On Coercive Statecraft
| DOI | 10.1177/004711789501200601 |
| Date | 01 December 1995 |
| Author | James Nathan |
| Published date | 01 December 1995 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
1
ON
COERCIVE
STATECRAFT:
’THE
NEW
STRATEGY’
AND
THE
AMERICAN
FOREIGN
AFFAIRS
EXPERIENCE
James
Nathan
Introduction
.
In
the
heady
aftermath
of
the
Cuban
Missile
Crisis,
an
exultant
Robert
McNamara
exclaimed
that,
henceforth,
the
only
serious
strategy
could
be
’crisis
management’ .’
The
analysis -
that
force
could
be
supervised
for
discrete
diplomatic
ends -
was
exhilarating.
A
generation
of
national
security
defence
intellectuals
came
to
believe,
in
the
aftermath
of
the
Cuban
Missile
Crisis,
that
they
had
found
some
kind
of
resolution2
to
the
vexatious
dilemmas
attendant
on
force.
For
nearly
200
years,
force
had
seemed
to
expand
beyond
any
sensible
purpose.
Yet,
while
the
volume
of
potential
destruction
in
war
exceeded
any
meaningful
object
save
deterrence
of
war
itself,
diplomacy
had
withered
as
a
meaningful
mechanism
in
moderating
the
conduct
of
states.
But
in
the
early
1960s,
a
new
nexus
between
force
and
order
seemed
to
appear:
henceforth,
it
was
hoped,
force
could
be
remarried
to
diplomacy.
Justice’s
precursor -
a
stable,
liberal,
international
regime -
was
the
union’s
much
hoped
for
issue.
With
properly
refined
techniques
of
statecraft,
there
would
be
no
need
for
deterrence
to
come
to
any
kind
of
unlimited
test.
If
intelligent
crisis
management
could
find
a
way
to
discretely
proportion
force,
if
force
could
be
made
a
calculable
instrument
of
bargaining,
then
it
followed
that
the
inner
dynamic
of
Soviet
expansionism
could be
tamed
and,
at
long
last,
the
sibylline
promise
of
an
American
century
could
be
realized.
New
doctrines
of limited
force
held
out
the
prospect
that
the
sterile
Kabuki
of
diplomacy
could
be
replaced
by
the
management
centre,
the
telex
and
a
flexible
and
responsive
military
establishment.
The
hopes
pinned
to
limited
war
conjured
a
memory
of less
lethal
times.
For
the
most
part,
from
the
mid-
seventeenth
to
the
onset
of
the
twentieth
century,
war
and
peace
were
ambiguous
concepts,
defined
as
much
by
legal
artifacts
as
by
the
empirical
1
Cited
by
Coral
Bell,
The
Conventions
of
Crisis:
A
Study
in
Diplomatic
Management
(London:
Oxford
University
Press,
1971 )
p.
2.
2
At
least
this
was
the
lesson
of
the
crisis
derived
by
many
of
the
’New
Strategists’.
The
term
is
not
mine;
rather
its
paternity
belongs
to
James
E
King,
a
pivotal
member
of
a
community
of
scholars,
among
whom
were
Bernard
Brodie,
Arnold
Wolfers,
Dennis
Healey,
PMS
Blackett,
Henry
Kissinger,
Liddell
Hart,
Herman
Kahn,
Edward
Meade
Earle,
Michael
Howard,
Alexander
George,
Robert
Osgood,
Pierre
Gallois,
John
Blackett,
Thomas
Schelling,
Raymond
Aron,
William
Kaufman,
and Leo
Szilard.
King’s
enormous,
two
volume,
still
unpublished
manuscript,
as
well
as
his
private
correspondence,
holds
a
germinal
place
in
the
intellectual
history
of
strategic
thought.
Most
of
the
first
generation
of
’New
Strategists’
read
at
least
part
of
his
manuscript.
The
present
author
holds
all
King’s
papers,
including
an
unpublished
book
length
manuscript
on
Clausewitz.
This
article
is
both
in
Jim
King’s
debt
and
in
his
honor.
2
reality
of
the
battlefield.
Wars
usually
began
by
declarations
and
ultimatums;
and
they
ended
with
treaties
and
conferences.
Short
of
war,
there
were
fre-
quent
military
manoeuvres
and
demonstrations
of
intent
undertaken
in
the
absence
of
much
public
concern.
European
publics
were
largely
unaware,
ill-
informed
and
disengaged
from
war.
The
worst
of
most
wars
was
fought
at
sea
or
in
outposts
distant
to
the
capital.
Battles
might
be
intense,
but
the
costs
were
limited
to
largely
professional
armies
and
navies.
The
stakes
of
these
con-
flicts
were
relatively
small.
From
the
Treaty
of
Westphalia
to
the
onset
of
the
Napoleonic
War,
capital
and
courts
were
rarely
at
risk.
The
consequences
of
defeat,
in
contradistinction
to
earlier
practices,
were
neither
slavery,
slaughter
nor
forcible
conversion.
Rather,
a
kind
of
custom
of
redistributive
recompense
evolved.
Gains
or
losses
were
summed
up
and
parsed
out
in
the
form
of
military
alliances,
dynastic
marriages
or
overseas
colonies.
The
Clausewitzian
heritage
To
Clausewitz,
both
the
warrior
and
the
diplomat
ought
to
have
a
kind
of
regulatory
synergy,
sharing
an
end
not
of
victory,
but
a
better
kind
of
peace.’
War,
to
Clausewitz,
was
but
a
’stronger
form
of
diplomacy’;4
while
the
battlefield
was
merely
an
extension
of
the
conference
chamber.
Clausewitz’s
spectre
was
’pure
war’,
which,
of
’its
own
independent
will
...
usurp[s]
the
place
of
policy
the
moment
it
[is]
brought
into
being’.
Clausewitz’s
great
fear
was
that
war
would
become
’pointless
and
devoid
of
sense’ -
a
’thing
unto
itself.
Once
war
compelled
animosities
too
intense,
it
lost
its
integration
with
the
broader
world
of
statecraft.6
The
ensuing
carnage
would
only
cease
with
the
annihilation,
not
just
of
the
enemy’s
forces
in
the
field,
but
of
the
enemy’s
state.
In
the
eighteenth
century,
as
Clausewitz
noted,
an
unlimited
struggle
was
only
a
theorist’s
abstraction
and
not
the
reality
of
the
battlefield:
[W]ar
was
still
an
affair
for
governments
alone,
and
the
people’s
role
was
simply
that
of
an
instrument ...
[T]he
executive ...
represented
the
state
in
its
foreign
relations
...
the
people’s
part
had
been
extinguished ...
War
thus
became
solely
the
concern
of
the
government ...
[government
parted
company
with
their
peoples
and
behaved
as
if
they
were
themselves
the
statue.
With
the
American
Civil
War,
war
began
to
approach
its
terrible
and
absolute
form.
As
a
result,
the
best
remaining
rationale
for
war’s
employment
was
to
defeat
the
causes
of
war
itself.
It
was,
Raymond
Aron
noted,
’essential
to
inflate
the
purposes
of
victory’,
since
’peace
would
be
durable
only
if
dic-
tated
unconditionally
after
crushing
the
enemy.
The
demand
for
total
victory
3
Carl
Von
Clausewitz
On
War,
edited
and
translated
by
Michael
Howard,
Peter
Paret
and
Bernard
Brodie
(Princeton:
Princeton
University
Press,
1984)
[Book
Two,
Chapter
2].
p.
146.
4
Carl
von
Clausewitz,
op.
cit.,
page
69,
pp.
488,
501.
5
Carl
von
Clausewitz,
op.
cit.,
[Book
One,
chapter
1;]
p.
88.
Book
Eight,
Chapter
6[B]
page
605.
6
Carl
von
Clausewitz,
op.
cit. ,
[Book
Eight,
Chapter
6]
p.
706.
7
Carl
von
Clausewitz,
op.
cit. ,
Book
Eight:
Chapter
8,
pp.
583,
589-91,
and
see:
Book
One
Chapter
2
and
page
647.
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