War

2 Pages 606 Words

Peace: it’s wonderful. Everyone likes it as much as the next man, and have none wish to be willfully gloomy at a moment when optimism about the future shape of the world abounds. My thesis in this essay is that we will soon regret the passing of the Cold War. I intend to show that it will not be the by-products of the Cold War — such as the Korean and Vietnam — that we will miss, but the order that it brought to the area of international relations. To be sure, no one will want to replay the U-2 affair, the Cuban missile crisis, or the building of the Berlin Wall. And no one will want to revisit the domestic Cold War, with its purges and loyalty oaths, its xenophobia and stifling of dissent. We will not wake up one day to discover fresh wisdom in the collected fulminations of John Foster Dulles. We may, however, wake up one day lamenting the loss of the order that the Cold War gave to the anarchy of international relations. For untamed anarchy is what Europe knew in the forty-five years of this century before the Cold War, and untamed anarchy—Hobbes’ war of all against all — is a prime cause of armed conflict. Those who think that armed conflicts among the European states are now out of the question, that the two world wars burned all the war out of Europe, are projecting unwarranted optimism onto the future. The theories of peace that implicitly undergird this optimism are notably shallow constructs. They stand up to neither logical nor historical analysis. One would not want to bet the farm on their prophetic accuracy. The world is about to conduct a vast test of the theories of war and peace put forward by social scientists, who never dreamed that their ideas would be tested by the world-historic events announced almost daily in newspaper headlines. This social scientist is willing to put his theoretical cards on the table as he ventures predictions about the future of Europe. In the process, alternative theories of war an...