Foreign Policy
Spring 1998

International Security: Changing Targets

By Lawrence Freedman

This abstract is adapted from Dr. Freedman's article, originally published in the Spring 1998 issue of FOREIGN POLICY.  All rights reserved.

During the Cold War, as politicians and generals became mindful of the potentially devastating consequences of superpower conflict, they turned to members of the academy for help in devising policies that avoided both war and appeasement. Out of this relationship emerged a set of cherished formulas that imbued the Cold War with a sense of order—"containment," "flexible response," and "détente." This order, and with it the mainstream agenda for international security studies, largely collapsed along with the Berlin Wall.

The absence of a great power conflict to worry about produced evidence of disorientation among strategic practitioners. Attempts to conjure up replacements for the lost Soviet threat—out of a reconstituted Russia, revanchist Germany, revivalist Japan, rampant China, or so-called "rogue states" in the Third World—were often greeted with derision, as were attempts to recast international conflict in terms of a clash of great civilizations rather than great powers.

A certain amount of retooling did take place. There was a mass exodus from arms control to ethnic conflict, requiring practitioners to pay more attention to the softer social sciences such as anthropology. Economic, social, and environmental factors deserved attention because they could aggravate violent tendencies, trigger cross-border conflicts, and affect the conduct of war. Russia’s efforts to hold on to Chechnya in part reflected concern over oil pipeline routes. The drug trade threatened to destabilize governments in Latin America. Arguments over scarce resources such as water were a constant source of irritation in many parts of the world and could be expected to intensify if population pressures continued to grow. More questionable was the tendency to classify these factors as sources of insecurity that could pose larger risks to the West than potential military threats.

But military force does not lend itself to coping with such problems—diplomatic, multinational frameworks are better suited to dealing with economic and environmental hazards. Once anything that generates anxiety or threatens the quality of life in some respect becomes labeled a "security problem," the field risks losing all focus. Practitioners are likely to reach inappropriate conclusions if they insist on squeezing issues that vary so widely into one, unsuitably broad, conceptual framework geared toward coping with military threats. The notion of "economic security" encourages a confrontational approach to trade policy, while that of "environmental security" has often served more to confuse than to clarify by encouraging a search for adversaries.

Nor has the end of the Cold War suddenly rendered irrelevant the conceptual framework through which the dynamics of conflict, crisis, and war were understood in the past, even though this structure was developed in connection with the quarrels and rivalries of the great powers. There are still tensions at the international level that require attention, but there are also now important applications of this framework to be made on a smaller scale at the regional level. Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East have all witnessed eruptions of violence, turning states and groups that have long coexisted for some time, sometimes sometimes apparently amicably, into belligerents.

Investigations into these conflicts require security practitioners to integrate vigorously invigorate diplomacy and military power with knowledge of local history, socioeconomic conditions, and political life. This approach would also benefit regional specialists who, because of their inability to grasp "power politics," can at times be taken by surprise by the course of events in their area. During the buildup to the 1991 Gulf War in 1991, for example, disaffected members of the local intelligentsia were often more vocal, accessible, and sympathetic than feudal monarchs, but the power lay with the latter. And the inability of the United States and its allies to dislodge Iraqi president Saddam Hussein since 1991 indicates that the use of power without a keen appreciation of the context within which it is being exercised can go awry.

There is also awareness in the security community—as the West faces the ongoing challenge of implementing the Dayton accords on Bosnia — that the ideal of decisive military activity, with forces able to return home after a quick burst of victorious fighting, is likely to remain the exception rather than the rule. Responses to the failure of weak states may involve stronger nations getting bogged down in irregular forms of warfare over extended periods and accepting some responsibility for the reconstruction of a civil society and a functioning economy.

The discretionary aspect of the West’s military operations comes at a time when its conventional military superiority is beyond dispute. But , there is also a nagging realization that the logical response of opponents to this sort of conventional strength is not to fight on Western terms but to rely on more irregular methods. Those aspects of the international security agenda geared toward addressing the problems of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction can, from this perspective, be understood as part of an effort to preserve America’s decisive edge in the conventional sphere by containing the wherewithal of others for non-conventional warfare. To the extent that this effort fails, then engagement in individual conflicts can become more hazardous for outside forces, while those conflicts themselves are more likely to take on a terrible aspect.

Even as some Western security analysts warn of the perils of foreign intervention, in East Asia and the Middle East there has been evidence that local states still expect the United States to play a leading role and, in fact, often depend on it. The challenge for the United States, and its closest allies, is to find a level of engagement in international affairs that prevents small problems from becoming large without imposing unacceptable burdens at home.

 

Sidebar: America’s Achilles’ Heel?

 

Further Reading

The most accessible version of Clausewitz’s On War remains that of Michael Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Brodie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976)

Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company 1971)

Richard Betts, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” (World Politics, October 1997)

Betts, “The New Threat of Mass Destruction” (Foreign Affairs, January/February 1998)

Stephen Biddle, “Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf War Tells Us About the Future of Conflict” (International Security, Fall 1996)

Bernard Brodie, The Absolute Weapon (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1946)

Lawrence Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, second edition (London: Macmillan for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1989)

Alexander George, et. al, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy: Laos, Cuba, Vietnam (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1971—new version published in 1994)

Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976)

Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960)

William Keller & Janne Nolan, “The Arms Trade: Business As Usual?,” Robert Manning, “The Nuclear Age: The Next Chapter,” and John Steinbruner, “Biological Weapons: A Plague Upon All Houses” (FOREIGN POLICY Winter 1997–98)

Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York, NY: Harper, 1957)

Edward Kolodziej,  “Renaissance in Security Studies?” (International Studies Quarterly, December 1992)

Richard Ned Lebow & Janice Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)

Martin Libicki, Defending Cyberspace and other Metaphors (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1997)

Edward Luttwak, “A Post-Heroic Military Policy” (Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996)

Michael Mandelbaum, The Dawn of Peace in Europe (New York, NY: Twentieth Century Fund, 1996)

Joseph Nye, Jr. & William Owen, “America’s Information Edge” and “A Revolution in Warfare”   (Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996)

Scott Sagan & Kenneth Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1995)

Tom Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1960)

George & Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1974)

Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1991)

Stephen Walt, “The Renaissance of Security Studies” (International Studies Quarterly, June 1991)