International Security vol.1: The Cold War and Nuclear Deterrence

SAGE L ~ B ~ A ROF--Y [ N T E R N A T I ~ N ARELATIONS L

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY

SAGE LIBRARY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY VOLUME I The Cold War and Nuclear Deterrence

Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen

@SAGEPublications Los Angeles

London New Delhi Singapore

Introduction and editorial arrangement 0 Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen 2007 First published 2007 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, thrs publication may be reproduced, stored or transn~ittedin any form, or by any means, only with the prior permrssion in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, In accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all the copyright owners of the material reprinted herem. However, if any copyright owners have not been located and contacted at the time of publication, the publishers will be pleased t o make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver's Yard 5 5 City Road London E C l Y ISP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks. California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt I,td B 111 1, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-4129-2139-8 (set of four volumes) Library of Congress Control Number: 2006938798 Typeset by Televijay Technologies (P) Limited, Chennai Printed on paper from sustainable resources Printed and bound in Zrinski d.d Croatia

Appendix of Sources

ix

Editors' Introduction

xvii

VOLUME I The Cold War and Nuclear Deterrence I . The Sources of Soviet Conduct

X

1

2. "National Security" as an Ambiguous Symbol Arnold Wolfers

15

3. Another "Great Debate": The National Interest of the United States Hans J . Morgenthau

30

4. The Delicate Balance of Terror

5. The Stability of a Bipolar World

Albert Wohlstetter Kenneth N. Waltz

6. The Sharing of Nuclear Respons~b~lities: A Problem In Need of Solution Andre' Beaufre

55

74

97

7. S t r ~ t e g ~Studies c and Its Cr~tics Hedley Bull

106

8. Arms Control and World Order

117

Hedley Bull

9. Cooperation Under the Security D~lemma Robert Jervls

130

10. Rational~tyat the Brmk: The Role of C o g n ~ t ~ vProcesses e In Failures of Deterrence lack I,. Snyder

171

11. Contrasts in American and Soviet Strategic Thought Fritz W. Ermarth

19 1

12. Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn't Matter

Robert Jervis

207

Colin S. Gray 14. Managing Nuclear Multipolarity John J. Weltman

246

15. Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament The Report of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues

258

13. Strategic Stability Reconsidered

16. Redefining Security

Richard H. Ullman

223

296

17. Security in the Third World: The Worm About to Turn? Mohammed Ayoob

317

18. Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications Carl Sagan

330

vi

Contents

19. The OffensiveIDefensive Balance of Military Technology: A Theoretical and Historical Analysis Jack S. Levy 20. Why Even Good Defenses may be Bad

Charles L. Glaser

21. Transarmament: From Offensive to Defensive Defense Johan Galtung

VOLUME I1 The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda 22. Economic Structure and International Security: The Limits of the Liberal Case Barry Buzan 23. Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals Carol Cohn 24. Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other Simon Dalby

25. International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Sean M . Lynn-Jones 26. Base Women Cynthia Enloe 27. The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security Daniel Deudney 28. Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics R.B.J. Walker 29. How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO Bradley S. Klein 30. Soft Power Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

31. Security and Emancipation

Ken Booth

32. The Renaissance of Security Studies Stephen M. Walt 33. The Quagmire of Gender and International Security Rebecca Grant 34. Renaissance in Security Studies? Caveat Lector! Edward A. Kolodziej

35. A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul 36. Japan's National Security: Structure, Norms, and Policies Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara 37. The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict Barry R. Posen 38. The Clash of Civilizations? Samuel P. Huntington

362 386 413

Contents

vii

39. The Emerging Structure o f International Politics Kenneth N . Waltz

40. Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security David Dewitt

4 1 . New Dimensions of Human Security Human Dezwlopment Report 1994 42. 'Message in a Bottle'? Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies Richard W y n Jones

VOLUME I11 Widening Security 43. What is Security?

Emma Rothschild

44. A Genealogy of the Chemical Weapons Taboo

45. Securitization and Desecuritization

Richard Price

Ole W m e r

46. Security Studies and the End of the Cold War David A. Baldwin

47. Identity and Security: Buzan and the Copenhagen School Bill McStueeney 48. Broadening the Agenda of Security Studies: Politics and Methods Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams 49. Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO Thomas Risse-Kappe~

SO. Insecurity and State Formation in the Global Military Order: The Middle Eastern Case Keith Krause 5 1. Constructing National Interests Jutta Weldes 52. Multiple Identities, Interfacing Games: The Social Construction of Western Action in Bosnia K.M. Fierke

53. Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy Barry R. Posen and Andrew L. Ross 54. Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations Emanuel Adler

VOLUME IV Debating Security and Strategy and the Impact of 9-11 55. Should Strategic Studies Survive? Richard K. Betts 56. Identity and the Politics of Security

Michael C. Williams

1 25

viii

Contents

57. Revisiting Copenhagen: Or, on the Creative Development of a Security Studies Agenda in Europe Jef Huysmans 58. After Pax Americana: Benign Power, Regional Integration, and the Sources of a Stable Multipolarity Charles A. Kupchan 59. States of Insecurity: Plutonium and Post-Cold War Anxiety in New Mexico, 1992-96 Joseph Masco 60. Human Security and the Interests of States Astri Suhrke 61. The Lonely Superpower Samuel P. Huntington 62. The Little Mermaid's Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School Lene Hansen 63. Nuclear Order and Disorder

William Walker

64. Global Governance, Development and Human Security: Exploring the Links Caroline Thomas 65. Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air? Roland Paris 66. Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease Didier Bigo 67. Power and Weakness Robert Kagan 68. Feminist Responses to International Security Studies J. Ann Tickner 69. On the Pedagogy of 'Small Wars'

Tarak Barkawi

70. Knowledge as Power: Science, Military Dominance, and US. Security Robert L. Paarlberg 71. The 'War on Terror': Good Cause, Wrong Concept Gilles Andreani 72. Imaging Terror: Logos, Pathos and Ethos James Der Derian

73. Should HIVIAIDS Be Securitized? The Ethical Dilemmas of Linking HIVIAIDS and Security Stefan Elbe 74. From Social to National Security: On the Fabrication of Economic Order Mark Neocleous

Appendix of Sources Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permis sion to reproduce material in this book.

1.

'The Sources of Sov~etConduct', X Eorezgn Affairs, 25(4) (1947): 566-82. "Reprinted with permmion of Foreign Affam. Copyright (1947) by the Council on Foreign Relat~ons,Inc."

2.

' "National Security" as an Ambiguous Symbol', Arnold Wolfers Political Science Quarterly, LXVII(4) (1952):481-502. 0 The Academy of Political Science. Reprinted by permission from Political Science Quarterly.

3.

'Another "Great Debate": The National Interest of the United States', Hans I. Mougenthau The American Political Science Review, XLVl(4) (1952): 96 1-88. 0 American Political Science Association, published by Cambridge University Press, reprinted with permission.

4.

'The Delicate Balance of Terror', Albert Wohlstetter Foreign Affairs, 37(2) ( 1 9 5 9 ) :211-34. "Reprinted with permission of Foreign Affairs. Copyright (1959) by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc."

5.

'The Stability of a Bipolar World', Kenneth N. Waltz Dadalus, 93(3) (1964): 881-909.

0 1964 by the American Academy of Arts 81 Sciences. Reprinted with permission o f MIT. 6.

'The Sharing of Nuclear Responsibilities: A Problem in Need of Solution', Andre' Beaufre International Affairs, 41(3) (1965): 41 1-1 9. 0 Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission.

7.

'Strategic Studies and Its Critics', Hedley Bull World Polit~cs,20(4) ( 1 9 6 8 ) :593-605. 0 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

8.

'Arms Control and World Order', Hedley Bull Internatzonal Security, l ( 1 ) ( 1 976): 3-16. 0 1976 by the Pres~dentand Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Inst~tuteof Technology. Reprinted w ~ t hpermlsslon.

x

Appendix of Sources

9.

'Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma', Robert Jeruis World Politics, 30(2) (1978): 167-214. O The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

10. 'Rationality at the Brink: The Role of Cognitive Processes in Failures of Deterrence', Jack L. Snyder World Politics, 30(3) (1978): 345-65. O The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 21. 'Contrasts in American and Soviet Strategic Thought', Fritz %! Ermarth International Security, 3(2) (1978): 138-55. O 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 12. 'Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn't Matter', Robert Jeruis Political Science Quarterly, 94(4) (1979-80): 617-33. O The Academy of Political Science. Reprinted by permission from Political Science Quarterly. 13. 'Strategic Stability Reconsidered', Colin S. Gray D ~ d a l u s Journal : of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 109(4) (1980): 135-54. O 1980 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Reprinted with permission of MIT.

14. 'Managing Nuclear Multipolarity', John J. Weltman International Security, 6(3) (198 1-82): 182-94. O 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 15. 'Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament - The Report of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues', Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament - The Report of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (London: Pan Books, 1982), Chapter 1, 'Common Survival' pp. 1-13, Chapter 6, 'Recommendations and Proposals' pp. 138-76. O The Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982. Reprinted with permission. 16. 'Redefining Security', Richard H. Ullman International Security, 8(1) (1983): 129-53. O 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 17. 'Security in the Third World: The Worm About to Turn?', Mohammed Ayoob International Affairs, 60(1) (1984): 41-51. O Blackwell publishing. Reprinted with permission.

Appendix of Sources

xi

18. 'Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications', Carl Sagan Foreign Affairs, 62(2) (1983-84): 257-92. Published by Foreign Affairs. Copyright O 1983 by Carl Sagan. Reprinted with permission from Democritus Properties, LLC. 19. 'The OffensiveIDefensive Balance of Military Technology: A Theoretical and Historical Analysis', Jack S. Levy lnternational Studies Quartevly, 28(2) (1984): 219-38. 0 Rlackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission. 20. 'Why Even Good Defenses may be Bad', Charles L. Glaser International Security, 9(2) (1984): 92-123. 0 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 21. 'Transarmament: From Offensive to Defensive Defense', ]ohan Galtung /ournal of Peace Research, 21(2) (1984): 127-39. 0 PRIO. Reprinted with permission. 22. 'Economic Structure and International Security: The Limits of the Liberal Case', Barry Buzan International Organization, 38(4) (1984): 597-624. 0 1984 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 23. 'Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals', Carol Cohn Signs: Journal of Woman in Culture and Society, 12(4) (1987): 687-718. 0 1987 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. 24. 'Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other', Simon Dalby Alternative, XIII(4) (1988): 4 15-42. Copyright 0 1988 by Alternatives. Used with permission of the World Order Models Project and Lynne Rienner Publisher, Inc. 25. 'International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field', Joseph S. Nye, ]r. and Sean M . Lynn-]ones International Security, 12(4) ( 198 8): 5-27. O 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 26. 'Base Women', Cynthia Enloe Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense o f lnternational Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 6-5-92, 216-20. 0 University of California Press. Reprinted by permission via the Copyright Clearance Center.

xii

Appendix of Sources

27. 'The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security', Daniel Deudney Millennium: Journal of lnternational Studies, 19(3)( 1990): 46 1-76. 0 Millennium: Journal of lnternational Studies. This article first appeared in Millennium, and is reproduced with the permission of the publisher. 28. 'Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics', R.B.J. Walker Alternatives, XV(1) (1990): 3-27. Copyright O 1990 by Alternatives. Used with permission of the World Order Models Project and Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 29. How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO', Bradley S. Klein International Studies Quarterly, 34(3) (1990): 31 1-25. O Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission. 30. 'Soft Power', Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Foreign Policy, 80: 153-71. Reprinted by permission of PUBLIC AFFAIRS, a member of Perseus Books Group. 31. 'Security and Emancipation', Ken Booth Review of International Studies, 17(4) (1991): 313-26. O British International Studies Association, reproduced with permission. 32. 'The Renaissance of Security Studies', Stephen M. Walt International Studies Quarterly, 35(2) (1991): 21 1-39. O Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission. 33. 'The Quagmire of Gender and International Security', Rebecca Grant V. Spike Peterson (ed.), Gendered States: Feminists (Re) Vision of k London: Lynne Rienner International Relations Theory (Boulder i Publishers, 1992), pp. 83-97. Copyright O 1992 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Used with permission. 34. 'Renaissance in Security Studies? Caveat Lector!', Edward A. Kolodziej International Studies Quarterly, 36(4) ( 1992): 421-38. O Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission. 35. 'A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era', James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul International Organization, 46(2) (1992): 467-9 1. O 1992 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 36. 'Japan's National Security: Structure, Norms, and Policies', Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara International Security, 17(4) (1993): 84-118.

Appendix of Sources

xiii

O 1993 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 37. 'The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict', Burry R. Posen

Survival, 35(1) ( 1 993): 27-47. O 1993 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Taylor 81 Francis Ltd. http://www.informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission. 38. 'The Clash of Civilizations?', Samuel P. Huntington Foreign Affairs, 72(3) (1993): 22-49. "Reprinted with permission of Foreign Affairs. Copyright (1993) by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc." 39. 'The Fmerg~ngStructure of Internatwnal Polit~cs',Kenneth N. Waltz lnternatlonal Securtty, 18(2) (1993):44-79. 0 1993 by the Pres~dentand Fellows of Harvdrd College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprmted with permission. 40. 'Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security', David Dewitt The Pacific Review, 7 ( 1 ) (1994): 1-15. 0 1994 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Taylor 8i Francis Ltd. http://www.informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission. 4 1 . 'New Dimensions o f Human Security', Human Development Report Human Development Report 1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 22-40. Published by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. 42. ' "Message in a Bottle"? Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies', Richard Wyn Jones Contemporary Security Policy, 16(3) (1995):299-319. O 1955 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. http://www.informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission. 4.3. 'What is Security?', Emma Rothschild Dgdalus, 124(3) (1995): 53-98. 01995 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Reprinted with permission of MIT. 44. 'A Genealogy o f the Chemical Weapons Taboo', Richard Price Intcrnational Organization, 49(1) ( 1995): 73-103. 0 1995 by the I 0 Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 45. 'Securitization and Desecuritization', Ole W ~ v e r Ronny Lipschutz (ed.), O n Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 46-86. O Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission.

xiv

Appendix of Sources

46. 'Security Studies and the End of the Cold War', David A. Baldwin World Politics, 48(1) (1995): 117-41. O The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 47. 'Identity and Security: Buzan and the Copenhagen School', Bill McSweeney Review of International Studies, 22(1) (1996): 8 1-93. O British International Studies Association, reproduced with permission. 48. 'Broadening the Agenda of Security Studies: Politics and Methods', Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams Mershon International Studies Review, 40(2) (1996): 229-54. O Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission. 49. 'Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO', Thomas Risse-Kappen Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 357-99. O Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission. 50. 'Insecurity and State Formation in the Global Military Order: The Middle Eastern Case', Keith Krause European Journal of International Relations, 2(3) (1996): 3 19-54. O Sage Publications Ltd. Reprinted with permission. 51. 'Constructing National Interests', Jutta Weldes European Journal of lnternational Relations, 2(3) (1996): 275-318. O Sage Publications Ltd. Reprinted with permission. 52. 'Multiple Identities, Interfacing Games: The Social Construction of Western Action in Bosnia', K.M. Fierke European Journal of International Relations, 2 ( 4 ) (1996): 467-97. 0 Sage Publications Ltd. Reprinted with permission. 53. 'Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy', Barry R. Posen and Andrew L. Ross lnternational Security, 21(3) (1996-97): 5-53. O 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 54. 'Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations', Emanuel Adler Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 26(2) (1997):249-77. O Millennium: Journal of International Studies. This article first appeared in Millennium, and is reproduced with the permission of the publisher. 55. 'Should Strategic Studies Survive?', Richard K. Betts World Politics, 50(1) (1997): 7-33.

Appendix of Sources

xv

0 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 56. 'Identity and the Politics of Security', Michael C. Williams European Journal of International Relations, 4 ( 2 ) (1998 ): 204-25. O Sage Publications Ltd. Reprinted with permission.

57. 'Revisiting Copenhagen: Or, on the Creative Development of a Security Studies Agenda in Europe', Jef H u ~ s m a n s European Journal of International Relations, 4 ( 4 ) (1998):479-505. O Sage Publications Ltd. Reprinted with permission. 58. 'After Pax Americana: Benign Power, Regional Integration, and the Sources of a Stable M ~ l t i p o l a r i t ~Charles ', A. Kupchan International Security, 23(2) (1998): 40-79. O 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 59. 'States of Insecurity: Plutonium and Post-Cold War Anxiety in New Mexico, 1992-96', Joseph Masco Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall (eds), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 203-3 1. O University of Minnesota Press. Reprinted with permission. 60. 'Human Security and the Interests of States', Astri Suhrke Security Dialogue, 30(3) (1999): 265-76. 0 Sage Publications. Reprinted with permission. 6 1 . 'The Lonely Superpower', Samuel P. Huntington Foreign Affairs, 78(2) (1999): 35-49. "Reprinted with permission of Foreign Affairs. Copyright ( 1 999) by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc." 62. 'The Little Mermaid's Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School', Lene Hansen Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 29(2) (2000): 28.5-306. O Millennium: Journal of International Studies. This article first appeared in Millennium, and is reproduced with the permission of the publisher. 63. 'Nuclear Order and Disorder', William Walker International Affairs, 76(4) (2000): 703-24. 0 Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission. 64. 'Global Governance, Development and Human Security: Exploring the Links', Caroline Thomas Third World Quarterly, 22(2) (2001): 159-75. O 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals.

xvi

Appendix of Sources

65. 'Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?', Roland Paris International Security, 26(2) (2001): 87-102. O 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts lnstitute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 66. 'Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease', Didier Bigo Alternatives, 27(Special Issue) (2002): 63-92. Copyright O 2002 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Used with permission. 67. 'Power and Weakness', Robert Kagan Policy Review, 113 (2002): 3-28. O 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Reprinted with permission. 68. 'Feminist Responses to International Security Studies', J. Ann Tickner Peace Review, 16(1) (2004): 43-48. O 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., http://www.taylorandfrancis.com 69. 'On the Pedagogy of "Small Wars" ', Tarak Barkawi International Affairs, 80(1) (2004): 19-37. O Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission. 70. 'Knowledge as Power: Science, Military Dominance, and U.S. Security', Robert L. Paarlberg International Security, 29(1) (2004): 122-51. O 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission. 71. 'The "War on Terror": Good Cause, Wrong Concept', Gilles AndrPani Survival, 46(4) (2004-05): 31-50. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals. 72. 'Imaging Terror: Logos, Pathos and Ethos', James Der Derian Third World Quarterly, 26(1) (2005): 23-37. O Taylor & Francis Ltd. http:Nwww.tandf.co.uk/journals. 73. 'Should HIVIAIDS Be Securitized? The Ethical Dilemmas of Linking HIVIAIDS and Security', Stefan Elbe International Studies Quarterly, 50(1) (2006): 119-44. O Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission. 74. 'From Social to National Security: On the Fabrication of Economic Order', Mark Neocleous Security Dialogue, 37(3) (2006): 363-84. O Sage Publications. Reprinted with permission.

Editors' Introduction Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen

0

ne of the concepts in International Relations (IR) is security. Since the primary unit of IR is the state, the field of International Security Studies (ISS) was formed around the security of states, somewhat misleadingly labeled 'national security'. That states strive to be secure, and that security involves not only territorial integrity, but the protection of a particular set of political and cultural values, is thus one of the axioms of international politics. Yet, if there is agreement that states seek security, there is no consensus on what this implies for war and conflict. The Realist school argues that states are by nature driven by their self-interest and a prudent suspicion towards others: that they seek their own security first and foremost, and that they put it above all other goals, including economic prosperity. To be a strong state requires a healthy economy, technological know-how, and a united citizenry, but what ultimately counts is a state's ability t o project military force. To Realists the so-called security dilemma implies that states strive to enhance their security, particularly by maintaining military capability adequate t o meet potential challenges. Yet although conceived as a defensive means, to other states this can easily look like an offensive move. States become trapped in a spiral where each attempts t o protect its security only to find others raising the stakes in the attempt t o improve theirs. Alliances might be forged t o balance the capabilities of threatening states, but they are, argue Realists, fragile and temporary arrangements that dissolve with the external threats that brought them together. The discipline of ISS has Realism and its understanding of the state and military force at its center. Realism is however far from uncontested, indeed as many of the articles in this Reader show it is challenged on descriptive, analytical as well as normative grounds. From the birth of ISS a t the end of World War 11, Idealist or Liberal approaches held a fundamentally different view of the state and its security. Idealists agreed with Realism that states feared for their security, but they disagreed that an inbuilt fear of others drove states to see security only through the lens of narrow self-interest. Hence, it is possible t o break the escalating logic of the security dilemma: states do have the capacity to understand the consequences of their own military strategies and acquisitions, and international institutions can help solve disputes and build trust. The state, in short, is not a fixed entity; some might act in a Realist manner, but others might not. If the state is not necessarily Realist, neither is the international system: states can form institutional arrangements

xviii

Editors' Introduction

whose positive purpose stretches beyond defensive alliances and which make states realize that their own security is deeply interdependent with that of others. The debate between Idealists and Realists centered on the status of the state and the ensuing dynamics of the international system. This debate was and is central in that it goes to the core of basic analytical and normative assumptions about human nature, political community, sovereignty, authority, legitimacy and order. Can security only be provided by the state, as Realists argue, should international or global security be guaranteed by states cooperating, or is a radical dismantling of the state a precondition for 'real security'? To trace the evolution of ISS is to uncover a series of conceptual debates on whether security should be defined in narrow or in broader terms: whether the security of the state or the security of other 'referent objects' (crucially, the individual, humanity, ethnic, religious, racial and gendered groups) should be privileged, whether the concept should be confined to include only military threats and organized violence or whether it should include for example environmental dangers, hunger, poverty and epidemics. These are also debates over what constitutes good social science and whether normative questions can and should be raised. The rest of this Introduction is organized into two main sections. The first considers the birth of ISS and the main forces that have driven its development. The second traces the evolution of ISS, looking first at the mainstream debates during the Cold War, and at the challenges to them; then at the widening and deepening of the ISS literature that began later in the Cold War but blossomed during the 1990s; and finally at the impact, still unfolding, of 9/11 and the 'global War on Terror'. References in bold are to articles included in the Reader.

I. The Origins a n d Dynamics of International Security Studies The Birth of International Security Studies ISS emerged as a sub-field of IR after World War 11. It was new in the sense that while 'security' had long been used by political theorists and military strategists, 'international security' had never before been the organizing concept for a field of study. In addition, post-World War I1 writers on international security began to see themselves as forming a discipline devoted to a defined set of questions. ISS was nevertheless related to earlier writings in two important ways. First, because it drew upon the older discipline of political theory where writers from classical Greece through to Hobbes, Machiavelli, John Stuart Mill and Montesquieu had been concerned with the questions of sovereignty and political authority. It also drew on diplomatic history which traced the development of relationships between the European states system and the rest of the world, and military strategists writing on defense, war and power (on the latter see Baldwin, 1995: 119-120j. The articles included in this

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reader begin with the birth of the discipline of ISS after World War 11, which means that these forerunners are not included. But as R.B.J. Walker (1990) and Michael C. Williams (1998) show, these writings were and are significant to ISS precisely because this classical heritage is constantly referred to and debated. Second, 'security' was a key political concept prior to 'national security' gaining center stage after World War 11. Emma Rothschild (1995: 61-4) traces the many and quite different meanings the word 'security' had before the French Revolution. She notes that what unites modern uses of 'security' is a concern with the relationship between the individual on the one side and the larger collective on the other. Moving from the French Revolution to the American Depression of the 1930's, Mark Neocleous (2006) and Arnold Wolfers (1952:481-2) point out that this period linked 'security' to questions of welfare and economics, not to the national and military security of the state. What happened after World War I1 was thus that 'security' went from being a term used within the field of social policy as well as more loosely within the study of war, defense and diplomacy, to being a term that structured an entire field. Writing in 1952, Wolfers (1952: 483) observed that, 'The term national security, like national interest, is well enough established in the political discourse of international relations to designate an objective of policy distinguishable from others.' The articles included in this fourvolume reader are all part of the development of this field, although they differ in that some explicitly question the concept of security, while others take some given version of it for granted. The main example of the latter practice is most of the works on nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, which simply analyzed the importance of particular themes within a given understanding of USIWestern military security (e.g. the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons, Levy, 1984; or the applicability of a policy of flexible response or a policy of mutually assured destruction, Jervis, 1979-80; or key events such as the Cuban Missiles Crisis, Snyder, 1978). Explicit discussions of the concept of security calling for its expansion beyond nationallstate security and military threats emerged during the 1980's (Common Security, 1982; Buzan, 1984; Ullman, 1983) and gained ground as the Cold War and the bipolar international structure dissolved. When ISS emerged it addressed a classic question - how could states protect themselves and how did they know what and who were threatening them? -yet the shift of guiding concepts from 'war' and 'defense' to 'security' also implied crucial changes in that it opened up the study of a broader set of political issues, including the importance of societal cohesion and the relationship between military and non-military threats and vulnerabilities. Indeed the first three articles in Volume I by George F. Kennan (1947), Arnold Wolfers (1952) and Hans J. Morgenthau (1952) are clear indications of this development and together they delineate five themes central to ISS. First, that the key political question that drove the evolution of LSS was the concern with the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the ch~llenges of bipolarity.

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Second, while military capabilities were crucial to assessing national security, they were by no means the only important factors, as economic performance and domestic cohesion were deemed crucial to the containment of the Soviet Union (Kennan, 1947: 578-81; Morgenthau, 1952: 973). Third, the interpretation of enemies - or 'knowing the Other' (Dalby, 1988) - and their intentions was also an important theme (Kennan, 1947). Did states have basically similar identities and national interests or were they products of such distinct histories and traditions that they needed to be understood in their own right? If states were the product of historical processes, their identities and definitions of security would also be open to change. Fourth, Wolfers argued (1952: 485) that security has both an objective ('the absence of threats t o acquired values') as well as a subjective ('the absence of fear' that values be attacked) dimension. Assessing security objectively would be very difficult and if possible then only with hindsight (Wolfers, 1952: 485).Yet while objective security would be hard to define, it should, argued Morgenthau (1952: 965-6) be the goal of ISS to construct a scientific theory that let the analyst determine a rational course of action and then assess whether facts complied thereto. The fifth and final theme introduced was the question of morality. Wolfers' stance was that 'no policy, or human act in general, can escape becoming a subject for moral judgment - whether by the conscience of the actor himself or by others - which calls for the sacrifice of other values, as any security policy is bound to do' (Wolfers, 1952: 498). Yet, both Wolfers and Morgenthau (1952: 987) stressed the impossibility of judging security policy in the abstract and that a choice always had to be made between different moral principles. Ending on a more Realist note than Wolfers, Morgenthau (1952: 987) claimed that, 'The realist will choose the national interest on both moral and pragmatic grounds; for if he does not take care of the national interest nobody else will.'

T h e Driving Forces of International Security S t u d i e s Although they were to make a comeback as the explicit conceptual debates picked up by the mid-1980s, by the mid-1950's these five themes were to a large extent overridden by more concrete concerns related to nuclear weapons and deterrence. 'National security' - the security of the state - defined in politico-military terms held a virtually complete analytical monopoly. As David Baldwin (1995: 122) noted four decades later, 'It is as if the field came to be so narrowly defined in later years that the questions addressed during these early years were no longer considered to belong to the field of security studies.' But before surveying this historical development and the return of wider debates on international security, we must answer the question: what drove this process? Obviously there is not one single factor that can explain the evolution of ISS and we suggest that five are particularly important, although

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not necessarily equally important at all times: great power politics, technology, key events, the internal dynamic of academic debates, and institutionalization.

Great Power Politics

Great power politics subdivides into three elements: the distribution of power among the leading states (the polarity of the international system); the patterns of amity and enmity among the great powers; and the degree of involvement or interventionism by the great powers. As is immediately clear from the articles in Volume 1, security analysis during the Cold War was almost synonymous with studying US-Soviet relations, a bipolar system with enmity between two great powers whose direct and covert influence stretched around the globe. Other phenomena appeared on the research agenda, for instance the question of Third World security (Bull, 1976), b ~ ~ t these were seen as structured (if not determined) by bipolar relations. The importance of great power politics is also evident from the debate over which polarity replaced bipolarity after the end o f the Cold War, with suggestions ranging from uni- to multipolarity (Waltz, 1993; Kupchan, 1998; Huntington, 1999). Until the end of the 1980s superpower relations had heen frozen at only slightly fluctuating levels of enmity and engagement, but with the dissolution of the Soviet Union came not only a reconsideration of the polarity of the international system, but also of the relations between the great powers. Was the US going to face enemies or would its deployment of 'soft power' or 'co-optive power' stabilize the system (Nye, 1990)? And what level of resources was the US prepared to devote to security problems outside of its own immediate sphere of interest (Posen and Ross, 1996-7)? The attacks on September 11 led US policy makers and many security analysts to define a new era. Whether the War on Terror will ultimately boost or weaken the relative power of the US as well as exacerbate or ameliorate patterns of amity and enmity remains to be seen, but great power politics is still a key question on the agenda. To point to great power politics as a driving force is also to note that ISS began as an American discipline, focused on American security and written by Americans (although some had emigrated from Europe to the US before or during World War 11) (Kolodziej, 1992: 434). European approaches might have gained more ground after the end of the Cold War, but as Ayoob (1983-84) and Krause (1996) point out, it is still the Western model of the state which forms the core of ISS.

Technology Technology drives ISS through its impact on the threats, vulnerabilities and (in)stability of strategic relationships. The arrival during the mid-1940s of the atom bomb was pretty much the foundational event for Strategic Studies and the impact of nuclear - and nuclear- related - technology during the Cold War can hardly be exaggerated. Nuclear weapons provided a

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huge surplus capacity of destructive power for the first time in military history. Long-range ballistic missiles speeded up delivery times and were capable of carrying nuclear warheads, a technological development that liberated nuclear weapons from vulnerable bomber delivery systems, and greatly increased the capacity to make a first strike against opponents. Whereas nuclear warheads and intercontinental missiles were real developments feeding huge quantities of ISS literature, the enormous and ongoing literature on Anti Ballistic Missiles (ABM)/Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) reveals that even potential technology developments could have major impacts on both strategic relations and ISS. Technology need not be exclusively military in kind to make an impact on ISS. The history of military and civilian technologies is often one of interplay and 'dual-use'. The Internet for instance was originally developed as a military technology, as a distributed network transmitting information under a nuclear attack. Nuclear technology to take another example has a military as well as a civil side (energy and medicine) that can be difficult to distinguish, a fact which also complicates the assessment of nuclear proliferation. The same dilemma is also applicable to biological and chemical weapons or to the communications technologies applied in both civilian consumer electronics and battlefield management. If the concept of security is expanded beyond the military sector the list of technological factors that can drive security debates grows as well. If AIDSIHIV is seen as a threat to regional security in parts of Africa and Asia, the retroviral technology for treating those infected is key to the spread and consequences of the decease (Elbe, 2006). Or, if the environment is threatened by the effects of industrialization, then the technologies implicated in these threats and their solution become central. The attacks on September 11 and the War on Terror show that technology and the identification of threats and enemies are intimately linked and that the list of technologies central t o ISS changes over time. First, the technology of digital networks (the electronic movement of money, cellphones and Internet communication) is significant for how physically dispersed terrorist networks communicate while simultaneously erasing (most of) their traces. Second, the spectacular character of the attack could be seen as deeply connected to the images created and the instantaneity with which they were globally broadcast allowing the world to watch in real time as the World Trade Center collapsed (Der Derian, 2005). Arguably the power of terrorist networks like Al-Qaeda lies not in their quantitative capabilities (no one considers an invasion likely), but in their qualitative ability to unsettle Western societies' feeling of security. Hence the production and distribution of iconic images through new media technologies that propel this feeling becomes a key security concern. The question how technology impacts economic, political, military and cultural developments has been a topic of great debate in the social sciences and to speak about technology as a driving factor thus raises the specter of technological determinism (Levy, 1984; Paarlberg, 2004). Yet while technology is undoubtedly a main driving force in the development of ISS, it is by no means a determining one, first, because technology is itself influenced by

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the other driving forces; and second, because there are human agents (civilian and military; commercial and public) who make decisions about which technology to develop. Decisions on nuclear technology during the Cold War were hugely impacted by the bipolar confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union. Once in the world, technology creates pressures of its own, which again impacts the political process, but this is a complex process of feedbacks between technology and the other driving forces and hurnan decisions, not one of determinism.

Key Events Events come in various forms, and they can change not only relationships among the powers, but also the academic paradigms used to understand those relationships. The most dramatic are specific, focused crises that not only become objects of study in their own right, but which change existing understandings, relationships and practices in the wider strategic domain. Two key examples of this type are the Cuba missile crisis in 1962 (Snyder, 1978; Weldes, 1996) and the terrorist attacks on the US on September I I , 2001 (Barkawi, 2004; Der Derian, 2005). And, the ending of the Cold War was of course the single most important event in the history of ISS. Other events take the form of steady processes unfolding over time that change the knowledge, understanding and consciousness that support existing practices. A good example of this is the rise of environmental concerns and the move o f the environment from a background variable to a foreground one (Ullman, 1983; Deudney, 1990). There was no specific crisis that put environmental issues into the foreground, but rather a steady drip of new information, new understandings, and a rising public consciousness that grew sufficiently wide and deep to open a place for environmental security in policy debates and the ISS literature. The identification of key events might often seem commonsensical: it is not hard to see the impact of the Soviet Union gaining nuclear weapons, its dissolution in 1991, or the attacks on September 11. Yet, in analytical terms one should note that events are in fact politically and intersubjectively constituted. It is the acknowledgen~entby politicians, institutions, the media and the public that something is of such importance that it should be responded to, possibly even with military means, that makes it an 'event'.

T h e internal Dynamic of Academic Debates An idealized model of how academic knowledge is created would p e d i c t that ISS has evolved progressively in response to key events, new tech~mlogies and great power politics. Hypotheses would be derived, falsified or verified, and theories revised, expanded or abandoned in response. The actual development of IIS is however much more complicated due to the absence of consensus on what scientific model should be adopted, that is whether positivist epistemologies and methodologies from the natural sciences and

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economics or interpretative epistemologies from the humanities (sociology, philosophy, history and anthropology among others) should be used. This driving force situates ISS within the larger debates on epistemology, methodology and choice of research focus that are conducted within the social sciences in general. As shown above, the call for objective measures and rational science was part of ISS since the early 1950s, and discussions of epistemology and methodology have been central ever since. To call ISS an 'applied' discipline would not be completely fair, but it is true that academic debates in ISS have relied upon significant imports from other disciplines, and not just mathematics and economics which delivered most of the first generation of nuclear strategists: game theory Uervis, 1978);cognitive psychology (Snyder, 1978); linguistics (Cohn, 1987; Fierke, 1996; Wxver, 1995); social theory (Dalby, 1988; Price, 1995; Jones, 1995; Krause, 1996; Hansen, 2000; Bigo, 2002; Der Derian, 2005); political theory (Walker, 1990; Williams, 1998); development and postcolonial studies (Ayoob, 1983-4; Krause, 1996; Thomas, 2001; Barkawi, 2004); and feminist theory (Cohn, 1987; Grant, 1992; Hansen, 2000; Tickner, 2004). The impact of these disciplines and their debates have been felt in ISS both in terms of how security should be conceptualized/what should fall under the rubric of ISS, and in terms of how it should be analyzed, that is the epistemology and methodology to be applied. During the Cold War, ISS had close links to (neo)realism, a link fortified by the division of labor between ISS and International Political Economy (IPE)which emerged as the other great sub-field of IR in the 1970s. IPE partly defined itself against ISS, the two sub-fields carving up the terrain of IR so that IPE claimed the cooperative, joint-gains side of the subject, with ISS claiming the conflictual, relative-gains one. As the Cold War drew to a close, a wave of critical articles emerged which contested both Realist ISS's focus on national security as well as the rationalist methodologies usually adopted to its study. Poststructuralists, Constructivists, Critical Theorists and Feminists introduced interpretative, linguistic, sociological and deconstructive epistemologies, and a split between rationalists and 'reflectivists' was coined by Robert Keohane (1988) to indicate the key dividing line in IR.

Institutionalization

To identify institutionalization as a driving force is to further highlight that academic debates do not unfold in an economic and structural vacuum. Research is influenced by the availability of funding, for ISS in general as well as for particular forms of research; by access to top journals and publishers; by the processes of hiring and institution building that take place in universities and by think tanks. For example hiring policies at universities are extremely central (Betts, 1997). Tenured professors make decisions on what future students learn, they decide which graduate students are accepted and on what topics, they have at least part of their time allocated to research, and the security of tenure provides them with a significant degree of freedom

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for research. Successful graduate programs are characterized by the ability of graduating Ph.D.s to find jobs at respectable universities and policy institutes. The very fact that courses on Strategic Studies were taught from the late 1960s onwards further institutionalized ISS within academe as well as in the policy world. The level and kind o f funding provided by governments and foundations is equally important. In countries characterized by high levels of public spending on education and research it might make a significant difference that resources are invested not only in university education and research, but in research centers such as the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (COPRI), home of the Copenhagen School (Huysmans, 1998), Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI),International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) and Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). Foundations have significant discretion to target their financial support towards particular programs, and to foster or inhibit new directions. The growth in widening approaches in the 1990s was for instance aided by a series of American foundations (Kolodziej, 1992: 437; for a critical assessment of this development see Nye and Lynn-Jones, 1988: 21). The influence of think tanks operating in the gray zone of policy advice, lobbying and consulting is another aspect of institutionalization, with the recent influence of neo-conservative think tanks on the policy of the George W. Bush administration as a case in point. In addition to influencing government policy and public debate, think tanks might also function as a reservoir for politically motivated appointments (Dalby, 1988). This account of institutionalization shows that this 'driving' force might speed up as well as slow down the effect of other forces. The institutionalization of ISS through generations of hiring practices might easily breed a certain conservatism as far as broadening the concept of security is concerned, balancing the impact of progressive foundations. Institutionalized conceptions might also 'slow down' the impact of key events, as when neo-realism managed to reinvent itself after its failure to predict the end of the Cold War.

11. T h e Evolution of International Security S t u d i e s

The themes set out by the very first writers on security worked together with the driving forces to found a field of Strategic Studies that was simultaneously productive, influential and fashionable as well as committed to a narrow, state-centric, military-political view of ISS. Broader questions, including those of economic security and domestic cohesion, put on the research agenda by Wolfers and Morgenthau were marginalized. Normative questions were not explicitly pursued either as mainstream ISS (Strategic Studies) saw itself as being on the right side of a conflict whose existence and legitimacy was beyond questioning. Cold War ISS was driven largely by the policy problems facing the US, and to a lesser extent those of its allies (e.g. Beaufre, 1965).

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Developments in Soviet capabilities and doctrine was the overwhelming concern (Ermarth, 1978). Epistemological questions were not at the forefront either as an objective, rationalist and positivist approach was shared by theoretical as well as empirical scholarship. It was thus the driving forces of superpower politics and new military technologies that were most conspicuous in forming mainstream ISS. While bipolarity was thought to be relatively stable (Waltz, 1964) the technology surrounding nuclear weapons was anything but. Nuclear weapons technology underwent very rapid and dramatic development throughout the Cold War, generating an ongoing military dynamic that defined the heart of ISS. Additional uncertainties were introduced by misinformation about who had deployed what: the bomber and missile 'gaps' of the mid- and late 1950s, in which Soviet secrecy and American domestic politics combined to produce huge US overreactions to non-existent Soviet 'leads'. Sputnik in 1957 helped launched the 'Golden Age' of Strategic Studies, when the basic rules and dynamics of mutual nuclear deterrence were worked out in detail (Wohlstetter, 1959), though many had been anticipated by earlier writers responding to the first arrival of nuclear weapons. Technological developments locked the superpowers into a fierce arms race with both quantitative (how many and how powerful missileslwarheads?) but also qualitative (how accurate, how quickly delivered, how well protected against pre-emptive attacks?) dimensions. Arms racing not surprisingly became a staple topic in the literature, giving yet more weight to what seemed to be the material driving forces defining the strategic agenda. The superpower arms race was driven not only by improvements in technology (and the lobbying power of arms industries), but also by fears that failure to keep up would make one's nuclear forces vulnerable to first strike by the enemy. From this foundational insecurity arose a huge and elaborate body of theory and argument about incentives to attack (or not) under various conditions of nuclear balance (Wohlstetter, 1959; Jervis, 1979-80; Gray, 1980; Weltman, 1981-2). Formal theoretic ways of thinking were called in to help in understanding the 'game' of deterrence and bipolar superpower rivalry (Jervis, 1978). Much of this literature was heavily dependent on assumptions of rationality (Snyder, 1978) to work out the great chains of if - then propositions that characterized deterrence theory: if A attacks B in a given way, what is B's best response, and what would A then do in reply, and then ... . The fear of first strike was real in the early phases of the Cold War when nuclear arsenals were small and vulnerable. It diminished from the later 1960s as nuclear arsenals got larger and much harder to attack (particularly when missiles were put into submarines), giving an effective so-called 'secure second strike'. But it was replaced by another, more subtle, fear known at the ex-ante ex-post dilemma. This envisaged a counterforce attack by one side against the other in which the attacked states loses more of its nuclear weapons than the attacker uses in his first strike. Did rationality suggest that the attacked state should not retaliate because to do so would be suicidal, thereby having to

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accept the attack without making any retaliation? Understanding these great chains of reasoning was seen as crucial to developing the best military options that would deter the enemy from attacking in the first place. Much ink was spilled among other technological choices over the costs and benefits of putting multiple warheads on missiles; of pursuing high levels of accuracy with so-called precision-guided munitions; of developing supersonic bombers; of deploying cruise missiles; and of building elaborate protected hiding places for land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. One o f the fiercest, and still ongoing, arguments of this sort was about ABM, aka BMD, systems, under argument since the 1970s (Common Security, 1982; Glaser, 1984; Walker, 2000). Part of the argument was about whether or not it could be done with existing or likely technology. But the more interesting theoretical part was about what impact deployment of an effective, or even partly effective, BMD would have on nuclear strategic stability. With its promise of escape from the whole logic of deterrence, and especially from having one's population held hostage under the grim, but supposedly stabilizing, logic of the Cold War's most notorious acronym, MAD (mutually assured destruction), RMD proved particularly attractive in US domestic politics, helped there by its appeal to enthusiasm for technological fixes, and its amenability to being staged as defensive (the protests of strategists about its costs, technical difficulty and destabilizing consequences notwithstanding). In addition to the pressures from rapidly evolving technologies, there was an ongoing fundamental disagreement about the basic nature of nuclear deterrence itself, and whether that made it easy or difficult to achieve (Jervis, 1979-80; Gray, 1980). Some thought that nuclear weapons made deterrence easy, because any even half-rational actor would be given serious pause by the prospect of obliteration. In other words, possession of a nuclear arsenal sufficient for 'assured destruction' would basically suffice, leading to a so-called 'minimum deterrence' strategy. Others calculated that a ruthless rational actor (as Kennan, 1947 had postulated the Soviet Union to be) would require not only a threat of high damage, but also a near-certain probability that such a retaliation would be delivered, before deterrence could be effective. Minimum deterrence offered a kind of stability in easy parity, and also economy, but at some risk of vulnerability to utterly ruthless opponents. Its logic also provided incentives for nuclear proliferation, making it seem fairly straightforward for lesser powers to acquire a great equalizer. Proliferation threatened to complicate not only the core elements of the nuclear debatedeterrence, arms control, and escalation - all of which were much more difficult with three or more parties than with just two (Weltman, 1981-2; Walker, 2000), but also bipolarity itself. Consequently, the US and the Soviet Union led the way in promoting a nuclear nonproliferation regime, and nuclear proliferation became a large and elaborate subject in its own right within the ISS literature. In contrast to minimum deterrence, maximum deterrence thinking offered higher entrance costs to would-be nuclear weapons states, and an expensive, open-ended arms race to existing nuclear weapon states. The supposed gain

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was to close loopholes against extreme aggressors who might take risks along the lines of the ex- ante ex- post dilemma. Dealing with this contingency generated demands for huge and elaborate forces capable of responding to aggression at any level, and of maintaining 'escalation dominance' throughout the spectrum of conventional and nuclear warfighting. Maximum deterrence thinking rested on the assumption of a highly aggressive, risktaking and opportunistic opponent, but it was also driven by the problem of Extended Deterrence (ED) that arose from the US guarantees to protect Europe embodied in the NATO alliance. ED links the technological driver to the great power politics theme. Extending the US nuclear umbrella was uncomplicated when the US nuclear monopoly made deterrence easy even in the face of much superior Soviet conventional military strength in Europe. But it became fiendishly difficult when the Soviets also acquired the capability to threaten the US with nuclear weapons. H o w could the European allies believe that the US would retaliate against the Soviet Union for, say, an attack on West Germany, when the consequence could be Soviet retaliation against American cities? This question and its many variants haunted Western strategic thinking from Sputnik onwards (Beaufre, 1965; Jervis, 1979-80; Gray, 1980). It was central to the literature on NATO and its recurrent discontents over especially nuclear strategy, which was another major theme in the ISS literature. Extended deterrence and flexible response fed another concern intrinsic to the whole logic of maximum deterrence, and also linked to rival superpower interventions in crises and conflicts in the Third World (Cuba, Southeast Asia, the Middle East): escalation and how to control it. The practice of ED inevitably led to scenarios about low- level warfighting in response to local aggression, and how to respond if the opponent raised the ante by moving t o higher levels of force, especially to the use of so-called 'tactical' nuclear weapons. Maximum deterrence logic required that rationality prevail, and that limited nuclear war be containable, but there were real doubts about whether such cool-headedness and fine-tuning would be possible once command and control systems came under the intense and unpredictable pressures of actual nuclear warfighting. Maximum deterrence logic and ED thus pushed deterrence theory into fantastic complications. The great chains of if-then propositions became so long, and rested on so many questionable assumptions about both technological performance and human behavior, that the credibility of the theory itself came into question. Even if the Cold War had not ended, deterrence theory was in trouble, and even at its peak it was never without challengers. Cold War Challengers to Mainstream Strategic Studies Strategic Studies definitely provided the foundation for ISS, but it was not unchallenged, nor was it an entirely uniform block as shown by for instance Snyder's and Bull's critical discussions of rational actor assumptions (Snyder, 1978; Bull, 1968). Peace Research (PR) had to a large extent constituted itself in opposition to Strategic Studies with Peace Researchers arguing that

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SS's assumptions of (elite) actor rationality and bipolar stability were not only wrong but dangerous. The devastation brought about by a nuclear exchange would be so enormous that one should not rely upon small elites to make such decisions (Sagan, 1 9 8 3 4 ) . Peace Researchers sometimes challenged the framework of bipolarity, mainly arguing that arms control, disarmament, a change from offensive t o defensive forces, and the acknowledgement of each other's legitimate existence could lower the levels of tension (Galtung, 1984; Common Security, 1982). Much of PR thus shared SS's conceptualization of security in political-military and state-based terms, but argued for a different analysis of the threats and dangers arising from nuclear deterrence. Perhaps the most conspicuous area of overlap was in the literature on arms control, which aimed at trying to stabilize the superpower-nuclear relationship by managing the types and numbers of weapons deployed (Bull, 1976). Arms control and much PR, can be seen as trying to give concerns about international security equal status alongside the mainly national security concerns of the early Strategic Studies literature. Underlying both was a normative critique of mainstream Strategic Studies for its failure to question sufficiently (or in some cases at all) the ethical implications of its state-centric focus on national security under nuclear conditions. Epistemologically, many Peace Researchers also adopted a rationalist and objectivist position: the Journal of Conflict Resolution and the journal of Peace Research featured studies built on clear assumptions of causality and quantitative analysis of large data sets. Carl Sagan's (1983-4) 'hardscience' yet evocative account of the climatic consequences of a nuclear war shows the objective and positivist nature of ISS challengers as well as the scope of critics. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was also devoted t o 'hard scientists' engaged in trying t o control and contain the consequences of the nuclear arms race. Other Peace Researchers worked more critically with the concept of security arguing that to privilege state security was t o leave out the security problems faced by many of the world's individuals. Individual security problems were numerous, but the most important (particularly in the Third World) were linked t o economic deprivation (poverty, malnutrition and hunger) and underdevelopment, t o 'structural violence' in Galtung's (1969) terminology. The report on Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament chaired by Olof Palme was key in this respect as its concept of Common Security successfully laid out a wider non-SS security agenda (Common Security, 1982; Dewitt, 1994). The majority of the report dealt with disarmament and was thus in line with the traditional PR approach to international security, but the report's first chapter also established a link between domestic and international security and North-South relations arguing that the Third World was highly negatively affected by global militarization which exacerbated the risk of 'economic failure and social disruption' (Common Security, 1982: 5 ) . Not a11 challengers to ISS self-identified as Peace Researchers and during the 1980s a series of approaches emerged which t o varying degrees argued

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for a revision of military-state-centric security. Barry Buzan's People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (1983) provided the first in-depth monograph on the concept of security with chapters on individual security and the international economic system, and Richard Ullman (1983; see also Buzan, 1984; Deudney, 1990) called for an expansion of security to include environmental and economic threats. These works helped define the basic structure of the widening debate which was to gain full force by the early 1990s: first, should the traditional focus of ISS on military-political threats (and means) be expanded to include environmental and economic threats as these were indeed more threatening to state survival than the nuclear weapons stabilized through successful deterrence? Second, should the privilege accorded to the state by the concept of national security be supplemented or replaced by a concept of internationallglobal security, individual security or non-state collectivities such as national, ethnic, racial and gendered groups? Many different answers have been given since the early 1980's: some wanted to expand the type of threats while being conservative in terms of keeping the state as the referent object, while others argued in favor of expanding to include non-state actors as well. The specific answers notwithstanding, the most significant change in ISS was the emergence of a distinct and explicit conceptual debate. One group of challengers argued that SS was an ethnocentric discipline in that it left out the Third World (unless it seriously impacted on superpower relations as during the Korean and Vietnamese Wars and the Cuban Missiles Crisis), built exclusively on American (or at least Western) authors, and perhaps most importantly relied upon a particular Western model of the state (Bull, 1976; Ayoob, 1983-84; Kolodziej, 1992; Krause, 1996; Barkawi, 2004). This presumably universal, but in fact particularly Western state, was uncritically applied to the non-Western world. But the legacy of colonialism, including the often arbitrary drawing of borders, implied that Third World states experienced distinct forms of security problems. One crucial difference was that internal security problems played a much larger role as states suffered from weak domestic political structures and poorly developed national communities (Ayoob, 1983-84; Krause, 1996). Most of what was written on Third World security during the 1980s was however concerned with national security, that is the domestic security problems the state was facing and the external consequences thereof. Only after the end of the Cold War did a distinct ISS literature develop that shifted the referent object from the state t o the individual and sub-state groups. Criticisms that more explicitly challenged the status of the state were argued by Poststructuralists and Feminists joining ISS in the latter half of the 1980s. Poststructuralists such as R.B.J. Walker, Richard Ashley, Michael Shapiro, Simon Dalby, James Der Derian and David Campbell held that the privilege accorded to the state in ISS rested upon the dominance that state sovereignty had gained from the Peace of Westphalia onwards. State sovereignty was not an inevitable condition, but constantly reproduced through political practices (with 'practices' covering both foreign and security policies and the academic disciplines of IR and ISS). State sovereignty offered a

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particular resolution to the questions of authority and security, but it was simultaneously a solution which made 'security' the prerogative of the state. Individuals gave up their right to define security - and pursue it - and invested it in the sovereign state, but this 'solution' meant that it became very difficult, if not impossible, to formulate a meaningful conception of 'individual security' or a collective conception of security below, above or across 'national security' (Walker, 1990; Williams, 1998). To challenge the 'national security' of ISS would require not simply calls for 'individual' or 'global' security as had been the case in parts of PR, but that the complexities at the heart of state sovereignty and the liberal theory on which it was based were reworked and reconstructed (Walker, 1990; Wazver, 1995). Poststructuralism in the 1980s was - as ISS in general - written in the light of the Cold War and the antagonistic relationship between the superpowers was the political context in which the Poststructuralist theory on identity and security developed. Poststructuralists argued that foreign and security policies were fundamentally about identity, that security policies had to formulate a narrative depicting a national Self against one or more threatening Others which might be concrete, as in the case of the Soviet Union, or abstract, as in the case of 'instability' (Dalby, 1988). Poststructuralism's concept of identity was relational, social (not a property of the individual, but argued in a public language and arena), and discursive (articulated through written and spoken statements). The Cold War and the construction of the Soviet Union provided Poststructuralists with many examples of the threatening Other (Dalby, 1988) and it was stressed how the construction of threatening Others on the outside was simultaneously part of producing domestic consensus and legitimacy around particular visions of 'America', 'the West' and 'NATO' (Klein, 1990). Poststructuralism's turn to discourse implied an important epistemological shift ( W w e r , 1995). Wolfers' distinction between security's objective and subjective dimensions had so far underpinned ISS in that discussions of rationality under deterrence had included subjective factors, but as 'filters' or 'misperceptions' distorting objective assessments of capabilities and intentions. The discursive conception of security introduced by Poststructuralism broke with this distinction, pointing neither to material capabilities nor beliefs as the explanatory variable, but to the way in which both were constituted and given meaning by ~oliticalactors (Cohn, 1987). Methodologically, this implied that the words and interpretations derided by scholars as diverse as Morgenthau (1952) and Galtung (1984) gained centerstage: it was the constitution of 'security', threats and enemies by politicians and institutions and the legitimation of policies and behavior which were to be examined. As Poststructuralism emerged as a distinct, critical perspective so did Feminism, in part as a consequence of how the two approaches were making a general impact on the Humanities and the Social Sciences (the driving force of academic debates), in part as a product of the political opposition to antagonistic policies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Feminist critiques were made of the gendered and disembodied language of deterrence (Cohn, 1987). Jean B. Elshtain (1987) showed how stereotypical constructions of men as warriors and women as supportive mothers and wives had

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underpinned Western thought and politics from classical Greece onwards, and it was argued that women faced concrete security problems overlooked by mainstream ISS, for instance as a consequence of the militarization of everyday life created by foreign bases (Enloe, 1989). Feminist work often took a multidimensional and multi-level approach tracing the links between military security, domestic and global economic structures, and gendered norms from particular groups of women in specific locales all the way up to the regional, national and international level (Enloe, 1989; Tickner, 2004). Conceptually as well as normatively this challenged Strategic Studies' approach to security: Strategic Studies had focused predominantly on the interactions between states, and to some extent on the state's ability to generate domestic order. Feminists stressed that 'national security' excluded a consideration of 'women's security', but that it also depended upon particular constructions of masculinity. Hence the goal was not to pitch 'women's security' against that of men's, but to show how men as well as women were cast into different identities that sustained a war-prone, Realist system. Epistemologically and methodologically the shift was equally striking: SS had focused on material capabilities, state behavior, and in some cases military and strategic rationality (Snyder, 1978) using quantitative methods or logical hypothetical reasoning when spinning out the scenarios of nuclear deterrence. Feminists argued in favor of making the definition of security dependent upon individuals' experiences (Tickner, 2004). On the one hand, 'experiences' were based on the individual's subjective definition, on the other it had to presuppose a collective subject ('women') for individual experiences to provide a meaningful concept of 'women's security'. As Rebecca Grant (1992) pointed out, this inherent tension always risked overwriting differences between women. These tensions aside, Feminist analysis broke important g o u n d for other approaches to emerge after the Cold War, in particular for Critical Security Studies (Booth, 1991; Wyn Jones, 1995) and anthropological studies linking micro- and macro-levels of analysis (Masco, 1999).

After the Cold War: Traditional versus Wider Security Agendas and Understandings

The ending of the Cold War was a benchmark event in the evolution of ISS. Much of the mainstream military-political agenda simply disappeared. Bipolarity - and the nuclear deterrence which surrounded it - had been the cornerstone of mainstream ISS for almost 40 years when the Cold War came to a halt. As a result mainstream ISS faced something of an institutional crisis, and approaches calling for a widening of security to include other sectors than the military and referent objects besides the state gained ground. The period from the early 1990s until September 11,2001 did not have one dominant event or political problem as had the Cold War to tie the discipline together. The war against Iraq in 1991, the rise of Japan or China, nuclear proliferation, the wars following the dissolution of Yugoslavia,

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humanitarian intervention in Somalia, and the war against Serbia in 1999 constituted some of the key events, but none of them structured an overarching internat~onalsecurlty agenda. The impact of this on ISS was not simply to end one line of approach and open the way to another. As the problematique of international security lost its dominant core and fragmented into multiple concerns, so also ISS evolved to match. The traditionalist core did not disappear, but it did lose ground to other approaches. There is thus quite a lot of continuity, but also a substantial change in the distribution of interest in various approaches. We characterized Cold War ISS as having one dominant (traditionalist) main stream with a number of challengers (Peace Research, Arms Control, Poststructuralism, Feminism, Postcolonialism) arrayed around it. During the 1990s this pattern changes to something more like a river delta where the main stream branches off into several streams, with none having a clear claim to be the main one. Arms Control, like the traditional approach generally, loses relevance because the strategic military threat has dropped away. Feminism, Postcolonialism and Poststructuralism continue to evolve as branches of ISS, and new branches based o n non-military agendas and Constructivist approaches join in. In this section we will look first at the continuities from the previous two sections, and then at the newer branches. The traditionalists remained robust, continuing to claim primacy, and pursuing a diverse post-Cold War military-political agenda. Their first concern, closely linked to neo-realism, was the debate over which polarity (multi- or uni-?) had replaced bipolarity, and the consequences thereof for US grand strategy (Goldgeier and McFaul, 1992; Huntington, 1993; Waltz, 1993; Posen and Ross, 1996-7; Kupchan, 1998; Huntington, 1999; Kagan, 2002). At the beginning of the Cold War this type of question had been settled relatively early, and the nature of the rival to the US became quickly and deeply sedirnented. The ending of the Cold War produced a much murkier international situation in which the nature and identity of the chall e n g e r ( ~to ) the US, if any, remained unclear: Japan and China were given particular concern (Waltz, 1993; Katzenstein and Okawara, 1993) as was the potential rise of an Islamic civilization (Huntington, 1993). The question of appropriate US strategy remained open for a longer time. Traditionalists also remained concerned with the strategic impact of technology, though now largely delinked from Cold War worries about nuclear deterrence. Discussions about defenses against BMD, and US policy debates ahout this, continued. So also did the debate about nuclear proliferation (Walker, 2000), though increasingly both of these themes were linked to so-called 'rogue states' (especially Iran, Iraq, North Korea) unwilling to abide by Western rules of the game. The technology theme was also featured in debate about the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA, see Paarlberg, 2004), which was mainly concerned with the impact of computing, surveillance and communications technologies on battlefield management. Conceptually an important shift within traditionalist ISS was to explicitly integrate the importance of sub-state conflicts and actors. Cold War Strategic Studies had only to a limited extent examined the impact of (or on)

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non-state actors, an analytical decision supported by the fact that while both the US and the Soviet Union worked to create allies, they did not generally intervene in defense of populations caught in the throes of civil war or murderous dictators. The end of the Cold War changed this as intra-state and ethnic conflicts became more prominent than inter-state wars and cases like the former Yugoslavia and Somalia extensively covered by the global media. Humanitarian interventions were undertaken in response with the goal of protecting civilian populations, although not necessarily to end the war itself (Posen and Ross, 1996-7; Fierke, 1996). (neo)realists responded by arguing that their theory was as adequate for analyzing conflicts at the intra-state level as at the international one (Posen, 1993). It was not tied to state security, but defined by the question of organized violence (Walt, 1991; Krause, 1996). Traditionalists did not just pursue their own agenda, but mounted a counterattack against the drive towards widening the security agenda that had begun during the 1980s (see previous section) and gathered strength during the 1990s (Nye and Lynn-Jones, 1988; Walt, 1991; Kolodziej, 1992; Baldwin, 1995; Betts, 1997). A significant change from the 1980s was that a more explicit debate on security emerged. The concepts of 'wideners' and 'deepeners' were coined (Krause and Williams, 1996), writers discussed where they fitted into the disciplinary landscape and more schools and labels were introduced in addition to Poststructuralism and Feminism which continued to grow. The least controversial wideners were those who followed the earlier lead of taking a conception of national (state) security and linking militarypolitical security to questions of the environment, ethnicity, economy or health while taking a largely objective and materialist (and often rather empirical) approach. Another group of challengers was made up of mostly American Constructivist scholars who worked with the concepts of culture, norms, ideas and identity to show how these constrained and enabled state behavior in ways that material explanations could not account for (Katzenstein and Okawara, 1993; Risse-Kappen, 1996; Krause, 1996; Price, 1995; Adler, 1997). This form of Constructivism grew out of the larger epistemological debate in IR between Rationalists and Reflectivists already under way by the late 1980s and did not directly challenge state-centrism: it allowed for ideational factors and non-state actors, particular international institutions, but this was with the aim of explaining the pursuit of state security (usually through the critique of Rationalist [Realist] Realist approaches), not to challenge its definition. Gradually the Constructivist camp divided into a 'mainstream' and a 'critical' position and the latter shifted the focus from the ideational and state-centric approach of 'mainstream Constructivism' to the study of linguistic and narrative structures in foreign policy texts and to the way they legitimized and produced security and identity for example in the American responses to the Cuban Missiles Crisis or the Western policies towards the Bosnian War (Weldes, 1996; Fierke, 1996). Critical Constructivists also showed how competing representations were possible, but marginalized by

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state discourse. This move from Conventional to Critical Constructivism implied a stronger concern with the politics of representation and hence a substantial and epistemological affinity t o Poststructuralism. Both forms of Constructivism were significant for bringing the study of ideational, linguistic and discursive issues to the ISS mainstream, yet, Constructivists have not to a similar extent as the Copenhagen School, Critical Security Studies, or the Human Security approach explicitly addressed the concept of security. Most of the explicit widening debate was thus carried out in Europe, in part perhaps due to a stronger PR influence and an ensuing concern with 'security' rather than social science epistemologies. One interpretation of this development is that ISS becomes less dominated by American scholars, another that the discipline bifurcates into two (increasingly separate) sets of debates, concepts and epistemologies. Probably the most successful attempt to capture the attention of the ISS mainstream while simultaneously reworking and widening the concept of security has been made by the Copenhagen School. Its first major conceptual innovation was the concept of 'societal security' (Wasver et al., 1993) which had 'society' as its referent object rather than the state (McSweeney, 1996; Krause and Williams, 1996; Huysmans, 1998). Societal security referred to questions of collective identity (national, ethnic, racial, religious) and was intended to provide a solution to the long-standing and unresolved debate between the traditional concept of 'national' (state) security on the one hand and the PR concepts of individual and global security on the other. 'National security' only identified threats to the state, while 'individual security' had no theory of how individual insecurities were to be collectively decided and prioritized (Wzver, 1995). 'Societal security' pointed to threats posed to societal groups by the state and to the importance of societal cohesion and identity: individuals were part of society, not separate from it, but their security was not identical to that of the state either. The second major conceptual innovation was Ole Waxer's 'securitization' theory which argued that 'security' was a speech act with a 'particular rhetorical and semiotic structure' that constituted something as 'an existential threat' with a particular 'priority and urgency' that allowed 'the securitizing actor' 'to break free of procedures or rules he or she would otherwise be bound by' (Buzan et al., 1998: 25). As 'security' is a particular and exceptional - form o f politics, the Copenhagen School argued, it is not necessarily preferable to constitute something as a security problem as this might easily mobilize an us-them logic and take the issue out of 'normal politics' and into the closed corridors of the Foreign Office. The politics and ethics involved in securitization need therefore to be carefully considered in the light o f exactly how security discourses constitute threats and subjects and with what policy result (Elbe, 2006). The ambition of 'securitization' paralleled 'societal security' in that it too sought to solve the individual-national security dilemma. Security could in principle be anything as long as it was discursively articulated as so by securitizing actors. Securitizing actors articulate threats in reference to a

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referent object usually located at the 'middle scale of limited collectivities', larger than the individual and smaller than humanity (Buzan et al., 1998: 36). However, since 'societal security is about large, self-sustaining identity groups' (Buzan et al., 1998: 119), it becomes difficult to analyze the potential insecurity of groups or individuals whose identity is produced through links to other identities (Hansen, 2000). Securitizing actors are usually top politicians, representatives of the armed forces or international institutions (NATO, the EU, the UN); the media and more marginal political actors might in some cases succeed to push governments into action. The Copenhagen School could thus be said to take a rather conventional view on who defines security and hence also on how societal interests and identities are constructed and represented (McSweeney, 1996; Huysmans, 1998). The School has also been criticized for overlooking how an institutionalized field of security comprised by the everyday practices of the police and governmental bureaucracies is implicated in national security policies (Bigo, 2002). Securitization theory has spawned a growing empirical research agenda, yet it has also generated criticism, particularly from approaches that advocate a more radical expansion of the concept of security. One of the most significant challengers has been CSS, specifically its so-called 'Welsh contingent', whose most prominent scholars are Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones. To Ken Booth, the Copenhagen School is 'state-centric, discourse-dominated, and conservative' (Booth, 2005: 271). CSS can in some ways be seen as an extension of the normative agenda of PR, but with Critical Theory instead of positivist methodologies (Jones, 1995). In Booth's (1991: 319-20) view, 'individual humans are the ultimate referent' for security as states are unreliable providers of security and too diverse to provide for 'a comprehensive theory of security'. For Wyn Jones (1995: 309), it is 'the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security' and 'common humanity' which should be at the heart of ISS. Central to CSS is the concept of emancipation, by Booth (1991: 3 19) defined as 'the freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do'. 'Individual security' creates a link from the older PR traditions through CSS to Human Security, a perspective that started out as a concept formulated by UNDP (1994), but which has subsequently gained academic attention and a certain prominence in the policy world. The UNDP report clearly opted for a widening of security arguing that, 'The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of a nuclear holocaust. It has been related more to nation-states than to people' (UNDP, 1994: 22). In response, Human Security is 'a universal concern', it emphasizes interdependence between different forms of threats, it encourages early prevention, and it is 'people-centred' (UNDP, 1994: 22-23). Human Security in its original formulation was an attempt to link development to security and its adoption by ISS has been

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predominantly as part of a CSS agenda or in an attack on neo-liberal economics and globalization which are seen as deepening already stark global inequalities (Thomas, 2001). The concept of Human Security has been the subject of widespread academic critique most of which evolves around the vagueness of making 'the human' the referent object (Paris, 2001). As 'individual security' before it, it confronts the of how a globe of individual insecurities are to he added up: if security is about assigning priorities t o particular issues, who is going to define which individual insecurities are more important? And who should be enforcing these decisions? Since 'humans' never appear as atomistic entities, stripped of their (collective) identities, to define 'human security' must imply a vision of how collective security is formulated and by whom. These conceptual weaknesses have not however prevented Human Security from becoming a prominent concept on the policy agenda of the UN, the EU, and of active internationalist states like Canada and Norway (Suhrke, 1999),and it has been supported by a series of foundations. What we have is thus an interesting case of a security concept (much like Common Security before it) making its way into ISS, not primarily through the scholarly community, but as a result of the pressure from (parts of) the driving force of Institutionalization.

The terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001 was definitely a key event but whether or not the subsequent 'global War on Terror' (CWoT) defines a new era of international security remains an open question. Whether it does or not hinges on the American ability to securitize 'terrorism' as a ,global threat and have this securitization accepted by at least its major allies and the great powers. If so (and the possibility is plausible if not certain), then the GWoT would provide a new core framing for ISS of a kind that has been absent since the end o f the Cold War. Certainly there is a noticeable new preoccupation with security actors other than the state, mainly terrorists (Barkawi, 2004; Der Derian, 2005), but also private military companies. Concern with terrorism is of course not new, with the literature stretching back into the Cold War. But the earlier literature dealt with terrorism as a peripheral problem to the main core of ISS concerns, not the central one. The situation however is nothing like that at the early stages of the Cold War when the identity of 'the enemy' crystallized quickly and attracted a broad consensus in the West. The GWoT itself, and particularly the characterization of 'terrorism' and the identity of 'terrorists' remain heavily contested, and the Bush administration's portrait of itfthem has done as much to divide the West as to unite it (Andreani, 2004-5). At the time of writing it remains to be seen whether the unfolding disaster of the US-led intervention in Iraq will do more to discredit or reinforce the GWoT. Against the idea of a new era in ISS is the fact that the traditional preoccupations of great power politics remain strong and that this might make other states reluctant to comply with the American articulation of the

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terrorist threat and in particular in granting the US a privileged position in combating it. The US in turn might question the sincerity and ability of other states to engage in the war, and thus embark on a classical balance of power politics against rising states. The debate about US grand strategy cited above is much less concerned with terrorism than with the thoroughly traditional fixation on the balance of power, and the possible rise of great power challengers to the US, principally China and the EU. Great power politics could easily return to dominate the security agenda, though given the arguments for democratic peace, that is not inevitable either. Terrorists certainly do pose a potentially severe threat to public peace and order. But they do not represent a plausible alternative political order in the way that the Soviet Union did, and future great power challengers might do. Unless the direst predictions about terrorists and weapons of mass destruction come to pass, it may well be that the concern with terrorism that dominated the agenda post September 11, might prove to be a transitory obsession rather than something that defines a strategic era. If the GWoT does prove durable, what does this signify for the directions of ISS? Was the agenda widening of the 1990s just a response to the temporary eclipse of military concerns, or do the ideas of democratic peace, societal and human security and the use of constructivist and other postpositivist approaches suggest a deeper and more durable transformation? It may well be too early to tell a mere six years from 2001, but so far the signs are that ISS will retain its multi-stream mode. There is of course an adjustment to take on board the GWoT as a topic, but far from returning ISS to a single dominant mainstream, this has just given a new subject that all of the approaches to ISS can and do address. All have to deal with the fact that the securitization legitimating the GWoT evolves around an elusive subject 'the networked Islamic terrorist' - which the Western states have difficulties comprehending. Yet it is a subject that allows the state to suspend public and private rights, to restrict immigration and to securitize a wide range of 'foreign' peoples and places. Looking at the ISS literature since 2001 does not give the impression that the form it took on during the 1990s is going to change in any major way. Traditionalists are still concerned about US Grand Strategy (Kagan, 2002), nuclear proliferation, the RMA, and BMD. The Copenhagen School continues to develop its ideas about securitization and regional security (Buzan and Wzver, 2003). Poststructuralists pit their analytical techniques against the GWoT (Der Derian, 2005) and the boundaries between domestic and international security (Bigo, 2002). Feminists have analyzed the gendering of the GWoT (Tickner, 2002; Agathangelou and Ling, 2004), and advocates of Human Security and CSS continue their criticism of statecentrism. Wideners point out the salience of threats from the environment and elsewhere (Elbe, 2006), and those concerned with the conceptual histories of security probe its origins and their significance for how its political usage has evolved (Neocleous, 2006).

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ISS will continue to adapt, as it has done since its birth, to changes in the public policy environment that define what constitutes international security for any given time and place. It will thus continue to be sensitive to changes in great power politics and the distribution of power, and to changes in technology that affect the use of force. It will be shoved and shaped by militarypolitical events such as 911 1 and the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as by events in other sectors, be it rises in sea level, the spread of a new plague, or changes in the way identities play into the realm of security. It seems likely that for some time yet the US will remain central to ISS (as both subject and main generator of ISS literature), meaning that its domestic politics will continue to influence the field in a big way. And so long as academic life goes on, one can be sure that new fashions and new ways of thinking will make their impact on how ISS evolves. What seems unlikely to us is that ISS will ever return to its Cold War form of a single dominant sector and a single dominant mode of analysis. The widening and deepenings that started during the Cold War and flowered during the 1990s are here to stay, even though the balance of influence among them will vary from place to place and time to time. All the new approaches have put down roots, made recognized contributions to understanding, established audiences for their work, and begun to reproduce themselves through the training o f next generations. ISS has become, and will remain, the multichanneled field that was hinted at when the concept of security first rose to prominence, but which got temporarily lost during the obsession with nuclear deterrence that marked the 'golden age' of the Cold War.

References A g ~ t h a n g e l o Anna ~ ~ , M. and Ling, L.H.M. (2004) 'Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence ~ l n d Des~re from September I l ' , lntrrnational Studies Qirarterly, 4813): 517-38. Hooth, Ken ( r d . ) (2005) Critrcal Security Studies and World Polltrcs. B o ~ ~ l d eCo.: r 1.ynne K~enner. Huzan, Rarry (1983) Peof~le,States 8 Fear: T h c Nat/onizl .Set-rrrrt)' Problcwz in Internatroni71 RcL7tions. Brighton: Wheatsheaf. K u ~ a n ,Barry and W ~ v e r ,Ole (200.3) Regior~sand P(jtoers: The Structure of l ~ t ~ r n a t ~ o t z ~ z l e: IJniversity Press. Security. C ~ ~ n b r i d g Cambridge Buyan, Karl-y, W m e r , Ole and de Wilde, J m p (1998) .Security: A Nezc~Frurnezlwrk for Co.: Lvnne Rienner. A ~ z u l ~ s iBoulder s. Elshta~n,Jean B. (1987) W o m e n and War. Ch~cago:The Univers~cyof Chicdgo Press. Galrung, Johan ( I 969) 'Violence, Peace, and Peace Research', Journal of Peace Research, 6(3): 167-91. Keoh.ine, Robert 0. ( 1 988) 'Internat~onalInstitutions: Two Approaches', Intertzati~~nnl Studies Qutrrterly, 32(4): 379-96. Tickner, J. A n n (2002) 'Feminist Perspectives on 911 l', lnternatzond Studies P c r ~ p ~ r t i v e3(4): s, 333-50. Wsver, Ole, Buzan, Barry, Kelstrup, Morten and Lemaitre, Pierre (1993) Identity, Migmtion m i l the Nrtij S ~ c ~ i r iAgenda ty in Europe. London: Pinter.

XI

Editors' Introduction Recommended Books on ISS

Allison, Graham (1971) Essence of Decis~on:Explaining the Cuba Missile Crisis. Boston: Little Brown. Bigo, Didier (2007) Polrcing Insecurity Today: Defense and Internal Security. Bas~ngstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brodie, Bernard (1946) The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Pouter and World Order. New York: Harcourt Brace. Bull, Hedley (1961) The Control of the Arms Race. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Buzan, Barry (1987) An lntroductron t o Strategic Studies: Military Technology m d International Relations. London: Macmillan. Campbell, David (1998) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy arid the Politrcs of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd edition. Evangelists, Matthew (1988)Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop N e w Military Technologies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Freedman, Lawrence (1981)The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. London: ~Macmillan. Gray, Colin (1982) Strategic Studies: A Critical Assessment. London: Aldwych Press. Hansen, Lene (2006) Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War. Imndon: Routledge. Jervis, Robert (1976) Perception and Misperception in lnternatronal Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. n~ the Unthinkable. New York: Horizon Press. Kahn, Herman (1962) ~ h i n k r About Kaplan, Fred M. (1983) The Wizards of Armageddon. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kapstein, Ethan B. and Mastanduno, Michael (eds.) (1999) Unipolar Politics: Reolisnr and State Strategies after the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press. Katzenstein, Peter (ed.) (1996) The Culture of Natiotzal Security. New York: Columbia University Press. Knorr, Klaus (1966) O n the Uses of Military Power In the Nuclear Age. Princeton, N J : Princeton University Press. Kolodziej, Edward A. (2005) Security and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mearsheimer, John (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: Norton. Morgan, Patrick (1977, 1983) Deterrence: A Conceptrral Analysrs. London: Sage. Rapoport, Anatol (1964) Strategy and Conscience. New York: Harper and Row. Russett, Bruce (1983) The Prisoners of Insecurrty. San Francisco: Freeman. Schelling, Thomas (1966)Arms and Influence. New Ha5en: Yale University Press. Sheehan, Michael (2005) International Security: A n Analytical Survey. Boulder Co.: Lynne Rienner. Singer, J. David (1962) Deterrence, Arms Control and Disarmament. Columbus Ohio: Ohio State University Press. Tickner, J. Ann (2001) Gendering World Politrcs: Issues and Approaches rn the Post-Cold War Era. New York: Columbia University Press.

The Sources o f Soviet Conduct X

T

he political personality of Soviet power as we know it today is the product of ideology and circumstances: ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in Russia. There can be few tasks of psychological analysis more difficult than to try to trace the interaction of these two forces and the relative r6le of each in the determination of official Soviet conduct. Yet the attempt must be made if that conduct is to he understood and effectively countered. It is difficult to summarize the set of ideological concepts with which the Soviet leaders came into power. Marxian ideology, in its Russian-Communist projection, has always been in process of subtle evolution. The materials on which it bases itself are extensive and complex. But the outstanding features of Communist thought as it existed in 1916 may perhaps be summarized as follows: ( a ) that the central factor in the life of man, the factor which determines the character of public life and the "physiognomy of society," is the system by which material goods are produced and exchanged; ( b ) that the capitalist system of production is a nefarious one which inevitably leads to the exploitation of the working class by the capital-owning class and is incapable of developing adequately the econonlic resources of society or of distributing fairly the material goods produced by human labor; (c)that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and must, in view of the inability of the capital-owning class to adjust itself to economic change, result eventually and inescapably in a revolutionary transfer of power to the working class; and ( d )that imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, leads directly to war and revolution. The rest may be outlined in Lenin's own words: "Unevenness of economic and political development is the inflexible law of capitalism. It follows from this that the victory of Socialism may come originally in a few capitalist countries or even in a single capitalist country. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and having Source: korezgn Affnrrs, 25(4) (1947):566-82.

2

T h e Cold War a n d Nuclear D e t e r r e n c e

organized Socialist production at home, would rise against the remaining capitalist world, drawing to itself in the process the oppressed classes of other countries."' It must be noted that there was no assumption that capitalism would perish without proletarian revolution. A final push was needed from a revolutionary proletariat movement in order to tip over the tottering structure. But it was regarded as inevitable that sooner or later that push be given. For 50 years prior to the outbreak of the Revolution, this pattern of thought had exercised great fascination for the members of the Russian revolutionary movement. Frustrated, discontented, hopeless of finding selfexpression - or too impatient to seek it - in the confining limits of the Tsarist political system, yet lacking wide popular support for their choice of bloody revolution as a means of social betterment, these revolutionists found in Marxist theory a highly convenient rationalization for their own instinctive desires. It afforded pseudo-scientific justification for their impatience, for their categoric denial of all value in the Tsarist system, for their yearning for power and revenge and for their inclination to cut corners in the pursuit of it. It is therefore n o wonder that they had come to believe implicitly in the truth and soundness of the Marxian-Leninist teachings, so congenial t o their own impulses and emotions. Their sincerity need not be impugned. This is a phenomenon as old as human nature itself. It has never been more aptly described than by Edward Gibbon, who wrote in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire": "From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud." And it was with this set of conceptions that the members of the Bolshevik Party entered into power. Now it must be noted that through all the years of preparation for revolution, the attention of these men, as indeed of Marx himself, had been centered less on the future form which Socialism2 would take than on the necessary overthrow of rival power which, in their view, had to precede the introduction of Socialism. Their views, therefore, on the positive program to be put into effect, once power was attained, were for the most part nebulous, visionary and impractical. Beyond the nationalization of industry and the expropriation of large private capital holdings there was no agreed program. The treatment of the peasantry, which according to the Marxist formulation was not of the proletariat, had always been a vague spot in the pattern of Communist thought; and it remained an object of controversy and vacillation for the first ten years of Communist power. The circumstances of the immediate post-revolution period - the existence in Russia of civil war and foreign intervention, together with the obvious fact that the Communists represented only a tiny minority of the Russian people - made the establishment of dictatorial power a necessity. The experiment with "war Communism" and the abrupt attempt to eliminate private production and trade had unfortunate economic consequences and caused

Y The Sources of Soviet Conduct

3

further bitterness against the new revolutionary regime. While the temporary relaxation of the effort to communize Russia, represented by the New Economic Policy, alleviated some of this economic distress and thereby served its purpose, it also made it evident that the "capitalistic sector of society" was still prepared to profit at once from any relaxation of governmental pressure, and would, if permitted to continue to exist, always constitute a powerful opposing element to the Soviet rCgime and a serious rival for influence in the country. Somewhat the same situation prevailed with respect to the individual peasant who, in his own small way, was also a private producer. Lenin, had he lived, might have proved a great enough man to reconcile these conflicting forces to the ultimate benefit of Russian society, though this is questionable. But be that as it may, Stalin, and those whom he led in the struggle for succession to Lenin's position of leadership, were not the men to tolerate rival political forces in the sphere of power which they coveted. Their sense of insecurity was too great. Their particular brand of fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power. From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent and peaceful coexistence of rival forces. Easily persuaded of their own doctrinaire "rightness," they insisted on the submission or destruction of all competing power. Outside of the Communist Party, Russian society was to have no rigidity. There were to be no forms of collective human activity or association which would not be dominated by the Party. N o other force in Russian society was to be permitted to achieve vitality or integrity. Only the Party was to have structure. All else was to be an amorphous mass. And within the Party the same principle was to apply. The mass of Party members might go through the motions of election, deliberation, decision and action; but in these motions they were to be animated not by their own individual wills but by the awesome breath of the Party leadership and the overbrooding presence of "the word." Let it be stressed again that subjectively these men probably did not seek absolutism for its own sake. They doubtless believed - and found it easy to believe - that they alone knew what was good for society and that they would accomplish that good once their power was secure and unchallengeable. But in seeking that security of their own rule they were prepared to recognize no restrictions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods. And until such time as that security might be achieved, they placed far down on their scale of operational priorities the comforts and happiness of the peoples entrusted to their care. Now the outstanding circumstance concerning the Soviet rkgime is that down to the present day this process of political consolidation has never been completed and the men in the Kremlin have continued to be predominantly absorbed with the struggle to secure and make absolute the power which they seized in November 1917. They have endeavored to secure it

4

T h e Cold War a n d Nuclear Deterrence

primarily against forces at home, within Soviet society itself. But they have also endeavored to secure it against the outside world. For ideology, as we have seen, taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders. The powerful hands of Russian history and tradition reached up to sustain them in this feeling. Finally, their own aggressive intransigence with respect to the outside world began to find its own reaction; and they were soon forced, to use another Gibbonesque phrase, "to chastise the contumacy" which they themselves had provoked. It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually t o be right. Now it lies in the nature of the mental world of the Soviet leaders, as well as in the character of their ideology, that no opposition to them can be officially recognized as having any merit or justification whatsoever. Such opposition can flow, in theory, only from the hostile and incorrigible forces of dying capitalism. As long as remnants of capitalism were officially recognized as existing in Russia, it was possible to place on them, as an internal element, part of the blame for the maintenance of a dictatorial form of society. But as these remnants were liquidated, little by little, this justification fell away; and when it was indicated officially that they had been finally destroyed, it disappeared altogether. And this fact created one of the most basic of the compulsions which came to act upon the Soviet regime: since capitalism no longer existed in Russia and since it could not be admitted that there could be serious or widespread opposition to the Kremlin springing spontaneously from the liberated masses under its authority, it became necessary to justify the retention of the dictatorship by stressing the menace of capitalism abroad. This began at an early date. In 1924 Stalin specifically defended the retention of the "organs of suppression," meaning, among others, the army and the secret ~ o l i c e ,on the ground that "as long as there is a capitalist encirclement there will be danger of intervention with all the consequences that flow from that danger." In accordance with that theory, and from that time on, all internal opposition forces in Russia have consistently been portrayed as the agents of foreign forces of reaction antagonistic to Soviet power. By the same token, tremendous emphasis has been placed on the original Communist thesis of a basic antagonism between the capitalist and Socialist worlds. It is clear, from many indications, that this emphasis is not founded in reality. The real facts concerning it have been confused by the existence abroad of genuine resentment provoked by Soviet philosophy and tactics and occasionally by the existence of great centers of military power, notably the Nazi rCgime in Germany and the Japanese Government of the late 1930's, which did indeed have aggressive designs against the Soviet Union. But there is ample evidence that the stress laid in Moscow on the menace confronting Soviet society from the world outside its borders is founded not in the realities of foreign antagonism but in the necessity of explaining away the maintenance of dictatorial authority at home.

\

T h e S o u r c e s of Soviet Conduct

5

Now the maintenance of this pattern of Soviet power, namely, the pursuit of unlimited authority domestically, accompanied by the cultivation of the semi-myth of implacable foreign hostility, has gone far to shape the actual machinery of Soviet power as we know it today. Internal organs of administration which did not serve this purpose withered on the vine. Organs which did serve this purpose became vastly swollen. The security of Soviet power came to rest on the iron discipline of the Party, on the severity and ubiquity of the secret police, and on the uncompromising economic monopolism of the state. The "organs of suppression," in which the Soviet leaders had sought security from rival forces, became in large measure the masters of those whom they were designed to serve. Today the major part of the structure of Soviet power is committed to the perfection of the dictatorship and to the maintenance of the concept of Russia as in a state of siege, with the enemy lowering beyond the walls. And the millions of human beings who form that part of the structure of power must defend at all costs this concept of Russia's position, for without it they are themselves superfluous. As things stand today, the rulers can no longer dream of parting with these organs of suppression. The quest for absolute power, pursued now for nearly three decades with a ruthlessness unparalleled (in scope at least) in modern times, has again produced internally, as it did externally, its own reaction. The excesses of the police apparatus have fanned the potential opposition to the regime into something far greater and more dangerous than it could have been before those excesses began. But least of all can the rulers dispense with the fiction by which the maintenance of dictatorial power has been defended. For this fiction has hcen canonized in Soviet philosophy by the excesses already committed in its name; and it is now anchored in the Soviet structure of thought by bonds far greater than those of mere ideology.

So much for the historical background. What does it spell in t e r m of the political personality of Soviet power as we know it today? Of the original ideology, nothing has been officially junked. Relief is maintained in the basic badness of capitalism, in the inevitability of its destruction, in the obligation of the to assist in that destruction and to take power into its own hands. But stress has come to be laid primarily on those concepts which relate most specifically to the Soviet regime itself: to its position as the sole truly Socialist rkgime in a dark and misguided world, and to the relationships of power within it. The first of these concepts is that of the innate antagonism between capitalism and Socialism. We have seen how deeply that concept has become imbedded in foundations of Soviet power. It has profound implications for Russia's conduct as a member of international society. It means that there can never be on Moscow's side any sincere assumption of a community of

6

The Cold War and Nuclear Deterrence

aims between the Soviet Union and powers which are regarded as capitalist. It must invariably be assumed in Moscow that the aims of the capitalist world are antagonistic to the Soviet regime, and therefore to the interests of the peoples it controls. If the Soviet Government occasionally sets its signature t o documents which would indicate the contrary, this is to be regarded as a tactical maneuvre permissible in dealing with the enemy (who is without honor) and should be taken in the spirit of caveat emptor. Basically, the antagonism remains. It is postulated. And from it flow many of the phenomena which we find disturbing in the Kremlin's conduct of foreign policy: the secretiveness, the lack of frankness, the duplicity, the wary suspiciousness, and the basic unfriendliness of purpose. These phenomena are there to stay, for the foreseeable future. There can be variations of degree and of emphasis. When there is something the Russians want from us, one or the other of these features of their policy may be thrust temporarily into the background; and when that happens there will always be Americans who will leap forward with gleeful announcements that "the Russians have changed," and some who will even try to take credit for having brought about such "changes." But we should not be misled by tactical maneuvres. These characteristics of Soviet policy, like the postulate from which they flow, are basic to the internal nature of Soviet power, and will be with us, whether in the foreground or the background, until the internal nature of Soviet power is changed. This means that we are going to continue for a long time to find the Russians difficult to deal with. It does not mean that they should be considered as embarked upon a do-or-die program to overthrow our society by a given date. The theory of the inevitability of the eventual fall of capitalism has the fortunate connotation that there is no hurry about it. The forces of progress can take their time in preparing the final coup de grice. Meanwhile, what is vital is that the "Socialist fatherland" - that oasis of power which has been already won for Socialism in the person of the Soviet Union - should be cherished and defended by all good Communists at home and abroad, its fortunes promoted, its enemies badgered and confounded. The promotion of premature, "adventuristic" revolutionary projects abroad which might embarrass Soviet power in any way would be an inexcusable, even a counter-revolutionary act. The cause of Socialism is the support and promotion of Soviet power, as defined in Moscow. This brings us to the second of the concepts important to contemporary Soviet outlook. That is the infallibility of the Kremlin. The Soviet concept of power, which permits no focal points of organization outside the Party itself, requires that the Party leadership remain in theory the sole repository of truth. For if truth were t o be found elsewhere, there would be justification for its expression in organized activity. But it is precisely that which the Kremlin cannot and will not permit. The leadership of the Communist Party is therefore always right, and has been always right ever since in 1929 Stalin formalized his personal

X

The Sources of Soviet Conduct

7

power by announcing that decisions of the Politburo were being taken unanin~ously. O n the principle of infallibility there rests the iron discipline of the Communist Party. In fact, the two concepts are mutually self-supporting. Perfect discipline requires recognition of infallibility. Infallibility requires the observance of discipline. And the two together go far to determine the behaviorism of the entire Soviet apparatus of power. But their effect cannot be understood unless a third factor be taken into account: namely, the fact that the leadership is at liberty to put forward for tactical purposes any particular thesis which it finds useful to the cause a t any particular moment and to require the faithful and unquestioning acceptance of that thesis by the menihers of the movement as a whole. This means that truth is not a constant but is actually created, for all intents and purposes, by the Soviet leaders themselves. It may vary from week to week, from month to month. It is nothing absolute and immutable - nothing which flows from objective reality. It is only the most recent manifestation of the wisdom of those in whom the ultimate wisdom is supposed to reside, because they represent the logic of history. The accumulative effect of these factors is to give to the whole subordinate apparatus of Soviet power an unshakeable stubbornness and steadfastness in its orientation. This orientation can he changed at will by the Kremlin but hy n o other power. Once a given party line has been laid down on a given issue of current policy, the whole Soviet governmental machine, including the mechanism of diplomacy, moves inexorably along the prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force. The individuals who are the components of this machine are unamenable t o argument or reason which comes to them from outside sources. Their whole training has taught them to mistrust and discount the glib persuasiveness of the outside world. Like the white dog before the phonograph, they hear only the "master's voice." And if they are to be called off from the purposes last dictated to them, it is the master who must call them off. Thus the foreign representative cannot hope that his words will make any impression on them. The most that he can hope is that they will be transmitted to those a t the top, who are capable of changing the party line. But even those are not likely to be swayed by any normal logic in the words of the bourgeois representative. Since there can be n o appeal t o common purposes, there can be n o appeal to common mental approaches. For this reason, facts speak louder than words to the ears of the Krenllin; and words carry the greatest weight when they have the ring of reflecting, or being backed up by, facts of unchallengeable validity. But we have seen that the Kremlin is under no ideological compulsion to accon~plishits purposes in a hurry. Like the Church, it is dealing in ideological concepts which are of long-term validity, and it can afford t o be patient. It has no right to risk the existing achievements of the revolution for the sake o f vain baubles of the future. The very teachings of Lenin himself require great caution and flexibility in the pursuit of Communist purposes.

8

The C o l d War a n d N u c l e a r D e t e r r e n c e

Again, these precepts are fortified by the lessons of Russian history: of centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast unfortified plain. Here caution, circumspection, flexibility and deception are the valuable qualities; and their value finds natural appreciation in the Russian or the oriental mind. Thus the Kremlin has no compunction about retreating in the face of superior force. And being under the compulsion of no timetable, it does not get panicky under the necessity for such retreat. Its political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power. But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these philosophically and accommodates itself to them. The main thing is that there should always be pressure, unceasing constant pressure, toward the desired goal. There is no trace of any feeling in Soviet psychology that that goal must be reached at any given time. These considerations make Soviet diplomacy at once easier and more difficult to deal with than the diplomacy of individual aggressive leaders like Napoleon and Hitler. O n the one hand it is more sensitive to contrary force, more ready to yield on individual sectors of the diplomatic front when that force is felt to be too strong, and thus more rational in the logic and rhetoric of power. O n the other hand it cannot be easily defeated or discouraged by a single victory on the part of its opponents. And the patient persistence by which it is animated means that it can be effectively countered not by sporadic acts which represent the momentary whims of democratic opinion but only by intelligent long-range policies on the part of Russia's adversaries - policies no less steady in their purpose, and no less variegated and resourceful in their application, than those of the Soviet Union itself. In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. It is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to d o with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward "toughness." While the Kremlin is basically flexible in its reaction to political realities, it is by no means unamenable to considerations of prestige. Like almost any other government, it can be placed by tactless and threatening gestures in a position where it cannot afford to yield even though this might be dictated by its sense of realism. The Russian leaders are keen judges of human psychology, and as such they are highly conscious that loss of temper and of self-control is never a source of strength in political affairs. They are quick to exploit such evidences of weakness. For these reasons, it is a sine qua non of successful dealing with Russia that the foreign government in question should remain at all times cool and collected and that its demands on Russian policy should be put forward in such a manner as to leave the way open for a compliance not too detrimental to Russian prestige.

The Sources of Soviet Conduct

9

In the light of the above, it will be clearly seen that the Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force a t a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manceuvres of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed o r talked out of existence. The Russians look forward t o a duel of infinite duration, and they see that already they have scored great successes. It must be borne in mind that there was a time when the Communist Party represented far more of a minority in the sphere of Russian national life than Soviet power today represents in the world community. But if ideology convinces the rulers of Russia that truth is on their side and that they can therefore afford to wait, those of us o n w h o m that ideology has n o claim are free to examine objectively the validity o f that premise. The Soviet thesis not only implies complete lack of control by the west over its own economic destiny, it likewise assumes Russian unity, discipline and patience over an infinite period. Let us bring this apocalyptic vision down to earth, and suppose that the western world finds the strength and resourcef~~lness to contain Soviet power over a period of ten to fifteen years. What does that spell for Russia itself? The Soviet leaders, taking advantage of the contributions of modern technique to the arts of despotism, have solved the question of obedience within the confines o f their power. Few challenge their authority; and even those w h o d o are unable t o make that challenge valid as against the organs of suppression of the state. The Kremlin has also proved able t o accomplish its purpose of building up in Russia, regardless of the interests of the inhabitants, an industrial foundation of heavy metallurgy, which is, t o be sure, not yet complete but which is nevertheless continuing t o grow and is approaching those of the other major industrial countries. All of this, however, both the maintenance of internal political security and the building of heavy industry, has been carried out a t a terrible cost in human life and in human hopes and energies. It has necessitated the use of forced labor o n a scale unprecedented in modern times under conditions of peace. It has involved the neglect o r abuse of other phases of Soviet economic life, particularly agriculture, consumers' goods production, housing and transportation. To all that, the war has added its tren~endoustoll of destruction, death and human exhaustion. In consequence of this, we have in R L I S Stoday ~~ a population which is physically a n d spiritually tired. The mass of the people are disillusioned, skeptical and n o longer as accessible as they once were t o the magical attraction which Soviet power still radiates to its followers ahroad. The avidity with which people seized upon the slight respite accorded t o the Church for tactical reasons during the war was eloquent testimony to the fact that their capacity for faith and devotion found little expression in the purposes of the rigime.

10

T h e Cold War a n d Nuclear Deterrence

In these circumstances, there are limits to the physical and nervous strength of people themselves. These limits are absolute ones, and are binding even for the cruelest dictatorship, because beyond them people cannot be driven. The forced labor camps and the other agencies of constraint provide temporary means of compelling people to work longer hours than their own volition or mere economic pressure would dictate; but if people survive them at all they become old before their time and must be considered as human casualties to the demands of dictatorship. In either case their best powers are no longer available to society and can no longer be enlisted in the service of the state. Here only the younger generation can help. The younger generation, despite all vicissitudes and sufferings, is numerous and vigorous; and the Russians are a talented people. But it still remains to be seen what will be the effects on mature performance of the abnormal emotional strains of childhood which Soviet dictatorship created and which were enormously increased by the war. Such things as normal security and placidity of home environment have practically ceased to exist in the Soviet Union outside of the most remote farms and villages. And observers are not yet sure whether that is not going to leave its mark on the over-all capacity of the generation now coming into maturity. In addition to this, we have the fact that Soviet economic development, while it can list certain formidable achievements, has been precariously spotty and uneven. Russian Communists who speak of the "uneven development of capitalism" should blush at the contemplation of their own national economy. Here certain branches of economic life, such as the metallurgical and machine industries, have been pushed out of all proportion to other sectors of economy. Here is a nation striving to become in a short period one of the great industrial nations of the world while it still has no highway network worthy of the name and only a relatively primitive network of railways. Much has been done to increase efficiency of labor and to teach primitive peasants something about the operation of machines. But maintenance is still a crying deficiency of all Soviet economy. Construction is hasty and poor in quality. Depreciation must be enormous. And in vast sectors of economic life it has not yet been possible to instill into labor anything like that general culture of production and technical self-respect which characterizes the skilled worker of the west. It is difficult to see how these deficiencies can be corrected at an early date by a tired and dispirited population working largely under the shadow of fear and compulsion. And as long as they are not overcome, Russia will remain economically a vulnerable, and in a certain sense an impotent, nation, capable of exporting its enthusiasms and of radiating the strange charm of its primitive political vitality but unable to back up those articles of export by the real evidences of material power and prosperity. Meanwhile, a great uncertainty hangs over the political life of the Soviet Union. That is the uncertainty involved in the transfer of power from one individual or group of individuals to others.

':

The Sources of Soviet Conduct

II

This is, of course, outstandingly the problem of the personal position of Stalin. We must remember that his succession to Lenin's pinnacle of preeminence in the Communist movement was the only such transfer of individual authority which the Soviet Union has experienced. That transfer took 12 years to consolidate. It cost the lives of n~illionsof people and shook the state to its foundations. The attendant tremors were felt all through the international revolutionary movement, to the disadvantage of the Kremlin itself. It is always possible that another transfer of preeminent power may take place quietly and inconspicuously, with no repercussions anywhere. But again, it is possible that the questions involved may unleash, to use some of Lenin's words, one of those "incredibly swift transitions" from "delicate deceit" to "wild violence" which characterize Kussian history, and may shake Soviet power to its foundations. But this is not only a question of Stalin himself. There has been, since 1938, a dangerous congealment of political life in the higher circles of Soviet power. The All-Union Congress of Soviets, in theory the supreme body of the Party, is supposed to meet not less often than once in three years. It will soon be eight full years since its last meeting. During this period membership in the Party has nun~ericallydoubled. Party mortality during the war was enormous; and today well over half of the Party members are persons who have entered since the last Party congress was held. Meanwhile, the same small group of men has carried on at the top through an amazing series of national vicissitudes. Surely there is some reason why the experiences o f the war brought hasic political changes to every one of the great governments of the west. Surely the causes of that phenomenon are basic enough to be present somewhere in the obscurity of Soviet political life, as well. And yet no recognition has been given to these causes in Russia. It must be surmised from this that even within so highly disciplined an organization as the Communist Party there must be a growing divergence in age, outlook and interest between the great mass of Party members, only so recently recruited into the movement, and the little self-perpetuating clique of men at the top, whom most of these Party members have never met, with whom they have never conversed, and with whom they can have no political intimacy. Who can say whether, in these circumstances, the eventual rejuvenation of the higher spheres of authority (which can only be a matter of time) can take place smoothly and peacefully, or whether rivals in the quest for higher power will not eventually reach down into these politically immature and inexperienced masses in order to find support for their respective claims? If this were ever to happen, strange consequences could flow for the Communist Party: for the membership at large has been exercised only in the practices of iron discipline and obedience and not in the arts of compromise and accommodation. And if disunity were ever to seize and paralyze the Party, the chaos and weakness of Russian society would be revealed in forms beyond description. For we have seen that Soviet power is only a crust concealing an amorphous

12

T h e Cold War a n d Nuclear Deterrence

mass of human beings among whom no independent organizational structure is tolerated. In Russia there is not even such a thing as local government. The present generation of Russians have never known spontaneity of collective action. If, consequently, anything were ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies. Thus the future of Soviet power may not be by any means as secure as Russian capacity for self-delusion would make it appear to the men in the Kremlin. That they can keep power themselves, they have demonstrated. That they can quietly and easily turn it over to others remains to be proved. Meanwhile, the hardships of their rule and the vicissitudes of international life have taken a heavy toll of the strength and hopes of the great people on whom their power rests. It is curious to note that the ideological power of Soviet authority is strongest today in areas beyond the frontiers of Russia, beyond the reach of its police power. This phenomenon brings to mind a comparison used by Thomas Mann in his great novel "Buddenbrooks." Observing that human institutions often show the greatest outward brilliance at a moment when inner decay is in reality farthest advanced, he compared the Buddenbrook family, in the days of its greatest glamour, to one of those stars whose light shines most brightly on this world when in reality it has long since ceased to exist. And who can say with assurance that the strong light still cast by the Kremlin on the dissatisfied peoples of the western world is not the powerful afterglow of a constellation which is in actuality on the wane? This cannot be proved. And it cannot be disproved. But the possibility remains (and in the opinion of this writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.

It is clear that the United States cannot expect in the foreseeable future to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime, It must continue to regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner, in the political arena. It must continue to expect that Soviet policies will reflect no abstract love of peace and stability, no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and capitalist worlds, but rather a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power. Balanced against this are the facts that Russia, as opposed to the western world in general, is still by far the weaker party, that Soviet policy is highly flexible, and that Soviet society may well contain deficiencies which will eventually weaken its own total potential. This would of itself warrant the United States entering with reasonable confidence upon a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force

The Sources of Soviet Conduct

I3

a t every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world. But in actuality the possibilities for American policy are by n o means limited t o holding the line and hoping for the best. It is entirely possible for the United States t o influence by its actions the internal developments, both within Russia and throughout the international Communist movement, by which Russian policy is largely determined. This is not only a question of the modest measure of informational activity which this government can conduct in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, although that, too, is important. It is rather a question of the degree t o which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows w h a t it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its o w n among the major ideological currents of the time. To the extent that such an impression can be created and maintained, the aims of Kussian Communism must appear sterile and quixotic, the hopes and enthusiasm of Moscow's supporters 111ust wane, and added strain must be imposed on the Kremlin's foreign policies. For the palsied decrepitude of the capitalist world is the keystone of Communist philosophy. Even the failure of the United States t o experience the early economic depression which the ravens of the Red Square have been predicting with such complacent confidence since hostilities ceased would have deep and important repercussions throughout the Communist world. Ky the same token, exhibitions of indecision, disunity and internal disintegration within this country have a n exhilarating effect o n the whole Communist movement. At each evidence of these tendencies, a thrill of hope and excitement goes through the Communist world; a new jauntiness can be noted in the Moscow tread; new groups of Foreign supporters climb on t o what they can only view as the band wagon of international politics; and Russian pressure increases all along the line in international affairs. It would be an exaggeration t o say that American behavior unassisted atid alone could exercise a power of life and death over the Communist movement and bring about the early fall of Soviet power in Russia. But the United States has it in its power t o increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, t o force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree o f moderation and circumspection than it has had t o observe in recent years, and in this way t o promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up o r the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. For n o mystical, Messianic movement - and particularly not that of the Kremlin - can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way o r another t o the logic of that state of affairs. Thus the decision will really fall in large measure in this country itself. T h e issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the over-all worth o f the United States a s a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up t o its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.

14

T h e Cold War a n d Nuclear Deterrence

Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

Notes 1. "Concerning the Slogans of the United States o f Europe," August 1915. Official Sowet edition of Lenin's works. 2. Here and elsewhere in this paper "Socialism" refers to Marxist or Leninist Communism, not t o liberal Socialism of the Second International variety.

"National Security" as an Ambiguous Symbol Arnold Wolfers

S

tatesman, publicists and scholars who wish to be considered realists, as many d o today, are inclined to insist that the foreign policy they advocate is dictated by the national interest, more specifically by the national security interest. It is not surprising that this should be so. Today any reference to the pursuit of security is likely to ring a sympathetic chord. However, when political formulas such as "national interest" or "national security" gain popularity they need to be scrutinized with particular care. They may not mean the same thing to different people. They may not have any precise meaning at all. Thus, while appearing to offer g ~ ~ i d a n cand e a basis for broad consensus they may be permitting everyone to label whatever policy he favors with an attractive and possibly deceptive name. In a very vague and general way "national interest" does suggest a direction of policy which can he distinguished from several others which may present theniselves as alternatives. It indicates that the policy is designed to promote demands which are ascribed to the nation rather than to individuals, sub-national groups or mankind as a whole. It emphasizes that the policy subordinates other interests to those of the nation. But beyond this, it has very little meaning. When Charles Beard's study of The Idea of National Interest was puhlished in the early. years of the New Deal and under the impact of the Great . Depression, the lines were drawn differently than they are today. The question at that time was whether American foreign policy, then largely economic in scope and motivation, was aimed not at promoting the welfare interests of the nation as a whole but instead at satisfying the material interests of powerful sub-national interest or pressure groups. While it was found hard to define what was in the interest of national welfare or to discover standards by which to measure it, there could be no doubt as to what people had in mind: they desired to see national policy makers rise above the narrow and special economic interests of parts of the nation to focus their attention on the more inclusive interests of the whole. Source: I'olrtlc-'11 Scicnce Q~rczrterly,I.XVII(4) (1952):48 1-502.

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The Cold War and Nuclear Deterrence

Today, the alternative t o a policy of the national interest to which people refer is of a different character. They fear policy makers may be unduly concerned with the "interests of all of mankind". They see them sacrificing the less inclusive national community to the wider but in their opinion chimeric world community. The issue, then, is not one of transcending narrow group selfishness, as it was a t the time of Beard's discussion, but rather one of according more exclusive devotion to the narrower cause of the national self. There is another difference between the current and the earlier debate. While it would be wrong to say that the economic interest has ceased to attract attention, it is overshadowed today by the national security interest. Even in the recent debates on the St. Lawrence Seaway, clearly in the first instance an economic enterprise, the defenders of the project, when seeking to impress their listeners with the "national interest" involved, spoke mainly of the value of the Seaway for military defense in wartime while some opponents stressed its vulnerability to attack. The change from a welfare to a security interpretation of the symbol "national interest" is understandable. Today we are living under the impact of cold war and threats of external aggression rather than of depression and social reform. As a result, the formula of the national interest has come to be practically synonymous with the formula of national security. Unless explicitly denied, spokesmen for a policy which would take the national interest as its guide can be assumed to mean that priority shall be given to measures of security, a term to be analyzed.' The question is raised, therefore, whether this seemingly more precise formula of national security offers statesmen a meaningful guide for action. Can they be expected to know what it means? Can policies be distinguished and judged on the ground that they do or d o not serve this interest? The term national security, like national interest, is well enough established in the political discourse of international relations to designate an objective of policy distinguishable from others. We know roughly what people have in mind if they complain that their government is neglecting national security or demanding excessive sacrifices for the sake of enhancing it. Usually those who raise the cry for a policy oriented exclusively toward this interest are afraid their country underestimates the external dangers facing it or is being diverted into idealistic channels unmindful of these dangers. Moreover, the symbol suggests protection through power and therefore figures more frequently in the speech of those who believe in reliance on national power than of those who place their confidence in model behavior, international cooperation, or the United Nations to carry their country safely through the tempests of international conflict. For these reasons it would be an exaggeration to claim that the symbol of national security is nothing but a stimulus to semantic confusion, though closer analysis will show that if used without specifications it leaves room for more confusion than sound political counsel or scientific usage can afford. The demand for a policy of national security is primarily normative in character. It is supposed to indicate what the policy of a nation should be in

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order t o be either expedient - a rational means toward a n accepted end - o r moral, the best o r least evil course of action. The value judgments implicit in these normative exhortations will be discussed. Before doing so, attention should be drawn t o a n assertion of fact which is implicit if not explicit in most appeals for a policy guided hy national security. Such appeals usually assume that nations in fact have made security their goal except when idealism o r utopianism of their leaders has led them t o stray from the traditional path. If such conformity of behavior actually existed, it would he proper t o infer that a country deviating from the established pattern of conduct would risk being penalized. This would greatly strengthen the norn~ativearguments. The trouble with the contention of fact, however, is that the term "security" covers a range of goals so wide that highly divergent policies can be interpreted as policies of security. Security points t o some degree of protection of values previously acquired. In Walter Lippmann's words, a nation is secure t o the extent t o which it is not in danger of having t o sacrifice core values, if it wishes t o avoid war, and is able, if challenged, t o maintain them by victory in such a war.' What this definition implies is that security rises and falls with the ability of a nation t o deter a n attack, o r t o defeat it. This is in accord with common usage of the term. Security is a value, then, of which a nation can have more o r less and which it can aspire t o have in greater o r lesser measure.' It has much in common, in this respect, with power o r wealth, t w o other values of great importance in international affairs. But while wealth measures the a m o u n t of a nation's material possessions, and power its ability t o control the actions of others, security, in a n objective sense, measures the absence of threats t o acquired values, in a subjective sense, the absence of tear that such values will be attacked. In both respects a nation's security can run a wide gamut from almost complete insecurity o r sense of insecurity a t one pole, t o almost complete security o r absence of fear a t the other.-' T h e possible discrepancy between the objective and subjective connotation of the term is significant in international relations despite the fact that the chance of future attack never can be measured "objectively"; it must always remain a matter of subjective evaluation and speculation. However, when the French after World War I insisted that they were entitled t o additional guarantees of security because of the exceptionally dangerous situation which France was said t o be facing, other Powers in the I.eague expressed the view that rather than t o submit t o what might be French hysterical apprehension the relative security of France should be objectively evaluated. It is a well-known fact that nations, and groups within nations, differ widely in their reaction t o one and the same external situation. Some tend t o exaggerate the danger while others underestimate it. With hindsight it is sometimes possible t o tell exactly h o w far they deviated from a rational reaction t o the actual o r objective state of danger existing a t the time. Even if for n o other reasons, this difference in the reaction t o similar threats suffices t o make it probable that nations will differ in their efforts t o obtain

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T h e Cold War a n d Nuclear Deterrence

more security. Some may find the danger to which they are exposed entirely normal and in line with their modest security expectations while others consider it unbearable to live with these same dangers. Although this is not the place t o set up hypotheses on the factors which account for one or the other attitude, investigation might confirm the hunch that those nations tend to be most sensitive to threats which have either experienced attacks in the recent past or, having passed through a prolonged period of an exceptionally high degree of security, suddenly find themselves thrust into a situation of danger." Probably national efforts to achieve greater security would also prove, in part at least, to be a function of the power and opportunity which nations possess of reducing danger by their own effort^.^ Another and even stronger reason why nations must be expected not to act uniformly is that they are not all or constantly faced with the same degree of danger. For purposes of a working hypothesis, theorists may find it useful at times to postulate conditions wherein all states are enemies provided they are not allied against others - and wherein all, therefore, are equally in danger of attack.' But, while it may be true in the living world, too, that no sovereign nation can be absolutely safe from future attack, nobody can reasonably contend that Canada, for example, is threatened today to the same extent as countries like Iran or Yugoslavia, or that the British had as much reason to be concerned about the French air force in the twenties as about Hitler's Luftwaffe in the thirties. This point, however, should not be overstressed. There can be no quarrel with the generalization that most nations, most of the time - the great Powers particularly - have shown, and had reason t o show, an active concern about some lack of security and have been prepared to make sacrifices for its enhancement. Danger and the awareness of it have been, and continue t o be, sufficiently widespread to guarantee some uniformity in this respect. But a generalization which leaves room both for the frantic kind of struggle for more security which characterized French policy a t times and for the neglect of security apparent in American foreign policy after the close of both World Wars throws little light on the behavior of nations. The demand for conformity would have meaning only if it could be said - as it could under the conditions postulated in the working hypothesis of pure power politics - that nations normally subordinate all other values to the maximization of their security, which, however, is obviously not the case. There have been many instances of struggles for more security taking the form of an unrestrained race for armaments, alliances, strategic boundaries and the like; but one need only recall the many heated parliamentary debates on arms appropriations to realize how uncertain has been the extent to which people will consent to sacrifice for additional increments of security. Even when there has been no question that armaments would mean more security, the cost in taxes, the reduction in social benefits or the sheer discomfort involved has militated effectively against further effort. It may be worth noting in this connection that there seems to be no case in history in which a country started a preventive war on the grounds of security - unless

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Hitler's wanton attack on his neighbors be allowed to qualify as such although there must have been circumstances where additional security could have been obtained by war and although so many wars have been launched for the enhancement of other values. Of course, where security serves only as a cloak for other more enticing demands, nations or anlbitious leaders may consider no price for it too high. This is one of the reasons why very high security aspirations tend to make a nation suspect of hiding more aggressive aims. Instead of expecting a uniform drive for enhanced or maximum security, a different hypothesis may offer a more promising lead. Efforts for security are bound to be experienced as a burden; security after all is nothing but the absence of the evil of insecurity, a negative value so to speak. As a consequence, nations will be inclined to minimize these efforts, keeping them at the lowest level which will provide them with what they consider adequate protection. This level will often be lower than what statesmen, military leaders or other particularly security-minded participants in the decision-making process believe it should be. In any case, together with the extent of the external threats, numerous domestic factors such as national character, tradition, preferences and prejudices will influence the level of security which a nation chooses to make its target. It might be objected that in the long run nations are not so free to choose the amount of effort they will put into security. Are they not under a kind o f compulsion to spare no effort provided they wish to survive? This objection again would make sense only if the hypothesis of pure power politics were a realistic image of actual world affairs. In fact, however, a glance at history will suffice to show that survival has only exceptionally been at stake, particularly for the major Powers. If nations were not concerned with the protection of values other than their survival as independent states, most of them, most of the time, would not have had to be seriously worried about their security, despite what n~anipulatorsof public opinion engaged in mustering greater security efforts may have said to the contrary. What "compulsion" there is, then, is a function not merely of the will of others, real or imagined, to destroy the nation's independence but of national desires and ambitions to retain a wealth of other values such as rank, respect, material possessions and special privileges. It would seem to be a fair guess that the efforts for security by a particular nation will tend to vary, other things being equal, with the range of values for which protection is being sought. In respect to this range there may seem to exist a considerable degree of uniformity. All over the world today peoples are making sacrifices to protect and preserve what to them appear as the minimum national core values, national independence and territorial integrity. But there is deviation in two directions. Some nations seek protection for more marginal values as well. There was a time when United States policy could afford to be concerned mainly with the protection of the foreign investments or markets of its nationals, its "core values" being out of danger, or when Britain was extending its national self to include large and only vaguely circumscribed

20

The Cold War and Nuclear Deterrence

"regions of special interest". It is a well-known and portentous phenomenon that bases, security zones and the like may be demanded and acquired for the purpose of protecting values acquired earlier; and they then become new national values requiring protection themselves. Pushed to its logical conclusion, such spatial extension of the range of values does not stop short of world domination. A deviation in the opposite direction of a compression of the range of core values is hardly exceptional in our days either. There is little indication that Britain is bolstering the security of Hong Kong although colonies were once considered part of the national territory. The Czechs lifted no finger to protect their independence against the Soviet Union and many West Europeans are arguing today that rearmament has become too destructive of values they cherish to be justified even when national independence is obviously at stake. The lack of uniformity does not end here. A policy is not characterized by its goal, in this case security, alone. In order to become imitable, the means by which the goal is pursued must be taken into account as well. Thus, if two nations were both endeavoring to maximize their security but one were placing all its reliance on armaments and alliances, the other on meticulous neutrality, a policy maker seeking to emulate their behavior would be at a loss where to turn. Those who call for a policy guided by national security are not likely to be unaware of this fact, but they take for granted that they will be understood to mean a security policy based on power, and on military power at that. Were it not so, they would be hard put to prove that their government was not already doing its best for security, though it was seeking to enhance it by such means as international cooperation or by the negotiation of compromise agreements - means which in one instance may be totally ineffective or utopian but which in others may have considerable protective value. It is understandable why it should so readily be assumed that a quest for security must necessarily translate itself into a quest for coercive power. In view of the fact that security is being sought against external violence coupled perhaps with internal subversive violence - it seems plausible at first sight that the response should consist in an accumulation of the same kind of force for the purpose of resisting an attack or of deterring a wouldbe attacker. The most casual reading of history and of contemporary experience, moreover, suffices to confirm the view that such resort to "power of resistance" has been the rule with nations grappling with serious threats to their security, however much the specific form of this power and its extent may differ. Why otherwise would so many nations which have no acquisitive designs maintain costly armaments? Why did Denmark with her state of complete disarmament remain an exception even among the small Powers? But again, the generalization that nations seeking security usually place great reliance on coercive power does not carry one far. The issue is not whether there is regularly some such reliance but whether there are no

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c ~ g n ~ f r c a nd~fferences t between natrons concerning t h e ~ rover-c~llc h o ~ c eof the means upon which they place their trust. The controversies concerning the best road t o future security that are so typical o f coalition partners a t the close of victorious wars throw light on this question. France in 19 19 and all the Allies in 1945 believed that protection against another German attack co~rldhe gained only by means of continued military superiority based o n German military impotence. President Wilson in 1919 and many observers in 194.5 were equally convinced, however, that more hope for security lay in a conciliatory and fair treatment of the defeated enemy, which would rob him of future incentives t o renew his attack. While this is not the place t o decide which side was right, one cannot help drawing the conclusion that, in the matter of means, the roads which are open may lead in diametrically opposed directions.The choice in every instance will depend o n a multitude of variables, including ideological and moral convictions, expectations concerning the psychological and political developnients in the camp of the opponent, and inclinations of individual policy makers." After all that has been said little is left of the sweeping generalization that in actual practice nations, guided by their national security interest, tend to pursue a mif form and therefore imitable policy of security. Instead, there a r e numerous reasons why they should differ widely in this respect, with some standing close t o the pole of complete indifference t o security or coniplete reliance on nonmilitary means, others close t o the pole of insistence on absolute security or of complete reliance on coercive power. It should be added that there exists still another category of nations which cannot be placed within the continuum connecting these poles because they regard security of any degree as a n insufficient goal; instead they seek t o acquire new values even a t the price of greater insecurity. In this category must be placed not only the "mad Caesars", w h o are o u t for conquest and glory a t any price, hut also idealistic statesmen w h o would plunge their country into war for the sake of spreading the benefits of their ideology, for example, of liberating enslaved peoples. The actual behavior o f nations, past and present, does not affect the norniativc proposition, t o which we shall n o w turn o u r attention. According t o this proposition nations are called upon t o give priority t o national security and thus t o consent t o any sacrifice of value which will provide an additional increment of security. It m a y be expedient, moral o r both for nations t o d o so even if they should have failed t o heed such advice in the past and for the most part are not living up t o it today. The first question, then, is whether some definable security policy can be said t o he generally expedient. Because the choice of goals is not a matter of expediency, it would seem t o make n o sense t o ask whether it is expedient for nations t o be concerned with the goal of sec~rrityitself; only the means used t o this end, so it would seem, can he judged as t o their fitness - their instrumental rationality - t o promote security. Yet, this is not so. Security, like other aims, may he an intermediate rather than a n ~lltimategoal, in which case it can be judged as a means t o these more ultimate ends.

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T h e Cold War a n d Nuclear Deterrence

Traditionally, the protection and preservation of national core values have been considered ends in themselves, a t least by those who followed in the footsteps of Machiavelli or, for other reasons of political philosophy, placed the prince, state or nation at the pinnacle of their hierarchy of values. Those who d o so today will be shocked at the mere suggestion that national security should have to be justified in terms of higher values which it is expected to serve. But there is a large and perhaps growing current of opinion - as a matter of fact influential in this country for a long time - which adheres to this idea. We condemn Nazis and Communists for defending their own totalitarian countries instead of helping to free their people from tyranny; we enlist support for armaments, here and in Allied countries, not so much on the grounds that they will protect national security but that by enhancing such security they will serve to protect ultimate human values like individual liberty. Again, opposition in Europe and Asia t o military security measures is based in part on the contention that it would help little to make national core values secure, if in the process the liberties and the social welfare of the people had to be sacrificed; the prevention of Russian conquest, some insist, is useless, if in the course of a war of defense a large part of the people were to be exterminated and most cities destroyed.I0 While excellent arguments can be made to support the thesis that the preservation of the national independence of this country is worth almost any price as long as no alternative community is available which could assure the same degree of order, justice, peace or individual liberty, it becomes necessary to provide such arguments whenever national security as a value in itself is being questioned. The answer cannot be taken for granted. But turning away now from the expediency of security as an intermediate goal we must ask whether, aside from any moral considerations which will be discussed later, a specific level of security and specific means of attaining it can claim to be generally expedient. When one sets out to define in terms of expediency the level of security to which a nation should aspire, one might be tempted to assume that the sky is the limit. Is not insecurity of any kind an evil from which any rational policy maker would want to rescue his country? Yet, there are obvious reasons why this is not so. In the first place, every increment of security must be paid by additional sacrifices of other values usually of a kind more exacting than the mere expenditure of precious time on the part of policy makers. At a certain point, then, by something like the economic law of diminishing returns, the gain in security n o longer compensates for the added costs of attaining it. As in the case of economic value comparisons and preferences, there is frequently disagreement among different layers of policy makers as to where the line should be drawn. This is true particularly because absolute security is out of the question unless a country is capable of world domination, in which case, however, the insecurities and fears would be "internalized" and probably magnified. Because nations must "live dangerously", then, t o some extent, whatever they consent to d o about it, a modicum of additional

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but only relative security may easily become unattractive to those who have to bear the chief burden. Nothing renders the task of statesmen in a democracy more difficult than the reluctance of the people to follow them very far along the road to high and costly security levels. In the second place, national security policies when based on the accumulation of power have a way of defeating themselves if the target level is set too high. This is due to the fact that "power of resistance" cannot be unmistakably distinguished from "power of aggression". What a country does to bolster its own security through power can be interpreted hy others, therefore, as a threat to their security. If this occurs, the vicious circle of what John Herz has described as the "security dilemma" sets in: the efforts of one side provoke countermeasures by the other which in turn tend to wipe out the gains of the first. Theoretically there seems to be no escape from this frustrating consequence; in practice, however, there are ways to convince those who might feel threatened that the accumulation of power is not intended and will never be used for attack." The chief way is that of keeping the target level within moderate bounds and of avoiding placing oneself in a position where it has to be raised suddenly and drastically. The desire to escape from this vicious circle presupposes a security policy of much self-restraint and moderation, especially in the choice of the target levef." It can never be expedient to pursue a security policy which by the fact of provocation or incentive to others fails to increase the nation's relative power position and capability of resistance. The question of what means are expedient for the purpose of enhancing security raises even more thorny problems. Policy makers must decide how to distribute their reliance on whatever means are available to them and, particularly, how far to push the accumulation of coercive power. N o attempt can he made here to decide what the choice should be in order to be expedient. Obviously, there can be no general answer which would meet the requirements of every case. The answer depends on the circumstances. A weak country may have no better means at its disposal than to prove to stronger neighbors that its strict neutrality can be trusted. Potentially strong countries may have a chance to deter an aggressor by creating "positions of strengthv. In some instances they may have no other way of saving themselves; while in others even they may find it more expedient to supplement such a policy, if not to replace it, by a policy intended to negotiate their opponent out of his aggressive designs. The reason why "power of resistance" is not the general panacea which some believe it to be lies in the nature of security itself. If security, in the objective sense of the term at least, rises and falls with the presence or absence of aggressive intentions on the part of others, the attitude and behavior of those from whom the threat emanates are of prime importance. Such attitude and behavior need not be beyond the realm of influence by the country seeking to bolster its security. Whenever they do not lie beyond this realm the most effective and least costly security policy consists in inducing the opponent to give up his aggressive intentions.

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While there is no easy way to determine when means can and should be used which are directed not at resistance but at the prevention of the desire of others to attack, it will clarify the issue to sketch the type of hypotheses which would link specific security policies, as expedient, to some of the most typical political constellations. One can think of nations lined up between the two poles of maximum and minimum "attack propensity", with those unalterably committed to attack, provided it promises success, at one pole and those whom no amount of opportunity for successful attack could induce to undertake it at the other. While security in respect to the first group can come exclusively as a result of "positions of strength" sufficient to deter or defeat attack, nothing could d o more to undermine security in respect to the second group than to start accumulating power of a kind which would provoke fear and countermoves. Unfortunately it can never be known with certainty, in practice, what position within the continuum one's opponent actually occupies. Statesmen cannot be blamed, moreover, if caution and suspicion lead them to assume a closer proximity to the first pole than hindsight proves to have been justified. We believe we have ample p o o f that the Soviet Union today is at or very close to the first pole, while Canadian policy makers probably place the United States in its intentions toward Canada a t the second pole. It is fair to assume that, wherever the issue of security becomes a matter of serious concern, statesmen will usually be dealing with potential opponents who occupy a position somewhere between but much closer to the first of the two poles. This means, then, that an attack must be feared as a possibility, even though the intention to launch it cannot be considered to have crystallized to the point where nothing could change it. If this be true, a security policy in order to be expedient cannot avoid accumulating power of resistance and yet cannot let it go at that. Efforts have to be made simultaneously toward the goal of removing the incentives to attack. This is only another way of saying that security policy must seek to bring opponents to occupy a position as close to the second pole as conditions and capabilities permit. Such a twofold policy presents the greatest dilemmas because efforts to change the intentions of an opponent may run counter to the efforts to build up strength against him. The dangers of any policy of concessions, symbolized by "Munich", cannot be underestimated. The paradox of this situation must be faced, however, if security policy is to be expedient. It implies that national security policy, except when directed against a country unalterably committed to attack, is the more rational the more it succeeds in taking the interests, including the security interests, of the other side into consideration. Only in doing so can it hope to minimize the willingness of the other to resort to violence. Rather than to insist, then, that under all conditions security be sought by reliance on nothing but defensive power and be pushed in a spirit of national selfishness toward the highest targets,

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it should be stressed that in most instances efforts to satisfy legitimate demands of others are likely to promise better results in terms of security." That is probably what George Kennan had in mind when he advised policy makers to use self-restraint in the pursuit of the national interest. While in the face of a would-be world conqueror who is beyond the pale of external influence it is dangerous to be diverted from the accumulation of sheer defensive power, any mistake about his true state of mind or any neglect of opportunities to influence his designs, where it has a chance of being successful, violates the rules of expediency. It should always be kept in mind that the ideal security policy is one which would lead to a distribution of values so satisfactory to all nations that the intention to attack and with it the problem of security would be minimized. While this is a utopian goal, policy makers and particularly peacemakers would d o well to remember that there are occasions when greater approximation to such a goal can be effected. We can now focus our attention on the moral issue, if such there be.I4 Those who advocate a policy devoted to national security are not always aware of the fact - if they d o not explicitly deny it - that they are passing moral judgment when they advise a nation to pursue the goal of national security or when they insist that such means as the accumulation of coercive power - or its use - should be employed for this purpose.'' Nations like individuals or other groups may value things not because they consider them good or less evil than their alternative; they may value them because they satisfy their pride, heighten their sense of self-esteem or reduce their fears. However, no policy, or human act in general, can escape becoming a subject for moral judgment - whether by the conscience of the actor himself or by others -which calls for the sacrifice of other values, as any security policy is bound to do. Here it becomes a matter of comparing and weighing values in order to decide which of them are deemed sufficiently good to justify the evil of sacrificing others. If someone insists that his country should d o more to build up its strength, he is implying, knowingly or not, that more security is sufficiently desirable to warrant such evils as the cut in much-needed social welfare benefits or as the extension of the period of military service. I h Many vivid examples of the moral dilemma are being supplied by current controversies concerning American security policy. Is a "deal with fascist Spain" morally justified, provided it added an increment to our security, though principles valued highly by some were being sacrificed? Should we engage in subversive activities and risk the lives of our agents if additional security can be attained thereby? Should we perhaps go so far as to start a preventive war, when ready, with the enormous evils it would carry with it, if we should become convinced that no adequate security can be obtained except by the defeat of the Soviet Union? In this last case, would not the exponents of amoralism have some moral qualms, at least to the point of rationalizing a decision favoring such a war by claiming that it would serve

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to satisfy not primarily an egotistical national demand for security but an altruistic desire to liberate enslaved peoples? It is easier to argue for the amorality of politics if one does not have t o bear the responsibility of choice and decision! Far be it from a political scientist to claim any particular competence in deciding what efforts for national security are or are not morally justified. What he can contribute here is to point t o the ambiguities of any general normative demand that security be bought at whatever price it may cost. He may also be able to make it more difficult for advisers or executors of policy to hide from themselves or others the moral value judgments and preferences which underlie whatever security policy they choose to recommend or conduct. The moral issue will be resolved in one of several ways depending on the ethical code upon which the decision is based. From one extreme point of view it is argued that every sacrifice, especially if imposed on other nations, is justified provided it contributes in any way to national security. Clearly this implies a position that places national security at the apex of the value pyramid and assumes it t o constitute an absolute good to which all other values must be subordinated. Few will be found t o take this position because if they subscribed to a nationalistic ethics of this extreme type they would probably go beyond security - the mere preservation of values - and insist that the nation is justified in conquering whatever it can use as Lebensraum or otherwise. At the opposite extreme are the absolute pacifists who consider the use of coercive power a n absolute evil and condemn any security policy, therefore, which places reliance on such power. For anyone who does not share these extreme views the moral issue raised by the quest for national security is anything but clear-cut and simple. He should have n o doubts about the right of a nation to protect and preserve values to which it has a legitimate title or even about its moral duty to pursue a policy meant to serve such preservation. But he cannot consider security the supreme law as Machiavelli would have the statesman regard the ragione di stato. Somewhere a line is drawn, which in every instance he must seek to discover, that divides the realm of neglect, the "too-little", from the realm of excess, the "too much". Even Hans Morgenthau who extols the moral duty of self-preservation seems to take it for granted that naked force shall be used for security in reaction only to violent attack, not for preventive war. Decision makers are faced with the moral problem, then, of choosing first the values which deserve protection, with national independence ranking high not merely for its own sake but for the guarantee it may offer to values like liberty, justice and peace. He must further decide which level of security to make his target. This will frequently be his most difficult moral task though terms such as adequacy or fair share indicate the kind of standards that may guide him. Finally, he must choose the means and thus by scrupulous computation of values compare the sacrifices, which his choice of means implies, with the security they promise to provide.

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It follows that policies of national security, far from being all good or all evil, may be morally praiseworthy or condemnable depending on their specific character and the particular circumstances of the case. They may be praised for their self-restraint and the consideration which this implies for values other than security; they may instead be condemned for being inadequate to protect national values. Again, they may be praised in one instance for the consideration given to the interests of others, particularly of weaker nations, or condemned in another because of the recklessness with which national values are risked on the altar of some chimera. The target level falls under moral judgment for being too ambitious, egotistical and provocative or for being inadequate; the means employed for being unnecessarily costly in other values or for being ineffective. This wide range of variety which arises out of the multitude of variables affecting the value computation would make it impossible, and in fact meaningless, to pass moral judgment, positive or negative, on "national security policy in general". It is this lack of moral homogeneity which in matters of security policy justifies attacks on so-called moralism, though not on moral evaluation. The "moralistic approach" is taken to mean a wholesale condemnation either of any concern with national security - as being an expression of national egotism - or of a security policy relying on coercive and therefore evil power. The exponent of such "moralism" is assumed to believe that security for all peoples can be had today by the exclusive use of such "good" and altruistic means as model behavior and persuasion, a spirit of conciliation, international organization or world government. If there are any utopians who cling to this notion, and have influence on policy, it makes sense to continue to disabuse them of what can surely be proved to be dangerous illusions. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the opposite line of argument, which without regard for the special circumstances would praise everything done for national security or more particularly everything done for the enhancement of national power of resistance, is no less guilty of applying simple and abstract moral principles and of failing to judge each case realistically on its merits. In conclusion, it can be said, then, that normative admonitions to conduct a foreign policy guided by the national security interest are no less ambiguous and misleading than the statement of fact concerning past behavior which was discussed earlier. In order to be meaningful such admonitions would have to specify the degree of security which a nation shall aspire to attain and the means by which it is to be attained in a given situation. It may be good advice in one instance to appeal for greater effort and more armaments; it may be no less expedient and morally advisable in another instance to call for moderation and for greater reliance on means other than coercive power. Because the pendulum of public opinion swings so easily from extreme complacency to extreme apprehension, from utopian reliance on "good will" to disillusioned faith in naked force only, it is particularly important to be wary of any simple panacea, even of one that parades in the realist garb of a policy guided solely by the national security interest.

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Notes 1. Hans Morgenthau's In Defense of the National Interest (New York, 1951) IS the most explicit and impassioned recent plea for an American foreign policy which shall follow "but one guiding star - the National Interest". While Morgenthau is not equally explicit in regard t o the meaning he attaches t o the symbol "national interest", it becomes clear in the few pages devoted to an exposition of this "perennial" interest that the author is thinking in terms of the national security interest, and specifically of security based on power. The United Stares, he says, is interested in three things: a unique position as a predominant Power without rival in the Western Hemisphere and the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe as well as in Asia, demands which make sense only in the context of a quest for security through power. 2. Walter Lippmann, U. S. Foreign Policy (Boston, 1943), p. 51. 3. This explains why some nations which would seem to fall into the category of status quo Powers par excellence may nevertheless be dissatisfied and act very much like "imperialist" Powers, as Morgenthau calls nations with acquisitive goals. They are dissatisfied with the degree of security which they enjoy under the status quo and are out to enhance it. France's occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 illustrates this type of behav~or.Because the demand for more security may induce a status quo Power even to resort to the use of violence as a means of attaining more security, there is reason to beware of the easy and often self-righteous assumption that nations which desire to preserve the status quo are necessarily "peace-loving". 4. Security and power would be synonymous terms if security could be attained only through the accumulation of power, which will be shown nor to be the case. The fear of attack -security in the subjective sense - is also not proportionate to the relative power position of a nation. Why, otherwise, would some weak and exposed nations conslder themselves more secure today than does the United States? Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society (New Haven, 1950), d e f ~ n ing security as "high value expectancy" stress the subjective and speculative character of security by using the term "expectancy"; the use of the term "h~gh",while mdicating no definite level, would seem to imply that the security-seeker aims at a position in which the events he expects - here the continued unmolested enjoyment of his possessions - have considerably more than an even chance of materializing. 5. The United States offers a good illustration and may be typical in this respect. For a long time this country was beyond the reach of any enemy attack that could be considered probable. During that period, then, it could afford to dismiss any serious preoccupation w t h security. Events proved that it was n o worse off for having done so. However, after this happy condition had ceased to exist, government and people alike showed a lag in their awareness of the change. When Nicholas J. Spykman raised his voice in the years before World War I1 to advocate a broader security outlook than was indicated by the symbol "Western Hemisphere Defense" and a greater appreciation of the r6le of defenswe mtlitary power, he was dealing with this lag and with the dangers implied in it. If Hans Morgenthau and others raise t h e ~ r warning voices today, seemmgly treading in Spykman's footsteps, they are addressing a narlon which after a new relapse into wishful thinking in 1945 has been rad~callydisillusioned and may now be swinging toward excessive security apprehensions. 6. Terms such as "degree" or "level" of security are not intended to indicate merely quantitative differences. Nations may also differ in respect to the breadth of their security perspective as when American leaders at Yalta were so preoccupied with security agalnst the then enemy countries of the United States that they failed or refused to consider future American security vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. The differences may apply, instead, to the time range for which security is sought as when the British at Versailles were ready to offer France short-run security guarantees while the French with more foresight ins~sredthat the "German danger" would not become acute for some ten years. 7. For a discussion of this working hypothesis - as part of the "pure power" hypothesis see my article on "The Pole of Power and the Pole of Indifference" in World Pol~tics,vol. IV, No. 1. October 1951.

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8. Pvlyres S. Mcllougal ("Law a n d Peace" in the A m e r m m /o~irtznlof lntcrn~7tron~zI 1.~7~: vol. 46. No. 1, January 19.52, pp. 102 et seq.) rightly criticize\ H a n s Morgenthau ( a n d George t i e n t u n tor what tiennan himself wrongly believes t o he h ~ os w n point o t view in the matter; see fn, 15 rr~frtr)for his failure t o appreciate the rhle which non-power methods, such as legal procedures and moral a p p e d s , may a t times successfully play in the pursuit of security. But ~t i \ s u r p r ~ s l n gh o w llrrle aware McDougal appears t o be of the d~sappoinringmodesry of the c o n t r ~ h u t i o n swhich these "other means" have actually made t o the enhancement of security a n d the quite insignificant c o n t r ~ b u t ~ o nthey s have made t o the promotion of ch.inges of the status quo. T h ~ slatter failure signif~esthat ther have heen unable t o remove the m ~ i nc~luses of t h e attacks which security-minded peoples rlghtly fear. 9. On the problem of security policy (Sicl~erheitspolrt~k) with special reference t o "collective secur~ty"see the comprehensive and illuminating study of Heinrich Rogge, "Kollektivsicherheit Buendnispolitik Voelkerhund", Theorre der natzonulerz ttnd rnternntionizlctr S~cherhcrt(Berlin, 19371, which deserves attention despite the fact that ~t was written a n d puhl~shedin N u t Germany and bean J distinctly L'revisioni~t"slant. 10. Raymond Dennett goes further in making the generalization that, "if economlc pressures become great enough, almost any government, when put t o the flnal test, will rnoder,~teo r ahandon a ool~ticalassociation" (such as the alliance svstern of the United States with its usefulness t o nation,d security) "if only a n alteration of policy seems t o offer the possibility of maintaining o r .~chievitigliving standards ,idequate enough t o permit the reglme t o survive". "Danger Spots In the Pattern of American Security", In World Politzcs, vol. IV, No. 4, July 19.52, p. 449. I I. N o t everyone agrees that this can be done. Jeremy Benrham wrote that "measures of mere self defense are naturally taken for projects of aggression" with the result t h , ~ t "each ninkes h a t e t o hegin for fe,~rof heing forestalled." Prmczples of Internatronal 1 . a ~ Essay ~. IV. 12. T h e Quakers, in ,I book on T b r Unrted Stntrs m d t h r Sol& Urzion: Some Quczkrr Propos'11s for Prncr ( N e w Haven, l 9 4 9 ) , p. 14, state that "it is highly q u e s t ~ o n a b l ewhether securlty c,ln be achieved in the tnodern world through a n attempt t o estahllsh ,111 overwhelming preponderance of military power." This c a n be read t o mean that 3 less a m b ~ r ~ o milit'lry us target than overwhelming preponderance r n ~ g h tbe a means o f achieving security. 13. As A.D. Lindsay puts it, "The search for perfect security ... defeats its o w n ends. Playing for safety 1s the most dangerous way t o live." Introduction t o T h o m a \ Hobbes, /.~1'1~7t/~dl2, p. XYII. 14. O n the moral problem in international r e l a t ~ o n ssee 11iy article o n "St:~tesmansh~p J I ~ M o r a l Choice" in World Politics, vol. I, N o . 2, January 1949, pp. 176 et seq.. especially p. 18.5. In o n e of h ~ most s recent statements o n the subject, Reinhold Nlehuhr, T ~ J Iro~zy L, of Att~cv~cm Hlstory ( N e w York, 19451, points specifically t o the moral problem ~nvolvedin security policy - " n o imperiled nation", he writes, "is morally able t o dispense with weapons which might insure its sul-vivd" ( p . 39). 15. It IS not w ~ t h o u irony t that of the t w o authors w h o have rrcently c o m e o u t tor a policy of the national interest, the one, George F. Kennan, w h o calls for a policy of n a t ~ o n a lselfrestraint a n d humility, ~ ~ s u a l ~dentlfied ly with morality, should deny "that state behavior is 1' fit subject for moral judgment" (Amerrcan DlpIomi7cy. 1900-1950, Chicago, 1952, p. IOO), while the other, H a n s Morgenthau (op. cit.), calling for a policy of ~ ~ n a d u l t e r ~ l tnational ed egotlsm, claims t o speak In the n a m e of morality. 16. It would he unrealistic t o assume that ~ o l i ,c vmakers divide their attention strictlv between ends a n d means a n d only after having chosen a speclf~ctarget level as heing morally iustified decide whether the means by which ~t can be attamed are morally acceptable. Moral judgment is more llkely t o be passed o n the t o t a l ~ t yof a course of action which embraces both the desired end , ~ n dthe means which lead t o it.

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Another "Great Debate": The National Interest o f the United States Hans J. Morgenthau

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he controversy which has arisen on the occasion of Ambassador Kennan's and my recent publications differs from the great historical debates on American foreign policy in two significant respects. It raises a n issue more fundamental to the understanding of American foreign policy and of all politics than those with which the previous "great debates" were concerned, and it deals with the issue largely in terms which are not conducive to understanding. The great debates of the past, such as the one over intervention vs. neutrality in 1793, expansion vs. the status quo before the Mexican and after the Spanish-American War, international cooperation vs. isolation in the 'twenties, intervention vs. abstention in the late 'thirties - all evolved around clear-cut issues of foreign policy. In 1793 you were in favor of going to war on the side of France or of remaining neutral. In the 1840's you approved of the annexation of Texas or you did not. At the turn of the century you supported overseas expansion or you were against it. In the 'twenties you advocated joining the League of Nations or staying out of it. In the late 'thirties you wanted to oppose the Axis Powers by all means short of war or you wanted t o abstain from intervening. What separates the "utopian" from the "realist" position cannot be so sharply expressed in terms of alternative foreign policies. The very same policies can be and are being supported by both schools of thought. What sets them apart is not necessarily a matter of practical judgment, but of philosophies and standards of thought. The issue which the present debate raises concerns the nature of all politics and, more particularly, of the American tradition in foreign policy. The history of modern political thought is the story of a contest between two schools which differ fundamentally in their conception of the nature of man, society, and politics. One believes that a rational and moral political order, derived from universally valid abstract principles, can be achieved here and now. Source: The American Political Science Review, XLVI(4) ( 1 9 5 2 ) :961-88.

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It assumes the essential goodness and m f ~ n ~ malleabhty te of human nature standards to lack of knowledge and understanding, obsolescent social institutions, or the depravity of certain isolated individuals or groups. It trusts in education, reform, and the sporadic use of force to remedy these deficiencies.' The other school believes that the world, imperfect as it is from the rational point of view, is the result of forces which are inherent in human nature. To improve the world one must work with those forces, not against them. This being inherently a world of opposing interests and of conflict among them, moral principles can never be fully realized, but at best approximated through the ever temporary balancing of interests and the ever precarious settlement of conflicts. This school, then, sees in a system of checks and balances a universal principle for all pluralist ~ o c i e t i e s It . ~ appeals to historic precedent rather than to abstract principles, and aims at achievement o f the lcsser evil rather than of the absolute good. This conflict between two basic conceptions of man and politics is at the bottom of the present controversy. It is the same conflict which found its classic expression in the polemic of Burke against the philosophy of the French Revolution. Given the sad state of political thought in our time, it would be vain to expect the spokesmen of political realism to speak with the voice of Burke and the defenders of political utopianism to measure up to the standards of Condorcet and Rousseau. Yet one has a right to expect that scholars discuss the issue without resort to invective and with proper regard for established facts.'

In order to refute a theory which pretends to be scientific, it is first necessary to understand what a scientific theory is. A scientific theory is an attempt to bring order and meaning to a mass of phenomena which without it would remain disconnected and unintelligible. Any one who disputes the scientific character of such a theory either must produce a theory superior in these scientific functions to the one attacked or must, at the very least, demonstrate that the facts as they actually are do not lend themselves to the interpretation which the theory has put upon them. When a historian tells us that the balance of power is not a universal principle of politics, domestic and international, that it was practiced in Europe only for a limited period and never by the United States, that it ruined the states that practiced it,4 it is incumbent upon him to tell us how we can dispose by means of theory of the historic data by which, for instance, David Hume demonstrated the universality of the balance of power and Paul Scott M o w r e r h n d Alfred Vagts%ts practice by the United States; what Kautilya was writing about in the fourth century B.C. when he summarized the theoretical and practical tradition of Indian statecraft in terms of the balance of power; what the Greek city states, the Roman republic, and the medieval emperors and

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popes were doing if they did not apply the principles of the balance of power; and how the nations which either neglected these principles or applied them wrongly suffered political and military defeat and even extinction, while the nation which applied these principles most consistently and consciously, that is, Great Britain, enjoyed unrivalled power for an unparalleled length of time. The historian who wishes to replace the balance of power as the guiding principle of American foreign policy with the "humanitarian and pacific traditions" of the "coordinate state"' must first of all explain how it has come about that the thirteen original states expanded into the full breadth and a good deal of the length of a continent, until today the strategic frontiers of the United States run parallel to the coastline of Asia and along the River Elbe. If such are the results of policies based upon "humanitarian and pacific traditions," never in the history of the world has virtue been more bountifully rewarded! Yet our historian must explain not only the great sweep of American expansion, but also the specific foreign policies which in their historic succession make up that sweep. Is it easier to explain the successive shifts of American support from Great Britain to France and back again from the beginning of King George's War in 1744 to the War of 1812 in terms of the "coordinate state" than in terms of the balance of power? The same question might be asked about the postponement of the recognition of the independence of the Spanish colonies until 1822, when the Floridas had been acquired from Spain and Spain had thereby been deprived of the ability to challenge the United States from within the hemisphere. The same question might be asked about the Monroe Doctrine itself, about Lincoln's policies toward Great Britain and France, and about our successive policies with regard to Mexico and the Caribbean. One could go on and pick out a t random any foreign policy pursued by the United States from the beginning to 1919 and one would hardly find a policy, with the exception perhaps of the War of 1812, which could not be made intelligible by reference to the national interest defined in terms of power - political, military, and economic - rather than by reference to the principle of the "coordinate state." This inevitable outcome of such an inquiry is well summarized in these words: Ease and prosperity have made us wish the whole world to be as happy and well to do as ourselves; and we have supposed that institutions and principles like our own were the simple prescription for making them so. And yet, when issues of our own interest arose, we have not been unselfish. We have shown ourselves kin to all the world, when it came to pushing an advantage. Our action against Spain in the Floridas, and against Mexico on the coasts of the Pacific; our attitude toward first the Spaniards, and then the French, with regard to the control of the Mississippi; the unpitying force with which we thrust the Indians to the wall wherever they stood in our way, have suited our professions of peacefulness and justice and liberality no better than the aggressions of

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other nations that were strong and not to be gainsaid. Even Mr. Jefferson, philanthropist and champion of peaceable and modest government though he was, exemplified this double temper of the people he ruled. "Peace is our passion," he had declared; but the passion abated when he saw the mouth of the Mississippi about to pass into the hands of France. Though he had loved France and hated England, he did not hesitate then what language to hold. "There is on the globe," he wrote to Mr. Livingston at Paris, "one single spot the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. The day that France takes possession of New Orleans seals the union of two nations, who, in conjunction, can maintain exclusive possession of the sea. From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation." Our interests must march forward, altruists though we are; other nations must see to it that they stand off, and d o not seek to stay us. This realist appraisal of the American tradition in foreign policy was published in 1901 in the Atlantic Monthly. Its author was a professor of jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton by the name of Woodrow Wilson." Nothing more needs to be said to demonstrate that facts d o not support a revision of American diplomatic history which tries to substitute "humanitarian and pacifist traditions" and the "coiirdinate state" for power politics and the balance of power as the guiding principle of American foreign policy. What, then, does support it? Three things: the way American statesmen have spoken about American foreign policy; the legal fiction of the "coiirdinate state"; finally, and foremost, an emotional urge to justify American foreign policy in humanitarian, pacifist terms. It is elementary that the character of a foreign policy can be ascertained only through the examination of the political acts performed and of the foreseeable consequences of these acts. Thus we can find out what statesmen have actually done, and from the foreseeable consequences of their acts we can surmise what their objectives might have been. Yet examination of the facts is not enough. To give meaning to the factual raw material of history, we must approach historical reality with a kind of rational outline, a map which suggests to us the possible meanings of history. In other words, we put ourselves in the position of a statesman who must meet a certain problem of foreign policy under certain circumstances and ask ourselves, what are the rational alternatives from which a statesman may choose who must meet this problem under these circumstances, presuming always that he acts in a rational manner, and which of these rational alternatives was this particular statesman, acting under these circumstances, likely to choose? It is the testing of this rational hypothesis against the actual facts and their consequences which gives meaning to the facts of history and makes the scientific writing of political history possible. In the process of writing the history of foreign policy the interpretations by statesmen of their own acts, especially if they are made for public

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consumption, must needs have a strictly subsidiary place. The public selfinterpretation by actors on the political scene is itself, of course, a political act which seeks to present a certain policy to its presumed supporters in terms of their moral and political folklore and to those against which it is directed in terms which intend to embarrass and deceive. Such declarations may indeed shed light upon the character and objectives of the policy pursued if they are considered in conjunction with, and in subordination to, rational hypotheses, actions, and likely consequences. Yet it is quite a different matter to interpret the American tradition of foreign policy in the light of a collection of official statements which, like most such statements, present humanitarian and pacifist justifications for the policies pursued. If anybody should be bold enough to write a history of world politics with so uncritical a method he would easily and well-nigh inevitably be driven to the conclusion that from Timur to Hitler and Stalin the foreign policies of all nations were inspired by the ideals of humanitarianism and pacifism. The absurdity of the result is commensurate with the defects of the method. It is only from a method which accepts the declarations of statesmen as evidence of the character of the policies pursued, that the principle of the "coordinate state" receives a semblance of plausibility. Statesmen and international lawyers have been wont to speak of the "equal dignity" of all states, regardless of "wealth, power, size, population or c u l t ~ r e , "which ~ I take the principle of the "coordinate state" to mean. It is also referred to as the principle of "federalism in international r e l a t i ~ n s . " ' As ~ its prime examples are cited the relations amongst the states of the Union, the states of the American system, the members of the Commonwealth of Nations, and the members of the Swiss Confederation. If the whole world were organized in accordance with this principle, as are already these four political entities, it is assumed that the freedom, dignity, and peace of all nations would then be assured. There is no need to examine the theoretical and practical merits of the principle of the "coordinate state," because for none of the four political entities mentioned does the idea of the "coordinate state" provide the principle of political organization. The equality of the states as the political foundation of the United States became obsolescent when Chief Justice Marshall's Supreme Court resolved the ambiguity of the Constitution in favor of the federal government, and it became obsolete when the Civil War proved Chief Justice Marshall's point. The equality of the states survives today only in the shadow and by virtue of the federal government's political supremacy, and without the cohesive force of that supremacy there would be no union of equal states to begin with. That these powers of the federal government are limited and qualified by the principle of federalism, that is, by the constitutionally granted powers of the states, is quite a different matter; it concerns the distribution of powers between federal government and states within a general system of checks and balances, but has nothing to do with the equality of the states as the alleged political foundation of the American system of government. With the exception of the

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equality of senatorial representation, the principle of the equality of the states is today, as it has been for almost a century, devoid of political content. It serves only as a principle of regional organization, of administrative decentralization, and, above all, of constitutional rhetoric. What it really signifies was pointed out more than fifty years ago by W.A. Dunning when he summarized his answer to the question "Are the states equal under the Constitution?" by saying that "the theory of equal states falls to the ground." I ' Similarly, the federalism of Switzerland is the result of a long series of civil wars, the last one fought a little more than a century ago, which established the predominance of the German-speaking cantons within the confederation. Here too, it is the existence of predominant power, located in one segment of the federal system, which makes federalism possible in the first place. By the same token, the unchallengeable supremacy of the United States within the Western Hemisphere has throughout been the backbone of the system of American states. As long as this supremacy is secure, there is, on the one hand, no need for the United States to assert it in the political and military sphere, and, taking it for granted, the United States can well afford to pursue a policy of the Good Neighbor; and there is, on the other hand, no opportunity for the other members of the system to challenge that supremacy effectively. This is what the principle of the "coiirdinate state" amounts to in the Western Hemisphere. Consequently, whenever there was even a remote possibility that the supremacy of the United States might be challenged, generally through instigation from outside the hemisphere, the United States asserted its superior power within the hemisphere and acted as all states must act under similar conditions. Whatever possibility for common political action there remains among the members of the Commonwealth of Nations is the result of the interests which these members may have in common. In other words, the member states may work together or each of them may work with other nations, as their interests dictate. Their membership in the Commonwealth, as the examples of India, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand clearly show, has no influence upon this decision; that membership is but a faint remembrance of the times when Great Britain could secure cooperation among the member states on its terms by virtue of its superior power. What, then, have these four examples of the "coiirdinate state" in common which would establish them as a distinct type of interstate relationship, and what conclusions can be drawn from them for the organization of the world? The only thing that these four examples seem to have really in common is the legal stipulation of the equality of the members of the respective systems and this characteristic is not peculiar to them, but a general principle of international law applicable to all sovereign states. In the political sphere they seem to have nothing in common at all. What they tend to show, however, is the decisive importance of the distribution of political power for the operation of federal and egalitarian relations among states. The political cohesion of a federal system is the result of superior power

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located in some part of it. It is by virtue of its superior power that the predominant part can afford to grant the other members of the federal system a measure of equality in the non-political sphere. These observations bring us back to power politics and the balance of power to which the principle of the "coordinate state" was supposed t o be the alternative. In truth, it is not the disinterested consideration of facts which has given birth to the theory of the "coordinate state." That theory is rather the response to an emotional urge, and since this emotion is not peculiar to a particular author but typical of a popular reaction to the new role which the United States must play in world affairs, it deserves a brief analysis. One of the great experiences of our time which have impressed themselves upon the American mind is the emergence of the United States as a nation among other nations, exposed to the same opportunities, temptations, risks, and liabilities to which other nations have been traditionally exposed. This experience becomes the more shocking if it is compared with the expectation with which we fought the Second World War. We expected from that war a reaffirmation of the secure, detached, and independent position in world affairs which we had inherited from the Founding Fathers and which we had been successful in preserving at least to the First World War. By avoiding what we thought had been Wilson's mistakes, we expected t o emerge from that war if not more independent, certainly more secure l ~ even in the early than we were when we entered it. In fact, ~ r o b a b not days of the Republic were we more exposed to danger from abroad than we are today, and never had we less freedom of action in taking care of our interests than we have today. It is naturally shocking to recognize that a happy chapter in the history of the nation and in one's own way of life has come to an end. There are those who reconcile themselves to the inevitable, albeit with sorrow rather than with glee, and try to apply the lessons of the past to the tasks at hand. There are others who try to escape from a disappointing and threatening reality into the realm of fantasy. Three such escapist fantasies have arisen in our midst in response to the challenge of American world leadership and power: the fantasy of needless American participation in war, the fantasy of American treason, and the fantasy of American innocence. The first of these fantasies presumes that the present predicament is a result not of necessity but of folly, the folly of American statesmen who needlessly intervened in two world wars. The second of these fantasies attributes the present predicament to treason in high places whereby the fruits of victory were handed to the enemy. The third of these fantasies denies that the predicament is real and prefers to think of it as an intellectual fraud perpetrated upon the American people. To support this fictional denial of the actualities of the present, it draws upon a fictional account of the past. The United States does not need to bear at present the intellectual, moral, and political burdens which go with involvement in power politics and the maintenance of the balance of power; for it has never borne them in the past, never having been thus involved. The golden age of past political

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innocence sheds its glow upon a but seemingly less innocent present and promises a future in which all the world will follow the example of America, forswear power politics and the balance of power, and accept the principle of the "coiirdinate state." Our rearmament program, as exemplified in the Atlantic Security Pact, we are told, has nothing to do with the balance of power but aims at the "organization of as much of the world as we can upon the basis of the coiirdinate state. . . . It may prove impossible under present conditions to build such a system without having to fight a war with Russia, but then at least we will be fighting, as we did before, for the thing we consider worth defending with our lives and treasure."" Thus a fictional account of the American past, begun as an act of uncalled-for patriotic piety, issues in an ideology for a third world war. Escape we must from the unfamiliar, unpleasant, and dangerous present, first into the political innocence of the past and from there into the immediate future of a third world war, beyond which the revived and universalized innocence of the more distant future will surely lie. We have said that to present the American tradition in foreign policy as having been free from concern with power politics and the balance of power is not warranted by the facts of American history. Yet it might still be argued, and it is actually being argued, that, regardless of the evidence of history, the American people will not be reconciled to power politics and the balance of power and will support only policies based upon abstract moral principles. While in the past the United States might have pursued balance of power policies and while it might be a good thing if it did do so again, the American people will not stand for it. Here the emotional appeal to patriotic piety is joined by calculations of political expediency. Yet the case for misrepresenting American history has nothing to gain from either. There is a strong tendency in all historiography to glorify the national past, and in popular presentations that tendency takes on the aspects of the jingoist whitewash. Even so penetrating a mind as John Stuart Mill's could deliver himself of an essay in which he proved, no doubt to the satisfaction of many of his English readers but certainly of few others, that Great Britain had never interfered in the affairs of European nations and had interfered in those of the Indian states only for their own good.'' Yet it is the measure of a nation's maturity to be able to recognize its past for what it actually is. Why should we not admit that American foreign policy has been generally hardheaded and practical and at times ruthless? Why should we deny Jefferson's cunning, say, in the Puget Sound affair, the cruelty with which the Indians were treated, and the faithlessness with which the treaties with the Indians were cast aside? We know that this is the way all nations are when their interests are at stake - so cruel, so faithless, so cunning. We know that the United States has refrained from seeking dominions beyond the seas not because it is more virtuous than other nations, but because it had the better part of a continent to colonize. As has been pointed out elsewhere at greater length, the man in the street, unsophisticated as he is and uninformed as he may be, has a surer

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grasp of the essentials of foreign policy and a more mature judgment of its basic issues than many of the intellectuals and politicians who pretend to speak for him and cater to what they imagine his prejudices to be. During the recent war the ideologues of the Atlantic Charter, the Four Freedoms, and the United Nations were constantly complaining that the American soldier did not know what he was fighting for. Indeed, if he was fighting for some Utopian ideal, divorced from the concrete experiences and interests of the country, then the complaint was well grounded. However, if he was fighting for the territorial integrity of the nation and for its survival as a free country where he could live, think, and act as he pleased, then he had never any doubt about what he was fighting for. Ideological rationalizations and justifications are indeed the indispensable concomitants of all political action. Yet there is something unhealthy in a craving for ideological intoxication and in the inability to act and t o see merit in action except under the stimulant of grandiose ideas and far-fetched schemes. Have our intellectuals become, like Hamlet, too much beset by doubt to act and, unlike Hamlet, compelled to still their doubts by renouncing their sense of what is real? The man in the street has n o such doubts. It is true that ideologues and demagogues can sway him by appealing to his emotions. But it is also true, as American history shows in abundance and as the popular success of Ambassador Kennan's book demonstrates, that responsible statesmen can guide him by awakening his latent understanding of the national interest.

Yet what is the national interest? How can we define it and give it the content which will make it a guide for action? This is one of the relevant questions to which the current debate has given rise. It has been frequently argued against the realist conception of foreign policy that its key concept, the national interest, does not provide an acceptable standard for political action. This argument is in the main based upon two grounds: the elusiveness of the concept and its susceptibility to interpretations, such as limitless imperialism and narrow nationalism, which are not in keeping with the American tradition in foreign policy. The argument has substance as far as it goes, but it does not invalidate the usefulness of the concept. The concept of the national interest is similar in two respects to the "great generalities" of the Constitution, such as the general welfare and due process. It contains a residual meaning which is inherent in the concept itself, but beyond these minimum requirements its content can run the whole gamut of meanings which are logically compatible with it. That content is determined by the political traditions and the total cultural context within which a nation formulates its foreign policy. The concept of the national interest, then, contains two elements, one that is logically required and in that sense necessary, and one that is variable and determined by circumstances.

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Any foreign policy which operates under the standard of the national interest must obviously have some reference to the physical, political, and cultural entity which we call a nation. In a world where a number of sovereign nations compete with and oppose each other for power, the foreign policies of all nations must necessarily refer to their survival as their minimum requirements. Thus all nations d o what they cannot help but do: protect their physical, political, a n d cultural identity against encroachments by other nations. It has been suggested that this reasoning erects the national state into the last word in politics and the national interest into an absolute standard for political action. This, however, is not quite the case. The idea of interest is indeed of the essence of politics and, as such, unaffected by the circumstances of time and place. Thucydides' statement, born of the experiences of ancient Greece, that "identity of interest is the surest of bonds whether between states or individuals" was taken up in the nineteenth century by Lord Salisbury's remark that "the only bond of union that endures" among nations is "the absence of all clashing interests." The perennial issue between the realist and utopian schools of thought over the nature of politics, to which we have referred before, might well be formulated in terms of concrete interests vs. abstract principles. Yet while the concern of politics with interest is perennial, the connection between interest and the national state is a product of history. The national state itself is obviously a product of history and as such destined t o yield in time to different modes of political organization. As long as the world is politically organized into nations, the national interest is indeed the last word in world politics. When the national state will have been replaced by another mode of organization, foreign policy must then protect the interest in survival of that new organization. For the benefit of those who insist upon discarding the national state and constructing supranational organizations by constitutional fiat, it must be pointed out that these new organizational forms will either come into being through conquest or else through consent based upon the mutual recognition of the national interests of the nations concerned; for no nation will forego its freedom of action if it has n o reason to expect proportionate benefits in compensation for that loss. This is true of treaties concerning commerce or fisheries as it is true of the great compacts, such as the European Coal and Steel Community, through which nations try to create supranational forms of organization. Thus, by a n apparent paradox, what is historically relative in the idea of the national interest can be overcome only through the promotion in concert of the national interest of a number of nations. The survival of a political unit, such as a nation, in its identity is the irreducible minimum, the necessary element of its interests vis-a-vis other units. Taken in isolation, the determination of its content in a concrete situation is relatively simple; for it encompasses the integrity of the nation's territory, of its political institutions, and of its culture. Thus bipartisanship in foreign policy, especially in times of war, has been most easily achieved in the promotion

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of these minimum requirements of the national interest. The situation is different with respect to the variable elements of the national interest. All the cross currents of personalities, public opinion, sectional interests, partisan politics, and political and moral folkways are brought to bear upon their determination. In consequence, the contribution which science can make to this field, as to all fields of policy formation, is limited. It can identify the different agencies of the government which contribute to the determination of the variable elements of the national interest and assess their relative weight. It can separate the long-range objectives of foreign policy from the short-term ones which are the means for the achievement of the former and can tentatively establish their rational relations. Finally, it can analyze the variable elements of the national interest in terms of their legitimacy and their compatibility with other national values and with the national interest of other nations. We shall address ourselves briefly to the typical problems with which this analysis must deal. The legitimacy of the national interest must be determined in the face of possible usurpation by subnational, other-national, and supranational interests. O n the subnational level we find group interests, represented particularly by ethnic and economic groups, who tend to identify themselves with the national interest. Charles A. Beard has emphasized, however onesidedly, the extent to which the economic interests of certain groups have been presented as those of the United States.14 Group interests exert, of course, constant pressure upon the conduct of our foreign policy, claiming their identity with the national interest. It is, however, doubtful that, with the exception of a few spectacular cases, they have been successful in determining the course of American foreign policy. It is much more likely, given the nature of American domestic politics, that American foreign policy, insofar as it is the object of pressures by sectional interests, will normally be a compromise between divergent sectional interests. The concept of the national interest, as it emerges from this contest as the actual guide for foreign policy, may well fall short of what would be rationally required by the overall interests of the United States. Yet the concept of the national interest which emerges from this contest of conflicting sectional interests is also more than any particular sectional interest or their sum total. It is, as it were, the lowest common denominator where sectional interests and the national interest meet in an uneasy compromise which may leave much t o be desired in view of all the interests concerned. The national interest can be usurped by other-national interests in two typical ways. The case of treason by individuals, either out of conviction or for pay, needs only to be mentioned here; for insofar as treason is committed on behalf of a foreign government rather than a supranational principle, it is significant for psychology, sociology, and criminology, but not for the theory of politics. The other case, however, is important not only for the theory of politics but also for its practice, especially in the United States. National minorities in European countries, ethnic groups in the United States, ideological minorities anywhere may identify themselves, either

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spontaneously or under the direction of the agents of a foreign government, with the interests of that foreign government and may promote these interests under the guise of the national interest of the country whose citizens they happen to be. The activities of the German-American Bund in the United States in the 'thirties and of Communists everywhere are cases in point. Yet the issue of the national interest vs. other-national interests masquerading as the national interest has arisen constantly in the United States in a less clear-cut fashion. A country which had been settled by consecutive waves of "foreigners" was bound to find it particularly difficult to identify its own national interest against alleged, seeming, or actual other-national interests represented by certain groups among its own citizens. Since virtually all citizens of the United States are, as it were, "more or less" foreign-born, those who were "less" so have frequently not resisted the temptation to use this distinction as a polemic weapon against late comers who happened to differ from them in their conception of the national interest of the United States. Frequently, this rationalization has been dispensed with and a conception of foreign policy with which a writer happened to disagree has been attributed outright to foreign sympathy or influence or worse. British influence and interests have served as standard arguments in debates on American foreign policy. Madison, in his polemic against Hamilton on the occasion of Washington's Neutrality Proclamation of 1793, identified the Federalist position with that of "the foreigners and degenerate citizens among us, who hate our republican government, and the French revolution,"" and the accusation met with a favorable response in a majority of Congress and of public opinion. However, these traditional attempts to discredit dissenting opinion as being influenced by foreign interests should not obscure the real issue, which is the peculiar vulnerability of the national interest of the United States to usurpation by the interests of other nations. The usurpation of the national interest by supranational interests can derive in our time from two sources: religious bodies and international organizations. The competition between church and state for determination of certain interests and policies, domestic and international, has been an intermittent issue throughout the history of the national state. Here, too, the legitimate defense of the national interest against usurpation has frequently, especially in the United States, degenerated into the demagogic stigmatization of dissenting views as being inspired by Rome and, hence, being incompatible with the national interest. Yet here, too, the misuse of the issue for demagogic purposes must be considered apart from the legitimacy of the issue itself. The more acute problem arises at the present time from the importance which the public and government officials, at least in their public utterances, attribute to the values represented and the policies pursued by international organizations either as alternatives or supplements to the values and policies for which the national government stands. It is frequently asserted that the foreign policy of the United States pursues no objectives apart from those of -

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the United Nations, that, in other words, the foreign policy of the United States is actually identical with the policy of the United Nations. This assertion cannot refer to anything real in actual politics to support it. For the constitutional structure of international organizations, such as the United Nations, and their procedural practices make it impossible for them to pursue interests apart from those of the member-states which dominate their policyforming bodies. The identity between the interests of the United Nations and the United States can only refer to the successful policies of the United States within the United Nations through which the support of the United Nations is being secured for the policies of the United States.16The assertion, then, is mere polemic, different from the one discussed previously in that the identification of a certain policy with a supranational interest does not seek to reflect discredit upon the former, but to bestow upon it a dignity which the national interest pure and simple is supposed to lack. The real issue in view of the problem that concerns us here is not whether the so-called interests of the United Nations, which d o not exist apart from the interests of its most influential members, have superseded the national interest of the United States, but for what kind of interests the United States has secured United Nations support. While these interests cannot be United Nations interests, they do not need to be national interests either. Here we are in the presence of that modern phenomenon which has been variously described as "utopianism," "sentimentalism," "moralism," the "legalistic-moralistic approach." The common denominator of all these tendencies in modern political thought is the substitution for the national interest of a supranational standard of action which is generally identified with an international organization, such as the United Nations. The national interest is here not being usurped by sub- or supranational interests which, however inferior in worth to the national interest, are nevertheless real and worthy of consideration within their proper sphere. What challenges the national interest here is a mere figment of the imagination, a product of wishful thinking, which is postulated as a valid norm for international conduct, without being valid either there or anywhere else. At this point we touch the core of the present controversy between utopianism and realism in international affairs; we shall return to it later in this paper. The national interest as such must be defended against usurpation by non-national interests. Yet once that task is accomplished, a rational order must be established among the values which make up the national interest and among the resources to be committed to them. While the interests which a nation may pursue in its relation with other nations are of infinite variety and magnitude, the resources which are available for the pursuit of such interests are necessarily limited in quantity and kind. N o nation has the resources to promote all desirable objectives with equal vigor; all nations must therefore allocate their scarce resources as rationally as possible. The indispensable precondition of such rational allocation is a clear understanding of the distinction between the necessary and variable elements of the national interest. Given the contentious manner in which in democracies

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the variable elements of the national interest are generally determined, the advocates of an extensive conception of the national interest will inevitably present certain variable elements of the national interest as though their attainment were necessary for the nation's survival. In other words, the necessary elements of the national interest have a tendency to swallow up the variable elements so that in the end all kinds of objectives, actual or potential, are justified in terms of national survival. Such arguments have been advanced, for instance, in support of the rearmament of Western Germany and of the defense of Formosa. They must be subjected to rational scrutiny which will determine, however tentatively, their approximate place in the scale of national values. The same problem presents itself in its extreme form when a nation pursues, or is asked to pursue, objectives which are not only unnecessary for its survival but tend to jeopardize it. Second-rate nations which dream of playing the role of great powers, such as Italy and Poland in the interwar period, illustrate this point. So d o great powers which dream of remaking the world in their own image and embark upon world-wide crusades, thus straining their resources to exhaustion. Here scientific analysis has the urgent task of pruning down national objectives to the measure of available resources in order to make their pursuit compatible with national survival. Finally, the national interest of a nation which is conscious not only of its own interests but also of that of other nations must be defined in terms compatible with the latter. In a multinational world this is a requirement of political morality; in an age of total war it is also one of the conditions for survival. In connection with this problem two mutually exclusive arguments have been advanced. O n the one hand, it has been argued against the theory of international politics here presented that the concept of the national interest revives the eighteenth-century concept of enlightened self-interest, presuming that the uniformly enlightened pursuit of their self-interest by all individuals, as by all nations, will of itself be conducive to a peaceful and harmonious society. O n the other hand, the point has been made that the pursuit of their national interest by all nations makes war the permanent arbiter of conflicts among them. Neither argument is well taken. The concept of the national interest presupposes neither a naturally harmonious, peaceful world nor the inevitability of war as a consequence of the pursuit by all nations of their national interest. Quite to the contrary, it assumes continuous conflict and threat of war, to be minimized through the continuous adjustment of conflicting interests by diplomatic action. N o such assumption would be warranted if all nations at all times conceived of their national interest only in terms of their survival and, in turn, defined their interest in survival in restrictive and rational terms. As it is, their conception of the national interest is subject to all the hazards of misinterpretation, usurpation, and misjudgment to which reference has been made above. To minimize these hazards is the first task of a foreign policy which seeks the defense of the national interest by peaceful means. Its second task

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is the defense of the national interest, restrictively and rationally defined, against the national interests of other nations which may or may not be thus defined. If they are not, it becomes the task of armed diplomacy to convince the nations concerned that their legitimate interests have nothing to fear from a restrictive and rational foreign policy and that their illegitimate interests have nothing to gain in the face of armed might rationally employed.

We have said before that the utopian and realist positions in international affairs d o not necessarily differ in the policies they advocate, but that they part company over their general philosophies of politics and their way of thinking about matters political. It does not follow that the present debate is only of academic interest and without practical significance. Both camps, it is true, may support the same policy for different reasons. Yet if the reasons are unsound, the soundness of the policies supported by them is a mere coincidence, and these very same reasons may be, and inevitably are, invoked on other occasions in support of unsound policies. The nefarious consequences of false philosophies and wrong ways of thinking may for the time being be concealed by the apparent success of policies derived from them. You may go to war, justified by your nation's interests, for a moral purpose and in disregard of considerations of power; and military victory seems t o satisfy both your moral aspirations and your nation's interests. Yet the manner in which you waged the war, achieved victory, and settled the peace cannot help reflecting your philosophy of politics and your way of thinking about political problems. If these are in error, you may win victory on the field of battle and still assist in the defeat of both your moral principles and the national interest of your country. Any number of examples could illustrate the real yet subtle practical consequences which follow from the different positions taken. We have chosen two: collective security in Korea and the liberation of the nations that are captives of Communism. A case for both policies can be made from both the utopian and realist positions, but with significant differences in the emphasis and substance of the policies pursued. Collective security as an abstract principle of utopian politics requires that all nations come to the aid of a victim of aggression by resisting the aggressor with all means necessary to frustrate his aims. Once the case of aggression is established, the duty to act is unequivocal. Its extent may be affected by concern for the nation's survival; obviously no nation will commit outright suicide in the service of collective security. But beyond that elemental limitation no consideration of interest or power, either with regard to the aggressor or his victim or the nation acting in the latter's defense, can qualify the obligation to act under the principle of collective security. Thus high officials of our government have declared that we intervened in Korea

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not for any narrow interest of ours but in support of the moral principle of collective security. Collective security as a concrete principle of realist policy is the age-old maxim, "Hang together or hang separately," in modern dress. It recognizes the need for nation A under certain circumstances to defend nation B against attack by nation C. That need is determined, first, by the interest which A has in the territorial integrity of B and by the relation of that interest to all the other interests of A as well as to the resources available for the support of a11 those interests. Furthermore, A must take into account the power which is at the disposal of aggressor C for fighting A and B as over against the power available to A and B for fighting C. The same calculation must he carried on concerning the power of the likely allies of C as over against those of A and B. Before going to war for the defense of South Korea in the name of collective security, an American adherent of political realism would have demanded an answer to the following four questions: First, what is our interest in the preservation of the independence of South Korea; second, what is our power to defend that independence against North Korea; third, what is our power to defend that independence against China and the Soviet Union; and fourth, what are the chances for preventing China and the Soviet Union from entering the Korean War? In view of the principle of collective security, interpreted in utopian terms, our intervention in Korea was a foregone conclusion. The interpretation of this principle in realist terms might or might not, depending upon the concrete circumstances of interest and power, have led us to the same conclusion. In the execution of the policy of collective security the utopian had to be indifferent to the possibility of Chinese and Russian intervention, except for his resolution to apply the principle of collective security to anybody who would intervene on the side of the aggressor. The realist could not help weighing the possibility of the intervention of a great power on the side of the aggressor in terms of the interests engaged and the power available on the other side." The Truman administration could not bring itself to taking resolutely the utopian or the realist position. It resolved to intervene in good measure on utopian grounds and in spite of military advice to the contrary; it allowed the military commander to advance to the Yalu River in disregard of the risk of the intervention of a great power against which collective security could be carried out only by means of a general war, and then refused to pursue the war with full effectiveness on the realist grounds of the risk of a third world war. Thus Mr. Truman in 1952 is caught in the same dilemma from which Mr. Baldwin could extricate himself in 1936 on the occasion of the League of Nations sanctions against Italy's attack upon Ethiopia only at an enormous loss to British prestige. Collective security as a defense of the status quo short of a general war can be effective only against second-rate powers. Applied against a major power, it is a contradiction in terms, for it means necessarily a major war. Of this self-defeating contradiction Mr. Baldwin was as unaware in the 'thirties as Mr. Truman seems to be in 1952. Mr. Churchill

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put Mr. Baldwin's dilemma in these cogent terms: "First, the Prime Minister had declared that sanctions meant war; secondly, he was resolved that there must be no war; and thirdly, he decided upon sanctions. It was evidently impossible to comply with these three conditions." Similarly Mr. Truman had declared that the effective prosecution of the Korean War meant the possibility of a third world war; he resolved that there must be no third world war; and he decided upon intervention in the Korean War. Here, too, it is impossible to comply with these three conditions. Similar contradictions are inherent in the proposals which would substitute for the current policy of containment one of the liberation of the nations presently the captives of Russian Communism. This objective can be compatible with the utopian or realist position, but the policies designed to secure it will be fundamentally different according to whether they are based upon one or the other position. The clearest case to date for the utopian justification of such policies has been made by Representative Charles J. Kersten of Wisconsin who pointed to these four "basic defects" of the "negative policy of containment and negotiated coexistence": It would be immoral and unchristian to negotiate a permanent agreement with forces which by every religious creed and moral precept are evil. It abandons nearly one-half of humanity and the once free nations of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia and China to enslavement of the Communist police state. It is un-American because it violates the principle of the American Declaration of Independence, which proclaims the rights of all people to freedom and their right and duty to throw off tyranny. It will lead to all-out World War 111 because it aligns all the forces of the non-Communist world in military opposition to and against all the forces of the Communist world, including the 800,000,000 peoples behind the Iron Curtain. The policy of mere containment is uneconomic and will lead to national bankruptcy.I8 This statement is interesting for its straightforwardness and because it combines in a rather typical fashion considerations of abstract morality and of expediency. The captive nations must be liberated not only because their captivity is immoral, unchristian, and un-American, but also because its continuation will lead to a third world war and to national bankruptcy. To what extent, however, these considerations of expediency are invalidated by their utopian setting will become obvious from a comparison between the utopian and the realist positions. From the utopian point of view there can be no difference between the liberation of Esthonia or Czechoslovakia, of Poland or China; the captivity of any nation, large or small, close or far away, is a moral outrage which cannot be tolerated. The realist, too, seeks the liberation of all captive nations because he realizes that the presence of the Russian armies in the

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heart of Europe and their cooperation with the Chinese armies constitute the t w o main sources of the imbalance of power which threatens our security. Yet before he formulates a program of liberation, he will seek answers to a number of questions such as these: While the United States has a general interest in the liberation of all captive nations, what is the hierarchy of interests it has in the liberation, say, of China, Esthonia, and Hungary? And while the Soviet Union has a general interest in keeping all captive nations in that state, what is the hierarchy of its interests in keeping, say, Poland, Eastern Germany, and Bulgaria captive? If we assume, as we must on the historic evidence of two centuries, that Russia would never give up control over Poland without being compelled by force of arms, would the objective of the liberation of Poland justify the ruin of western civilization, that of Poland included, which would be the certain result of a third world war? What resources does the United States have at its disposal for the liberation of all captive nations or some of them? What resources does the Soviet Union have at its disposal to keep in captivity all captive nations or some of them? Are we more likely to avoid national bankruptcy by embarking upon a policy of indiscriminate liberation with the concomitant certainty of war or by continuing the present policy of containment? It might be that in a particular instance the policies suggested by the answers to these questions will coincide with Representative Kersten's proposals, but there can be no doubt that in its overall character, substance, emphasis, and likely consequences a utopian policy of liberation differs fundamentally from a realist one. The issue between liberation as a utopian principle of abstract morality vs. the realist evaluation of the consequences which a policy of liberation would have for the survival of the nation has arisen before in American history. Abraham Lincoln was faced with a dilemma similar to that which confronts us today. Should he make the liberation of the slaves the ultimate standard of his policy even at the risk of destroying the Union, as many urged him to do, or should he subordinate the moral principle of universal freedom to considerations of the national interest? The answer Lincoln gave to Horace Greeley, a spokesman for the utopian moralists, is timeless in its eloquent wisdom. "If there be those," he wrote on August 22, 1862, who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I d o not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If 1 could save the Union without freeing any slave I would d o it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because 1 believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts

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the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear t o be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

The foregoing discussion ought to shed additional light, if this is still needed, upon the moral merits of the utopian and realist positions. This question, more than any other, seems to have agitated the critics of realism in international affairs. Disregarding the voluminous evidence, some of them have picked a few words out of their context t o prove that realism in international affairs is unprincipled and contemptuous of morality. To mention but one example, one eminent critic summarizes my position, which he supposes t o deny the possibility of judging the conduct of states by moral criteria, in these words: "And one spokesman finds 'a profound and neglected truth,' to use his words, in the dictum of Hobbes that 'there is neither morality nor law outside the state.'"I9 These are indeed my words, but not all of them. What I actually said was this: There is a profound and neglected truth hidden in Hobbes's extreme dictum that the state creates morality as well as law and that there is neither morality nor law outside the state. Universal moral principles, such as justice or equality, are capable of guiding political action only to the extent that they have been given concrete content and have been related to political situations by society.20 It must be obvious from this passage and from all my other writings on the subject2' that my position is the exact opposite from what this critic makes it out t o be. I have always maintained that the actions of states are subject to universal moral principles and I have been careful to differentiate my position in this respect from that of Hobbes. Five points basic to my position may need to be emphasized again. The first point is what one might call the requirement of cosmic humility with regard to the moral evaluation of the actions of states. To know that states are subject to the moral law is one thing; to pretend to know what is morally required of states in a particular situation is quite another. The human mind tends naturally to identify the particular interests of states, as of individuals, with the moral purposes of the universe. The statesman in the defense of the nation's interests may, and at times even must, yield to that tendency; the scholar must resist it at every turn. For the light-hearted assumption that what one's own nation aims at and does is morally good and that those who oppose that nation's policies are evil is morally indefensible

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and intellectually untenable and leads in practice to that distortion of judgment, horn of the blindness of crusading frenzy, which has been the curse of nations from the beginning of time. The second point which obviously needs to be made again concerns the effectiveness of the restraints which morality imposes upon the actions of states.

A discussion of international morality must guard against the two extremes either of overrating the influence of ethics upon international politics or else of denying that statesmen and diplomats are moved by anything else but considerations of material power. O n the one hand, there is the dual error of confounding the moral rules which people actually observe with those they pretend to observe as well as with those which writers declare they ought to observe. ... O n the other hand, there is the misconception, usually associated with the general depreciation and moral condemnation of power politics, discussed above, that international politics is so thoroughly evil that it is no use looking for ethical limitations of the aspirations for power 011 the international scene. Yet, if we ask ourselves what statesmen and diplomats are capable of doing to further the power objectives of their respective nations and what they actually do, we realize that they do less than they probably could and less than they actually did in other periods of history. They refuse to consider certain ends and to use certain means, either altogether or under certain conditions, not because in the light of expediency they appear impractical or unwise, but because certain moral rules interpose an absolute barrier. Moral rules d o not permit certain policies to be considered at all from the point of view of expediency. Such ethical inhibitions operate in our time on different levels with different effectiveness. Their restraining function is most obvious and most effective in affirming the sacrednese of human life in times of peace." In connection with this passage we have given a number o f historic examples showing the influence of moral principles upon the conduct of foreign policy. An example taken from contemporary history will illustrate the same point. There can be little doubt that the Soviet Union could have achieved the objectives of its foreign policy at the end of the Second World War without antagonizing the nations of the West into that encircling coalition which has been the nightmare of Bolshevist foreign policy since 1917. It could have mitigated cunning for its own sake and the use of force with persuasion, conciliation, and a trust derived from the awareness of a partial community of interests and would thereby have minimized the dangers to itself and the rest of the world which are inherent in the objectives o f its policies. Yet the Soviet Union was precluded from relying upon these traditional methods of diplomacy by its general conception of human nature, politics, and morality. In the general philosophy of Bolshevism there is no room for honest dissent, the recognition of the intrinsic worth of divergent

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interests, and genuine conciliation between such interests. O n all levels of social interaction opposition must be destroyed by cunning and violence, since it has no right t o exist, rather than be met half way in view of its intrinsic legitimacy. This being the general conception of the political morality of Bolshevism, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union is limited to a much more narrow choice of means than the foreign policies of other nations. The United States, for instance, has been able, in its relations with the nations of Latin America, to replace military intervention and dollar diplomacy with the policy of the Good Neighbor. That drastic change was made possible by the general conception of political morality which has been prevalent in the United States from its very inception. The United States is a pluralist society which presupposes the continuing existence and legitimacy of divergent interests. These interests are locked in a continuing struggle for supremacy to be decided by force only as a last resort, but normally through a multitude of institutional agencies which are so devised as to allow one or the other interest a temporary advantage but none a permanent supremacy a t the price of the destruction of the others. This morality of pluralism allows the United States, once it is secure in that minimum of vital interests t o which we have referred above, t o transfer those principles of political morality to the international scene and to deal with divergent interests there with the same methods of genuine compromise and conciliation which are a permanent element of its domestic political life. The third point concerns the relations between universal moral principles and political action. I have always maintained that these universal moral principles cannot be applied t o the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be, as it were, filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus"; the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no moral right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival. There can be n o political morality without prudence, that is, without consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action. Classical and medieval philosophy knew this and so did Lincoln when he said: "I d o the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make n o difference." The issue between utopianism and realism, as it bears on this point, has been put most succinctly by Edmund Burke, and what he has to say in the following passage about revolution, that is, civil war, may well be applied mutatis mutandis to all war.

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Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are hroad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but Prudence is cautious how she defines. O u r courts cannot be more fearful in suffering fictitious cases to be brought before them for eliciting their determination on a point of law than prudent moralists are in putting extreme and hazardous cases of conscience upon emergencies not existing. Without attempting, therefore, to define, what never can be defined, the case of a revolution in government, this, 1 think, may be safely affirmed - that a sore and pressing evil is to be removed, and that a good, great in its amount and unequivocal in its nature, must be probable almost to a certainty, before the inestimable price of our own morals and the well-being of a number of our fellowcitizens is paid for a revolution. If ever we ought to be economists even to parsimony, it is in the voluntary production of evil. Every revolution contains in it something of evil." Fourth, the realist recognizes that a moral decision, especially in the political sphere, does not imply a simple choice between a moral principle and a standard of action which is morally irrelevant or even outright immoral. A moral decision implies always a choice among different moral principles, one of which is given precedence over others. To say that a political action has no moral purpose is absurd; for political action can be defined as an attempt to realize moral values through the medium of politics, that is, power. The relevant moral question concerns the choice among different moral values, and it is at this point that the realist and the utopian part company again. If an American statesman must choose between the promotion of universal liberty, which is a moral good, at the risk of American security and, hence, of liberty in the United States, and the promotion of American security and of liberty in the United States, which is another moral good, to the detriment of the promotion of universal liberty, which choice ought he to make? The utopian will not face the issue squarely and will deceive himself into believing that he can achieve both goods at the same time. The realist will choose the national interest on both moral and pragmatic grounds; for if he does not take care of the national interest nobody else will, and if he puts American security and liberty in jeopardy the cause of liberty everywhere will be impaired. Finally, the political realist distinguishes between his moral sympathies and the political interests which he must defend. He will distinguish with Lincoln between his "official duty" which is to protect the national interest

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and his "personal wish" which is t o see universal moral values realized throughout the world. The issue has been admirably put by Father Wilfred Parsons of Catholic University in defending Ambassador Kennan's position: Mr. Kennan did not say state behavior is not a fit subject for moral judgment, but only that it should not sway our realization of the realities with which we have to deal. Msgr. Koenig continues: "Should we accept power realities and aspirations without feeling the obligation of moral judgment?" And he appeals to the present writer and other political scientists to say whether this doctrine agrees with Pope Pius XII's messages on peace. I am sure that most political scientists, and also Mr. Kennan, would agree with the Monsignor that we should not accept those realities "without feeling the obligation of moral judgment." But there is a difference between feeling this obligation (and even expressing it) and allowing this feeling to sway our actions in concrete negotiations that deal with the national or world common good. We can still feel and yet deal. To make my meaning clearer, I understood Mr. Kennan to hold that we went off the beam with Woodrow Wilson, when we began to make our moral disapprobation an essential part of our foreign relations, even sometimes at the expense of our own and the world's common good. Logically, such an attitude would inhibit our dealing with Britain, France and a host of countries. Pius XI, speaking of Mussolini after the Lateran Treaty, said he would deal with the devil himself if he must. Here was moral disapprobation, but it was not "carried over into the affairs of states." This relative position, and not the absolute one of Msgr. Koenig (with which in itself I agree), is, I think, the issue raised by Mr. Kennan, and it is worth debating on that basis.14 The contest between utopianism and realism is not tantamount to a contest between principle and expediency, morality and immorality, although some spokesmen for the former would like to have it that way. The contest is rather between one type of political morality and another type of political morality, one taking as its standard universal moral principles abstractly formulated, the other weighing these principles against the moral requirements of concrete political action, their relative merits to be decided by a prudent evaluation of the political consequences to which they are likely to lead.2" These points are re-emphasized by the foregoing discussion. Which attitude with regard to collective security and to the liberation of the captive nations, the utopian or the realist, is more likely to safeguard the survival of the United States in its territorial, political, and cultural identity and at the same time to contribute the most to the security and liberty of other nations? This is the ultimate test - political and moral - by which utopianism and realism must be judged.

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Notes 1. 7'his IS tlie ideal type ot the u t o p ~ mp o s i t ~ o nrather than the e m p i r ~ c a descr~prion l of any p n r t i c u l ~ rh ~ s t o r ~type. c In actualit!: a n d this is true particularly of the present, tlie utopian position in internat~onalaffairs is not always consistent with its philosophic premises. 2. It o ~ ~ g not h t t o need special emphasis that a p r i n c ~ p l eof socidl conduct, In contrast t o a law of ncirure, a l l o w of, 'ind even presupposes, conduct in violarion of the pr~nciple.Robert W. Tuckel; In "Professor Morgenthau's Theory of Political 'Kealism"' in this Rtvn w, Vol. 46, pp. 214-224 ( M a r c h , 1952), has missed this a n d many other polnts in his zeal t o find contr'v dictions where there 'ire none. 3. ‘‘This Itlie realist] doctrine," write\ o n e historian - Frank TLinnenhaurn,"The Balance of Power versus the Coordinate State,"Pol~trralScience Qrtartrrly, Vol. 67, p. 173 (June, 1952) "is contessedl!; nay gleefully, amoral. It prides itself upon hei