extreme brand of Islamism and lead to the eventual toppling of “apostate” governments in the Arab world (including bin Laden’s native Saudi Arabia).

Illegal Enemy Combatants

The very ambiguity of the status of terrorists in domestic and international law raises questions about how captured suspected terrorists ought to be treated. Are they prisoners of war, criminals, or neither? If they are neither, it means they exist in a legal limbo and can be denied even the most basic rights. In theory, they can be tortured or killed in captivity and the world would never know. They can be imprisoned for months or even years without being charged or having legal counsel or contact with family members—this is, in fact, the status of an unknown number of suspected terrorists taken captive by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere after 9/11.*

The Bush administration declared these captives were neither common criminals nor prisoners of war (POWs), but rather “illegal combatants”—a category tailor-made for the war on terror but widely rejected by other governments, as well as by experts on international law. Many suspected al Qaeda terrorists rounded up in Afghanistan (about 650 according to published reports) were taken to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay (also known as “Gitmo”) in Cuba, where they were to be kept indefinitely in a maximum-security facility off limits to the press and public.

The constitutionality of indefinite detention without trial was finally challenged in June 2007 in the case of Ali al-Marri, a student at Bradley University who was initially arrested and jailed on charges having nothing to do with terrorism. Al Marri was eventually classified as an illegal combatant and transferred to the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina. In June 2007, a federal appeals court ruled that U.S. residents cannot be incarcerated indefinitely as enemy combatants without being charged. “Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them ‘enemy combatants,’” the court said. The same federal appeals court held a rehearing of the ruling and reversed itself 5 to 4. But in March 2009, the Supreme Court erased that ruling after al-Marri was indicted on federal criminal charges in Illinois, thus belatedly granting his constitutional right to a trial by jury in a civilian court. Al-Marri entered a guilty plea to one count of conspiracy involving a foreign terrorist organization.*

The concept of “illegal combatants” does not exist in international law and did not exist in U.S. public policy or jurisprudence before 9/11. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both viewed it as a necessary tool in the war on terror. Critics, including the American Bar Association, have questioned the constitutionality of capturing prisoners outside the jurisdiction of the United States, holding them incommunicado, and denying them access to counsel.

Characteristics of Terrorist Groups

Most terrorist groups are short-lived, operate locally, and get very little publicity. Although our national news media covers only a few, hundreds of identifiable terrorist groups exist worldwide.* They tend to be small and tight-knit, seldom numbering more than one hundred members and usually fewer than several dozen. Many of the most notorious are found in the Middle East and associated with Islamic fundamentalism—the Abu Nidal Organization, al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hezbollah (Party of God) are five contemporary examples. Because they are often ethnically and politically homogeneous, with members who are close friends or even relatives, terrorist cells are extremely difficult to penetrate or monitor, frequently confounding the best efforts of intelligence agencies.

As the world learned after the release of the fourth post-9/11 bin Laden videotape in mid-December 2001, al Qaeda operates on a need-to-know basis, closely guarding and compartmentalizing information within its own ranks, much like official intelligence services do. This emphasis on secrecy is essential for the success and survival of terrorist groups and networks, especially under greatly heightened security in the United States, Europe, the Arab world, and elsewhere.

Even so, the life span of most terrorist groups is only about five to ten years. By the same token, the leaders of terrorist groups tend to come and go. However, there are exceptions—two of the most notorious being Abu Nidal, who masterminded countless terrorist acts (including airport massacres in Rome and Vienna) for three decades until he was murdered in Baghdad in 2002, reportedly on direct orders from Saddam Hussein; and Osama bin Laden, founder of al Qaeda and the prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks. Finally, terrorist groups seldom operate from a fixed location. Although the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were exceptions, terrorists often have relatively little training, use unsophisticated equipment, and acquire the “tools of the trade”—some of which could be purchased at any hardware store—by theft.

Algeria in the 1990s: Nightmare and Prelude

In Algeria, the line between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism—or between revolution and civil war—was difficult to discern in the 1990s. Algeria can be seen as a preview of the political crises that have swept across the Arab world in recent years and destabilized Libya, Egypt, and Syria, among others, where popular anger has become dry tinder for extremists bent on the overthrow of established secular governments in the region. Few stories about Algeria’s horrific internecine war appeared in the U.S. press, and even today, few in the United States are aware of what happened there.

Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962 after a long, violent revolutionary struggle. For most of the next thirty years, pro-Marxist military strongmen ruled. Eventually, however, a core of Muslim fundamentalists became dangerously discontented. From this disquiet emerged the political organization Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Later, when Algeria’s first multiparty elections were held in 1991, the FIS gained a dazzling first-round victory. However, in 1992, the military simply canceled the second round of elections and installed a new president. This cynical act radicalized the FIS and prompted it to go underground. Even worse, it split the armed Islamist movement in Algeria and gave the most extreme jihadist elements—advocates of all-out terrorism—the upper hand. At the end of 1992, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) emerged as a murderous alternative to the somewhat less violent and uncompromising FIS.

Algeria’s terrorist nightmare began with GIA attacks primarily on the police, security forces, and government officials. Soon the terrorists began targeting other groups as well. In 1993 and 1994, there were dozens of attacks on opposition groups, foreigners, intellectuals, journalists, and other civilians. Between 1995 and 1998, only about 25% of the attacks were directed against security forces and government officials; the rest struck at civilians. Schools and school employees were among the favorite targets.

As the strategy changed to targeting mainly civilians, the insurgents’ tactics changed as well. In 1996, there were more bombings than assassinations, violent clashes with security forces, and organized armed attacks. After the mid-1990s, the bombings increasingly targeted markets, cinemas, and restaurants, as well as schools. According to one Middle East authority on the Algerian Islamist movement:

Violence reached its ultimate level of cruelty in a series of massacres that began at the end of 1996. At least 67 massacres took place between November 1996 and July 1999, but most … took place in 1997 (42 massacres)…. These massacres involved militants armed with guns, crude bombs, knives, and axes descending on villages at night to kill their inhabitants, often by hacking them to death and slitting their throats. Other atrocities involved fake security checkpoints set up by militants to identify specific targets—e.g., state employees and men with conscription papers.*

The government countered with lethal force. In November 1996, constitutional amendments that appeared to move Algeria toward a limited democracy were popularly ratified. The main aim, however, was to curtail radical Islamic groups and ban all political parties based on language or religion, while retaining preponderate power in the executive branch. Thus, during the June 1997 elections, the FIS and similar groups could not run candidates and could only urge citizens not to vote.

The FIS condemned the new constitution and continued to struggle against the regime until September 1997, when its armed wing, the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), declared a cease-fire. But it was the vicious bands of zealots and thugs that comprised the GIA, not the AIS, that had carried out most of the bloody massacres. Not surprisingly, the hard-line “eradicators” in the government favored finding and killing the terrorists rather than trying to negotiate with them. This stance was not unreasonable given the fact that the GIA had shown no proclivity toward compromise.

The election of a new president in 1999 broke the ice. The government released some political prisoners and pushed through the Law of Civil Reconciliation, extending amnesty to rebels who had not committed atrocities. The AIS, which benefited from a general amnesty due to its 1997 cease-fire, began disbanding its militia under state supervision at the end of 1999. Thousands of AIS rebels took advantage of the general amnesty granted by the regime; at the beginning of 2000, even some GIA militias began declaring they would abide by the cease-fire.

Amnesty International called Algeria the most violent country in the Middle East at the end of the 1990s. The proximate cause of the violence was the military’s illegal cancellation of a national election in 1992, but the roots of Algeria’s nightmare run deep in social and economic failure. Despite its extensive oil and natural gas reserves, its people are overwhelmingly poor. Unemployment hovers around 25%. Nearly one-third of the population is under 15 years of age. High unemployment hits youth the hardest, which may, in part, explain why terrorists and revolutionaries are disproportionately young. Meanwhile, tensions based on ethnic and linguistic divisions persist. Most notably, Berbers are a sizable minority who feel alienated and powerless, a feeling intensified when Algeria moved to make Arabic its sole official language.

Nevertheless, terrorism still plagues Algeria. One of various terrorist groups operating in Algeria today calls itself al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In 2008, dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks against police, foreigners, government employees, and civilians threatened to plunge the country into anarchy, but Algerian security forces reportedly killed, wounded, or arrested hundreds of terrorists.

The number of terrorist incidents dropped sharply for several years after a bloody 2008, but in August 2011, a suicide attack on a military academy left 18 people dead, including 16 soldiers, and 20 wounded. In December 2013, a terrorist attack on a BP gas facility in eastern Algeria left 37 hostages and at least 32 militants dead. The attack, carried out by anti-Western Islamist elements, “fanned fears of a new terror front,”* not least because in 2012 Islamist insurgents seized control of a large swath of territory in neighboring Mali. France sent troops into Mali in early 2013; in February, French and Malian forces succeeded in regaining control of the strategic northern city of Gao, as well as the legendary town of Timbuktu.

Thus, terrorists in Algeria, Mali, and the Maghreb (northwest Africa) continue to find fertile ground for fresh recruits. In retrospect, Algeria in the 1990s was a prelude to the upheavals tearing the Arab societies of North Africa and the Middle East—from Libya to Syria—apart today.

Terrorist or Freedom Fighter?

The terrorism that ravaged Algerian society in the 1990s is hard for people living normal lives to comprehend. Who are the perpetrators of these despicable acts? How do they differ from common criminals, guerrilla fighters, and revolutionaries? Why is terrorism any different from other forms of violence?

Official U.S. policy treats terrorism as an illegal political phenomenon. This approach stresses the illegitimacy of terrorism and advocates combating it with swift punishment and due vigilance. Critics (including some European countries and NATO allies) focus on the socioeconomic causes of the problem. These divergent views point to quite different policy responses, including targeted programs of trade, aid, and investment designed to alleviate misery, hunger, and disease in poverty-stricken, violence-prone countries and regions, as well as diplomacy that does not exclude talking to regimes and dictators we despise.

Policy differences aside, terrorists are criminals, though by no means ordinary ones. Killing and kidnapping, robbing banks, and hijacking airplanes are heinous crimes, no matter who perpetrates them or why; they become terrorist acts when the motive is political. When a serial killer is on the loose in a community, the victims are typically innocent people, but psychopaths are not motivated by religion or ideology. Sometimes the line is blurred, as in the case of narcoterrorists—armed rebels in Colombia associated with powerful drug lords or drug traffickers in Mexico—who use terrorist tactics to intimidate the public, press, and police. In 2008 alone, some 5,700 Mexicans were killed in drug-related violence. In January 2009, drug traffickers staged a grenade attack on Mexico’s top TV network, Televisa, during the nightly news broadcast.* By May 2011, the death toll from Mexico’s drug war had claimed a staggering 34,000 victims and the cost to Mexico’s sluggish economy in human resources and lost tourism revenues was inestimable.

If terrorists are not ordinary criminals, neither are they ordinary guerrillas or freedom fighters. Guerrillas often constitute the armed wing of a revolutionary movement or party—Mao’s Red Army is one well-known historical example. Guerrilla forces sometimes commit atrocities against civilians (as do soldiers in uniform), but most insurgent violence is directed at the security forces and government. By contrast, terrorists target civilians and noncombatants, as well as police and security forces—a strategy designed to sow the seeds of fear and doubt so people will not cooperate with the police and military, and to show people the government cannot protect them.

Certainly, many revolutionaries in the twentieth century have resorted to terror—both before and after taking power. But, unlike terrorists, revolutionaries seek to overthrow the government in existing circumstances, rather than trying to precipitate a political and social crisis by changing the circumstances. To that end, revolutionaries attempt to build a subversive party; infiltrate the government, the police, and the military; spread propaganda; agitate among trade unions; recruit and indoctrinate the young; and incite strikes, riots, and street demonstrations. Terrorism in the hands of revolutionaries is a tactic, not a strategy; in the hands of terrorists, terror is both a tactic and a strategy. Terrorists often appear to share the view of Émile Henry, a French anarchist who, when charged with throwing a bomb in a Paris café in 1894, replied, “No one is innocent.”

Terrorism and Society

Europeans abhor terrorism as much as Americans do, but they tend to sympathize with the social classes or ethnic communities from which terrorists often arise. In sharp contrast to the U.S. pro-Israeli stance, most European governments are openly critical of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. The best way to defeat terrorism, in their view, is to ameliorate its underlying causes—injustice, despair, and hopelessness. To European critics, Israeli policy exacerbates these conditions and plays into the hands of extremists.

Even where Middle Eastern governments suppress extreme Islamist groups, many people secretly sympathize with them. In Palestine, sympathy with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah is widespread and hardly a secret. Many Arabs admit that throughout the Arab world people expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden. Indeed, in some Arab countries, Osama has reportedly become one of the most popular names for baby boys.

To be sure, any comprehensive theory of terrorism in today’s world must take account of its social context, including the dehumanizing effects of life in refugee camps or ghettos, youth unemployment, and the Western intrusion—first colonization and now globalization. People unable to cope with these stresses react in different ways. Some turn to crime, others to alcohol or drugs, and some drop out. A few become terrorists. Of course, not all terrorists are products of poverty. Many are well educated and come from relatively privileged backgrounds; Osama bin Laden was born into a fabulously wealthy family in Saudi Arabia.

Why youths decide to become martyrs is unclear. Perhaps it is from a sense of hopelessness (nothing to lose) or religious zeal, perhaps from idealism, or because they want to be a hero in the eyes of friends and family.

Youthful Recruits

Occasionally young females become suicide bombers, especially in the Middle East. The Shi’ite suicide bomber who drove her explosives-packed Peugeot into an Israeli Army convoy in southern Lebanon in 1985 was 16 years old. But most terrorists are male, single, and young.* The Jordanian who tried to assassinate a United Arab Emirates diplomat in Rome in 1984 was 22. The oldest of the four Palestinian terrorists who hijacked a Mediterranean cruise ship (the Achille Lauro) carrying 400 passengers in October 1985 was 23; the youngest, 19.

Research puts the median age of terrorists between 22 and 23 years. Twelve- and 14-year-old terrorists have been arrested in Northern Ireland; 14- and 15-year-old children are recruited by Arab and Iranian groups, sometimes for particularly dangerous missions.* A German psychologist who interviewed captured members of the Red Army Faction noted elements of an “adolescent crisis” among terrorists, while an expert on the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) observed a “terrorist tradition” at work in some countries where “whole families pass on to their children that [terrorism] is the way you struggle for your rights.”*

Eric Hoffer touched on the susceptibility of certain youths to fanatical causes in The True Believer. He placed them in a group he called “misfits,” a category he further broke down into temporary and permanent. Hoffer wrote:

Adolescent youth, unemployed college graduates, veterans, new immigrants, and the like are of this category. They are dissatisfied and haunted by the fear that their best years will be wasted before they reach their goal.*

At the same time, although they tend to be “receptive to the preaching of a proselytizing movement,” Hoffer argued that they “do not always make staunch converts.”

If the grievances that give rise to terrorism were removed, would there be no terrorists? Possibly, and yet there are many societies where abject poverty and injustice have not given rise to terrorism. The logical conclusion: oppression is a necessary condition of terrorism but not a sufficient one.

The Psychology of Terrorism

According to one expert on the psychology of terrorism, “terrorists with a cause” are the most dangerous to democratic society.* Who are these rebels? What motivates them? Not surprisingly, many of the most common traits exhibited by members of terrorist groups are associated with adolescence, including the following:*

· Oversimplification of issues. Terrorists see complex issues in black-and-white terms; they have no interest in debate; they often live out a “fantasy war,” imagining the people overwhelmingly support their cause.

· Frustration. Terrorists feel society has cheated them, life is unfair, and they deserve far more; they are unwilling to wait or work for something better and believe the only way to get is to take.

· Orientation toward risk-taking. Many terrorists seek situations offering adventure and are easily bored.

· Self-righteousness. Terrorists display belligerent assertiveness, dogmatism, and intolerance of opposing views.

· Utopianism. They harbor an unexamined belief that heaven on earth is just over the horizon; the only thing standing in the way is the corrupt and oppressive existing order.

· Social isolation. Terrorists, one expert noted, are often “people who are really lonely.” For some, a terrorist cell may be the only “family” they have.

· A need to be noticed. Terrorists share a need to feel important, a desire to make a personal imprint by getting media attention.

· A taste for blood. Interviews with captured terrorists, testimony of relatives and acquaintances, and eyewitness accounts by former hostages point to a final, startling characteristic: Some terrorists kill without an ounce of remorse.

· Terrorists often oversimplify reality; thus, they may see victims as mere objects—a habit of mind observed among Nazi guards at extermination camps during the Holocaust.* In a similar vein, Paul R. McHugh, a distinguished Johns Hopkins School of Medicine psychiatrist, argued that terrorists, like other actors with a “ferocious passion,” have an “overvalued idea,” defined as “a thought shared with others in a society or culture but in the patient held with an intense emotional commitment capable of provoking dominant behaviors in its service.”* Adolf Hitler (anti-Semitism), Carrie Nation (temperance), and John Brown (abolitionism) are three examples of historical figures with an obsessive belief in overvalued ideas, though acting on these beliefs had drastically different consequences in each case.

· Those who suffer personality or emotional disorders associated with overvalued ideas are commonly called fanatics. Once again, Hoffer’s discussion of fanatics in The True Believer proves appropriate. Fanaticism—excessive, blind devotion—whether political or religious, is almost always based on hatred, according to Hoffer; the fanatic places hatred in the service of a cause or a vision. Hatred is, in turn, a unifying force for like-minded fanatics, whereas love is divisive. Thus, hatred provides a reason for living, often appealing to individuals who are insecure, have little sense of self-worth, or lack meaning in their lives. Finally, Hoffer noted:

· The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources—out of his rejected self—but finds it only by clinging passionately to [some cause]. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity…. And he is ready to sacrifice his life to demonstrate to himself and others that such indeed is his role. He sacrifices his life—for example, in a suicide bombing—to prove his worth.*

· Nor are fanatics necessarily motivated by a good cause. They embrace a cause not primarily because it is just or holy but because they have a desperate need to hold onto something. It is this need for passionate attachment that turns a cause into the cause. From there it can be a short step to jihad or a terrorist campaign.* But for normal people fortunate enough to be living normal lives in normal times, it remains a mystery how anyone can commit barbarous acts out of idealism or religious fervor.

· Terrorism and the Media

Terrorism and the Media

Terrorists seek publicity. As they see it, the more attention they can get, the better. Why? Because media coverage—above all, the dramatic images that flash across our television and computer screens—draws worldwide attention to the act itself and the overvalued idea embraced by those who perpetrated it. This coverage is both politically prized and personally gratifying—it makes otherwise obscure individuals feel important. The prime-time exposure terrorists frequently get on CNN and other network news all over the world is also free. And, of course, the most daring, deadly, or otherwise sensational terrorist acts receive the most extensive media attention. Without question, the two fatal blows struck against the World Trade Center are the most widely and repeatedly televised terrorist acts in history.

In light of terrorists’ need for publicity, many political analysts outside the profession of journalism blame the rapid rise of terrorism in part on the media—on television, in particular. After all, bad news makes for better headlines and better copy, and bad news that is also sensational and shocking garners the most attention and the highest Nielsen ratings, which in turn translates into higher advertising revenues for the networks. In this sense, at least, terrorism is tailor-made for television.

In a market economy, simply reporting the news is not enough; the news industry must also sell the news. The audience share that chooses to watch television news determines how much companies will pay to advertise their products on a particular network. Thus, producers of news shows are loath to pass up a good story, even if it means playing into the hands of terrorists. Of course, an airplane hijacking involving hundreds of innocent people is newsworthy by any standard. The media do, after all, have a responsibility to keep people informed. And even if one network decided not to cover a particular terrorist incident or to pay only slight attention to it, the others would not ignore it.

Media self-restraint is the only practical solution. Realistically, the news industry is not likely to cut back significantly on its reporting of terrorism until public opinion turns against such reports. As consumers of news, we often get what we demand and, in that sense, deserve what we get.

Countering Terrorism

The question facing democratic societies is how terrorism can be curtailed without jeopardizing democratic rights and liberties. The rise of international and state-sponsored terrorism, the danger of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, and use of the Internet to plot and coordinate terrorist attacks all underscore the need for governments to coordinate global counterterrorist efforts.

Domestic Legislation

Authoritarian and totalitarian states are free to deal quickly and harshly with terrorists and accused terrorists. Democratic states, however, are committed to following the rule of law whenever and wherever possible. Over the past two decades, many democracies have enacted new laws or adapted old laws to deal more effectively with terrorists and terrorism.

Skyjacking and committing an act of violence against an airline passenger were made crimes in the United States way back in 1961, four decades before 9/11. In the wake of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing two years later, Congress passed an antiterrorism act in April 1996 that provided more resources for federal law enforcement to fight terrorism, tightened immigration, and loosened deportation procedures for aliens suspected of being terrorists.

But in 2001, on that fateful day in September, the second assault on the World Trade Center revealed the inadequacy of existing counterterrorist policies. President Bush quickly set up a new cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security, designed to coordinate the work of all federal departments and agencies engaged in any aspect of counterterrorism, and also issued a controversial directive creating military tribunals for suspected terrorists.*

The major changes in the government’s power over legal aliens in the United States are contained in a law passed by Congress after the 9/11 attacks. The cumbersome name of this law is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, more commonly known as the USA Patriot Act. In addition to greatly expanding the FBI’s wiretapping authority, this act broadens the notion of who is considered a terrorist suspect and gives the U.S. attorney general sweeping authority to detain Arabs and Muslims, as well as other foreigners; it permits the government to deny entry into the United States to any foreigner who publicly endorses terrorism or belongs to a terrorist group; it expands the definition of terrorist activity to include any foreigner who uses “dangerous devices” or raises money for a terrorist group, wittingly or unwittingly; finally, it allows the government to detain any foreigner the attorney general considers a menace.

Taken together, the antiterrorist measures growing out of executive orders and the Patriot Act give the U.S. federal government powers of surveillance and infiltration unprecedented in modern times. At first supportive, public opinion is now deeply divided on the wisdom and necessity of warrantless wiretaps and other forms of government spying on civilians. In 2005, a CBS poll found respondents split (49% approved; 45% disapproved); in 2008, the candidate who opposed intrusive government measures—Barack Obama—won the election. As commander in chief, however, President Obama backed extension of the Patriot Act.

In June 2015, the United States Senate passed an act that restricts National Security Agency (NSA) authority to collect phone metadata. (The House passed the measure by a vote of 338 to 88 in mid-May.) Under the proposed new rules, the intelligence services can obtain such data in counterterrorism operations only on a case-by-case basis. The new measure—called the USA Freedom Act—replaces parts of the Patriot Act. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican and outspoken libertarian running for president, advocates nullifying the Patriot Act in its entirety.

The Bush administration’s counterterrorist methods and policies were controversial and, according to critics, illegal. One of the most divisive was the use of waterboarding to extract information from prisoners suspected of belonging to Iraqi terrorist groups. These methods also appeared to be counterproductive. Only in 2007 after President Bush ordered a troop surge in Iraq did the insurgency and violence there finally subside, although the level of violence rose again in 2009. Today, after more than a decade of turmoil, Iraq’s prospects for social peace and governmental stability are dim.

President Obama kept his promise to withdraw U.S. combat forces from Iraq by the fall of 2010, but to the dismay of many of his backers, he ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan. At the same time, he fired the commander of U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, and replaced him with a general known for his tough counterterrorism credentials, General Stanley McChrystal.* But Obama’s problems with his generals did not end there; in June 2010, he ordered General McChrystal back to Washington because he made disparaging remarks to a reporter about Vice President Joe Biden and other top White House officials close to the president. McChrystal resigned rather than be fired, and Obama replaced him with General David Petraeus.

Many democracies, including Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Greece, ban membership in terrorist organizations. In Great Britain, specific terrorist groups are outlawed, including the IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army, as is soliciting funds for them. In 2005, the European Union acted to improve information sharing to combat terrorism through the Schengen Information System (SIS). The EU has also created a European Arrest Warrant to facilitate coordinated action in capturing suspected criminals and terrorists, who can move across national boundaries in Europe easily now that all border controls have been abolished among the twenty-five countries that belong to the Schengen Area. Italy and Sweden have also made it easier for police to tap telephones and open mail to detect letter bombs. In general, most democracies do not protect privacy rights to the extent the United States did before 9/11 and place fewer restrictions on police and investigative agencies. As a result, they did not need a Patriot Act to adopt tough counterterrorism measures. What they did need was better cooperation across borders—which they now have.

Cooperation among Nations

Prior to 9/11, international efforts to combat terrorism undertaken by the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Council of Europe were largely ineffective.* Bilateral agreements often proved more successful—even between countries otherwise adversarial. For instance, the 1973 agreement between the United States and Cuba brought an end to a wave of skyjackings of U.S. planes to Havana.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration initially enjoyed the full cooperation of NATO allies, as well as such key countries as Pakistan and Russia, in its war on terror. NATO endorsed, and many NATO members participated in, the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. However, most of this support, with the notable exception of the United Kingdom and former Prime Minister Tony Blair, faded away when the White House made the decision to invade Iraq.

Intelligence sharing across borders has improved since 9/11. Organizations such as Interpol (an international police agency headquartered in France) have reportedly facilitated the capture of terrorists in some instances and possibly prevented some terrorist acts from occurring. Despite many obstacles and continuing challenges, the United States and the European Union have taken steps to achieve closer cooperation on matters related to police, judicial, and border control policy.*

In one striking example of bilateral cooperation, high-ranking FBI and CIA officials cooperated with Russian internal security agencies to fight organized crime in Russia and ferret out its suspected links to both international terrorist groups and would-be smugglers of nuclear weapons materials. In another, a retaliatory surgical bombing strike against a dictator with a history of sponsoring international terrorism was facilitated by a close U.S. ally. Specifically, President Ronald Reagan decided to teach Colonel Muammar Qaddafi a lesson.

Qaddafi, Libya’s autocratic ruler, was long suspected of sponsoring terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere. In April 1986, Reagan ordered the bombing of Tripoli, Libya’s capital. Initially, only the British supported the U.S. strike; the French, fearing terrorist reprisals, refused to allow U.S. warplanes based in the United Kingdom to fly over French territory. The punitive U.S. air strike hit Qaddafi’s official residence and killed his baby daughter. Thereafter, signs of an emerging multinational consensus began to appear. On April 21, 1986, the European Community voted to impose economic sanctions against Libya; and in the summer of 1986, Libyans were expelled from Great Britain, West Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, were eventually caught and placed on trial before the International Court of Justice at The Hague in the Netherlands in 2000. In 2003, Qaddafi surprised the world by renouncing terrorism. In September 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid an official visit to Tripoli where she met with Qaddafi, and the United States moved to reestablish normal relations with Libya. But in mid-March, 2011, when Qaddafi used deadly force (including planes, tanks, and cannon) to quell a rising popular rebellion against his rule, President Obama ordered creation of a “no fly zone” and air strikes against loyalist ground forces, ostensibly to protect civilians and prevent a massacre. Few doubted, however, that Qaddafi’s pre-2003 reputation as a sponsor of international terrorism also played into the decision to back the Libyan rebels. Unlike the war on Iraq, this intervention was sanctioned by the United Nations and the Arab League. France and the United Kingdom participated actively in the military operations, and NATO assumed full command of the Libya campaign at the end of March.

Unilateral Counterterrorist Measures

Virtually every nation strengthened airport security after the bloody terrorist massacres in Vienna and Rome airports in 1985. But the United States did too little too late; on September 11, 2001, four commercial airplanes were hijacked almost simultaneously from three different East Coast airports in one morning. All the hijack teams apparently managed to get on the planes with weapons (knives and box cutters).

Landmarks in History Counterterrorism in Italy: A Success Story

In the 1970s, Italy was the most terror-ridden country in the West. The extreme left-wing Red Brigades kidnapped and killed hundreds of judges, industrialists, and politicians—symbols of capitalism and the establishment. From 1969 to 1983, more than 14,000 acts of terrorist violence were recorded, 409 people were killed, and 1,366 were injured.

In 1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro, a former prime minister and one of Italy’s leading politicians. When the government refused to negotiate with Moro’s abductors, he was murdered. In the end, however, it was the terrorists who lost. Shocked and outraged, the public demanded a tough counterterrorist program. Thereafter, the Red Brigades went into sharp decline.

How did Italy do it? First, the police infiltrated Red Brigade terror cells and subsequently arrested hundreds of members. Second, reduced prison sentences were offered to repentant terrorists who supplied information about the activities and whereabouts of other terrorists. Third, the police concentrated on a limited and manageable number of terrorist targets, such as airports, harbors, and border crossings. Finally, new laws gave the police greater ability to tap phones and use other resources more effectively.

Deprived of sympathy for whatever cause they embraced, Italy’s terrorists were isolated. Today they pose little or no threat to the country’s stability.

Many authorities believe retribution and deterrence are the only effective approach to dealing with terrorism. In this view, deterrence requires, at a minimum, a refusal to make concessions to terrorists. To do otherwise is self-defeating and tantamount to rewarding evil, inviting future attacks of a similar nature. According to one expert, “Where counterterrorism has worked, a unifying thread has been the demonstrated will and ability of the government to take harsh and preemptive (“proactive”) military or paramilitary countermeasures against terrorists.”*

The availability of special counterterrorist units such as the British SAS is not enough; governments must also demonstrate a willingness to use them in order “to establish an unmistakable pattern of failure and retribution.”* There is always the risk of failure (for example, the 1980 U.S. attempt to free hostages in Iran), and the immediate consequences can be tragic. But the long-term consequences of acting indecisively can be even more tragic.

Other steps governments can take include controlling arms and explosives and, perhaps most important (though most difficult), developing better domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering capabilities. Modern technology using satellites, electronic surveillance, advanced search technologies, explosives detection, scanners, robotic vehicles, and drones have greatly enhanced existing counterterrorist capabilities, for only by obtaining information about terrorists’ hideouts, movements, and plans can governments prevent attacks. There is also ongoing research in the promising new field of network analysis, using social science techniques to better understand the workings of terrorist networks.

Time is a crucial factor in fighting both insurgencies and terrorism (which often go hand in hand in today’s world). The conventional wisdom long held that time was on the side of the insurgents—they are more highly motivated, closer to the people, and so on. There is reason to doubt the truth of this axiom. Consider the case of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka.

The defeat of the Tamil Tigers, modern Asia’s longest-lasting insurgency, in the spring of 2009 demonstrates that a patient strategy, allowing time for terrorists’ acts to work against them, can succeed. At one point, the Tamil insurgents controlled a third of Sri Lanka; they used terrorist tactics—child soldiers and suicide bombers—and fought a conventional war, with outside aid from China, Pakistan, and high-earning Tamils abroad. But in the end, the Tamil Tigers’ brutality and the Sinhalese-majority government’s refusal to negotiate in the face of terrorist blackmail drained the lifeblood from the insurgency.*

Obviously, the nature of democratic societies and the constitutional framework in which governments operate present obstacles to police and investigative agencies charged with thwarting terrorism. Citizens are unaccustomed to acting as informants, and intelligence gathering is divided among several agencies, in part to prevent any one of them from gaining too much power. In the United States, for example, intelligence and counterintelligence have traditionally been separated; the CIA is responsible for foreign intelligence and is forbidden to engage in domestic spy operations against U.S. citizens or groups, and counterintelligence is the function of the FBI. Coordinating the work of these two agencies after 9/11 was the prime reason behind President Bush’s decision to create the new Office of Homeland Security.

Private Measures

Finally, private citizens and firms have developed strategies to protect themselves.* Just as many governments were “hardening” their embassies and other overseas facilities in the 1980s and 1990s, private companies were spending billions of dollars annually on security services.*

With the advent of the Digital Age, a new security threat—so-called cyberterrorism—has arisen. As a consequence, governments, banks, and businesses, as well as private individuals, also spend vast sums on sophisticated software to protect computers, data, financial assets, communications, and state secrets from Internet hackers.

Most citizens cannot afford to hire private security guards, but an alert public can make the terrorist’s job more difficult. In Israel, for example, where everyone is acutely aware of the terrorist threat, officials claim 80% of bombs in public places are disarmed because suspicious objects are usually noticed and reported in time.* Most security experts agree that success in countering terrorism depends on vigilant citizens, as well as police and security forces.

The Terrorists among Us

Multiple killings such as the massacres in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 raise serious moral and political issues. Who cares how such heinous acts are labeled? And yet it matters. To understand why, consider the problem of “dirty hands” in politics. We all face moral dilemmas in life; but politicians have to make choices that have far-reaching effects on the whole society—plus, they want to get reelected. So it’s no surprise when they clamber to show how tough they are on terrorism.

But the problem of dirty hands becomes a problem of bloody hands when politicians in the U.S. Congress climb into bed with the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association (NRA) because they care more about not getting targeted for defeat in the next election than about the safety of schoolchildren. Arguably, the most dangerous “terrorists” are not the ones we tend to fear the most—imagined “foreigners” who infiltrate our society with malicious intent. Perhaps we have the most to fear from individuals who are “natural-born citizens” and who may even live next door. And, in stark contrast to virtually all other Western societies (with the exception of Switzerland), adult citizens in the United States can legally possess a veritable arsenal of deadly weapons.

Can Terrorism Be Defeated?

Terrorism poses a continuing threat that shows few signs of abating, despite the ongoing post-9/11 war on terror. Is a “war on terror” winnable? If not, why not? If so, how?

There is no single or totally effective solution to terrorism. Even one terrorist can be too many. One terrorist with a small support system—a few friends, safe houses, and supplies—can inflict enormous damage. Still, as we have seen, there are ways of limiting the opportunities available to terrorists and of deterring, punishing, or simply eradicating terrorism before it becomes an epidemic as it did in Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s, Peru in the 1980s, Algeria in the 1990s, and Pakistan in the late 2000s.

Meanwhile, doomsday scenarios involving terrorist plots to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—from anthrax to a “dirty” radiation bomb—cannot be dismissed lightly. No single state can meet this threat alone. Unfortunately, declaring “war on terror” is better theater than public policy, and fear of terrorist attacks can be exploited by governments to silence opposition or erode constitutional rights.

Words matter in politics. War is one of the words that matters most. The word, like the phenomenon itself, has a definite meaning and a long history. It is a word we often use loosely—too loosely. Terrorism cannot be defeated the way Germany and Japan were defeated in World War II. Terrorism does not have a territory or a seat of government. It can be contained but not occupied the way Germany and Japan were occupied (and Iraq and Afghanistan are today).

Terrorism is war by other means. War is politics by other means—and the focus of the next chapter.

Summary

Terrorism, a political effort to oppose the status quo by inducing fear in the civilian population through the widespread and publicized use of violence, has become an everyday occurrence in the contemporary world. Although it has ancient roots in religious conflict, contemporary terrorism can be traced to the 1960s.

Terrorists seek to create a climate of chaos and confusion in the belief that political instability will hasten the downfall of a government. They form groups that are close-knit, homogeneous, small, and (often) short-lived. Terrorists can pose great challenges to countries facing political and economic problems; Muslim fundamentalism in Algeria provides such an example.

Although terrorists violate the law, they are not criminals in the everyday sense of the term. Nor are they guerrillas or ordinary revolutionaries. All terrorists are revolutionaries, but not all revolutionaries are terrorists. A terrorist is a kind of revolutionary who does not seek to obtain political power, but whose primary objective is to protest and combat the perceived injustice of the existing political order through random acts of violence. Terrorists tend to be young, single males who share a variety of key psychological characteristics, including fanaticism and hatred.

Democracy and terrorism are implacable enemies. Democracy depends for its existence on compromise, tolerance, and mutual trust; whereas terrorists are zealots who seek to radicalize society and destabilize the political system. Furthermore, democratic societies are, by nature, open and vulnerable to terrorist attacks. This vulnerability is both physical and psychological.

The problems democracies face in countering terrorism are complicated by the need to preserve individual freedoms while also protecting national security. Still, various singular and cooperative measures that democracies have undertaken show promise of containing—though not eliminating—terrorism.

Chapter 17. International Relations: The Struggle for World Order

Learning Objectives

· 1Define “power politics.”

· 2Explain the ways world politics differs from other politics.

· 3Compare the classical balance of power systems in Europe with the world order that emerged after World War II.

· 4Identify and elucidate the three biggest changes in world politics since the end of the Cold War.

· 5Elaborate on the role of the United States in the New World Order.

· 6Explain the role of international law in world politics and why it is often least enforceable when and where it is most needed.

· 7Describe the historical context that made creation of the United Nations appear to be a good idea, and identify its major structures and functions.

In 416 BCE, Athens sent ships and troops against the island of Melos, a colony of Sparta that had remained neutral and wanted no part of the war between Sparta and Athens. * Negotiating from a position of overwhelming strength, the Athenians insisted on unconditional surrender, telling the Melians, “You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power—the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The Melians responded, “And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule?” “Because,” the Athenians answered, “you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you.”

Undaunted, the Melians insisted the interest of all would be enhanced by peaceful relations between the two states. The Athenians would have no part of this logic. With ruthless disregard for justice, they reasoned that if the Melians were permitted to remain independent, they and others would take it as a sign of Athenian weakness. “[By] extending our empire,” the Athenians pointed out, “we should gain in security by your subjection; the fact that you are islanders and weaker than others rendering all the more important that you should not succeed in baffling the masters of the sea.” Thus, the cold calculus of power politics doomed the Melian state:

Reinforcements afterwards arriving from Athens in consequence, under the command of Philocrates, son of Demeas, the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.

Melos was a real place, and the tragedy depicted in the story really happened. The context was the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), and we know the Melians’ cruel fate because the Greek historian Thucydides wrote about it.

Get Real! Machiavelli and Morgenthau

The greatest political thinker of the Italian Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli, taught that the wise ruler must always play to win, for “how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation.”* Prudent rulers, he argued, recognize what must be done to preserve and enlarge their dominions and do not allow moral qualms to cloud their judgment. Rulers should keep their promises only when it suits their purposes to do so:

A prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist…. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them.*

The teachings of Machiavelli, and the fate of the Melians, suggest morality plays a less significant role in politics among nations than within nations. As long as international politics resembles the state of nature, tensions between nations will persist, talking will fail, reason will take a holiday, and the only question left will be who lives and who dies. When survival is at stake, necessity is often a tyrant.

Machiavelli’s intellectual honesty and relentless realism were the basis for perhaps the most successful and influential political philosophy in the modern world—and evidence for its validity has continually mounted. The theory that nations act on the basis of interests, rather than ideals, is known as political realism. Today, this theory is most closely identified with the writings of Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980).

Following Machiavelli’s rationale, political realists pay little heed to the way nations ought to act. Rather, they focus on how nations actually do act and why they act as they do. Survival is the basic goal of national policy, and the best way to ensure survival is to enhance the nation’s power. In international politics, Morgenthau argued, whatever the ultimate aim, the immediate aim is always power. Thus, interest is defined as power; indeed, for Morgenthau, these two concepts merge into one—it is in the best interest of every nation to seek power first and other objectives second, and then only as they enhance national power, prestige, and the like.

Political realists stress that success in international politics, even without confrontation, ultimately depends on power. According to Morgenthau, power is “man’s control over the minds and actions of other men.”* Military force is an important but not the only aspect of political power. Geopolitical, economic, and social concerns also contribute. Even the personal charisma or competence of a nation’s leader or the effectiveness of its political institutions gives it an edge.*

According to Morgenthau, “Realism considers prudence—the weighing of the consequences of political action—to be the supreme virtue in politics.”* A foreign policy based on realism will avoid “the blindness of crusading frenzy [that] destroys nations and civilizations—in the name of moral principle, ideal, or God himself.”*

To the political realist, the successful statesman is one who balances national interests and objectives against national capabilities (or power). Prudence demands that a statesman distinguish between what is necessary and what is merely desirable. The essence of statecraft lies in bringing the expectations and desires of a nation into line with its capabilities and correctly differentiating between vital and expendable interests. Political realism places a premium on flexibility, objectivity, and lack of sentimentality in the conduct of foreign policy. Thus, the political realist would say there are no permanent allies, only permanent interests.

In the perilous world of international politics, morality is different than it is in our domestic lives. Because other nations act on the basis of their perceived interests, rather than lofty ideals, one’s own nation must do likewise; all try to gain an advantage at the expense of others. Therefore, Morgenthau asserted, political realism not only explains why nations act the way they do, but in the true spirit of science, it can also predict how they will act.

Nation-States and the Balance of Power

Machiavelli and Morgenthau were both products of tumultuous but very different times. Machiavelli was influenced by the fierce rivalries, intrigue, and conflict among Italian city-states of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The modern nation-state system, designed to maintain equilibrium (or balance) among the participating states, was still in its infancy.

The Classical System: 1648 to 1945

The classical system started with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 more than a century after Machiavelli’s death. Morgenthau was born in Germany shortly before World War I. The balance-of-power system was one of the casualties of that war.

Although this collective balancing act was based on nations’ individual interests, it depended on a common definition of interest that emphasized self-preservation of each through a system that depended on the survival of all.

Europe’s classical balance-of-power system operated for almost three centuries (see Figure 17.1), beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia and ending with the outbreak of World War I. Although Napoleonic France came perilously close at the start of the nineteenth century, no state was able to establish hegemony on the Continent during this 266-year period—a remarkable achievement for any era.

Figure 17.1.

SOURCE: Edward V. Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power (New York: Norton, 1967).

Adjusting the Balance of Power. Equilibrium (A) is upset by adding a new participant (B); it is restored (C) by the transfer of one state from one alliance to another.

The Westphalian system, or model, depended on the existence of an “honest broker,” a so-called keeper of the balance—a Power that would consistently oppose the aggressor and back the threatened state or weaker alliance. Great Britain was ideally suited to this role because of its geographic detachment and military (especially naval) prowess.

Britain was an impregnable fortress so long as no single Power succeeded in conquering the Continent. A major British aim was to prevent a Great Power on the Continent from controlling the Lowlands (modern-day Belgium and Holland) just across the English Channel, a mere twenty-two miles wide at its narrowest point. Finally, its unchallenged naval supremacy and economic vitality made it a powerful ally or a formidable foe, while its lack of a large standing army removed any threat of British domination on the Continent.

A common outlook—sometimes called “Christendom” or “Western Civilization”—held by nations with certain shared traditions was one key to creating and sustaining this system. Many scholars have stressed the role of cultural and religious traditions that pervaded European society and transcended national boundaries during the heyday of the balance-of-power system.*

Under these extraordinary conditions, “international politics became indeed an aristocratic pastime, a sport for princes, all recognizing the same rules of the game and playing for the same limited stakes.”* Even when war broke out, the belligerents did not seek to annihilate each other. Fanaticism was generally spurned in favor of reason. Ideology was notably absent. Economic and military capabilities were limited: wars were costly, mobilization was a slow process, and military action was constrained by the absence of modern technology. Realignments occurred as circumstances changed and new threats arose.

The Sunset of the Old World Order

What happened to upset the balance-of-power system? First, Napoléon’s nearly successful attempt in the early nineteenth century to conquer Europe—creating the first mass-conscription, popular army in modern history—heralded the rise of modern nationalism (see Chapter 15), what Morgenthau famously named nationalistic universalism. Although France’s bid ultimately failed, it was a harbinger of things to come, and it demonstrated the power of a nation united by a common cause. The cause itself was rooted in the explosive idea of human equality, enshrined in both the American and French revolutions (see Chapter 14). Between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, ideas such as national self-determination and universal rights changed fundamental assumptions about politics and undermined the old aristocratic order.

In the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution’s economic and technological changes transformed the art of warfare. Prussia used railroads to move troops in victorious military campaigns against Austria (1866) and France (1870). New instruments of war were not far off—military applications of the internal combustion engine included self-propelled field artillery and, by World War I, combat aircraft.

A final factor that undermined the European system was the rigidity of military alliances. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, coalitions were becoming fixed, while nation-states were steadily accumulating military power. Unprecedented peacetime outlays for military research and development, the creation of relatively large standing armies, and a spiraling arms race reinforced the increasing division of Europe into two opposing alliances. This development set the stage for World War I, which signaled the beginning of the end of the classical balance-of-power system. It would take another world war to finish the job.

The Cold War: 1945 to 1991

World War II produced a new configuration, one that continues to shape world politics today. Replacing the European order was a worldwide system organized into two opposing alliances locked in a “cold war” in which the United States and the Soviet Union competed for the allegiance of the newly independent, nonaligned states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The Dawn of Bipolarity

World War II greatly accelerated the transformation that had already begun. Instead of the seven former Great Powers at the outbreak of the war, there were now two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. To qualify as a superpower, a state has to have a full range of power capabilities, including not only military muscle, but also economic, political, diplomatic, and even moral clout. Second, it must have global reach, the capacity to project power to all parts of the world. Third, it must be willing to assert its leadership role in the international arena.

During the Cold War, the United States formed a kind of protectorate over the western half of war-torn Europe. By the same token, the Soviet Union created a “satellite” empire in the eastern half, and a bipolar system was born. According to the three-part test for superpowers, the United States became the sole superpower when the Soviet Union self-destructed in 1991.

After World War II, the United States—the first to develop an atomic bomb and the only country ever to use one—enjoyed a short-lived nuclear monopoly. The Soviet Union conducted a successful nuclear test in 1949. In military might, global reach, and economic resources, the United States and the Soviet Union—the two “superpowers”—dwarfed all other nations in the 1950s. And the ideological chasm dividing them was deep and wide.

The Primacy of Ideology

Because one superpower was capitalist and democratic and the other was communist and dictatorial, the rivalry between them turned especially acrimonious and dangerous. After World War II, Allied mistrust of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, was greatly heightened by his nation’s permanent occupation of Eastern Europe, which the Red Army had liberated from the Germans, and his attempt to force Western powers to abandon West Berlin. No less alarming was the prospect of a totalitarian Soviet state with nuclear weapons.

The Soviets viewed U.S. foreign policy (the cutoff of lend-lease aid, the refusal to grant large loans, and the massive U.S. foreign aid for Europe under the Marshall Plan) as proof positive that “American imperialism” was aimed at the destruction of the “world socialist system.” The United States inveighed against a “world Communist conspiracy,” a secret Soviet blueprint to subvert all democratic societies. However exaggerated in retrospect, the constant barrage of Cold War propaganda on both sides lent a certain credibility to this extreme rhetoric.

U.S.-led efforts at containment were epitomized in Western Europe by the creation of a powerful military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Soviet Union countered with a military pact of its own, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, known as the Warsaw Pact, linking Moscow and Eastern Europe. The aura of confrontation that permeated the two alliance systems left little room for compromise or conciliation.

From its inception, the Cold War was waged by two nuclear superpowers whose aims, interests, and values were incompatible. In stark contrast to the Westphalian model, each sought to block the other’s ambitions and actively endeavored to hasten the other’s collapse (see Figure 17.2). Both now played a zero-sum game, in which a win for one side was a loss for the other.

The Danger of Nuclear War

Two technological breakthroughs in the twentieth century greatly expanded the destructive potential of military weaponry:

· (1)

the development of airborne bombers and missile delivery systems and

· (2)

the invention of fission (atomic) and fusion (hydrogen) bombs capable of leveling entire cities.

From these advances grew formidable arsenals of increasingly accurate land- and sea-based missiles armed with multiple nuclear warheads.

The two superpowers commanded a vast overkill capacity—each held enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other many times over. All-out war had become tantamount to mutual suicide. But how was it possible to safeguard a world threatened with pushbutton destruction?

Mutual Deterrence

The unprecedented power of nuclear weapons made the concept of deterrence paramount during the heyday of Soviet–American rivalry. In 1957, the Soviet Union put the first artificial satellite (Sputnik) into orbit, demonstrating to the world that it had the technology to build long-range rockets capable of striking targets in the United States. By the late 1960s, the era of U.S. invulnerability was over, and deterrence became the new watchword in a great debate over military strategy and an integral part of the post–World War II balance of power.

According to deterrence theory, nations acquire nuclear weapons not to use them but to deter other nations from using them. Deterrence bears a close resemblance to a high-stakes poker game; players must minimize risks, and bluffing is part of the process. Much depends on the perceptions each side has of the other’s will, intentions, and resolve in the face of grave danger. If Country A uses military power to keep Country B from pursuing its foreign policy objective, Country B’s prestige is damaged and Country A gains a psychological edge.

Deterrence theory is based on a rational actor model—that neither side dares to launch a nuclear strike unless it can protect itself from a counterattack. Both sides have to possess a credible second-strike capability—that is, enough nuclear weapons left after an attack to deliver a retaliatory blow (second strike) adequate to inflict unacceptable damage on the attacker. It follows that if both sides are rational and both possesses a second-strike capability, neither side will launch a first strike.

To ensure the survivability of its nuclear forces, the United States built three separate but interrelated nuclear weapon delivery systems after World War II: manned bombers (known as the Strategic Air Command, or SAC), land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The Soviet Union developed a similar “triad.”

Deterrence and the arms race went hand in hand for decades. Rapid advances in the science and technology relevant to war conduct exerted a powerful influence. On one hand, because technological knowledge cannot be unlearned, both nations were wary of disarmament; on the other, the possibility that one nation might achieve a technological breakthrough provided an incentive to continue investing vast sums in weapons research and development.

After the Cold War: Return to Multipolarity?

Political realism emphasizes national self-interest as the principal guiding foreign policy. Some contemporary critics, however, say self-centered national interest is outmoded. They argue for “a new diplomacy and for new institutions and regulatory regimes to cope with the world’s growing environmental interdependence” because “our accepted definition of the limits of national sovereignty as coinciding with national borders is obsolete.”* Perhaps, but there is little concrete evidence that state behavior has fundamentally changed.

New World, Old Ideas

The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the end of the post–World War II bipolar balance of power. The new world order lacks a clearly defined shape and form. The rules of the game remain unclear and contradictions abound. In Europe, for example, the movement toward integration, which transcends traditional nation-state boundaries, competes with the simultaneous rise of religious and ethnic particularism within nations, as evidenced in the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and, most recently, Ukraine.

Problems such as global warming, air pollution, disappearing rain forests, overpopulation, pandemics, and world poverty are global in scope and require global solutions.* The pursuit of narrow self-interests is still possible, of course, but is it still desirable? Is it compatible with a sustainable world economy or world order?

These are the kinds of questions serious thinkers are asking. Many climate scientists, for example, are saying the fate of the planet depends on the answers. The need for a new, broader definition of self-interest is implicit in this view.

To old-school realists, talk of a “global community” sounds like soft-boiled idealism. But the new realists advocate policies rooted in enlightened self-interest and argue that global security and self-preservation require a radical rethinking of world politics. In today’s world, they contend, yesterday’s realism is obsolete—not only short-sighted but also self-defeating.

Globalization

Two contradictory economic trends characterize the new global economy—one toward increased interdependence, the other toward intensified competition. Interdependence and globalization are two sides of the same coin. As more economic interactions and transactions occur, national borders remain in place but recede in importance.* The forces of globalization are many and varied—multinational corporations (MNCs) seeking to maximize profits and gain competitive advantage from advances in transport, communications, and information technology; sovereign governments seeking allies, influence, and trade advantages; and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) trying to do good in the world, to name but three.

By the same token, many problems in today’s world—trade liberalization, global warming, and arms control, to name a few—are not susceptible of national solutions. Major crises in the global economy occurred in 1997 and 2008. Both times, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—a specialized agency of the UN—was called upon to play an important role in restabilizing the global economy. In 2009, at the G-20* economic summit in London, President Obama declared that U.S. interests were “tied up with the larger world,” and leaders agreed to provide $1.1 trillion in new funds to recapitalize the IMF.

Despite “free trade agreements” and other impediments to protectionism, governments still find ways to subsidize domestic industries and agriculture, levy tariffs on imports, and erect nontrade barriers. Relations between the United States and Japan have been strained over Japanese protectionism, for example, and wrangling over agricultural subsidies causes friction in US-EU trade ties. The United States and other countries accuse Beijing of keeping the value of the renminbi (RMB) or yuan (China’s currency) artificially low in order to boost its exports. Not surprisingly, China rejects such accusations. The United States treads lightly because China is America’s major source of foreign capital. Even so, China has reduced its U.S. bond holdings (the amount it is willing to lend us).

Competition and rivalry remain prominent features of the new world order. At the same time, globalization has greatly reduced America’s footprint in the world economy.

The It Revolution

It’s no secret that the revolution in information technology (IT) has changed the way the world works and plays. It has also changed the way nations spy on each other and fight wars, including cyberwars.

The carrying capacity of the global communications network of computers, telephone, and television continues to grow exponentially. According to Moore’s Law (named for Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel), computing power per dollar doubles every eighteen months. A $1,500 laptop computer today is far more powerful than a $10 million mainframe was in the mid-1970s. In the 1970s, there were only about 50,000 computers in the world; by the turn of the twenty-first century, there were more than 140 million. A transatlantic telephone cable could carry only 138 conversations simultaneously in 1960; a fiber-optic cable now carries 1.5 million. The number of Internet users stood at about 361 million at the end of 2000; a decade later, estimates put the number at nearly 2 billion.*

One consequence of the IT revolution is that governments’ hold over societies and individuals has been weakened. People now have greater access to independent sources of information than ever before in history. For this reason, the Internet poses a challenge to dictatorships. China and Iran routinely block certain websites and jam radio broadcasts of the BBC, the Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. But these efforts do not prevent all international contacts via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, nor can they monitor or prevent all international text messaging.

Paradoxically, computers and the Internet also greatly magnify the potential for government intrusion into the private lives of citizens, as the controversy sparked by Edward Snowden’s leak of classified NSA documents in 2013 illustrates. In George Orwell’s classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, new eavesdropping technology—including a poster of Big Brother with moving eyes and two-way “telescreens” that watched the watcher—enhanced the ruthless grip of tyrannical rulers. In today’s world, the kind of technology Orwell imagined is no longer confined to the realm of science fiction. High-tech sensors, meters, cameras, and the like give the modern state the means to monitor most anything and everything it chooses.

The political and social implications of the IT revolution are far-reaching. Computers and the Internet make it more difficult for the state to control what people know and how they know it—and vice versa.

The Rebirth of Europe

When the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was launched in the 1950s, it was a modest effort to integrate two industrial sectors among six countries (France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries). From its seeds grew the world’s largest single economy, the twenty-eight-nation European Union (EU). The impressive gains achieved by Europe’s integrated economy have inspired efforts to form geography-based trading blocs in other regions of the globe.*

The end of the Cold War witnessed a second geopolitical transformation of Europe—three new countries were admitted to the EU in 1995 (Austria, Finland, and Sweden), ten in 2004 (Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia), and Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007. Serbia and Croatia are knocking on the door, as is Turkey. Ukraine also wants to join the West (NATO and the EU), but Russia remains adamantly opposed.

European integration has evolved through decades of economic and military cooperation in the West. Its results, however, are revolutionary. Despite the recent euro crisis, the EU symbolizes the success of Europe’s post-WWII resolve to end centuries of rivalry, especially between France and Germany.

Some say the nation-state as we know it is being eclipsed by regionalism and globalization. Others emphasize the wisdom of a greater reliance on local production and consumption in a crowded and carbon-polluted world. What that would mean for the future of regional trading blocs, which fall between global and local, is anybody’s guess. What do you think?

Weapons of Mass Destruction

As symbols and instruments of national power, weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—nuclear, biological, and chemical—are in a class by themselves. Typically, states that possess them want to prevent so-called threshold states—including Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Japan, both Koreas, and Taiwan—from acquiring them.

Although various arms limitation treaties covering WMDs do exist, many states refuse to sign or be constrained by them. The number of nuclear “haves” is still quite small, yet it has grown from only five in the 1960s to nine at present. Oil-rich Libya, Iran, and Iraq once sought to acquire WMDs. Dictators in both Iraq and Libya have been ousted, but Iran is believed to be close to having “the bomb.” Unauthorized nuclear transfers are strictly forbidden under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), but Pakistan has never signed the NPT and is therefore not bound by it. The same, of course, is true of Iran and North Korea. Both Iran and North Korea are on the U.S. list of rogue or pariah states.* (See “Ideas and Politics”).

Following the midterm elections in November 2010, Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate moved to block a vote on a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, saying the matter was too important to be decided by a lame duck Congress.* But supporters contended that failure to approve the treaty would send the wrong message and jeopardize Russian support for U.S. efforts to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In the end, the supporters won and the treaty was approved, a victory for Obama and perhaps a modest step toward deeper nuclear arms cuts in the future.

Ideas and Politics Pariah States: An Axis of Evil?

In 2003, the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed a secret WMD arsenal. As we now know, these allegations were false. Nonetheless, the Iraq war was the first in the Nuclear Age fought for the ostensible purpose of preventing nuclear proliferation.

Having ousted Saddam and set up an interim government in Iraq, the United States confronted two other pariah states, North Korea and Iran, calling them the “axis of evil” while demanding they discontinue all WMD research and development and submit to international inspections.

A defiant North Korea conducted its first-ever atomic test in October 2006, prompting alarm in Japan and the United States as well as in the wider international community. Veiled U.S. military threats, combined with diplomatic pressure from China, compelled President Kim Jong Il to accept a six-nation accord in February 2007, which committed North Korea to shutting down its nuclear weapons program in return for certain trade and aid concessions. But the Pyongyang regime broke the agreement in 2008-2009 when it conducted nuclear tests, ran six short-range missile tests, and twice attempted to test-launch long-range missiles.

In 2007, the United States turned the spotlight on Iran’s nuclear weapons program (see Figure 17.3). When President Bush assumed a confrontational stance, the Iranian government responded in kind. For a time, the long-standing diplomatic stalemate appeared to be escalating toward war. Although relations between the United States and Iran have remained icy and adversarial, the United States participated in multilateral negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program in 2014, the so-called P5+1 talks involving the five permanent UN Security Council members and Iran. At the beginning of April 2015, the five world powers and Iran agreed to a framework for a nuclear pact to be finalized if certain key sticking points involving an end to economic sanctions and international inspections could be worked out over the next three months. In late May, the world powers led by the United States held “intense” negotiations with Iran in advance of the July 1 deadline.

· The United States was the first country in the world to develop nuclear weapons and remains the only country that has ever used them in war. The United States dropped atomic bombs on two cities in Japan to end World War II, and these “weapons of mass destruction” were directed at civilians, not enemy combatants. Today the United States has a massive arsenal of such weapons and the most sophisticated delivery systems on the planet. What right does the world’s first and foremost superpower have to tell other countries to do as we say, not as we do? Think about it.

(Hint: Weigh the argument that totalitarian dictatorships like North Korea are more likely to use nuclear weapons in a crisis than are prosperous “open societies” like the United States, UK, or France. Contemplate the dangers inherent in nuclear proliferation.)

The End of the World as We Know It?

Environmental dangers remained largely unrecognized in the United States until the early 1960s, when Rachel Carson’s best-selling book, Silent Spring, first appeared.* Since then, protecting the environment has become more and more political, fueled by declining biodiversity, evidence of global warming, and other signs of climate change. Acid rain, global warming, receding water tables, declining forests and fisheries, and the rapid depletion of the earth’s fossil fuels all have contributed to a new sense of urgency.

Today, Green Parties exist in virtually every major democracy except the United States, where organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, Save the Whales, and the National Wildlife Federation nonetheless exert considerable political clout. In addition, many research institutes and public policy “think tanks” monitor the state of the environment and advocate ecology-conscious public policies.

The signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 represented a major step toward a global action plan to combat climate change. Kyoto called for the 37 industrialized countries and the European Union to reduce GHG emissions—carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, and fluorocarbons—by 2012. The Protocol had been endorsed by 192 countries. The United States, Canada, and Afghanistan are the only holdouts now.* (See Chapter 13 for a fuller discussion of environmental policy.)

In 2001, then President George W. Bush announced the United States was withdrawing from the Kyoto accord on the grounds that complying with its provisions would hurt the U.S. economy. Russia announced it would ratify the treaty in 2004, further isolating the United States on this issue. The Bush administration reversed itself and pledged U.S. support for global efforts to combat climate change at a G8 summit meeting in Europe in June, 2007. President Obama created the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, tasked with developing and directing federal efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In 2015, environmental scientists and activists continued to lament what they saw as a woeful lack of leadership from Washington on this issue.

A More Level Playing Field

The world changed dramatically after the Cold War ended and again a decade later after 9/11. The changes were economic as well as geostrategic. The U.S. share of global GDP fell from 20% in 2004 to 16% in 2014. In the eyes of critics, the waste of U.S. lives and resources in two unwinnable wars, the unbridled greed of Wall Street in the run-up to the 2008-2009 stock market crash, and gridlock in Washington have resulted in the loss of U.S. standing in the world, eroded the foundations of the post–Cold War world order, and leveled the playing field in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

The emergence of China as a major global economic force also signals a major change in the global balance of power—namely, the end of the U.S.-dominated post–Cold War unipolar system. According to a World Bank estimate, the PRC will replace the United States as the world’s largest economic power in 2015. Other estimates, using a different metric, say that won’t happen until 2021. Nobody doubts that it will happen—the only question is how soon.

Long the world’s fastest-growing major economy, China achieved average growth rates of 10% for three decades. China’s growth rate slowed to a “mere” 7.4% in 2014, but it is still growing much faster than any of the other major world economies. The PRC is now the world’s largest exporter and the second largest trading nation. China exports far more to the United States than it imports every year, a chronic imbalance sustained only by heavy U.S. borrowing—from China. As a result, China is mounting a big challenge to U.S. global leadership—arguably, bigger even than that of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

India and Brazil are potential economic behemoths. If current trends hold, India will soon become the third largest economy, moving ahead of Japan and Germany, and Brazil has overtaken both France and the United Kingdom in GDP (PPP*).

Today, Green Parties exist in virtually every major democracy except the United States, where organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, Save the Whales, and the National Wildlife Federation nonetheless exert considerable political clout. In addition, many research institutes and public policy “think tanks” monitor the state of the environment and advocate ecology-conscious public policies.

The signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 represented a major step toward a global action plan to combat climate change. Kyoto called for the 37 industrialized countries and the European Union to reduce GHG emissions—carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, and fluorocarbons—by 2012. The Protocol had been endorsed by 192 countries. The United States, Canada, and Afghanistan are the only holdouts now.* (See Chapter 13 for a fuller discussion of environmental policy.)

In 2001, then President George W. Bush announced the United States was withdrawing from the Kyoto accord on the grounds that complying with its provisions would hurt the U.S. economy. Russia announced it would ratify the treaty in 2004, further isolating the United States on this issue. The Bush administration reversed itself and pledged U.S. support for global efforts to combat climate change at a G8 summit meeting in Europe in June, 2007. President Obama created the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, tasked with developing and directing federal efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In 2015, environmental scientists and activists continued to lament what they saw as a woeful lack of leadership from Washington on this issue.

A More Level Playing Field

The world changed dramatically after the Cold War ended and again a decade later after 9/11. The changes were economic as well as geostrategic. The U.S. share of global GDP fell from 20% in 2004 to 16% in 2014. In the eyes of critics, the waste of U.S. lives and resources in two unwinnable wars, the unbridled greed of Wall Street in the run-up to the 2008-2009 stock market crash, and gridlock in Washington have resulted in the loss of U.S. standing in the world, eroded the foundations of the post–Cold War world order, and leveled the playing field in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

The emergence of China as a major global economic force also signals a major change in the global balance of power—namely, the end of the U.S.-dominated post–Cold War unipolar system. According to a World Bank estimate, the PRC will replace the United States as the world’s largest economic power in 2015. Other estimates, using a different metric, say that won’t happen until 2021. Nobody doubts that it will happen—the only question is how soon.

Long the world’s fastest-growing major economy, China achieved average growth rates of 10% for three decades. China’s growth rate slowed to a “mere” 7.4% in 2014, but it is still growing much faster than any of the other major world economies. The PRC is now the world’s largest exporter and the second largest trading nation. China exports far more to the United States than it imports every year, a chronic imbalance sustained only by heavy U.S. borrowing—from China. As a result, China is mounting a big challenge to U.S. global leadership—arguably, bigger even than that of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

India and Brazil are potential economic behemoths. If current trends hold, India will soon become the third largest economy, moving ahead of Japan and Germany, and Brazil has overtaken both France and the United Kingdom in GDP (PPP*).

Ideas and Politics Power and Morality: The Struggle for Palestine

In July 2014, war between Israel and Hamas broke out in the miniscule, densely populated Gaza Strip. A withering Israeli offensive, including more than 5,000 airstrikes, started on July 8; for its part, Hamas fired about 4,600 rockets and mortars at Israel. The war claimed 2,104 victims in Gaza (of which 69% were civilians, according to the UN). Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers died, and six civilians were killed in Israel.

The origins of the tragic struggle for Palestine go back at least to World War I and the Balfour Declaration proclaiming Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland. After World War II, Jewish nationalists, or Zionists, waged a successful war for a homeland in Palestine. As justification, Zionists cited historical, biblical, and legal authority and argued that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews could live in security only in a Jewish homeland. But many Palestinian Arab refugees, who had fled rather than live in a Jewish state, regarded the Israelis as imperialists. Palestinian Arabs behaved like people in war zones (or not) everywhere in the world. Some Arabs in Palestine fought and some didn’t. Some fled the violence and some stayed put. Indeed, there is still a significant Palestinian minority in Israel to this day. Neighboring Arab states declared a holy war against Zionism and vowed to destroy Israel.

Subsequently, radical Palestinian groups directed acts of terrorism against the Israeli population with the complicity of several Arab governments, notably Egypt. In 1956, Egypt seized the Suez Canal from Great Britain and France, which then actively backed Israel in a war with Egypt over which nation would control access to the canal. This episode only strengthened the Arab belief that Zionism and Western imperialism were conspiring to dominate the Muslim nations of the Middle East.

After more than a decade of smoldering hostilities, another war erupted. In 1967, reacting to Egyptian threats and intelligence reports suggesting it was about to attack, Israel launched a preemptive military operation that resulted in the so-called Six Days’ War. After less than a week of fighting, the Israelis had routed their enemies and occupied large tracts of Arab territory, including the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip in Egypt, the Golan Heights in Syria, and the West Bank of the Jordan River in Jordan. Jerusalem, until then partitioned, fell under complete Israeli control.

Humiliated by defeat, Egypt and Syria prepared for yet another round of fighting. In 1973, they attempted to revise the post-1967 status quo by attacking Israeli-held territories. The Israelis were again equal to the challenge, but this time they suffered a setback early on. With the United States acting as a mediator, the Egyptians eventually regained the Sinai desert by agreeing to a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 (the Camp David Accords). The other Arab nations charged Egypt with selling out to Zionism and “imperialism.”

In the decades that followed, peace has remained elusive. In December 2008, Israel launched air strikes against targets in the Gaza Strip, killing civilians and destroying homes, and then invaded Gaza in an effort to hunt down Hamas militants. Israel claims Hamas is responsible for launching rocket attacks against southern Israel. Meanwhile, about 1.4 million impoverished Palestinians who live in Gaza were cut off from the world by an Israeli embargo.

· The Arab states, along with the Palestine Liberation Organization, refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But Israel has also, at times, been part of the problem, such as when it permitted the establishment of Jewish settlements on land seized from the Arabs. Both sides believe they are blameless victims of religious zealots out to destroy them. Who is right and who is wrong? Think about it.

(Hint: Similar ambiguities crop up frequently in international politics. Real grievances are seldom confined to one side in a dispute. Competing claims do not preclude judgments about right and wrong, but they definitely make them more difficult to reach.)

Landmarks in History Manifest Destiny

The United States has always pretended to pursue a status quo policy, even when it was, in fact, expanding. The story of how the United States grew from thirteen states huddled along the Atlantic seaboard (the original colonies) into a vast empire stretching across an entire continent is known to every U.S. schoolchild, but teachers rarely present it as a story about imperialism or expansionism—unless, perhaps, the children and the teacher are Native Americans. Spaniards and Mexicans would have reason to differ over this point as well, as people living in Texas, Arizona, California, or Florida (among other states) ought to know. Having ventured into Alaska before the United States existed, even Russians might object. Expansionists in the U.S. Congress called it Manifest Destiny, but, as Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name is still a rose.

Defense of the status quo is not proof of moral superiority any more than the proponents of change are always in the right. The United States pursued a policy of expansionism in the nineteenth century (see “Landmarks in History: Manifest Destiny”) but fought two world wars to preserve the status quo in the twentieth century. The U.S. post–World War II policy of containment was also aimed at defending friendly governments against Soviet-backed “national liberation movements.”

The Monroe Doctrine

President James Monroe promulgated the Monroe Doctrine in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823, pledging that the United States would strictly respect the existing political configurations in the Western Hemisphere. “With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere,” Monroe observed. But, he continued, as for:

the governments who have declared their Independence, and maintain it … we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by an European power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States.*

The Monroe Doctrine asserted the right of the United States to maintain a preeminent position in half of the world. If there was any question of the extent of the U.S. sway, it was answered in 1898 when the United States fought a war with Spain (the Spanish-American War) and seized Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines (across the Pacific some 7,300 miles from the California coast!).

Containment

The containment idea was unveiled in a celebrated article in the journal Foreign Affairs in July 1947. The anonymous author, “X,” turned out to be George F. Kennan (1904–2005), then the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and later an ambassador to the USSR. “It is clear,” Kennan wrote:

that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies…. Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.*

Kennan went on to predict that if a policy of containment were applied consistently for a decade or so, the Soviet challenge would diminish significantly. He also suggested (prophetically) that if containment proved successful, the totalitarian Soviet state would ultimately fall victim to severe internal pressures.

Why containment? World War II had drastically altered the European and thus the global balance of power. In its aftermath, the United States was thrust for the first time into the role of paramount world leader—a role challenged by a formidable adversary under Stalin’s leadership. It seemed as if Tocqueville’s century-old prophecy that the United States and Russia had each been “marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe” was about to be fulfilled.*

At bottom, containment was a remodeled status quo policy adapted to a new set of circumstances. Its first major test came in 1947, when Greece appeared about to fall to a communist insurgency. In response, President Harry Truman enunciated what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine: “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”*

After a Communist government gained power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the United States countered with the Marshall Plan, a $16.5 billion program aimed at reconstructing the war-torn economies of Western Europe—and preventing what happened in Czechoslovakia from happening in France or Italy. In 1949, the United States established NATO, thus “militarizing” containment.

The “loss” of China to the Communists in 1949 provoked another great wave of anxiety throughout the United States. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the United States stretched containment to cover Asia as well as Europe. During the 1960s, the policy was stretched again—this time to cover the entire Third World. The Cold War strategy of intervention against Communism reached its high-water mark in the 1960s, when hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were sent to Vietnam in what ultimately proved to be an ill-fated attempt to prevent Communist-ruled North Vietnam from vanquishing the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam. Critics called it strategic or imperial overstretch

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War undercut the rationale for containment and called the need for the NATO alliance into question. In the aftermath of 9/11, the war on terror replaced the Red Menace as the big threat to peace and democracy. Critics charged that fear-mongers and right-wing politicians were exaggerating the threat to justify a bloated defense budget.

Blowback: The Curse of Unintended Consequences

The concept of blowback has been at the center of a debate over U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Chalmers Johnson, an expert on Asia, who wrote a best-selling book of the same name, popularized the term.* According to Johnson:

[Blowback] refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of “terrorists” or “drug lords” or “rogue states” or “illegal arms merchants” often turn out to be blowback from earlier operations.*

As examples, Johnson cited the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which, he asserted, “was retaliation for a 1986 Reagan administration aerial raid on Libya that killed President Muammar Qaddafi’s stepdaughter.”*

Johnson also suggested that terrorist attacks against U.S. targets are blowback, citing a 1997 Pentagon report: “Historical data shows a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.”* Johnson argued that “the most direct and obvious form of blowback often occurs when the victims fight back after a secret American bombing, or a U.S.-sponsored campaign of state terrorism, or a CIA-engineered overthrow of a foreign political leader. All around the world today, it is possible to see the groundwork being laid for future forms of blowback.”*

The war on terror led to U.S. airstrikes and drone attacks on civilian populations in Muslim countries, including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Washington justified these attacks as deterring terrorism “even if the targets proved to be irrelevant to any damage done to facilities of the United States. In this way, future blowback possibilities are seeded into the world.”*

Unsurprisingly, Johnson’s dissenting views are not universally shared by other academic or policy experts. Indeed, in the wake of 9/11, many in the United States viewed any criticism of U.S. foreign policy as unpatriotic.

The Bush Doctrine

After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush declared war on terror. The United States, he warned, would retaliate against terrorists and those who harbor them. When the Taliban ignored Bush’s ultimatum to hand over Osama bin Laden and shut down al Qaeda operations, the United States orchestrated a large-scale military invasion of Afghanistan.

But for Bush, overthrowing the Taliban and destroying the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan were only the first steps. There still existed an “axis of evil” that included Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The universal right of self-defense, Bush asserted, justifies the use of preemptive action when an “imminent danger of attack” exists:

The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.*

The logic of this foreign-policy stance—the so-called Bush Doctrine—was invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq.

On May 1, 2003, after the U.S. military invaded Iraq, ousted Saddam Hussein, and replaced his brutal regime with a Coalition Provisional Authority (occupation government), President Bush declared “mission accomplished”—the end of the major fighting in Iraq. But it was a premature victory lap. The death toll mounted steadily in the ensuing years as Iraqi insurgents planted bombs, launched missile attacks, and staged ambushes. By mid-June 2009, more than 4,160 U.S. soldiers had died in Iraq after the “mission accomplished” pronouncement. Other casualties included 1,306 contract workers, 138 journalists, and 308 coalition troops—and an estimated 1.3 million Iraqis.*

Shane T.Mccoy/U.S. Navy/MCT/Landov

Prisoners at the U.S. “Gitmo” detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The methods and policies associated with the Bush Doctrine in the conduct of the war on terror caused a “blowback” effect that damaged President Bush’s popularity at home and his credibility abroad. Campaigning for president in 2008, Barack Obama pledged to close Guantanamo if elected. In 2015, he has yet to do so.

President Bush ordered a troop surge in 2008 in a desperate attempt to defeat the urban guerrilla war of attrition in Iraq. He saw his approval ratings fall as a rising chorus of criticism continued to take its toll and cast a shadow over his administration.

Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, but as president stayed the course. Upon taking office, President Obama ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan. In 2011, amidst tumult in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and much of the Arab World, he approved airstrikes against the armed forces of the repressive Qaddafi regime, thus intervening in Libya’s civil war. In 2014, he gave the order to bomb the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and recommit troops in Iraq after withdrawing the last U.S. combat forces from Iraq a few years earlier. This fealty to the Bush Doctrine, however, did nothing to mitigate the vitriolic criticism of Obama’s leadership from Republicans in Congress.

Statecraft: Beyond Realism

Some international theorists contend that not much has changed in the post–Cold War era. In this view, the United States “must anchor its security and prosperity in a less-than-utopian set of objectives [and] think in terms not of the whole world’s well-being but … of purely national interest.”*

Other foreign policy experts argue that the United States has strayed from primary reliance on diplomacy to an overemphasis on military solutions. These critics argue for multilateralism over unilateralism and the use of statecraft over force and the threat of force whenever and wherever possible.

What is statecraft? According to Dennis Ross, chief Middle East peace negotiator under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, “It is the use of the assets or the resources and tools (economic, military, intelligence, media) that a state has to pursue its interest and to affect the behavior of others, whether friendly or hostile.” Ross notes, “Plato wrote about statecraft. Machiavelli theorized about it. And Bismarck practiced it, never losing sight of his objectives and recognizing that a nation’s ambitions should never exceed its capabilities.”*

Ideals and Self-Interest: The Power of Morality

In sharp contrast to political realism, idealism places great emphasis on the role of values, ideals, and moral principles. It not only helps explain why nations act, but it also furnishes guidelines for how nations ought to act. Idealists tend to view war as irrational—a manifestation of misguided ideology or fervent nationalism. They see trade, aid, diplomacy, and international law and organizations as antidotes—and alternatives—to war.

Idealists often regard realists as cynics; realists say idealists are naive. Who is right? Nations do sometimes act altruistically—for example, by offering asylum to refugees who flee political persecution, economic disaster, or civil war. Between the two world wars, British leaders sought to alleviate harsh conditions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, a stand hailed as “a noble idea, rooted in Christianity, courage, and common sense.”*

Even the arch-realist Hans Morgenthau did not deny morality’s role in international relations. Some actors on the world stage clearly give moral principles more weight than others. President Woodrow Wilson emphasized national self-determination and collective security, Hitler obsessed over territorial expansion (Lebensraum), British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sought peace through appeasement, and President Jimmy Carter actively promoted global human rights. President Bill Clinton ordered the U.S. military action in Somalia from 1992 to 1994 to alleviate mass starvation.*

Still, it is easier by far to cite instances when leaders and states do not act altruistically. President Bill Clinton did not intervene against the genocide in Rwanda, and President George W. Bush did not send troops to stop the savagery in Darfur. The major European nations, too, stayed on the sidelines in both instances.

Most foreign policy contains elements of both ideals and self-interest. Winston Churchill, who measured his words carefully, called the Marshall Plan “the most unsordid act in history.”* But the Marshall Plan was also consistent with the United States’ post–World War II status quo strategic policy of reestablishing a stable Western European community, able to resist armed aggression from without and organized subversion from within. Germany sent massive amounts of aid to Russia in the winter of 1991–1992, partly for humanitarian reasons and partly out of fear a failed Russia would destabilize Western Europe and unleash a horde of refugees in Germany’s direction.

Nations have occasionally sacrificed concrete national interests for the sake of moral principle. Although an occupied country during World War II, Denmark was granted much political autonomy by the Nazi government. Many Danes dared to defy German edicts in order to protect Jewish citizens and other refugees, thus creating “an extraordinary obstacle which arose in the path of the German destruction machine: an uncooperative Danish administration and a local population unanimous in its resolve to save its Jews.”* Denmark, “too weak to seek self-preservation through power,” limited its foreign policy “largely to humanitarian causes, and … in the end survived Hitler’s conquest.”*

A true understanding of the national interest takes into account both power and morality. Power without morality is mere expedience and, as history shows, can be self-defeating, whereas morality without power rarely goes beyond good intentions.*

Aggression: Says Who?

Aggression is strictly condemned in international law and diplomacy. But who starts a fight—who hurls the first insult in a bar or fires the first shot in a war—is often impossible to determine. Third parties seldom agree. The disagreement can and often does lead to a wider conflict.

However, not every state with a territorial claim against another or a desire to change the global distribution of power and wealth is guilty of aggression. A border dispute, for example, does not in itself mean either contending country has an appetite for empire. Neither does the demand by many developing countries for a “new international economic order” (a redistribution of global wealth). Challenging the status quo in this way is hardly proof of aggression, both because the objectives are limited and reasonable and because the methods are political and diplomatic rather than military or economic.

Historically, when one nation’s army invaded and occupied the territory of another nation, it was an act of aggression—a violation of international law. Invaders are seldom welcomed by the native inhabitants, and aggressors are seldom embraced by the international community. But, as mentioned previously, since World War II the United States has intervened militarily in some countries and invaded others without intending to plunder or seize territory, without intending to take over the country’s government, and without intending to stay. Unfortunately, “good” intentions are often misunderstood, misinterpreted, or, in the eyes of others, not good at all. When that happens—and it almost always does—the unintended consequences can be disastrous.

Aggression is often in the eyes of the beholder. It is something others do.

William E. Thompson

Here boys are playing at “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia where genocide happened in the 1990s. Is aggression inherent in human nature, a necessity in a dangerous world, or a form of learned behavior?

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush called for punitive measures against any state(s) that harbored international terrorists.* The methods the United States used were violent—bombing and inserting special operations combat teams in order to

· (1)

overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and

· (2)

kill or capture Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network.

Later, the United States led the invasion of Iraq, the ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein followed, and then his capture and execution. These acts were aggressive, but did they constitute aggression? Were they offensive or defensive in nature? What do you think?

Hard Facts about Soft Power

Scholar Joseph Nye argues power in contemporary world politics is “distributed among countries in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game.” Imagine three chess games on as many chessboards taking place on three levels simultaneously. On the top board, military power is concentrated in the United States; the world looks unipolar. On the middle chessboard, however, economic power is distributed more evenly among the United States, Europe, Japan, and China; and the world appears multipolar. Finally, there “is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside government control” on the bottom of the chessboard:

This realm includes actors as diverse as bankers electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets at one extreme, and terrorists transferring weapons or hackers disrupting Internet operations at the other. On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity or hegemony.*

In a three-dimensional game, Nye argues, you will lose if you focus only on the top board and fail to notice the other boards and the vertical connections among them. Nye draws an even more fundamental distinction between “hard coercive power” and “soft or attractive power,” which he defines as “the important ability to get others to want what you want.” He concludes: “The paradox of American power in the 21st century is that the largest power since Rome cannot achieve its objectives unilaterally in a global information age.”*

The More Things Change …

What does the future hold? During the Cold War, many feared that the world as we know it would be incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. When the Cold War ended, one famous scholar, the late Samuel Huntington, warned that the old clash of ideologies was being replaced by a “clash of civilizations.”* In his words, “The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning.”* Then came 9/11, which was widely viewed as a vindication of Huntington’s thesis, supposedly pitting the Judeo-Christian West against the Islamic world (an oversimplification that nonetheless has some basis in reality).

About the same time, another scholar, Robert Kaplan, saw a different danger on the horizon—what he called “the coming anarchy.” The nation-state as we know it, he argued, is obsolete and destined to be replaced not by larger regional groupings or a world-state (as idealists predicted after World War II) but by a formless force field of political whirlpools energized by the teeming, chaotic, crime-infested cities or “city-states” of the future. The picture Kaplan painted was bleak in the extreme.* West Africa in the 1990s presented a glimpse of this grim future, as did the Balkans war after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

There is a famous French adage that goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more it’s the same thing). Apocalyptic visions of the future are titillating and thought-provoking, but they often exaggerate the chaos and minimize the order at work in the world. Containing conflict and avoiding war depends on respect for law, moral norms, and established institutions—our focus in the next and concluding section.

International Law

For roughly 350 years, an evolving body of international law defining the rights and obligations of states in relation to one another has helped maintain a modicum of order and peace in the world. The “rules of the game” freely adopted by sovereign states have often assumed the form of treaties. Other widely recognized sources of international law include custom and convention; general legal principles based on such ideas as justice, equity, and morality; and the judicial decisions and teachings of eminent legal authorities.

The most famous codification of international law remains Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace, published in 1625, only twenty-three years before the formal establishment of the nation-state system in the Treaty of Westphalia. International law has since become a vital part of what we might call diplomatic business as usual in the arena of world politics.

Usefulness

If a river ran between two states, who would decide whether the boundary should be drawn along the riverbed, along the river banks, or down the exact center of the river? What would guarantee the safety of diplomatic representatives accredited to a foreign government? How would territorial boundaries on land and sea be determined? How would traffic on the high seas be regulated? Should neutral states have the right to carry on normal commercial relations with belligerents in times of war? The need to answer such practical questions makes international law a vital necessity.

Compliance and Enforcement

During the four hundred years of its existence, international law has in most instances been scrupulously observed. When one of its rules is violated, however, it is not always enforced and, when enforcement action is taken, it’s not always effective. Yet to deny that international law plays a vital role in maintaining world order flies in the face of all evidence.*

Enforcing international law is difficult. Governments cannot be arrested, placed on trial, or incarcerated, but they can be made to pay a price for rogue behavior. States perceived as lawbreakers can be subjected to diplomatic censure and economic sanctions. In extreme cases, they can be threatened or attacked, conquered, subjugated, made to pay reparations, or annexed.

Tyrants and mass murderers can be put on trial. One result of political and diplomatic pressure, for example, was the reluctant decision of the Serbian government in 2003 to turn over ex-President Milosevic to the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

Fear of political repercussions is not the only reason governments play by the rules. Trade, travel, and tourism would be greatly impeded without rules, as would banking, foreign investment, and cross-border cultural, scientific, and technological exchanges. Few governments would send ambassadors and envoys to foreign capitals without diplomatic immunity.

Still, power is the coin of all politics, and law without adequate means to enforce it is a farce. In the global arena, either the participants (states) police the system or there is no system worthy of the name. Hence, the balance of power is “an indispensable condition of the very existence of International Law.”*

International Law in the Modern Era

Prior to World War II, the Geneva and Hague Conventions constituted the most important body of international law and set forth the rules of war. Since 1945, international law has advanced in several important areas, most notably in arms control. In the future, international law will likely be increasingly concerned with environmental issues. We look next at each of these important examples of contemporary international law.

The Geneva and Hague Conventions

In 1856, several Great Powers endorsed the Declaration of Paris, first of a series of multilateral international conventions. It limited war at sea by outlawing privateering and specifying that a naval blockade had to be effective to be legally binding. More important was the Geneva Convention of 1864 (revised in 1906), which laid down rules for the humane treatment of the wounded on the battlefield. Of still greater importance was the Hague Convention of 1899, which codified for the first time many accepted practices of land warfare. A second Hague Convention, in 1907, revised the 1899 codes and prescribed rules for the use of new weapons such as dumdum bullets, poison gas, and gas-filled balloons for bombing.

Arms Control Treaties

During the Cold War, no global issue was more pressing than the arms control agreements between the two nuclear superpowers. Although they were both numerous and controversial, these agreements altered neither country’s dependence on nuclear deterrence to maintain peace.

The demise of the Soviet Union, a perceived improvement in relations between the United States and Russia, and the existence of nuclear weapons in the newly created nations of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan spurred the United States and Russia to negotiate new arms control treaties. Most notably, the 1993 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty II (START II) cut nuclear warheads by 60% over levels already reduced two years earlier. START II banned multiple warheads on land-based missiles and reduced submarine-launched multiple warheads. Underlying the treaty was each nation’s hope that it “could reduce the chances of a war of annihilation by banning the nuclear weapons that both powers would be most likely to use in a preemptive strike.”*

Over the past forty years, a number of important arms control measures have been multinational. Some noteworthy agreements include:

· The 1959 Antarctic Treaty prohibited all military activity on the Antarctic continent and accorded each signatory the right of aerial surveillance. It also prohibited dumping of nuclear wastes and encouraged cooperation in scientific investigations.

· The 1967 Outer Space Treaty banned nuclear weapons from outer space, prohibited military bases and maneuvers on the moon and other planets, and barred claims of national sovereignty in outer space.

· The 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty restricted signatories from transferring or receiving nuclear weapons or materials. Although most of the world’s nations have signed this agreement, several have not consistently obeyed its provisions; and a number of other nations, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and India, have not signed it.

· The 1971 Seabed Treaty banned nuclear weapons from the bottom of the world’s oceans outside each state’s twelve-mile territorial limit.

· The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention pledged the destruction of biological stockpiles while outlawing the production and storage of such weapons.

· The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention intended to eliminate chemical weapons within ten years. The U.S. Senate ratified this treaty in April 1997.

There are limits to what we can expect such pacts to accomplish. Governments usually do not sign agreements that require them to act contrary to the way they would act in the absence of such agreements. When the United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, it claimed to have no intention of developing such weapons (nor did it rely on those weapons for its national security). When a proposed agreement on international rules of conduct has required the negotiating parties to relinquish something important to them, however, international law has not fared so well.

What Global Warming Treaty?

Future international law is likely to include important environmental agreements. Some experts believe past arms limitations treaties will provide a precedent for these.

With a few exceptions, such as the Montreal Protocol (curbing chlorofluorocarbons and other gases that deplete the ozone layer),* the number and scope of most international environmental agreements have been limited. Regulations aimed at environmental protection have traditionally come under national sovereignty. Unfortunately, air and water pollution, conservation, wildlife protection, and many other human-induced changes in the biosphere cannot be contained within national boundaries.

Over the past forty years, a number of important arms control measures have been multinational. Some noteworthy agreements include:

· The 1959 Antarctic Treaty prohibited all military activity on the Antarctic continent and accorded each signatory the right of aerial surveillance. It also prohibited dumping of nuclear wastes and encouraged cooperation in scientific investigations.

· The 1967 Outer Space Treaty banned nuclear weapons from outer space, prohibited military bases and maneuvers on the moon and other planets, and barred claims of national sovereignty in outer space.

· The 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty restricted signatories from transferring or receiving nuclear weapons or materials. Although most of the world’s nations have signed this agreement, several have not consistently obeyed its provisions; and a number of other nations, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and India, have not signed it.

· The 1971 Seabed Treaty banned nuclear weapons from the bottom of the world’s oceans outside each state’s twelve-mile territorial limit.

· The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention pledged the destruction of biological stockpiles while outlawing the production and storage of such weapons.

· The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention intended to eliminate chemical weapons within ten years. The U.S. Senate ratified this treaty in April 1997.

There are limits to what we can expect such pacts to accomplish. Governments usually do not sign agreements that require them to act contrary to the way they would act in the absence of such agreements. When the United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, it claimed to have no intention of developing such weapons (nor did it rely on those weapons for its national security). When a proposed agreement on international rules of conduct has required the negotiating parties to relinquish something important to them, however, international law has not fared so well.

What Global Warming Treaty?

Future international law is likely to include important environmental agreements. Some experts believe past arms limitations treaties will provide a precedent for these.

With a few exceptions, such as the Montreal Protocol (curbing chlorofluorocarbons and other gases that deplete the ozone layer),* the number and scope of most international environmental agreements have been limited. Regulations aimed at environmental protection have traditionally come under national sovereignty. Unfortunately, air and water pollution, conservation, wildlife protection, and many other human-induced changes in the biosphere cannot be contained within national boundaries.

The Global Warming Treaty negotiated at Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 is a good example of the difficulties in fashioning international environmental law. Many scientists, including geophysicists and meteorologists, predict a significant rise in the earth’s temperature over the next century. If these predictions are true, global warming will likely disrupt the world’s climate, imperil agriculture, and cause a rising sea level that could threaten many major cities.

A major cause of global warming is carbon dioxide, created when coal, oil, and other fossil fuels are burned in internal combustion engines. However, there is political opposition in the United States to any treaty that would limit energy use. Labor unions, such as the AFL-CIO, worry about lost jobs. Executives from manufacturing industries complain about additional government regulations. Skeptics question the computer models and doubt whether global warming will actually occur or argue that it can be easily or effectively controlled.

Europe has been in the forefront of efforts to combat global warming. A small number of Caribbean and South Pacific nations, seeing themselves most at risk from global warming (even a two-foot rise in sea level would endanger their coastal businesses and poison their drinking water), champion even more stringent standards. Many developing nations, including China, India, and Brazil, have sought to exempt themselves from any agreement. And oil-producing nations, such as Saudi Arabia, see any future treaty as economically harmful and thus have continued to oppose the Kyoto Protocol outright.

The Limitations of International Law

Treaties intended to outlaw war (such as the unsuccessful Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, eventually ratified by sixty-four nations) and pacts intended to promote peace and international understanding (such as the UN Charter) seldom withstand the test of time. The world lacks three practical prerequisites necessary to maintain the rule of law. First, there is no world organization with the legitimate authority to pass binding laws. Second, there is no global chief executive with the power to initiate or enforce international law. Third, sovereign states cannot be forced to submit disputes to the World Court for adjudication or to accept the verdict even when they do.

Enforcement must be left to individual nation-states, which too often enforce decisions unreliably or not at all. As long as international law lacks the predictability and coherence that give the rule of law its unique value, it will remain more of a convenience for governments than a constraint on them.

The World Court

The lack of international law-enforcement capabilities is reflected most clearly in the workings of the World Court, headquartered in The Hague (Holland’s old capital). Officially known as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), one of six principal organs established by the UN Charter, the Court is a full-fledged judicial body, complete with judges, procedural rules, and the solemn trappings of a dignified tribunal, but it lacks a clearly defined jurisdiction.

For the Court to gain jurisdiction over an international dispute, the nations involved must confer jurisdiction on it in accordance with Article 36 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, which stipulates:

Parties to the present Statute may at any time declare that they recognize as compulsory … in relation to any other State accepting the same obligation, the jurisdiction of the Court in all legal disputes concerning:

· (1)

the interpretation of a treaty;

· (2)

any question of international law;

· (3)

the existence of any fact which, if established, would constitute a breach of an international obligation.

[Emphasis added]

In other words, governments are legally obligated to abide by a decision of the Court only when they have given prior consent to the Court’s adjudication of a case. They may make a declaration of intent to accept the Court’s jurisdiction in advance, as Article 36 invites them to do, or they may simply choose to submit certain cases on an ad hoc basis.

In the first twenty years of the World Court’s existence, forty-two governments declared their intent to accept its compulsory jurisdiction. But declarations are not deeds, especially when they involve sovereign states, and appearances can be deceiving. The U.S. “acceptance” of Article 36 in 1946 is a case in point. It was, in fact, a diplomatic sleight of hand. It states, in part:

This declaration shall not apply to: a. disputes the solution of which the parties shall entrust to other tribunals by virtue of agreements already in existence or which may be concluded in the future; or b. disputes with regard to matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States of America as determined by the United States of America; or c. disputes arising under a multinational treaty, unless

Over the past forty years, a number of important arms control measures have been multinational. Some noteworthy agreements include:

· The 1959 Antarctic Treaty prohibited all military activity on the Antarctic continent and accorded each signatory the right of aerial surveillance. It also prohibited dumping of nuclear wastes and encouraged cooperation in scientific investigations.

· The 1967 Outer Space Treaty banned nuclear weapons from outer space, prohibited military bases and maneuvers on the moon and other planets, and barred claims of national sovereignty in outer space.

· The 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty restricted signatories from transferring or receiving nuclear weapons or materials. Although most of the world’s nations have signed this agreement, several have not consistently obeyed its provisions; and a number of other nations, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and India, have not signed it.

· The 1971 Seabed Treaty banned nuclear weapons from the bottom of the world’s oceans outside each state’s twelve-mile territorial limit.

· The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention pledged the destruction of biological stockpiles while outlawing the production and storage of such weapons.

· The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention intended to eliminate chemical weapons within ten years. The U.S. Senate ratified this treaty in April 1997.

There are limits to what we can expect such pacts to accomplish. Governments usually do not sign agreements that require them to act contrary to the way they would act in the absence of such agreements. When the United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, it claimed to have no intention of developing such weapons (nor did it rely on those weapons for its national security). When a proposed agreement on international rules of conduct has required the negotiating parties to relinquish something important to them, however, international law has not fared so well.

What Global Warming Treaty?

Future international law is likely to include important environmental agreements. Some experts believe past arms limitations treaties will provide a precedent for these.

With a few exceptions, such as the Montreal Protocol (curbing chlorofluorocarbons and other gases that deplete the ozone layer),* the number and scope of most international environmental agreements have been limited. Regulations aimed at environmental protection have traditionally come under national sovereignty. Unfortunately, air and water pollution, conservation, wildlife protection, and many other human-induced changes in the biosphere cannot be contained within national boundaries.

The Global Warming Treaty negotiated at Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 is a good example of the difficulties in fashioning international environmental law. Many scientists, including geophysicists and meteorologists, predict a significant rise in the earth’s temperature over the next century. If these predictions are true, global warming will likely disrupt the world’s climate, imperil agriculture, and cause a rising sea level that could threaten many major cities.

A major cause of global warming is carbon dioxide, created when coal, oil, and other fossil fuels are burned in internal combustion engines. However, there is political opposition in the United States to any treaty that would limit energy use. Labor unions, such as the AFL-CIO, worry about lost jobs. Executives from manufacturing industries complain about additional government regulations. Skeptics question the computer models and doubt whether global warming will actually occur or argue that it can be easily or effectively controlled.

Europe has been in the forefront of efforts to combat global warming. A small number of Caribbean and South Pacific nations, seeing themselves most at risk from global warming (even a two-foot rise in sea level would endanger their coastal businesses and poison their drinking water), champion even more stringent standards. Many developing nations, including China, India, and Brazil, have sought to exempt themselves from any agreement. And oil-producing nations, such as Saudi Arabia, see any future treaty as economically harmful and thus have continued to oppose the Kyoto Protocol outright.

The Limitations of International Law

Treaties intended to outlaw war (such as the unsuccessful Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, eventually ratified by sixty-four nations) and pacts intended to promote peace and international understanding (such as the UN Charter) seldom withstand the test of time. The world lacks three practical prerequisites necessary to maintain the rule of law. First, there is no world organization with the legitimate authority to pass binding laws. Second, there is no global chief executive with the power to initiate or enforce international law. Third, sovereign states cannot be forced to submit disputes to the World Court for adjudication or to accept the verdict even when they do.

Enforcement must be left to individual nation-states, which too often enforce decisions unreliably or not at all. As long as international law lacks the predictability and coherence that give the rule of law its unique value, it will remain more of a convenience for governments than a constraint on them.

The World Court

The lack of international law-enforcement capabilities is reflected most clearly in the workings of the World Court, headquartered in The Hague (Holland’s old capital). Officially known as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), one of six principal organs established by the UN Charter, the Court is a full-fledged judicial body, complete with judges, procedural rules, and the solemn trappings of a dignified tribunal, but it lacks a clearly defined jurisdiction.

For the Court to gain jurisdiction over an international dispute, the nations involved must confer jurisdiction on it in accordance with Article 36 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, which stipulates:

Parties to the present Statute may at any time declare that they recognize as compulsory … in relation to any other State accepting the same obligation, the jurisdiction of the Court in all legal disputes concerning:

· (1)

the interpretation of a treaty;

· (2)

any question of international law;

· (3)

the existence of any fact which, if established, would constitute a breach of an international obligation.

[Emphasis added]

In other words, governments are legally obligated to abide by a decision of the Court only when they have given prior consent to the Court’s adjudication of a case. They may make a declaration of intent to accept the Court’s jurisdiction in advance, as Article 36 invites them to do, or they may simply choose to submit certain cases on an ad hoc basis.

In the first twenty years of the World Court’s existence, forty-two governments declared their intent to accept its compulsory jurisdiction. But declarations are not deeds, especially when they involve sovereign states, and appearances can be deceiving. The U.S. “acceptance” of Article 36 in 1946 is a case in point. It was, in fact, a diplomatic sleight of hand. It states, in part:

This declaration shall not apply to: a. disputes the solution of which the parties shall entrust to other tribunals by virtue of agreements already in existence or which may be concluded in the future; or b. disputes with regard to matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States of America as determined by the United States of America; or c. disputes arising under a multinational treaty, unless

· (1)

all parties to the treaty affected by the decision are also parties to the case before the Court, or

· (2)

the United States of America especially agrees to jurisdiction.

Together, these qualifications meant the U.S. government agreed to compulsory jurisdiction only on the condition that the agreement did not compel it to accept the Court’s jurisdiction.

The United States and the World Court

In 1985, the Marxist Sandinista government of Nicaragua filed suit against the United States in the World Court, charging Washington with aggression for mining the harbor at Corinto and supporting the Contra rebels. The United States boycotted the proceedings and suspended bilateral talks on the grounds that Nicaragua was using the Court for political and propaganda purposes.

In June 1986, the World Court ruled decisively against the United States. At Nicaragua’s initiative, the Security Council voted 11 to 1 to support the World Court’s decision (with the United Kingdom, France, and Thailand abstaining). Yet the ruling had no practical effect because the U.S. government rejected the ICJ’s jurisdiction.

In 1992, the United States and Great Britain led a successful fight for UN sanctions against Libya when its government refused to extradite two Libyan nationals suspected of masterminding the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 people died. When Libya successfully sought relief in the World Court, the U.S. again argued the Court lacked jurisdiction.

Power and Principle

Are principles of justice irrelevant in international politics? There’s no simple answer to this question. Strong states can punish weaker states (for example, through economic sanctions or military action). Rogue rulers can also be punished—the International Criminal Court (ICC) trials of former presidents of Yugoslavia (Slobodan Milosevic) and Liberia (Charles Taylor) for crimes against humanity are two examples in recent history.

International law is most effective when it serves the interests of powerful nations. Great Powers typically seek political and military solutions (where they have greater control over the outcomes) rather than judicial remedies (where judges decide the outcomes).

The United Nations: Our Mirror in a Mirror

The quest for peace in response to two catastrophic world wars in the first half of the twentieth century led to the birth of the United Nations (UN). The UN is the first and only true “world organization” in the sense of having a near-universal membership (North Korea and Taiwan are two rare exceptions). As such, it is a mirror reflecting the realities of a troubled world.

Historical Background

Beginning in the nineteenth century, several international peacekeeping federations were founded, usually in the aftermath of increasingly destructive wars. The Holy Alliance, formed in 1815 in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, represented an attempt by Europe’s major powers to control international events by means of meetings and conferences. A more elaborate organization was the League of Nations, set up in 1919 after World War I.

When the Covenant of the League of Nations was sealed in 1919, Wilsonians (followers of President Woodrow Wilson) hailed it as the advent of a new age. The League’s Assembly was a deliberative body of representatives from each member-state, and all votes carried equal weight. Motions required unanimous approval for passage, so no matter how tiny, every member enjoyed veto power over nearly every decision. The much-smaller Council was made up of four permanent and four nonpermanent members who investigated and reported on threats to the peace and proposed or recommended appropriate action to the Assembly. The two bodies were supervised by the Permanent Secretariat, the League’s administrative arm.

The League’s ambitious aims included, above all, the maintenance of international peace through the promise of swift and certain retribution against aggressor nations—peace and punishment were two sides of the same coin. War was crime, and crime would not pay. In this respect, the League became the institutional embodiment of President Wilson’s desire to replace the traditional balance of power with “a single overwhelming, powerful group of nations who shall be trustees of the peace of the world.”* The key was to create a system of collective security with the combined military forces of all law-abiding nations so formidable that no single challenger would stand a chance against it. The prospect of facing such a potential force would be a sufficient deterrent.

Despite Wilson’s inspired advocacy of the League of Nations, the United States was sidelined because Republicans in the Senate opposed the Treaty of Versailles. The U.S. failure to join the League foreshadowed the organization’s future misfortunes. By the early 1930s, conflicting interests and bitter rivalries had resurfaced with a vengeance.

The League was doomed to failure by several fatal flaws. First, the United States was conspicuously absent. Second, the requirement for unanimity invited inaction in a crisis. Third, although collective security measures were to be triggered by acts of aggression, the Charter failed to define what constituted aggression. Germany remilitarized the Rhineland, Italy invaded Ethiopia, Germany invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Japan embarked on a career of conquest in Asia—none of these actions prompted a collective reaction on the part of the League.

World War I transformed the Eurocentric balance-of-power system to one that was truly global and moved the United States front and center on the world stage. The Republican majority in the U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI and established the League of Nations. As a consequence, the Wilsonian idea of collective security as the key to a world without war was stillborn.

The Founding of the United Nations

The shocking death toll and terrifying new weapons of World War II sparked renewed efforts to ensure world peace through a powerful international organization. The United Nations was, in effect, an attempt to build a new and improved League of Nations.

In contrast to the League, the UN Charter created a Security Council entrusted with “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” and made up of five permanent members—the United States, the Soviet Union (recently replaced by the Russian Republic), the United Kingdom, France, and China—and ten nonpermanent members. In sharp contrast to the League, the so-called Big Five alone can veto proposed peacekeeping and collective security measures.

The idea was to give major powers responsibilities commensurate with their economic and military capabilities. In Chapter 7, Article 39 specifies “the Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measure shall be taken in accordance with Articles 40 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

Article 41 deals with economic sanctions, including “complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.” Article 42 contemplates situations in which economic sanctions may be inadequate; in such cases, the Security Council “may take action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockades, and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of Members of the United Nations.” Other articles in Chapter 7 deal with organizing the military components of a full-fledged collective security system, including the establishment of the Military Staff Committee (Article 47). The military provisions in the UN Charter far surpass the League’s in scope and detail.

The UN Charter was not designed as a blueprint for world government. Article 2, paragraph 7, states that matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state” are beyond the purview of UN authority. Article 2 explicitly recognizes the “sovereign equality” of all UN member-states.

Still, many of the UN’s creators viewed it as the foundation of a new world order. The wide array of specialized agencies leave no doubt that the UN was committed from the outset to the positive goal of promoting prosperity, as well as preventing war. The Charter mirrors the mix of realism and idealism present at the creation—and shows how patterns from the past often intrude on the best attempts to build a better future.

The United Nations in the Cold War: 1945 to 1991

The United Nations faced problems not unlike those that destroyed the League of Nations. A world government capable of keeping the peace implied nothing less than a wholesale forfeiture of state sovereignty. Anything short of a world government would leave the UN unable to punish an aggressor or preserve the peace unless all the Great Powers—at a minimum, the five permanent Security Council members—were in complete accord.

On one hand, the Charter obligates member-states to act in accordance with the rule of law and empowers the Security Council to punish states when they do not; on the other hand, it provides a number of loopholes and escape clauses for states that wish to evade or ignore their obligations. Article 51, for example, states, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense.” Such a provision invites aggression as long as “self-defense” is a lawful justification to resort to force and individual states are free to define as self-defense any action they deem in their national interest. The dilemma is obvious: without escape clauses such as Article 51, the UN Charter would not have been acceptable; with them, it may not be enforceable.

Another problem plaguing the world body until recently was the persistent state of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, which seriously hampered the workings of the United Nations during the Cold War. Because each superpower maintained a coalition of allies, followers, and admirers that at one time or another held the majority in the General Assembly, deadlock became the hallmark of most UN deliberations. The consensus necessary to promote peace through collective security was also absent at many critical junctures; when the Soviet Union did not veto a controversial measure, the United States often did. Despite these difficulties, the United Nations has contributed valuable, if limited, efforts toward peace by sending mediators, truce supervision teams, and quasi-military forces to various parts of the world, including the Congo, Cyprus, the Middle East, and the Balkans.

The United Nations after the Cold War: 1991 to the Present

The mid- to late 1980s saw an unprecedented period of cooperation among the five permanent members of the Security Council, particularly between the United States and the Soviet Union. The catalyst was the Soviet Union’s new conciliatory foreign policy, initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. This era of increased cooperation produced two significant results. First, the United Nations embraced a particularly vigorous approach to international peacekeeping, sometimes bordering on peacemaking.* Second, it sanctioned collective military action against Iraq after it invaded Kuwait.

After the Cold War, with the superpower rivalry a thing of the past, the United Nations momentarily blossomed. Although balance-of-power politics and nuclear deterrence forged a relatively stable system of order after 1945, the end of the Cold War gave rise not only to new opportunities for order building but also to new dangers and sources of instability. Wherever there was conflict or a humanitarian crisis, the UN was called upon. President Bill Clinton renounced unilateralism and made it a rule to seek UN approval before resorting to military force. The prestige of the UN was at an all-time high.

In 2001, the UN and Secretary-General Kofi Annan were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for working toward a more peaceful world. It was a fitting tribute to the individual and the organization he served.

Peacekeeping Operations

A mere fifty observers helped facilitate the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, while peacekeeping forces from 109 nations helped secure peace and independence for Namibia in 1989 by creating the conditions for elections and securing the repeal of discriminatory and restrictive legislation, the release of prisoners, and the return of exiles.

During the 1990s, the United Nations launched peacekeeping operations in Kosovo (Yugoslavia), Sierra Leone (West Africa), East Timor (formerly part of Indonesia), the Congo (Central Africa), and Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea (the horn of Africa). In 1991, the UN fielded major peacekeeping operations in El Salvador and Cambodia. Such missions are never risk free, and they come with no guarantee of success. UN troops sent to Somalia in 1992 to facilitate the safe distribution of food to starving people were attacked by rebels who viewed the UN as a cat’s paw for the West.

In 1993, the UN dispatched nearly 40,000 peacekeepers to the former Yugoslavia. The presence of this force, combined with NATO military support and UN-sponsored sanctions, induced Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to negotiate in good faith and helped bring about the U.S.-brokered peace settlement known as the Dayton Accords in 1995. Later, after Milosevic was defeated in national elections and created a popular groundswell when he tried to cancel the results, the United Nations was instrumental in bringing the brutal former president and other accused war criminals in Yugoslavia to justice.

UN peacekeepers generally try to avoid combat but have suffered many casualties over the years, including some 2,591 fatalities (as of mid-2009) since 1948. In the half-century between 1948 and1999, just over 1,600 UN military personnel were killed in action, compared to nearly 1,400 between 1999 and 2012. Among the 222,000 who died in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti were 102 UN peacekeepers.

Some UN peacekeeping operations have become permanent fixtures without leading to a final settlement—Kashmir, Cyprus, and Lebanon are prime examples. These missions stretch the UN budget to the breaking point, (see “Ideas and Politics: Peace on the Cheap”). Even so, the cost of UN peacekeeping is tiny measured against national defense budgets or the cost of a major war. The war in Iraq, for example, has cost the United States over $3 trillion, according to one authoritative estimate.* By comparison, the cost of a peacekeeping operation is a real bargain.

Collective Military Action

In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United Nations responded by authorizing collective military action. This use of force recalled Woodrow Wilson’s failed dream of collective security under the League of Nations flag and an early attempt at collective military action under the auspices of the UN.

Ideas and Politics Peace on the Cheap: Too Good to Be True?

According to the United Nations:

· UN peace operations are less expensive than other forms of international interventions, and costs are shared more equitably among UN member-states.

· A survey by Oxford University economists found that international military intervention under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter is the most cost-effective means of reducing the risk of conflict in post-conflict societies.

· The approved peacekeeping budget for the period from July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013, was approximately US$7.23 billion. This represents about 0.5% of global military spending (estimated at US$1.6 trillion for 2010).

· A study by the U.S. Government Accounting Office estimated that it would cost the United States about twice as much as the UN to conduct a peacekeeping operation similar to the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH)—$876 million compared to the UN budgeted $428 million for the first fourteen months of the mission.

· In 2014, the number of refugees worldwide reached a record 59.5 million, some 8.3 million more than the previous year. Note: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) heads the only international agency that keeps collects and publicizes this information; UNHCR provides relief aid to refugees wherever and whenever possible.

· If the United Nations didn’t exist, it is often said, it would have to be invented. Is this true? Think about it.

(Hint: Check on the year the UN was launched and consider the context; also, review the causes of war discussed earlier in this book and the types of conflicts that erupted repeatedly in the second half of the twentieth century.)

SOURCE: United Nations, “Peacekeeping Fact Sheet”; http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/resources/statistics/factsheet.shtml .

In June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, the United Nations, at the urging of the United States, responded with military force. As a permanent member of the Security Council, the Soviet Union was in a position to block this action. But the United States avoided a Soviet veto by taking the matter to the General Assembly (in the form of the “Uniting for Peace” resolution) where it enjoyed an automatic majority. Although the UN flag was raised, the Korean conflict was in truth a war fought by the United States against North Korea and, later, the People’s Republic of China. The supreme commander, General Douglas MacArthur, was responsible to the president of the United States, not to the secretary-general of the United Nations.

Four decades later, in 1990-1991 when the United States (backed by the British) launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, the Security Council became a forum for the major powers to consult on how to respond to Iraqi aggression. The Council backed resolutions condemning Iraq, establishing tough economic sanctions, and ultimately approving the use of force to expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait. After the Gulf War’s end, UN inspectors were allowed access to sites in Iraq suspected of hiding biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.

The United Nations did not provide any forces of its own. The war was financed in large part by contributions from the richest U.S. allies, including Japan, Germany, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The UN legitimized Desert Storm—nothing more, nothing less. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq without the authorization of the Security Council and in the face of overwhelming opposition in the General Assembly.

The United Nations and the Iraq War

In the fall of 2002, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441 requiring Iraq to disarm and allow weapons inspections or face “serious consequences.” UN weapons inspectors subsequently found no weapons of mass destruction or weapons laboratories, but the Bush administration claimed to have evidence to the contrary.

The UN Security Council was strongly against an immediate invasion. In opposing a rush to war, France and Germany, longtime U.S. NATO allies, took the lead. Russia and China, both permanent members of the Security Council (like France), also demurred. U.S. polls showed that the public was ambivalent and self-contradictory: a majority favored U.S. action to oust Saddam from power, but an even larger majority agreed the UN Security Council “should make the final decision regarding the disarmament of Iraq”—if the United Nations did not approve the action, the United States should stay out.*

When Secretary of State Colin Powell’s attempt to persuade the Security Council that Iraq possessed WMDs failed, President Bush decided to act without UN approval. Hawks suggested the United Nations was irrelevant or worse, and the United States was wise to ignore it.

The outcome of the invasion was never in doubt: the United States had overwhelming military superiority and was banking on a quick war with a happy ending—one that would rid the Iraqi people of a sadistic ruler and lead directly to a flourishing democracy. As we now know, the outcome of the occupation was quite a different matter.

Through the Looking-Glass

As the history of the postwar world demonstates, the UN has literally functioned as a life-saver in many conflict-ridden parts of the world. But despite its successes, the world organization has not lived up to all the soaring expectations of its founders, and some problems resemble those of the League, which could not be overcome.

To understand why, we have to peer through the looking-glass, to see what’s behind the UN’s frequent failure to act effectively to prevent a war or to broker a peace pact. Too often the Security Council is deadlocked; action can be thwarted by the veto of one member, or the General Assembly may fiddle while a village in Nigeria burns.

Procedural difficulties, however, are often rooted in deep-seated political differences. Critics call the UN irrelevant, ineffectual, or even a joke; in truth, the UN is a mirror of the human condition and a testament to the all-too-frequent triumph of emotion over reason in international politics.

The Quest for World Peace

No magic formula will resolve the problem of human conflict once and for all. The rule of law will not become the norm in international relations anytime soon, nor will reverence for human life or the sanctity of treaties render national armed forces obsolete.

Irene Chu Hampson

Exhibit at Disneyland in Hong Kong.

International law and organizations can and do play a vital role in conflict management, but there is still no substitute for goodwill and enlightened leaders. Ending the Cold War rivalry was a significant step toward a safer and saner world, but perpetual peace is as elusive today as it was a century ago.

Summary

The character of international politics differs significantly from that of domestic politics due to the absence of a world government capable of maintaining law and order. The struggle for power, inherent in the international system, is designed to advance national interests. Sovereign states choose a variety of ends, almost always overshadowed by one ultimate aim, to maximize power.

Modern European history saw the rise of the nation-state and the emergence of a multipolar world order sustained by a balance of power characterized by a relatively equal distribution of resources and capabilities among several major states. The traditional balance-of-power system that came into being in Europe in 1648 was limited in size and scope. All members shared certain common values and beliefs; Great Britain acted as keeper of the balance. The system worked because means and ends were limited, alliances were flexible, and crusading zeal was absent.

The demise of the old Eurocentric order following the two world wars fought in the first half of the twentieth century ushered in a bipolar system in the second half of the twentieth century in which two rival “superpowers” were preeminent. In the Cold War, the United States adopted a status quo policy of containment, aimed at preventing the Soviet Union from expanding or upsetting the global balance of power. A bipolar system replaced the old multipolar European system, with ideological differences and the specter of nuclear holocaust characterizing the bitter rivalry between the two superpowers. By the late 1960s, a strategic stalemate based on mutual deterrence made war between these two titans equally irrational for both.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, a new international order emerged. Following a brief “unipolar moment” during which the United States was unrivalled as the sole remaining superpower, a new era of multipolarity rapidly emerged characterized by ever-greater interdependence in a dynamic global economy driven by the revolution in information technology; growing concentration of economic power in three regions, namely Europe (the twenty-eight-member EU), northwest Asia (China, Japan, and South Korea), and North America; a deteriorating global economy; the unmitigated danger of nuclear proliferation; climate change and a threatened global environment; and a leveling of the playing field as the share of U.S. GNP in the world economy shrinks.

The world has changed dramatically since the Cold War ended, but U.S. foreign policy has remained basically unchanged. In the Western Hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine was designed to perpetuate the status quo; after World War II, containment in effect applied the same logic to the entire globe. On many occasions the United States intervened militarily to prevent leftist takeovers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Sometimes, these interventions caused “blowback”—self-induced policy problems arising from imprudent past actions—as happened in Vietnam. The Bush Doctrine, asserting a U.S. right to take preemptive measures whenever and wherever it deems necessary, provided the rationale for the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Political realists run the risk of underestimating the power of moral principles. Aggression is universally denounced in international politics but difficult to define. Neorealists stress the value “soft power”—power derived from goodwill and good works rather than from threats and the use of force. Critics of recent U.S. foreign policy urge a greater reliance on statecraft, or the skillful and prudent practice of diplomacy, as an alternative to overreliance on military force (or “hard power”).

To what extent have international organizations and international law contributed to a more peaceful world? In the twentieth century, the League of Nations was torn apart by conflicting national interests. During the Cold War, from the early post–World War II period until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United Nations encountered many obstacles, although it had modest success as a peacekeeping institution. Peacekeeping activity expanded in the post–Cold War era when the United Nations authorized collective military action in the Persian Gulf (Iraq), the Horn of Africa (Somalia), the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), West Africa (Sierra Leone and Liberia), and Central Asia (Afghanistan), among others. However, the United Nations refused to back the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

International law facilitates and regulates relations among sovereign and independent states whose interactions might otherwise be chaotic. Examples of international law include the Geneva and Hague Conventions, which set rules for warfare, and the multilateral arms limitations treaties. International environmental agreements, such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, are becoming an increasingly important part of international law.

The limitations of international law are starkly apparent in the difficulties encountered by the World Court. The United Nations is similarly constrained by its inability to act against the wishes of the major powers, especially the five permanent members of the Security Council.

Conflict is endemic in the world, always has been and always will be. Apocalyptic visions of the future tend toward alarmism, exaggerating dangers, and focusing on disorder in the world while ignoring evidence of peace and progress.

“If the UN did not exist, it would have to be invented.” What do you think?