THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  *Although it was not much commented on at the time, a not dissimilar consideration operated with respect to France, which might not have been entirely averse to seeing U.S. troops expelled from Germany and to having the WEU, of which the United States is not a member, supplant NATO.

  *The Helsinki Final Act was signed by almost all the principal European leaders of the time. It was the product of an intensive effort by the Soviet Union and its allies to obtain recognition for the strategic division of Europe. In exchange for this recognition, the West obtained various paper concessions from the Soviets in the area of human rights. Somewhat unexpectedly, Eastern Europeans and later Russians used these concessions to delegitimate the communist party regimes then prevailing such that once the Berlin Wall came down, the CSCE process set up at Helsinki quickened. Between January 19, 1989, and October 3, 1991, the Vienna Conference was concluded and followed six months later by the Paris Conference, which was in turn followed one year later by the Copenhagen Conference, and then by the Moscow Conference—all children of Helsinki.

  *The capital of unified Germany has been returned to Berlin.

  *Acheson's successor, John Foster Dulles, declared, “I confess to being one of those lawyers who do not regard international law as law at all.” Anthony Arend, Pursuing a Just and Durable Peace: John Foster Dulles and International Organization (Greenwood Press, 1988), 57.

  †“Jus cogens norms, which are nonderogable and peremptory, enjoy highest status within customary international law, are binding on all nations, and cannot be preempted by treaty… [They include] torture, murder, genocide, and slavery” U.S. v. Matta-Ballesteros, 71 F. 3d 754 (1995).

  *Thomas Franck writes, “Legitimacy is a property of a rule or rule-making institution which itself exerts a pull towards compliance on those addressed normatively because those addressed believe that the rule or institution has come into being and operates in accordance with generally accepted principles of right process.” The legitimacy of a norm in international law is indicated by four facts: its determinacy or clarity; its symbolic validation by diplomatic rituals and formalities; its conceptual coherence; and the development and maintenance by “right process.” Thomas M. Franck, The Power of Legitimacy among Nations (Oxford University Press, 1990), 24.

  *And the NATO action in Yugoslavia over Kosovo.

  *Decisions are not law unless they possess both authority—“the participation in decision in accordance with community perspectives about who is to make what decisions with what criteria”—and control—defined as “effective participation in [decision making] and execution.” McDougal and Lasswell, 384. “When decisions are authoritative but not controlling, they are not law but pretense; when decisions are controlling but not authoritative, they are not law but naked power.” Ibid.

  *As Paul Porter—another celebrated Washington lawyer—is said to have remarked, “If the ends don't justify the means, I'd like to know what the hell does!”

  *This cable, sent from Moscow where Kennan was serving as deputy to the U.S. Ambassador, alerted official Washington to the intractability of the Soviet position and advised in favor of “containing” Communist expansion.

  †See Chapter 4.

  ‡As Goncharov, Lewis, and Xue Litai show on the basis of archival research and interviews with Korean, Chinese, and Russian participants, “the invasion of June 25, 1950 was pre-planned, [approved] and directly assisted by Stalin and his generals, and reluctantly backed by Mao at Stalin's insistence.” These archives reveal that Stalin, beginning in 1949, launched an immense arms buildup, believing that Korea would serve as a springboard for the invasion of Japan and that a Chinese-backed revolutionary struggle in Viet Nam and Southeast Asia would force the United States to divert critical forces from Western Europe. Consistently with our study, Stalin's moves, as Jacob Heilbrun astutely observes, 89 had their “origins not in economic fears of American expansionism but in the need to restore his party's grip on his [own] society…” Soviet occupation abroad even replicated the tactics Stalin had used to consolidate power in the USSR before the war. In Stalin's case, the constitutional imperatives of communism not only determined Soviet strategy abroad but also its tactics in the Long War.90

  *Nor can one adequately imagine the peril if the Long War after 1945 had triangulated among the USSR, the United States, and Japan, all with nuclear weapons.

  *I am aware that in some quarters the United States is believed to be just such a state—interfering in the constitutional makeup of states like Grenada or Panama, and changing the boundaries of Serbia and Iraq. The Peace of Paris ought to settle this constitutional question for the society of states: no state's sovereignty is unimpeachable if it studiedly spurns legitimating parliamentary institutions and human rights protections. The greater the rejection of these institutions—which are the means by which sovereignty is conveyed by societies to their governments—the more sharply curtailed is the cloak of sovereignty that would otherwise protect governments from interference by their peers. U.S. action against the sovereignty of Iraq, for example, must be evaluated in this light.

  †In order to conquer and annex another state against its will, for example.

  ‡In order to bring about nuclear multipolarity or acquire clandestine nuclear weapons, either of which would destabilize the system of deterrence, for example.

  *See the discussion of reassurance in the introduction to Book I.

  * A reference to the Avignon papacy.

  *Even the anthrax attacks in 2001 in the United States, alarming as they were, did not cause mass casualties.

  †Indeed the German army in World War II avoided areas with typhus outbreaks, prompting one community to vaccinate its citizens in order to register false positives on the Weil-Felix diagnostic test. This saved the residents from deportation to concentration camps. E. S. Lazowski and S. Matulewicz, “Serendipitous Discovery of Artificial Weil-Felix Reaction Used in Private Immunological War,” ASM News 43 (1977): 300 – 302.

  *It is a mistake to assume that the victim of a biological attack will automatically seek assistance or that he would be correctly diagnosed in any event. Some victims would wait until it was too late for effective treatment; some doctors might not recognize unfamiliar symptoms. In the case of infectious diseases such delay could be costly.

  †It is alleged that Leon Trotsky proposed at one time a modern telephone system for the new Soviet state, and that Stalin vetoed this idea with the remark that he could imagine no greater instrument of counterrevolution.

  *I am indebted to Ashbel Green for pointing out that the revolt in the Ivory Coast was at least in part inspired by what its citizens saw happening on TV to Milosevic. What has been called the “CNN effect” apparently has consequences for repressive regimes too.

  *See Chapter 10.

  *A development in economics analogous in my view to the transformation of time, in physics, from an invariant measuring standard to a concomitant element of the dimension of space.

  *This speculation assumes that the euro does not displace the dollar—a guess that, thus far, seems plausible.

  *Though, according to Japan's External Trade Organization, the Japanese slump in the 1990s has reduced Japanese direct investment in the United States from $32 billion to about $12 billion. These figures are very difficult to compute, owing to differences in definition and the lack of consensus on technology transfer numbers. See Trends in Japan's Foreign Investment Outflow, Table 9, March 23, 2001, JETRO website.

  *The decision by U.S. trade authorities not to protect American pharmaceutical patents from Third World unauthorized production in states gravely threatened by AIDS is a hopeful sign. This decision led directly to the collaboration between pharmaceutical companies and Third World states to reduce the cost of treatment.

  *The idea of a state-owned press or television, while the norm in the nation-states of the past, is becoming a rarity in the market-states of the present.

  *Scene 5.

  †He also
wrote an essay on the shield of Achilles.

  ‡This story is drawn from Boccaccio's Decameron.

  §I have simplified this enchanting parable considerably. Please consult the endnotes for a fuller text.

  *Though not incomparable; see Mathew Adler, “Review of Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason,” XIX Philosophy in Review 3 (June 1999): 168.

  *And the most recent experience, as of this writing, in Afghanistan suggests that while NATO and the U.N. have important political roles, the actual management of crises in international society will fall, as predicted, to ad hoc coalitions.

  *“Bonaparte's victory bulletin was typical in every respect of the many hundreds that were to follow in the course of the next thirteen years—the eagerly awaited bulletins, from Germany, from Austria, from Poland, from Russia, from Spain; the bulletins that set the imagination of young boys on fire and whose memory made the postwar years seem so drab and dull to them; the bulletins that old couples and young wives and mistresses and sisters would pore over, wondering whether the digits and the ciphers representing the crippled and the dead, the brave who were immortalized in an anonymous glory, included those they loved; the bulletins to which there seemed to be no end, as if henceforth the purpose of men's lives would be forever the gain of honor at the price of death; the bulletins that spoke, in lapidary yet incandescent prose, of the beauty of battlefields, the splendor of cities aflame; the glorious, hateful bulletins, with their exhilarating statistics of captured flags and guns, of enemies killed and wounded, of individual acts of bravery, that form the stanzas of the epic of Napoleon.” J. C. Herold, The Age of Napoleon (American Heritage, 1963); “To lie like a bulletin” was a proverbial expression in Napoleon's army, Ibid., 408. See also Louis-Leopold Boilly's painting of the French family poring over one of these bulletins.

  *Which is not to say that political partisanship is dead. It thrives in the transitional environment from one constitutional order to another. But this partisanship is programmatic (it is a right-wing conspiracy, or left-wing, or some other) whereas press opposition is nonsubstantive, in the sense that it objects, period. It poses no alternatives.

  *The U.S. force in Kosovo was one-tenth the size of the Desert Storm force in the Gulf War, yet it used a hundred times the bandwidth.

  *A conception quite different from the egalitarianism of the nation-state, where equality meant treating all citizens equally because citizenship was granted equally to all.

  *Compare the Hungarian proposals for a “contractual nation,” a range of government agencies and foundations that link ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries to Hungary. “According to this view, Hungarians abroad should be able to claim Budapest as their cultural center, Bratislava or Belgrade as their state capitals, Cluj-Napoca or Novi Sad as their regional centers, and so on.” Zsuzsa Csergo and James Goldgrier, “Virtual Nationalism,” Foreign Policy (July/August 2001): 76.

  *Some of the key cases to watch are the communities of the Walloons (Belgium), the Turks (Bulgaria), the Quebecois (Canada), Germans (Czech Republic), Magyars (Romania), the Basques and Catalans (Spain), the Irish, Welsh, and Scots (United Kingdom), and the Lombards (Italy).

  *Compare Homer's description of the two cities—the City at Peace and the City at War—in his depiction of scenes on the shield of Achilles, The Iliad, Book XVIII, lines 491 – 549.

  *Written after the attacks on New York and Washington, September 11, 2001.

  † Joseph Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (Pennsylvania State University, 2001), 17 – 18.

  ‡lbid.

  *Described in Chapter 12.

  †See, for example, Boris Pasternak, “Indian Summer,” in The Poems of Dr. Zhivago (Kansas City, 1967), 26 (trans. E. M. Kayden).

  *Peter Gomes, Sundays at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass: 1995), 23.

  *Quoted in John W. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1958), 429 – 30.

  *I should also like to thank the copyeditor, Susanna Sturgis, for whose labors I am grateful and of whom I thought when I came across this passage in a letter from the English critic James Agate: “Dear Cardus:—Re your Ten Composers. Have corrected your spelling. Also your Italian, German, French and occasionally your English. Have put your French accents right. Have emended your quotations… Titivated your titles. In places made the clumsy felicitious. Verified your keys. Rationalized your punctuation… In short, I have put this entrancing book right in all matters of fact and left only its errors of taste and judgment.” Jacques Barzun, “James Agate and His Nine Egos,” in A Jacques Barzun Reader, 94 (New York, 2002).