THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Moreover, we are unwilling, or we should be, to trade off our economic or cultural or strategic well-being because these interests are in fact so bound up with one another. Even survival is not an ultimate value, for there are conditions of life that are intolerable. So we have this unstable con-tredanse, ABC/BCA/CAB, or BAC/CBA/ACB, contrived—of course—to make this point: that an optimal constitutional arrangement is one that permits peaceful change as states shift from one approach to another over time and as these shifts impose stresses on international society that mirror the stresses felt within states. In the stories, as I have written them, it is that constitutional arrangement that allows a society—even a society of states—to transcend its prevailing approach that proves most successful. It is human agency that avoids the plausible futures that on examination seem so intolerable.

  We choose which questions to answer in life just as studiedly as we choose our answers. Societies are creatures of their decisions to treat certain issues as problems, because such decisions enable societies to respond to those problems. Because there is at this moment a growing confusion in our understanding of the role of the State, our usual habits of choosing certain problems and creating our history by means of crafting solutions to those problems is at present ill-formed and confused. We know the old rules—to uphold the international law of nation-states—no longer command us. Yet we are unclear about the choices we are making in the new society of market-states when we decide cases whose ultimate significance is still hidden from us. In the scenarios just described, we can get some picture of the problems and opportunities that may arise as a result of our choosing different paths for this society.

  We do scenarios to help us define what kind of world we really want, among many possible worlds, to clarify how decisions taken today will effect large-scale results later, and to make us more alert to the meaning of unfolding events. Thus scenario-based planning is not about solving the hypothetical problems of some distant tomorrow, but about making deci-sions wisely today. To take one example from the scenario exercise above: the first decades of the twenty-first century will witness the acceleration of two trends already evident at the end of the twentieth: the withdrawal of governments from the task of providing for the ultimate welfare of their citizens and the increasing assumption of this responsibility by the private sector. All across the postindustrial world, governments will have to learn from the experience and knowledge of the private sector how to create opportunity, and business leaders will have to learn how to manage with an eye to the public acceptance of their actions. Business leaders are wholly unprepared to take up the moral and political responsibilities that governments are busily casting off, and politicians and bureaucrats are seldom well situated to make the long-term investments in infrastructure that create opportunity. Yet how many business schools, law schools, and public policy institutes will plan this next semester's curriculum with these shortfalls in mind? How many are even aware that they are contributing to these mounting intellectual deficits?

  This chapter, “Possible Worlds,” is not the last chapter in this book because it is not really about the future. It is not a coda. It is not futurology. It is about current choices, as these can be illuminated by the imagination.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Coming Age of War and Peace

  EVERY MARKET-STATE will make historic choices among the models described in Chapter 24, and perhaps among other models that are yet to be developed. These choices will do much to shape the constitution of the society of states, and it may be that, as described in Chapter 25, one model will predominate. But suppose this does not happen? Suppose these three models—or others—all seek an international order reflecting their priorities but none succeed?

  The Peace of Paris suggests some common elements among the various versions of the market-state. The treaties that compose that Peace specifically refer to the necessity for market economies and for the human right to possess property as well as the requirement for parliamentary, democratic, and judicial processes. The Peace of Paris, however, does not resolve the tensions among the alternative forms of the market-state, tensions that mainly lie in the varying degrees of sovereignty retained by the people of a market-state. Instead, by ending the Long War and incorporating the agreements reached in San Francisco and at Versailles, the Peace of Paris completed the process of globalizing a certain form of the nation-state while universalizing international law—achievements that are to some degree incompatible with the market-state. Indeed, many of the international institutions of the last fifty years—the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to take but a few notable examples—will either have to be radically transformed or will decay into obstructive irrelevance. The U.N. Security Council is obviously a Long War creation: who would choose those particular five states to manage international security today? Our recent experience in Bosnia suggests that NATO might be able to make this transition while the U.N. might not, while our even more recent experience in Kosovo suggests that NATO can perhaps enable the U.N. to act effectively in the new era.* This example of the regional enabling the universal mirrors the phenomenon of the market-state in which devolution goes hand in hand with more unified markets. Perhaps neither could exist without the other: Lombardy may be too small to be economically viable while the European Union may be too large to command the cultural allegiance of Lombards. Together, these new models for state organization reinforce each other.

  We will seek a new constitutional order for the society of states in order to cope with the novel challenges presented in Chapter 24. The bureaucratized nation-states struggling to satisfy the ever-escalating requirements of providing for the welfare of their aging publics are increasingly being denied their axiomatic legitimacy by those very publics. Those publics are beginning to look to transnational entities, like the multinational corporation (whose shares they hold), and subnational institutions, like particular interest groups (whose fund-raising they support), to provide for their tangible well-being. So long as the State's legitimacy is a matter of ensuring the welfare of its citizens, then the globalization and interdependence of its economy, the vulnerability and transparency of its security, and the accessibility and fragility of its cultural institutions will increasingly deny the State that legitimacy. As a result, individual states will change—they are already changing—to reacquire legitimacy by creating a new basis on which they may claim it. A change in the constitutional order of states will eventually recreate the nature of the society of states and its constitutional order.

  Before we can create such a new order, however, we must establish a consensus; that is to say, before we can have a new constitution for the society of states, we must have a constitutional convention. In order to have a constitutional convention for this society there must be a congress of the kind that met at Augsburg, Westphalia, Utrecht, and Vienna. This congress need never meet; it need never produce a single document: the only necessary element it must possess that it shares with the great congresses of the past is consensus. War provided the means by which consensus was achieved in the past. Peace resolves issues that war has defined, winnowed, and presented in a way that is ripe for resolution. The great peace congresses that ended epochal wars were constitutional conventions for the society of states convened to resolve matters tried by state violence.

  It is worth remembering that neither changes in the constitutional order nor innovations in strategy cause wars. Wars are fought over the usual mix of ambition and fear that has characterized state conflict from the time states began. The causes of epochal wars are no different from the causes of war generally. What marks these conflicts as “epochal” has to do not only with their duration and scope, but also with the fact that epochal war encompasses fundamental constitutional issues that must be resolved for peace to take hold. Regardless of what caused it, the epocha
l war has the consequence of changing the constitutional order of the states that fought; the peace conference that follows such a war marks the acceptance of a new constitutional order for the society of states.

  Virtually no one, apart from a few apocalyptic millennialists, is concerned about the possibility of large-scale war at the present time. The assessment of the strategic threats facing the world that is given in the U.S.'s 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) concluded that the international community has barely commenced a ten-year strategic lull. In late 2000, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the risk of war among developed countries will be low through at least 2015.1 This sense of peace “as far as the eye can see” is widely shared.2 Yet there is also a sense in the QDR and elsewhere of uneasiness, a sense that the future is likely to be dangerous in new ways—even a sense that we will look back on the Cold War as a golden age.3 For the reasons given in the preceding chapters, I think this sense of foreboding is justified, and that the new ways in which the world will be threatened are exquisitely connected to the old ways in which the Long War was finally silenced. If the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the apogee of the nation-state—for what other political entity could possibly have financed and manned such an undertaking as the Manhattan Project, let alone World Wars I and II—then that moment was also the birth of the universal vulnerability of the nation-state. If the development of high-speed computing was critically important to ending the Long War without armed conflict between the superpowers, this development has also made possible asymmetric warfare by individuals and small groups that are otherwise powerless. If the creation of the international telecommunications system crushed the pretensions of the nonparliamentary nation-states, it also made the very notion of creating a state in the image of a nation seem vain and insular. These are the new ways—the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, asymmetric warfare by means of attacks on critical infrastructure, and the transnational environmental and epidemiological plagues of the future—in which threats will be manifested. These new ways must be added to the more conventional threats to states, which, if they have in some theatres receded, have not vanished.

  But even if this sense of foreboding is not without foundation because these new tools lower the costs to an aggressor of waging war, why should we prepare for a new epochal war? What is it about our current situation that would justify such apprehensions, and if they are justified, what pre-cisely should we do about it?

  The three new forms of the market-state that are currently emerging are marked by radically different views of sovereignty. The entrepreneurial market-state holds that state sovereignty is transparent: other states are entitled to pierce the veil of sovereignty if the target state has forfeited its claim to legitimacy, even by its internal acts. Managerial market-states hold, by contrast, that sovereignty can be penetrated only with the endorsement of the United Nations, or at least the ratification by a regional security organization that is itself endorsed by the U.N. Mercantile market-states hold that sovereignty is opaque and cannot be breached on the basis of a state's internal behavior.

  When the United States and other entrepreneurial market-states intervene abroad, other states—with different views of sovereignty—are threatened. The use of force against an international terrorist network, for example, might involve interventions in Somalia (where there is at present no effective government), the Philippines (where the government has solicited assistance against Abu Sayyaf), Colombia (where the government is fighting terrorists unsuccessfully), or Iraq. If prolonged hostilities on a global scale result, the conflict could put in play the very bases of the constitutional order itself. This, of course, is the watermark of the epochal war.

  Then why not simply renounce foreign intervention for the domestic acts of other states? What's wrong with a little modest circumspection? First, we forfeit the chance to build collaborative relationships with other peer competitors through the management of joint interventions. Second, such a renunciation saps the moral role of the State as a protector at a time when its constitutional order, that of the market-state, is particularly vulnerable to the charge of amorality. This makes the State a likelier target for civil disorder and even civil war on the basis of one of the other competing constitutional forms (including nation-state versus market-state). Third, and most important, if one group of states renounces intervention—for whatever reason—it is by no means obvious that all states will do so. China can consistently hold that sovereignty is opaque and still invade Taiwan; the same thing can be said of the Koreas and other divided states. Nor should we rely on consistency: hypocrisy is not unknown in world affairs.

  The alternative to abandoning intervention as an instrument of the State is to set clearly articulated standards for intervention so that other states do not become threatened by interventions in remote regions that do not, in themselves, threaten the vital interests of anyone other than the targeted state. China must know that an intervention to rescue Hutu civilians in Burundi or to trap Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan is not preparation for intervention on behalf of Tibetans.

  This suggests “epochal war” might come in alternative forms. It might come in the guise of a series of asymmetrical low-intensity conflicts like the war against terrorism; or it might resemble the great continent-spanning coalitional, high-intensity wars of the past; or First World peer competitors might fight a largely nonexplosive technologically sophisticated war by attempting to bring about unattributed disruption through stealth.4 I will term these three possibilities the “chronic,” the “cataclysmic,” and the “critical” respectively.

  We must choose which sort of war we will fight, regardless of what are its causes, to set the terms of the peace we want. To many, such a sentence must sound like courting war. Shouldn't the avoidance of war be our objective? The avoidance of war per se, however, is not an objective; it is a policy. And I fear it is a policy that can mask the approach of cataclysmic war because it counsels against the preparations for war that might avert massive, carefully planned, large-scale attacks by one state on another, and because it actually invites low-intensity conflicts once aggressors can rest assured they can find sanctuaries where they will not be troubled by outsiders.

  There is a widespread view that war is simply a pathology of the State, that healthy states will not fight wars. This view ignores the role strategy plays in the formation and continuance of states. War, like law, sustains the State by giving it the means to carry out its purposes of protection, preservation, and defense. This view that the State can be permanently separated from the historic occurrence of war also mistakes the sources of peace. Peaces, when they are constitutions, contain within them unresolved challenges to the orders they establish. Consensus does not mean stasis.

  Divided nations seeking nation-states present the greatest threat to the society of states. The two Koreas, China and Taiwan, the states of the former Palestine, the states of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, and the states of the subcontinent, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—all present lethally inviting venues for war that could become cataclysmic. The partition of states along national lines was the constitutional surgery of choice for the society of nation-states; reintegrating these fragments of a whole will present a formidable challenge to the society of market-states that has inherited the consequences of these diplomatic fixes. If we wish to ensure that the new states that emerge are market-states rather than chronically violent nation-states it may be that only war on a very great scale could produce the necessary consensus. We should not exclude the democracies from idealistic ambitions that could lead to conflicts on such a scale. It is often said that democracies do not attack other states. Actually, the historical record tends to support the narrower assertion that democracies do not attack each other5 (and even this assertion has been challenged).6 Such states have shown themselves quite ruthless in conflicts with states that are nondemocratic or against groups that were perceived as threatening
the stability of the democratic state.7Cataclysmic war is a real possibility in Asia. India, Russia, and China all face nationalist challenges to the development of a market-state. Each could provide the theatre for war. China possesses a potential for civil war that is the product of the attraction and repulsion the market-state holds for Chinese society. For this reason a weak and unstable China is far more dangerous than a strong China. Russia is experiencing a Weimar situation at least as painful as anything Germany endured. What other state today combines a nuclear arsenal with surging mortality and plunging fertility tables? Both Russia and China—because of their weakness—find themselves intertwined with criminal conspiracies that could lead to external conflict. China has been an unacknowledged partner of the East Asian sea pirate networks; in Russia, there is “such extraordinary interpenetration of the intelligence services, organized crime, and business that it is very difficult to tell with whom one is dealing in almost any circumstance.”8 These criminal involvements pose two potential problems: first, they may launch irritating, sometimes deadly, probes to which other states may react with violence and the intent to pierce Russian or Chinese sovereignty. Second, the involvement of criminal conspiracies raises the possibility of theft from their respective military industrial complexes, including fissionable material, biological weapons, guidance systems, and other deadly exports. Like Russia and China, India is a nuclear power—though a modest one—with a high potential for dissolution, and thus a domestic appetite for international adventure. In any of these countries, the outbreak of civil war could be succeeded by predation on neighbors. Great powers that sat by during the first phase of conflict might be drawn into the second.

  There is no certainty, however, that even a pluralism of constitutional forms of the market-state can exist without violence. The three versions of the nation-state that competed in the Long War had to externalize to make themselves secure at home. Parliamentarianism, fascism, and communism in every state rose and fell with their fortunes abroad. By contrast, the three versions of the market-state have to be internalized to become secure abroad. The entrepreneurial, mercantile, and managerial alternatives will rise—or fall—in popularity depending on the success and cohesion each is able to achieve domestically. Inevitably this will mean a rise in domestic coercion in some states. When this happens, threatened local groups will call on their allies in states abroad. Then, as before, law and strategy, the inner and the outer faces of the State, will be united. Civil disobedience and civil strife will become more widespread, and more threatening. This could mean a silent war, fought with largely covert means because overt conflict is too risky and too discrediting. Such a war would be fought principally with defensive weapons—redundancy, deception, missile defenses, information, and ever-advancing technology, including genomics—against undefined adversaries supported by rival states.