On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace
Kagan, Donald
The moral of Donald Kagan's wise and compelling book was summed up neatly by the Roman military commentator Flavius Vegetius—si vis pacem, para bellum: "If you want peace, prepare for war." Kagan,...
...El/ n Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, currently in theatrical re-release, a band of gun-running, gone-to-seed outlaws, led by William Holden's hard-bitten Pike, rages against the dying sunset of an old West now ruled by the railroad monopolies...
...enjoyed overwhelming nuclear superiority at that time...
...These conflicts were formed in the crucible of the long wars that preceded them...
...by November, the rate had climbed to 4 trillion—practically meaningless sums, unless one's salary and life savings happened to be in marks...
...Kagan shows that it is likely that he did so only because he believed that Khrushchev had no intention of basing medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Castro's Cuba...
...For this, Neville Chamberlain must bear the lion's share of the blame...
...The crisis came because the more powerful state also had a leader who failed to convince his opponent of his will to use its power for that purpose...
...and the First World War, form one pair...
...He feared that they would choose shame—and have war nevertheless...
...He was right...
...But the Roman people refused to accept this settlement and upped the ante, demanding an additional thousand talents immediately, cutting the payment period for the rest of the indemnity to ten years and insisting that the Carthaginians leave other islands as well...
...In 1914, the exchange rate was 4.2 marks to the dollar...
...A s is well known, the First World War concluded with a similar blunder: the Germans were humiliated and burdened with reparations that ruined their economy...
...To create such an army, the British would have had to require conscription and the maintenance of a large standing army in peacetime—an almost unthinkable contingency in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Britain, although even the liberal John Stuart Mill was in favor of it after the ignominious defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War...
...Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938 declaring that he had brought—bought, rather—"peace in our time...
...The Cuban missile crisis, which brought us to the brink of nuclear war with the former Soviet Union, was a direct result of his vacillation and weakness...
...The Greek word, time, encompasses not only "honor" but also "esteem," "worth," "prestige," amour propre...
...What seemed like the counsel of prudence turned out to be a recipe for vacillation and indecisiveness: qualities that form a nearly irresistible invitation to disaster...
...But perhaps the most important consideration in each was time...
...The modem notion that peace is natural and war an aberration has led to a failure in peacetime to consider the possibility of another war...
...Professor Kagan has structured his book as a series of object lessons...
...Their policy "was both too hard and too soft, unclear, self-deceptive, and, therefore, dangerous...
...The first two chapters, on the Peloponnesian Roger Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion...
...Real preparedness, however, was beyond the will of the British...
...In this book Kagan examines four wars, two ancient and two modern—the Peloponnesian War, the First World War, the Second Punic War, the Second World War—and one near-war--the Cuban missile crisis...
...Kennedy made a televised speech announcing that the United States would not tolerate offensive missiles in Cuba...
...As he put it to one of his ministers in 1938, "we must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied...
...Unfortunately, there are many signs that our willingness to maintain and, if need be, to use that power judiciously is faltering...
...It is striking, he notes, what a relatively small role "considerations of practical utility and material gain" played in these conflicts...
...Neither country deployed a credible offensive force, Kagan explains, "because the Western leaders, and many of their people, did not examine their situation objectivelyand realistically but emotionally and hopefully...
...In these cases, the balance of power was upset by the swift expansion of power on one side: the growth of the Athenian empire in the years following the war between the Persian Empire and the Greeks, and Germany's drive to win European preeminence in the years after Bismarck's death...
...The contrast with Winston Churchill is instructive...
...But in fact, as Kagan points out, the Munich agreement represented "the triumph of an unrealistic muddle-headedness that based its idea of justice on a gross misreading of history and its notion of safety on the promises of a demonic and ruthless leader of a brutal totalitarian regime whose writings, speeches, and actions over a decade and a half showed that he had no intention of keeping them...
...But Sir Winston had two things Chamberlain lacked: the wit to understand the nature of the Nazi threat, and the gumption to oppose it tooth and claw...
...It is an unsatisfactory and dangerous device when it is resorted to out of fear and necessity, for then it does not reduce resentment but shows weakness and induces contempt...
...Why do men go to war...
...Until the outbreak of war, Chamberlain was hailed by many of his contemporaries as a man of peace...
...He finally took action at the eleventh hour, only because if he hadn't—as he admitted to his brother Robert-1 would have been impeached...
...As Churchill himself put it before the House of Commons in 1938, the British people had before them the choice of shame or war...
...He was that...
...in October, it took 25 billion...
...According to this myth, the resolution of the crisis was the result of "the calm and measured toughness of the brave young President, who had refused to yield under pressure"—a myth assiduously reinforced by the fawning biographies by Kennedy epigones such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Theodore Sorensen...
...Similarly, the growth of German power between 1898 and 1914 meant that only "a large, well-trained British army that could quickly come to France's aid in case of attack" could secure peace...
...Rather than maintain a competent offensive capability, which would have kept the peace, the British and French settled for the less onerous burden of a defensive posture...
...Nothing could be more natural in a liberal republic," Kagan notes, "yet nothing could be more threatening to the peace" that we have recently achieved...
...In fact, the U.S...
...It is said that Kennedy wisely left Khrushchev an honorable way out of the crisis and still managed to preserve the peace while giving nothing away...
...As is usually the case with truthful accounts of events in which any modern Kennedy has played a role, the story is largely an exercise in demythologization...
...This decision infuriated the Turks, who had been staunch allies, and was probably illegal to boot, since the missiles were deployed by NATO, not the United States...
...Kennedy's foreign policy record—the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Vienna summit at which Khrushchev issued various ultimatums to the dazed American president, the erection of the Berlin wall—is excruciating...
...Kennedy was, as one wit put it, all profile and no courage...
...The Second World War presented a similar scenario...
...Athens struggled to keep the peace when a complicated system of alliances was shaken by a few renegade city states, but Pericles pursued a policy that "was either too weak or too strong": too weak to prevent an outlying city from revolting, too strong to assuage Sparta's alarm about Athens's ultimate intentions...
...p rofessor Kagan's most original historical contribution in On the Origins of War emerges from his consideration of the Cuban missile crisis, which is based partly on documents that have only recently been declassified...
...for many of us, the word has an archaic ring...
...In the post–Cold War era, the world is more and more a tangle of enmities...
...But he was also the sort of peacemaker who encourages wars...
...Kagan argues that the best answer to the question is still that of Thucydides—people wage war because honor, fear, or interest seems to demand it...
...It was, Kagan concludes, "a bargain so embarrassing that [Kennedy] concealed it from the American people and made secrecy about it a condition for the agreement...
...The United States and its allies have the greatest interest in preserving the peace...
...The Cuban missile crisis," Kagan writes, "demonstrated that it is not enough for the state that wishes to maintain peace and the status quo to have a superior power...
...They were moved by the horror of war, the fear of its reappearance, and the blind hope that a refusal to contemplate war and prepare for it...
...In truth, Kennedy's actions "pushed his opponent further into a corner...
...Kagan quotes one commentator who notes that, as late as January 30, 1963, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara "lied outright to Congress" about the removal of the missiles from Turkey...
...C hamberlain, Kagan writes, "regarded Hitler and Mussolini as rational men like himself with limited goals who could be dealt with by flexibility and reasoned discussion, and he was eager to get on with it...
...Even today, after all the revelations about John Kennedy's private life and the implosion of his smarmy rhetoric, many people point to his handling of the Cuban missile crisis as a triumph of statesmanship...
...If the allies—and here the blame must fall especially on the French—had responded with force in 1936 when Hitler marched into the Rhineland and began his remilitarization in earnest, the Nazi war machine would have been nipped in the bud...
...E yen more damaging is the revelation that Kennedy secretly agreed to remove NATO missiles from Turkey in exchange for Khrushchev's removing the Soviet missiles from Cuba...
...Appeasement, Kagan notes, "can be effective when applied from a position of strength, when it is a freely taken action meant to allay a grievance and create good will...
...would somehow keep the peace...
...If Rome had intervened early in Spain, it could have crushed Hannibal before he had the chance to loose his devastating attacks on Italy...
...But ofcourse it was precisely Hitler's strategy—not to say his character—to demand more and more and more...
...Kagan recalls Talleyrand's famous reaction to Napoleon's murder of the Duc d'Enghien: "It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder...
...Motivated by the highest ideals, he nonetheless lacked the will to realize them...
...Indeed, he concludes that Kennedy himself would have been willing to accept The American Spectator May 1995 67 the deployment of nuclear missiles on Cuba but for the political outcry at home...
...If the goal is to preserve peace," Kagan writes, "the worst mistake we can make is to take inadequate measures to that end because we do not comprehend the nature of the problem...
...France, despite its large army, relied on the Maginot Line, the perfect emblem of Gallic military fatuousness...
...As with the Athenians, "their refusal to adjust their strategic capacity to their policy undermined their ability to conduct that policy...
...Alas, as the 1930s wore on, the policy of appeasement was applied from a position of cravenness, not strength...
...The Cuban missile crisis took place at a time when there was a great deal of talk about a "missile gap" that favored the Soviet Union...
...We can understand the latter two, but "honor" is more difficult...
...He did not permit himself to consider the possibility that their demands might be unacceptable or even unlimited...
...Although Hannibal was the aggressor, Kagan concludes that the Romans bear the major responsibility for the war...
...Hesitation helped to account for the popularity of the warlike Hannibal and demagogic Hitler, but unpreparedness did much to aid their cause...
...Unwilling to commit themselves clearly and firmly to the price ON THE ORIGINS OF WAR AND THE PRESERVATION OF PEACE Donald Kagan Doubleday / 606 pages / $30 reviewed by ROGER KIMBALL 66 The American Spectator May 1995 of defending the peace they wanted to maintain, they had to pay the price of a long, bloody, costly, devastating, and almost fatal war...
...War (431-404 B.C...
...in 1919, it was 8.9 marks to the dollar...
...We are also fortunate to possess the military might to do so...
...He also presided over extensive military cuts in the 1920s...
...Kagan, former dean of Yale College and now Bass Professor of History, Classics, and Western Civilization at the university, puts it thus: "Peace does not keep itself...
...When the Romans defeated the Carthaginians in the First Punic War (the Romans called the Carthaginians "Poem" or "Puni"), the victorious general offered them reasonable terms...
...by July 1923, it took 353,412 marks to purchase a greenback...
...The great misfortune of the Western powers," Kagan writes, "was that they lacked leaders at this moment of crisis wise enough to understand the situation and strong enough to move against the current...
...Churchill himself had once expressed admiration for Mussolini and—albeit very briefly—Hitler...
...Kagan's discussion of "Hannibal's War" (the Second Punic War) and the Second World War present a differentscenario...
...The Carthaginians were required (among other things) to leave Sicily, return Roman prisoners, and pay an indemnity of 2,200 silver talents over twenty years, a sum that they could comfortably afford...
...Britain had her fleet and her island isolation...
...If vindictiveness is one mistake, hesitation and unpreparedness can lead to consequences just as bad...
...They were "the product of the failure of the victors...
...Variations of the phrase recur in nearly every chapter of On the Origins of War...
...His inner circle of advisers played along...
...This vindictiveness angered the Carthaginians, turning them into implacable enemies...
...It is his theme, his message, his plea...
...Fear was an important factor in some of them...
...But real strength inheres not only in the possession but also in the projection of power—and it was here that Kennedy failed dismally...
...to construct a solid basis for peace...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
