Kagan juxtaposes the Peloponnesian War with World War I because, in each case, there were two opposed alliance systems, and one of the hegemonic powers found itself drawn into a conflict of intrinsic interest only to its chief ally. He juxtaposes the Second Punic War with World War II for comparable reasons. In each case, the war involved powers which had fought before, and one side had been victorious and had imposed a peace. In studying these last two examples, one can ponder what it is that makes a good postwar settlement and what is required to enforce or maintain the peace.
It should have been easy for Rome to forge a lasting settlement
in the wake
of the First Punic War. Once Rome achieved full control of the sea,
Carthage was helpless. Rome could have destroyed its rival. But the
Romans were reluctant to govern an empire, and so they sought to
turn Carthage into a client state. In the Peace of Lutatius, they
defined for the powers two separate spheres, taking Sicily and the
nearby islands for themselves and leaving Carthage with Sardinia
and the Maghreb. In principle, this might have workedbut Carthage
had been a great power long before Rome was worthy of notice, and
it is by no means clear that it would have been satisfied with
second-class status. In any case, when the Carthaginians became
embroiled in a con flict in North Africa with their own mercenaries
and rebellious mercenaries in Sardinia offered that island to Rome,
the Romans hesitated; and when the offer was made a second time
after the Carthaginians had put down the rebellion near home, the
Romans pounced. After that, what little chance there was that the
Carthaginians would ever trust the Romans and accept the hand that
fate had recently dealt them disappeared.
Even then, Kagan insists, the peace might have been kept. The Romans might have attempted appeasement and they might have prevented the Carthaginians from establishing an empire in Spain. They did neither. Kagan's tale of what they did instead is a story of gross ineptitude.
Something of the sort can be said concerning the origins of World War II. Given what the victorious allies had suffered in the course of a war fought for the most part on French and Belgian soil, and given what they had learned concerning Germany's intentions from the terms imposed on the Soviet Union in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, one can hardly blame them for being wary of the prospect that Germany might emerge from the war as a power dominant on the continent of Europe. If the peace imposed on Germany was a Carthaginian Peace, as is sometimes said, it was not because the Versailles settlement was needlessly harsh but rather because it was not harsh enough. At the end of World War I, German industry was intact; the German economy had far better prospects for a quick recovery than the economies of her rivals. The peace imposed on Germany was bound to inspire resentment. It applied the principle of national self-determination to all but Germans, and it held the Central Powers responsible for the war. But the real problem was that, having added insult to injury, it left the aggrieved with the wherewithal to press hard for a general revision of the settle ment in their favor. The Versailles settlement was not a peace that would enforce itself.
That would not have been fatal had the Allies been willing to enforce the peace themselves. The French were willing, but they could notor at least would notdo so alone. At Versailles, the French had pressed for the dismemberment of Germany. They had been persuaded to give way on the expectation that they would be awarded a defensive alliance with the United States and Britain. But when Woodrow Wilson failed to make good on his promises, Britain exercised its right to forgo the alliance, and France was left to her own devices.
In fact, after the peace was signed, neither the Americans nor the British were comfortable with the results. Wilson's pious hopes for collective security and his contempt for balance-of-power politics caught on, especially in the United Kingdom. Under the influence of those notions, the British set out to appease the Germans and bring them within the League of Nationsand the French, after a brief attempt to go it alone, followed their lead. In the 1930s, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain merely pursued to its logical conclusion the appeasement policy adopted the decade before.
Twenty years ago, Kagan's course tended to end on a note of triumph. Where Pericles and other statesmen had failed, John F. Kennedy had succeeded. The events of October 1962 were a diplomatic crisis well handled: It did not end in war. That was, of course, the impression left by the memoirs published by those inside the Kennedy administration. The release of hitherto classified data has altered the picture, and Kagan is no longer inclined to congratulate the Americans on their statesmanship. Kennedy emerges in this account as a man much more like Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill. He had, to be sure, a proclivity for extreme rhetoric, but that rhetoric was rarely, if ever, backed up by action.
In the 1960 election campaign, Kennedy publicly called for an invasion of Cuba by the Cuban exiles. Then he allowed it to fail. On Laos, where Eisenhower had been tough, he accepted a settle ment unfavorable to the United States. At the Vienna Summit, he allowed Nikita Khrushchev to browbeat him. He did nothing to prevent the building of the Berlin Wall and may have encouraged Sen. J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to float the idea that the Soviets would be perfectly justified in closing the border and cutting off East German emigration to the West. When, in panic, Kennedy announced that America would not hesitate to launch a first strike if the Soviets invaded Western Europe, Khrushchev figured that it was worth the risk to try to put an end to America's nuclear superiority by shipping to Cuba middle-range and intermediate -range ballistic missiles bearing nuclear weapons. Even if the Americans discovered the missiles before they were operational, the Soviet leader appears to have reasoned, Kennedy lacked the cour age to do anything to prevent them from being readied.
Kagan's account suggests that Khrushchev was right in his estimation of Kennedy. The delib erations of Ex Comm, the body that Kennedy set up to weigh America's options, were taped on Kennedy's orders. The transcripts are now available, and they demonstrate that neither Robert McNamara nor John F. Kennedy had any appreciation of the strategic consequences of allowing the missiles to stay in place. Both could think only of the elections that would take place in a few weeks. They evidently regretted Kennedy's public commitment, announced in early September, that the United States would not tolerate the introduction to Cuba of missiles with a nuclear payload. Neither appears to have been willing seriously to contemplate an American attack on the missiles' site or an American invasion of the island.
Kagan's judgment can, of course, be questioned. Twenty years ago, I was inclined to think that Pericles was less like Bismarck than like the last preWorld War I German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and I still suspect that the embargo against Megara was aimed at dividing Corinth from Sparta and splitting the Peloponnesian League so that Athens could fight an inevitable war on favorable terms. Others may wish to challenge Kagan's assessment of Bismarck or Kaiser Wilhelm II; of Roman statesmanship between the First and Second Punic Wars; of the Versailles Treaty; of Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and Winston Churchill; of John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. But none of this detracts from the value of this book, for its purpose is less to tell one what to think than to make one do so. Even if Kagan is wrong on a given question, he has much to teach us concerning the questions that we must repeatedly askand, as anyone in the business of strategic management can testify, posing the right questions is where political prudence begins.
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