International Security in an Age of Choice
| Published date | 01 March 1998 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb025866 |
| Pages | 69-76 |
| Date | 01 March 1998 |
| Author | Lawrence Freedman |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & finance |
Journal of Financial Crime — Vol. 6 No. 1 — International
INTERNATIONAL
International Security in an Age of Choice
Lawrence Freedman
International security addresses questions of force:
how to spot it, stop it, resist it and occasionally
threaten and even use it. It considers the condi-
tions that encourage or discourage organised
violence in international affairs and the conduct of
all types of military activity. It therefore deals with
the most fundamental questions of war and peace
and so the highest responsibilities of government.
For this reason it has long been an area of aca-
demic endeavour where it is considered both
appropriate and possible for scholarship to feed
into the policy process. Yet as the danger of total
war has receded, and as the complexities of the
workings of the international system have come to
be appreciated, many now question whether there
is a research agenda here that is either intellectually
coherent or of more than passing policy interest.
This article argues that the issues here are still of
vital importance, but they need to be recast to take
account of the changing patterns of world politics,
and in particular those that allow for a more dis-
cretionary engagement by the stronger states in the
problems of the weak.
THE GOLDEN AGE
Until the second world war the study of war was
largely the preserve of generals and peace that of
lawyers. The idea that the worst tendencies of
states might become constrained through the
effective application of international law was left in
some difficulty after the effort to follow this prin-
ciple after the first world war failed to prevent the
second. If anything the peace tradition has now
been taken over by economists who, having moved
beyond mercantilism, no longer see any useful
purpose being served by war, and who have long
been excited by the potentially pacific consequen-
ces of international trade.
The study of war is still strongly influenced by a
Prussian General who fought against Napoleon's
armies. Carl von Clausewitz's legacy was an unfin-
ished book, 'On War', which combined a practical
grasp of strategy and tactics with a sophisticated
view of war's essential character. His teachings
were followed avidly, though not always accu-
rately, in a number of countries. 'On War' influ-
enced the German Kaiser's general staff and the
Russians Bolsheviks alike. To this day theorists of
war tend to define themselves by reference to
Clausewitz, although increasingly in opposition as
he was largely a theorist of a classic form of war-
fare that is now no longer being practised.
His most famous aphorism, that war is a con-
tinuation of political activity by other means, has
provided the basis for the study of war as a poten-
tially rational pursuit. This was the starting point
for investigations into the strategic implications of
nuclear weaons. Bernard Brodie was the first to
popularise the notion that these weapons were so
fearful that they might actually serve to prevent
another total war through the workings of deter-
rence. The experience of the Korean War sug-
gested that wars could be kept limited in their
means, that is non-nuclear, so long as the ends of
war were also limited, a theme picked up by
Robert Osgood and Henry Kissinger in the mid-
1950s.
This left a problem. While the US had enjoyed
a nuclear superiority it had taken on obligations to
allies in NATO that at least required the possi-
bility of initiating nuclear war, an action that
appeared to be downright suicidal with the growth
of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. -The attempts to find
ways of extracting political benefit from a nuclear
arsenal without triggering a cataclysmic conflagra-
tion dominated strategic theory from the mid-
1950s to the early 1960s. In addition to historians
and political scientists, engineers and economists
entered the fray. Drawing on advanced method-
ologies, such as game theory, they sought to con-
struct models to help conceptualise the dilemmas
of nuclear strategy.
Some found this outrageous, giving credibility to
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