200 words DQ

Chapter2 WW1

Kaiser Wilhelm II (left) is accompanied by Winston Churchill on a review of German troops in this photograph from 1909. Why did Great Britain and Germany fail to align and perhaps avoid World War I—because of naval and colonial competition (the realist perspective), inept diplomacy (the liberal perspective), or diverging liberal and autocratic political systems (the identity perspective)?

Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress

World War I was a catastrophe. More than fifteen million people died. The world had not experienced such a level of butchery at least since the Thirty Years’ War, which ravaged Europe in the seventeenth century. How did this disaster occur? We still do not know; historians and scholars disagree. Undoubtedly there were many causes. Perhaps it was a “perfect storm,” with multiple causes coming together at the same time. But which causes were more important than others? That, we will see, is a matter of perspective and level of analysis.

Europe in 1914

On June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated while on a visit to Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, then provinces of Austria. This incident touched off World War I. But if you think history has only one outcome, consider the tragic comedy of the assassination itself. A bomb-wielding Serbian nationalist agent had attempted earlier that morning to kill the archduke. The attempt failed, but several people were wounded, including an army officer in the car trailing the archduke. The archduke went on to City Hall, where he was welcomed, and then later he set out to visit the wounded officer in the hospital. His driver made a wrong turn and stopped the vehicle in front of a shopping area. There, by coincidence, another one of the seven agents involved in the earlier plot was standing. Given an unexpected second chance, this agent stepped forward and succeeded in killing the archduke. So a good counterfactual question is: What if the assassination had never occurred?

Austria considered Serbia responsible for the attack and had to retaliate. The next month brought the world, step by step, closer to war. Now another scene emerges. On the morning of July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. But before war actually began and before Russia, Germany, Britain, and France joined the hostilities, the monarchs of Germany and Russia exchanged frantic telegrams. The two monarchs were cousins. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was the son of Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, the first child and daughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. Victoria Adelaide had married Prince Frederick, the son of Kaiser Wilhelm I. The second daughter of Queen Victoria, Alice, had married the German duke of Hesse-Darmstadt. Their daughter, Alix, went on to marry Nicholas II, the czar of Russia in 1914. (She became the famous czarina who had a hemophiliac son, befriended the mad monk Rasputin, and was subsequently killed with Nicholas and her five children by Bolshevik executioners in 1918.) So, by marriage, Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm, known to each other as Nicky and Willy, were cousins. Their frantic exchanges became known as the “Willy-Nicky telegrams.” George V, the king of England in 1914 and another grandson of Queen Victoria, was also a cousin. These family members were about to declare war on one another. (And you thought your family had problems?)

Russia had vital interests at stake in Serbia and had pledged to come to its aid in the event of war, so Nicholas II was under great pressure to mobilize Russian forces to support Serbia. His last chance was to get Germany, an ally of Austria, to pull Austria back from its declaration of war against Serbia. On July 29, he telegraphed Willy, “An ignoble war has been declared on a weak country.... I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far.” In reply, Willy warned his cousin that “military measures on the part of Russia, which would be looked upon by Austria as threatening, would precipitate a calamity.” For three days, Willy and Nicky talked past one another—in English, which was their common language—and on August 1 the world plunged into the abyss of total war.4

Could the cousins have changed the course of history even if they had wanted to? Many students of history would say no. Applying levels of analysis tools, they would argue that systemic and domestic forces overrode individual influences. Germany felt encircled and devised a war strategy in 1913 to break out before Russia became too powerful. In addition, monarchs no longer had the absolutist power of Louis XIV or Frederick the Great. Kaiser Wilhelm was not really in full control of his military. But when, then, did events veer out of control? Here the three principal perspectives on international affairs offer different answers. Let’s summarize the answers and then explore them in more detail.

Realist perspectives argue that the crucial event was the unification of Germany in 1871. German unification created a new power in the heart of Europe that had a larger population and, in short order, a more powerful economy than any other European power. Such a central power inevitably threatened its neighbors, so these neighbors, in response, allied against Germany. Now surrounded by enemies, Germany felt even more threatened.

Notice here the security dilemma at work. How could Germany be sure that its neighbors intended only to defend themselves, and how could its neighbors be sure that Germany would not use its dominance to attack them? No country was being particularly aggressive. The problem, as realist perspectives see it, “was Germany’s growing economic and military power, not its aggressive behavior.”5

Ultimately, the problem could be resolved only through the reduction of German power, which the victors attempted to accomplish after World War I, or the integration of German power into western Europe and then into the whole of Europe, which was done after World War II and the Cold War. History, realist perspectives argue, bears out the fact that a freestanding Germany in the center of the European balance of power is destabilizing. Europe is stable today only because a united and once again powerful Germany is part of a new supranational actor known as the European Union.

Liberal perspectives see it differently. It was not a shift of power due to German unification that made countries insecure; rather, it was the lack of adequate institutions and diplomacy to make commitments openly and to develop information about who was complying with those commitments and who was not. It was, in short, the secrecy and manipulation of European diplomacy from the late nineteenth century onward that created the uncertainty, not the situation of unbalanced power driven by the security dilemma. Notice here the problems of inadequate information, miscommunication, and lack of institutions to enforce compliance that liberal perspectives emphasize. Interestingly, European diplomacy and institutions failed just as powerful new forces of economic and political interdependence emerged that might have overcome distrust. Industrialization was creating new linkages among banks and corporations that opposed war. International institutions, such as the Hague Conferences started in 1899, were being set up to reduce arms and regulate other relationships. When the war ended, liberal perspectives proposed an entirely new system of collective security to manage international military relations. The League of Nations was their hope to replace the balance of power.

Identity perspectives focus on yet another primary force leading to World War I—that of shared and competitive identities. Nationalism, ignited by the French Revolution, grew out of different cultures and, in its most virulent form, was associated with different races. Different cultures and races struggled to survive in world politics, much as different species struggled to survive in the natural world. Social Darwinism, drawn from Charles Darwin’s new theory of natural evolution, became the shared mind-set among European nations and drove them to conflict and war. It constructed a particularly virulent form of anarchy, which drove nations apart and eventually proved a stronger force than peace movements, the Hague Conferences, and international trade and investment, which drove nations together. European countries raced off into the inferno of World War I eager to prove that their culture was the superior one. Notice here how ideas, which identity perspectives emphasize, shaped conflicting identities that, in turn, generated military competition and overrode the cooperative opportunities offered by common institutions and trade.

Let’s take a deeper look at these three explanations of World War I and then assess their relative validity. As we go along, we take special note in the text’s margins of the way the causal arrows work from the different perspectives or levels of analysis, pointing out explicitly in which direction causality runs. We also then summarize in matrix tables the explanations from each perspective at the different levels of analysis. Finally, Parallel Timeline 2-1 will help you remember key historical events and sort them out regarding which perspective might emphasize them. Remember, historical events always involve all three principal causes of international behavior—ideas, institutions, and power. But realist perspectives highlight the power struggles underlying events, liberal perspectives the interdependence factors, and identity perspectives the ideas.

If you still doubt that this history has much relevance today, consider the many similarities between the world before 1914 and the world today. A dominant power existed (Great Britain then, the United States today), a rising power threatened the status quo (Germany then, China today), failed states proliferated (Balkan states and Turkey then, Somalia, Yemen, Mali, Syria, and Afghanistan today), competition over trade and resources intensified (colonial territories then, commodities and high-tech trade today), and anti-Western doctrines inspired militants (Marxism and anarchists then, jihadism and terrorists today). There are, of course, also many differences; the existence of nuclear weapons is but one of them. But we cannot know what is the same or what is different about today unless we know about the past.

Realist Explanations

From a systemic structural level of analysis, Germany’s unification in 1871 significantly altered the balance of power in Europe. Germany, as well as Italy, had been divided for more than a thousand years. The central part of Europe, known as the Holy Roman Empire (the weak successor to the Roman Empire, nominally under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church), contained more than three thousand separate units at the time of Charlemagne in 800 c.e., 300 or so at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and still more than thirty at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. As Map 2-1 shows, this fragmentation provided a kind of buffer as other great powers emerged and contended for power in Europe. At times, the European balance of power functioned in two parts, a major rivalry between France and Great Britain in the west and another among Prussia, Austria, and Russia in the east. And even though western and eastern powers participated in wars across the continent—for example, Russia’s role in the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s or Britain’s role in the Crimean War in the 1850s—their priority interests remained somewhat separate. Britain was concerned primarily with the Low Countries of Belgium and the Netherlands, Russia with the countries of Prussia and Austria-Hungary. Once Germany was united, the European balance of power became a single whole, and it was more likely now that a disruption in one part would trigger a wider war among all great powers. This was especially true because Germany occupied the northern plains of Europe, which offered few geographic obstacles to invasion. A united country in this part of Europe would feel vulnerable, just as Poland, which also occupies the northern plains, was historically vulnerable and indeed subject to repeated partition. Geography matters, a realist perspective would point out; a united Germany would have to be either very strong and threaten its neighbors or very weak and become the potential prey of its neighbors.

The Rise of German Power

As it turned out, a united Germany was going to be very strong. Already in the 1830s, Prussia had created the Zollverein, a customs union with other German states that lowered barriers to trade and ignited rapid industrial development. Through this trade community, which a liberal perspective might emphasize, Prussia between 1850 and 1870 increased sixfold the number of steam engines driving its industry and tripled its railway capacity. Germany was changing so fast that Karl Marx, visiting Berlin in 1859, said, “Whoever last saw Berlin ten years ago would not recognize it again.”6 (Many visitors see the same rapid change today in the cities of China.) By 1870, Prussia/Germany had pulled ahead of France in both population and gross national product (GNP, the total income of the residents of a country) and had eight times the relative wealth of Russia. And by 1900, Germany had pulled even with Great Britain, the preeminent power in Europe, and was three times wealthier than France or Russia. In 1913, one year before the war broke out, German wealth exceeded that of Great Britain by 40 percent.7

Germany was also able to convert its wealth into military power. Countries do this with differing degrees of efficiency, and power conversion becomes one of the factors complicating the assessment of power in balance-of-power politics. Remember from Chapter 1 how realist perspectives include political competence and stability as measures of power capabilities—not something we can touch but clearly something vital for mobilizing and converting resources into military arms. Russia, for example, had substantial wealth, particularly natural resources. But it did not have an efficient bureaucracy and could not support its military the way Germany did. By 1900, Germany, with less than half the population of Russia, had an army (including reserves) bigger than Russia’s and was building a navy to challenge British dominance on the high seas.8 During World War I itself, Germany massively outproduced Russia across the whole range of military equipment: airplanes, machine guns, artillery pieces, and rifles.9 This administrative capacity to convert wealth into military power was also one of the strengths displayed by the United States as it rose to the status of a great power around the time of World War I.10

Map 2-1 Europe prior to German Unification in 1871

Power conversion reflects one of the ways in which the levels of analysis interact in the realist perspective and in international affairs more generally. Different domestic capacities to convert resources into power affect the relative systemic structural balance of power. Germany and earlier Poland were both affected by vulnerable strategic positions. The one survived while the other succumbed, in part because of domestic factors. But both too were driven by structural vulnerabilities, Germany to aggression and Poland to submission (partitioned by Prussia, Austria, and Russia in the late eighteenth century and not reconstituted until after World War I).

Zollverein: a customs union created by Prussia involving other German states that lowered barriers to trade and ignited rapid industrial development beginning in the 1830s.

Power Balancing: Triple Entente and Triple Alliance

What was Europe going to do with this efficient colossus sitting across the strategic northern plains? Balance it, the realist perspective says. And that’s exactly what Germany’s neighbors proceeded to do. For a while, through the masterful but secretive diplomacy of Bismarck, Germany was able to reassure its weaker neighbors and keep them from aligning against Germany’s greater power. But in 1894, four years after Bismarck left the scene, the two countries most directly affected by Germany’s power, France and Russia, formed an alliance. Now, with the Franco-Russian Alliance, Germany had potential adversaries on both borders. As Map 2-2 shows, Poland did not exist at the time, so Germany and Russia shared a border. A lot now depended on what Great Britain did.

Map 2-2 Europe and Germany in 1914

For two decades prior to World War I, Britain and Germany had flirted with the idea of alliance. Remember that Kaiser Wilhelm’s uncle, Edward VII, and cousin, George V, were the English monarchs during this period. In the 1890s, Willy spent his summer vacations in England participating in yacht races with his relatives and admiring the British naval fleet. A British–German alliance might have avoided the encirclement that Germany feared from France and Russia. From a realist perspective and systemic level of analysis, alliances tend to develop in a checkerboard rather than a domino pattern. Threatened countries leapfrog their neighbors to counterbalance bordering rivals. An alliance with Great Britain might have offset the threat from France and made sense for Britain as well. By 1900, the United States had surpassed Great Britain in total wealth and power. Britain and the United States did not share a border, but they competed increasingly on the high seas. The American navy was expanding rapidly under the influence of Admiral Alfred Mahan and the leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt. Thus, Germany and Britain might have acted to check the growing specter of American power. But geography matters as well as total power, realist perspectives argue, and Germany was closer to Great Britain and hence a more proximate threat than the United States. Great Britain had long defended the neutrality of the Low Countries of Belgium and the Netherlands, and Germany’s new power potentially threatened these countries, just as French power had in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Observe that, from the realist perspective, it does not matter that the United States and Britain shared similar cultural and political systems. This factor is important from an identity perspective and a domestic level of analysis. Some identity-oriented analysts attribute the eventual alliance between the United States and Great Britain primarily to the shared Anglo-Saxon culture of the two countries.11 In contrast to realist analysts, they conclude that domestic and dyadic-level (systemic process between two countries) forces of culture and democracy ultimately override the systemic structural-level forces of power competition.

Thus, in 1904, Britain turned to counterbalance Germany, not align with it against the United States. Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale, an agreement that settled colonial disputes between them (they had almost come to blows at Fashoda in the Egyptian Sudan in 1898) and, although not explicitly directed against Germany, ended a century of “splendid isolation” for British policy, during which it had avoided specific commitments on the continent. That the Entente Cordiale had broader purposes became evident within a year. In 1905, Russia suffered a major naval defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. Japan was another rising power in Russia’s neighborhood, in this case in Asia. Worried that Russia was now seriously weakened vis-à-vis Germany, Great Britain and France expanded their alliance in 1907 to include Russia. The Entente Cordiale became the Triple Entente.

Sir Eyre Crowe, permanent secretary of the British foreign office, wrote a famous memorandum in 1907 that summed up the realist logic driving British policy. He noted that Germany might have two intentions, “aiming at a general political hegemony and maritime ascendance” or “thinking for the present merely of using her legitimate position and influence as one of the leading Powers in the council of nations.” However, as he noted, “there is no actual necessity for a British government to determine definitely which of the two theories of German policy it will accept.” Either way, “the position thereby accruing to Germany would obviously constitute... a menace to the rest of the world.”12 Regardless of German intentions, the Crowe memorandum argued, German power had to be balanced.

And the balance of power seemed to be working. Many scholars estimate that German power reached its peak around 1905. Just as it did so, Germany’s major neighbors came together in the Entente Cordiale and Triple Entente to check that power. In 1913, the Triple Entente had about 50 percent of European wealth. The other 50 percent was accounted for by the Triple Alliance, an alliance first formed between Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879, then joined by Italy in 1882. In 1914, the two alliances offered a near-perfect offset.13 According to the power balancing school of realism, equilibrium existed and should have prevented war. What went wrong?

Here realist perspectives split in explaining the breakdown of the balance of power. Some argue that the offsetting alliances became too rigid and converted a flexible multipolar balance of power into a rigid bipolar balance. This tense standoff eventually precipitated a preemptive war, an attack by one country on another because the second country is getting ready to attack the first. Others argue, as observed in Chapter 1, that a bipolar distribution is the most stable but that the problem was not the current balance of power but the potential future balance of power. By this account, Germany saw Russia as a rising power in the future and therefore launched a preventive war to avoid Germany’s decline at a later date. Still others argue that hegemony or unipolarity is the most stable configuration of power and that Britain, whose hegemony ensured the long peace of nineteenth-century Europe, was now a declining power, leading to a multipolar scramble to decide which country would be the next hegemon. Let’s look further at each of these realist arguments.

Entente Cordiale: an agreement signed in 1904 between Great Britain and France that settled colonial disputes between them and ended a century of British isolation from conflicts on the continent.

Triple Entente: an agreement signed in 1907 in which Great Britain and France expanded the Entente Cordiale to include Russia.

Triple Alliance: an alliance formed first between Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879, then joined by Italy in 1882, that accounted for 50 percent of all European wealth in the early twentieth century.

Rigid Alliances and Preemptive War

How could countries balance against German power and still preserve flexibility? As we have noted, if Germany had aligned with Britain to avoid encirclement, it would have created an even more powerful grouping, accounting for about two-thirds of Europe’s wealth in 1913. And France and Russia would have felt even more threatened. So the balance of power required Britain to align against Germany. In that sense, encirclement and confrontation of the two alliance arrangements may have been unavoidable. It was a consequence of Germany’s superior power and its position at the center of the European continent. It was, in short, an outgrowth of the security dilemma. Any effort to counterbalance Germany within Europe would necessarily have involved encirclement, and encirclement meant that Germany had to plan to fight a war on two fronts.

This logic led Germany as early as the 1890s to consider a preemptive war, a lightning strike or Blitzkrieg, against one (neighbor so that German forces could then turn and concentrate against the other neighbor. The Schlieffen Plan named for General Alfred von Schlieffen, who first developed it) called for an attack on France first, by way of Belgium—undoubtedly bringing Britain into the war—followed by an attack on Russia. It became official policy in 1913.

Notice that, in the realist argument, the strategic situation dictated the military strategy and was the primary cause of war. Some scholars say that geopolitics is a necessary but not sufficient explanation for war. They want to emphasize more specific factors at the foreign policy, domestic, and individual levels of analysis. Later we consider liberal arguments, for example, that bureaucratic factors, such as military and mobilization plans, not strategic imperatives, such as geopolitics, were the primary cause of war.

But why must bipolarity of alliances be unstable? The common argument is that each side is supersensitive to any gains by the other side because there are no other allies to turn to for balancing. But a counterargument is that the two powers have only one another to consider and therefore focus “like a laser beam” on each other so that neither side can gain advantage. Perhaps the balance was unstable in 1914 because both sides believed that military technology favored offensive strategies—machine guns, motorized vehicles, and other attack weapons. In a balanced bipolar situation, offensive technology would give the advantage to the attacker and therefore place a premium on preemption. As it turned out, however, technology actually favored defensive strategies; World War I was a stalemate for most of its duration, involving stagnant trench warfare.

An explanation that hinges on whether weapons are offensive or defensive slides into liberal and identity explanations of the outbreak of World War I (see the subsequent discussion). Such an explanation depends on bureaucratic and cognitive factors that influence perceptions and cause misperceptions. In this case, military leaders had incorrect information about weapons (an argument from the liberal perspective and domestic level of analysis) or saw only the facts they wanted to see based on their ideas or beliefs (an argument from the identity perspective and individual level of analysis). From a strictly realist perspective, perceptions are not a primary variable. Power realities speak for themselves.

preemptive war: an attack by one country against another because the second country is preparing to attack the first.

Schlieffen Plan: Germany’s mobilization plan that called for an attack on France first, by way of Belgium, followed by an attack on Russia.

Future Balances and Preventive War

A more consistent realist argument is that the balance ultimately broke down not because of current imbalances but because of fears of future imbalances. This argument hinges on Germany’s fear of Russian power and whether that fear was reasonable. If the fear was not reasonable, liberal or identity factors were at work, distorting the perception of material balances. According to this argument, Germany feared that Russia would surpass Germany in military and industrial power by 1916–1917. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the German chancellor, visited Russia in 1912 and observed “Russia’s rising industrial power, which will grow to overwhelming proportions.”14 Russia was rapidly developing a railroad network that would permit it to move forces more quickly to the front. This would give Germany less time to deal with France before it would have to turn and confront Russian forces as well.

But why then didn’t Germany attack before 1914? Its power peaked in 1905, when Russia was weak after the disastrous naval defeat by Japan and when Britain and France had just concluded the Entente Cordiale, which was not strictly an alliance against Germany. From 1905 on, there were plenty of occasions for war. Germany and other European powers were involved in a series of diplomatic crises in Morocco (1905 and 1911) and the Balkans (1908–1909 and 1912–1913) that were at least as serious as the assassination of the Austrian archduke in June 1914.15 One answer to why Germany waited is that its naval program was not completed until July 1914, and Germany relied on this program to either deter Great Britain or hold it at bay while Germany attacked France. Thus, all the pieces for a preventive war were in place by the July crisis. Germany knew that Russia was not getting ready to attack it. Hence, the war was not preemptive—that is, it was not initiated in anticipation of an imminent Russian attack. In fact, Germany had to goad Russia into war. Now foreign policy–level factors become important. According to this account, Bethmann-Hollweg and military leaders such as Helmuth von Moltke, the German army chief of staff, used diplomacy “with Machiavellian dexterity” to provoke Russian mobilization and bring about a war to unite domestic groups, even delaying for twelve hours the transmission of the kaiser’s instructions to settle the dispute peacefully so that Austria had time to declare war (see more discussion later).16 Notice how at the foreign policy level of analysis individuals connect systemic (preventive war) and domestic (social unity) factors to cause outcomes. The individuals themselves are not the cause; they are responding to larger forces both beneath and above them.

In this realist account, notice how diplomacy plays a role, but as an intervening, not independent, variable. The projection of future relative Russian predominance drives the diplomacy, not the other way around. And this projection of future balances is systemic as long as it is reasonable. If it is unreasonable, then other factors at the diplomatic, domestic, and individual levels of analysis must be distorting leaders’ perceptions. At the time, some believed this fear of Russian power was reasonable.17 But in retrospect, historians know that Russia was not much of a match for German military forces. Russia eventually capitulated in 1917 to a German force that represented only half of Germany’s capabilities (the other half of the German force was fighting against France). And Russia disintegrated into civil war in 1917 and did not emerge to play a role in European politics for the next fifteen years. So, perhaps, identity factors distorted perceptions.

preventive war: a war by one country against another that is not preparing to attack the first country but is growing in power and may attack in the future.

Power Transition and Hegemonic Decline

A final realist perspective is that World War I was caused not by the rising power of Germany or the projected future dominance of Russia but by the declining hegemony of Great Britain. According to this version, it is not present or future balances that produce stability but hegemony. The dominant power has interests that span the system as a whole and, therefore, more than any other country, looks after the maintenance of the balance of power. Britain played this role during the Pax Britannica, the long century of peace in the nineteenth century. It exercised naval superiority around the globe and kept watch on the European continent so that no power gained ascendance. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Britain no longer had that kind of power. The United States had surpassed Britain, but the United States was not yet powerful enough to play a global role. It was only beginning to assert its foreign policy presence and did not see its interests affected yet by the larger system or balance of power in Europe.

In this 1916 photograph from the Battle of the Somme in northern France, British troops ascend from trenches to no-man’s land, the devastated landscape between battle lines that changed little during World War I.

Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Thus, in the early twentieth century, the world experienced a dangerous interregnum in which Germany faced no leading power to temper rivalries. British diplomacy was not specifically at fault because it was a product of British power, and British power was simply declining. The same was true for the United States, but for the opposite reason: its diplomacy was not at fault because the United States was not yet powerful enough to direct events in Europe. Notice that, in this explanation from the systemic structural level of analysis, diplomacy is an intervening, not primary, variable. Structural power shifts explain diplomacy, not the other way around.

The absence of a hegemonic power to stabilize the situation draws from the power transition school of realism, which alerts us to dangerous periods of transition when a declining power falls and a challenging power closes in. Moving toward balance from this school’s perspective is viewed as destabilizing, whereas moving toward balance from the power balancing perspective is viewed as stabilizing. This difference stems in part from a focus on different actors and different assumptions about goals. Power transition perspectives focus on the declining power and assume that it seeks to preserve the status quo. Thus, the loss of hegemony threatens stability. Power balancing perspectives focus on the rising power and assume that it would like to change the status quo. Hence, the emergence of hegemony threatens stability.

Cartelized Domestic Politics and German Aggression

Realist explanations of World War I also operate at the domestic level of analysis. One domestic-level explanation argues that World War I was caused by German aggression and that German aggression, in turn, was caused by German domestic politics. According to this explanation, Germany’s domestic politics was cartelized or united among various elite groups, all of which had independent interests in one or another aspect of German belligerence and expansion. The agricultural landowners of large estates in East Prussia, or Junkers, were interested in high tariffs to protect grain prices; military elites were interested in offensive war plans and military weaponry; and industrial leaders advocated high tariffs to develop industry and military arms, including a naval fleet. As political scientist Jack Snyder explains, “These groups logrolled their interests, producing a policy outcome that was more expansionist and overcommitted than any group desired individually.”18 Thus, grain tariffs antagonized Russia, a large grain exporter; heavy industry and naval plans antagonized Great Britain; and military leaders and their offensive war plans alienated France and Russia. These cartelized domestic interests “embroiled Germany simultaneously with all of Europe’s major powers.”19

Figure 2-1 The Causes of World War I: The Realist Perspective and Levels of Analysis

Snyder does not ignore international factors: “International circumstances did affect German expansionist policy, but only by influencing the domestic political strength of imperialist groups.”20 He simply judges that domestic expansionist forces were primary and exploited systemic factors to go to war. (See Figure 2-1 for a summary of realist explanations.)

Liberal Explanations

Liberal accounts of World War I focus on diplomatic miscalculations and institutional deficiencies, both in the international system and in the domestic politics of key players such as Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.

International diplomacy had been developing since the Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, toward a more multilateral and open system for settling disputes. The Concert of Europe, created at Vienna, convened numerous international conferences during the nineteenth century and for the most part preserved peace among the great powers. But Bismarck’s diplomacy to unite Germany dealt this emerging liberal systemic structure a damaging blow. Although Bismarck tried to replace the Concert of Europe with an intricate series of offsetting alliances, his secretive style of diplomacy bred suspicion. Once Bismarck was gone, Kaiser Wilhelm II proved less capable at navigating the system. Notice here the causal effect of the individual level of analysis—Bismarck was able to offset domestic and systemic factors to make diplomacy work to preserve peace; the kaiser was not.

As the liberal perspective sees it, the kaiser blundered his way into a naval competition with Great Britain and military strategies toward France and Russia that ultimately produced rigid alliances and self-initiating mobilization plans. The explanation thus far emphasizes diplomatic mistakes at the individual level of analysis. Wilhelm was not being pressured to do what he did by domestic or systemic forces. In the crisis of July 1914, German and European diplomacy then got caught up in a spiral of action and reaction, compounding the march to war. Each decision narrowed the options of the next decision in what liberal perspectives call path dependence. Eventually, the process led to the last move of the prisoner’s dilemma, in which war seemed to be inevitable. Now the explanation draws on the interactive or systemic process level of analysis. Meanwhile, other liberal causes at the systemic structural level, such as expanding trade and the Hague Conferences called in 1899 and 1907 to resolve disputes peacefully through multilateral consensus, proved too weak to head off war.

Diplomatic miscalculations were abetted by domestic institutional weaknesses in most of the major continental powers. At the domestic level of analysis, Germany’s political system was sharply divided between royalist and socialist factions, and its parliament, the Reichstag, had minimal controls over military plans and spending. The czar in Russia was a weak leader with a crumbling imperial administration, and nationalism was eating away at the vital organs of the once mighty Austrian (after 1867, Austro-Hungarian) and Ottoman (remnant of the Golden Age of Islam) Empires. A closer look at these diplomatic and institutional developments illustrates how liberal perspectives emphasize interactions and institutions rather than power balancing or ideologies, as the primary causes of war and peace.

Secret Diplomacy: Bismarck

After weakening, if not effectively destroying, the Concert of Europe system through wars with Austria and France, Bismarck in 1873 reconstituted the Three Emperors’ League, a faint reproduction of the old Holy Alliance. (Identity-based explanations might give more weight to the “Holy” or religious aspect, whereas Bismarck was more interested in the realist “Alliance” aspect.) Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia were still led by traditional monarchs. Unlike the emerging constitutional monarchs in Britain and France, they resisted liberal politics and pledged to oppose rebellion in other countries. The Three Emperors’ League was immediately tested in the Balkans, a region that produced most of the crises after 1870 and eventually war in 1914. In 1876, Bulgaria, which for centuries had been under Turkish rule, revolted. Russia proclaimed support for its Orthodox religious brethren in Bulgaria. The czar was either genuinely motivated to protect Christians in the Balkans or used this identity factor for realist expansionist aims. Austria-Hungary and Great Britain suspected the latter—suspicions that had led them earlier to block Russia’s advance toward the Balkans in the Crimean War in the 1850s. Britain feared Russia’s dominance of the Dardanelles, as well as its relentless push through central Asia toward India, then Britain’s prize colonial territory. Thus, when Russian and Bulgarian forces reached the gates of Constantinople in 1878 and announced the Treaty of San Stefano, creating a Bulgarian state and drastically weakening Turkey, Bismarck with British support called a conference, the last major conference of the Concert of Europe era. Britain and Russia solved the most contentious issues before the conference, leading to significant Russian concessions. Hence, the Berlin Conference in 1878 left a bad taste in the mouth of the Russians, and Russia thereafter blamed Germany.

Over the next fifteen years, Germany and Russia grew apart, creating one of the fault lines that contributed to World War I. In 1879, Bismarck concluded a secret alliance with Austria-Hungary against Russia. Austria, in turn, gave Germany veto power over its policies in the Balkans. This was the basis for the crucial role that Germany played in Austrian diplomacy in 1914 (see the following discussion). Bismarck renewed the Three Emperors’ League in 1881, but its purpose was now purely defensive. Each country pledged to remain neutral if one of them went to war against a fourth country. Russia would stay out of a war between Germany and France, and Austria-Hungary would stay out of a war between Russia and Great Britain. In 1882, Bismarck concluded still another alliance with Italy. This one pledged Italian assistance to Germany against a French attack and to Austria-Hungary against a Russian attack. One of the rigid alliances, the Triple Alliance—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy—was now in place. Another Bulgarian crisis in 1885 shattered the Three Emperors’ League for good. Bismarck made one final effort to maintain ties with Russia, the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887. But when Bismarck left office—essentially fired—in 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm II did not renew the treaty.

Although Germany rose rapidly in power from 1870 to 1890, Bismarck’s diplomacy preserved the peace. Could his successors have replicated that virtuoso performance? Some prominent realists think so.21 They judge that systemic factors were driving Bismarck’s policy, not individual-level factors. Hence, someone else as adept as Bismarck might have been able to continue his success. But the liberal and identity perspectives might argue that that is expecting too much from any individual. Indeed, even by realist logic, Bismarck’s performance was lacking. For example, he did relatively little to reassure France except to avoid rivalry in colonial disputes. Instead, he was the principal architect of annexing Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 (the last of three wars leading to the unification of Germany), even though he knew this policy would poison French–German relations thereafter. He did it to weaken France, expecting France to be an enemy for good: “An enemy, whose honest friendship can never be won, must at least be rendered somewhat less harmful.”22 Bismarck apparently considered France a permanent enemy and contaminated the realist logic of a flexible balance of power with identity factors. Realism says to never regard a country as either a permanent enemy or a permanent friend and to be ready to align with any country, regardless of friendship or animosity, to counter greater power. Even if Bismarck had followed that rule, could he have reassured France any more than he was able to reassure Russia? After all, Russia made the first alliance with France relatively soon (four years) after Bismarck left office. Would that not have happened eventually, whoever succeeded Bismarck? From realist perspectives, diplomacy can do only what the balance of power allows. And from the liberal and identity perspectives, the balance of power in Europe before World War I was flawed either because it relied too much on secrecy and manipulation or because it demanded perfect—we might say angelic—statesmanship, which even Bismarck was unable to deliver. Thus, realist perspectives enthrone Bismarck as the master statesman, while liberal and identity perspectives counter that only a godlike statesman could have pulled it off.

Kaiser Wilhelm II signed this mobilization order, which amounted to a German declaration of war against Russia, in August 1914. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg countersigned the document. Liberal views fault Wilhelm II’s diplomatic failures for the onset of war.

FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Clumsy Diplomacy: Wilhelm II

From a liberal perspective, Kaiser Wilhelm II was clearly a less capable diplomat than Bismarck and quickly stoked further antagonism between Germany and Russia, contributing to the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894. He also initiated a colonial and naval rivalry with Great Britain, something that Bismarck had astutely avoided. In 1895, the kaiser sent a famous telegram to President Paul Krüger of the independent Boer states, settled by Germans in the South African Transvaal. Krüger’s army had just defeated a raid into the Transvaal supported by British colonialists. The so-called Krüger telegram congratulated the Boer leader for the victory. It was a gratuitous slap at the British. The kaiser carried the insult further and launched a major shipbuilding program to challenge British naval supremacy. Envious of the British ships he saw on his summer vacations in England, he launched an arms race that witnessed the production of more and bigger battleships, culminating in the famous Dreadnought competition.23 The secret and rapid buildup of the German navy under the determined leadership of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was a key factor contributing to growing rivalries before World War I.

Other colonial conflicts followed. German and French interests clashed in the Moroccan crises in 1905 and 1911. Russia and Austria-Hungary almost went to war in a Balkan crisis in 1908–1909 after Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina (where Sarajevo is located, the site of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which triggered World War I, and, by the way, the central city in the Bosnian crisis of 1992–1995). Balkan wars broke out again in 1912–1913. In October 1912, Montenegro, another small Balkan state, declared war on Turkey and was quickly supported by Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece. After this crisis was settled, Bulgaria attacked Serbia and Greece in June 1913. In both crises, Austria and Russia stood eyeball to eyeball, fearing that the other might gain an advantage. Germany supported Austria and had significant influence over Austrian policy, as called for by the Treaty of 1879. Great Britain, which sent its war minister, Richard Haldane, to Berlin in 1912, sought to ensure that Germany would not threaten Belgium. Suspicions were mounting for the final drama of war.

Misperceptions and Mobilization Plans

Why did war break out in 1914 and not in 1912 or 1913? From a liberal perspective, diplomacy had prevented war in earlier crises. Why didn’t diplomacy do so again in 1914? For three reasons, liberal accounts suggest. First, Germany expected Britain to remain neutral in 1914 as it had in previous crises, thus permitting a local settlement. Second, mobilization plans—such as the Schlieffen Plan—were finalized in 1913 that called for an automatic escalation to war. Now the slightest spark could ignite a firestorm. And third, civilian institutions in various countries broke down, contributing to a last-move situation familiar in game theory, when the only choice remaining is to go to war. Notice that all these factors are contingent on interactive factors (misperceptions, bureaucratic plans, and policy failures); they are not consequences of unbalanced alliances (power) or conflicting identities (ideas). A primary focus on interrelationships is typical of liberal explanations of international events.

On July 5, a week after the assassination of the archduke, the kaiser met the Austrian ambassador in Germany and told him that Germany would back Austria against Serbia “whatever Austria’s decision.” The German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, confirmed this commitment the next day in what became known as a “blank check,” giving Austria a free hand to start a war.24 The kaiser did not expect Russia, Serbia’s ally, to go to war and did not even discuss the possibility that Britain might intervene. Kaiser Wilhelm left town for his regular summer North Sea cruise. Austria sent an ultimatum to Serbia on July 23. The Serbs replied on July 27 and appeared to concede to Austria’s demands. The kaiser, who had just returned from his cruise, ordered negotiations, proposing that Austria “halt in Belgrade”—meaning occupy Belgrade temporarily—until Serbia met other demands. But the kaiser’s instructions did not arrive in Vienna until July 28, after Austria had declared war against Serbia—perhaps deliberately delayed, according to some realist accounts that we have discussed, to start a preventive war.

Now the issue hinged on whether the war could be localized between Austria and Serbia without involving their allies, Germany and Russia. British neutrality was key. If Britain did not support Russia, an ally under the Triple Entente, a wider war might be avoided. As already noted, some German officials did not expect Britain to intervene. But on the evening of July 29, a telegram from London warned firmly that Britain would support Russia if war occurred. Germany now tried to rein in its Austrian ally. Early in the morning of July 30, Bethmann-Hollweg fired off his famous “world on fire” telegrams urging Vienna to implement the kaiser’s instructions to negotiate—just a smoke screen, as some realist accounts see it, to shift blame for war onto Russia.

Military plans and mobilization, however, now made diplomacy difficult. War plans were based on quick strikes, and Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, as we have noted, called for an attack first on France and then on Russia. Military plans relied on precise timetables and the complex movements of troops. In response to Austria’s declaration of war against Serbia, Russia had already partially mobilized on July 29, and the czar actually ordered full mobilization that same evening but canceled the order two hours later when he received another telegram from his cousin Willy. Under intense pressure from his generals, however, Nicholas went ahead the next day with full mobilization. In response, Germany sent an ultimatum to Russia on July 31 and declared war on August 1. When the kaiser met with his generals to order them to limit the war to Russia and not attack France, von Moltke, the German army chief of staff, protested:

Your Majesty, it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised. If Your Majesty insists on leading the whole army to the East, it will not be an army ready for battle but a disorganized mob.... These arrangements took a whole year of intricate labor to complete and once settled they cannot be altered.25

The Last Move

The kaiser won the argument, and German troops in the west were pulled back. Although a German infantry unit had already crossed into Luxembourg, another unit went in and, following the kaiser’s instruction, ordered the first unit out.26 France mobilized the same day, even though it positioned its troops ten kilometers from the border to avoid accidents. Nevertheless, German military and political leaders doubted that France would stay out of the war, and on August 3, Germany declared war on France. The next day, German troops invaded Belgium, and Britain entered the war. A general European war was under way.27

From the liberal perspective, no one sought a general war, but rational behavior ultimately led to it. Why? The process of interaction broke down. In iterative game theory—which is the liberal perspective, illustrated by the example of the prisoners interacting regularly in the prison yard in Chapter 1—actors count on being able to play the game again tomorrow. This expectation, or shadow of the future, encourages cooperation. But if they come to believe that they are playing the game for the last time, the so-called last move, they face the static prisoner’s dilemma or realist situation and defect. In a sense, liberal accounts argue, this is what happened to ignite World War I. Listen to the conclusions of political scientist Marc Trachtenberg: “[Bethmann-Hollweg] had not set out to provoke a great war.... He had made a certain effort to get the Austrians to pull back. But war was almost bound to come eventually, so he would just stand aside and let it come now.”28 No one wanted war, but by a process of action-reaction the great powers became dependent on a path that eventually resulted in war.

Notice the language of the pending last move (“almost bound to come eventually”). Under these circumstances, it was rational for Bethmann-Hollweg to behave the way he did. Now compare this argument to the previous, realist one that Germany sought a general war to avoid the future dominance of Russia. In the realist argument, Germany always intended war because future relative power projections required it. In the liberal argument, Germany did not reach that conclusion until late in the process of diplomatic action and reaction. In the realist case, relative power projections at the systemic structural level caused the war; in the liberal case, negotiating dynamics at the systemic process level brought it about. Observe that in neither argument are Germany’s intentions the primary cause of the war. Germany’s intentions are the result of either power requirements (realist) or interactive factors (liberal).

But the debate goes on because, as Professor Kier Lieber notes, World War I “appears to offer at least some empirical support for practically any theory or explanation.”29 Lieber sees a larger role for intentions and identity factors. On the basis of new materials obtained from former East German archives after the Cold War, he concludes that the war was neither unintended, as power balancing (defensive) realists might argue, nor a consequence of diplomatic blunders, as liberal accounts might suggest, but “that German leaders went to war in 1914 with their eyes wide open.”30 The war, in short, was intended. For Lieber, the intentions were caused primarily by hegemonic aspirations. He is a proponent of the offensive realist school, which assumes that countries always seek more power, not just enough power to balance. For others, the intention may derive from ideational or identity factors such as Germany’s heroic self-image and militant ideology, as we examine below in the section on identity perspectives.

Weak Domestic Institutions

The last-move argument assumes that diplomats are in control of institutions, especially the military, and act rationally. But other liberal explanations suggest that diplomats may not be in control and that institutions malfunction. In the case of World War I, institutional weaknesses contributed to fragmentation and faulty coordination of policy. German diplomacy, for example, was weakened by “an astonishing lack of coordination between the political and the military authorities.”31 Political interests that sought to avoid war, or at least to shift the blame for war, worked at cross-purposes with military strategies that counted on precise timetables and a two-front war to achieve victory.

German domestic institutions were also divided. The conservative coalition that ran the German government consisted of landed agricultural interests (rye) and industrial leaders (iron). Known as the iron-rye coalition, it excluded for the most part the growing working class and its socialist leaders who held the majority in the Reichstag. The only way this growing division could be overcome was by war. A policy of war diverted resources to the military, which the Reichstag did not fully control, and co-opted socialist opponents through appeals to patriotism and nationalism. As one historian concludes, reflecting a foreign policy level of analysis, Germany “sought to consolidate the position of the ruling classes with a successful imperialist foreign policy.”32

Domestic cleavages were even stronger in the other monarchies. Austria-Hungary was disintegrating from within, the Russian czar was in a precarious position, and the Ottoman Empire was barely surviving. Within four years of the outbreak of war, all three of these institutions would cease to exist.

Elsewhere domestic institutions were becoming more popularly based and representative. Representative government made it more difficult to conduct foreign policy in a timely and coherent way. In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson campaigned for reelection in 1916 on a promise to keep the United States out of war; nevertheless, by April 1917, Germany’s policy of unlimited submarine warfare and the sinking of the American ship Lusitania led the United States to enter the war. American involvement may have been decisive, and German diplomacy blundered by alienating the United States. Germany defeated Russia in early 1918 just as American doughboys arrived to counter the additional German forces moved from the Russian to the western front. Germany may well have worn down the western allies if fresh American troops had not entered the battle.

iron-rye coalition: a domestic coalition of military and agricultural interests that dominated German politics before World War I.

Insufficient Interdependence: Trade and the Hague Conferences

International commerce and banking had expanded dramatically in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Not only colonial trade but also trade among the industrial powers reached levels before World War I that would not be reached again until the 1970s. Britain had led an effort to liberalize trade unilaterally, and some countries followed, such as France. But there were no effective multilateral institutions to coordinate and expand this effort, and other countries, such as Germany and the United States, did not liberalize their trade policies. Still, the growing numbers of bankers and merchants opposed war and called for the peaceful resolution of political disputes. A best-selling book published just two years before the outbreak of World War I proclaimed that war was a “great illusion” because the costs of war from the breakup of lucrative trade and investment now far exceeded its benefits. War had become obsolete, its author, Norman Angell, declared.33 Multilateral diplomacy was a better way to resolve disputes. The Hague Conferences, convened in 1899 and 1907 by initiative of the Russian czar, brought small as well as large states into the diplomatic process (twenty-six states in 1899, forty-four in 1907). Although these conferences solved no major issues, they reformed the rules and methods of diplomacy and started discussions to control arms races.

From the liberal perspective, trade and law were becoming more important aspects of international affairs than power and secret diplomacy. William Gladstone, who became British prime minister in 1880, foresaw this development and observed that

a new law of nations is gradually taking hold of the mind, and coming to sway the practice, of the world; a law which recognizes independence, which frowns upon aggression, which favours the pacific, not the bloody settlement of disputes, which aims at permanent not temporary adjustments: above all, which recognizes, as a tribunal of paramount authority, the general judgement of civilized mankind.34

Notice Gladstone’s emphasis on classic liberal themes—law, practice, pacific settlement of disputes, permanent solutions, and universal participation—which he terms the “general judgement of civilized mankind.” Gladstone’s insights became the banner of another great statesman in the next century. The American president Woodrow Wilson championed worldviews that emphasized open markets, the rule of law, and collective rather than national security. From the liberal point of view, these factors were too weak to head off World War I. But after the war, they formed the edifice of a whole new approach to managing military relations in international politics, which we discuss more fully in the next chapter. (See Figure 2-2 for a summary of the liberal explanations of the causes of World War I.)

Figure 2-2 The Causes of World War I: The Liberal Perspective and Levels of Analysis

Identity Explanations

Identity perspectives on World War I emphasize the ideas and norms that motivate prewar diplomacy and military rivalries. These ideas are both shared and autonomous, rational and psychological. The dominant ideology in prewar Europe was nationalism. Three broad varieties emerged in the nineteenth century. Militant nationalism focused on cultural and ultimately racial differences and advocated a kind of aggressive, heroic approach to international relations. Liberal nationalism focused on political ideologies and called for wider participation and the rule of law in both domestic and international politics. Socialist nationalism sought greater economic equality and social justice, especially among social classes and with colonial territories. Each variety of nationalism also had an international or collectivist dimension. Militant nationalism, for example, embraced Social Darwinism, a collectivist norm of political and military struggle to preserve and promote cultural superiority. Liberal nationalism supported the Hague legal process and later collective security under the League of Nations, while socialist nationalism embraced a series of international meetings known as the Second International, which advocated the solidarity of the working classes. Let’s look more closely at these different types of nationalism.

Militant and Racist Nationalism

Rising nationalism in the nineteenth century weakened the solidarity or collective identity of the European conference system, the Concert of Europe. Bismarck contended that there was no higher principle or purpose than service to one’s country. This kind of nationalism exalted the culture and language of each nation, which did not change much and could not be shared easily with other nations.

It was a short step from this type of cultural nationalism to the virulent militarist and racist doctrines that spread in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Militarism reflected the imperative to organize and train a citizen army, often including extensive reserves. Prior to the eighteenth century, armies consisted mostly of nobles, peasants recruited for each campaign, and mercenaries. Wars were fought among tens of thousands, not millions, and direct casualties were relatively low (most soldiers died of diseases). In the eighteenth century, Prussia began to change this model for armies by introducing “limited military conscription, intensive tactical training, efficient artillery barrages, and skillful generalship.” Napoleon accelerated these developments. As Robert Osgood and Robert Tucker write, he “created a ‘nation in arms’... [and] transformed warfare into a national crusade, involving not just tactical maneuver and attrition of the enemy’s supply lines but annihilation of the enemy’s forces, occupation of his territory, and even political conversion of his people.”35 War now had the objective of regime change. The industrial revolution completed this transformation. It created not only new technologies of military power but also a whole new arms industry that promoted and thrived on accelerating arms races, such as the Dreadnought battleship competition mentioned earlier.

Military technological changes contributed to a widespread belief among European military establishments that offensive strategies would hold the advantage in the next war. This belief led to the need for rapid mobilization plans and secret military planning. In this way, ideas created the mobilization spiral that caused World War I, not the mobilization process itself, which liberal perspectives emphasize. A militarist mentality created the cult of the offensive.36 This belief in the advantage of using military power offensively was the reason rapid mobilization plans were developed in the first place; the mobilization plans and their interaction at the end of July 1914 were simply a consequence. Notice again how arguments are differentiated depending on the way the causal arrow runs, in this case from ideas (cult of the offensive) to both interactions (mobilization plans) and power (relative military capabilities) rather than the reverse.

Across Europe, World War I was greeted with nationalistic enthusiasm. Here German citizens rally in late July 1914 in front of the kaiser’s palace (right) in Berlin.

Ullstein Bild/The Granger Collection, New York

militant nationalism: a form of nineteenth-century nationalism that focused on cultural and racial differences and advocated an aggressive, heroic approach to international relations.

liberal nationalism: a form of nineteenth-century nationalism that focused on political ideologies and called for wider participation and the rule of law in both domestic and international politics.

socialist nationalism: a form of nineteenth-century nationalism that sought greater economic equality and social justice, especially in class and colonial relationships.

cult of the offensive: a belief in the advantage of using military power offensively.

Liberal Nationalism

The second type of nationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century was more ideological and political than racial. It too emphasized culture and military struggle. But it offered political rather than racial visions of the way the world was unfolding. Liberal nationalism saw a trend toward increased individual freedom, fundamental human rights, and the rule of law. It emphasized equality of opportunity, especially the possibility of education and participation of all members of society in the political life and institutions of the country.

The United States and Great Britain led the development of liberal nationalism. By 1830, the United States had enfranchised all white male citizens. Through two major reform laws in 1832 and 1867, Great Britain also extended the franchise. Britain first and then the United States, after a bloody civil war, eliminated slavery, although political and economic, as opposed to legal, emancipation of black citizens took another century or more to achieve. Women too waited another century. Still, these countries planted the seed of expanding individual freedom and developed some of the early international movements for human rights and international law—for example, the British campaign against the international slave trade in the early nineteenth century.

More utopian versions of liberal ideology proclaimed universal peace. Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher, wrote an Idea for a Universal History and Perpetual Peace, in which he predicted that democracy would spread and lead to a federation of peaceful states.37 This type of thinking may have contributed to a complacency before World War I that war was increasingly obsolete and that international organizations, law, and trade could resolve disputes, as Gladstone and Angell had envisioned.

Socialist Nationalism

Socialist nationalism focused more on the social and economic equality of individuals and advocated that state institutions restrict economic freedoms and redistribute economic wealth from the capitalist to the working classes. While communism, a more radical version of socialism, did not yield political fruit until 1917, when Vladimir Ilyich Lenin installed it in Russia, many European and other societies—for example, India—adopted socialist programs well before World War I.

Socialist parties emerged and sharpened conflicts with liberal and conservative parties. Socialist parties met in international conferences in 1907, 1910, and 1912, known as the Second International, and denounced militarism and war. In the end, however, nationalism proved stronger than internationalism. Although Social Democrats, representing the interests of the working class, held the majority in the German parliament in 1914, they voted on August 4, 1914, unanimously for war. In the 1860s, Bismarck had used war to co-opt the liberal nationalists and unify Germany. Now in 1914, conservatives in Germany, Russia, and other countries used war to co-opt the social nationalists and forge ideological unity through conservative and militant nationalism.

Social Darwinism

Militant, liberal, and socialist spirits came together at the end of the nineteenth century in the worldview of Social Darwinism. Charles Darwin, an English scientist, published in 1859 his theory of evolution in The Origin of Species. Darwin identified a process of competition and natural selection that accounted for the evolution and survival of biological species. In The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin applied his theory to the origins of human beings. Many nineteenth-century political leaders concluded that it must also apply to the survival and evolution of human societies and, indeed, nation-states. Bismarck, for example, said that “without struggle there can be no life and, if we wish to continue living, we must also be reconciled to further struggle.”38 President Teddy Roosevelt once famously mused, “Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, the civilized ones will be of little avail.”39 Thus was born the idea of a struggle among nations for the survival of the fittest. Only strong nations survived, and the strength of a nation involved its military power and its cultural cohesion.

Race inevitably became a measure of cultural cohesion for Social Darwinists. It linked culture to biology and seemed to follow from Darwinist logic. It affected all countries during this period. The United States openly discriminated against Chinese immigrants and continued to disenfranchise black Americans. But German leaders were particularly blunt about race. Kaiser Wilhelm II suggested on more than one occasion that the issue for him was race: “Now comes... the Germanic peoples’ fight for their existence against Russo-Gallia [Russia and France]. No further conference can smooth this over, for it is not a question of high politics but of race... for what is at stake is whether the Germanic race is to be or not to be in Europe.”40 His army chief of staff, von Moltke, agreed: “A European war is bound to come sooner or later, and then it will be, in the last resort, a struggle between Teuton and Slav.” And so did his foreign minister, Gottlieb von Jagow: “The struggle between Teuton and Slav was bound to come.”41

These comments reflect an identity perspective. The kaiser explicitly rules out the possibility that liberal factors might resolve the problem (“no further conference can smooth this over”) and says the question is not one of “high politics,” a frequent reference to relations among great powers or realist factors. Moltke’s and Jagow’s comments suggest that identity differences are bound to override diplomatic efforts for peace and lead to the last move (“war is bound to come sooner or later”). In each case, ideas are driving diplomacy and conflict, not the other way around.

Here was a witch’s brew of culture and race stirred together in a kind of hypernationalism that would afflict world politics for the next century. Some historians see German war aims as the direct cause of World War I. Others agree that hypernationalism was present but came to the fore much more virulently in World War II. (See Figure 2-3 for a summary of identity explanations of the causes of World War I.)

Figure 2-3 The Causes of World War I: The Liberal Identity and Levels of Analysis

Social Darwinism: a nineteenth-century worldview that saw a struggle among nations for survival of the fittest.

Critical Theory Explanations

Lenin saw World War I as a product of capitalist dynamics. The capitalist countries would fight one another for markets, and communist countries would be left to pick up the pieces. As soon as Lenin seized control in Russia in 1917, he pulled the Russian forces out of the capitalist war between Germany and the west. He concentrated on building communism in a single country, believing that the historical dialectic of class conflict was on his side. Critical theories, such as Marxism, emphasize the deeper material forces propelling history toward its predetermined end. In the case of Marxism, the predetermined end is communism; in other cases of critical theory, it might be emancipation of marginalized voices or simply deconstruction of all power relationships. Critical theories remind us that attempts to understand history through perspectives are always selective and therefore biased. Social forces are holistic. They drive social science researchers no less than do the political, economic, and military events that researchers try selectively to understand.

Critical theories are skeptical of rationalist explanations. Realism, for example, points to a famous statement by Lord Palmerston, a British prime minister in the nineteenth century. Speaking for Britain, Palmerston said, “We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies.” This statement became realism’s mantra—countries should not align with one another based on domestic ideological sentiments but, instead, solely on the basis of relative power considerations to confront the greater power. Yet Lord Palmerston also said that “the independence of constitutional states... never can be a matter of indifference to the British parliament, or, I should hope, to the British public. Constitutional states I would consider to be the natural allies of this country.”42 Now, Palmerston is saying that in making foreign policy, the domestic political identities of countries matter more than the countries’ relative power. He is hinting at the tendency of democracies (he calls them constitutional states) to align and not go to war with one another, thereby creating the “democratic peace.” Which statement is correct?

Critical theories make us skeptical of all these efforts to select and emphasize specific factors to understand international relations, whether power or identity factors. Realist scholars writing about the past do not tell the whole story, not because they are devious but because they can’t. Neither, of course, can scholars writing from liberal or identity perspectives. No single perspective or level of analysis suffices. Reality is holistic, not fragmented or capable of being decomposed piece by piece.

Figure 2-4 The Causes of World War I: The Critical Theory Perspective and Levels of Analysis

Note: Factors identified at the various levels of analysis are not causes but parts of a holistic explanation.

Critical theories, on the other hand, face a comparable limitation. Even though they insist on studying history as a whole, not by selecting and focusing on specific hypotheses, they have to concede that they can never tell us the whole story of history. History is too gargantuan, which is why mainstream scholars turn to selective perspectives in the first place. Critical theory can tell us the story of history only from the social vantage point of a particular critical theory scholar. As we see in this book, the social vantage point that critical theorists often select is that of the poor, oppressed, and disenfranchised peoples of the world, whose interests, in these theorists’ view, are systematically e-emphasized in mainstream perspectives. (See Figure 2-4 for a summary of critical theory explanations of the causes of World War I. Bear in mind, however, that critical theories do not actually distinguish among the various levels of analysis for causal purposes.)

Summary

Our discussion of World War I shows how the concepts emphasized by each perspective play out in the actual course of historical events. Realist perspectives emphasize material factors such as anarchy and the security dilemma (self-help), rising (Germany) and declining (Great Britain) states, power conversion through more and less efficient bureaucracies, imperialistic domestic interest groups (cartelized politics in Germany), and weak leaders (Czar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II). Liberal perspectives emphasize the absence or demise of common international institutions (Concert of Europe), the depth or shallowness of interdependence (the Hague Conferences), the misperceptions and accidents of diplomacy (secret diplomacy and path dependence, leading to the last move), and the breakdown of domestic policy coordination and institutions. Identity perspectives emphasize the variety of nationalist ideologies and their accompanying international discourses. Social Darwinism and the spread of hypernationalist ideologies glorifying the cult of the offensive won out over Kantian liberal and Marxist socialist discourses. Evil or emotionally unstable leaders may have also contributed.

The principal perspectives emphasize these concepts from different levels of analysis. The kaiser may have been a uniquely weak leader (individual level), Germany an aggressive militarist state (domestic level), the leadership manipulative in using war to overcome domestic fissures (foreign policy level), or Germany just too powerful to contain (systemic level).

Critical theories weave all these causal factors from different perspectives and levels of analysis into a single historical drama, such as dialectical materialism in the case of Marxist theories. This drama is driven by factors beyond the control of theorists and thus not subject to rational manipulation. We cannot understand or make the future by applying tested propositions from the past to policy prescriptions for the future.

The variety of explanations is bewildering. But our analytical tools help us distinguish and organize them. Then, as scholars and students, we have an obligation to keep testing and evaluating the explanations. We may never obtain definitive answers, but we can know more, especially about how and why we disagree.

(Nau 87-117)

Nau, Henry R. Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas, 5th Edition. CQ Press, 20160105. VitalBook file.

The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.

Chapter 3 World War II Why Did War Happen Again?

Führer Adolf Hitler salutes his troops at a Nazi rally. Was Hitler trying to establish a master race (the identity perspective), negotiate a better peace than Versailles (the liberal perspective), or prepare for a war to exploit the balance of power (the realist perspective)?

Universal History Archive/Getty Images

On November 5, 1937, Adolf Hitler summoned his generals to a meeting in Berlin. The meeting was expected to be routine, but once it began Hitler swore the participants to secrecy and proceeded to outline his plans for war. According to minutes drafted from memory a few days later by an army adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, Hitler said that the aim of German policy was to secure a larger living space— Lebensraum —for the German racial community. This expansion could be accomplished only through war, which had to occur before 1943–1945, when German power would peak. The first steps would be to seize Czechoslovakia and Austria. Hitler believed that France, England, and Poland had already written off the Czechs and had too many problems of their own to offer any resistance. But if they did, Germany must counter with lightning strikes. The deck would then be cleared for the final strike against the primary enemy, Russia.1

Is this the explanation for World War II? Did the war result from a premeditated plan by a single racist man (notice the identity perspective and individual level of analysis) who had written two books ten years earlier—the two-volume Mein Kampf in 1925–1926 and a secret, unpublished book in 1928—that not only laid out a strategy for conquering territory in the east but also hatched his horrific plans for the extermination of the Jews? The war followed this plan pretty closely. As Professor John Mueller concludes, “The Second World War... was almost single-handedly created by one man, Adolf Hitler.”2 The explanation seems convincing, right? Case closed. We can go straight to the next chapter.

Causes of Madness

Not so fast. How did a man like Hitler ever come to power in the first place? What domestic-level factors facilitated his rise, and what systemic factors permitted another colossal catastrophe so soon after the death trenches of World War I? What about causal forces from the liberal perspective? Hadn’t European diplomats abandoned the balance of power and built a bold new international institution called the League of Nations to settle disputes peacefully? Massive mistakes that set the conditions for war must have been made long before Hitler came to power in January 1933. Did Hitler just exploit these mistakes? Could someone else have started World War II even if he had not? Or would Germany have gone to war eventually because realist factors, such as Germany’s unity and exposed central location, continued to fuel the security dilemma, even if Germany and other countries had done almost everything right? We have to try to answer these questions, because World War II killed three times as many people, approximately thirty-five to fifty million, as World War I, six million of them Jews in the Holocaust. What could have caused such madness?

Once again, there is disagreement. Realists ask if World War II wasn’t really just a continuation of World War I. The basic problem was the same: anarchy, the security dilemma, and an unstable balance of power. After World War I, Germany was not occupied or destroyed. It remained intact and potentially a looming menace again in the exposed center of the European system (remember the open plains). True, Germany was much weaker. It had lost about 13 percent of its prewar territory, the monarchy had ended, and runaway inflation and economic depression had followed. The Versailles Treaty limited Germany’s arms and stripped it of its colonies, but it continued to have the largest population in Europe and one of the most resilient, talented, and efficient societies in the world. The major powers in Europe did not see this problem in the 1920s, distracted, as realists see it, by utopian liberal schemes of collective security centered on the League of Nations. When they did see it in the late 1930s, it was too late. Germany had gathered momentum, as it had before World War I, and the security dilemma intensified with renewed force. Germany was too big to contain without encirclement and too little to feel safe with encirclement.

From the liberal perspective, the balance of power itself was the problem. As the dilemmas with German encirclement suggested, such a balance could never be stable. It had to be replaced by new institutional arrangements. Liberal advocates led by the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, proposed a whole new scheme for managing military relations in international politics. The concept of collective security organized force on a different principle, one based on common institutions and the preponderance of power rather than on separate national interests and the balance of power. The League of Nations embodied this imaginative new approach, but it didn’t work at the time. Why? Liberal accounts lay the blame largely at the door of the United States. It refused to play its role as a new, leading great power. After helping win World War I, the United States did an about-face, left Europe, refused to join the League, and retreated into isolationism during the 1920s and 1930s. Without the leading power, the League could not muster a preponderance of power, and the world marched off into another nationalist struggle for power.

But why does nationalism have to lead to war? How do nationalities or identities get constructed so as to lead to war? If all nations were satisfied with the status quo, no state would seek to upset it. What kind of nationalism leads to aggression? Identity perspectives have an answer—the kind that derives from revanchism (the desire for revenge), irredentism (the desire to regain territories), racism, and xenophobia. German nationalism after World War I had all these characteristics. Many Germans felt that they had been unjustly blamed for World War I and humiliated by the Versailles Treaty that ended the war.3 They considered it only reasonable that Germany should regain territories where Germans lived, such as Alsace-Lorraine, which France had seized in World War I (and which, of course, Germany had seized in 1871). Many Germans also indulged in a racism of Aryan superiority and murderous anti-Semitism, and they dehumanized foreigners not of their superior race. This was the extreme nihilistic nationalism that German nationalism unleashed in the 1860s. Otto von Bismarck, the German statesman who unified Germany through war, predicted it in conversations with his conservative mentor, Leopold von Gerlach: “I can even think out the idea that some day ‘unbelieving Jesuits’ will rule over the Mark Brandenburg [core of Prussia] together with a Bonaparte absolutism.”4 Aggressive missionaries (Jesuits) without any beliefs (unbelieving) ruling over Berlin with a Napoleon-like absolutism—not a bad description of the Nazis who controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945.

This time let’s start with liberal explanations of the war. President Wilson and the League of Nations may have failed to prevent a second world war, but they left a powerful example of collective security through universal international institutions that was later realized in the UN intervention in 1990–1991 in the first Persian Gulf War (see Chapter 5). Liberal perspectives argue that if there is hope that the world community might someday go beyond the balance of power and domesticate military force—that is, convert it to police power, as in domestic society—this hope will have to grow out of the seed of institutional arrangements in which all nations and people participate. As we will see, other perspectives disagree. Realist perspectives say it still matters more who holds power within those institutions, while identity perspectives argue that the values these institutions promote matter more than the rules or power they employ. Parallel Timeline 3-1 helps organize events leading to World War II by perspectives.

Lebensraum : Hitler’s expansionist ideology that proposed a larger living space for the German racial community.

League of Nations: a universal institution, founded after the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, that embodied the collective security approach to the management of military power.

Liberal Accounts

In asking Congress to declare war on Germany, Woodrow Wilson emphasized that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”5 Subsequently, in January 1918, he laid out for Congress his famous Fourteen Points, a plan to restructure the world order after the war. Consider the emphasis in this plan on liberal themes of relationships, negotiations, interdependence, and peaceful pursuits (non-zero-sum goals). Wilson advocated open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, general disarmament, removal of trade barriers, impartial settlement of colonial claims, internationalization of the Dardanelles, and establishment of the League of Nations. The program also contained realist elements. It called for territorial and military adjustments: restoration of Belgium, return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, evacuation of Russian territory, readjustment of Italy’s frontiers, evacuation of the Balkans, and creation of Poland (actually re-creation—it had been partitioned among Prussia, Russia, and Austria at the end of the eighteenth century) with access to the sea. And there was an important identity element as well, the granting of autonomy or self-determination to the national minorities of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Wilson expected that self-determination would lead to democracy, hence his theme of “making the world safe for democracy.” But the plan relied overwhelmingly on the expectation that repetitive practices of trade and diplomacy would condition state behavior to preserve the peace and prepare the way for democracy to spread and the balance of power to recede. Liberal procedures would steadily trump identity and power disparities.

Collective Security, Not Balance of Power

What was this new approach? Collective security started with a fundamentally different configuration of power. From the liberal perspective, the decentralization or balance of power had failed disastrously. Wilson was an unrelenting critic of the secret treaties, arms races, colonial rivalries, and great power maneuvering that he believed drove the balance of power toward war before 1914. Restoring that system after World War I, as the Congress of Vienna did after the Napoleonic Wars, was out of the question. Wilson wanted “no odor of the Vienna settlement” at Versailles.6 The new approach of collective security would centralize, not decentralize, military power. It would require all nations to join together in a single universal institution and pool their military power to create an overwhelming central military force. This central force would be so powerful it could reduce the overall level of force through disarmament and operate largely on the basis of economic, not military, sanctions. Now if a particular country threatened another country, the common institution would order the offending power to desist and, if necessary, threaten it with economic sanctions. Overpowered, the offending country would be deterred or, if it persisted, defeated. No country could withstand the centralized power of the entire global community. Protection for all countries would be achieved not through the balance of power but through the preponderance of power.

How would the central institution decide which country was threatening the system? In the balance-of-power system, countries aligned against the country with the greatest power, which constituted the greatest threat. But in the collective security system, all countries belonged to the same common institution (one great big alliance). How would this institution define and measure threat, as the realist perspective did on the basis of relative power? It would do so by creating a set of common institutional procedures that states would have to follow in resolving international disputes peacefully. If a state violated these rules, it was the threat. From the liberal perspective, common institutions and rules defined threat, not relative power. Intentions were more important than capabilities.

self-determination: nations’ right to autonomy in deciding their own domestic identities.

The League of Nations

The League of Nations was the first international institution to embody the collective security approach to the use of military power. The Covenant of the League spelled out the various provisions of collective security.

Article 5 of the Covenant established the principle of unanimity. All nations, great and small, participated in the League and decided collectively what constituted a threat to international peace and security. Remember Gladstone’s appeal in the nineteenth century to the “general judgement of civilized mankind”? The League was, as Woodrow Wilson said, the “general judgment of the world as to what is right.”7 Consequently, all countries, regardless of relative power or domestic ideologies, made decisions on an equal basis. The League of Nations buried the old Congress of Vienna system, in which great powers had special responsibilities.

The League of Nations meets in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1921 to resolve disputes peacefully under the auspices of collective security.

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Article 2 created the two main institutions of the League: the Council, composed initially of nine members, and the Assembly, composed of all members. Article 4 made the five great powers that had just won the war (the United States, which of course never joined; Great Britain; France; Italy; and Japan) permanent members of the Council. But these members did not have any special privileges. Each Council member, great or small, had a veto. Unanimity was required to act. Moreover, the Council had no special responsibilities. The Assembly, on which all members sat and also made decisions by unanimity, had exactly the same responsibilities. Indeed, Articles 3 and 4, establishing the responsibilities of the Assembly and Council, respectively, used the same language: either body “may deal at its meetings with any matter within the sphere of action of the League or affecting the peace of the world.” There was no hierarchy between the Council and the Assembly.

Articles 10 and 11 of the League Covenant established the collective commitment to deter or defeat aggression. Article 10 committed members to “respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and political independence of all Members of the League.” Article 11 committed members to consider “any war or threat of war, whether immediately affecting any of the Members of the League or not,... a matter of concern to the whole League.” Now a threat to any member was a threat to all members, regardless of whether that threat immediately affected a particular country. Conflict anywhere was a threat everywhere. Peace was indivisible; it was a collective good, hence, collective security. It existed for all or none, and its enjoyment by one did not diminish its enjoyment by others.

How was this possible? As realists argue, don’t countries have separate geopolitical interests and see threats differently? Think of the differences between the United States and some of its allies in the 2003 war on Iraq. True, but the hope in the League was to channel these differences through a process, a discussion of disputes, a set of rules and procedures that would lead to compromise and define the aggressor as any country that stood in the way of compromise.

Articles 12 through 15 set out the League’s rules that countries had to follow to resolve disputes peacefully. They created a path of procedures that would identify the aggressor. Notice how this liberal approach defines threat by iterative interactions, reciprocity, and path dependence, not by power disparities or ideological differences. Article 12 said members must submit disputes to peaceful arbitration, judicial settlement, or the Council—which in turn could submit disputes to the Assembly. Countries must then refrain from war until after the League made a decision. If the issue was suitable for arbitration or judicial settlement, Articles 13 and 14 set up the Permanent Court of International Justice to render judicial decisions. If the dispute went to the Council, Article 15 required the Council to settle the dispute or issue a report with its recommendations. If the Council issued a unanimous report except for the parties to the dispute, the members agreed that they would not go to war with any party to the dispute that abided by the Council’s recommendations. This provision was intended to isolate the aggressor party and make it feel the full condemnation and power of the common community of nations.

Article 16 then said that if any member went to war in disregard of Council or judicial recommendations as prescribed in Articles 12 through 15,

it shall, ipso facto, be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League, which hereby undertake immediately to subject it to the severance of all trade or financial relations, the prohibition of all intercourse between their nationals and the nationals of the Covenant-breaking state, and the prevention of all financial, commercial or personal intercourse between the nationals of the Covenant-breaking state and the nationals of any other State, whether a member of the League or not.

The word immediately implied that these sanctions would be automatic.

Presto, the world had a new system to define threat and deal with it. But didn’t such a system risk turning every dispute, however minor, into a global war? After all, everyone had to confront the aggressor. That made a local dispute a global one, just the way the balance of power turned a local clash between Austria and Serbia into World War I. The League had an answer. As Article 16 said, League members would use economic sanctions, not military force. Because everyone would be participating, economic sanctions would suffice to deter the aggressor. The aggressor would be isolated and would relent or starve to death if it did not. Military force would not be necessary, except as a backup or last resort should sanctions fail—for example, if the aggressor attacked out of desperation. Military power, in fact, could be reduced. Article 8 called for “the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations.”

Here is the classic liberal solution to conflicts (at any level of analysis, but in this case at the systemic structural level). Get everyone to participate, negotiate peacefully, use economic sanctions if necessary, and maintain military power only to the extent necessary to implement economic sanctions and serve as a last resort should sanctions fail. Do you think this approach is utopian or irrelevant today? Think again—it worked like a textbook case in the first Persian Gulf War in 1990–1991. And it inspired critics of U.S. policy in the second Persian Gulf War in 2003 who argued straight from the collective security rule book: the United Nations was the only legitimate institution to make the decision to go to war because it included everyone (the general judgment of the world), negotiations were the only way to facilitate inspections and resolve the issue of WMDs, economic sanctions were sufficient to convince Iraq to come clean, and military force was necessary only to support economic sanctions—that is, to get the UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq by positioning an invasion force in the Persian Gulf, but not by invading the country. Under both Presidents Bush and Obama, the United States has pursued exactly the same collective security strategy to stop the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran. The idea of collective security is alive and well today, even if it failed under the League of Nations.

unanimity: a principle in international affairs that all nations, regardless of size or identity, participate in global institutions and decision making.

Why the League of Nations Failed

What went wrong with the liberal solution of the League of Nations? Several things. First, the United States, the leading world power, did not join. Nor did the Soviet Union until 1933, by which time two other major powers, Germany and Japan, had withdrawn. The League of Nations never achieved the preponderance of power it required to work effectively. Second, the League never organized effective security guarantees. It failed to provide credible military commitments to defend all countries and establish the indivisibility of peace as a collective good. Eventually countries scrambled to protect their security outside the League through alliances. Third, although it made some progress in reducing arms, disarmament without credible security commitments led to more, not fewer, security fears. Fourth, unanimity proved to be the League’s Achilles’ heel. The aggressor country also had a veto. The League could issue a report without concurrence of the parties to the dispute, but the report was toothless unless the League either followed it up with specific actions, which the aggressor could veto, or implemented Article 16 sanctions automatically, which might mean war. When the League condemned Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Japan vetoed the report and withdrew from the League. When the League imposed economic sanctions on Italy, it eventually backed off because France and Britain feared this action might mean war with Italy, and they were more concerned at the time with the threat from Germany. Peace in this case proved not to be indivisible. One threat (Germany) was not considered to be the same as another threat (Italy). And given different perceptions of threat, the veto for everyone became a loophole that enabled inaction.

Let’s see how American isolationism, utopian disarmament agreements, unanimity, and Japanese and Italian aggression undermined the League.

American Isolationism.

Woodrow Wilson literally died trying to persuade the U.S. Congress and American people to join the League. In July 1919, he returned from the peace negotiations in Paris to campaign nonstop across the country for Congress to approve the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. But in early October he collapsed and suffered a massive paralytic stroke. When the treaty came up for votes in November and again in March 1920, the League’s greatest champion was still seriously ill.

A favorite counterfactual question from the liberal perspective is whether different leadership (for example, someone like Franklin Roosevelt, who deftly guided an isolationist country into World War II) or a healthier President Wilson might have persuaded Congress to approve the League. The country was not of one mind on the League issue. One group opposed the League and any American military entanglement abroad. It was led by William Jennings Bryan, a frequent Democratic presidential candidate and Wilson’s first secretary of state, and by Senator William E. Borah of Idaho. This group harked back to George Washington’s warning in his farewell address to stay out of foreign alliances. A second group, led by former president Teddy Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, did not oppose military commitments per se, but preferred specific ones and recoiled at the automatic sanctions under Article 16 to act without congressional deliberations. Finally, a third group led by former president William Howard Taft supported the League.

To win the confirmation battle in the Senate, Wilson had to win over the second group, the one that demanded reservations on Article 16 preserving the constitutional power of Congress to declare war. He failed, and analysts still argue about the causes. Was it because the constitutional structure of the American government prevented Congress from giving up its power to declare war—a liberal argument from the domestic level of analysis? Or was it Wilson’s high-mindedness and ideological inflexibility? Identity factors at the individual level of analysis outweighed institutional ones at the domestic level. Or maybe it was simply a political struggle for domestic power between Wilson and his foes—a realist explanation from the domestic level of analysis. Notice again how our analytical tools of perspectives and levels of analysis help sort out a sometimes bewildering array of conflicting arguments explaining an historical event.

The result, in any case, was a League of Nations that was supposed to mobilize preponderant power but lacked from the outset the world’s then most important power, the United States. Another soon-to-be great power, the Soviet Union, also went into isolationism. The October 1917 Russian Revolution toppled the czar, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whom the Germans had transported into Russia in 1916 in a secret railroad car, seized power with his Bolshevik faction and pulled Russia not only out of the war—which is why the Germans helped him—but also out of world diplomacy. Russia slipped into civil war and then, under Stalin after 1925, concentrated on the transformation of its domestic society to communism. Marxist-Leninist ideology—an identity factor—convinced some communist leaders that the state would wither away and that diplomacy, at least as conventionally understood, would not require much of their time.

Disarmament Agreements: The Washington Naval Conference and Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Compared with realist perspectives, liberal perspectives tend to downplay military power. As we have noted, Article 8 of the League Covenant called for disarmament. Other international agreements at the time similarly restricted military capacity. The Treaty of Versailles imposed stringent arms control measures on Germany. The Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922 set ceilings on sea power, placing the United States on a par with Great Britain and holding Japan to three-fifths of the U.S. level. Disarmament talks continued episodically throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Even after Germany left the League in 1933, Hitler concluded a naval pact with Great Britain in 1935 that limited the German surface fleet to 35 percent of Britain’s.

The idea of getting rid of arms and war itself was behind the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in 1928. Originally proposed as a U.S.-French agreement, the pact called on all signatories “to condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy.”8 Practically all the nations of the world signed it, including Germany, Japan, and Italy. As a statement of moral and legal sentiment, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was unsurpassed. But as a practical matter, it barely survived its signing. Immediately, countries, especially the United States, entered reservations based on self-defense, regional security, and sovereignty that gutted the commitment. The pact became meaningless. When asked why the United States should be interested if another nation broke the treaty, U.S. secretary of state Frank Kellogg replied, “There is not a bit of reason.”9

Japanese Aggression in Manchuria.

The first real test for the League came in 1931. Japan invaded Manchuria, a northern province of China. China appealed to the League, and the League called on Japan to withdraw its troops. But Japan voted against the resolution. Here was the core problem of collective security, as seen from a realist or an identity perspective. Unanimity, and the veto, let the big and the bad guys hold the world community at bay.

When the Qing dynasty fell in 1911 and China lapsed into civil war, Japan had increased its military position along the Manchurian railroad, where it had already stationed troops under agreements stemming from the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 (brokered by U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, one of America’s first forays onto the stage of world diplomacy). In September 1931, the Japanese military, with or without orders from Tokyo (this is still disputed), staged an incident and invaded the rest of Manchuria, creating the puppet state of Manchukuo.

After Japan blocked League action, the League established a commission to investigate the incident. The Lytton Commission (named for its chairman, Lord Lytton of Great Britain) issued a report in September 1932 that asked League members not to recognize Manchukuo. But the report did not invoke Article 16. When the League voted in February 1933 to accept the Lytton report, Japan cast the lone dissenting vote and then abruptly withdrew from the League. The League was exposed as a paper tiger. It was not long before European powers, Italy and Germany, dealt the finishing blow to the League.

Italian Aggression in Ethiopia.

In the nineteenth century, Italy acquired colonies in Eritrea, an African territory at the mouth of the Red Sea. It tried at the time to colonize neighboring Ethiopia as well but failed. In October 1935, the Italian government, under fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia again. This time, the League got around the unanimity requirement. It convened a special conference. Fifty members attended and defined Italy as the aggressor. They invoked specific but not complete sanctions—an arms embargo, the cutoff of loans to Italy and imports from Italy, and an embargo on certain exports to Italy, such as rubber and tin. But they did not embargo steel, coal, and oil exports to Italy, break off diplomatic relations, or close the Suez Canal, through which Italy supplied its forces in Eritrea. The League seemed to be working, at least partially and certainly better than in the case of Japan and Manchuria.

By December 1935, however, Britain and France were having second thoughts because they needed Italy to balance power against an increasingly resurgent Germany. Here was the problem with collective security arrangements. These arrangements considered every threat to be of equal concern to all League members, regardless of where the conflict occurred or which countries it involved. Peace was assumed to be indivisible, or a collective good. But in this case, Britain and France did not consider the threat from Italy to be as great as that from Germany. Thus, the British and French foreign ministers met and came up with the Hoare-Laval plan, which divided Ethiopia into two parts, awarding one part to Italy and the other to the League. When word of the plan leaked, the British minister, Samuel Hoare, had to resign. Public opinion was outraged, as were the representatives of small nations, one of whom warned, “Great or small, strong or weak, near or far, white or colored, let us never forget that one day we may be somebody’s Ethiopia.”10

The fate of the weak in this case was nevertheless sealed. When Hitler marched into the Rhineland in March 1936, Britain and France met with Italy in Stresa and gave the green light to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia. The balance of power prevailed over collective security. Would the balance of power now work better than it had in 1914? Don’t hold your breath. (See Figure 3-1 for a summary of liberal explanations of the causes of World War II.)

Figure 3-1 The Causes of World War II: The Liberal Perspective and Levels of Analysis

Realist Accounts

From the realist perspective, the problem was always Germany. As Map 3-1 shows, its unity and location in the center of Europe upset the balance of power. Germany was either too small, and thus vulnerable to neighbors on both sides, or too big, and thus threatening to neighbors on either side. This reality triggered a virulent security dilemma of encirclement and fear. So Germany had to be either weakened or divided again, as it was before 1871. The Versailles Treaty tried the first solution. It weakened Germany. But then Germany scratched its way back. It aligned with Russia, joined the League, and accepted border guarantees with France and Belgium in the west but not with Poland and Czechoslovakia in the east. Hitler systematically reclaimed territories and German populations in the east that Germany had lost in World War I. By 1939, Germany faced the prospect of another two-front war. This time it defeated France outright and occupied Russia to the outskirts of Moscow. Germany now dominated a weakened Soviet Union on one side (Map 3-2), and Japan threatened the Soviet Union on the other side (Map 3-3). The United States became concerned. It tightened the noose on Japan, and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States joined Great Britain and the Soviet Union and eventually destroyed German and Japanese power. After World War II, the allies tried the second solution—they divided Germany again. But we save that story for the next chapter; here we take up the tragedy of Versailles and the interwar period.

Map 3-1 Germany before World War II, 1938

Map 3-2 Germany and Occupied Territories, 1942

Versailles Treaty

After World War I, the victorious allies met in the Versailles Palace outside Paris to conclude the peace treaty. The Versailles Treaty gutted the former German empire. Germany lost territory and its colonies. Alsace-Lorraine went back to the French. The Rhineland was permanently demilitarized and administered for fifteen years by an international authority. Poland was restored with a corridor to the sea and the port of Danzig, which became a “free city” under League supervision (see Map 3-1). The Polish corridor split East Prussia from the rest of Germany, in the same way that Kaliningrad, a Russian province in former East Prussia, is separated today from Russia. Versailles cut Germany’s army to one hundred thousand volunteers and its navy to six cruisers and a few smaller vessels. The German navy was interned by the British and then scuttled by its own officers pending the outcome of the Versailles negotiations. Germany was forbidden to have a general staff and any offensive weapons such as submarines, aircraft, tanks, or heavy artillery. Most punitively, Versailles pronounced in Article 231, the famous “war guilt” clause, that Germany was solely responsible for the outbreak of World War I (adopting a domestic level of analysis explanation of World War I), and Germany was required to pay massive reparations (then about $33 billion; in today’s dollars, some $300–$400 billion) that subsequently burdened the German economy and international trade.

Map 3-3 Japan and Japanese-Controlled Territories, 1942

Problem solved, right? Not quite. France knew that Germany would not remain weak permanently. Like the victorious powers at Vienna in 1815, France wanted a military alliance to subdue the defeated power should it rise again. Britain, however, saw France as the more powerful country. In the 1920s, France had a smaller share of European wealth than Britain, but it had an army of around six hundred thousand men, double or triple the size of Britain’s and six times Germany’s allotted number.11 Neither Wilson and the U.S. Congress nor a Bolshevik and isolated Russia was ready to make a military commitment to defend France. So France turned to keeping Germany weak as long as possible and finding smaller allies. It occupied the Ruhr Valley—the heart of Germany’s industrial establishment next to the Rhineland—in January 1923 to extract reparations. And it concluded alliances with the small states of eastern Europe—Poland and the “Little Entente” of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia—to serve as a substitute, it hoped, for the Franco-Russian Alliance before World War I.

Rapallo and Locarno

Excluded and humiliated by the Versailles Treaty, Germany responded to encirclement by meeting in April 1922 with the Russians at Rapallo, a seaside resort in Italy. Both countries nurtured grievances against the west (Russia because of western involvement in its civil war from 1918 to 1920) and agreed to establish full diplomatic relations. Over the next fifteen years, Russia helped Germany evade some of the Versailles restrictions on its military forces and training. Think of it. Here was a classic realist alignment. Even then ideological foes, the two countries (one recently monarchist going fascist—Hitler’s failed barroom putsch occurred in 1923—the other already communist) shared a common interest in radically revising the established order coming out of World War I.

Seeing the dangers of alienating Germany, the western powers rushed to reassure Berlin. France ended the Ruhr occupation in fall 1923, and Great Britain proposed the alliance that France had always wanted. But Britain did not want to isolate Germany further, so it proposed an alliance to guarantee French and Belgian borders as part of a broader agreement under the League, which would also admit Germany as a new member. The Locarno Pact, signed in 1925 (and for which the French, British, and German foreign ministers won the Nobel Peace Prize), guaranteed Germany’s western borders with France and Belgium. As a member of the League, Germany now also undertook general obligations to settle disputes peacefully with its eastern neighbors—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Significantly, however, arbitration agreements with these countries did not guarantee borders in the east as the Locarno Pact did in the west. Nor did other League members guarantee the eastern borders.

So here was a huge hole in the commitment to collective security. In the west, where France and Great Britain were relatively strong, the League guaranteed borders. In the east, where small states had replaced Russia and Austria-Hungary and the balance of power was relatively weak, the League did not guarantee borders. All that existed in the east were a few frail alliances that France had set up with Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. This vulnerability only got worse with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which promised peace without any alliances or use of power whatsoever. Without firm security commitments, countries were nevertheless encouraged to disarm. From the realist perspective, the stage was set for German aggression well before Hitler showed up, especially in the east, where World War II started.

Germany Expands

If Germany had ever intended to accept a weakened role in the postwar Versailles order, Hitler emphatically rejected that option. But he disguised his plans masterfully for several years. In October 1933, nine months after coming to power, Hitler pulled Germany out of the League and immediately broke the restrictions on German rearmament. At the same time, however, he concluded a nonaggression pact with Poland that weakened Poland’s commitment to France if Germany attacked France and signed a naval treaty with Great Britain that avoided the kaiser’s mistake of competing with Britain on the high seas. He also started a major propaganda campaign to promote the notion that Germany sought only to reclaim what an unjust Versailles Treaty had taken away—once Germany had united all Germans again, it would have no further designs on its neighbors.

Thus, when German troops marched into the “permanently demilitarized” Rhineland in March 1936 to liberate German residents, no western power resisted, even though this step violated German as well as League guarantees. The next target was the German people in Austria. Germany signed an alliance with Italy in 1936 to create the Axis powers and wean one of Germany’s perennial rivals for control of Austria away from the west (remember how France and Britain had backed off on sanctions in the Ethiopian affair to court an alliance with Italy?). With Italy on board, Hitler then annexed Austria in March 1938. His last target, presumably, was the German population in the Sudetenland—Germans, living on the Czechoslovakian side of the border, who had been separated from Germany by Versailles. Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland. In late September 1938, Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, met Hitler in Munich, together with the French and Italian heads of government. The western allies agreed to return the Sudetenland to Germany, and the Munich Conference went down in history as the classic symbol of appeasement, a policy of making concessions to a stronger foe because one is unwilling to consider the use of force. Now that Germany was whole, the allies hoped, Hitler would surely cease to upset the status quo.

appeasement: a policy of making concessions to a stronger foe because one is unwilling to consider the use of force.

Another Two-Front War

Unfortunately, not so! From a realist perspective, whatever Hitler’s intentions, Germany still faced a security dilemma. Was that why Hitler did not stop after Munich? By 1939–1940, Germany was again superior. It controlled 36 percent of Europe’s wealth, compared to 9 percent for France, 24 percent for Great Britain, and 28 percent for the Soviet Union.12 It was too big for its neighbors to deal with individually, but if those neighbors got together, Germany was too small to deal with them collectively.

Germany faced the same situation of superiority and encirclement as it had before World War I. The security dilemma still dominated. And Germany followed roughly the same strategy to deal with this situation. It strengthened its position in the east, turned west, eliminated one adversary, and wheeled around for the final stroke against Russia. Some realists find it uncanny that this strategy repeated itself. It’s too easy, they argue, to attribute the war simply to Hitler’s megalomania. Larger structural forces had to be at work.13

Germany invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Now Germany’s neighbors knew it was not just trying to unite Germans, and Britain immediately signed defense guarantees with Poland and Romania. Counterbalancing was happening, but it was happening late. Why? Some realists argue that it was because Germany’s power, especially military power, did not peak until 1939–1940, unlike before World War I, when it peaked already in 1905.14 In addition, this time Germany had disguised its military buildup as well as its intentions. But the chess pieces were now moving into place. Both Britain and France had defense commitments with Poland and Romania. The Triple Entente (remember, Britain, France, and Russia before World War I) was struggling to reemerge. The missing piece was the Soviet Union.

Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin in 1925 and brutally yanked his country into the twentieth century. Massive state-driven industrialization raised the Soviet Union to the great power ranks. But Stalin imprisoned and murdered millions of farmers and opponents in the process.15 The Soviet Union joined the League in 1933 and played a cat-and-mouse game—realists call it buckpassing—with France and Britain; each was trying to get the others to stop Hitler. By summer 1939, however, the cat-and-mouse game was over, and the cat was about to jump into the fire.

Stalin had to decide whether to work with France and Great Britain or to throw in his lot with a fellow dictator. He negotiated with both sides and, to the surprise of the world, announced in August 1939 a nonaggression pact with Hitler, the famous Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, named for the two countries’ foreign ministers. Stalin gambled on bandwagoning and joined the stronger rather than the weaker side in the hope that the Soviet Union might benefit from the spoils of war between Germany and the west. German and Russian leaders agreed once again to partition eastern Europe, including the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. In September 1939, they implemented this agreement. Germany invaded Poland, the Soviet Union occupied the other half of eastern Europe, and World War II was under way.

Finishing off Poland, Germany turned west. It took Norway in the winter of 1939–1940 and invaded the Low Countries and France in spring 1940. An all-out air war against Great Britain followed, and Britain came perilously close to defeat. But the British air force bested the German Luftwaffe, and Hitler, frustrated, wheeled east in June 1941 and attacked the Soviet Union. Now, as the realist school warns, the dangers of bandwagoning came home to roost. Stalin reportedly couldn’t believe the perfidy of his Nazi ally—who was only following, of course, the realist proscription against permanent alliances—and went into a depression for several weeks.16

bandwagoning: the aligning of states with a greater power to share the spoils of dominance.

buckpassing: a free-riding strategy wherein a country allows other countries to fight conflicts while it stays on the sidelines.

Japan and the Pacific War

All the while, America slept. The United States had long since become the wealthiest country in the world. By 1941, its wealth constituted 54 percent of the combined wealth of the United States plus Germany, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Italy.17 But it was not using this wealth to exert a great power military role. Why? Some realist perspectives explain America’s isolationism in geopolitical terms. America enjoys “strategic immunity.”18 As long as it stays out of foreign military commitments, it is relatively invulnerable to attack. Two oceans thwart successful invasion, and the country’s vast size enables greater economic independence. Thus, it was rational for the United States to stand aside from Europe’s wars. Britain eventually repulsed German air power, and the Soviet Union would shortly emasculate German land power. All the United States had to do was buckpass and wait for other countries to do the balancing. Notice that this version of realism expects balancing to take place automatically, like the classic balance-of-power system in eighteenth-century Europe. No one power has to seek overall balance; rather, overall balance results from the work of an invisible hand.

Other realist perspectives aren’t so sure. For them, Hitler’s success in Russia would have been intolerable for Americans because German and Japanese power would have then dominated the Eurasian landmass. The United States would have faced a fascist juggernaut alone. If the European war was not enough to draw America in, certainly a global war including Asia was. Russia’s fate linked the European and Asian balance of power. Someone had to take charge of balancing the overall system, and America was the only remaining great power to step in.

In 1936, Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany. This was a declaration of opposition to communism and Soviet sale of arms to China. From its base in Manchukuo, Japan then invaded China in 1937. It declared its intent to create a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In 1940, after Hitler attacked France, Japan seized French colonies in Southeast Asia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. And in September 1940, Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact, which committed each country to go to war if any other country came to the defense of England. The pact was aimed primarily at the United States, but Stalin had reason to worry about an alliance between the two great powers on either side of the Soviet Union. In April 1941, he countered and signed a neutrality pact with Japan. Fortunately for Stalin, Japan was preparing to attack the United States, not the Soviet Union. When Germany finally attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin was able to concentrate all his forces against the Nazi onslaught. Even then, he just barely survived.

So the fact that Japan struck against the United States rather than the Soviet Union may have saved the Soviet Union. Did the United States play a role in this outcome? President Franklin Roosevelt tightened oil deliveries to Japan in 1939, either to deter Japan from striking the Soviet Union or perhaps to prod it to strike south toward the oil fields of Southeast Asia. As Roosevelt put it, “The United States would slip a noose around Japan’s neck and give it a jerk now and then.”19 While Roosevelt did not expect an oil embargo to lead to war, Japan began to see the situation it faced as the last move in a prisoner’s dilemma game. If war was coming, Japan had better make a preemptive strike first.

And it did. Japan bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States declared war. Four days later, Germany, drawing on the Tripartite Pact, declared war on the United States. The world was off for its second encounter with Armageddon, this one three times more deadly than the first.

Why Don’t Hegemons Stop?

Realist perspectives do not predict that balancing will always prevent war. The power transition school, in fact, predicts that balancing causes war when the challenger creeps up on the declining power. Nor do realist perspectives predict that states will always balance. States, like the Soviet Union in 1939, often buckpass or try to get others to balance for them. Realist perspectives predict only that balances will result. By war or other means, hegemons do not endure. That prediction seems solid enough. Hitler, like Louis XIV (who waged a hegemonic war against other European powers in the late 1600s and early 1700s) and Napoleon before him, ultimately went too far, and other states counterbalanced and beat him back.

Soldiers at Ford Island Naval Air Station watch in horror—as did all Americans—on December 7, 1941, as Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drawing America into World War II.

MPI/Getty Images

An interesting question is, why don’t hegemons stop when they are ahead? Hitler did not have to attack the Soviet Union, and he certainly held a commanding position in 1942 after driving the Soviet Union back to the outskirts of Moscow. Look again at Map 3-2. He dominated the entire continent, in effect ending Germany’s encirclement and security dilemma. Britain, even if it could not be beaten, posed no threat of invasion, and Russia might have been encouraged to sue for peace. But Hitler, like others before him, could not resist the temptation to keep going.

Realists give multiple explanations for this behavior: offensive imperatives, domestic cartels, polarity, and preventive war. Let’s look briefly at each.

Offensive Imperatives.

Offensive realists, such as John Mearsheimer, argue that states always seek more power because more power brings more security.20 In Germany’s case, Russia was still a looming menace on its border, and Germany was more secure if it controlled Russia than if it didn’t. But was it more secure? Liberal perspectives might respond that conquering and holding territory costs more than it returns. No, the offensive realism school replies, conquest pays.21 Thus, it was rational for Hitler to attack Russia. So far, the argument is pure realist.

But Mearsheimer goes on to argue that states that achieve conquest and hegemony on land cannot achieve hegemony across large bodies of water. The reason is the “stopping power of water,” by which Mearsheimer means that geography does not permit the projection of land power across large bodies of water. And hegemons cannot conquer and hold territory with naval and sea power alone. Thus, Hitler, like Napoleon, did not succeed in conquering Great Britain. And if Hitler could not subdue Great Britain across the English Channel, he certainly could not invade North America across the Atlantic Ocean. The United States was dominant in its region and relatively safe behind two large oceans. True, Japan did attack a territory of the United States, but it did not attack the mainland, and it did so by air, not by land. And although Japan did invade China across a body of water, it had already established a foothold in China in 1905 on the basis of the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War. In the 1930s, it expanded that position while possessing complete air and sea superiority, something Hitler never achieved against England.

The United States used a similar foothold in England to stage the successful D-Day invasion of Europe in 1944. With such a foothold, a land invasion across a smaller body of water may be possible, especially if the invader enjoys air and naval superiority, as the United States and Japan did in their respective assaults. Thus, technological constraints, not geography, may explain the stopping power of water. And technology can always change. The realist perspective tends to give the nod to geography (stopping power of water) over technology.

offensive realism: a school of realism that says states seek dominant power.

Domestic Cartels.

Defensive-oriented realists consider expansion beyond what is needed for security unnecessary from a systemic structural point of view. More power is not always better than less, and balancing suffices to achieve stability. Thus, when states cannot stop expanding, defensive realism looks for explanations at other levels of analysis. Some attribute the inability of hegemons to stop their expansion to domestic political factors. As noted in Chapter 2, Professor Jack Snyder argues that because of its late industrialization Germany had many diverse social groups with narrowly defined interests; remember the iron (industry) and rye (agriculture) coalition before World War I. These groups could not achieve their objectives independently, but they could logroll, or combine, to implement them through coalitions. In the process, their cumulative goals committed the state to overexpansion.

Hitler faced similar domestic cartels prior to World War II. He did not stop because he was backed by a wide domestic coalition that supported the need for Lebensraum. According to Snyder, “The Nazis won power... by promising incompatible payoffs to every group in Weimar society: labor, industry, farmers, clerks, artisans.... Hitler saw conquest as the only alternative to a politically unacceptable decision to cut consumption.”22 But this explanation, Snyder concludes, is not enough, because Hitler eventually did cut consumption to finance the war effort. Now Snyder appeals to pure ideology. Hitler held the country together with strategic myths such as Lebensraum.

Notice how this explanation, while remaining realist at its foundation (domestic interests compete for power), takes on some liberal (an emphasis on political logrolling and coalitions) and identity (myths) aspects. The explanation also drops to the domestic level of analysis. The competition for power as well as the logrolling and strategic myths all come from the country’s political system at home rather than from systemic factors such as the relative distribution of power abroad.

It is worth quoting Snyder’s conclusions in full to show how a sophisticated analyst considers all perspectives but ultimately weighs them differently. When you read books or articles, these are the kinds of passages you cannot afford to miss and, hopefully, with the help of this text, will detect:

Domestic explanations for German overexpansion must look not only at the interests of groups, but also at the process by which those interests were reconciled [logrolling] and at the unintended ideological consequences [path dependence] of the strategic myths used to promote those interests.23

Interests (power) and hence realist factors are still the primary causal variables. Logrolling is now the “process by which those interests were reconciled,” and “strategic myths” are “unintended ideological consequences... used to promote those interests.” Logrolling and myths are instruments or consequences of interests, not causes of them. If they become independent variables and dominate interests (become primary), the argument is no longer a realist one.

defensive realism: a school of realism that says states seek enough power to be secure.

Polarity.

Still another realist perspective, neorealism, explains Hitler’s attack on Russia in purely systemic terms. For political scientist Randall Schweller, the explanation lies in the peculiar distribution of power that preceded World War II.24 This distribution was tripolar: the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. In a tripolar world, no pole can allow the other two to come together, because that would constitute a dominating coalition. Hence, the tripolar distribution of power is uniquely unstable. Either Germany and its allies would dominate Russia or the United States and its allies would. Roosevelt understood that fundamental fact, and this knowledge prompted his intervention to weaken Japan.

Preventive War.

For Dale Copeland, the factor that drove German policy in World War II was the same as that in World War I—not the present power balances but Germany’s fear of Russian superiority in the future. At the meeting that Hossbach recorded, Hitler said that Russia was the ultimate target and that it had to be attacked before 1943–1945, when Germany’s power relative to Russia’s would peak. After that, Russia would have the advantage. So Germany undertook a preventive war to keep Russia from becoming more powerful as Germany became less powerful. As long as this assessment of power shifts was reasonable, and Copeland thinks it was, the realist perspective explains Germany’s behavior from a systemic structural level of analysis.25 Copeland, unlike Snyder (and Mark Haas; see the “Identity Matters” section later in this chapter), minimizes the role of race and ideology in Nazi decision making. He sees systemic power factors dominating and allows a role for identity only in the possibility that a country’s leadership might change in the future and become more belligerent.

If the assessment of power shifts is not reasonable—meaning not warranted by the systemic evidence available to the observer—then the assessment is being influenced by other factors, namely, institutional (lack of information) and identity (misperception) factors. For example, German leaders may not have had enough information to make an accurate assessment of Russia’s future power. Or they may have been affected by their racist or ideological (for example, anticommunist) prejudices toward Russia. When the perceptions of decision makers matter, the level of analysis often drops from the systemic structural level to the foreign policy level. The foreign policy level, as noted in Chapter 1, links systemic process factors such as German perceptions of Russia’s rise in power with domestic-level factors such as insufficient or inaccurate information in the German bureaucracy and intentional variables such as German leaders seeking to stay in power. An example, discussed next, is when decision makers misperceive the power realities because they lack information or indulge their biases.

Role of Misperceptions in Realist Accounts

Realist perspectives expect assessments of power to be accurate because material forces dominate. When such assessments are inaccurate, as Professor Snyder’s analysis shows, realist explanations appeal to liberal and identity factors that apparently distort material forces. Professor Stephen Walt developed a realist line of reasoning that includes judgments about additional factors such as whether offensive or defensive weapons dominate in a particular historical period as well as nonmaterial factors such as whether leaders’ intentions are aggressive or not.26 Threat is no longer just a function of capabilities, as in neorealist analysis, but also of military strategies (offensive or defensive, since most weapons can be used for both) and ideological intentions. As Walt’s critics point out, however, the analysis remains realist only if material factors still account for more of the explanation than does strategy or ideology.27

One liberal factor distorting realist behavior is misperception. Stalin, for example, judged French and British power to be much greater in 1939 than it actually was. He thought those two countries would hold out against Germany and drain its resources, allowing Russia to enter the conflict later as the decisive power. Thus, he buckpassed, but in this case he misperceived the realities. He lacked accurate information.

Another realist, the historian A. J. P. Taylor, concludes that the war was the consequence of a long series of such misperceptions and mistakes. Rejecting identity arguments that the war was intentional, he writes, “The war of 1939, far from being premeditated, was a mistake, the result on both sides of diplomatic blunders.”28 Hitler, he argues, bears unique responsibility for domestic horrors such as the Holocaust, but he does not bear any more responsibility than other powers for foreign policy mistakes. He sought to restore German power and exploited other countries’ mistakes to do so, especially Britain’s failure to negotiate an alliance with Stalin in 1939. “Human blunders,” Taylor concludes, “usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.”29 Notice how Taylor discounts motives or identity factors (wickedness) and emphasizes liberal factors (negotiations and blunders). Taylor believes the balance of power should work, and when it doesn’t, he blames inept diplomacy, which overrides balancing imperatives.

Figure 3-2 The Causes of World War II: The Realist Perspective and Levels of Analysis

States also misperceive the advantage of offensive versus defensive military power. France thought a defensive strategy dominated and buckpassed in 1938, when it still had an advantage over Germany. It waited for Britain to commit. When Britain finally did commit in 1939, France expected the defense to dominate and chain-ganged with Britain and Poland. This chain-ganging, or creation of a rigid defensive alliance (the opposite of buckpassing), left the initiative to Hitler. Hitler seized it and neutralized Russia while attacking Poland and France. Offensive power proved dominant. France had misperceived the offensive-defensive balance.30

Identity factors may influence perceptions when realists assess risks. Copeland acknowledges, for example, that even if Russia became more powerful than Germany in the future, Germany would still have to assess whether Russia was more or less likely to attack in the future compared to the present. That assessment might depend to some extent on the identity or nature of the political regime in Russia. A declining authoritarian regime, such as Germany, might remain suspicious of a rising authoritarian power, such as Russia, as was the case in the 1930s, when Germany feared rising Russian power in the future. But a declining democratic state, say Great Britain, might not worry too much about a rising state that was also democratic, say the United States.31 As noted in Chapter 2, before World War I, Britain worried more about Germany’s rise than about America’s.

In all these cases, realists draw on other factors to supplement relative power explanations. Liberal factors, such as domestic processes and institutions, distort perceptions. And identity factors, such as the ideology of Lebensraum and the nature of domestic political regimes, affect risk taking. When information is missing or misleading, institutions and ideologies fill in the gaps. (See Figure 3-2 for a summary of realist explanations of the causes of World War II.)

chain-ganging: the creation of a rigid defensive alliance.

Identity Matters

World War I decisively ended the common Christian and monarchic community that had provided a shared identity for Europe since the time of Charlemagne. The old Europe functioned on the basis of substantive religious beliefs (Holy Roman Empire) and the equal rights of sovereign monarchs (the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the religious wars in 1648). The new Europe functioned more on the basis of secular norms (nationalism and self-determination) and international institutions (League of Nations). Self-determination encouraged the proliferation of new nations from the remnants of old empires—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, among others—and nationalism pushed nations further and further apart, making institutional agreement based on unanimity more and more difficult.

British nationalism and French nationalism were vindicated by World War I, but German nationalism was humiliated and Russian nationalism was revived by communism. Many of the new nations in eastern Europe became irredentist. Irredentism, a virulent form of nationalism exploited also by Hitler in Germany, demanded changes in national boundaries to bring together peoples sharing historical memories and speaking the same languages. Liberal nationalism in Britain and France encouraged public indifference and in the United States isolationism. Fascist nationalism engulfed Italy and, after a brief democratic interlude, Germany and Japan as well. The Spanish Civil War in the 1930s showcased the fierce battle between fascism and communism. And anti-Semitism, which had erupted periodically in Europe since the time of Christ, reached its zenith with Nazi racism. Jews became the scapegoats for practically every grievance, from World War I to the Great Depression.

Outside Europe, self-determination did not apply. Colonialism persisted and suppressed nationalist sentiment. The League of Nations created mandates to legitimate colonial rule and carved up Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the developing world to satisfy colonial rivalries with little regard for the ethnic or national identities of local populations. Resentment and simmering revolutions built up in many mandated territories. The League was trying to hold countries together using rules that liberated nationalities inside Europe and stifled them outside Europe. From an identity perspective, it might be argued that the League sought to hold together too many substantive differences with too little procedural glue.

How much did these ideological differences matter? Identity perspectives say they mattered a lot. They shaped or, as it were, weakened and incapacitated the institutions, such as the League of Nations, that liberal solutions depended on. And they drove the competition for power, weakening the capacity of states to balance power and preserve stability that realist solutions relied on. Consciously or subconsciously, competitive or diverging identities propelled nations toward the abyss. As before World War I, nations constructed identities that exacerbated differences and conflicts, creating an atmosphere of xenophobia and racism. Because realist alliances continued to form among ideological adversaries—the Soviet Union and Germany in 1939 and then the Soviet Union and the western powers after 1941—most historians hesitate to attribute the primary causes of World War II to ideological factors. Identity factors become more prominent in the Cold War, after World War II. Nonetheless, capitalism, fascism, and communism were powerful identity factors driving events before World War II.

Cultural Nationalism

Cultural nationalism, the glorification of one national culture over others, hit its high-water mark in the period right after World War I. Romania and Bulgaria had become independent already in 1861 and 1908, respectively. Now Versailles created further new nations out of the collapse of the German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Self-determination both justified and contradicted this process. The new countries comprised peoples who shared common languages and cultures, but they also included minorities who did not. And the presence of these minorities triggered resentment, irredentism, and perpetual grievances throughout the interwar period.

The new democracy of Czechoslovakia had a population of fifteen million, which included three million Germans, one million Hungarians, and one-half million Poles. We saw how that mix played into the irredentist demands of Hitler when he claimed that he wanted only to reunite Germans in the new Third Reich. Romania became home to millions of Hungarians, and Poland included millions of Germans. Hungary, created in 1918, was embittered two years later by the Treaty of Trianon, which left five million Hungarians, or one-third of the Hungarian population, outside its national borders. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia gained nationhood but contained significant Russian minorities. Yugoslavia brought together at least six national groups: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Bosnians. In the process, Yugoslavia became the epicenter of cultural fault lines between Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia on one hand and these Christian groups and Bosnian Muslims on the other. Turkey emerged as the rump or residual Ottoman state and immediately fought terrible wars of ethnic and nationalist fury with Greece and Armenia, resonating to the present day with animosities and charges of genocide. Not only did new nations contain minorities that felt betrayed by the process of self-determination, but other nations also effectively disappeared as the Soviet Union put together its empire and subdued the Caucasus countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

What did all this mean? Which peoples should have a nation, when should they have one, and how should they govern it? In particular, how should a nation treat minorities? Nationalism based on language and culture inherently discriminates against other cultures. So, by this standard, minorities either acquired autonomy, which threatened national unity, or were oppressed, which negated their right of self-determination. President Wilson hoped that democratic political ideas would temper and eventually integrate diverse ethnic and national differences. Democracy protects minorities and celebrates cultural diversity. Unfortunately, Wilson was fifty or more years ahead of his time.

Liberal and Social Democracy

Liberal democracy emerged most prominently in the United States. It built a community ethos around the constitutional rights of individuals instead of around the homogeneous culture of the nation (although American folk culture and the English language remained powerful pressures to assimilate) and promoted a free-market economic system based on private property and competition. Social democracy was more prominent in Europe. It put more emphasis on community than on individual rights and favored state regulation and ownership of key sectors of the economy to manage the class struggle between management and labor. Socialist parties were already strong in Europe before World War I, controlling, as previously noted, the German parliament in 1914.

Britain and France became exemplars of social democracy. Both suffered traumas in World War I and in the interwar period confronted virulent enemies of freedom from domestic fascist and communist movements. Liberal forces in the middle were weakened, and inflation and later economic depression undermined enthusiasm for free markets. By the mid-1930s, France was so divided that conservatives seemed more fascist than nationalist. “Better Hitler than Blum” was the conservative slogan, referring to the French socialist leader Léon Blum, who came to power in 1936. Ideologies were beginning to transcend national feelings, and this affected foreign policy. As Professor Mark Haas notes, conservative groups in Britain and France preferred to align with fascist countries, such as Italy, to counterbalance Germany, while socialist groups preferred to align with communist countries, such as the Soviet Union, to counterbalance Germany. The unintended consequences of these ideological divisions were indecision and the failure to counterbalance Germany at all.32

American Exceptionalism

The United States suffered economic crisis but, because of leadership and national experience, avoided the violent class and cultural cleavages of Europe. The United States began as a conventional nation with a homogeneous culture. Its population was mostly Anglo-Saxon, except for the enslaved black minority. Despite slavery, it was one of the leading democracies of its day, at least regarding the number of white male citizens who could vote and the rights of that group to ownership and protection of property.33 Other countries, such as Britain, had smaller white male franchises during the nineteenth century but abolished slavery before the United States.

Subsequent waves of immigrants slowly transformed America into a multicultural country. The country was tied together less and less by a common culture—although a single language prevailed—and more and more by a common ideological creed of political and economic freedom. Slaves gained legal freedom in the Civil War, a private enterprise system took hold in the late nineteenth century (compared to the state-run industries of fascist and socialist systems in Europe), the Progressive Era (1900–1930) broadened suffrage and regulatory reform, and Franklin Roosevelt introduced a national social security system and broader concern for economic equality.

No fascist or socialist party of any consequence ever developed in the United States. While Europe armed, America’s military establishment remained minuscule. In June 1940, America had only 267,767 men under arms. Britain had 402,000, and France and Germany more than 2.2 and 2.7 million, respectively.34 And Roosevelt’s deft leadership during the economic crisis of the Depression preempted more radical socialist and communist economic alternatives that might have nationalized industries or eroded economic freedoms.

Altogether, the United States, even with its continuing faults, such as political and economic constraints on the freedom of blacks and the poor, was the leading example of liberal democracy in the interwar world. In this sense, it acquired an identity of exceptionalism, a country set apart from the rest of the world by its progressive, freedom-loving, and pacifist nature.

But the United States indulged this sense of exceptionalism too much and shunned Europe, and while it remained uninvolved, the lights of liberal democracy went out in Europe as well as across the rest of the world. After 1922, as Samuel Huntington observes, liberal democracy disappeared from one country after another:

In a little over a decade fledgling democratic institutions in Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, and Estonia were overthrown by military coups. Countries such as Yugoslavia and Bulgaria that had never known real democracy were subjected to new forms of harsher dictatorship. The conquest of power by Hitler in 1933 ended German democracy, ensured the end of Austrian democracy the following year, and eventually of course produced the end of Czech democracy in 1938. Greek democracy... was finally buried in 1936. Portugal succumbed to a military coup in 1926.... Military takeovers occurred in Brazil and Argentina in 1930. Uruguay reverted to authoritarianism in 1933. A military coup in 1936 led to civil war and the death of the Spanish republic in 1939. The new and limited democracy introduced in Japan... was supplanted by military rule in the early 1930s.35

Why did the United States not care? Some identity perspectives might argue that it was the country’s self-image, not its institutions or geography, that kept it out of the League of Nations. American democracy was unique or exceptional and did not apply to other countries in the world. And even if the United States had joined the League, it would not have been prepared to use force. The United States needed more than procedural rules of self-determination or alliance prescriptions of the balance of power to justify its participation in world affairs. As we see in the next chapter, when it finally entered World War II, it came up with another set of universal ideas to run the world. The United Nations was somewhat more realistic perhaps, but it was still pretty high-minded in the tradition of American exceptionalism.

exceptionalism: the view that a particular state, and especially the United States, is distinct from others because of its specific history and unique

Communist Nationalism

The communist movement brought a radical edge to socialism. In Germany right after the war, communists battled conservatives in Berlin.36 Whites (conservatives) fought Reds (Bolsheviks) in Russia. Eventually, Lenin and then Stalin consolidated communism in Russia. Whereas socialist parties struggled for the rights of workers through the parliamentary system, communism eradicated the party system. It designated the Communist Party as the sole vanguard of the proletariat or workers’ movement and used state institutions to uproot reactionary forces—conservative nobility and peasants—and commandeer the nation’s property and industry. Stalin forced Russian industrialization through state ministries and planning and displaced and starved millions of peasants to create collectivized farms. He also purged the military officer corps, a last bastion, as he saw it, of aristocratic nobility and fascist predilections.37 Stalin’s decimation of the officer corps suggests that his decisions were driven more by psychological or identity factors than by national security concerns.

Fascist and Racist Nationalism

Radicalization on the left was matched by radicalization on the right. Fascist parties rallied conservative forces to recall old glories of national triumph and merge militaristic virtues with heroic symbols borrowed from ancient Greece and Rome. Benito Mussolini’s fascist party seized power in Italy in 1922. Fascist and military groups subsequently dominated in Germany and Japan. Both countries had had parliamentary systems in the 1920s. Germany created the Weimar Republic and had, some believe, a moderate foreign policy leadership under Gustav Stresemann that might have brought Germany back peacefully into the European fold.38 Japan had political parties that struggled to control the military from the late nineteenth century on. By the early 1930s, however, both countries had chosen fascist futures.

Racism became a big part of nationalism in Germany and Japan. While prejudice is hardly unique to these two countries, the maniacal extremes it reached there remain the ultimate examples of human brutality and depravity. The Holocaust, of course, stands out by any standard, with more than six million Jews, plus other minorities such as Roma (often called Gypsies), systematically exterminated. It epitomizes genocide, the extermination of an entire people based on their race or ethnicity. Is there any way to explain it? Probably not to everyone’s satisfaction. How much blame do the masses of people share? How much do the leaders deserve? Could it have happened elsewhere? Is this a darkness that lurks in every society? The United States is not blameless. It has its own legacy of slavery and then race-based vigilantism. And the United States did not help the international cause of equal rights when it rejected a Japanese appeal at Versailles for a declaration of racial equality. Japan, of course, indulged in its own racism, alienating many of its Chinese and South Korean neighbors and raising issues, such as its use of “comfort women” or sex slaves, that fester to the present day. Suffice it to note that atrocities happened. They cannot be denied, as a few still do in Germany and perhaps more in Japan. And the explanation may not be as important as the process of forever searching for an explanation. Otherwise, such atrocities may happen again.

genocide: the systematic persecution and extermination of a group of people on the basis of their national, ethnic, racial, or religious identity.

Ideological Constructions and Chasms

Social constructivists emphasize the collective identities constructed in the interwar period that glorified nationalist traits and military exploits. More agency-oriented constructivists emphasize the relative identities or chasms that erupted among the self-images of different societies.

The ideological struggles going on in Europe came to the fore vividly during the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, the Spanish people elected a radical socialist government similar to the one in France under Blum. The rightist groups—monarchists, militarists, and fascists—rebelled and started a civil war. Fascism and communism went head-to-head. The battle fascinated the world, including Ernest Hemingway, who covered the war and wrote his classic novel For Whom the Bell Tolls to describe it. Italy and Germany aided the fascist

(Nau 118-149)

Nau, Henry R. Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas, 5th Edition. CQ Press, 20160105. VitalBook file.

The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.

Chapter 4

The Origins and End of the Cold War

President Kennedy and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko meet in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis as the world watches intently. Also shown in this photograph, taken at the White House on October 18, 1962, are Secretary of State Dean Rusk (seated on the couch, left) and Llewellyn Thompson (seated on the couch, right), special adviser on Soviet affairs.

Bettmann/Corbis

In mid-February 1946, a young, relatively obscure U.S. Foreign Service officer lay feverish and ill in bed in Moscow. An aide brought him a cable from the State Department in Washington asking why the Soviets seemed unwilling to support the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, two institutions the United States sought to create to manage postwar international economic relations. The query was routine and even trivial. But the sick diplomat, George Kennan, used the occasion to compose his famous long telegram outlining the nature of the conflict the United States faced with the Soviet Union and the diplomatic solution to it. 1

The Long Telegram

Kennan’s telegram hit Washington like a thunderbolt and made Kennan an instant diplomatic rock star. In typical telegram shorthand, it made the following six points:

First, the Soviet Union is confrontational. Kennan warned that the leadership of the Soviet Union had adopted an outlook of “antagonistic ‘capitalist encirclement,’” expecting a global confrontation between capitalism and socialism. Stalin, Kennan quoted, had stated as early as 1927 that “there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself the countries that incline toward capitalism. Battle between these two centers . . . will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world.”

Second, Marxism expresses Russian insecurity. This confrontational

Soviet party line is not based on any objective analysis of the situation beyond Russia’s borders. . . . At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity . . . insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. . . . Marxist dogma . . . became a perfect vehicle for [this] sense of insecurity.

Third, the Soviet Union will expand its power. Russia will increase

in every way strength and prestige of Soviet state; intensive military-industrialization, maximum development of armed forces, great displays to impress outsiders, continued secretiveness. . . . [And] whenever it is considered timely and promising, efforts will be made to advance official limits of Soviet power . . . for the moment . . . restricted to certain neighboring points . . . such as Iran, Turkey, possibly Bornholm [an island in the Baltic Sea south of Sweden]. However, other points may at times come into question . . . a port on Persian Gulf . . . Soviet base at Gilbraltar [sic] Strait.

Fourth, the Soviet Union leads a worldwide communist effort. Kennan foresaw that the Soviet Union would work “closely together” with leaders of communist parties in other countries “as an underground operating directorate of world communism, a concealed Comintern [Communist International] tightly coordinated and dominated by Moscow.” It would also steer the rank and file of communist parties “through front organizations” and use national associations such as labor unions, youth leagues, and women’s organizations, as well as international organizations, the Russian Orthodox Church, pan-Slav and other movements, and willing foreign governments “to undermine general political and strategic potential of major Western powers . . . to disrupt national self-confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity.”

Fifth, the United States must contain the Soviet Union and let communism fail. Perhaps most famously, Kennan argued for resistance to Soviet power but not overreaction to Soviet ideology:

How to cope with this force is undoubtedly greatest task [U.S.] diplomacy has ever faced. . . . Soviet power does not work by fixed plans. . . . Impervious to the logic of reason, it is highly sensitive to the logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw—and usually does—when strong resistance is encountered at any point. . . . [I]f situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns. . . . Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven . . . never since the termination of the civil war [1921] have the mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of the Communist Party than they are today. . . . Thus, internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured.

Sixth, the United States will win by improving its own society, not by spreading freedom. Kennan warned that the United States must not

be emotionally provoked or unseated by [the communist movement]. . . . Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. . . . Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale, and community spirit of our own people is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. . . . We must . . . put forward for all nations a much more positive and constructive picture of the sort of world we would like to see. . . . It is not enough to urge the people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples . . . are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. . . . Finally, we must . . . cling to our own . . . conceptions of human society. . . . [T]he greatest danger that can befall us . . . is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

Long by the standards of a telegram, Kennan’s analysis was succinct by the logic of diplomacy. It was also eerily prescient.

long telegram: George Kennan’s diplomatic telegram of 1946 outlining the U.S.–Soviet conflict and arguing for the policy of containment.

Snapshot of the Cold War

Within two years of the end of World War II, the two wartime allies faced off against one another, just as Kennan had highlighted. They used “the logic of force” to checkmate and contain one another. From 1949 to 1955, two massive military alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the west and the Warsaw Pact in the east, emerged to divide Berlin, Germany, and the rest of Europe not just politically but physically. By 1961, an ugly wall ran down the center of Berlin, and barbed wire, guard towers, and a barren no-man’s land cut a gash across the landscape of Europe, turning eastern Europe effectively into a concentration camp.

The two superpowers engaged one another with considerably more ideological fervor and saber rattling than Kennan had advised, and which he later sharply criticized. An intense series of worldwide crises followed. Berlin, Korea, and Cuba brought the superpowers to the brink of war. Nevertheless, in the end the superpowers ended the confrontation without firing a shot directly at one another. They engaged in a Cold War of deterrence and diplomatic crises that, although it included plenty of “hot” wars waged through proxy governments as in Vietnam, did not involve the use of force in direct battles between the superpowers. Deterrence sublimated the use of force to a psychological rather than physical level. The superpowers played out the scenarios of war in their imaginations, testing the credibility of threats against capabilities and resolve and ultimately pulling back from the brink and easing disputes before war began. And all the while, as Kennan anticipated, the United States and the Soviet Union fought the real battle at home through domestic competition. Forty-five years later, the United States and its allies won that competition decisively. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and in December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Figure 4-1 First Page of George Kennan’s Long Telegram

Source: National Archives

Does Kennan’s picture offer the best explanation of the start of the Cold War? Possibly, but first, what kind of explanation is it—realist, liberal, or identity? What is driving Soviet behavior in Kennan’s analysis? At first glance, it might seem to be Marxist ideology (identity). After all, as he points out, the Soviet party line of “capitalist encirclement” was “not based on any objective analysis” but was, instead, a “neurotic view of world affairs.” Moreover, in contact with the advanced west, Russia felt less competent, less powerful, making “Marxist dogma” a “perfect vehicle” to express its inferiority. But now geopolitics slips into the picture. This neurotic view was not itself the cause of Soviet behavior but a result of a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” Russia lived on a “vast exposed plain” in a “neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples” and had suffered three bloody invasions—by Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Hitler—in just over a hundred years. It was geopolitics and security (realist), not ideology, that explained Russia’s paranoia.

The real tip-off comes when Kennan suggests that “Soviet power does not work by fixed plans.” Moscow might have an ideology, but in the end that ideology bends to “the logic of force.” The Soviet Union can “easily withdraw—and usually does—when strong resistance is encountered at any point.” The balance of power works. How so, if the Soviet Union’s ideology calls for “drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism”? Because in determining Soviet behavior, Kennan judges, strategic and geopolitical realities ultimately trump ideology. They also trump liberal factors. Notice that the Soviet Union uses international organizations and transnational actors—for example, the Russian Orthodox Church—to advance the purposes of Soviet ideology. But institutions are instruments, not determinants, of Soviet behavior. Thus, when all is said and done, ideology and institutions bend to the logic of power. Kennan’s analysis is realist, and that’s why he can be relatively complacent about the ideological component of Soviet policy. The Soviet people do not really believe it: “never since the termination of the civil war [1921] have the mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of the Communist Party than they are today.” This is why he later criticized other analysts who made too much of ideological or identity factors. 2

This chapter addresses arguments about what caused the Cold War to begin and what caused it to end. As before, there are realist, identity, and liberal explanations of these historical events from different levels of analysis. And along the way critical theories offer their insights as well. The parallel timeline on page 160 assembles the events of the Cold War period chronologically.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): western alliance in the Cold War.

Warsaw Pact: communist alliance in Cold War.

Cold War: the global, putatively bloodless (hence cold, not hot) conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that resulted in massive arms buildups, international conflicts, and proxy wars.

Realist Explanations

Three main realist arguments explain the origins of the Cold War. They all trace events back to power factors, but they come from different levels of analysis. One domestic-level explanation suggests that the Soviet Union caused the Cold War because its society was aggressive. A second domestic-level argument says the United States caused the Cold War because its capitalist economic system was expansionist. A third explanation, perhaps the most influential, comes from the systemic level. It argues that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was responsible for the Cold War; rather, the Cold War was a consequence of the security dilemma. The two countries faced one another across a power vacuum in central Europe and had to compete to fill that vacuum whether they were aggressive or not.

The principal realist explanation for the end of the Cold War also comes from the systemic level. It holds that the United States eventually won the competition by successfully containing the Soviet Union, while domestic developments outside the influence of diplomacy led the Soviet Union to discard its communist ideology. Kennan predicted this outcome in a famous article published a year and a half after the long telegram. By confronting “the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world,” he wrote, the United States would “promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” 3

How the Cold War Started

In the sections that follow, we examine the three realist explanations about how the Cold War started; then how realist mechanisms such as atomic weapons and nuclear deterrence, crises such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and alliances/proxy wars expanded the Cold War; and finally the realist explanation of how the Cold War ended.

Soviet Aggression—Historical Expansionism.

“Russia on the march,” Henry Kissinger writes, “rarely exhibited a sense of limits.” It “seemed impelled to expand by a rhythm all its own, containable only by the deployment of superior force, and usually by war.” 4 This had been the case since the time of Peter the Great, long before the arrival of communism. So, according to this explanation of the Cold War, Soviet aggression was not a consequence of communist ideology or the sense of historical insecurity that Kennan stressed. It was an outgrowth of the aggressive nature of the domestic society that demanded aggrandizement and empire. As Stalin saw it, “Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.” 5 He was, according to this explanation, an offensive realist, seeking to maximize power rather than just provide security. And the cause of aggression came not from Stalin himself or the individual level of analysis, because every Russian leader since Peter the Great had been aggressive. Nor did it come from the systemic structural level of analysis or the sense of historical insecurity bred by the security dilemma. Rather, it came from the domestic society as a whole, and it was not the communist ideology or institutions but the aggressive nature of that society that caused the expansionism.

Stalin’s army had reached quite far when World War II ended. Soviet divisions occupied Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; all of eastern Europe; half of Germany; and northern Iran. Meanwhile, U.S. troops withdrew from Europe, reduced from 12 million down to 1.5 million by mid-1947. Stalin also pressed for a naval advantage, looking for warm-water ports in the Mediterranean and modes of access to the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps as a way to challenge, if not encircle, Britain and the United States on the high seas. Finally, when a million Soviet troops maneuvered in Romania and stayed in Iran beyond the end of 1945, Harry S. Truman saw a threat of aggression and became alarmed: “There isn’t a doubt in my mind that Russia intends an invasion of Turkey and the seizure of the Black Sea Straits to the Mediterranean. Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making.” 6

Although these crises passed, the impression of Soviet aggression lasted, and, by some accounts, the “policy of containment, as it came to be called, was adopted at the beginning of 1946.” 7 Aggressive Soviet actions convinced Washington policy officials that they had to draw a line of containment around the periphery of the territories Soviet armies occupied and defend that line, if necessary, by military force. No wonder Kennan’s telegram, which arrived about this time, set off such a furor. Policy makers had decided “the Soviet Union was an expansionist power, and . . . only countervailing power could keep her in line.” 8

In the same month, British prime minister Winston Churchill declared in Fulton, Missouri, that an iron curtain had descended on Europe, “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” 9 Churchill characterized the impending division of Europe in a political sense. But two years later, in 1948, the iron curtain became a physical barrier when the Soviet Union cut off access routes to the western occupied parts of Berlin located inside the Soviet-occupied zone (see Map 4-1 ). And two years after that, in 1950, it became a military division when North Korea, a client state of the Soviet Union, invaded South Korea and sparked a buildup of alliances in Europe.

This propaganda poster features one of Stalin’s five-year plans (1946–1950). Soviet aggression, realists think, prompted Washington to react with containment policies designed to keep Russia at bay.

Photo12/UIG/Getty Images

As was assumed then and is known now, the Soviet Union approved the North Korean invasion beforehand. 10 The attack set off alarm bells in Europe and sparked an arms race to prevent a Soviet-sponsored invasion from happening there. From this realist argument, Soviet aggression was clearly the culprit. And now Moscow had allies in Asia as well. In 1949, the communists under Mao Zedong won the civil war in China. The Cold War was in full swing.

containment: the policy of the United States during the Cold War that checked aggressive Soviet actions through military alliances.

U.S. Aggression—Capitalist Expansionism.

But wait a minute, you say. What about American or Western aggression? Weren’t Western armies also ensconced in Europe, even if they were being reduced? Didn’t American and British fleets dominate the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas, in effect “encircling” the Soviet Union? Hadn’t the Soviet Union, not the United States, recently been invaded by Nazi hordes, and didn’t the United States and Great Britain delay for almost three years before establishing a second front to help Russia fight off the Nazi invaders? For every one American who died in World War II, fifty-three Russians died. 11 Might Stalin have had reasons to wonder whether the United States and Great Britain were happy watching Germany and the Soviet Union eliminate or at least drastically weaken one another?

When the war ended, Russia was powerful militarily, but the United States possessed the atom bomb. And, with the Soviet economy in ruins, the United States was by far the most powerful country economically. It was the only major combatant in World War II to escape entirely any damage to its homeland industrial base. So the Soviet Union had good reason to feel that it was the weaker power and to expect and probably deserve substantial economic help from its Western allies, as well as reparations from Germany and conquered eastern European countries.

Map 4-1 The Division of Berlin

What did it get? Not much. First, as soon as the war was over in both Europe and Asia, the United States cut off Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union, the supply of all kinds of military and economic assistance during the war to countries fighting Germany and its allies. Then, at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the allies concocted a reparation plan that assumed Germany would remain unified. But the Soviet Union preferred a division of Germany and rejected the plan. 12 When the Western powers decided in the spring of 1946 to go ahead and rebuild their own zones, the Soviet Union saw the Western powers reconstructing Germany not only without it but against it. The battle for Germany was joined.

One year later, in the spring of 1947, the United States announced the Marshall Plan. This plan proposed to integrate the western zones of Germany into a larger program of European economic cooperation. The Soviet zone and other eastern European states were invited to join. But let’s think about this proposal now from the point of view of the Soviet Union. Economically ravaged and weak, its satellites were being asked to join a Western market system that was not only more powerful, given the backing of the United States, but that also operated on the basis of free trade. Quite understandably, Moscow saw this move as Western aggression, a plan to penetrate economically, and eventually take over politically, the protective band of countries in eastern Europe that the Soviet Union needed as a security buffer and had just sacrificed so many lives to establish. The U.S. action wasn’t military aggression as such, but it could be seen as capitalist imperial aggression. And it threatened the heart of Soviet interests in Europe, whereas alleged Soviet aggression challenged only peripheral Western interests in places such as Greece and Turkey.

When the Western powers announced in spring 1948 that they would unify the currency of the Western zones of Germany, Moscow reacted by shutting down the land routes to Berlin. As Map 4-1 shows, the city of Berlin was located inside the Soviet-occupied part of Germany (East Germany) and was itself divided into Western (U.S., British, and French) and Soviet zones. Thus, the Soviet Union controlled land access to Berlin. When Stalin blockaded the road and railway routes, the Western powers responded with the massive Berlin airlift. Over fourteen months, the allies made 277,804 flights to Berlin, delivering 2.326 million tons of supplies. The Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949 was the first physical confrontation of the Cold War. According to the United States-is-the-aggressor argument, however, Russia was not responsible. It was provoked. Moscow could not permit Western economic forces to expand and weaken its control of the Soviet zone.

The argument that the United States caused the Cold War is called a revisionist interpretation because it revises the traditional argument that the Soviet Union was the aggressor. To the extent that it emphasizes military causes of U.S. aggressive policy, it is clearly a realist argument. But to the extent that it draws on deeper historical forces of capitalist expansion, it slides into a critical theory perspective, which we address later in this chapter.

iron curtain: a metaphor for the political, ideological, and physical (no-man’s land) separation of the Soviet Union and Western countries during the Cold War.

arms race: the competitive buildup of weapons systems.

Potsdam Conference: the meeting among wartime allies in July 1945 that produced no agreement on the unification of Germany and other issues.

Marshall Plan: the Western plan to rebuild Germany and the rest of Europe after World War II.

Berlin Blockade: the first physical confrontation of the Cold War, taking place in 1948–1949, in which Stalin blocked the land routes into Berlin.

revisionist interpretation: an interpretation of the origins of the Cold War that emphasizes American ideological or economic aggression against the Soviet Union and its allies.

Power Vacuum and Spheres of Influence.

A third influential realist argument holds that the Cold War was nobody’s fault but was a consequence of the anarchic situation that the United States and the Soviet Union faced after World War II. In April 1945, the two massive allied armies met in the middle of Germany, at Torgau on the Elbe River. 13 Because the allies had agreed in 1943 to pursue the war until the unconditional surrender of the enemy, there was nothing left of Germany when they finished. The entire country lay in ruins.

How was Germany going to be rebuilt? Would it be rebuilt as a Western ally, a Soviet ally, or a neutral country? One thing was sure. As we know, Germany was the centerpiece of the old European state system. It had been divided for centuries, then it was united for nearly seventy-five years. Now it was destroyed. If it were united or divided again, it would matter greatly whether Germany added to Western power or Soviet power. The distribution of power at the time, some realists argue, was tripolar. 14 And, as discussed in Chapter 1 , a tripolar balance may be uniquely unstable. The third country, in this case a reconstructed Germany (or Japan in the case of Asia), could tip the balance. Whoever won this prize would control the center of Europe (or Asia, in the case of Japan). Thus, the stakes were very high. No one had to be an aggressor in this situation. It was a matter of security, not aggression, for each side to seek the best outcome.

So systemic structural forces were driving events. Essentially two great powers (and their smaller allies) sat astride a strategic piece of territory and faced the security dilemma of whether and how much to trust one another. The classic balance-of-power solution was to “split the difference”: divide the territory and power evenly and create two spheres of influence, one in which the Soviet Union dominated and the other in which the United States dominated. That way, the relative balance of power would not be affected. Roughly, that is what happened. By 1950, two German governments existed and two alliances divided up the rest of Europe.

The balance of power worked better than it had before World Wars I and II. There was no hot war in Europe for the next forty years. But there was a cold war. Why did it occur? Realist perspectives expected a spheres-of-influence solution, not a cold war. Each superpower would exert dominance in its half of Europe and respect the other’s dominance in the other half. That was the solution George Kennan favored. At best, realists might say that spheres of influence made the balance of power rigid once again, as before World War I. The bipolar confrontation left little room for error and thus provoked a deep security dilemma that made the two superpowers enemies instead of rivals. But identity perspectives (examined later in the chapter) might say that it was the ideological divide that prevented an accommodation, not rigid bipolarity and the security dilemma.

Churchill was an avid proponent of the spheres-of-influence solution. In October 1944, he met with Stalin in Moscow and, on a famous half sheet of paper, proposed a breakdown of relative influence in the Balkans. 15 The Soviet Union would have predominant influence in Romania and Bulgaria; Great Britain and the United States would have predominant influence in Greece. Both sides would split influence in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Deal done, right? Why not do the same for Germany and eastern Europe? Well, now think how you would administer such a spheres-of-influence arrangement, especially when the two partners already suspect one another. After the war, Soviet troops occupied Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. How could Britain and the United States know, let alone defend against, what might go on in those countries? At the Yalta Conference (held at a Russian resort of that name on the Black Sea) in February 1945, Roosevelt tried to reach an agreement with Stalin about what would happen in Poland. The United States would concede Soviet influence, since Soviet armies already occupied the country, if the Soviet Union would hold free and fair elections and create more transparency. But who then would ensure that the elections were free and fair? Yalta specified few details. In the end, no such elections were held. The Soviet Union installed a puppet government in Warsaw that Moscow manipulated. Later, in 1948, the Soviet Union staged another coup in Czechoslovakia. To this day, the conference at Yalta stands in the minds of eastern Europeans as a callous sellout of small powers by the great powers.

spheres of influence: areas of contested territory divided up and dominated by great powers, which agree not to interfere in one another’s areas.

Yalta Conference: a wartime conference held in February 1945 where the United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain agreed on the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany and postwar occupation of Europe, including a Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe.

How the Cold War Expanded

So the Cold War divided Europe. But why did it divide the globe? The answer, according to realist perspectives, is that a balance of terror replaced the balance of power and made the segregation of regional conflicts more difficult. Nuclear weapons introduced such a high level of terror that the mere threat to use them would deter all wars, both conventional and nuclear. But to be effective that threat would have to be credible, and superpowers would have to make clear commitments to defend their interests both outside as well as inside Europe. Alliances sprang up, and crises spread. The superpowers dueled through proxy wars in Korea and later Vietnam and Afghanistan and came close to a direct nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The costs of deterrence were high, and eventually the Soviet Union went bankrupt and the United States prevailed. From a realist perspective, competition and relative material capabilities decided the outcome. There was no direct war, but the persistent terrifying threat of nuclear war produced an equivalent psychological result.

The Atomic Bomb and the Balance of Terror.

On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear bomb (called Little Boy) was tested in the deserts of New Mexico, an event Truman reported to Stalin at Potsdam. Stalin was not surprised. Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy at Los Alamos, the center of U.S. weapons research in New Mexico, had been supplying Russia with atomic secrets for years. After his conversation with Truman, Stalin instructed V. M. Molotov, his foreign minister, and Lavrenty Beria, the head of the Soviet atomic program, “to hurry up the work” on the Soviet bomb. 16 In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its own nuclear weapon. According to realist logic, the Soviet Union could not depend on the United States or anyone else for security against this type of weapon.

Now a kind of balance of terror superseded the balance of power. If either side attacked, the other side might use nuclear weapons. As these weapons became more powerful—by 1951, hydrogen bombs were developed that were many times more powerful than atomic weapons—no country could risk nuclear war and survive. Yet conventional war might still be possible. If no one could risk nuclear escalation, then the struggle for power might be decided by regular armies with tanks, artillery, and aircraft or even by guerrilla forces engaged in wars of liberation. Each country had to worry about its capabilities to fight wars at all levels of potential conflict—guerrilla, conventional, and nuclear—and its resolve to escalate the use of force to higher levels to contain conflicts. Each country formed alliances to demonstrate such resolve, and proxy wars, in which superpowers tested each other’s capabilities and resolve in peripheral areas, became more likely. By such logic, according to the realist perspective, the Cold War spread both horizontally to the rest of the globe and vertically to include all levels of military arms.

An arms race began even before the Korean War started in June 1950. In early 1950, the White House drafted the famous National Security Council document NSC-68. Under this document, the United States boosted its defense budget in one year from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion. The number of U.S. troops in Europe ballooned from 80,000 in 1950 to 427,000 in 1953. NATO, created in 1949 to reinforce political ties among the Western allies, now developed into an integrated military force under a U.S. supreme commander. The military occupation of Germany by the Western allies ended, a West German government was established, and West Germany eventually rearmed and joined NATO. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union established a separate government in East Germany and created the Warsaw Pact alliance to counterbalance NATO. In 1955, NATO included, in addition to the United States and West Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Greece, Turkey, and Canada. The Warsaw Pact included, in addition to the Soviet Union and East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania.

The Korean War globalized the Cold War alliances. Korea had been divided at the end of World War II between a Soviet-dependent government in the north and a U.S.-dependent government in the south. In June 1950, North Korea, with permission from Moscow, invaded South Korea. The United States led a United Nations force to drive the North Koreans back. When UN forces threatened to cross the Yalu, a river dividing China and North Korea, China entered the war and the fighting seesawed back and forth across the peninsula until an armistice was signed in 1953 along the original dividing line, the 38th parallel. A peace treaty was never signed, and U.S. forces remain to the present day in South Korea. In the course of the 1950s, the United States signed a security treaty with Japan and created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) with Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand to defend allies in the rest of Asia. The United States also concluded bilateral alliances with Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan. In the Middle East, the United States established the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which included Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. And in Latin America it signed the Rio Treaty with twenty other nations.

balance of terror: a situation in which two or more countries use the threat of nuclear weapons to deter conflicts.

proxy wars: conflicts in peripheral areas in which nuclear powers tested each other’s military capabilities and resolve.

Korean War: a proxy war on the Korean Peninsula in the early 1950s between Soviet-backed North Korean and Chinese forces and a United Nations force led by the United States.

Nuclear Deterrence and Escalation.

How does nuclear deterrence work? Deterrence is the use of the threat of force to stop an attack before it occurs, in contrast to defense, which is designed to counter an attack after it occurs. If it works, deterrence substitutes the threat of the use of force for the actual use of force. One state threatens to retaliate against a second state that is preparing to attack with enough force that the second state will lose more than it might gain if it attacks, and therefore, it does not attack in the first place.

How much and what kind of capabilities are needed to provide effective deterrence? The debate has produced no conclusive answers. Some analysts argue that all a state needs to deter an attack are a few nuclear weapons that can survive the initial attack by the other side and be launched against the attacker’s civilian population and industry. Given the destructive power of nuclear weapons, this strategy of minimum deterrence makes any war too costly, and states will be very reluctant to build up and use arms at any level of violence. Other analysts argue that minimum deterrence is not enough. One state may acquire a conventional capability that another state cannot stop without threatening to use nuclear weapons first. Now the state threatened by overwhelming conventional forces has to “think the unthinkable” and develop a variety of nuclear responses, or maximum deterrence, not only to forestall a conventional attack but also to deter limited nuclear engagements without immediately igniting an all-out nuclear war.

The debate is illustrated by the strategy of extended deterrence, in which a country extends the threat of retaliation to defend other countries, not just itself. The United States employed this strategy to defend the territories of its allies in Europe during the Cold War. The scenarios went something like the following.

If Moscow threatened to use its larger conventional armies to invade western Europe, the United States and its allies would threaten to use nuclear weapons to deter the invasion. The threat to use nuclear weapons would deter the Soviet Union from using conventional forces first. But the threat to use nuclear weapons might not be credible because it would mean an immediate all-out nuclear war. So, initially, the allies might threaten to use only tactical nuclear weapons. In the 1950s, NATO deployed nuclear land mines as well as artillery shells in central Europe. But what if the Soviet Union then said it would retaliate against tactical weapons by using short- or intermediate-range nuclear missiles stationed in eastern Europe to attack western Europe but not the United States? Would the United States, even though its territory had not been attacked, still launch intercontinental missiles from the United States on the Soviet Union? That would automatically involve the United States in a global war with the Soviet Union, so the threat might not be considered credible. The Soviet Union and even America’s European allies might wonder if the United States would really risk the destruction of New York to retaliate for an attack on Paris. Thus, when the Soviet Union deployed SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles in eastern Europe in the 1970s, western European leaders and then NATO as a whole called on Western nations to station their own intermediate-range nuclear forces (INFs)—Pershing and cruise missiles—on western European territory. Now a threat from Soviet intermediate-range missiles could be counterbalanced by a threat from intermediate-range missiles located in western Europe. An attack from the Soviet Union on Paris would be met by an attack from France on the Soviet Union. The conflict would not immediately escalate to the global level, and the threat from Europe would be considered more credible.

But now wouldn’t western Europe be concerned that the United States might be more willing to start a nuclear war in Europe if it did not involve the United States? Yes, but that was one of the reasons the United States placed some American forces in western Europe from the outset. Now, if the Soviet Union attacked western Europe, using conventional or nuclear arms, U.S. troops would be killed and America would be involved in the war. What if the Soviet Union was still not deterred by intermediate-range missiles in Europe and the United States had to launch missiles from the United States? Wouldn’t it be better if these missiles were aimed at Soviet missiles, not Soviet cities, to minimize collateral damage and avoid a wider nuclear holocaust? Such missiles, called counterforce weapons, were designed to destroy specific military targets, as opposed to countervalue weapons, which were designed to destroy Soviet industries and cities. The threat of counterforce weapons led to the hardening of missile sites to ensure that some of these missiles would survive a first strike by the other side and thus be available to retaliate in a second strike at the next level of escalation.

First-strike capability is the capacity to use nuclear missiles preemptively to destroy most of or all the missiles of the other side. Second-strike capability involves protecting nuclear missiles so that enough survive a first-strike attack to be available to retaliate and ensure a level of unacceptable damage in a second strike, thereby deterring the first strike to begin with. Missiles were hardened in underground silos and dispersed on submarines, where they were virtually invulnerable and could be launched from unknown locations. In addition, a strategic bomber force armed with nuclear weapons was kept in the air around the clock to ensure that these weapons would not be destroyed on the ground in a preemptive first strike. The combination of land-, sea-, and air-based retaliatory weapons became known as the nuclear triad.

The strategy of nuclear deterrence thus sought to slice the stages of escalation finer and finer so as to avoid the last move to all-out nuclear war. The superpowers would move up the various stages, or rungs of the ladder, of escalation in an incremental and controlled fashion until one eventually achieved what was called escalation dominance—that is, the point at which the adversary was convinced not to go any farther up the ladder and was forced to choose between unacceptable escalation and compromise. Nuclear strategies might also be deployed offensively. In a compellence strategy, one state uses the escalation of threat to compel another state to do something the first state wants, whereas in a strategy of deterrence, one state seeks to dissuade the other state from doing something the first state does not want. From the Soviet point of view, was the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba a strategy of compellence to extract U.S. concessions in Berlin or a strategy of deterrence to discourage a U.S. attack on Cuba? We see the different points of view when we take up that crisis later.

Deterrence strategies evolved during the Cold War. For the first decade, the United States had the capacity to strike the Soviet Union but the Soviet Union could not strike the United States. The United States relied on a strategy of massive retaliation, or the threat of unleashing a general nuclear war if the Soviet Union attacked western Europe. After the Soviet Union launched the first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, thus demonstrating that it could strike the United States, the United States adopted a deterrence strategy of flexible response, or retaliating selectively to fight wars at conventional levels without immediately risking nuclear war or, if the nuclear threshold was crossed, engaging in limited nuclear war.

Eventually, as both sides acquired increasingly equivalent capabilities, the deterrence strategy settled on what became known as mutual assured destruction, or MAD (as critics thought it was). If each side could retaliate and assure an unacceptable amount of destruction to the other side, neither side would risk escalation. The strategy involved an emphasis on offensive weapons and a de-emphasis on defensive weapons. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements signed in 1972 and 1979 (the latter never ratified by the U.S. Congress) set ceilings on (but no actual reductions of) offensive weapons, while the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972, prevented the development of antiballistic missile defenses except for two installations on each side (later reduced to one). The idea was to preserve the vulnerability of populated centers to offensive missile strikes and thus maintain the fear of massive civilian casualties that nuclear deterrence depended on.

As you can imagine, all this nuclear war gaming and buildup provoked massive disagreements. Realist perspectives felt it was imperative to have capabilities at every level of potential escalation and that it was possible to use diplomacy to manage nuclear threats even in heated crises. Liberal perspectives felt that only a few second-strike nuclear weapons were necessary and that diplomacy could not control nuclear crises and should aim to reduce nuclear weapons to this minimum level.

In this debate, realist perspectives see diplomacy as the instrument for projecting credible force; liberal perspectives see it as a cause for reducing the role of force. The difference between realist and liberal perspectives on deterrence again is a matter of how the causal arrows run between force and diplomacy, not the exclusion of one factor. Realist perspectives worry that if only one country in the world decides that something is worth the risk of nuclear war, other countries had better be prepared to deter that country. Liberal perspectives worry that deterrence itself increases the risk of nuclear war.

minimum deterrence: a strategy of deterrence that relies on a few nuclear weapons to retaliate and inflict unacceptable damage on the adversary.

maximum deterrence: a strategy that relies on many nuclear weapons to deter both conventional and limited nuclear attacks.

extended deterrence: a strategy of deterrence in which one country uses nuclear weapons to deter an attack on the territory of an allied country.

nuclear triad: the combination of nuclear land-, sea-, and air-based retaliatory weapons.

massive retaliation: the strategy of threatening to unleash a general nuclear war.

mutual assured destruction (MAD): the nuclear deterrence strategy that called for the dominance of offensive over defensive weapons.

Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT): U.S.-Soviet talks held in the 1970s to limit offensive weapon systems.

Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty: a 1972 treaty between the United States and Soviet Union limiting antiballistic missiles.

Cuban Missile Crisis.

No crisis illustrates the dynamics of deterrence between the superpowers better than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Soviet leaders risked nuclear war, but in the end superpower diplomacy avoided it. Here we consider realist perspectives, but compare this account carefully with the liberal perspectives presented later in this chapter.

In the summer and fall of 1962, the Soviets moved medium- and intermediate-range nuclear-armed ballistic missiles into Cuba. What induced them to do that? And why did the United States risk nuclear war to get the missiles removed? Here’s the calculus according to realist perspectives.

In the 1960s, the United States had a substantial superiority of nuclear weapons and missiles over the Soviets, with roughly 3,000 nuclear warheads, 180 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with a range of 5,000 miles, 630 long-range bombers, and 12 nuclear submarines. The Soviet Union had 300 warheads, 20 ICBMs, 200 long-range bombers, and 6 nuclear submarines. U.S. bombers were deployed at forward bases in Europe and Asia, and American submarines could patrol waters within range of Soviet targets. In addition, the United States had placed intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) with a range of 2,200 miles in Britain and medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) with a range of 1,100 miles in Italy and Turkey. All these missiles could reach the Soviet Union. Soviet bombers had no forward bases or refueling capacity, and Soviet IRBMs and MRBMs could hit Europe but not the United States. Soviet submarines operated from bases 7,000 miles from the U.S. mainland and could not patrol in U.S. waters within the range of Soviet missiles, which was only 600 miles. 17

Why did the United States have such an advantage? As we have noted, the realist argument is that it needed this advantage to provide extended deterrence to its allies in western Europe. If the Soviet Union launched missiles at Europe, Britain and later France might have had a few missiles to retaliate. But the United States would also have to respond; otherwise, a Soviet attack might not entail sufficient risk of retaliatory damage to deter the Soviet Union in the first place, and the Soviet Union might try to divide Europe from the United States. Of course, it made little difference to the Soviet Union why the United States had more missiles. The Soviet Union saw them as an offensive threat, a first-strike capability that could destroy Soviet missiles on the ground before they were launched, thus leaving the Soviet Union defenseless. Might that be why Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, put missiles in Cuba, to give the Soviet Union an offsetting capability to destroy U.S. missiles before they left the ground?

Perhaps. Missile accuracies were not yet that precise. But once the communist revolutionary Fidel Castro overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Cuba in 1959, Khrushchev had his own distant ally to defend by extended deterrence. Castro turned to Moscow for help, and the Soviet Union started selling arms to Cuba in fall 1959. In April 1961, the United States backed an invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles. Known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the attack failed, in part because the United States dropped crucial air support at the last minute. But the United States continued covert activities to support an invasion of Cuba and tried several times to assassinate Castro. 18 Now Khrushchev wondered, as he later wrote in his memoirs, “what will happen if we lose Cuba?” 19 If the United States could defend Turkey by installing missiles, why couldn’t the Soviet Union install missiles to defend Cuba?

The credibility of both the Soviet Union and the United States was at stake. This credibility had just been tested in Berlin. From 1958 to 1961, the Soviet Union tried again to deny Western access to West Berlin by threatening to turn over controls to the East German government. East German citizens were fleeing in increasing numbers to the West. Khrushchev felt he had to do something to solve the Berlin problem. After renewing his threat to President John F. Kennedy at Vienna in June 1961, Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall in August. Now he saw another opportunity to get the Western allies out of Berlin altogether—trade a Soviet departure from Cuba for a Western departure from Berlin.

Berlin was the epicenter of the superpower conflict. If either superpower backed down on this issue, it would undermine its European alliances as well as its own security. That might explain the superpowers’ willingness to march to the brink of nuclear disaster over the Cuban missiles. 20

In May 1962, the Soviet Union made the decision to deploy to Cuba 48 MRBMs capable of striking Dallas, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Washington; 32 IRBMs capable of striking all U.S. cities except Seattle; nuclear weapons for coastal defense; cruise missiles; surface-to-air missiles (SAMs); 42 light Ilyushin-28 bombers; MIG fighter aircraft; and bases for 7 nuclear submarines. It then proceeded to lie to the United States and other nations as the deployment took place. Moscow, of course, believed the United States was doing the same thing as part of plans to invade Cuba. Notice here the realist problem of not being able to trust the other party—for good reason, realists point out, because the other party lies. Nevertheless, Khrushchev’s decision to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba was bold and breathtaking, not to mention deadly. The Soviet premier had either lost his mind or believed he had taken the measure of Kennedy and could get away with it. Here is a case, realist perspectives remind us, when someone was willing to risk nuclear war. Khrushchev expected to complete the installation by early fall and, as Kennedy himself later noted, “face us [that is, the United States] with a bad situation in November at the time he was going to squeeze us on Berlin.” 21 With the missiles installed in Cuba by November, Khrushchev would be in a much stronger position to demand a Berlin withdrawal for a Cuban one.

In October 1962, Kennedy reacted. He ordered a naval quarantine, not a blockade, of Soviet ships going to Cuba. A quarantine was a less belligerent act under international law and, in accordance with deterrence logic, initiated the crisis at a lower rung on the escalation ladder. Kennedy then demanded the removal of the missiles already there. He also prepared to escalate the use of force by mobilizing a major invasion force to storm Cuba if the Soviet Union refused. The superpowers were eyeball to eyeball. On Saturday, October 27, Kennedy, according to his own account, decided to schedule air strikes for the following Tuesday, October 30. 22 We now know that 9 MRBMs had already been assembled in Cuba, and 36 nuclear warheads were also on the island. More important, and unknown to American officials during the crisis, Soviet combat troops in Cuba, altogether some 42,000 (many more than U.S. policy makers thought), were equipped with tactical nuclear missiles with a range of 60 kilometers to resist the invasion. Soviet generals later said they were prepared to use the missiles to hit American ships 10 to 12 miles offshore when they were grouped together for landing and, hence, most vulnerable to attack. The generals had advance authorization to use the missiles if for some reason they could not reach Moscow for instructions, although that authorization was reportedly rescinded once the crisis began. 23 Nevertheless, earlier on October 27, Soviet generals in Cuba had acted on their own authority, after failing to reach Moscow, to shoot down a U.S. reconnaissance plane over Cuba. Thus, on that Saturday night, the world was very possibly only a couple of days away from Armageddon.

On Sunday, October 28, however, the Soviet Union blinked and the crisis ended. Khrushchev agreed to stop deployments and take out the weapons already there. On the surface, it looked like a complete U.S. victory. But in fact Kennedy had secretly traded in return two substantial concessions: a pledge not to invade Cuba and another to withdraw the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The secrecy protected alliance relations as well as President Kennedy’s own legacy. 24 Moreover, Soviet forces and tactical nuclear weapons stayed in Cuba for several years. Some of the delivery systems, although not the warheads, were never withdrawn. 25

Why did the Soviet Union back down in the Cuban Missile Crisis? According to realist perspectives, it did so because the American threat to escalate and use force was credible. As Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow conclude, “Khrushchev withdrew the Soviet missiles, not because of the blockade, but because of the threat of further action.” Khrushchev believed “he faced a clear, urgent threat that America was about to move up the ladder of escalation.” 26 The threat of escalation was decisive, at least according to this account.

Alliances and Proxy Wars.

As realist perspectives see it, alliances and proxy wars were central to the operation of deterrence and the eventual outcome of the Cold War. Deterrence worked in the Cuban Missile Crisis because alliances stood firm, but in other crises deterrence placed enormous stress on alliances. To work, alliances had to be tight to preserve credibility. But no country could feel completely comfortable relying on another country to defend it with nuclear weapons. America’s European allies, for example, feared the alliance might not be tight enough and that they would be abandoned, as the Berlin crises suggested. Or they worried that the alliance might be too tight and they would be entrapped or drawn into wars that they did not want, as the Vietnam crisis suggested. Partly because of these concerns, France withdrew from the NATO military command in 1966 and initiated a policy of détente with the Soviet Union before the United States did. The United States had concerns as well. In Suez, the United States stopped Britain and France from supporting an Israeli invasion of the Suez Canal because it feared being drawn by its allies into a Middle East war with the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had even bigger troubles with its allies. It used force in 1956 to crush a revolution and possible “abandonment” of the Warsaw Pact by Hungary and again in 1968 to terminate the anticommunist revolt, called the Prague Spring, in Czechoslovakia. In 1968–1969, it also fought a border war with China, terminating that alliance and providing the opening that President Richard Nixon exploited in 1972 when he visited China and forged a common alignment against the Soviet Union.

Proxy wars highlighted the tendency of deterrence to push disputes into peripheral areas. The Soviet Union supported national wars of liberation against Western colonialism, while the United States backed freedom fighters against communist revolutions. The superpowers probed one another’s intentions in the Middle East, Central America, Africa, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Some realists such as George Kennan never accepted the necessity of extending U.S. commitments to peripheral areas in the third world and advocated containment only in strongpoint or central areas such as Europe.

After World War II, decolonization under the United Nations created more than fifty new nations in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. As colonial powers retreated from these areas, the competing superpowers moved in to fill the vacuum. When Britain left Greece and Turkey in 1947, the United States stepped in to provide the two countries with economic and technical assistance. In the Middle East, the United States helped create the state of Israel and overthrew a communist government in Iran (1953). In Asia, it fought wars in Korea (1950) and Vietnam (1961). And in Latin America, it intervened in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), and other places. 27 The Soviet Union intervened in Cuba (1962), Egypt (1973), Angola (1975), Mozambique (1976), Afghanistan (1979), and other places.

The superpowers exacerbated but also contained many of these conflicts. They competed to establish friendly governments but cooperated to control the spread of nuclear weapons. From a realist perspective, the problem was less one of spreading democracy or communism than one of losing bases or allies to the other side. To use a metaphor common at the time, the domino theory haunted the superpowers. Leaders feared that if a key country in a particular region went over to the other side, their side would lose momentum and credibility in the larger global struggle. Other countries in that region would fall to the other side like dominoes. This fear, justified from some realist perspectives (not Kennan’s) but heavily criticized from other perspectives, led to numerous interventions by both superpowers in third-world conflicts. As realists see it, the issue often came down to a choice between a communist and an authoritarian regime. An authoritarian regime was to be preferred, particularly if it bolstered U.S. and Western credibility to maintain deterrence and protect freedom in western Europe and Japan. President Kennedy captured the dilemma in his comments about possible U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1963:

There are three possibilities in descending order of preference: a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo [then the dictator in the Dominican Republic] regime, or a Castro regime. We ought to aim at the first, but we can’t really renounce the second until we are sure we can avoid the third. 28

Map 4-2 Laos, Cambodia, North and South Vietnam

Many third-world countries sought refuge from the superpower competition by forming a nonaligned movement. Led by India, Yugoslavia, and Egypt, the nonaligned movement stressed nonintervention in the domestic affairs of newly independent nations and international aid for third-world development. The movement tempered somewhat the political impact of the Cold War on developing countries and focused attention on economic development.

Wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan marked the apogee of Cold War rivalry in the third world. Both wars ended in defeat for the superpowers. The Vietnam War was a traumatic experience for the United States. It cost fifty-eight thousand American lives and some three million Vietnamese lives. When France abandoned Indochina in 1954 (see Map 4-2 ), Laos and Cambodia became independent, but Vietnam, like Korea, was provisionally divided between a communist north and an authoritarian south. Elections to unite the country were contemplated but never held. The United States backed a fragile military government in the south, while the Soviet Union supported the Viet Cong revolutionaries in the north. After fifteen years of fighting with no significant gains to show for it, the United States packed up and left Vietnam in 1973. Two years later the South Vietnamese government collapsed, and the communists in North Vietnam reunited the country. Then in 1979, the Soviet Union established a naval base in Vietnam and invaded Afghanistan.

The Afghan War had even more fateful consequences for the Soviet Union and the United States. Fundamentalist Muslims called mujahideen battled Soviet forces in a long war of attrition. The United States armed and supported the mujahideen as freedom fighters. Eventually, the Soviet Union withdrew and shortly thereafter collapsed. In the process, however, the United States helped radicalize Muslim zealots who later formed the Taliban government in Afghanistan and who today threaten stability in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As realist perspectives see it, such wars were necessary at the time. When the United States entered Vietnam, the Cold War rivalry in Europe and Asia was intense. The Soviet Union had just put missiles in Cuba, and the eventual collapse of the alliance between the Soviet Union and China was unforeseen. Similarly, Soviet interventions in Africa and Afghanistan signaled Moscow’s recovery from the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis and its ability now to compete with Washington in the projection of power worldwide. Constant vigilance in peripheral areas maintained deterrence in central areas where war may have caused a nuclear holocaust. Other perspectives, of course, disagree. They see the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan as symbols of the folly of domino theory and deterrence outside Europe and a dark legacy for both superpowers. Defensive realists such as Paul Kennedy predicted the decline of the United States due to imperial overstretch, the squandering of resources in conflicts such as Vietnam. 29 In the end, the Soviet Union declined, not the United States, but both superpowers suffered from imperial overstretch in Vietnam and Afghanistan. (See Figure 4-2 for a summary of realist explanations for the start and expansion of the Cold War.)

Under siege, the United States leaves Vietnam. Here, a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter lifts off the rooftop of the U.S. embassy during the evacuation of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

AP Photo/phu

national wars of liberation: Soviet term for proxy wars against Western colonialism in developing countries.

freedom fighters: U.S. term for local forces resisting communist revolution in developing countries.

decolonization: the UN-led process by which former colonies in the third world gained their independence.

domino theory: a theory held by the superpowers that if one country in a developing region went over to the other side, other countries in the region would follow, falling like dominoes.

nonaligned movement: a coalition led by India, Yugoslavia, and Egypt that stressed neutrality in the Cold War.

Vietnam War: costly war fought by the United States in Southeast Asia to contain communism.

Afghan War: costly war fought by both the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the United States in the 2000s.

How the Cold War Ended

As some realists like Kennan see it, the Cold War ended because the U.S. contained Soviet power until the Soviet Union mellowed. Realists did not predict, however, that the Soviet Union would disappear. They expected the two superpowers to remain rivals and to compete over spheres of influence, as Churchill had advocated right after World War II. Other realist causes from the domestic level of analysis may have been at work. A vigorous U.S. rebound and a precipitous Soviet collapse in the 1980s decisively shifted the balance of power and ended the Cold War, with the United States remaining as the only military and economic superpower.

Figure 4-2 The Causes of the Origins and Expansion of the Cold War: The Realist Perspective and Levels of Analysis

U.S. Rebound.

The 1970s was not a good decade for the United States. Its economy fell on hard times, racial tensions and the Watergate scandal rocked its political system, it exited Vietnam with a significant loss of face and self-confidence, and it faced a Soviet Union that for the first time projected its military forces into areas beyond the European landmass, such as Angola and Mozambique. By 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and a revolutionary government in Iran seized American hostages, the United States hit bottom.

Then in 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent president Jimmy Carter and launched a massive military and economic buildup. Defense expenditures rose precipitously. Washington galvanized the NATO alliance to deploy INFs in Europe. And Reagan announced major new programs to eliminate offensive nuclear weapons and build up space-based defensive missile systems, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed Star Wars by its critics. Under Reagan’s policies of deregulating and supply-side tax cuts, the American economy roared back and grew steadily from 1980 to 2007 at unprecedented rates above 3 percent per year. 30

SDI was more than satellites, rockets, and lasers in space to knock down ballistic missiles. It changed the calculus of deterrence. As already noted, deterrence under MAD depended on offensive missiles threatening mutual assured destruction with no effective ABM defenses permitted to protect civilian populations. Now Reagan’s plans suggested that defensive systems might be built up and offensive weapons built down. The Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) agreements shifted the focus to reducing, not just limiting, offensive weapons, while SDI and Soviet ABM programs invested greater resources in defensive systems. In the short run, this change might increase instability, because whoever got effective defensive systems first might, in a crisis, launch a first strike against the other side, confident that its defensive systems would defeat whatever offensive missiles survived on the other side. For this reason, Reagan offered to share SDI technology with the Soviet Union. His idea was to shift deterrence from MAD to mutual assured protection (MAP). Each side would deter the other by being able to protect itself against low numbers of offensive missiles. 31 It was certainly more humane than the specter of MAD killing millions of innocent civilians, but at the time it scared a lot of people, including Soviet leaders, and almost thirty years later missile defense has still to be realized operationally.

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI): the space-based antimissile systems that formed the core of Reagan’s program to enhance U.S. missile defenses.

Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START): U.S.-Soviet talks held in the 1990s to reduce offensive weapons systems.

mutual assured protection (MAP): nuclear strategy, proposed by Reagan, to build up defensive systems and reduce offensive weapons.

Soviet Collapse.

While the United States was rebounding under Reagan, the Soviet Union fell on hard times. A series of aging Soviet leaders died in rapid succession: Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, Yuri Andropov in 1984, and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. Soviet forces bogged down in Afghanistan, and the Soviet economy plummeted. The Soviet economy had never been as strong as U.S. officials thought. It peaked in 1970 at only 57 percent of the U.S. GNP. Reagan’s buildup and the advent of the information age hit the Soviet Union at precisely the wrong time. When the younger, more technically sophisticated Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko in 1985, his primary goal was to revitalize the Soviet economy and avoid another arms race with the United States, which SDI threatened. In a Politburo meeting in October 1985, he told his colleagues:

Our goal is to prevent the next round of the arms race. If we do not accomplish it, the threat to us will only grow. We will be pulled into another round of the arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose, because we are already at the limits of our capabilities. Moreover, we can expect that Japan and the FRG [West Germany] could very soon join the American potential. . . . If the new round begins, the pressure on our economy will be unbelievable. 32

Figure 4-3 The Buildup of Nuclear Warheads, United States and Russia, 1945–2013

Source: Data are from Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “World Deployments of Nuclear Weapons, 2014,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 70(5): 96–108. http://bos.sagepub.com/content/70/5/96.full.pdf+html

Here, from a realist perspective, were the material forces driving the Soviet Union to defeat in the Cold War. Figure 4-3 shows the buildup of nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union from the early 1970s through the 1980s. During this time, the number of Soviet warheads quadrupled, and Soviet defense expenditures climbed as a percentage of GNP from 13.5 percent in 1976 to almost 18 percent in 1988 (before dropping for the first time in 1989). 33 Under the pressure of these expenditures, as we now know, the Soviet economy stagnated from 1971 on. The cause of change in the Soviet Union, therefore, was not any new ideas that Gorbachev brought to the table, the New Thinking that identity accounts emphasize (see discussion later in the chapter). Nor was it U.S.-Soviet negotiations, which had been in the deep freeze since Reagan took office. It was, pure and simple, an arms race coupled with the information revolution (notice how technology serves zero-sum, not common, goals in a realist perspective) and the coherence of Western alliances (notice Gorbachev’s reference to America’s two principal allies, Japan and West Germany). These material pressures affected old thinkers as well as new thinkers in the Soviet Union, showing that it was not a debate won by new thinkers that decided Soviet policy but material circumstances that neither old nor new thinkers could ignore. 34 A hard-liner and critic of Gorbachev’s New Thinking, Soviet chief of the general staff Sergei Akhromeyev made the point emphatically: “The Soviet Union could no longer continue a policy of military confrontation with the U.S. and NATO after 1985.” 35

So, from the realist perspective, the Cold War ended without a shot being fired but not without a psychological and material struggle, which the United States ultimately won. Because of nuclear weapons, crises such as those in Berlin and Cuba substituted for war, and conflicts were fought and won virtually through arms races and economic competition rather than violently through battlefield deaths and destruction. The historian John Lewis Gaddis sorts out these realist causes from an individual level of analysis:

Reagan saw Soviet weaknesses sooner than most of his contemporaries did; . . . he understood the extent to which détente was perpetuating the Cold War rather than hastening its end; . . . his hard line strained the Soviet system at the moment of its maximum weakness; . . . his shift toward conciliation preceded Gorbachev; . . . he combined reassurance, persuasion, and pressure in dealing with the new Soviet leader; and . . . he maintained the support of the American people and American allies. 36

Notice how the causal arrows run: material pressures (realist), not détente (liberal), strained the Soviet system, and Reagan’s actions (individual level of analysis), not responses to Gorbachev (systemic process level of analysis), initiated reconciliation. (See Figure 4-4 for a summary of realist explanations for the end of the Cold War.)

Identity Explanations

Identity perspectives take a very different cut at nuclear deterrence and the Cold War. They doubt that anyone would risk nuclear war for nothing more than a cynical struggle for power for which no one is responsible. They see the Cold War as shaped by values and common humanity. For some identity perspectives, it was a struggle between good and evil, the free world versus totalitarian societies, democracy versus communism. For others, it was a struggle for common human survival, regardless of political philosophy, a quest to save the Earth and human civilization from nuclear winter, the long dark devastation that would follow a general nuclear war.

Figure 4-4 The Causes of the End of the Cold War: The Realist Perspective and Levels of Analysis

How Ideas Started the Cold War

Three arguments explain the origins of the Cold War from an identity perspective. Two come from the domestic level of analysis and focus on internal ideological factors: Marxist-Leninism (not Russia’s historical insecurity) caused the Cold War, or, conversely, American democracy (not military or economic expansionism) caused the Cold War. The third comes from the systemic level of analysis and focuses on collective identity, on why the United States and the Soviet Union saw themselves as enemies rather than just rivals.

Soviet Ideology.

The first domestic-level identity explanation for the causes of the Cold War is that the Soviet Union genuinely believed its Marxist-Leninist ideology that communism was the wave of the future and would eventually vanquish capitalism. In this case, Marxist-Leninist ideas acted as a belief system that caused Soviet behavior. Now, contrary to Kennan’s view, ideology trumps insecurity or geopolitics. From this point of view, the Soviet Union was not likely to back down when confronted by superior force. It saw history as on its side and expected the correlation of forces (the Marxist-Leninist term for balance of power) to move steadily in its direction. That’s why Moscow made aggressive moves in the 1970s even though its economy was in decline.

A woman poses in 1951 with a box of chewing gum labeled “Red Menace,” a term applied to the purported threat of communism in the United States during the period known as McCarthyism, when Senator Joseph McCarthy instigated anticommunist congressional hearings.

AFP/Getty Image

The Soviet Union did support, as Kennan projected, a worldwide campaign to promote communism. It established Cominform in 1947 (a replacement for the old Comintern, which was disbanded in 1943) to assist communist parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere. Communists led the resistance in France against the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime (the pro-Hitler puppet government in France that nominally controlled part of the country during the war) and participated after the war in a coalition government. Communists also formed coalition governments in Italy and competed for power in eastern Europe, Greece, and Turkey.

When China fell (or, as it was said, “was lost”) to the communists in 1949, the event set off a virulent fear of communist conspiracies, especially in the United States. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin held hearings and developed lists of communist spies and sympathizers throughout the U.S. government who he said threatened American freedom. Richard Nixon, then a young member of Congress, gained notoriety when he accused (correctly, as it turned out) Alger Hiss, a highly respected government official and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, of lying about his earlier membership in the Communist Party. Ronald Reagan, at that time a young actor and president of the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that communists were infiltrating Hollywood, saying, “I abhor their philosophy,” while adding that he believed they had the right to express it. 37

American Ideology.

Looking at it from the Soviet direction, perhaps anticommunism or America’s ideology of democracy caused the Cold War. The United States too made ideas or belief systems the centerpiece of the struggle. Announcing the eponymous Truman Doctrine on March 12, 1947, the president had this to say:

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. . . .

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of human freedoms. 38

NSC-68, the document that in 1950 called for a big boost in defense expenditures, also laid out the case for the spread of democracy. For realists like Henry Kissinger, it went too far. It abandoned a policy based on material interests and “opted for the alternative vision of America as a crusader.” 39 In a speech in April 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson echoed the Truman Doctrine: “We are the children of freedom. We cannot be safe except in an environment of freedom. . . . We believe that all people in the world are entitled to as much freedom, to develop in their own way, as we want ourselves.” 40

John Foster Dulles, secretary of state under President Eisenhower, was perhaps the most ardent advocate of spreading American freedom. He labeled the eastern European countries “captive nations” and called on the United States to go beyond the defensive policy of containment and make “it publicly known that [the United States] wants and expects liberation to occur.” 41 Dulles favored a policy of rollback, or the recovery of the eastern European countries from Moscow’s control.

Were Truman, Acheson, Dulles, and others just trying to scare the American public into supporting a balance-of-power policy? Was Stalin also manipulating Soviet public opinion for realist ends? Were public opinion and ideology merely instruments of realist aims, or were they the driving forces of the Cold War?

Here is where judgment comes in. Take Kennan, for example. On one hand, he says the contest is an international struggle for power and discounts Soviet ideology; yet, on the other, he expects the contest to be determined mostly by a political struggle of ideas at the domestic level. Kennan is a classical realist. He, like Hans Morgenthau, judges that values matter more at the domestic level while power matters more at the international level. Every country has values, but all countries need power to protect their values. Kennan warned his superiors in Washington, D.C., that other countries worry less about abstract freedom, at least as Americans understand it, than they do about security. Thus, even if Soviet domestic politics mellowed, as he projected, the United States and the Soviet Union would continue to compete for power (a security concern). But, because communism and anticommunism would be less intense, they would compete more as nationalist rivals than as ideological enemies.

Truman Doctrine: U.S. policy that defined the Cold War in ideological terms.

rollback: John Foster Dulles’s policy in the 1950s of liberating the eastern European countries from Moscow’s control.

Constructing Cold War Identities.

The third identity explanation of the origins of the Cold War addresses more directly the social construction of national identities and argues from the systemic level that the Cold War superpowers saw one another as deadly enemies rather than as less dangerous rivals.

As we have noted, realism expected the great powers to compete across a political vacuum but ultimately to be able to manage their competition through a spheres-of-influence policy. They would become rivals but not all-out enemies. Unlike enemies, rivals compete without trying to change or eliminate one another. They also cooperate. As Walter Lippmann, a famous realist author and commentator of the period, said, “For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is all about.” 42

Enemies, on the other hand, threaten one another because of who they are, not just because they compete or cooperate with one another. Opposing ideologies make them mutually unacceptable, and each seeks to convert or eliminate the other side. For constructivist scholars, these identity factors account for the alignments after World War II better than do relative power factors. According to realist logic, Europe should have aligned with the Soviet Union against the United States, since the United States was supremely dominant over both Europe and the Soviet Union after the war. Moreover, U.S. forces occupied western Europe, not Soviet forces. Yet western European countries aligned with the United States because they feared the Russian army more than they did the American one. Why? The answer, constructivists say, has to do with who the armies were, not how big they were or where they were located. The ideology of the Russian army led it to impose its will by force. The ideology of the American army called for free elections. Both armies wanted to expand their ideologies, but for western Europeans the content of the ideology based on consent was less frightening than the one based on coercion.

How domestic identities related to one another was key. As Professor Thomas Risse argues, “Had Stalin ‘Finlandized’ rather than ‘Sovietized’ Eastern Europe, the Cold War could have been avoided.” 43 Stalin let Finland keep its own domestic system as long as it cooperated with Moscow on foreign policy. In eastern Europe, however, Stalin “Sovietized” domestic politics and imposed Moscow’s domestic system. And in western Europe, communist parties tried to exploit domestic disorder to impose communist governments. Thus, as Risse concludes, “Soviet power became threatening as a tool to expand the Soviet domestic order.” 44 Domestic identity made power a threat; identity was not simply a rationalization of power (realist).

Some realists argue that Stalin behaved with restraint in eastern Europe. He did not immediately impose communist governments, and he restrained communist parties in western Europe. 45 If the United States had been less ideological, a spheres of influence solution may have been possible. The focus of the superpower relationship would have been on external, not internal, identity. Others argue, however, that domestic and foreign policy cannot be separated that neatly. Stalin could not tolerate noncommunist governments throughout eastern Europe without their threatening the communist order back in the Soviet Union. Finland was an exception because it was on the periphery of central Europe. But Poland and Czechoslovakia were a different story; the Soviet Union could not be indifferent about whether democracy or communism prevailed in those countries because they were located in the heart of the continent.

Nor could the United States accept Finlandization in eastern Europe. As political scientist Colin Dueck tells us, the liberal democratic culture in the United States was so strong that practically all American policy makers rejected a spheres-of-influence policy that involved closed, authoritarian domestic systems in eastern Europe. 46 It was not because the United States insisted that every country be democratic; it was because the United States could not be comfortable in an international system that sanctioned strict controls and barriers between countries. The international system had to be open, at least for trade and travel; otherwise, understanding and diplomacy would not be possible. The United States feared secrecy and authoritarian power in eastern Europe because this type of system might weaken commitments to freedom and markets in western Europe or even weaken democracy back in the United States.

Because of who they were, the United States and the Soviet Union pursued conflicting zero-sum goals in the international system. As Secretary of State James F. Byrnes said in 1945, “There is too much difference in the ideologies of the U.S. and Russia to work out a long term program of cooperation.” 47 Even before the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy acknowledged the same divide. In a letter to Premier Nikita Khrushchev in August 1961, Kennedy observed how differences in philosophies and language (identities) severely complicate efforts to communicate. Notice in his comment that ideas drive communications or interactions, not the reverse as liberal perspectives might expect:

You and I have already recognized that neither of us will convince the other about our respective social systems and general philosophies of life. These differences create a great gulf in communications because language cannot mean the same thing on both sides unless it is related to some underlying purpose. 48

(See Figure 4-5 for a summary of identity explanations for the origins of the Cold War.)

How Ideas Ended the Cold War

How can a Cold War end peacefully? If ideas can “construct”—cause or constitute—events, how do they change in the course of events? Three possibilities illustrate the identity perspective on the end of the Cold War: convergence of ideas, change of ideas, and triumph of ideas.

Convergence.

The first possibility is that opposing systems of ideas eventually converge at the systemic process level of analysis. The United States becomes more postmodern (community oriented), while the Soviet Union becomes more modern (individual oriented). Writing in the late 1960s, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later President Carter’s national security adviser, anticipated such a convergence:

The 1950s were the era of certainty. The two sides—Communist and Western—faced each other in a setting that pitted conviction against conviction. Stalinist Manicheans [who see the world in terms of good and evil] confronted Dulles’s missionaries. That mood quickly gave way to another, with Khrushchev and Kennedy serving as transitions to an era of confusion. Dissension in the communist world prompted an ideological crisis, while the West increasingly began to question its own values and righteousness. Communist cynics confronted liberal skeptics.

There are indications that the 1970s will be dominated by growing awareness that the time has come for a common effort to shape a new framework for international politics. . . . [A]n emerging global consciousness is forcing the abandonment of preoccupations with national supremacy and accentuating global interdependence. 49

Notice that in Brzezinski’s prediction ideas (“an emerging global consciousness”) are driving out realist factors (“abandonment of preoccupations with national supremacy”) and emphasizing liberal ones (“accentuating global interdependence”). Brzezinski does not fail to take realist and liberal factors into account; he simply sees identity factors as driving or dominating them. The causal arrows run from ideas to power to institutions.

Figure 4-5 The Causes of the Origins of the Cold War: The Identity Perspective and Levels of Analysis

(Nau 155-185)

Nau, Henry R. Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas, 5th Edition. CQ Press, 20160105. VitalBook file.

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