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The Pentagon's New Map > Deleted ScenesDeleted Scene #3Chapter Two: The Rise of the 'Lesser Includeds'Section: The Fracturing of the Security MarketCommentary: This third "deleted scene" was my effort to introduce the Waltzian three-tiered paradigm in all its glory. I have done this many times in reports over the years, feeling it is only right to give the man his due. Mark Warren cut this section because he felt it went on too long and because it came off as too academic. His point was that the reader really didn't need all this extra information for me to make the ensuing points in the text. Plus, because my use of this conceptual tool is unique enough, all I really needed to do was to give the man a good endnote, which I did. Deleted Scene: Introducing Kenneth Waltz' Three Perspectives[TEXT BEGINS] Across the nineties, I had my own working brief of concepts I kept trying out on military officers every chance I got. My little pictures were basically Rorschach Tests, or abstract renderings of reality that I would hold up in officers' faces and ask, "What do you think you see here?" If they recognized anything at all, the follow-up was predictable: "And how does that make you feel?" Of course, never once did I get the response, "I think it looks like the national interest!" Although, in many ways, that is what I -- like everyone else -- was fruitlessly searching for. I thought that if I could capture this mythical beast, or at least get my "patient" to recognize it for what it truly represented, then maybe we could finally get at the root causes of all this unease and creepiness. Tell me, how do feel when I say the words, national interest? I got furthest in these therapy sessions with officers when I used one very simple ordering construct that I borrowed from a classic book of international relations theory. The book is Kenneth Waltz's Man, the State and War. In this volume, Professor Waltz, considered a true giant in the field, approaches the subject of why wars happen between states. He does so by examining three separate explanatory models that he labels "images," or what you or I might simply refer to as levels of perspective. Because I am someone who explains complex concepts with visuals, I developed a simple PowerPoint slide in the early 1990s that I have been using ever since. It is my equivalent of the watch on a chain that I use to begin the hypnosis. Once I get you outside of your normal consciousness, I can help you explore the various realms of reality that I think we face in the international security environment. Better yet, I am convinced that once you look at the world this way, your understanding of the rule set shifts in the 1990s will immediately become clear. Of course, this trick does not work on everyone. Like those 3-dimensional art works that hide embedded images, sometimes officers could stare at this slide for a long time and still not get it. The near-sightedness caused by going eyeball-to-eyeball with the Soviets all those years is hard to overcome.
What I do in this slide is simply take Waltz's three images and arrange then in a vertical stack to suggest a hierarchy that naturally emanates from his analysis of the various causes of war between states. Waltz's first "image," or perspective, was that of the individual. How do we explain wars by looking at individuals? One basic explanation is that man is inherently violent and therefore enjoys fighting. Another is that "bad leaders" are naturally inclined to start wars, like a Hitler and all those "rogues" who have been compared to him ever since. This explanation, or perspective, is bottom-up in my presentation, because you are looking for answers within or below the level of the nation-state itself -- sort of what Freud might call the id of war. Moving up one level of perspective, Waltz tackles the problem more head-on. Wars between states happen because there are "bad states" and "good states." Good states (or stable democracies), on average, start wars far less often than bad states (or authoritarian states). We know this by looking at warfare across history. But we have also learned that states transitioning from bad to good, or from authoritarian to democracies, are the most likely to start wars. 1 I make the analogy to being a teenager: when we were kids we got into more fights than now as adults, but the period during which we got into the most fights was that transition from kid to adult -- or being a teenager. Same thing applies to states. Of course, the hope here has long been to make every nation a stable democracy, because then we might assume there would be no more war. This concept was first famously enunciated by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century as the dream of "perpetual peace" -- a phrase that has been misappropriated by modern fear-meisters who drone on endlessly about "perpetual war." 2 Moving up yet another level of perspective, or what I would call the top-down view, Waltz examines the international system as a whole. Here, the leading explanation for wars between states was first enunciated by the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes' basic thesis was that because the international system lacked an all-powerful ruling force, or what he called a Leviathan, all states within that chaotic order were doomed to near-constant conflict in an existence he described as "nasty, brutish and short." 3 This theory makes intuitive sense to most people, especially parents of small children or any adult who attended a public high school in their adolescence. Now, when I would show this slide to military officers, they would naturally gravitate to the nation-state perspective, despite the dreamy connotations of Kant's perpetual peace. That is because the military so firmly identifies itself as a creature or function of the state, since it is the government that aggregates the assets -- typically in the form of taxes -- to finance this instrument of big violence. That instrument is created primarily to do battle with other sources of big violence, which, in our international system, has been defined almost exclusively by nation-states for the past four centuries-the so-called Westphalian era. 4 So if you take this tripartite perspective on where big violence may be sourced, you can break down the universe of military contingencies as follows: there is system-level violence of the sort we feared would occur in the Cold War, otherwise known as World War III; then there is the classic sort of interstate war like Iraq invading Kuwait in 1990; and finally, there is the sort of violence that occurs not between states but within them, like the killing fields of Cambodia's Pol Pot in the 1980s or the ethnic cleansing of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s. [TEXT ENDS] [1] For details, see Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield, "Democratization and the Danger of War," International Security (Summer 1995), pp. 5-38. [2] Kant reference—is it needed? [4] Footnote to explain Treaty of Westphalia? |
Putnam, 2004
Esquire, March 2003
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