Reason versus Arms
GITLIN, TODD
Reason versus Arms An End to Arms, by Walter Millis. Atheneum. 301 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Todd Gitlin Walter Millis' book is a lucid argument for a particular kind of world order. It comes at a...
...Despite some anguished academic efforts to have us "think about the unthinkable," war was finished as the ultima ratio—it was recognized to be worse than useless: it would put an end to the game...
...But if Millis' argument is flawed, it is nonetheless valuable as a provocation...
...In his view, the present international system is rapidly moving toward a state in which the great weapons will be totally irrelevant to the interplay of power...
...one problem with a long view is that it often obscures the "small" (but dangerous) irrationalities...
...GABRIEL GERSH is a free lance writer whose articles have appeared in The Commonweal, The Christian Century, and The New York Times...
...it has, in fact, become a new international system, in which the power struggle does not preclude "relative" peace...
...Instead, Millis argues, a demilitarized world must first be envisioned by the great powers...
...For the Damoclean sword still hangs over our heads, regardless of the intentions of the great powers, and military expenditures are intolerable in the face of such visible and crying needs...
...The starting point is a distinction between two kinds of international disputes: those that involve the immediate interests of nation-states and, on the other hand, those over the "power to control the future...
...For one thing, the continuities between deterrence and disarmament seem to me far from mechanical...
...Walter Millis has given us a long view of international affairs, in the neglected classical tradition of Rousseau's A Lasting Peace and Kant's Perpetual Peace...
...In particular, a book directed to the American public should take some account of the role of vested interests in bringing about the disparity between what is and what is plainly right...
...The book's purpose, in Millis' words, is to try "to assess the factors that have stultified all disarmament conferences for the past sixty of seventy years...
...THE REVIEWERS RICHARD HOFSTADTER is a professor of American history at Columbia University...
...In these times, reason must be harnessed to reconstruction, which never comes without effort...
...ALLAN F. WESTIN teaches public law and government at Columbia...
...then and only then can the arms be dispensed with...
...It always takes commitment to implement a system that is "objectively in the cards...
...They vie for influence in the seething Third World, but "always without risking the naked power confrontation for which the only outcome would be world war...
...If An End to Arms raises more questions than it answers —a possibility the author himself entertains—was there ever a time when the wrong questions were being asked so insistently, so that a right answer cannot be recognized for what it is...
...But paradoxically, while the military nation-state system and its bastard child, war, arose for the pursuit of narrower interests ("War is the continuation of policy by other means"), the power struggle, in the Twentieth Century, came to be focused on the more grandiose, global strategies that nations pursue...
...A "power struggle" such as the cold war is of the second type: East and West have no "immediate" (territorial, economic) cause for antagonism, but each jockeys for a diffuse power applicable to all future disputes...
...In the foreseeable future, it will be possible to codify this fait accompli in the form of a world constitution to be enforced by world police, rather than military institutions...
...Subversion," riot, internal turmoil in the Third World will continue, but can be brought under control once the great powers realize that the world is too complex to permit a traditional power struggle...
...Once the means of war were brought into being, they had to be used, even if for no rational reason...
...In other words, disarmament heretofore has been propounded in circumstances in which arms seemed necessary, in which the use of force was uninhibited...
...This takes us to the present time, but Millis is not content to let the matter rest there in the smug manner of so many of our accredited political scientists...
...It comes at a time when the discussion of disarmament has been too much cluttered with technicalities, and not enough informed with what the book jacket properly calls "a new vision...
...There are troubling echoes of this "now or never" mentality in the present American stance toward China...
...Among his books are "Anti-lntellectual-ism in American Life" and "The American Political Tradition...
...Further, it is not obvious to me that disarmament need wait, if the present international system is indeed as close to de facto demilitarization as Millis thinks...
...Thus, neither the United States nor Japan wanted war in 1941, but "each believed that the consequence of any retreat, even a partial retreat toward possible compromise, would be to deprive each side of all power to control the future...
...PAT WATTERS is information director of the Southern Regional Council and a former city editor of The Atlanta Journal...
...Millis, thankfully, is not afraid to display moral outrage at the economic waste and the perversion of scientific talent...
...the rise of neutralism is another...
...If there was ever any doubt of this (as over Indochina in 1954), the Cuban missile confrontation dispelled it forever...
...why not now...
...It would be a pity, though, if it were read as- a ringing call to complacency...
...A second paradox aggravates the first...
...Millis is an optimist...
...But the nation-state, not a supra-national government, is to be the primary unit of world order: not because world government is Utopian but simply because it would be ill-suited to enforce order when most of the major disruptions are within nations rather than between them...
...Coexistence became the only rational form of great-power conduct...
...The weapons had to have some rationale, namely deterrence, but war, as President Eisenhower put it, became "unthinkable...
...Millis is, I think, too sanguine about the role of reason...
...The present system of threat and counter-threat, with the centers of world power breaking up, is substantially non-military, because the great nations feel secure...
...While disarmament is an obvious goal, "Most efforts to meet the world problem by beginning with disarmament are like efforts to design a water turbine that will work only if water would run uphill...
...The "delicate balance of terror" has proved not so delicate...
...polycentrism is yet another...
...Thermonuclear weapons, the ultimate in man's destructive ability, cannot even be used in pursuit of the struggle for future power...
...He wrote a widely-quoted article on the John Birch Society in Com-memtary in 1961, and a book "An Autobiography of the Supreme Court...
...TODD GITLIN is a coordinator of the peace research and education project of Students for a Democratic Society and a graduate student in political science at the University of Michigan...
...Disarmament would then follow in rapid order, in that it would simply record "a universal conviction that military power has become superfluous, inapplicable, and useless as an instrument of international politics...
...Any blueprint such as Millis' must contain a strategy for transcending those domestic forces which, by dint of their very existence, have made it necessary that there be reassuring blueprints...
...Rife with superb epigrams and sub-arguments—including a pungent demolition of the "domino theory," and a nice disquisition on the use and abuses of language—it reads well and deserves a wide audience...
...Finally, I miss a sense of the institutional obstacles to international sanity...
...to take a fresh look at the basic problems of power, of law and order, of our ideas about international politics, which have blocked almost all advance through the disarmament approach, and to ask whether these problems and these ideas are not undergoing changes that will make a demilitarized (and therefore a disarmed) system of international politics an actual possibility for the first time in the history of mankind...
...There is still—the argument continues—a power struggle, but it is continued by means other than full-scale war...
...The new technology of war is only one reason...
...The argument is more subtle than I can convey in this space, but perhaps some of its weaknesses are already clear...
Vol. 29 • May 1965 • No. 5
