Why War is Futile

JONATHAN SCHELL / Harpers v.306, n.1834, Mar03

NO MORE UNTO THE BREACH
PART ONE

There are moments in history when a crack in time seems to open and swallow the known world: solid-seeming institutions, rotted from within, collapse or are discarded; settled beliefs are unsettled; old truths are discovered to be provisional; acts that were forbidden are permitted or even required; boundaries thought impassable are passed without comment; and outrageous and unreal events, seeming to belong more to comic books than to reality, flood in profusion from some portal of the future that no one was guarding or even watching. Sometimes everything happens at once, hut at other times there is a pause between a moment of dissolution and a moment of new foundation. Such intervals may, like the interregnum between the abdication of the Russian czar in February 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution in October of that year, last just a few months, or they may, like the hiatus between the American Revolution of 1776 and the adoption of the American Constitution in 1788, last for years. At some point, however, decisions are made, often with little warning. Bold authors step in to set up the architecture of the future, or, far more likely, unexpected shocks, often violent, cut short deliberation to dictate the shapes of things to come. These are times that call for exceptional vigilance, because what is at stake is not just who will win and who will lose but the rules by which everyone will have to play from then on. What is decided then, whether by accident or design, will he decided for a long time; what is founded then will endure; and what disappears then will likely be gone forever.

In the twentieth century, there were many formative shocks of this kind, hut the most powerful and consequential was certainly the outbreak of the First World War. In his poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," written at the end of the war, William Butler Yeats looked back with disenchanted longing at the vanished prewar world:

All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare?

But in the aftermath of the war, which he called a "foul storm," the scene of peace and progress had changed or been revealed to be a mirage. "Days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare/Rides upon sleep," he wrote, and

We who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth, 
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.

But in actuality, even then the foul storm had not run its course. For the breakdown of 1914, we can see in retrospect, set in motion not only the war itself but a linked series of mass slaughters, both within nations and between them, that were to unfold over most of the rest of the century. The seventy-five-year Bolshevik terror—which Solzhenitsyn called The Red Wheel in the novel of that name—rolled out of the trenches of World War I, as did its jagged counterpart the Nazi swastika, and the aggression and antagonism of these regimes led straight to the Second World War. It was an epic of violence and counter-violence brought to a pause only by the fearful discipline of the even more horrifying violence threatened by the nuclear terror of the Cold War, which paralyzed the great powers by menacing them with a common annihilation.

Annihilation was a prospect that Yeats had also glimpsed. "He who can read the signs," he wrote in "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," knew that all human accomplishment was in some new kind of jeopardy—that "no work can stand,/Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent," nor "honour leave its mighty monument." Such despair could prompt a nihilistic response:

That image can bring wildness, bring a rage 
To end all things, to end 
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page.

It was not, that is, just the existing poems, buildings, and cities but the very source of all these, the human powers of creation, that were at risk of being poisoned and shut down.

One might suppose that it was impossible to grasp the terrible import of 1914 contemporaneously. Yet there were, as there always are, a few who, guided more by intuition than by reason, apprehended the event's dire significance even as it broke an the world. One was Henry James. His novels were concerned mostly with the conversations, thoughts, and loves of refined, rich Americans in the drawing rooms of turn-of-the-century Europe. In not one of his works is any dagger drawn or gun fired. Politics for the most part seems to occur an another planet. Yet an the cusp of the war, he sensed before the event everything that Yeats described just after it. In a letter to his friend Rhoda Broughton an August 10, 1914, he wrote:

Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived an to see it. You and I ... should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara—yet what a blessing we didn't know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way—but I avert my face from the monstrous scene!

In retrospect, we can see that the war's consequences were as far-reaching as they were because its outbreak decided a question of fundamental importance. In the century since Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Europe had escaped general war, and many of its greatest statesmen—conservative as well as liberal—had labored to create systems of peace that could relieve Europe of the danger permanently. They dreamed that a "holy alliance" or a "Concert of Europe" might institutionalize the peace. The catastrophe of 1914 represented the definitive failure of these efforts and a decision to consign the future of Europe, and with Europe the world, once again to the immemorial final arbiter, force. In the global war system that had grown up in the preceding centuries, a decision by force could only mean a worldwide war fought by rival alliances. Once the global war system was in operation, the latitude for further choice was curtailed drastically. For the better part of the rest of the century, as Hannah Arendt has written, "Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented. Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality." In particular, new hopes and schemes for peace were condemned to a mainly rhetorical existence, almost a dream life, as ineffectual a! they were uplifting. The most important o., these was, of course, the League of Nations which was first put forward by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917, formally establishes in 1919, and then condemned to watch helplessly as Japan, Italy, and Germany engaged in the acts of aggression that precipitated the Second World War.

There is little doubt that the attack on the Pentagon and destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, constituted another of history's formative shocks. The administration of President George W. Bush immediately launched its global "war on terror"; led a reorganization of the federal government from top to bottom; rewrote the rule book of domestic politics; severely curtailed civil liberties and challenged the separation of powers ordained by the Constitution, especially in regard to the war making power; and propounded a "revolutionary" (the word is Henry Kissinger's) new foreign policy that placed at its center the preemptive use of force. Elsewhere—in the Middle East, in South Asia, within Russia, in North Asia—military conflicts and confrontations, conventional and nuclear, as if taking their cue from September 11 and the American response to it, flared up with new intensity. The optimism and hopeful ness that had largely prevailed since the end of the Cold War more than a decade before gave way in an instant to war fever and war.

In light of these events, it's reasonable to ask, as many have, whether September 11 was an other August 1914, turning the twenty-first century over to the irredeemably stupid fatality that governed so much of the twentieth. The parallels are striking. In 2001, as in 1914, a period of political liberalization, economic globalization, and peace (at least in the privilege( zones of the planet) was summarily ended by a violent explosion. The fundamental decision now, as it was then, is whether to place our faith in force or in international cooperation as the means to reach safety. Again, the world—led this time by the United States—has turned to force. Again, observers have been compelled, like Henry James in 1914, to acknowledge retroactively that the immediate past was a time of illusion—a time when the world was racing toward a precipice hut did not know it, or did not care to know it. Again, an unpredictable chain reaction of violent events has been set in motion—some have even said that a third world war is upon us.

And yet, since history does not really repeat itself, the analogy between 1914 and 2001, like all measurements of the present with yardsticks from the past, is useful only for querying events, not for predicting them. There are equally important differences between the two moments, some of them obvious, others less so. In 1914 the great powers' preparations for war were complete. The arms were piled high, the troops massed, the mobilization schedules fixed, the treaties of alliance signed and sealed. Even before the first shot was tired, the whole of the long war to come lay mapped out in the file cabinets of the chanceries of Europe, needing only the right mishap to bring it to life. And when that mishap came and the armies were hurled across the borders, no power on earth, including the governments involved, could call them back until the war had run its full bloody course. Our moment, by contrast, is one of exceptional unpredictability and fluidity. A decade before the towers of the World Trade Center were struck down, let us recall, the Berlin Wall was peacefully dismantled by joyful East Germans, liquidating half a century of global hostility and giving birth to hopes for a peaceful and democratic future. Even today, no ancient quarrel or ideological schism freezes great powers into hostile blots. No defeated power awaits the hour of revenge, as Germany did after the First World War. No inexorable timetables for mobilization or webs of alliances among great powers drag everyone together into a new abyss. Only one power, the United States, is able or inclined to unleash force on a global scale. The unexpected—new crises, abrupt developments, sudden opportunities—is the order of the day. The strength of the group that attacked on September 11 is unclear and appears likely to wax or wane in response to other events. The Bush Administration has outlined a series of wars that it may decide to fight, but there will be points of decision at every step along the way. Actions summon reactions. Other governments and their publics are watching and waiting uneasily, uncertain where and how to bring the weight of their influence to bear. Setbacks in the field can quickly change political opinion at home. The proliferation of nuclear weapons can inhibit as well as provoke war. The effect of a series of wars, if such occur, on the global integration of the economy is unknown, and immense uncertainties shadow the economic scene.

Yet if September 11 was not itself an August 1914 it was an unmistakable warning that such a moment may be approaching fast. It pointed to a Niagara higher and more violent than the one that a heartbroken Henry James lived to witness. The gaping "ground zero" on which the World Trade Center towers once stood in lower Manhattan, sickening as it is in itself, is also a portent of that incomparably more spacious and appalling emptiness, the nuclear ground zero that could lie in our future. For the principal sources of danger today are not, as before, the massed conventional armies and systematized hatreds of rival great powers; they are, above all, the widespread, unappeased demons of national, ethnic, and class fury; the prospect that a single Superpower, the United States, will respond to these dangers by pursuing a strategy of global military supremacy; and the persistence and spread of biological or chemical weapons. It is impossible to predict how and when these elements might intersect to push history over the precipice. The cataclysm could take the form of nuclear war in South Asia, causing the deaths of tens of millions of people. It could be the use of another weapon of mass destruction. It could be the annihilation of one or several cities, in the United States or elsewhere, by a terrorist attack. It could he a war spinning out of control in the Middle East, leading by that route to the use of weapons of mass destruction. It could be war, conventional or nuclear, in Korea, or war between the United States and China over Taiwan. Or it could be, is even likely to he, some chain of events—some nuclear 1914 or anthrax 1914—that we are at present incapable of imagining.

In sum, September 11, although not itself the point of no return, gave notice that such a moment may be approaching quickly. A new cycle of violence has been initiated, yet it can be broken or reversed. We do not need to look at the world and its future solely through the blood-dimmed lens of September 11. There is still scope for choice and will, in the United States as elsewhere. There is still time to step back from the immediate terrors that occupy us, real as they are, and, in a view that encompasses both the wall and the towers, pose afresh the larger issues of war and peace.

A CONSTITUTION FOR THE WHOLE WORLD

But if we were to resolve to avoid a new Niagara in our time, does there in fact exist a realistic path that leads away from it? A discussion of this question, if it takes place, would of necessity be very different from the one occasioned almost a century ago by the First World War. For even the briefest review of the efforts of peacemakers from that time forward reveals that quiet but deep changes, both in the grand architecture of the world and in its molecular processes, have profoundly altered not only the shape of the global structures of violence but also the resources available for replacing them with something better.

An essential point of reference in taking stock of these changes is Wilson's attempt in 1919 to establish the League of Nations. In September 1915, one year after the outbreak of the First World War, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, dispatched a telegram to Wilson. "Would the President propose," he inquired, "that there should be a League of Nations binding themselves to side against any Power which broke a treaty ... or which refused, in case of dispute, to adopt some other method of settlement than that of war?"

The president would. The president did. Wilson was a revolutionary. By establishing the League, he aimed, as he said in London at the war's end, to "do away with an old order and to establish a new one." He intended to uproot the war system and replace it with a system of international law backed by the force of world public opinion. "The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends," he declared in January of 1917, "is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? ... There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace."

The watchwords of Wilson's vision of peace were democracy, freedom, self-determination, and the rule of law—principles that have won increasing allegiance between his time and ours. Yet Wilson, of course, failed utterly. His scheme foundered upon the interlocking structures of violence—imperialism, totalitarianism, and the war system itself-that in combination were to he the grand venues for the century's worst carnage. Application of his principle of self-determination would have required dismantling the globe-circling European empires, not to speak of the American mini-empire acquired in the last days of the nineteenth century, largely at the expense of Spain. America's allies, England and France, had no intention of relinquishing their empires—and neither, for that matter, did America. Western imperialism was at its zenith. The British were still rulers of an empire on which the sun never set. The second of Wilson's renowned Four Principles, announced on January 29, 1917, as a basis for settling the war, was "that people and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even the great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power." But during the war, England, France, and Italy had indeed been secretly and shamelessly bartering peoples—in, for example, the Sykes-Pitot Agreement by which England and France had divided up large chunks of the defunct Ottoman Empire between themselves. At the peace conference at Versailles, Wilson surrendered ground on specific colonial issues while publicly holding fast to his general beliefs, prompting the English prime minister, David Lloyd George, to remark with a chuckle to an aide at one point, "He has saved his precious principles, but we got our colonies."

Nor was democracy about to flourish in the decades just ahead. The liberalism seemingly on the rise at the turn of the century was on the verge of its worst reversal since the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Its mortal twentieth-century adversary, totalitarianism, born in and of the war, was about to make its appearance. Liberal principles had steadily gained ground in Europe, and even in imperial Germany and imperial Russia popular participation in government had increased. The First World War and the rise of totalitarianism reversed these trends at a stroke. In a word, the blow that the war system had already landed on liberalism turned out to have been incomparably more powerful than the answering blow from a staggering liberalism. Wilson was in this respect like a man who proposes the construction of additional floors of a building at exactly the moment that the floor he's standing on is collapsing under him.

The most intractable of the large structures of violence that Wilson faced, however, was the one he had targeted most directly: the war system. Notwithstanding the shock and horror of the First World War, that system's foundations had never been more solid. its grip on the community of nations never tighter. War systems had, of course, existed throughout history, arising wherever several armed nations within range of one another had jockeyed for power; but the war system that arose in Europe in the modern period and then was extended to envelop the world was unique. Previous war systems had been comparatively static. Innovation in the military arts was gradual. Combat was chiefly hand-to-hand, and the instruments of war—the sword, the spear, the bow and arrow, the trireme, the horse, the chariot, the fortification, the battering ram—were widely available and slow to evolve. Nations could only rarely achieve a sudden, decisive advantage through an improvement in weapons or technique. In the modern period, however, the pace of Innovation accelerated sharply, and the leading powers, by adopting new inventions first, could often put themselves in a position to destroy their rivals.

The modern "world system," some scholars have said, was formed by three protracted revolutions—the scientific, the democratic, and the industrial—and each, even as it provided new benefits to life in peacetime, also poured forth vast new resources for the war system. The democratic revolution brought the Rights of Man and millions of willing recruits for war; the scientific revolution offered pure knowledge and ever more powerful weapons; the industrial revolutions created consumer goods and more materiel for larger and longer wars. Military power in this period can be seen as a sort of clearinghouse in which the new forces of the modern age were, in a military counterpart of the market system, assembled, brought into relation, and thrown into the contests in which the life and death of nations and empires were determined. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this system, implacable and merciless, compelled all "backward" nations to reform on pain of destruction-to adapt to the modern Western innovations or die as independent countries. Although the century between Napoleon's defeat and the First World War was a period of relative military restraint and peace in Europe, military establishments were all the while quietly equipping themselves with the new powers of the modern age. On the eve of the First World War, there were 200 divisions ready for battle in Europe. In 1914 the dam burst, and in the words of the war historian John Keegan, "The submerged warrior society ... sprung armed through the surface of the peaceful landscape."

Wilson thus spoke truly when he identified the First World War as a systemic problem. The cause of war in 1914, as he recognized, had not been so much the ambition of one nation or another as the precariousness of the bloated, unitary, deep-rooted global war system of the early twentieth century, which could tip the participants into a sea of fire if the slightest imbalance of power appeared.

Sometimes a revolution can be accomplished in stages. Wilson's plan could not. It had to be implemented all at once or not at all. The reason was not excessive ambition on Wilson's part; it was the nature of the problem that required solution. A fatally dangerous global system required a full systemic substitute—a "new constitution for the whole world ... produced in eight days," as the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who opposed the plan, described it mockingly. Or as the British diplomat Harold Nicolson, who attended the Versailles conference as a member of the British delegation and at first was an ardent supporter of Wilson, observed later, "Instinctively, and rightly, did we feel that if Wilsonism was to form the charter of the New Europe it must be applied universally, integrally, forcefully, scientifically." The war system and the Wilsonian plan were antithetical at every point. The measures that assured safety in the one system spelled danger in the other. In the Wilsonian system the sovereignty of nations had to be abandoned, but in the war system sovereignty had to be kept inviolable. In the Wilsonian system the safety of nations required disarmament, but under the war system safety required arms. Wilsonism called for a league of all nations in a system of cooperative security, but the balance of power called for specific alliances against specific enemies. Wilsonism harkened to considerations of equity and justice; the war system attended only to calculations of force. If the Wilsonian palace were to be built, the edifice of the war system had to be torn down. If the war system were to survive, it could not be adulterated with Wilsonism.

Thus, although Wilson's insistence upon a full systemic solution may have been hopeless, it was anything but gratuitous. He located the source of the problem of his era at its true depth and had the courage to outline a solution on the scale necessary to solve it. That the cure was beyond the capacity or will of the world of his day does not impeach the accuracy of the diagnosis. Wilson has often been criticized for the naïveté of his solution, but his analysis of the problem was more realistic—and more prophetic-than that of his detractors. For, unfortunately, the tact that Wilson's plan could not be implemented did not mean that the alternative, the existing war system—the system that had already brought on the First World War—had turned into a formula for peace and stability. Clemenceau spoke in the French parliament of "an old system which appears to be discredited today, but to which I am not afraid of saying I am still faithful." But his faith, too, was tragically misplaced. There is, as George Kennan has remarked, a naïveté of realism as well as a naïveté of idealism. Clemenceau's realist successors fell victim to it. Yet it could have been no great comfort to idealists that "realism" was as unrealistic as their idealism. The interwar period appears to have been one of those dispiriting times when each school was condemned to be shrewd in its critique of its rival's plan but credulous when it came to its own. The balance of power was never righted. The world was not rescued from war by its rejection of Wilsonism and did plunge back into war, just as Wilson foresaw.

The puzzle was how, without writing a constitution for the world in eight days, to tackle the war system that had underlain disaster. Even in retrospect, the diplomat Nicolson was impaled on the dilemma. The political credo he offered in Peacemaking 1919 remained a summation of Wilson's liberal internationalist faith.

In spite of bitter disillusionment I believe [in the principles of Wilson] today. I believed, with him, that the standard of political and international conduct should be as high, as sensitive, as the standard of personal conduct. I believed, and I still believe, that the only true patriotism is an active desire that one's own tribe or country should in every particular minister to that idea. I shared with him a hatred of violence in any form, and a loathing of despotism in any form. I conceived, as he conceived, that this hatred was common to the great mass of humanity, and that in the new world this dumb force of popular sentiment could he rendered the controlling power in human destiny.

Yet having delivered himself of this anathema against force, Nicolson declared almost in the next breath that force must be the linchpin of the system he had wanted Wilson to build. Asking himself how he had come to place his faith in Wilson at the beginning of the conference, he answered, "The one thing which rendered Wilsonism so passionately interesting at the moment was the fact that this centennial dream was suddenly backed by the overwhelming resources of the strongest Power in the world"-the United States. Therefore, he possessed "the unquestioned opportunity to enforce these ideas upon the whole world."

Here was a contradiction to contend with. Force was to be expunged from world affairs by the greatest force that had ever been known. How, indeed, could it be otherwise in the face of the entrenched war system of that time? Yet if under the auspices of the League of Nations enough force were to be assembled to overpower the most powerful aggressors, then the question of what else might be done with that force naturally arose. The "war to end war" would have to do its job, it seemed, with as much war as it ended.

In reality, of course, the United States did not join the League of Nations, which never came remotely near to posing such a threat, yet the central quandary had been laid bare. On the one hand, there was the likelihood that the League's powers of enforcement would not be strong enough to overcome the danger of aggression latent in the war system. On the other hand, there was the danger that if the League did grow strong enough, it would have to become something like a world government. Yet a world government based on force would be a global Leviathan. No halfway house, no mere reformist program, could resolve this dilemma. And given a choice between international anarchy, no matter how bloody, and global Leviathan, how could anyone who loved liberty—that is, how could any liberal—choose Leviathan?

The liberal tradition, which in its prescriptions tor domestic government sought to mitigate the role of force, seemed full of promise for peak in the world, but Wilsonism was unable to deliver on it. In order to have any part of the Wilsonian program, you had to have all of it, hut all of it was too notch. This was the unsolved riddle that the liberal internationalist project placed before the world in 1919.

NUCLEAR PEACEMAKING

he failure of the twentieth century's second major bout of liberal peacemaking, the foundation of the United Nations, followed the pattern of the League's failure—but only in part. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who first called for such an organization in the Atlantic Charter in 1941, had sought to draw lessons from the League's fate. Instead of as signing the peacekeeping function to a large council, as the League did, they vested it in an alliance of the prospective victors of the Second World War—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, England, and France-each of whom was given a permanent seat on the Security Council and a veto over its decisions. The hope was that this small, tight-knit group of great powers could guarantee the peace more effectively than the multitude of nations charged with that responsibility under the provisions of the League. But almost immediately after the organization's foundation in 1946, this arrangement for all intents and purposes was nullified by the Cold War, whose tensions had reached a crisis point as early as the spring of 1945, when the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves unable to agree on the political future of Poland.

If the onset of the Cold War had been the only reason for the U.N.'s failure, the story would be a familiar one, well known to analysts of the League's collapse: collective security fails to get off the ground because the powers that are supposed to enforce it fall out with one another. The designated peacemakers become the peace breakers, and no one else is strong enough to bring them into line. In fact, however, the United Nations also failed for another reason—one more relevant to the challenge that faces peacekeeping today.

After 1914 the technology of war kept improving, bringing, among other innovations, improvements in the power of explosives, the heavy bomber, the jet plane, the aircraft carrier, radar, the rocket. The powers, obedient as ever to the compulsions of the modern evolutionary war system, rated to acquire these weapons, and all were used to the full in the Second World War, in which an estimated 70 million human beings were killed. But it was the last time. Even as the war was being fought, an instrument that would make such wars forever impossible was being prepared in the desert of New Mexico. Never has a single technical invention had a more sudden or decisive effect on an entrenched human institution than nuclear weapons had on war. The great clearinghouse of the modern adapt-or-die war system, in which the powers of the modern age were cashed in for the universal currency of military power, was abruptly closed for business at the global level. The set-piece battles that had long been history's favorite grand decision-maker sank into the past. Industrialists might still offer their products, scientists their inventions, and citizens their patriotic zeal, but now their contributions could only increase the overkill—"strengthen our deterrent," or some such. Thereafter, war was forced into other venues. The critical link between military power and political power was severed at the highest level of international Operations. For war was a paradoxical freak of evolution—a creature that depended for its survival on that unsung virtue of arms: their weakness. Without weakness, war's critical event, its gift to politics—defeat—could not occur, but human weakness, in the twentieth century, proved a dwindling asset. Like clean air, rain forests, and coral reefs, it was being steadily depleted by technical progress. In July of 1945, it ran out. The bomb revealed that the war system that had defeated Wilsonism and all previous systemic plans for peace was not an everlasting but a historical phenomenon. It had gone the way of the tyrannosaurus rex and the saber-toothed tiger, a casualty not of natural but scientific evolution, whose new powers, as always, the war system could not refuse. Its day was done.

What is less often recognized is that the bomb was as revolutionary for peacemaking as for war making. By an accident of historical timing, the bomb arrived in the hiatus between the framing of the United Nations and its foundation. In April of 1945, in San Francisco, the United Nations Conference on International Organization formally agreed on the outlines of the U.N. Charter. On October 24, the U.N. came into existence. In the meantime—on August 6—the destruction of Hiroshima radically transformed the nature of the main problem, great-power war, that the new organization had been fashioned to solve. Conceived in one age, the U.N. was born in another. Having been designed to cope with a world dominated by the global war system, it came into existence after that system's death knell had been sounded. The word "nuclear" appears nowhere in the charter.

As the two sides of the Cold War built up their nuclear arsenals, the verdict that the advent of the nuclear age had passed upon world war became increasingly clear. The understanding was eventually codified in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, or "mutual assured destruction," whose central prescription was that each side would be stopped from attacking the other by the knowledge that it would be annihilation ed in response. War was displaced from the battlefield to a realm of appearances—of "credibility," in the jargon of the nuclear trade—in which terrifying shows of nuclear power were meant to have the influence that actual fighting had had under the old war system. The new arrangement was called a balance of terror, as distinct from a balance of power, but it might better have been called a balance of powerlessness, for its success depended on the unmitigated, absolute vulnerability to annihilation of all participants.

With these developments, nuclear strategy acquired a Wilsonian dimension. The bomb had evolved into a war stopper. But that of course was also the mission of the U.N., whose central purpose, in the words of the preamble to its charter, was "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind." Under the doctrine of deterrence, the nuclear powers of the Cold War jointly took over this responsibility. Even as the Cold War was disabling the U.N., nuclear deterrence was coopting its main role. The bomb ruined world war by turning it into annihilation. And the threat of annihilation was a problem that the United Nations had not been designed to address and did not address.

POLITICS IN COMMAND

he ascending spiral of twentieth-century violence—in which conventional war drew the newborn Promethean energies of the modern age, one after another, into its mighty orbit, leading, in a paradoxical culmination, to the terrorized calm of the nuclear stalemate—was, however, only one of the two major developments in the metamorphosis of war that took place between Wilson's time and ours. The second, concurrent development led in an opposite direction—away from the blackboards and computer screens in the think tanks, the scientific laboratories, and the missile ranges, and down into poor, "underdeveloped" peasant villages and remote swamps and jungles, where scientifically unsophisticated people were incubating methods of warfare that, in their own way, were scarcely less absolute than the total war of the great powers and, in the long run, were to prove the more successful invention. These were the methods of people's war. If nuclear weapons, by spoiling the old final arbiter, conventional war, posed the question of how disputes in the international sphere now were to be settled, then people's war, although itself a bloody affair, pointed the way to an answer. For while nuclear weapons were producing stalemate, people's war was changing the political map of the world. And this development, too, would have implications as deep for the endeavor of peacemaking as for the conduct of war.

Like the invention of nuclear weapons, the rise of people's war had a wider context—the centuries-long movement of the peoples of the earth to achieve self-determination, a movement that Leonard Woolf, a British writer on imperialism, called a "world revolt." In 1818, John Adams asked, "When will France, Spain, England, and Holland renounce their selfish, contracted, exclusive systems of religion, government, and commerce?" And he answered with a prophecy: "They may depend upon it, their present systems of colonization cannot endure. Colonies universally, ardently breathe for independence. No man, who has a soul, will ever live in a colony under the present establishments one moment longer than necessity compels him." Substantial fulfillment of Adams's prophecy came in December of 1991, when the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, and the leaders of two other republics of the Soviet Union declared the foundation of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the last of the European empires. Between these dates, all of the empires that had existed in 1776, whether dynastic or colonial, or both, and all of the empires that subsequently arose, including those built on revolutionary foundations, were destroyed. In the former category were the Russian empire of the czars; the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Hapsburgs; the German empire of the Hohenzollerns; the Ottoman empire; and the overseas empires of Holland and England. In the latter category were the colonial empires of France, Belgium, and Italy, the Napoleonic empire, the Japanese "Co-Prosperity Sphere" in Asia, Hitler's "thousand-year Reich," and the Soviet empire. The self-determination movement also cut across all political dividing lines. No political system, feudal or modern, proved capable of resisting it. Neither monarchies (the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, the Ottomans), nor liberal democracies (England, Holland, the United States), nor military dictatorships (France under Napoleon, Spain, Portugal under Salazar and Caetano), nor Communist regimes (the Soviet Union, Vietnam, in its Cambodian venture), were able, in the long run, to perpetuate imperial rule. On the other hand, almost every political creed was adequate for winning independence. Liberal democracy (the United States in 1776, Eastern Europe in the 1980s and '90s), Communism (China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba), racism (the Boers of South Africa), militarism (any number of South American states), theocracy (Iran and Afghanistan in the 1980s), and even monarchy (Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century) all proved adequate foundations on which to base self-determination.

People's war was a means to redress the gaping military imbalance between the forces of the Imperialist West and its colonial victims. In the 1930s and early '40s, battle after battle demonstrated China's inability to face Japan in conventional war. In June of 1938, Mao Zedong, who had just consolidated his position as undisputed leader of the Communist Party of China, candidly acknowledged that "we are still a weak country, and, in striking contrast to the enemy, are inferior in military, economic and political-organizational power." Japan, by contrast, was "a powerful imperialist country which ranks first in military, economic and political-organizational power in the East and counts as one of the five or six outstanding imperialist countries in the world."

But how, exactly, could people's war enable a weak and backward people to defeat a modern nation-state equipped with the most technically advanced arms? What advantage did it possess? In a single chorus, the leaders of the Chinese revolution broadcast their answer to the world: "politics." Unable to compete in conventional war, China opened up a new field of battle-one on which, Mao believed, China's people themselves could appear in strength. Everything—tactics, strategy, recruitment, logistics, intelligence-must be subordinated to politics, which meant winning the support of the population at large. Mao never tired of making the point: 

What is the relationship of guerrilla warfare to the people? Without a political goal, guerrilla warfare must fail, as it must if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and their sympathy, co-operation, and assistance cannot be gained.

And the most famous:

Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy's rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water and the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it he said that these two cannot exist together? lt is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element, cannot live.

Not long after the Chinese revolutionaries' victory in 1949, the power of "politics" was put on spectacular display again in the war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese leaders were veterans of people's war, having been steeped in Chinese revolutionary politics for two decades. Ho Chi Minh had lived in China in the twenties and thirties, and had even spent time in prison there. Many of the strategies the Vietnamese were to use against the French in the fifties had already been battle-tested in China. Most important was the insistence, from start to finish, on the subordination of military action to political goals. As one resolution of the party's Central Committee put it, "Politics forms the actual strength of the revolution: politics is the root and war is the continuation of politics."

THE DEMATERIALIZATION OF POWER

any respects, nuclear deterrence and people's war, which were the dominant military developments of the Cold War period, were opposites. One was a fruit of the scientific revolution and depended on new technical instruments of unlimited destructive power; the other was mainly a fruit of the democratic revolution and depended on the aroused will of peoples. One was a strategy of the powerful, the other a strategy of the wretched of the earth. One was geopolitical in scope, the other local. One produced stalemate, the other victory. Yet in other respects the two strategies were akin. In both a certain dematerialization of power occurred. In deterrence it was the decline of actual war-fighting in favor of creating fearful appearances—credibility—that became the coinage of military might in the nuclear age. In people's war it was the eclipse of the power that flowed from the barrel of a gun by the political power that flowed from the hearts and minds of the people. In both strategies violence became not so much an instrument for producing physical results as a kind of bloody system of communication, through which the antagonists delivered messages to one another about their wills. In both the intangible effect upon wills was paramount, and the tangible effect upon the opposing military forces was secondary. In both we seem to see the human will detaching itself from physical fighting, as if getting ready to make a break and turn to other means but without doing so. In both the capacity of force to decide political issues was thrown into doubt. The greatest obstacle facing peacemakers, whether of the Wilsonian or some other stamp, had been the assumption, as old as recorded history, that force was the final arbiter in political affairs. But now, both at the summits and in the valleys of the war system, that arbiter was losing finality and some new arbiter seemed to be making decisions in the background.

These similarities between deterrence and people's war should not, however, unduly surprise us. Both were responses to the same broad underlying historical development—the steady increase throughout the modern age of the destructive power of war. Through people's war, non-Western peoples found a way to defend themselves against the West's awesome technical superiority. Through the strategy of nuclear deterrence, those great powers themselves, finding that their weapons had also become too destructive to be used against one another, tried as best they could to accomplish the old purposes with apocalyptic threats. The twentieth century had produced the most extreme violence that the human species had ever visited upon itself. In the Cold War, those means threatened the species with its actual extinction. It was natural—it was a necessity—that, in different ways, people would react against this violence, would seek ways to overcome it, to escape it, to go around it, to replace it with something else. In earlier times, violence had been seen as the last resort when all else had failed. "Hallowed are the arms where no hope exists but in them," Livy had written. But in the twentieth century a new problem forced itself on the human mind: What was the resort when that last resort had bankrupted itself—when no hope existed in arms either? Was there a resort beyond the "final" resort? Nuclear deterrence and people's war were two groping, improvised, incomplete attempts to find answers to this question. Wilson had tried to impose a wholesale solution from above. But now, in the thick of events, people were grappling with the same dire facts that he had faced and coming up with new modes of action that did not so much solve the problem as change its shape.

It is of course also true—to state what is perhaps more obvious—that nuclear deterrence and people's war marked two extremes of physical violence, two apogees of total war. Deterrence promised peace only at the price of threatening the world with annihilation. People's war sought to assert the people's interests but only by turning every section of the population, including women and children, into fighters and victims. Both strategies simultaneously evoke admiration and horror. Even as we are pleased with the Wilsonian ambition that deterrence has taken as its goal, we are revolted by the unlimited slaughter it menaces. Even as we are awed by the epic of human courage that people's war presented and by the nobility of its goal of serving the interests of the least fortunate, we are disgusted by its use of terror and the totalitarianism, with its various gulags and "reeducation camps," to which it has often given birth. Deterrence bought peace at the price of the threat of annihilation. It was only a stay of execution, not a reprieve. People's war immersed the people in the violence from which it then sought to deliver them. And yet in reaching each of these ambiguous extremes, we can, for the first time, catch a glimpse of a far deeper rejection of the twentieth century's legacy of extreme violence, as when climbers, upon reaching a mountaintop, unable to climb higher, first see the new land beyond and turn their steps down the other side.

LIVING IN TRUTH

The forms of political power that appeared in people's war had a further development. For most of history, military victory has been the royal road to political rule over a rival country, a sequence crystallized in the single word "conquest." It was the genius of the inventors of people's war to challenge this deceptively self-evident proposition by discovering, in the very midst of battle, the power of what they called politics. What if, the inventors of people's war had asked, those on the losing side declined to obey the invader even after conventional battlefield defeats? They showed that victory by this means was possible. In people's war, politics did not stand on its own; it was interwoven with the military struggle into what Mao Zedong called a "seamless fabric." Yet Mao and others placed political organization first in the order of importance and military action only second, and this ranking at least suggested the question of whether, if the fabric were unraveled, political action alone might thwart an occupying power. Did revolutions have to be violent? Could nonviolent revolution-that is, purely nonviolent revolution—succeed?

That was the utterly unexpected accomplishment of the activists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who pushed the Soviet empire into its grave. They in fact had an anti-imperial predecessor of whom, it appears, they were only dimly aware: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, leader of India's successful, nonviolent movement for independence from British rule. At the beginning of the century, when Gandhi was fighting for the rights of the Indian community in South Africa, he had thought deeply about the nature of political power and arrived at a conclusion. All government, he steadily believed, depends for its existence on the cooperation of the governed. If that cooperation were withdrawn, the government would be helpless. Government was composed of civil servants, solders, and citizens. Each of these people had a will. If enough of them refused to carry out its commands, it would fall. This idea had admittedly occurred to political thinkers in the past. The philosopher of the English Enlightenment David Hume likewise believed that all government, even tyranny, rested an a kind of support. "The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome," he wrote, "might drive his, harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiment, and inclination: but he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or praetorian bands, like men, by their opinion." And James Madison once wrote, "All governments rest on opinion."

Gandhi, however, was the first to found upon this belief a thoroughgoing program of action and a new understanding of the relationship between violence and Politics. The central role Of consent in all government meant that noncooperation—the withdrawal of consent—was something more than a morally satisfying activity; it was a powerful weapon in the real world. He stated and restated the belief in many ways throughout his life:

I believe, and everybody must grant that no Government can exist for a single moment without the cooperation of the people, willing or forced, and if people suddenly withdraw their cooperation in every detail, the Government will come to a standstill.

Gandhi's Politics was not a politics of the moral gesture. It rested on an interpretation of political power and was an exercise of power-power that played a decisive role in ending British rule in India and, indeed, the British Empire in its entirety. From his surprising premises Gandhi drew a conclusion more surprising still:

The causes that gave [the English] India enable them to retain it. Some Englishmen state that they took and they hold India by the sword. Both these statements are wrong. The sword is entirely useless for holding India. We alone keep them.

Gandhi does not merely say that English rule is made possible by Indian acquiescence; he goes a step further and charges that Indians "keep" the English, almost as if the English were struggling to get away and the Indians were pulling them back. His claim flew in the face of the one conviction on which everyone else in the imperial scheme, whether ruler or ruled, agreed-that, in the words of the London Times, it was "by the sword that we conquered India, and it is by the sword that we hold it." Some enthusiastically approved of this supremacy of the sword, some bowed to it, and some despised it, but only Gandhi denied that it was a fact. Not only, in Gandhi's thinking, was force not the final arbiter; it was no arbiter at all. What arbitrated was consent, and the cooperation and support that flowed from it, and these were the foundation of dictatorship as well as democratic government.

Many observers later claimed that Gandhi's movement could thrive only because in Britain he faced an imperial overlord that, although repressive in India, based its rule on consent and law at home. Faced with a totalitarian foe, they believed, nonviolent resistance would have been powerless. Certainly, if you believed that force was the final arbiter in political affairs, then no state had ever looked more thoroughly immune to challenge from within than the Soviet Union. The nuclear stalemate only seemed to add its pressure to the already crushing weight of totalitarian repression. As Václav Havel, the leader of Czech resistance to Soviet rule and until recently the president of the Czech Republic, wrote in his analysis of the Soviet empire, the "stalemated world of nuclear parity, of course ... endows the system with an unprecedented degree of external stability." After Stalin's death, the Soviet ruling class congealed into the privilege- and status-hungry nomenklatura, the "new class," or "Red bourgeoisie." The historian Adam Ulam has aptly called their philosophy immobilisme and the state they ran a bureaucrats' paradise. A conviction, unknown perhaps since the days of the Roman Empire or certain dynasties of ancient China, took root that the current shape of things was likely to remain unchanged more or less forever.

And yet the universal conviction that Soviet rule could not be challenged from within proved wrong-stupendously wrong. The Cold War, frozen solid at the upper reaches of the world order, was in the lower reaches moving toward its denouement along unnoticed, circuitous pathways. Change, blocked in the time-tested arteries of military action, was forced into the world's unremarked-on capillary system, where, disregarded, it quietly advanced. And then it burst forth in mass resistance by entire societies. A politics so novel that one of its pioneers, the writer Gyorgy Konrád of Hungary, called it "Antipolitics," was about to initiate the downfall of an immense empire. The actors were, among others, workers on factory floors, rebellious students, intellectuals talking to one another over kitchen tables or "writing for the drawer," dissidents who were promptly dispatched to concentration camps, disaffected technocrats, and even bureaucrats in the state apparatus. Every step they took was ventured without a chart or a clear destination. Yet the revolution they made was peaceful, democratic, and thorough.

Until very late in the day, the Eastern European activists who initiated the process of the Soviet collapse did not envision even the downfall of their local, satellite governments, much less the downfall of the whole Soviet system. On the contrary, one of their greatest achievements in the late 1970s was to discover a way to fight for more modest, immediate goals without challenging the main structures of totalitarian power. Their ambition—itself widely condemned as utopian by Western observers—was merely to create zones of freedom, including free trade unions, within the Soviet framework. Activism, Havel said, should be directed at achieving immediate changes in daily life. He proposed what he called "living in truth," which consisted of an unshakable commitment to achieving modest, concrete goals in one's life and locality. "Defending the aims of life, defending humanity," he asserted, "is not only a more realistic approach, since it can begin right now and is potentially more popular because it concerns people's everyday lives; at the same time (and perhaps precisely because of this) it is also an incomparably more consistent approach because it aims at the very essence of things." In Poland in 1976 meanwhile, the activist Adam Michnik was explaining, "I believe that what sets today's opposition apart from the proponents of those ideas [of reform in the past] is the belief that a program for evolution ought to be addressed to an independent public, not to totalitarian power. Such a program should give directives to the people on how to behave, not to the powers an how to reform themselves."

Michnik's words fell on fertile ground. They anticipated (and helped to produce) a blossoming of civic and cultural activity in Poland. An early example was the Workers' Defense Committee. Its purpose was to give concrete assistance to workers in trouble with the authorities—assistance that the organisation referred to as "social work." Aid was given to the families of workers jailed by the government. Independent, underground publications multiplied. A "flying university," which offered uncensored courses in people's apartments and other informal locations, was founded. Organizations devoted to social aims of all kinds—environmental, educational, artistic, legal—sprouted. In both form and content, these groups were precursors to the 10-million-strong Solidarity movement that arose in 1980. Of such was the stuff of revolution without violence.

For once the disintegration of totalitarian rule had begun in society, it turned out, to the surprise of its creators, to spread unstoppably to the satellite regimes, and from there, in new variations, to the heart of the empire, the Soviet Union. The contagion, which at every stage combined a longing for national self-determination with a longing for freedom, proceeded, in an unbroken progression from the Eastern European satellites to the peripheral republics of the union (in particular, Lithuania), and then to Moscow itself, where, under the leadership of its newly elected president, Boris Yeltsin, great Russia joined the company of rebels against the Soviet Union, which, lacking now any territory to call its own, melted into thin air. Seeking modest, limited change, the anti-Soviet activists found, to their own astonishment and everyone else's, that they had opened a new era in world history.

A NEW KIND OF POWER

That the nonviolence of the Soviet collapse was no historical fluke is indicated by the fact that both before and after that event dozens of other repressive regimes of every ideological coloration were ushered out of power by nonviolent processes. Nations in which this occurred include Greece, Portugal, Spain, the Philippines, South Korea, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and Serbia. Of equal importance, almost all of the governments founded by mainly nonviolent means were democratic. The liberal democratic revival of the late twentieth century, which has been celebrated and even over-celebrated by many writers, was at the same time a flowering of nonviolent action. By that unexpected means, the threads of liberal development that had been snapped by the global descent into violence in 1914 were picked up again in the century's final years.

No less striking is the historical inclination, which has also been commented on recently by many writers, of liberal democracies to refrain from war among themselves. The liberal democratic revival, however, must have a central place in any discussion of peacemaking for a reason that is deeper and more integral to the nature of this form of government. The goal of taming the violence endemic in human affairs has always been at the very core of the liberal program. To the degree that the ideal is realized, a country's constitution and its laws become a hugely ramified road map for the peaceful settlement of disputes, large and small. The liberal democratic state systematizes nonviolence. For if it is true, as the Romans said, that when arms speak the laws fall silent, it is equally true that when the laws speak arms fall silent. Otherwise, who would bother with laws? Every peaceable transfer of power in accord with the decision of an electorate is a coup d'état avoided. Every court case—however acrimonious the lawyers—is a possible vendetta or bloodbath averted. And so the spread of democracy, if it rests on a solid foundation, is an expansion of the zone in which the business of politics is conducted along mainly nonviolent lines. In this basic respect, the long march of liberal democracy is a "peace movement"—possibly the most important and successful of them all.

Thus in some parts of the world, at least, a beneficent cycle—a sort of cycle of nonviolence—had made a dramatic appearance. Peaceful revolution tended to produce peaceful rule (liberal democracy), which in turn has contributed to international peace. Even as, thanks to nuclear arms, the structures of war—the immemorial final arbiter—were being paralyzed, a new arbiter, a new kind of political power, was making its debut. It was the political power of people to resist oppressors and achieve self-rule, and it didn't flow from the barrel of a gun. Nor was the appearance of this force—let us call it cooperative power, as distinct from the coercive power of warfare and other violence—a marginal historical phenomenon. Political power is a capacity to decide something and make the decision stick in the realm of human affairs. In conventional wisdom, power has been equated with force. If you didn't use force you would lose, and therefore to shun force was to abdicate: to let the foe into your country, perhaps to destroy your town and kill your family; to dictate your faith; to rule over you; to determine the shape of the future. But in our era the bearers of superior force have, in an ever-widening sphere, failed to make their decisions stick. lf force remained the essence of power and the final arbiter in politics, then the British today would rule India, the United States would preside over South Vietnam, the apartheid regime would survive in South Africa, the Communist Party would rule over the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union would rule over Eastern Europe. That none of these things is the case testifies to the capacity of cooperative power to defeat superior force. The popular resistance that brought down the Berlin Wall was as historically consequential—as final an arbiter—as either of the two world wars. Has what William James called the "moral equivalent of war" ever been more clearly demonstrated? It ended Soviet Communism and with it the famous "specter" of "international communism." It finished off a great empire whose origins in fact predated the Communists by hundreds of years. It set in motion the creation of more than a dozen new countries. It was the equivalent of a third world war except in one particular-it was not a war.

A NOTE ON PART TWO

Wilson tried to establish a system of peace all at once, and he failed. Given the realities of the war system of his time, he probably had no choice. But in the decades between then and now, those realities have changed radically in ways favorable to peace, and there are solid reasons for believing that a new approach, aiming at Wilsonian ends with new means, is feasible. The paralysis of great power war (and, increasingly, of middle-power war) by nuclear arsenals; the absence of any global ideological schism that divides the great powers; the nearly universal success of the world revolt and the collapse of all territorial empires; the broadening democratic revival of the last several decades; the fall of totalitarianism in its countries of origin; and the spectacular success of revolutions using only "politics" as their means are features of a new international landscape fundamentally different from the one Wilson faced. As I will discuss in the next issue, they are new grounds for optimism in the restricted but real sense that if the will to turn away from force and toward cooperative means were to develop, history has provided more extensive and solid foundations for accomplishing this than have ever existed before.