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Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
War and the New Global Order: Has Anything Really Changed?
By David J. Bercuson
In their best-selling book, The Coming Conflict with China, Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro sketch out a frightening but all too plausible scenario. It is 2004; after a major, decade-long campaign to reform the People’s Liberation Army from the world’s largest military museum to a modern and fully capable fighting force, Beijing decides to take Taiwan. The PRC’s land, sea and air campaign against the island mounts, and Taiwan’s not inconsiderable military response begins. But the final playing out of the scenario occurs not in the Taiwan Strait, but in the White House in Washington. There, at the peak of the fighting, and with the PRC about to prevail over the Taiwanese armed forces, the President of the United States ponders his options. The US can stand by and allow Beijing to take control of the most important chokepoint in Asia which will give China control of the sea routes linking the middle east to Japan, the Pacific Ocean to the South China Sea, and the Pacific Ocean to the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. Or, the US can go to war.
The scenario is, of course, sheer speculation. Bernstein and Munro are known as China “hawks” who generally put the worst possible face on any development in Chinese-US relations. They themselves call their scenario “unlikely but not unimaginable” which is a good turn of phrase. Yet there are few experts on international politics, or the strategic situation in Asia, who would disagree with the proposition that the Taiwan question is both extremely dangerous and potentially war-producing.
The 22 million people of Taiwan have built a fully functioning liberal democracy. They possess a not-insignificant military capability, and they may well have access to nuclear weapons. They have no desire whatever to “join” the PRC. They believe themselves to be a separate political entity and will resist to the death any attempt by Beijing to impose it’s dictatorship on them. The pro-Taiwanese independence Democratic Progressive Party is gaining in popularity on Taiwan and will more than likely form a majority in the Taiwanese national parliament and capture the presidency within the next decade. At the same time it is a matter of faith among virtually all mainland Chinese, no matter what their political stripe, that Taiwan’s destiny must lie with the PRC.
The PRC-Taiwan situation frames the notion that global politics has entered a new era, and that this new era—this “new world order” as US President George Bush dubbed it at the time of the Gulf War—is leading to a transformation in the nature of war. For those who believe in the notion of such a transformation, the Gulf War was a watershed. It was the most dramatic assertion of collective security since the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and it was also, supposedly, an illustration of how new technologies are transforming not only the framework within which wars may be fought, but the very nature of war.
If that notion is true, if there is a “new world order”, and if the nature of war is changing, how might it be possible that a major inter-state war between the US and China over the fate of Taiwan can loom so large? After all, the real issue of importance for the West in the China-Taiwan imbroglio is the issue of navigation, and who controls it. That was also the root cause of the Peloponnesian war of 431 BC! Military historian John English recently observed of the 1996 Chinese missile “tests” in the seas near Taiwan: “Chinese missiles raining into the sea around Taiwan... amply reminded [that] the spectre of major interstate conflict has not entirely faded, even in the short run, from the international scene.”
We are on the eve of the third millennium. The fact that the millennium is only a figment of humankind’s need to order, count, and classify the periods between sunrise and sunrise is being lost in the rush to find a hidden meaning in the lining up of zeros. It is as if the turning of a car odometer from 10,000 kms to 10,001 is cause for religious celebration! At the same time, however, those baby boomers and war babies who still set the social and political agenda in the western world are aging rapidly. Death is just around the corner for most of us. In addition to the turning of another thousand years, and the nearing footsteps of the Grim Reaper, everything we do seems to be changing so much faster than ever due to changes in technology.
These intangible factors have produced a veritable flood of phony futurology. Hollywood is seized with the notion of aliens, alien contact, and life after death. Angels are the fad of the hour. So-called near-death experience is the daily fair of the supermarket tabloids and the new TV tabloid sensationalism. No doubt someone will shortly report Princess Diana in the company of Elvis Presley sipping coffee at an Iowa truckstop.
In a 1994 issue of Bad Subjects, a little-known webzine, editor Joe Sartelle summarized this trend well:
These are apocalyptic times that we live in. The fall of the Soviet Union, global warming and overpopulation, Michael Jackson’s post-racial surgery, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, the coming turn of the millennium. Everywhere we look we seem to be surrounded by signs and portents that humanity is making a transition from one era of its history to another. . .the apocalyptic mood is quite real, and needs to be accounted for. One way is to understand that mood not as prophecy, but as the expression of a wish...apocalyptic fantasies are displaced ways of imagining social revolution.
Economist Robert Heilbroner made the same point in a recent book on the way people have thought about the future since the dawn of civilization: “Any effort to foretell the course of politics, of social relations, of religious beliefs, or even of science itself over the next century is pure arrogance.” Alvin Toffler got it almost all wrong in his 1970 book Future Shock, but the millions who bought that book then could not, of course, have known that.
Humankind has a natural and laudable need to make sense of its surroundings and historians and other social scientists are, after all, human too. The great changes in the international power balance and in the technology of both peace and war that have been so obvious over the past decade, have produced new theories about states and how they relate, new explanations for the rise and fall of powers, new interpretations of the causes and nature of war. Probably the best known of these sweeping “futurepretations” is Samuel Huntingdon’s book The Clash of Civilizations. It it he posits new global alignments, somewhat like politico-tectonic plates, coming together in the next century. They will be based on alignments of race and religion. Along the boundaries of those civilizations, wars will erupt and in particular, a gargantuan struggle will develop between the west and a de facto Confucian-Islamic coalition.
No one can test how well Huntington has forecast a possible re-shuffling of the world order, but it is not difficult to throw a large monkey-wrench into the works. That monkey wrench is the PRC’s so-called autonomous region of Xinjiang. Xinjiang forms the easternmost political expression of a huge swath of Turkic-Islamic lands that encompass Turkey, the Russian Caucuses’, parts of Syria and Iraq, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. The PRC is systematically practising wholesale population transfer of Han Chinese to Xinjiang so as to overwhelm the Uyger Moslem majority that lives there. Is it wholly inconceivable that a Turkey repeatedly rejected and, in the eyes of its leaders, humiliated by the EU might someday turn eastward to offer leadership to its kith and kin from the Bosporous to Xinjiang, thereby challenging Chinese power in central Asia? What then of Huntington’s Confucian-Islamic coalition?
Another but less well known effort to make sense of things is that of former British diplomat Robert Cooper. His 1996 essay The post-Modern State and the World Order suggested the emergence of three types of states, pre-modern, modern and post-modern. The first group of states are those like Bangladesh that are barely able to provide their citizens with the basic social and political necessities such as a functioning infrastructure, social peace, and the civil order that must exist if people are to rise above subsistence level. The second group of states are those like Brazil, or India, or China, that place national interest and territorial sovereignty above all other considerations in their relations with other states. They are disturbingly like those nation-states of early twentieth century Europe that precipitated the First World War. The third group of states—the post-moderns—are nations like Canada, or the members of the EU, who have accepted definite limits on unfettered sovereignty and territorial integrity in that they have re-defined their national sovereignty to allow the intrusion of extra-national authority in a variety of guises. They are almost all democracies and they almost all eschew war as an instrument of national policy. Cooper warns them to be exceedingly cautious of the second group. He is correct to do so.
Huntington and Cooper paint two very different pictures of how the world may be ordered in the coming decades. They do, however, share a common assumption, namely that the international world will evolve in the future as it has evolved in the past. In that they are surely correct. Nations will rise and fall. They will align with other nations then shift alignments. They will define national interests in different ways, at different times, and under different circumstances. The more stable of them will adhere to longer-term, fundamental interests over much longer periods. The more volatile, less democratic, less affluent will flip about much more frequently. There will be no single “new world order;” the world will continually evolve and re-order itself as it always has.
When US President George Bush declared the coming of the “new world order”, he was actually evoking an oft-championed in the liberal-democratic world, multilateralism. It is the opposite to the unilateralism that seems to especially scare political liberals. Unilateralism is too naked an exercise of power to comfort those who believe the world ought to be a moral and ordered place (even though it is not) and that if it is, great wars will become obsolete. The United States emerged from World War Two as the world’s only super power, yet it sought allies and alliances not only for the modicum of additional strength those alignments might give it, but also for reasons of moral legitimacy. That was plain in the summer of 1950 when the US carefully orchestrated UN support for its intervention in the Korean War. The interests of the US and the free world at that time most definitely demanded US intervention in Korea, unilateral or otherwise, but US President Truman and his advisors sought UN support anyway because of the boost that support would give to the morality of their position.
In a 1995 address to the William H. Donner Foundation in Toronto, the well-known American political analyst Charles Krauthammer traced the history of the US flirtation with multilateralism and collective security in the Twentieth Century. The first period of enamour formed the backdrop for President Woodrow Wilson’s effort to bring the US into the League of Nations. The second followed the Allied victory in World War II and produced the UN. The third—George Bush’s “new world order”—infected US thinking at the end of the Cold War. Krauthammer described it as:
nonsense, dangerous nonsense, as dangerous as the nonsense that followed the first two great wars of the century. Marx said that all great events in world history reappear in one fashion or another, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. I would add: the third time as hallucination. In plain truth, international relations remains in precisely the same state it was in one and two and five centuries ago. As Henry Kissinger put it, “In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power. There is no other way.”
George Bush’s “new world order” formed the context for the military victory and restoration of the status quo ante in the Gulf War. But was that victory really a victory for multilateralism? Consider the sequence of events. Immediately after Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, the US declared the restoration of Kuwaiti independence to be a vital national security interest. Bush declared early in the crisis that he would not let the annexation of Kuwait stand, no matter what. That outspoken determination surely gave America’s traditional allies little choice but to support the effort. It also put those states in the region that were formerly neutralist, or pro-Soviet, in a difficult position. The USSR was obviously waning as a superpower; the US was the only superpower left in town. Can there be any doubt that the much-weakened USSR had its own ulterior motives for supporting the coalition once the US had made plain its intention to act?
Times and circumstances have changed so much over the last eight years that the anti-Iraq coalition of 1990 cannot now be recreated. That ought to be proof enough that collective security, like Marxism, almost never works, and that when it does, never for very long. Also like Marxism, however, its unworkability doesn’t seem to faze its proponents who always claim it has never had a true test.
Though the international scene is certainly arranged differently today than it was ten short years ago, it can hardly be said that there is a “new world order.” In fact, the world community now somewhat resembles the world community of a century or so ago, before the rise of German military and in particular seapower initiated a struggle for hegemony which ended only in 1989/90. What is usually termed the bipolar world of the Cold War had its roots in the competition of two power blocs for hegemony over the North Atlantic-Eurasian world. One of those power blocs was liberal-democratic, with strong interests in western-Europe and ties across the North Atlantic. From the 1880s or so until about 1920, that power bloc was dominated by Britain with its Royal Navy. And although Britain can hardly be said to have been a land power for most of that four decades, it was the British Expeditionary Force with its Empire-Commonwealth component, which eventually became the decisive factor bringing defeat to Imperial Germany in 1918. When Britain’s ability to dominate that power bloc waned, the United States assumed Britain’s mantle.
The other power bloc was autocratic, central-European, with ties and interests reaching eastward to central Asia and the Pacific beyond. It was dominated first by Imperial Germany. Imperial Germany might have remained in control of that power bloc much longer than it did if it had been content to remain Europe’s dominant land power. Instead, it made the cardinal error of challenging British seapower, thus putting itself on a collision course with the UK. After the collapse of Imperial Germany, a power vacuum existed in central Europe for a little more than a decade until Germany assumed its own mantle and resumed the struggle for hegemony it was forced to quit in 1918.
In May 1945 control of the autocratic, central-European power bloc was wrenched from one vicious autocracy by another autocracy, almost as vicious, though not primarily racially motivated. The bipolar contest for hegemony continued in the guise of the Cold War. Now, we have American hegemony in place of a century-long balance of power between two blocs. But for how long will that hegemony last? China and Chinese intentions remain an enigma, but the rising power of China is too obvious to ignore. Will the PRC be content to dominate its corner of the globe, or will it challenge the US and NATO for global hegemony, thus creating another bipolar world.
Classical Clausewitzian theory about the causes and nature of war lent itself well to the bipolar world that has now passed. Indeed, it was born during the earliest stirrings of that world in the Napoleonic wars. The connection between Clausewitz and the Napoleonic era has given those who disagree with vom Krieg a platform to attack it. Clausewitz is said to have been wrong about the nature of war and its causes because he is alleged to have tied war to a particular set of circumstances in a particular time and place. A number of well-known military historians have recently launched withering barrages against vom Krieg , taking issue most particularly with Clausewitz’s assertion that “war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means.”
We cannot know if there is a transformation taking place in the nature of war unless we can discern if there is a transformation taking place in the causes of war. At bottom, war is not a technological phenomenon, it is a social one. The means of waging war change over time but those changes do not determine if wars are to be waged, but rather how they will be waged and that “how” is almost always unforeseen prior to the outbreak of conflict. Since Clausewitz is still the sun around which much thinking about war rotates, his theory about the aim of war is as good a place to start as any for trying to determine if human beings are transforming the causes of wars, and thus the nature of them.
There are library shelves groaning with books about the causes of war; it is not possible here to even begin to summarize them. Most of those analyses, however, repeatedly plow old ground with one recent and notable exception. In her recent book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, biologist Barbara Ehrenreich tries to explain the stone-age origins of war as an activity of men in groups killing other men. The book is sweeping, imaginative, and erudite, and addresses a particular purpose; Ehrenreich thinks of war as a social disease that must be eradicated. If humankind can only find the social or psychological virus that set war in motion, humanity may be able to free itself from the curse.
Ehrenreich’s basic thesis is that war began when early humankind’s primeval terror of beasts led it to form special groups with the specific task of killing those beasts. When it did so, rituals were invented that perpetuated the practise of group killing. That is possibly so, but as a recent reviewer declared: “there’s no way to know whether Ehrenreich’s theory is true or not, and its only utility can be to enrich with a kind of poetic resonance our thinking about war.” In anything, Ehrenreich’s book adds to the evidence that war was and is a universal human experience.
One of the more serious challenges to classical Clausewitzian theory about the origin and conduct of war comes from John Keegan. In his A History of Warfare, Keegan asserts that although war and the existence of organized society are mutually dependent, the Clausewitzian notion of war as “total” depends absolutely on the rise of organized society and, in particular, the modern nation-state. Primitive humans did not wage wars of annihilation, Keegan asserts, because they saw no need to, and could sense no advantage in it. National war in its Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic guises introduced the concept of totality. If Keegan is right, then vom Krieg was a period piece and the apparent erosion of the nation state as it evolved in nineteenth century Europe may also lead to the erosion of war as we have known it.
Keegan’s notion that total war was a product first of the rise of civilization and then of modern nationalism has been seriously questioned by Lawrence H. Keeley. The central thesis of Keeley’s recent book, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, is that human beings have been killing each other in wars, with ruthless efficiency, for at least 12,000 years. Keeley scorns the notion that stone age peoples practised a sort of ritualized war or blood sport and were more restrained in inflicting slaughter than later, so-called civilized peoples.
Organized human society, as the anthropologists and archaeologists generally define it, seems to have emerged just about everywhere about 12,000 years ago. Keeley’s findings clearly indicate that that emergence paralleled the beginning of organized warmaking. It is not too great a stretch to conclude from this evidence all forms of organized human society, at all times, have resorted to war to achieve certain ends. It did and does not matter what form that society takes nor its particular economic, social, religious, or political character, nor even its state of advancement. It seems, then, that there will always be some tribe, some village, some city state, some dukedom or kingdom or nation state or coalition of states ready to attack another for some reason of pride or interests. Pacificism or military weakness has not promoted survival under those circumstances.
In his 1995 study On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, historian Donald Kagan added his interpretation of the causes of wars to the already vast literature on that subject. He examined the roots of the Peloponnesian war of 431-404 BC, the First World War, the Second Punic War of 218-201 BC, the Second World War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. This last was not a war, of course, but it could easily have been one.
Kagan’s main question can be summed up this way: were these major conflicts brought about by shrewd calculation of interests or by far less tangible factors such as fear or wounded pride? His answer is that “interests”, as we normally understand the term, were almost never the cause of major wars. City states, ancient empires, modern nation states in two world wars, plunged into war because of fear of being attacked, or because of wounded pride, or due to arrogance, or miscalculation, or misreading the signals of a potential protagonist. They almost never made war on a cold, unemotional, calculation of interests. Indeed, anyone would be hard pressed to find a single major war in this century that was waged because one side believed that a tangible economic interest was at stake. If we broaden the definition of “interests” to include non-tangible factors such as those Kagan asserts caused the wars he examined, we will have diluted the meaning of the word “interests” to the point it means nothing at all.
What then do we really know about a “new world order” and about the impact such a phenomenon may well have upon the causes of wars? We know that “new world order” is far more apparent than real. We know that we cannot predict with any certainty how the international stage will look even ten years down the road. We know that any talk of an erosion of the “traditional” causes of war is based on wish fulfillment, not evidence. We know that we know nothing about why humans started making war 12 millennia ago and we also know that war seems to be a universal human experience. Since the world doesn’t seem to have changed all that much, we also ought to know that the causes of wars won’t change much either. What about the conduct of wars? Will the new technologies so often discussed by current military analysts change the nature of wars? Will war in the future be significantly different than it has been in the past?
The expectation of an “RMA” is based on the current rapid development of computer-driven, satellite-linked, communications. The theory is this; instant digital data uplinks can tie the battlefield commander to the battlefield in an unbroken, accurate, flowing, river of data that will almost completely dispel Clausewitz’s “fog of war”. That will have two connected effects. It will allow the battlefield commander to wage war from a remote location where he is himself plugged into a wide array of links to instantly available weapons systems. It will allow the entire panoply of battlepower to be brought to bear anywhere on the battlefield at any time. The RMA, then, is about “smart” weapons, digital data uplinks, “real time” battlefield-level information processing, and the like. In future war will be fought primarily with computer-linked weapons operated at consoles by keyboards. The infantry, much better protected and much more heavily armed will merely occupy ground won by computer-controlled weapons that will largely take the chance, and much of the risk, out of battle.
The problem with this seamless picture of cyberwar is that there is nothing fundamentally new in the age-old process of organized killing. There have been countless significant changes in the organizing, administering, victualling, arming, transporting, and leading of armies over the last two to three thousand years. There have been countless revolutions in weapons design and manufacture. Soldiers and civilians parted company to create different cultures, value systems, and support structures, giving rise to the professional soldier. Soldiers divided themselves into specialists in artillery, infantry, engineering, administration. Military medicine and military psychiatry became specialties in their own right. And still the essence of war remained unchanged. The gunpowder revolution, the artillery revolution, revolutions in logistics brought about by railways, or in the size of armies brought about by nationalism, or in the sweep of the battlefield brought about by mass bombing, did not change the essence of warfare either. Warfare is different in many obvious ways than it was a hundred, or a thousand years ago, but it remains the same in the fundamental way that its essence is the organized destruction of human life for abstract purposes.
In 1995 Time magazine published an article called “Onward Cyber Soldiers” that summed up in a popular vein some of the advanced thinking in warfare that is now percolating through the military and strategic studies think tanks of the US and other advanced countries. The article discussed computer war, logic bombs, instant data links, psy-ops and psy-war, and electromagnetic pulses. It demonstrated how some future commander might identify enemy formations with his or her mouse, and click them out of existence. It also showed what the well-dressed infantryman of the next century will wear including a computer embedded in his body armour, headgear and thermal weapon sights integrated into a datacom network, flat panel night vision screens, and other Star Wars wonders. The soldier in the Time illustration, however, was also carrying a rifle. Granted, it looked like something out of Star Trek. But it had a stock and receiver, sights, a magazine, a banana clip, a trigger, and a muzzle.
Whatever the “rifle” of the future may look like, and however it may accomplish it’s task, it will most assuredly be designed only to kill people. If, as some analysts suggest, the “poor bloody infantry” will soon be replaced by a small number of high-technology equipped, special operations, troopers, those troopers will still go in harm’s way and will still be tasked with killing the other enemy troopers. Whatever high technology communications or intelligence-enhancing apparatus a future soldier may carry, it will all be directed to helping him use his weapon more effectively than his World War One predecessor might have done. That will also be true of the enemy who seeks to kill him.
During the 1991 Gulf War between the UN Coalition Forces and Iraq, the public was treated to pictures of precision-guided munitions destroying hardened Iraqi military targets by literally blowing in their front doors and systematically and surgically “taking” them out. But the reality was different. Air war is less chancy today than it was fifty years ago, but the US General Accounting Office recently published a study pointing out that the increase in air attack precision in the Gulf War was only incremental over earlier conflicts. In other words, there is still a lot of “missing” in the brutal business of air attack. The last 80 or so years have produced a succession of air war theorists, each promising the ultimate in destructive power delivered where needed, when needed, to allow the infantry to simply “mop up.” Like Bomber Harris, they have always overstated their case.
In the Gulf war, the coalition forces suffered “disturbing losses from friendly fire.” Those “blue-on-blue” casualties were caused primarily by standoff weapons. Now, friendly fire has always been a problem, on any battlefield, but it seems to be looming as an ever more serious problem now that humans are acting more and more on machine-indicated firing solutions. That is one aspect of the RMA that is not often discussed. But it should be. There doesn’t seem much point in putting the commander with her finger on the trigger so far away from the battle, with so much computing power at her fingertips, only to enhance her ability to kill her own troops by mistake.
When it comes to warfare, the word “revolution” promises more than it delivers. Time after time in the history of warfare, what appeared to be a quantum leap in innovation, giving one side a measurable superiority over another, was soon cancelled out, or outleaped by the other side. The essential sameness of the human brain, the enemy’s independent will, and the need to survive will always see to that process. That is why, at bottom, warfare is still the organized, state-sanctioned, violence-continuing-politics-by-other-means, as Clausewitz wrote, as it was in the days of the Egyptian pharaohs. Ulysses S. Grant once summarized his strategy for dealing with the Confederacy this way: “Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” On the eve of the Gulf War, Gen. Colin Powell, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, summarized his strategy for dealing with Iraq this way: “Our strategy in going after this army is very simple...First we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it.” Not much change there over the course of 160 years!
In his seminal study The Revolt of the Masses, Jose’ Ortega y Gasset defined revolution as: “not...uprising against pre-existing order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one.” A real Revolution in Military Affairs would produce an entirely new way of planning, preparing for, and fighting wars. Such a development might mean, for example, the wholesale substitution of non-lethal for lethal means of waging war. A protagonist would not aim to destroy enemy armour, for example, but try instead to glue its treads to the ground. Research into non-lethal means of waging war is currently being conducted in the US, Great Britain, and elsewhere, but as an adjunct to lethal warfare, not as a replacement for it.
A bit more than a half century ago, the world witnessed one of the very few general wars in human history. The last general war ended when Rome plowed under the ruins of Carthage and salted its fields. As Harry Summers points out in his recent book The New World Strategy, World War Two was distinct even from World War One in that the World War Two Allies sought total victory over the Axis. They fought for nothing less than unconditional surrender. They aimed to crush the enemy’s will and his ability to resist. There was to be no political solution to that war, no limited objectives. The enemy was to be killed to the last man if he did not throw down his weapons and put up his hands. Those were the only terms given him.
It is not the limited conventional warfare we see around us today that is anomalous. The inter-state and intra-state wars that have been waged since 1945 have been the rule in human history, not the exception. The Koreas, Afghanistans, Vietnams, Chechnyas, Bosnias, Gulf Wars of the last 40 years are the norm. Is there really any sign that such wars will abate? Are we so certain China will not, at some point in the near future, try to grab Taiwan by force? Given that we know very little about why men go to war, but a great deal about how pervasive war has been, is it not logical to conclude that human kind will have to endure war for a long time to come? And if that is true, is it better to just endure it, or hope it stays far away, or to prepare for it however hateful that prospect. The tides of history ebb and flow, but there is really no evidence that the world has entered a new era in the relations of states to each other as much as it has closed the book on a century of historical anomaly. That is as true of the international order as it is of the nature of war.