War and Peace

Paul A. Rahe from the October 1995 issue

On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, by Donald Kagan, New York: Doubleday, 606 pages, $30.00

Twenty-five years ago, shortly after shifting from Cornell to Yale University, Donald Kagan launched a new lecture course, "Historical Studies in the Origins of War." Each fall, he would introduce hundreds of freshmen and sophomores to Greek history; and when neither on leave nor saddled with administrative duties as department chair or Yale College dean, he would invite a host of undergraduates to devote the spring to reconsidering the course of events that led to the Peloponnesian War, World War I, the Second Punic War, World War II, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. By now, the teaching assistants who have run sections for Kagan before wandering off to take up assistant professorships at campuses all over the country are many (I was one two decades ago), and they are greatly outnumbered by the Yale alumni who once chose to wrestle with the complex set of issues that Kagan raised.

In On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace , Kagan, now Bass Professor of Western Civilization at Yale, makes it possible for readers throughout the world to share what was for many years an essential part of the Yale experience. He addresses the same four wars and the missile crisis, and he has apparently found a large audience. The book has been featured by the History Book Club and offered by the Book of the Month Club; its author has been interviewed on C -SPAN's Booknotes; and he has been invited to address the CEOs of the Fortune 500. Sales have been brisk.

It is easy to see why. Kagan's writing is clear; his book is well adorned with maps; his topic is one of permanent importance; and his presumptions are quite sensible. Nowhere does he suggest that we can hope for a world without war, but neither does he succumb to fatalism. While acknowledging that we operate within constraints, he insists that statesmen frequently have real choices to make and that these choices can be made wisely or foolishly. Kagan stoutly resists both the social scientist's instinct to force dissimilar situations into a similar mold and the historian's proclivity for presuming that no two situations are genuinely comparable. While demonstrating that the devil is in the details, he makes analogies where appropriate, keeping his eyes open for that which is permanent in the human condition.

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from these carefully linked studies, it is that statesman ship matters. Kagan insists that, in the absence of careful management, the international system tends towards anarchy. The maintenance of peace requires the presence of a great power willing to devote its efforts to avoiding a general conflagration. This superintending entity must be a satisfied power: No country possessed of territorial ambitions or revolutionary intentions likely to bring it into conflict with other states can be trusted to serve as an honest broker. This state must be powerful: In the best of circumstances, it should hold the balance between contending rivals. At the very least, it should be clear to all concerned that its intervention on one side or another in a given conflict will make a real difference to the outcome. Finally, this country must be aware of the role that it is called on to play; its citizens must be willing to shoulder the burden; and it must be shrewdly led.

Kagan concludes that, when these conditions are absent, a general war will almost certainly be the result; and in the course of five discrete narratives, he indicates why this is so. Kagan's conten tion ought to be a sobering thought for Americans. The United States is the only satisfied power in today's world with the political, economic, and moral capital to play what he takes to be the requisite role, and we may now be inclined to presume that "a return to normalcy" means for us a withdrawal from the world and a massive reduction in armaments. This Kagan thinks exceedingly dangerous. As a consequence, his book ought to be read by every citizen willing seriously to ponder whither we are tending. It should be force-fed to Bill Clinton, to his Republican rivals, and to the leaders of both parties in the two houses of Congressfor if its author is right, we as a nation cannot afford to be wrong.

At the beginning and throughout the book, Kagan emphasizes the first item on Thucydides' list of the three great concerns that influence political communities. While contemporary readers will not be surprised by the notion "that fear and interest move states to war," Kagan writes, it may seem strange to them that a "concern for honor should do so." Of course, he notes, "if we take honor to mean fame, glory, renown, or splendor, it may appear applicable only to an earlier time." If, on the other hand, "we understand its significance as deference, esteem, just due, regard, respect, or pres tige we will find it an important motive of nations in the modern world as well."

Honor, Kagan insists, is "desirable in itself," but "it also has practical importance in the compe tition for power. When it is on the wane, so, too, is the power of the state losing it, and the reverse is also true. Power and honor have a reciprocal relationship." Above all else, an otherwise formidable state tends to lose prestige, and with it the capacity to accomplish its goals, when it is "seen to lack the will to use its material power." Kagan warns his readers that they "may be surprised by how small a roleconsiderations of practical utility and material gain, and even ambition for power itself, play in bringing on wars and how often some aspect of honor is decisive."

Such was the case with the Peloponnesian War. As Kagan tells the story, Thucydides was right in general and wrong in particular: This great conflict was by no means inevitable. Neither the Spartans nor the Athenians were intent on war. They had come to blows in the recent past, and neither side had proved able to eliminate or secure a decisive advantage over the other. There were circumstances that could encourage confrontation: Athens ruled a maritime empire, and Sparta was a land power, which led and dominated the so-called Peloponnesian League. Instability within either alliance might tempt the other to intervene. But the Spartans, outnumbered as they were by a restive and troublesome servile population, were exceedingly reluctant to take risks; and Athens, which was the less vulnerable of the two, was led by Pericles, a sober and capable statesman graced with first hand experience of the dangers that one subjected one's country to when one embarked on such a war.

In the event, Corinth, a maritime power that happened to be the most independent of Sparta's allies, became embroiled in a conflict in the Adriatic. The Athenians were drawn in when faced with the prospect that the Corinthians might conquer hitherto neutral Corcyra and, by bringing together under their control the second and third largest fleets in Greece, emerge as a threat to Athens on the sea. When the Athenians intervened to prevent the Corinthians from achieving this goal, the latter successfully pressed the Spartans for a declaration of war.

The Corinthians were driven chiefly by honor; the Spartans, by the fear that their alliance would come apart, by the conviction that war would in any case eventually come, and by the desire not to dishonor themselves by abandoning a longtime ally. Initially, the Athenians were concerned with their own safety. Under Pericles' leadership, they came to the defense of Corcyra but did so in an unprovocative manner. They blundered only when, in anger, out of a sense of honor, they retali ated against Megara for her participation in Corinth's Corcyraean adventure by imposing a trade embargo on that Spartan ally. By putting pressure on the very community that Athens had taken from Sparta at the beginning of the earlier war, Pericles touched a nerve, bringing Sparta into the conflict.

Pericles, though he failed in the end, is the hero of the piece, as he was in Kagan's Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (1991). But here he serves primarily as a foil for a figure who appears to have been an even greater man: Otto von Bismarck, the statesman most responsible for the formation of Germany.

As Kagan recounts the tale, Bismarck was a man who knew what could be done and what could not. After forging German unity, he recognized that further German expansion would unite the rest of Europe against the upstart power. He therefore presented his country to its neighbors as a saturated power intent on the preservation of peace, willing and able to serve as an honest broker. Having injured France by the seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, he sought at the same time to isolate that potentially revanchist power and to soothe its fears. Recognizing the danger that Russian ambitions might pose, he tried both the carrot and the stick, neither encouraging adventurism on Russia's part nor drawing so close to Austria-Hungary that Russia would be estranged. It was, as Kagan empha sizes, a bravura performance.

It ended when, after the death of Bismarck's patron Kaiser Wilhelm I, that fortunate monarch's grandson Wilhelm II asked for the great statesman's resignation. Under Wilhelm II, Germany em barked on a quest for power and glory. In the process, it needlessly alienated Russia; found itself forced to fall back on its alliance with Austria-Hungary; encouraged fear and revanchism in France; and built a fleet, for which it had no real need, that so threatened the British that they abandoned their traditional isolationism, drew near to their ancient enemy France, and eventually signed an alliance with Russia.

Having encircled themselves, the Kaiser and his advisers seized upon the crisis stirred up by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo as an opportunity to drive a wedge between England, Russia, and France, taking "a calculated risk" that ended in a general war. If Bismarck's story is a tale of a difficult situation magnificently handled, the history of Wilhelmine Germany is a case study in what not to do.