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The Second Nuclear Age, by Colin S. Gray
2. The Second Nuclear Age: The Hunt for Political Context
To adapt a familiar aphorism, “They cannot know nuclear matters, who only nuclear matters know.” 1 Of the four chapters that compose the main body of this book, no fewer than three are devoted quite narrowly to questions of nuclear (and other WMD) policy (Chapters 3–5). It is all the more essential, therefore, that the political context for nuclear matters be explored early; hence this hunt for political context. To what character of world politics, to which era in those politics does the subsequent analysis pertain? At the very least, it is convenient to treat the question of political meaning here in a way that allows easy reference in the chapters to come without requiring later diversion from the analytical trajectory.
The discussion opens with consideration of the hypothesis of a second nuclear age and with a critical review of questions of evidence. We proceed next with thoughts on historical continuity and discontinuity. The principal section of the chapter offers full-frontal description of the most significant descriptors of this second nuclear age.
Hypothesis, Evidence, and Argument
Students of nuclear security are scarcely more reliably knowledgeable about their subject than are the historians who contrive to write detailed accounts of Byzantine history in the seventh and eighth centuries. In the latter case there are next to no good sources remaining, 2 whereas in the former case there is a plethora of sources but a comprehensive absence of compelling evidence. Allegedly definitive accounts of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 keep appearing. 3 That apparently most perilous “strategic moment” of the great Cold War now suffers the not uncommon modern distinction of yielding both too much and too little evidence for our understanding.
Because data, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom are distinguishable, it is not entirely self-evident that more scholarship necessarily must yield superior, let alone definitive, understanding of what happened. It can be a revelation to appreciate that historians of World War I—a subject of which we now know virtually everything that we can know—and future-oriented strategists, writing about a subject on which zero reliable knowledge is possible, share a like quality of artistry. A historian’s speculation is just that, speculation. Because history is played only once, who can say (let alone prove) that Austria-Hungary bears the heaviest burden of guilt for the course of events in 1914? 4 Similarly, the strategic theorist as futurist writes wholly in the realm of “perhaps.” The historian can amass a mountain of facts and probable facts to support the plausibility of his or her argument. The strategist as futurist has no facts or probable facts to deploy—beyond current trends, that is, which may count as semifacts for the future—so he or she too lives in a zone judged by plausibility.
These thoughts suggest, subversively, that much of what we think we know about today, and especially about yesterday, may be wrong. An unfortunate paradox lurks to ambush the seekers after strategic truth for the purpose of improving public policy: the more important the question—for example, why did nuclear combat not terminate the Cold War?—the less useful the historical evidence. Lurking beneath these thoughts is the proposition that we may know less about nuclear-era history to date than we think we do. For example, we are almost overinformed by scholars on the eminently researchable topic of the (domestic) politics of Minuteman (ICBM) vulnerability. 5 But until quite recently we knew (really knew, that is) painfully little about the domestic politics of Soviet weapons programs. Our knowledge of, as contrasted with speculative opinion concerning, the strategic history of the Cold War remains critically fragile. Moreover, even when historians of the first nuclear age uncover all that can be uncovered from archival, literary, and oral sources, the larger issues of peace and war, decline and political defeat are apt to remain definitively unanswerable. Such great questions as why was war avoided in October 1962, or why did the USSR decline and fall, and decline and fall peacefully—a quiet expiration as after a long illness—in the 1980s, will be debatable forever. Such questions require answers that transcend strictly factual evidence, or more information.
This is not to suggest that we should be reticent on grounds of absent evidence in our efforts to theorize from the hypothesis that a second nuclear age is under way, even though the facts are far from in on where the new security environment is tending. The point is that although the first nuclear age has passed, many of the more important facts about that now historical age are both missing today and prospectively will be missing in perpetuity. This is not to succumb to the fallacy of believing that because we do not understand everything about our nuclear history we do not know anything. Furthermore, I am not arguing that enquiry is futile just because authoritative answers to central questions must ever prove elusive.
Existentially, the most important aspect of the idea of a nuclear weapon is the demonstrated fact that the weapon works in practice (which is not to claim that every nuclear weapon in every country’s arsenal actually would “work” to deliver close to the expected yield). In human, cultural, and several other terms, by far the most important aspect to the nuclear history of the Cold War is the unanswerable fact that it was neither terminated nor punctuated by nuclear combat. Today we know with absolute certainty that every actor who behaved to some strategic effect in the East-West Cold War behaved in ways consistent with the avoidance of general war, nuclear and otherwise. Apart from being massively important in itself, that fact of nonwar should be helpful to us as we consider how to cope with the problem of nuclear security today and tomorrow—but is it helpful?
Did an East-West nuclear war not occur because of our, and their, policies, strategies, and prudent activities in the category of behavior labeled by Clausewitz “preparations for war”? 6 Or did such a war not occur despite our policies, strategies, and relevant activities? Should we be self-congratulatory over the fact that war did not explode out of the Cuban imbroglio of October 1962, or appalled at how close to war we may well have been? Similarly, are we impressed by the fact that none of the nuclear accidents suffered by East or West produced a military outcome of strategic note? Or, again, are we chastened by the growing body of evidence now available on the apparent, if arguable, breadth and number of nuclear-related accidents? What matters here primarily is the avoidance of false conclusions, not the picking of the winner among necessarily subjective characterizations of the past.
We cannot know why there was no nuclear war from 1947 until the formal demise of the USSR in 1991. What is avoidable, however, is the drawing of unwarranted conclusions from essentially contestable, or absent, evidence. We know a great deal about both the first and even the new, second nuclear age. We know that the nuclear relevant structure of international and national security has been transformed by the change from a bipolar international political system to something else. Since the argument here ultimately is empirical rather than conceptual, meaning that my hypothesis is testable according to the relaxed standards of assay of qualitative social science, it is especially important that fact should be distinguished from judgment. The hypothesis and argument advanced here is that:
Continuity and Discontinuity
When policy-oriented scholars look back into strategic history for educational assistance with contemporary challenges, 8 they are liable to discover that what they think they know about the past perhaps they do not really know. A hypothesis keyed to periodization has bias toward encouraging the theorist to seek discontinuity rather than continuity. But because this book has a transformation in the character, not nature, of the nuclear era as its central conceptual pillar, I have no compunction identifying continuities as well as changes. Nonlinear change in the political, and hence military, architecture of international security was effected between 1989 and 1991. Nonetheless, much of importance to security did not change, any more than the dramatic arrival of the first nuclear age in 1945 revolutionized all rules and conditions of world politics. Much of what this book suggests to be unsound attitudes toward nuclear weapons derives from a poor grasp of the vital distinction between the enduring dimensions of security, the persisting nature and purpose of statecraft and strategy, and the ever changing character of security conditions, statecraft, and strategy. 9
Artful theorists of world politics, after the manner of “magic geography” perpetuated by cartographically gifted geopoliticians, 10 can so organize historical periodization as to tell a wide range of stories. Choice of organizing principle translates as choice of message. What is modern strategic history all about? The grand theorist can select a defining characteristic for periodization keyed to one or more of many candidates.
Every exercise in periodization pays a price for the clarity of its central argument. That price includes the risk of exaggeration of quantity and quality of change and hence of undervaluation of elements of continuity. There will be cases when claims for status of “defining characteristic” are easily sustainable. For an obvious example, in any history of the Jewish people, assertion of the era of the Holocaust of 1941–1945, including its immediate antecedents and consequences, is not simply a historian’s convenience. Similarly, though admittedly in lesser key, to label 1945–1989 the first age of the nuclear era is more prosaic than fanciful. Much of world politics was not troubled by nuclear menace in those years, but the dominant architecture of the balance of power was supported critically by a web of contingent nuclear promises that just might have eventuated in a general cataclysm. Nonetheless, important questions remain to be answered, in some cases even addressed, about how nuclear the nuclear era really has been.
Periodization both emphasizes a claim for change rather than continuity and—since there has to be some chosen organizing principle(s) or defining characteristic(s)—promotes one dimension, element, or factor above others. To label the Cold War era “the first nuclear age” is to assert a defining strategic historical significance to nuclear weapons for those years. There is the existential difficulty that there were no operational nuclear events in action during the Cold War; indeed, for most people on both sides of the Cold War divide, the (first) nuclear age was distinctly a virtual reality. Of course, the same kind of point could be registered with reference to various ages of religious faith.
The concept of a second nuclear age plainly distinguishable from a first such age is keyed simply, perhaps too simply, to a single defining characteristic, albeit one that can have a dominant significance for security. Specifically, this book claims a second nuclear age distinctive from a first on the basis of a radically changed, indeed transformed, political architecture of threat. There has been a discontinuity in the Soviet/Russian polity, no less than at least a temporary loss of imperium, empire, and ideological rationale for rule. The U.S. end of the balance of power discovered abruptly that it was balancing nothing.
The world political events of 1989–1991 were on a scale, of a kind, and with consequences that modern history otherwise has recorded only in the aftermath of great (anti)hegemonic wars. For strict intensity of merited odium, the German Third Reich has set a standard for all time. Nonetheless, for sheer scope of domestic and international incivility, the USSR was a historical player of extraordinary note. That granted, the facts remain that the discontinuities claimed between both a nuclear and a prenuclear era, and between a first and a second nuclear age, can hardly help but risk misleading readers over the enduring nature, though changing character, of the general warp and woof of security affairs.
There can be no denying worth in the claim for a nuclear revolution in the mid-1940s. It is true that the U.S. nuclear arsenal contained zero ready atomic bombs in the fall of 1945, but still the potential for a revolutionary relationship between offense and defense plainly was evident: atomic power could be considered an absolute rather than a militarily relative weapon. 11 The next several decades demonstrated that this was by no means self-evidently the case, but for now it can stand as a robust basis for asserting a revolutionary character to the nuclear event.
General theorists among scholars of world politics are ever willing to pass beyond Clausewitz’s “culminating point of victory.” 12 It is a paradoxical empirical truth that although every bold thesis of purported long, or short, cycles in world politics typically meets with a skeptical yawn, a simple reminder of the radical change in security conditions between, say, 1909 and 1919, 1919 and 1929, 1929 and 1939, and so on, meets with no consumer resistance. It is more controversial to postulate a second nuclear age than it is to note the fact of a post–Cold War world. The latter means nothing at all other than that we now live in a period after the great Cold War. The public and policymakers do not need scholars to tell them that.
The thesis of a second nuclear age expresses continuity and discontinuity in strategic history. In and of itself, though, the thesis implies nothing in particular about the character of the age in question other than that it is a nuclear one. To proceed further and claim that nuclear weapons continue to be important as sources of security and insecurity, however, is by no means beyond argument. Indeed, one might try to argue that at the end of the twentieth century, nuclear weapons are all but irrelevant to global security problems yet are sufficiently menacing as to be worthy of abolition. If such an apparent contradiction can be explained to be more sensible than it sounds, one needs to argue that nuclear weapons contribute more notably to insecurity than they do to security, so that they are part of the problem rather than the solution. It is not obvious that this is true, as later discussion shows.
To assert a second nuclear age is not necessarily to make a judgment about the significance of nuclear weapons. Thus far this text has argued only that there are noteworthy differences between the roles and the probable strategic effect 13 of nuclear weapons today as contrasted with their roles and strategic effect during the Cold War. I am not arguing that the current period warrants labeling as a second nuclear age in preference to other candidate labels. This happens to be an information age; also, it is the age of nationalism, yet again. Much as an individual can have a strategic culture that contains an only possibly harmonious mixture of influences deriving from civilization (e.g., broadly Western or Oriental), 14 nation, region, ethnicity, individual armed service, branch of service, and personal experience, 15 so an age can be characterized variously. The challenge accepted here is to understand the multifaceted nuclear dimension to this age. The task mandates that the whole security context be explored.
Some readers may be uncomfortable with a decision rule for distinguishing between nuclear ages that rests overwhelmingly upon political criteria and that makes scant direct reference to trends in nuclear arsenals, in pressures for adherence to nonproliferation norms, and in reduced (U.S.-NATO) reliance upon nuclear deterrence for security. For the record, it is probably important for me to acknowledge readily the very large reductions achieved already in strategic nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles. 16 In addition, there is no doubting the fact of huge cuts in deployed nonstrategic nuclear weapons. Indefinite renewal of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) shows the general health of antinuclear sentiment, globally, whereas the information-led RMA is reinforcing the effect of an absent superpower foe in relegating nuclear deterrence very much to residual, backup status. Unfortunately, these large changes in nuclear matters are much less significant than they can appear.
In the first place, the changes in nuclear arsenals just cited substantially are the result of prior political changes, not vice versa. Second, as the analysis in Chapter 5 shows, even very large-scale reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals are not strategically significant. Third, India and Pakistan have demonstrated the truth in the principle that negotiated measures of arms control, in any shape or form and on any subject, cannot handle the hard cases that matter most. Finally, although it is certainly true that nuclear deterrence has moved very much backstage for the United States since the demise of the USSR, even backstage roles can be vitally important (see Chapter 5), and those polities who find themselves distinctly RMA-challenged will be likely to discern more than residual duties for their nuclear WMD.
The New Security Environment
The term “new security environment,” like “post–Cold War world,” is essentially vacuous; it does, however, have the merit of pointing to nonlinearity in strategic history. 17 To mix chemistry with politics, the Soviet crisis of empire required in the 1980s a change of state. But just as the water that becomes steam when heated can condense back into liquid form, so the change of state from USSR to Russia barely conceals important constituent continuities. When world politics abruptly is disorganized, if not reorganized, theorists rush to their word processors to speculate on what it all means. Lest there be any misunderstanding, I admit to a preference for a minimalist theory of world politics. It is true that in some important senses in world politics “ideas rule,” even “theory rules,” but much of the scholarship classified as theory on international relations—the scholarly discipline—has painfully little to say of great interest, or perhaps does not say it in ways interesting, to the practical world of international relations. 18 This is both my personal opinion and is a generalization that rests on the evidence of my experience over nearly thirty years with the response of policymakers to much of academic international relations.
This book is only a minimalist exercise in the theory of international relations. The argument here is keyed to the presence or absence of a globally dominant political rivalry, which is an empirical matter. The first nuclear age that was the Cold War largely was organized by the bipolar rivalry between the U.S. and Soviet superpowers. The second nuclear age is a period defined—one can hardly say organized—by the absence of a dominant political rivalry (bipolar or otherwise). A third nuclear age is likely to be a return to a dominant political rivalry preeminently bipolar in organization and operation, if not quite in composition of balancing agents. It is possible that far from a third nuclear age comprising “bipolarity redux”—or “the Cold War rides again” minus much of the ideological baggage—such an age will be born out of and be shaped by an immensely awful, if probably regionally confined, nuclear event. This “sidebar” to the main line of argument requires careful attention at the right juncture. 19
A leading problem with much of the academic theorizing about international relations is that such theorizing multiplies the factor of pretension, by the value of abstraction, to the power of fashion. The products are abstruse and arcane sets of propositions that are so “high concept” and “big picture,” and so geared to demonstrate what the theorist began by believing, as to be substantively all but worthless. None of us can help but be the result of our time, place, and culture, but we can strive to control for some obvious potential biases. To note accurately what is happening today, a fleeting moment, is not to be seduced by fashion—unless one erects some edifice of theory on the basis of the unsound proposition that what one sees today is eternal truth. Ken Booth is right when he accuses “realist” theorists of international politics (including myself) of singing the same old songs, commenting on the same old games, and generally repeating what he regards as yesterday’s errors in new guises. 20 We “realists,” certainly we neoclassical realists, are confident that the game of security politics remains the same, even though the years after 1991 warrant categorization as a different season (or age).
I recognize that many scholars of international relations have responded to the challenge posed by the collapse of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, and the demise of the international system organized by Cold War security architecture by rushing to judgment with sundry grand theories. Once cast adrift from the solid anchor of bipolar superpower competition, how does one explain the organization and working of world politics? U.S. strategic theorists and defense analysts have been accused plausibly of attempting to function beyond a political context. 21 During the Cold War years, a small cottage industry developed wherein British professors lectured their U.S. colleagues on the perils of a technological reductionism (the illusion of the quest after a “technical peace”). I find myself guilty of perpetuating this somewhat prideful tradition of finger-wagging, in my case over the more enthusiastic strains of U.S. theorizing about the strategic promise in the contemporary information-led RMA. 22 Because innovation in strategic theory typically is triggered by pressing demands from national security policy, 23 the halls of strategy are rather quiet at present. Not so, however, the halls of theory on the emerging international political context. People and organizations have difficulty thinking strategically in close to a political void. To write strategy without a dominant strategic mission is an art in short supply. No less to the point, the energy expended in the generally healthy confusion that abounds today over what is, or might be, the international political context of security is largely unconnected to disciplined thought on grand, or military, strategy. We need to consider critically both what high theory is trying to persuade us and what it might be that our favored high theory or theories appear to imply by way of strategic questions in general and nuclear (and other WMD) matters for strategy in particular.
For Those Adrift in Strategic History
The second nuclear age is a hypothesis for analytical utility, not in some sense a hypothesis that can be tested for its quotient of truth. In my mind, of course, the second nuclear age is both more than a hypothesis yet less than critically important. After all, here we are only in the realm of names. What is going on in global security affairs is going on regardless of what we elect to call it. A reader could find the hypothesis of a second nuclear age analytically uninteresting yet still discern important merit in the arguments developed below about arms control and strategy.
The case for the hypothesis of a second nuclear age is strong but not overwhelmingly so. Stated more exactly, the case for the concept of a second nuclear age is a strong one, but there is so much continuity from Cold War practices (see Chapter 5) that it is easy to see why one might be accused of rerunning some nuclear first-age principles in different packaging for a claimed second age. There are times for subtlety, nuance, and even intended ambiguities, but this juncture in the book is not one of them. The analytical utility of the concept of a second nuclear age has the following justifications:
Having defended the hypothesis of a second nuclear age, I must note that the argument here would not change even were I to scrap my preferred concept in favor of some alternative. All scholars, myself included, are apt to seduction by their favorite ideas. The second nuclear age is useful in pointing generically to some broad differences from the first age but in and of itself is nonspecific. We academics should wear our favored concepts and verbal formulas lightly. Concepts and verbal formulas are important as levers to help make sense of the world, but they are not the world; they are but tools. There is a danger that some scholarly reviewers of this book may “lose the plot” by indulging in unduly rigorous examination of the hypothesis that this is a second nuclear age. A parallel phenomenon is scholastic scrutiny of the claims for an RMA. Is information-led warfare an RMA, a military-technological revolution (MTR), a military revolution (MR), a revolution in strategic affairs, and so forth? Sometimes, there are issues important for understanding lurking in the wings of such arcane discussion, but sometimes there are not. As Richard Betts has observed, even in strategic studies—a multidiscipline that tends to err on the side of a pragmatic approach to truth—the necessary process of theory construction all too often strays into the barren zone of theory for theory’s sake. “One sure sign of intellectual degeneration in a field is when the logical relationship between generalization and specification is inverted, theories threaten to outnumber their applications, and the shelf life of theoretical work turns out to be hardly longer than that of policy analysis.” 26
The argument for the concept, or hypothesis, of a second nuclear age is good enough. Suggestions that this is not a second nuclear age but rather is some other character of age readily can descend into the murky reaches of academic trivial pursuit. My conceptual claim is less than imperial and should be treated as such. The claim would be vulnerable were one able to show plausibly that nuclear weapons have become irrelevant, at least unimportant, for national and international security. The entire text of this work can be read as being intended to take issue with such a view. 27
U.S. merchants of high concepts and grand theories recently have risked overperformance. From a Cold War condition of notable, if understandable, underachievement, the scholarly authors of large organizing ideas have been working overtime since the USSR closed for business at the end of 1991. The problem is that from a condition in the 1980s wherein there was too little competitive theorizing of a basic kind about alternative political contexts, today we probably have too much of such theory. Albeit with a broader domain, the grand theorists of the 1990s have exhibited some of the less attractive traits of the theorists on nuclear strategy in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Specifically, concepts and theories are sprouting and gelling into scholarly thoughts, “discrete images, models, or paradigms,” 28 at a pace dictated more by energy in intellect than by well-refereed thought. It must be emphasized that the postulate of a second nuclear age as the leading organizing idea for this analysis truly rests upon only one principle, among several possible, of discrimination. That principle is the presence or absence of a dominant political-strategic rivalry. Such rivalry would not be inconsistent with more evidence of genuine multipolarity than generally was the case between 1945 and 1989—thinking especially of China—but it would have to be of a kind that had bipolar magnetic attraction. The idea is that if, as was suggested in Chapter 1, we drift from this second nuclear age toward a third such age, a key “sign of the times” that that process of drift was well under way would be the phenomenon of more and more polities taking careful account of the meaning for them of an emerging central rivalry in international security affairs. Not everyone would be obliged to join one or the other of two great “teams,” but most polities would find that that bipolar rivalry was exercising more and more organizing power over world affairs.
The political context for the second nuclear age has six principal defining features.
First, we have a new global security environment and a new world order characterized by many features of a U.S. hegemony. Much as the Soviet-U.S. rivalry arose all but inevitably out of the destruction of the intra-European balance of power in two world wars, so the contemporary U.S. hegemony is the result of one of the erstwhile near-first-class teams abruptly vacating the field of play. “The American Century” continues, or so a theory—with which I agree—insists. 29 As recently as the mid to late 1980s, it was fashionable to proclaim the demise of the American half-century. It was no accident, as Marxist theorists used to say, that Paul Kennedy’s Spengleresque morality tale, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers—and especially the United States—hit the best-sellers lists in 1987–1988. 30 It is ironic that the spectacular popularity of that scholarly book was matched only by its spectacular degree of error concerning the United States. As Kennedy was proclaiming the fall of the U.S. imperium because of imperial overstretch, so the United States’ superpower foe was moving into position to effect a bungee jump of desperate reform measures relying on a hugely rotten rope.
If the popular declinism of 1987–1988 was overadvertised, so its direct opposite—assertion of an unassailable unipolar primacy—has been equally overstated a decade later. The image of a hegemonic United States presiding over its “unipolar moment” does provide an essential contribution to the definition of this second nuclear age, a definition that emphasizes the singular power and influence of the United States. 31 This paradigm is not wrong, but neither is it wholly correct. Indeed, the world today truly is unipolar with a privileged United States, as modern social scientific jargon would express the matter. But just what does that mean? Self-evidently, the international political system at the close of the twentieth century is in some senses unipolar American. But what does that claim mean for the course of strategic history?
The United States’ “unipolar moment,” let alone “the American Century,” is one of those many cases in strategy and statecraft wherein a popular idea can mislead the unwary. The United States today is the sole global superpower. That truth, however, does not suppress entirely a need to pose the classic strategy question, So what? Recall that this text locates the most defining characteristic for a second nuclear age in the absence of dominant great power rivalry, not in the presence of U.S. unipolarity. Even if the United States showed more talent for imperial governance and had more stomach for the costs of hegemony than appears to be the case, still there are severe limits upon U.S. ability both to police the present and to shape the future. Moreover, those severe limits upon U.S. influence have a significant nuclear dimension.
There is some truth in Joseph Joffe’s clever argument that contemporary U.S. policy, whether by purposeful grand design or benign accident, functionally approximates that of Bismarck’s Germany rather than, say, Disraeli’s Britain. 34 The United States today, as with Germany in the 1880s, has made itself so essential a security partner to potential rivals that an international effort to balance U.S. power and influence is difficult, if not impossible, to organize. One might venture further and suggest that much as Bismarck sought to keep France isolated by cunningly co-opting France’s potential allies, so the United States tomorrow might keep China isolated be denying it a Japanese, Russian, or (German-led) European alliance.
Whatever one believes about the prospects for its longevity, there is no doubt that U.S. hegemony is a notable factor of this second nuclear age. But if one also claims that that hegemony is the defining paradigm for this new age, then one has a troubling empirical difficulty with the facts of the evident limits on U.S. power and influence. In principle, the lack of a countervailing state or coalition leaves the United States substantially unconstrained. In practice, however, the absence of a great rival hugely reduces the United States’ will to act on behalf of its vision of world order. Ever fewer of the burgeoning conflicts that scar world politics today self-evidently engage U.S. major, vital (let alone survival) interests. America’s well-advertised (indeed probably overadvertised) casualty shyness is not unconnected to the absence of perception of high stakes for the country in overseas quarrels today. Nevertheless, it is hard for a country to be, or look like, the unipolar hegemon when it demonstrates to the world that it is not prepared to accept casualties among its professional soldiers and that it is even squeamish about hurting foes.
The United States is the most important power in Europe and Asia, even though it is not a European or an Asian power. In some contrast to security conditions in the late 1940s at the beginning of the first nuclear age, the United States today is a superpower, indeed the superpower, more despite than because of nuclear facts. 35 Nuclear strength is important, nay vital, as we shall see; but it is an unfortunate and increasingly ill-understood necessity rather than the leading edge of national strategic prowess. On balance, but only on balance, the nuclear facts of this second nuclear age serve to restrict the will and capability of the United States to act on behalf of international order. As a general rule, nuclear menace today has the consequence of discouraging an activist policy by a U.S. polity superior to any political foe or group of foes in almost all categories of grand-strategic instruments. Nuclear and BC facts reduce U.S. power and influence in the world. For today, that claim is a slight exaggeration. For many years to come, however, the claim will point to a truly potent source of systemic weakness in the U.S. world role. The risks that attach to playing coach and quarterback for world order will be seriously out of step with popularly understood appreciation of the benefits.
One should not paint a picture of the United States as a helpless giant, as a muscle-bound but hog-tied Gulliver in Lilliput. But one must point out that even though the United States is today undoubtedly the most influential player in European and East Asian security, and even though it could impose its will upon most roguish or otherwise recalcitrant regional or local powers, its practical ability to shape the course of strategic history is modest. At some small risk of appearing deterministic, I believe that still there is a commonsense logic of geopolitics and geostrategy that already today is shaping the probability of the emergence of a major, possibly era-defining, rivalry between the United States and China. U.S. high policy choices toward security in East Asia are closely constrained, notwithstanding the supposed strategic blessings of a unipolar moment. Imperium can endure, but U.S. sway as the strategically dominant force in East Asian security must erode as, perhaps if, China both modernizes and brings to full maturity a strategic design that allows no positive role for U.S. influence in the region. 36
U.S. hegemony, which does help define the second nuclear age, contains the seeds of its own demise—at least erosion—in that its regional manifestations around the world are not acceptable to rising regional powers who see little advantage in tolerating what amounts to U.S. organization of their regional security. The demise, or fencing-in, of the implications of the United States’ unipolar moment must have a significant nuclear aspect to it. “Old-fashioned” nuclear weapons, as well as other old-fashioned WMD and some new BC options, have to be strategically attractive to East Asian, South Asian, and other polities, including the new Russia, who have a problem deterring a United States supreme in digitized, conventional military prowess.
Second, this period marries naturally a U.S. hegemony with an absence of the kind of great power rivalry, or rivalries, that can shape and direct much of the action in world affairs. Politicians and scholars do not know what to call the current era. “Post–Cold War World” is more than a little tired, not to say empty of positive connotation. Much of the architecture of international security of Cold War vintage remains in place—NATO preeminently—and for excellent reasons; but its roles are uncertain as officials and soldiers are cast adrift from the strategic historical course that they understood, or thought they understood. For Europe today it is not unfair to pose the matter thus: If NATO is the answer, what is the question? 37 For East Asia a parallel point can be made: If the U.S.-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty (1951) is the answer, what is the question? 38 One can try to argue slickly that defense planning today is risk-pulled rather than threat-pushed, but such a formula cannot obscure the fact that decisions are required on endorsement of the scale and character of those risks and on the priorities imposed among them.
In effect, this second nuclear age can be seen as a period of interregnum between irregular cyclical surges in the kind of great power rivalry that organizes many strands in the course of strategic history. There is a sense in which each of the leading players in world politics is adrift without a compass in strategic history, to press a favored metaphor. No ideological commandment, even for Beijing, requires particular nexuses of hostility today between pairs of “greater powers,” but that benign cultural fact offers only limited comfort.
Each of the “greater powers” knows well enough where serious security trouble is likely to develop. The United States, informally as yet, has identified China as the leading potential “organizing threat” of tomorrow; that tentative identification encourages an already extant disinclination to credit the new Russia with the will and the capability to provide a “pole” of power. China is in no doubt whatsoever that if it has to contest regional hegemony for East Asia, by far the most plausible rival is the United States playing an extended protectionist role. Russia certainly is irritated by NATO’s enlargement and by its belligerent peacemaking initiatives in the Balkans, but recognizes that irritation and genuine cause for alarm are different matters. Russia’s alarm, as contrasted with irritation, can be predicted to focus eastward and southeastward rather than westward. Moreover, as the golden rule affirms, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. A Russia sharing northern and central Asia with China probably is going to be a Russia in need of friends and allies. Japan has no explicit foes, let alone a major foe in a single dominant rivalry. But Japan knows that there is only one plausible source of serious menace to its security—broadly defined—and that is the potential influence over its trading policy and practices that might be achieved by a would-be regionally hegemonic China. Japan’s (long-standing) difficulties with the United States, genuine though they are, pale into near insignificance when compared with the problems that Japan could face were it obliged to seek to accommodate, which is to say appease, a risen China. 39
The case of EU-Europe is more complex, because the demise of the Soviet threat liberates Europe from the need for U.S. protection. Of all the major players—the “greater powers”—EU-Europe, notwithstanding the solid-seeming security architecture of NATO, actually is liable to be the most “adrift.” If Russia comes to focus its security gaze upon east and central Asia, a geopolitical consequence is almost certain to be a loosening of the transatlantic bonds of security cooperation. If anything, there will be some danger that an EU-Europe, out of the front line of international antagonisms, could be tempted to play Britain’s nineteenth-century role as “balancer” between more settled protagonists. 40
For the time being, however, all of this speculation remains strictly speculation. None of the greater powers can be certain that a central and, as it were, system-organizing rivalry between the United States and China actually will mature. Beyond U.S. hegemony, at present there is no central organizing structure to international security. In such a condition of uncertainty, the leading players are unsure as to the identity of their major and vital interests and are apt to be confused over what roles they should assume and play.
Third, there is some limited merit in the proposition that this second nuclear age is set in an ever more globalized political context. Information technologies allow, indeed mandate, that events that once would have been of local significance can now have rapid global meaning. “Globalization” is not the issue; the issue, rather, is whether there are processes of globalization at work that carry some plausible promise of rewriting the script for world security politics. I am not convinced that globalization means a safer world. This topic is discussed in the next few paragraphs, but really the whole of this book must stand as a challenge to those who argue that globalization will translate as enhanced security.
Although some of the theorists of the postulated “American” revolution in military affairs keyed to (1) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), (2) command, control, communications, and computing (C4), and (3) precision strike are thinking in terms of uniquely national U.S. advantage, 41 there is a school of thought, as just noted, that reads the meaning of the information age rather differently. The theory is that even though states continue to reign, only decreasingly do they rule. A range of possible futures can attend this theory, but the central logic is generally uncontroversial among adherents to the broad proposition. Specifically, a process of globalization allegedly is well advanced that is transforming old-fashioned international politics into world politics, preferably global politics. Problems of contemporary security, so the theory proceeds, embrace factors other than the military and indeed frequently relegate military security to the file of atavistic concerns. Political, economic, societal/cultural, and environmental factors are apt to be treated as pointing as much to core security concerns as do military questions. 42
Globalization is a very big and amorphous idea. As a “sign of the times,” it is worth noticing that a recent textbook, published by Britain’s leading scholarly publisher and edited by scholars from the largest, oldest, and best-established of the British nurseries for production of theory on international relations, is entitled The Globalization of World Politics. In their introductory essay, the editors, with admirable evenhandedness, specify the arguments both supportive and critical of the thesis of globalization. 43 Among the supporting arguments they cite are pace of economic transformation away from states’ ability to control their economies; global electronic (inter alia) communications; development of global culture (with electronic mass media as the midwife); growing homogeneity of peoples; the collapse of time and space as new information technologies defeat geography and chronology; an emerging global polity, with transference of identity and loyalty from the state to other bodies; cosmopolitan culture, or consciousness—growth of a global mind-set as a basis for local action; and appreciation that the risks to security that matter most are truly global in character and cannot be addressed by nation states. Needless to say, perhaps, a counterpoint or two (or three, or four) is possible to each of the arguments just suggested. There are both factual and normative objections to every one of these arguments.
Even if one rejects the bolder of the theories, as I do, plainly there exist processes of globalization that are helping to shape the context of security, including nuclear security. What one finds is that global trends and state-centric security foci are functioning synergistically. There is a global financial market, a global market for military-technical skills of all kinds, and a global market for scarce raw materials and finished products with military applications. In short, in very modern times—early modern and medieval Europe is another matter entirely—never have military goods and services been so mobile; never has military supply and demand been so well organized, expedited, and lubricated. If “global village” means global security community in key security senses, then the relative ease of trafficking in lethal items would matter little. If demand is slight, abundant supply can scarcely signify. The problem is that the current cascade of theory about the several forms of globalization is plausible up to a point. That cascade does rest upon evidence of actual, and expanding, global traffic flows that are real enough (even if much of it is only “virtual”). But the global political peace that may lurk somewhere down the pathway of globalization has yet to assume plausibly authentic forms. The argument that globalization correlates with a sharp reduction in the incidence of interstate war, let alone major interstate war, is interesting and worthy of careful consideration; but it ultimately fails to convince. States, and nations that wish to acquire states, continue to command the kind of loyalty necessary for war. Moreover, endangered species of beast or not, even only a very low incidence of interstate war can be sufficient to blight a whole era. One might argue that the twentieth century was ravaged by “only” two major interstate conflicts. Or one might assert that “only” one such conflict was practical in the decades from the 1940s to the 1980s.
The empirical, if not the more normative, theorists of globalization undoubtedly are on to something real and probably important. But just how important global processes are, as contrasted with old-fashioned national, subnational, and regional factors, remains to be seen. The elements of chaos in the structure, or lack of structure—even with U.S. hegemony—of international security referred to above is more than matched (indeed its effects are multiplied) by a globalization that mocks laws and frontiers. In a world abundantly endowed with fissile material and the cultures, precursor materials, and compounds for biological, toxin, and chemical weapons, and the relevant skills for weaponization, the emergence of a global market threatens to help define this second nuclear age. The traditional constraints upon individual initiative for private profit that flow from geopolitics, ideology, state controls, and—broadly—culture are much diminished at this millennium. Globalization means a global village more as a market for the skills, materials, and products for death than as a community wherein the demand for lethal instruments is absent.
Fourth, Samuel P. Huntington’s theory of a “clash of civilizations” overreaches, 44 but it does point to an important strategic facet of this second nuclear age. As noted above, most of the world’s conflicts are not between states and necessarily not about competition between the interests of states. To admit as much is not, however, to endorse some grand theory of inevitable war among civilizations. Many conflicts are really about political, social, and cultural identity and the rights that such assertion of multidimensional identity should be accorded. 45 Intercommunal violence, though, has only limited explanatory power for the course of world politics. It is true both that interstate war has become rare and that it has been delegitimized. Unfortunately, rare does not mean extinct, and delegitimization does not mean impossibility. More to the point, we have no good reason to believe that such extinction and impossibility are probable conditions for the next century. The current context, which is dominated by intrastate and transnational conflicts, may or may not prove to be a trend with longevity. Whatever one decides to conclude about the declining legitimacy and incidence of interstate conflict, however, cannot plausibly dominate the argument here. Readers might care to recall that major war was deeply unpopular across Europe in the 1930s, but war occurred anyway. Millennium optimism should be noted but rejected. It would have to err only in a tiny fraction of possible cases to be wrong catastrophically (after the fashion of a nuclear deterrence that “works” wonderfully well 99 percent of the time but not for the 1 percent of the time when we really need it).
The second nuclear age is defined most critically by U.S. hegemony and the absence of a dominant rivalry. Moving on, a third nuclear age is likely to be defined by the reassertion of an organizing bipolar competition for power. None of those most critically defining conditions have anything to do with clashing civilizations. The “clash of civilizations” may tell us a lot about the motives behind sundry “Islamic bombs” and assuredly alerts us to the malign impact of intercultural antagonisms; but it scarcely qualifies as a player when competing with the opposed interests of states as expressed in the practice of geopolitics.
Fifth, the United States’ unipolar strategic moment of hegemony is as uncontestable as it is ambiguous in its implications. The victorious superpower in the great Cold War should be able to organize security structures in the postwar period. We know that the USSR lost the Cold War; it is less certain that the United States won. Much of the challenge of the second nuclear age lies precisely in the inability, or political unwillingness, of the United States to play the heavy-handed policeman. The United States may have won the Cold War, but it has not obviously ruled in the years that have followed.
Unsurprisingly, U.S. politicians and officials have not known how to behave in this second nuclear age. In the absence of an “organizing” superstate foe, what is the role of U.S. hegemonic superpower? If, by geopolitical default, the United States is the polity most responsible for international security, what are the rights that balance and facilitate performance of that duty?
A hegemony flowing from unipolarity implies that extraordinary duties are laid uniquely at the door of the hegemonic power. “The imperial temptation,” in current U.S. reality, is a chimera. 46 The temptation to U.S. statecraft today is to attempt too little, not too much. The core of the problem is the very character of this age. A period whose most defining characteristic is the absence of a dominant great power rivalry leaves the sole superstate desperately short of reliable navigation aids for policy guidance. The vague vision of a United States doing good in the world through a policy of “engagement” is no more helpful than is the idea of trying to prevent the emergence of regional hegemonic challenges to the United States’ somewhat inchoate role as global guardian. Does an activist style of engagement in regional security discourage or, inadvertently perversely, encourage the emergence of regional would-be hegemons? For example, does the upgrading of potential military cooperation as specified under modernization of the terms of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty make it less or more probable that China will need to be contained actively? 47 Or, for another example, on balance does the modest but significant enlargement to the east of the U.S. protection system that is NATO encourage or discourage Russian willingness to play the role of responsible Eurasian power?
Policymakers do not have confident answers to these all-too-real regional questions, but neither do scholars. The theory of international politics, after the fashion of Clausewitz’s theory of war and strategy, should be able to help educate the mind of the statesperson or soldier, even though it does not yield reliable advice on policy action. U.S. hegemony is a fact, but it is both a fact of less than self-evident meaning and, for some people, a theory of long-term benign imperium. As with power, unipolarity or hegemony is both fact and value. A unipolar and hegemonic, if less than imperial, United States needs not only to understand the structure and “working” of this second nuclear age, but also to decide how best to act in order to shape the future. 48
There is no very powerful argument to be made suggesting that we are witnessing today in the United States’ reluctant hegemonism some fundamental shift in the terms and functioning of world politics. When the course of strategic history renders a polity hegemonic, let alone truly unipolar, the behavior of that polity must be shaped by its domestic character and strategic culture. Strategic history can have no truck with the follies of neorealist theory that would “black-box” disparate societies and states. 49 The modern scholarship that would pose even the possibility of a sharp distinction between culturalist and realist explanations of strategic behavior is fundamentally in error. 50 When policymakers act for their polities, they apply classically realist standards as shaped and fine-tuned by their cultural context.
The sixth defining feature of this current and second nuclear age is its residual, indeed probable, character as nursery of a succeeding bipolar era. One might well hesitate to conclude a chapter on the second nuclear age with presentation of a descriptor of the (nuclear) age most likely to follow. Nonetheless, anticipation of the probable consequences of contemporary trends must help shape nuclear policy decisions now. Recent debates in the United States on nuclear fundamentals—for example, should U.S. policy push for the total elimination of nuclear weapons?—relate directly both to views of the future course of strategic history and to assumptions about the way that world politics works. No matter what impression to the contrary may be given by studies on the details of nuclear matters, nuclear policy and nuclear strategy are subjects first and foremost driven by their political context.
There is no iron law of world politics that requires the effectively bipolar balance of power of 1945–1989 to be functionally replicated in the twenty-first century. The claim that most likely there will be a third nuclear age characterized by a return to approximate political bipolarity rests upon my classically realist appreciation of how world politics works. That appreciation finds leading concrete focus in the structure of Sino-U.S. strategic relations. China is a power that has the potential capability to play an extraordinarily influential role at least in Asia and that appears to be bound, for traditional geopolitical reasons, upon a collision path with the United States. Of course, twenty-first-century China may cease to be a significant player in regional security because of domestic trouble. That caveat granted, the scholar of nuclear (and other WMD) issues today has to develop analysis with a mind to the strong possibility that world politics two to three decades hence will be increasingly organized around the rival poles of U.S. and Chinese power.
This thesis expresses the core of the structure of the future security condition in what would be a third nuclear age. Fortunately, it does not much matter whether this belief is found to be persuasive or not. The theory cannot be proved, but neither can it be disproved. What matters is only that the moderate to strong possibility, if not probability, of a future bipolar condition should be recognized. Indeed, for the partial comfort of readers who strongly dislike this thesis, one could suggest that the argument has the potential to work in a way that would be self-negating. Much as the successful conduct of deterrence paradoxically tends retrospectively to undermine confidence in the need for, or actual operation of, that deterrence, so energetic pursuit by the United States of a neo-Bismarckian statecraft of hegemonic co-option might postpone the evil day a truly peer competitor appears.
The second nuclear age, even now, is forging a third such age. There is a sense in which the claim is true even if the United States works effectively over the next several decades successfully to discourage the emergence of a superstate rival. Most probably, a conscious U.S. attempt to play co-optively at being Bismarck’s Germany reborn will prove futile. No matter how powerful the U.S. military or how wonderfully and uniquely multidimensional the U.S. ascendancy, primacy is a wasting condition. The American Century will not, at least need not, be terminated deterministically by the reappearance of bipolar rivalry—any more than it was by the appearance of such rivalry after World War II—but it can hardly help but fuel the competition that must undermine it. It is possible that China in the next century will discern more value in cooperation than in competition with the security system in East Asia preferred by the United States, just as it is possible that a recovering Russia will choose to “join Europe” on whatever terms NATO and the European Union elect to offer. But such possibilities should not be permitted to dominate thought about the future. Modern strategic history already has registered quite sufficient cases wherein hope has triumphed over experience.
Although all the leading predictions are fraught with deep uncertainty, there are stronger grounds for predicting a return to bipolar rivalry in Sino-U.S. form than any other pairing.
Consider why the proposition of a return to bipolarity is important for nuclear issues. First, this discussion bears directly on the question of whether or not military security will figure very significantly in U.S. national security policy over the coming decades. 51 Second, judgment about the political context bears explicitly on the issue of scale and quality of menace to U.S. interests. Third, more detailed consideration of the probable identity of a national rival or rivals leads immediately into scenario-specific structures in strategic relationships. It should be recalled that geopolitics drove geostrategy, which in turn drove choices in U.S. and NATO nuclear strategy, for the four decades of the Cold War. 52 A peer-competitor China would menace Japan—Japanese trade, at least, which would be the same thing—Russia in Asia, and ASEAN in Southeast Asia. A peer-competitor “returning” Russia most immediately would threaten independent Ukraine, the Baltics, all of the Eastern March of the new NATO, and the new EU-Europe. Geostrategically, China is a different rival to the United States than is Russia, and the difference matters.
It is no exaggeration to say that today there is profound uncertainty in the United States—and in NATO-Europe—over the future of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and nuclear strategy. Has nuclear strategy in some vital sense “gone away” because there is no longer in this second nuclear age a foe worthy of a Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)? 53 Alternatively, perhaps, has nuclear strategy “gone away” because for the United States it has been banished into military-operational and even deterrent irrelevance by the several variants of the contemporary information-dependent RMA? Or, has nuclear strategy only appeared to go away, or allowed itself to be redefined almost wholly into the channel of disarmament debate, by the lack of contemporary policy demand for its services? The rise of a clearly rival powerful polity, even if only a rival in one region, must work wonderfully to concentrate the mind. Raymond Aron expressed the matter appropriately in one of the finest essays ever written on strategy. In Aron’s words, “Strategic thought draws its inspiration each century, or rather at each moment of history, from the problems which events themselves pose.” 54 Strategic theorists and defense planners today have no little difficulty thinking and planning in a focused way about and for either an age that lacks a central strategic focus 55 —the current one—or an age yet to emerge—a third nuclear age. The origins of this book lie in appreciation of the loss of compass among those who should, and those who might, think coherently about nuclear and other WMD issues.
Contrary to appearances, perhaps, I am not casually dismissive of futurist theory that is fundamentally skeptical about the continuing vitality of realist assumptions. One can paint a picture of the twenty-first century wherein world politics has been so transformed by the several processes of globalization that great states no longer behave in the opportunistic, let alone predatory, way that frequently was true in modern history (from, say, 1648 to 1991). Admittedly, it is possible that neoclassical realist theorists like myself may be misunderstanding the general course, character, terms, and conditions of world politics, much as we—and everyone else—misunderstood the resilience of Soviet power in the 1980s. It is an appealing thought. This realist, for one, would be delighted to be convinced both that political peace truly is breaking out all over the world and that strategic history genuinely has ended. As yet, I am not convinced.
A scholar who seeks to treat nuclear policy in the manner of policy science, which is to say for the purpose of exploring the structure of a problem area for policy, is assailed by the calls of variously “endist” visions and aspirations. The distinguishing mark of the endist claim is the assertion that times have changed radically. This form of eschatological argument, if permitted, effectively can disarm all rivals. The endist theorist does not need to debate nuclear strategy in any detail; he or she is self-licensed to consign rejected arguments into the bin marked “irrelevant,” because a world is posited that needs no nuclear strategy.
There is no licensing authority for endist claims, so the short list below is open-ended (no pun intended). Endist theory is more than marginally relevant to the nuclear future (or less nuclear future) when it proclaims the following:
If any of the leading optimistic endist theories are credited with dominant insight, then the only policy question remaining to ask of the nuclear arsenals is how most safely we can effect their definitive demise. One must introduce the adjective “definitive,” because one cannot ignore the fact that nuclear innocence is no longer possible. Even if nuclear and other WMD were to be eschewed, what would prevent an abrupt reversal of policy on nuclear possession at some future time of acute national need?
To be fair, an endist claim is an endist claim. I have some difficulty intellectually with endism, because although I can cope with the existential fact of a unique course of history, I am deeply skeptical of claims for definitive historical endings. As a realist (but not neorealist) analyst and theorist of strategic history, I am all but culturally inbred with the expectation that history will repeat itself, by irregular cycles, in the situations that it creates and re-creates and re-creates, etc.
* * *
This book suggests that the political context for a second nuclear age is not a progressively benign condition of globalization. There is no strong reason to believe that the United States, the China, and the Russia of the early twenty-first century will behave in ways radically different from times past. The transculturally obvious fact that the political costs of major war could hugely outrun the worth of hoped-for benefits does not contribute a fatal indictment of classical realism. The most central precept of the realist perspective is prudence. 59 The fact that polities are more reluctant to fight when they anticipate assault by WMD, or even just lengthy hostilities, is not evidence of some “new way” in politics; it is simply classically realistic prudence.
Sadly for the authority of my argument, though, I recognize that each school of thought on world politics will define the contours of prudent policy in ways that fit the paradigm already preferred. There is no way in which I can demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt the superior merit in my understanding of behavior toward WMD that is prudent for this second nuclear age. If some readers elect to believe that we are living through some great antistrategic transition that will—not just distantly might—consign the precepts and practices of classical realism to the garbage heap of history, such is their right. To close this discussion with an analogy, some people decline to wear seat belts in cars: they believe that they are immortal, accident-proof, or perhaps divinely blessed with perpetual good luck. Alternatively, there may be people around who believe that if drivers wear seat belts, they will acquire a false sense of security and drive more aggressively. 60
Endnotes
Note 1: Familiar to English readers, at least. The original of the aphorism holds that “they cannot know cricket, who only cricket know.” U.S. readers who might be intrigued, if not baffled, by this claim could do a great deal worse than consult the brilliant little book by Nandy, Tao of Cricket. Back.
Note 2: An excellent study warns its readers that “for much of the period between 600 and 1025 only one account of events has been preserved—or at least only one with minor variations. This does not mean that it can be regarded as basically correct.” Whittow, Making of Orthodox Byzantium, p. 9. Back.
Note 3: For recent examples, Gaddis, We Now Know; and Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble.” Back.
Note 4: Which is not to deny that Holger Herwig succeeds in making an exceptionally strong case for Vienna’s war guilt. See his masterly study, First World War. Back.
Note 5: David Dunn, Politics of Threat. Back.
Note 6: Clausewitz, On War, p. 131. Back.
Note 7: Domestic motives for nuclear acquisition figure prominently in Scott Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?” Back.
Note 8: Policy orientation is not synonymous with policy relevance. This book is policy oriented. In principle, an author could write a strategic historical study of, say, the Peloponnesian War that would not be policy oriented for today but that would be policy relevant. Kagan, On the Origins of War, is a work that is policy relevant but not (quite) policy oriented. Back.
Note 9: Murray and Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy,” and Knox, “Conclusion: Continuity and Revolution in the Making of Strategy,” are essential reading. Back.
Note 10: Speier, “Magic Geography;” Spykman, Geography of the Peace, ch. 2. Back.
Note 11: See Brodie, Absolute Weapon; Jervis, Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution; and Paul, Harknett, and Wirtz, Absolute Weapon Revisited. Back.
Note 12: Clausewitz, On War, p. 566. Back.
Note 13: Strategic effect refers to the effect upon the course of events of the threat or use of force. Gray, Explorations in Strategy, esp. p. 11. Back.
Note 14: An argument important to Keegan, History of Warfare. Back.
Note 15: See Johnston, “Thinking About Strategic Culture”; Desch, “Culture Clash”; and Gray, “Strategic Culture as Context.” Back.
Note 16: For authoritative brief analyses of U.S. strategic nuclear forces today, see William Cohen, Annual Report, pp. 57–61. For Russia, see Wilkening, “Future of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Force”; and Benson, “Competing Views on Strategic Arms Reduction.” Back.
Note 17: Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War”; Beaumont, War, Chaos, and History. Back.
Note 18: Evidence to back up these strong words is deployed in Gray, NATO and the Evolving Structure of Order in Europe, chs. 2, 3. A similar judgment pervades Wallace, “Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats”; but see Booth, “Reply to Wallace.” Back.
Note 19: Which happens to be principally in Chapter 4. Back.
Note 20: Booth, “Dare Not to Know.” Back.
Note 21: Bull, “Strategic Studies and Its Critics”; Gray, Strategic Studies, ch. 4; Howard, “Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy.” Betts, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” also is relevant. Back.
Note 22: Gray, American Revolution in Military Affairs and “Fuller’s Folly.” Back.
Note 23: See Aron, “Evolution of Modern Strategic Thought,” p. 7. Back.
Note 24: Iklé, “Second Coming of the Nuclear Age.” Back.
Note 25: Gray, “Nuclear Weapons and the Revolution in Military Affairs.” Back.
Note 26: Betts, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” p. 31. Back.
Note 27: Payne, “Post–Cold War Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Deterrence Policy,” is strongly supportive of my thesis. Back.
Note 28: Harkavy, “Images of the Coming International System,” p. 570. Back.
Note 29: This idea became something of an International Security debate. Layne, “Unipolar Illusion”; Jervis, “International Primacy”; Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters”; Posen and Ross, “Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy”; Mastanduno, “Preserving the Unipolar Moment.” Back.
Note 30: Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. This book was celebrated in the United States as flagging the peril of military overextension to long-term economic health—and hence security tomorrow—whereas in truth it was the USSR that fell, as it were, to Kennedy’s declinist thesis. Back.
Note 31: It is not only U.S. academics who have become in danger of intoxication by the fumes of primacy. With reference to the RMA, for example, the defense editor of The Economist has written that “history suggests that no country can exploit new military technologies to maintain a position of global dominance indefinitely. Ultimately, other countries will learn to counter or copy the revolution in military affairs. But there is no prospect of Russia, China or any other country having the wealth or expertise to catch up with America for decades.” Grant, “America’s Ever Mightier Might,” p. 78. It is words like these that mandate reading of Matthews, Challenging the United States Symmetrically and Asymmetrically. Back.
Note 32: Nye, Bound to Lead, remains useful. Back.
Note 33: There is, however, rather less to this claim than might appear. One should recall that British superpower was unsuccessful in the Americas between 1775 and 1783, while U.S. superpower succeeded only in delaying North Vietnam’s conquest of the South for a decade between 1965 and 1975. Superpowers can lose small wars. See Ion and Errington, Great Powers and Little Wars. Back.
Note 34: Joffe, “‘Bismarck’ or ‘Britain’?” and “How America Does It.” Back.
Note 35: An argument well registered in Freedman, “Great Powers, Vital Interests and Nuclear Weapons.” Back.
Note 36: The speculative literature was beginning to boom before the Asian economic crisis of 1998. By way of an illustrative sample: Rohwer, Asia Rising; Calder, Asia’s Deadly Triangle; Bernstein and Munro, The Coming Conflict with China; Segal, “How Insecure Is Pacific Asia?”; Shambaugh, “Chinese Hegemony over East Asia by 2015?”; and Nye, “China’s Re-emergence.” If anything, the regional, possibly eventually global, economic crisis enhances rather than reduces the influence of a China that appears to be weathering the storm better than its regional neighbors. Back.
Note 37: This question is posed and answered in Gray, NATO and the Evolving Structure of Order in Europe. Back.
Note 38: The treaty was revised in 1996 to allow for more extensive Japanese logistic support for U.S. operations in the region—a revision that met with predictable hostility in Beijing. Back.
Note 39: In the early 1990s, a different view was fashionable. For an exciting example, see Friedman and Lebard, Coming War with Japan. Back.
Note 40: I am grateful to Dale Walton for his insightful exploration of these ideas. Back.
Note 41: For example, Owens, “The Emerging System of Systems”; Nye and Owens, “America’s Information Edge”; and Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Athena’s Camp. Back.
Note 42: Buzan, People, States and Fear, was a landmark text. Also see Weaver et al., Identity, Migration; and Nolan, Global Engagement. Back.
Note 43: Smith and Baylis, “Introduction,” pp. 9–11. Back.
Note 44: Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations” and Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Back.
Note 45: Weaver et al., Identity, Migration. Back.
Note 46: Tucker and Hendrickson, Imperial Temptation. Back.
Note 47: Shambaugh, “Containment or Engagement of China?” Back.
Note 48: It is almost painfully apparent that a U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) that purportedly was keyed to the shaping of the future strategic environment in fact has nothing of much interest to contribute to policy determination on such “shaping.” William Cohen, “Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review,” pp. 8–14, summarizes the QDR, including its massively unrealized ambition to provide a strategy-led guide to shaping a U.S.-friendly future strategic environment. Kane, “Sins of Omission,” offers a devastating critique. Back.
Note 49: Waltz, Theory of International Politics. Back.
Note 50: Just such a contrast is posed in Desch, “Culture Clash.” Desch’s view is challenged in Gray, “Strategic Culture as Context.” Back.
Note 51: Baldwin, “Security Studies and the End of the Cold War,” and Betts, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” are important. Back.
Note 52: Gray, Geopolitics of Super Power; Leffler, Preponderance of Power. Back.
Note 53: Ball, “Development of the SIOP”; Blair, Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, esp. ch. 3. Back.
Note 54: Aron, “Evolution of Modern Strategic Thought,” p. 7. Back.
Note 55: Glaser, “Nuclear Policy Without an Adversary”; Goldman, “Thinking About Strategy Absent the Enemy.” Back.
Note 56: Baldwin, “Security Studies and the End of the Cold War,” tends powerfully in this direction. Back.
Note 57: Expressed most famously in Fukuyama, End of History and the Last Man. Back.
Note 58: Brown, Lynn-Jones, and Miller, Debating the Democratic Peace. Back.
Note 59: For which the most sacred text remains Aron, Peace and War. Back.
Note 60: For a variant on this analogy, to my mind generic rejection of the policy argument in this book would be akin to shipowners ignoring national and international law and choosing not to equip ships with lifeboats, for the logical reason that they had no intention of allowing their ships to sink. Back.
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