Conflict After the Cold War: Arguments on Causes of War and Peace

682 Pages·2012·2.78 MB·English

by  Richard K. Betts

Conflict After the Cold War
Arguments on Causes of War and Peace
Fourth Edition
BETTS
RICHARD K.
Columbia University
The Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
First published 2013, 2008 and 2005 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Published 2016 by Routledge
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ISBN: 9780205851751 (pbk)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conflict after the Cold War: arguments on causes of war and peace /
[edited by] Richard K. Betts. —4th ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-205-85175-1
ISBN-10: 0-205-85175-4
1. World politics—1989– 2. War. 3. Peace. I. Betts, Richard K., 1947–
D2009.C66 2012
303.6’6—dc23
2012001266
CONTENTS
Preface vii
PART I Visions of War and Peace 1
■ The End of History? 6
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
■ Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War 18
JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER
■ The Clash of Civilizations? 35
SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON
■ Economics Trumps Politics 54
FAREED ZAKARIA
PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power 66
■ The Melian Dialogue 69
THUCYDIDES
■ Doing Evil in Order to Do Good 74
NICCOLÓ MACHIAVELLI
■ The State of Nature and the State of War 78
THOMAS HOBBES
■ Realism and Idealism 82
EDWARD HALLETT CARR
■ The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory 100
KENNETH N. WALTZ
■ Hegemonic War and International Change 107
ROBERT GILPIN
■ Power, Culprits, and Arms 120
GEOFFREY BLAINEY
PART III International Liberalism: Institutions and Cooperation 133(cid:3)
■ Perpetual Peace 136
IMMANUEL KANT
■ Peace Through Arbitration 143
RICHARD COBDEN
iii
iv Contents
■ Community of Power vs. Balance of Power 146
WOODROW WILSON
■ Liberalism and World Politics 149
MICHAEL W. DOYLE
■ Power and Interdependence 164
ROBERT O. KEOHANE AND JOSEPH S. NYE
PART IV Psychology: The Human Mind and International
Conflict 172
■ Why War? 175
SIGMUND FREUD
■ How Good People Do Bad Things 183
STANLEY MILGRAM
■ Why Hawks Win 190
DANIEL KAHNEMAN AND JONATHAN RENSHON
■ War and Misperception 194
ROBERT JERVIS
PART V Culture: Customs, Norms, and Learning 211
■ Anarchy Is What States Make of It 214
ALEXANDER WENDT
■ Spirit, Standing, and Honor 236
RICHARD NED LEBOW
■ Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity 244
MARGARET MEAD
■ The Obsolescence of Major War 249
JOHN MUELLER
■ Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention 262
MARTHA FINNEMORE
■ Men, Women, and War 280
J. ANN TICKNER
PART VI Economics: Interests and Interdependence 294(cid:3)
■ Money Is Not the Sinews of War, Although It Is Generally
So Considered 297
NICCOLÓ MACHIAVELLI
■ The Great Illusion 299
NORMAN ANGELL
■ Paradise Is a Bazaar 301
GEOFFREY BLAINEY
Contents v
■ Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism 309
V.I. LENIN
■ Imperialism and Capitalism 317
JOSEPH SCHUMPETER
■ War as Policy 326
ALAN S. MILWARD
■ Structural Causes and Economic Effects 339
KENNETH N. WALTZ
■ Trade and Power 349
RICHARD ROSECRANCE
PART VII Politics: Ideology and Identity 364
■ Nations and Nationalism 368
ERNEST GELLNER
■ Democratization and War 380
EDWARD D. MANSFIELD AND JACK SNYDER
■ Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars 394
CHAIM KAUFMANN
■ The Troubled History of Partition 412
RADHA KUMAR
PART VIII Military Technology, Strategy, and Stability 421
■ Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma 425
ROBERT JERVIS
■ The Offensive/Defensive Balance of Military Technology 442
JACK S. LEVY
■ Arms Control: Historical Experience 454
CHARLES H. FAIRBANKS JR. AND ABRAM N. SHULSKY
■ The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better 465
KENNETH N. WALTZ
PART IX Revolution, Unconventional Warfare,
and Terrorism 477
■ The Strategic Logic of Terrorism 481
MARTHA CRENSHAW
■ Religious Radicalism and Political Violence 495
MARK JUERGENSMEYER
vi Contents
■ Speech to the American People 511
OSAMA BIN LADIN
■ Jihadi Networks of Terror 516
MARK SAGEMAN
■ Science of Guerrilla Warfare 530
T. E. LAWRENCE
■ On Guerrilla Warfare 539
MAO TSE-TUNG
■ Patterns of Violence in World Politics 550
SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON
■ Insurgency and Counterinsurgency 575
DAVID GALULA
■ Principles, Imperatives, and Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency 591
ELIOT COHEN, CONRAD CRANE, JAN HORVATH, AND JOHN NAGL
■ A Strategy of Tactics: The Folly of Counterinsurgency 598
GIAN P. GENTILE
PART X New Threats and Strategies for Peace 611
■ Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict 614
THOMAS F. HOMER-DIXON
■ Ecoviolence 629
INDRA DE SOYSA
■ A World of Liberty Under Law 641
G. JOHN IKENBERRY AND ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER
■ China: Can the Next Superpower Rise Without War? 646
RICHARD K. BETTS AND THOMAS J. CHRISTENSEN
■ Peace Among Civilizations? 659
SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON
(cid:3)
PREFACE
The original motive for this book was to help students make sense of the
transition from the conflict-ridden twentieth century to the new world
of international politics, and to confront the question of how much
or how little the future will be like the past. The “century of total war”—
two world wars and a long Cold War—had given way to amity among m ajor
powers, economic globalization, and a surge of democratization. For a little
while many assumed that nothing would ever be the same, and the world
was hurtling toward permanent peace. Others cautioned that this calmer new
world was temporary, bound to fall back into age-old cycles of conflict and
instability.
We are now long past the Cold War. Optimism of the early 1990s has
been tempered by new outbreaks of political violence around the world, but
they are smaller in scale than many wars of the past century, and peace re-
mains robust among the only powers that have the capacity to repeat the huge
catastrophic clashes of earlier times. The contentious issues of how much
progress toward peace is possible, the issues that animated earlier editions of
this book, are yet to be resolved: What concepts best explain the odds of con-
flict or cooperation between governments or groups? What causes war, and
what causes peace? Can war be made obsolete? Thus many readings from
earlier editions remain in this one, since the questions they address are as rel-
evant as ever. Indeed, some of what seems new in the world is actually, in a
sense, old. For example, in recent years Iraq and Afghanistan have brought the
problem of irregular warfare back to the front burner of the national security
agenda for the world’s sole superpower, after it had been studiously forgotten
in the decades after the Vietnam War. Although the adversaries and particular
circumstances are different in crucial ways, the nature of the problem of un-
conventional or guerrilla war, and ideas for dealing with it, are in many ways
similar to what they were in earlier times.
NEW TO THIS EDITION
While this edition preserves much of previous ones, it focuses on evolving is-
sues by including seven new items:
■ Fareed Zakaria’s assessment, drawn from his book The Post-American
World, of how economic development in non-Western countries is shap-
ing international incentives and constraints in unprecedented ways. This
supplements the three basic visions (Fukuyama, Mearsheimer, and Hun-
tington) that have been featured as the perspectives for organizing ideas
about future developments.
vii
viii Preface
■ Robert Jervis’s discussion of “War and Misperception,” which adds a
perspective emphasizing cognition to supplement the psychoanalytically
oriented explanations in Part IV.
■ A discussion of emotional and spiritual motives for war, by Ned Lebow,
drawn from his book Why Nations Fight. This explores important di-
mensions of the problem unaccounted for in the materialist approach of
realist and liberal theories emphasized elsewhere in the book.
■ Three new readings on the challenge of unconventional war: selections
from David Galula’s classic book, Counterinsurgency Warfare, which an-
alyzed the problem through the experience of the Cold War competition;
an article by Eliot Cohen and others summarizing recent ideas that drove
the official U.S. military revision of doctrine on the subject; and a critique
by U.S. Army colonel Gian Gentile, arguing that counterinsurgency is
more or less a fool’s errand.
■ Indra de Soysa’s analysis of the causes of violence over ecological and
resource issues, which contrasts with the prominent argument by Thomas
Homer-Dixon.
FEATURES
The main point of this book has been to expose students to the timeless
questions and recurrent debates about what causes war and peace, to show
them that most current ideas are actually variations on old themes and that
classic disagreements by thoughtful theorists about what either logic or his-
tory should tell us still have much relevance. As much as possible, readings
were selected that argue with each other, to make students realize that what
seems self-evident or obvious to many people can be challenged in serious
ways. Pedagogically, my purpose is to make students step back from certainty,
to question what seems to be common sense, and to think about what more
they need to know to have informed opinions on the subject.
To do this, Part I presents contrasting basic arguments about what the
driving forces in world politics are, and how they affect the odds of conflict or
cooperation. Parts II and III outline the main competing traditions in theory
of international politics—realism and liberalism. Statements by both historic
theorists and contemporary analysts in both parts demonstrate the durability
of contrasting convictions, however much the particular elements of argumen-
tation evolve. Parts IV and V add perspectives on psychological and cultural
causes, more subjective sources of decisions about war that may sometimes
override the materialist and conscious motives that dominate explanations of
the realist and liberal sorts.
Getting into more theoretical detail, Part VI presents contrasting argu-
ments variously grounded in the basic realist and liberal traditions about why
the logic of free economics and international interdependence naturally en-
courages peace (Angell, Schumpeter, Rosecrance), or how economic causes, ef-
fects, and interests can leave ample motives for conquest (Machiavelli, Blainey,
Preface ix
Lenin, Milward, Waltz). Part VII suggests how political development and
ideological change create frictions that foster violence. Ideas about national
identity and self-determination can put groups at each others’ throats (Gellner,
Mansfield, and Snyder), raising questions about which is the lesser evil: delib-
erate separation of antagonistic ethnic groups or forced national i ntegration.
Kaufmann and Kumar argue on opposite sides of the latter question.
The next two sections are about the workings of war itself, and how they
channel other causes and constraints. In Part VIII, on conventional and supra-
conventional warfare, Jervis and Levy present different assessments about how
judgments of the difference in effectiveness of offensive or defensive modes of
combat affect decisions about war. Waltz and Fairbanks and Shulsky offer
counterintuitive views about how the most destructive weapons, or negotiated
efforts to ban them, may have effects quite opposite from what conventional
wisdom assumes.
Part IX, on subconventional war and terrorism, has the greatest number
of readings of any section because it covers the topics that have dominated the
recent national security agenda in the world’s most powerful states, especially
the United States: terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Is terrorism simply a nihil-
istic and nonsensical atrocity, or is it a strategically rational instrument, how-
ever objectionable? Crenshaw, Juergensmeyer, bin Ladin, and Sageman offer a
variety of perspectives. Lawrence, Mao, Huntington, and Galula then analyze
the classic interaction of objectives, strategy, and tactics in revolutionary or
guerrilla warfare, and the other authors in this section engage the question as
it is now presenting itself in the twenty-first century.
The last section, Part X, first illustrates the emergence of new sources of
potential political violence with contrasting assessments by Homer-Dixon and
de Soysa about environmental degradation and competition for natural re-
sources. It concludes with three essays that link speculation about the future
to the overarching visions and theories featured at the beginning of the book.