The above list of conditions also suggests a way in which states can decide when to use force to achieve or maintain peace, that is, it implies a calculus analogous to the Weinberger Doctrine.1 This program assumes that states will have to reconfigure and retrain their forces to function in ambiguous environments, where the threat may not come from another state or even an identifiable aggressor, and where the line between war and crime has been smudged.
We ask the same questions that we asked before. Which crises demand consideration for intervention? Those with significant costs to world public order, that system of state legitimacy that relies on the ten conditions for peace outlined above. When do these crises profit from intervention? When intervention is likely to make a decisive difference at a cost/reward ratio that is commensurate with the significance of the risk to world public order. Who should intervene? Those states with the largest stakes in world public order. What objectives should be pursued? Restoring and maintaining the conditions for a civil society. How is this accomplished? By voluntary coalitions of essentially mercenary forces, compensated by contributions from all states having a stake in the outcome.2 In Europe (and perhaps the Near East) this might mean the use of NATO forces; in Africa, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) troops, augmented as necessary, and so on. The United States should take the lead in assembling such mercenary teams. As Joseph Nye has rightly said:
the United States has to recognize a basic proposition of public-goods theory: if the largest beneficiary of a public good (such as international order) does not provide disproportionate resources toward its maintenance, the smaller beneficiaries are unlikely to do so.3
Such is the calculus of the society of states of peace. It is no more than a rather formulaic rendering of the commonsense judgments statesmen make every day, with the factors made a bit more perspicuous. This calculus recognizes the State's interest in a peaceful order. It contrasts with the classic calculus of a state of war, that is, that the State should not intervene when the risks of intervention in a crisis exceed the State's vital interests in the outcome.*
Expressing these rules of decision so plainly helps to determine the selection of the war aim, which we can define as that objective such that its relation to world public order yields a stake for the intervening state that exceeds the share of the risks—political and military—it is asked to bear. Such rules can also help determine the weapons to be deployed and the command structure to be used. These rules prompt leaders to offer realistic justifications for the courses of action they choose. It should not be necessary to pretend disingenuously that contemporary interventions obey the classic calculus of a state of war when the historical context for these deci-sions comes after the end of the Long War and in contemplation of preventing another such cataclysm. Leaders can forthrightly explain why they are intervening in situations that previously would not have been thought appropriate for intervention. To take one example: the U.S. president's speech explaining the situation in Kosovo when NATO air attacks began ought also to have explained our criteria for undertaking such attacks. The U.S. president's speech to Congress explaining our taking up arms against terrorism did so.
We have long been accustomed to think of the imperatives of the State as basically strategic, and of the issues that engage the society of states as fundamentally questions of law. We have long been accustomed to deny that a State can be compelled by other states to obey its own laws, and we usually deny that the society of states has any particular strategic objectives.
The developmental picture of the State that I have presented, however, portrays the constitutional and the strategic dimensions as intimately and inextricably interconnected. This interconnectedness between law and strategy is also a fundamental feature of the society of states. Within a single state the constitutional order determines the ways conflict is managed and rationalized domestically and abroad. For the international society of states, peace treaties perform a similar role, by attempting to solve the puzzles created by wars. In both instances, constitutions provide a society—whether it is a society of citizens or the society of states—with the means to choose among values when there is no one optimum solution. When the choices to be made are among incommensurate values, a constitution records and determines how those choices are to be made in order for them to be accorded legitimacy.
We have thought of international law as providing a largely stable background to the spread of the model of the European state around the globe. Some particular doctrines may change, but the idea of a law of nations is supposed to be more or less constant, ever expanding until it has become universal. On the basis of the portrait I have given of international law, however, this description is unjustified. International law has developed in a turbulent periodicity, changing its most basic precepts as its constituent parties, states, underwent dramatic and fundamental constitutional change. One consequence of this different understanding is that universalism no longer seems inevitable, and we can entertain the idea that the reversibility of this universalism does not mean the retrenchment or death of international law itself.
We have thought of the history of the nation-state as having begun at Westphalia. Here, too, the portrait I have drawn is somewhat different. This, too, is freeing, because it allows us to imagine that the nation-state may indeed be dying (as seems to many to be the case) without having to concede that the State itself is withering away (as seems improbable).
The Long War of the nation-state is over, having destroyed every empire that participated in it, every political aristocracy, every general staff, as well as much of the beauty of European and Asian life. Of that brief period after world markets brought relative comfort and security and before world ambition brought the destruction of societies that in retrospect appear so very unworldly, we can only say: such a period could not exist in our age.
I have called this conflict the Long War not simply because of its duration but because this length connects the world of many centuries—feudal, national, imperial, mercantile, and religious—with the world that is yet to be, the new century's world that is being born.
Two tasks lie before us: to decide, as states, when it is appropriate to use force in this new world; and to determine, as a society of states, when to collectively sanction the use of that force in this world. This is a matter of creating precedents and case law. It amounts to deploying the habits of law on behalf of strategy, and of course vice versa.
These precedents and case law, however, are not those generated by courts. We may accomplish in Bosnia a successful, long-term intervention by the society of states on world-public-order grounds; if we do, then the Yugoslav Wars will become as much a precedent in the future as the Gulf War is now. The same is true of our war on international terrorism. The rules of collective engagement will be based on how the last similar problem was approached, and on what basis we would like to see the next, future problem resolved. I believe that the combination of improvised constitutional instruments with increasingly settled case law is the appropriate method for the society of market-states. This combination is a reversal of the method of the nation-state (and to that extent may take place outside the U.N.).
This case law of the society of states must be consciously crafted. It will require political, business, and media leaders to think in terms of following and creating precedents rather than in terms of the impromptu. It will require that leaders forthrightly explain their decisions by means of doctrine, and not simply in emotive phrases. We are now in a position to write this case law through our decisions; some day, through an inability to achieve international consensus, we may no longer be in such a position, and we will regret having wasted an opportunity that would have avoided a world-rending war.
The views on international security generally prevailing today, however, are far from those that reflect a commitment to creating such case law. These views are at once very narrow and very ambitious. They are narrow because they have up to now ex
cluded the nonterritorial threats to the State that are becoming increasingly dangerous; they are complacently ambitious because they do not recognize that the power of states to ensure their own security by conventional strategies is rapidly waning.
States are losing control of their sovereignty, especially if this is conceived in territorial terms. Once the territorial membrane collapses, then the distinction between law and strategy—the separate inner and outer modalities of the State—seems to weaken. In fact, this membrane was always a reflection of the interconnectedness of these two ideas, not of their independence. Because it was always so, implicitly, it should not alarm us now that we contemplate a world in which it is explicitly so. Like the union of time and space that once seemed so counterintuitive, the union of law and strategy is compelled by its usefulness. We simply cannot understand the development of the State and the society of states by holding either of these concepts in isolation from the other.
The threats we will soon be facing are not easily categorized as state aggressions. Indeed for the first time since the birth of the State, a state structure is no longer necessary in order to organize violence on a scale that is devastating to a society. And yet, perhaps ironically, this development makes the role of the State all the more crucial in achieving international peace and national security. This is because the shift away from retaliatory, threat-based strategies to defensive, vulnerability-based strategies will require a State—indeed will require a society of states—to successfully execute. Acting alone, the market can never coordinate the defensive tactics I have described into a general strategy. A market-state is required.
In the new era we are entering, the State will be as indispensable to peace as it was in the era of invasions that gave it birth. To stop a state's aggressions, especially against its own people, and to build international defenses against aggression that can, but need not, come from official governments will require strong states. If these missions are avoided or postponed, a new, horrifying kind of conflict may emerge in which an authoritarian market-state challenges the contentment of the rest because they are weak, and because their weakness is a threat, enabling nonstate terrorists and aggressors they cannot suppress to bring chaos everywhere. The market that encouraged this passivity will have destroyed the market-state.
So we begin a new millennium—not in terror but not in tranquility either; with faith and hope, but with wariness and an anxious foreboding, also. Law, strategy, and history continue, as before, to set the terms of legitimacy for the State. Although technology has changed the context for each of these fate-shaping institutions of godlike creation, the terms of legitimacy are human terms, not technological ones, written in human acts, and broken or mended by human deeds.
To act is to understand; every act reflects an understanding. My aim has been to enhance an understanding that has been called upon perhaps no more than a half dozen times in the last five hundred years to create a new world from the inherited political institutions of the old. Will we lay a long siege against ourselves or master the craft of the armorer when shields are made of secrets and not of bronze?
Advice to a Prophet
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?
Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
—Richard Wilbur
Epilogue
FOR FIVE CENTURIES only a state could destroy another state. And for five centuries, states have developed means of defeating other states. Entire worlds of diplomacy, international law, alliances, and naval, air, and land warfare are all predicated upon conflicts among states. Only states could marshal the resources to threaten the survival of other states; only states could organize societies to defend themselves against such threats. Only states could bring about peace congresses.
We are entering a period, however, when very small numbers of persons, operating with the enormous power of modern computers, biogenetics, air transport, and even small nuclear weapons, can deal lethal blows to any society. Because the origin of these attacks can be effectively disguised, the fundamental bases of the State will change.
During the second half of the hegemony of the order of nation-states—a period, that is, immediately following Hiroshima—many persons, including Albert Einstein, believed there would be either “one world or none.” Fearing a nuclear holocaust, they hoped that strategy could be subordinated to world law. This fear has largely dissolved with the end of the Long War and the strategic triumph of one version of the nation-state, liberal parliamentarianism. Yet we may again soon hear this dated slogan because we will confront dangers every bit as great as we did then.
For the end of the Long War created a set of new challenges, and today a question descended from this conflict confronts the constitutional order. It is whether and how states can continue to exist with ever more ubiquitous and powerful technologies that can alter or destroy our entire environment. These technologies include weapons of mass destruction and biogenetic and cybernetic techniques. The legal institutions of the triumphant parliamentary states are committed to the protection of individual rights and civil liberties. To protect these institutions in the face of these new challenges will require a strategic ingenuity that would tax the gifts of the historic innovators described in this volume.
When a disguised attack with these new weapons occurs, and its author is not definitely identified, three deadly risks will arise: (1) a state that is unwilling or unable to suppress the elements believed to be responsible will forfeit its sovereignty and be subject to attack and even occupation; (2) a state that is the subject of an attack will sacrifice its constitutional institutions and turn on its own people—or a discrete minority within—with violence and despotic police methods; (3) a state, though disavowing responsibility, will be deemed the author of the attacks through unknown agents, and will become the target for retaliation. All three of these scenarios fall along the seam of sovereignty that separates law from strategy, and all three are laden with peril. Any one of these scenarios could lead to war, as the targets of retaliation resist.
> In fact it is sometimes hard to separate the threats posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and cyberattacks, because so many of the techniques of any one of these is useful to the others. A coordinated biological attack is the dream of many terrorists; such scenarios are espe-cially horrific when the means of coping with them, which are highly dependent on rapid information transfer, are also attacked. Furthermore, an adversary state might well want to shield itself from retaliation by operating not through its armed forces—arrayed invitingly across a desert frontier—but through shadowy agents posing as terrorists or acting through the infinitely extendable arms of the Internet.
Similarly, within a state,
the knowledge and techniques for making biological super-weapons will become dispersed among hospital laboratories, agricultural research institutes, and peaceful factories everywhere. Only an oppressive police state could assure total government control over such novel tools for mass destruction. In a free and open democracy, those who wish to destroy the political order that they despise will inevitably find ways to acquire these tools.1
Such attacks will not arrive with labels that tell us whether they are the result of a terrorist's attack, or a strategic assault by another state, or just the afternoon diversions of a teenager in California. Therefore we must have governmental structures that are supple and flexible enough to react in an environment of unprecedented uncertainty. Above all we must avoid the paralysis that can seize a government when the jurisdictional lines along which we habitually act do not neatly correspond to the known facts of an incident.
Strategically the important thing to appreciate about such attacks is their essential ambiguity. Because it may not be possible to determine the source of the incursion, strategies of retaliation and deterrence, which have served us well in the past, become less useful. In such a world we must move our thinking from threat-based strategies that rely on knowing pre-cisely who our enemy is and where he lives, to vulnerability-based strategies that try to make our infrastructure more slippery, more redundant, more versatile, more difficult to attack.
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Page 115
