THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (132 page)

The above list of conditions also suggests a way in which states can decide when to use force to achieve or maintain peace, that is, it implies a calculus analogous to the Weinberger Doctrine.
¹
This program assumes that states will have to reconfigure and retrain their forces to function in ambiguous environments, where the threat may not come from another state or even an identifiable aggressor, and where the line between war and crime has been smudged.

We ask the same questions that we asked before.
Which crises demand consideration for intervention?
Those with significant costs to world public order, that system of state legitimacy that relies on the ten conditions for peace outlined above.
When do these crises profit from intervention?
When intervention is likely to make a decisive difference at a cost/reward ratio that is commensurate with the significance of the risk to world public order.
Who should intervene?
Those states with the largest stakes in world public order.
What objectives should be pursued?
Restoring and maintaining the conditions for a civil society.
How is this accomplished?
By voluntary coalitions of essentially mercenary forces, compensated by contributions from all states having a stake in the outcome.
²
In Europe (and perhaps the Near East) this might mean the use of NATO forces; in Africa, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) troops, augmented as necessary, and so on. The United States should take the lead in assembling such mercenary teams. As Joseph Nye has rightly said:

Such is the calculus of the society of states of peace. It is no more than a rather formulaic rendering of the commonsense judgments statesmen make every day, with the factors made a bit more perspicuous. This calculus recognizes the State's interest in a peaceful order. It contrasts with the classic calculus of a state of war, that is, that the State should not intervene
when the risks of intervention in a crisis exceed the State's vital interests in the outcome.
*

Expressing these rules of decision so plainly helps to determine the selection of the war aim, which we can define as that objective such that its relation to world public order yields a stake for the intervening state that exceeds the share of the risks—political and military—it is asked to bear. Such rules can also help determine the weapons to be deployed and the command structure to be used. These rules prompt leaders to offer realistic justifications for the courses of action they choose. It should not be necessary to pretend disingenuously that contemporary interventions obey the classic calculus of a state of war when the historical context for these deci-sions comes after the end of the Long War and in contemplation of preventing another such cataclysm. Leaders can forthrightly explain why they are intervening in situations that previously would not have been thought appropriate for intervention. To take one example: the U.S. president's speech explaining the situation in Kosovo when NATO air attacks began ought also to have explained our criteria for undertaking such attacks. The U.S. president's speech to Congress explaining our taking up arms against terrorism did so.

We have long been accustomed to think of the imperatives of the State as basically strategic, and of the issues that engage the society of states as fundamentally questions of law. We have long been accustomed to deny that a State can be compelled by other states to obey its own laws, and we usually deny that the society of states has any particular strategic objectives.

The developmental picture of the State that I have presented, however, portrays the constitutional and the strategic dimensions as intimately and inextricably interconnected. This interconnectedness between law and strategy is also a fundamental feature of the society of states. Within a single state the constitutional order determines the ways conflict is managed and rationalized domestically and abroad. For the international society of states, peace treaties perform a similar role, by attempting to solve the puzzles created by wars. In both instances, constitutions provide a society—whether it is a society of citizens or the society of states—with the means to choose among values when there is no one optimum solution. When the choices to be made are among incommensurate values, a constitution records and determines how those choices are to be made in order for them to be accorded legitimacy.

We have thought of international law as providing a largely stable background to the spread of the model of the European state around the globe.
Some particular doctrines may change, but the idea of a law of nations is supposed to be more or less constant, ever expanding until it has become universal. On the basis of the portrait I have given of international law, however, this description is unjustified. International law has developed in a turbulent periodicity, changing its most basic precepts as its constituent parties, states, underwent dramatic and fundamental constitutional change. One consequence of this different understanding is that universalism no longer seems inevitable, and we can entertain the idea that the reversibility of this universalism does not mean the retrenchment or death of international law itself.

We have thought of the history of the nation-state as having begun at Westphalia. Here, too, the portrait I have drawn is somewhat different. This, too, is freeing, because it allows us to imagine that the nation-state may indeed be dying (as seems to many to be the case) without having to concede that the State itself is withering away (as seems improbable).

The Long War of the nation-state is over, having destroyed every empire that participated in it, every political aristocracy, every general staff, as well as much of the beauty of European and Asian life. Of that brief period after world markets brought relative comfort and security and before world ambition brought the destruction of societies that in retrospect appear so very unworldly, we can only say: such a period could not exist in our age.

I have called this conflict the Long War not simply because of its duration but because this length connects the world of many centuries—feudal, national, imperial, mercantile, and religious—with the world that is yet to be, the new century's world that is being born.

Two tasks lie before us: to decide, as states, when it is appropriate to use force in this new world; and to determine, as a society of states, when to collectively sanction the use of that force in this world. This is a matter of creating precedents and case law. It amounts to deploying the habits of law on behalf of strategy, and of course vice versa.

These precedents and case law, however, are not those generated by courts. We may accomplish in Bosnia a successful, long-term intervention by the society of states on world-public-order grounds; if we do, then the Yugoslav Wars will become as much a precedent in the future as the Gulf War is now. The same is true of our war on international terrorism. The rules of collective engagement will be based on how the last similar problem was approached, and on what basis we would like to see the next, future problem resolved. I believe that the combination of improvised constitutional instruments with increasingly settled case law is the appropriate method for the society of market-states. This combination is a reversal of the method of the nation-state (and to that extent may take place outside the U.N.).

This case law of the society of states must be consciously crafted. It will require political, business, and media leaders to think in terms of following and creating precedents rather than in terms of the impromptu. It will require that leaders forthrightly explain their decisions by means of doctrine, and not simply in emotive phrases. We are now in a position to write this case law through our decisions; some day, through an inability to achieve international consensus, we may no longer be in such a position, and we will regret having wasted an opportunity that would have avoided a world-rending war.

The views on international security generally prevailing today, however, are far from those that reflect a commitment to creating such case law. These views are at once very narrow and very ambitious. They are narrow because they have up to now excluded the nonterritorial threats to the State that are becoming increasingly dangerous; they are complacently ambitious because they do not recognize that the power of states to ensure their own security by conventional strategies is rapidly waning.

States are losing control of their sovereignty, especially if this is conceived in territorial terms. Once the territorial membrane collapses, then the distinction between law and strategy—the separate inner and outer modalities of the State—seems to weaken. In fact, this membrane was always a reflection of the interconnectedness of these two ideas, not of their independence. Because it was always so, implicitly, it should not alarm us now that we contemplate a world in which it is explicitly so. Like the union of time and space that once seemed so counterintuitive, the union of law and strategy is compelled by its usefulness. We simply cannot understand the development of the State and the society of states by holding either of these concepts in isolation from the other.

The threats we will soon be facing are not easily categorized as state aggressions. Indeed for the first time since the birth of the State, a state structure is no longer necessary in order to organize violence on a scale that is devastating to a society. And yet, perhaps ironically, this development makes the role of the State all the more crucial in achieving international peace and national security. This is because the shift away from retaliatory, threat-based strategies to defensive, vulnerability-based strategies will require a State—indeed will require a society of states—to successfully execute. Acting alone, the market can never coordinate the defensive tactics I have described into a general strategy. A market-state is required.

In the new era we are entering, the State will be as indispensable to peace as it was in the era of invasions that gave it birth. To stop a state's aggressions, especially against its own people, and to build international defenses against aggression that can, but need not, come from official governments will require strong states. If these missions are avoided or postponed, a new, horrifying kind of conflict may emerge in which an authoritarian market-state challenges the contentment of the rest because they are weak, and because their weakness is a threat, enabling nonstate terrorists and aggressors they cannot suppress to bring chaos everywhere. The market that encouraged this passivity will have destroyed the market-state.

So we begin a new millennium—
not
in terror but not in tranquility either; with faith and hope, but with wariness and an anxious foreboding, also. Law, strategy, and history continue, as before, to set the terms of legitimacy for the State. Although technology has changed the context for each of these fate-shaping institutions of godlike creation, the terms of legitimacy are human terms, not technological ones, written in human acts, and broken or mended by human deeds.

To act is to understand; every act reflects an understanding. My aim has been to enhance an understanding that has been called upon perhaps no more than a half dozen times in the last five hundred years to create a new world from the inherited political institutions of the old. Will we lay a long siege against ourselves or master the craft of the armorer when shields are made of secrets and not of bronze?