THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (8 page)
Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
Thus we won't be able to reassure our peer competitors because we will fail to appreciate the true threats they face. Instead, mesmerized by “rogue states” whose hostility to the United States is essentially a by-product of our global reach that frustrates their regional ambitions, we will find ourselves increasingly at odds with the other great powers. Until we know what will serve the function of maintaining the Alliance that has become a proto-world order, we know not what to assure our allies of (or insure them against). The problem for the United States has become to identify its interests and future threats so that it can use its power to strengthen the world order that it has fought, successfully, to achieve, and that can, if properly structured and maintained, re-enforce American security to a far greater degree than the United States could possibly do alone. This is essentially an intellectual problem, just as the solution devised by the
United States and its allies to the universal vulnerability that attended the development of nuclear weapons was an intellectual solution.
16
But faced with the immense difficulties of anticipating a new strategic environment—both at the state level, where peer competitors may emerge as threats, and at the technological level, where weapons of mass destruction make nonsense out of our defense preparations—who is eager to take the bureaucratic and political risks inherent in accepting this challenge?
17
How much more likely it is that we will extrapolate from the world we know, with incompetent villains and heroic (and recent!) success stories.
Our present world, this “Indian summer”
*
as one writer puts it, not only presents a beguiling invitation to complacency reinforced by new technological possibilities. It also offers an opportunity to undertake some fundamental reassessments without the terrible pressure of war. Recent American successes in the Gulf War and in Yugoslavia, however, may tend to discourage any too-radical revisions.
Paul Bracken correctly concludes,
The focus on the immediate means that a larger, more important question is not being asked: should planners redesign the U.S. military for an entirely new operational environment, taking account of revolutionary changes in military technology and the possible appearance of entirely new kinds of competitors?
18
And Fred Iklé adds that
... military planners, as well as most scholars, would shrug off these cosmic questions and instead nibble at the edges of the problem—worrying, say, about whether a tactical nuclear weapon could be stolen in Russia and sold to Iran, or whether Iraq might still be hiding some Second World War–type biological or chemical agents.
19
A failure to take seriously the new strategic environment can have costly consequences in the domestic theatre as well. Should the use of a weapon of mass destruction occur, the state in which this happens will undergo a crisis in its constitutional order. How it prepares for this crisis will determine the fate of its society, not only its sheer survival, but the conditions of that survival. Some societies may become police states in an effort to protect themselves; some may disintegrate because they cannot agree on how to protect themselves.
The constitutional order of a state and its strategic posture toward other states together form the inner and outer membrane of a state. That membrane
is secured by violence; without that security, a state ceases to exist. What is distinctive about the State is the requirement that the violence it deploys on its behalf must be legitimate; that is, it must be accepted within as a matter of law, and accepted without as an appropriate act of state sovereignty. Legitimacy must cloak the violence of the State, or the State ceases to be. Legitimacy, however, is a matter of history and thus is subject to change as new events emerge from the future and new understandings reinterpret the past. In the following chapters, we will see how the standards against which state legitimacy is measured have undergone profound change, animated by innovations in the strategic environment and transformations of the constitutional order of states.
It is often said today that the nation-state is defunct.
20
Recently, in a single year, two books were published with almost identical titles,
The End of the Nation-State
21
and
The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies
.
22
To these can now be added Martin van Creveld's distinguished
The Rise and Decline of the State
.
23
There are skeptics, however, who point out that both nationalism and the State are thriving enterprises. Moreover, for all the transfer of functions to the private sector, we don't really want the State to fade away altogether. There are many things we want the State and not the private sector to do because we want our politics rather than the market to resolve certain kinds of difficult choices. And, it must be conceded, the market itself has need of the State to set the legal framework that permits the market to function.
What is wrong in this debate over the demise of the nation-state is the identification of the nation-state with the State itself. We usually date the origin of the nation-state to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years' War and recognized a constitutional system of states. In fact, however, the nation-state is relatively new—being little more than a century old—and has been preceded by other forms of the State, including forms that long antedated the Thirty Years' War. The nation-state is dying, but this only means that, as in the past, a new form is being born. This new form, the
market-state
, will ultimately be defined by its response to the strategic threats that have made the nation-state no longer viable. Differ-ent models of this form will contend. It is our task to devise means by which this competition can be maintained without its becoming fatal to the competitors.
HE
L
ONG
W
AR OF THE
N
ATION-
S
TATE
THESIS: THE WAR THAT BEGAN IN 1914 WILL COME TO BE SEEN AS HAVING LASTED UNTIL 1990.
Epochal wars can embrace several conflicts that were thought to be separate wars by the participants, may comprise periods of apparent peace (even including elaborate peace treaties), and often do not maintain the same lineup of enemies and allies throughout. The Long War—which includes the First and Second World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, and the Cold War—like earlier epochal wars, was fought over a fundamental constitutional question: which sort of nation-state—communist, fascist, or parliamentary—would lay claim to the legitimacy previously enjoyed by the imperial state-nations of the nineteenth century
.
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds
,The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist; and the pubs
Wide open all day—
And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy
,The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer;
Never such innocence again.
—Philip Larkin
T
HUCYDIDES
WROTE
the classical masterpiece
The Peloponnesian War
during his exile from Athens. That exile began in 424
B.C.
as a consequence of the loss of Amphipolis where he had been commander of the Athenian forces, ending the period in which he had served as an Athenian general in Thrace. He is believed to have begun his history of the war between Athens and Sparta in the years after 421 B.C., that is, after the signing of the Peace of Nicias that ended the Ten Years' War, as it was known to him and to his contemporaries. Yet he is not generally known to us as the author of a “History of the Ten Years' War.”
1
It is clear from the way in which he concludes his account of this war in the perfect tense before beginning his famous “second preface” that he regarded this war, and its history, as complete. It was only after 413
B.C
. that Thucydides conceived the idea of the series of conflicts between Athens and Sparta as a single continuing war. At this point he decided to incorporate this first book—the history of the Ten Years' War—into the larger work.
Why was this? Thucydides did not make this decision after the final defeat of Athens; the main body of Books VI and VII was written when he was still in exile, well before the end of the war. Rather it seems to have been an Athenian raid in 414
B.C
. that made clear that the issues of the Ten Years' War had not been fully resolved. So it is with all
epochal
wars—the Hundred Years' War,
2
the Thirty Years' War,
3
the Punic Wars
4
—and so it will be seen of the war of the twentieth century. Historians classify such epochal wars as constituting a single historical event because, despite often lengthy periods in which there is no armed conflict, the various engagements of the war never decisively settle the issues that manage to reassert themselves through conflict. Whereas we commonly think that the aspirations at the outset of war will determine its closure, it is in fact the dynamic interplay between strategy and the legitimating goals of the state that must be satisfied before we can say that a particular war is really over. The goals of the warring states must be compromised or otherwise the means
of pursuing those goals by violence will be taken up again. When constitutional issues come into play there is little room for compromise; the loss of the issue can mean the loss of the state itself.
