One of the strengths of Noel Malcolm's essay that opens this issue of The National Interest is that it is clearly, if mutedly, a Clausewitzian analysis of the crisis in Bosnia. Readers needn't agree with Malcolm's assessment of the correlation of forces in the former Yugoslavia--that the Bosnian army, "properly armed, and given limited assistance from the air...could have regained the territory itself"--or his contention that preventing the establishment of Greater Serbia was of such interest to the United States or Western Europe to allow for intervention. But they are obliged to appreciate the essential sanity of his larger point: war is an instrument of politics.

I know what you're thinking: here comes another dreadful lecture from a Clausewitz zealot. But one would have thought that in this age, so saturated with politics that art and literature are judged more for their political content than their aesthetic value, that war-as-politics would be an assumption rather than an argument. So why, to paraphrase Malcolm, do we turn to Jung and Freud to explain the confusion of the post-Soviet era?

The phenomenon extends far beyond the Balkans. John Keegan, perhaps the best-known and most widely-read military historian of the day, recently wrote in U.S. News & World Report of the "warrior spirit" conferring special determination and fighting skills upon the fighters of Chechnya. These abilities, Keegan argued, were "something that Chechens imbibe with their mothers' milk." The roots of this warriordom spring from Chechen history, geography, blood ties, and the creed of holy war. Is it any wonder, confronted with men who coursed with such warrior vitality, that the poor Russian conscripts had such a hard time?

Keegan is a leading light of the anti-Clausewitz movement--one always strong in Britain, Malcolm notwithstanding--now enjoying a renaissance of sorts. Indeed, the Prussian has taken a beating in recent years. Keegan's recent book, A History of Warfare, is his most theoretical and takes the form of an extended argument against Clausewitz. The first sentence reads: "War is not the continuation of policy by other means." Like those politicians and commentators whom Malcolm cites, Keegan is not satisfied with a political explanation of war, and seeks the origins of war in some deeper well of human experience.

His answer is war-as-culture, "culture" being "that great cargo of shared beliefs, values, associations, myths, taboos, imperatives, customs, traditions, manners and ways of thought, speech and artistic expression which ballast every society." While this might seem to be a conservative belief, it is at foundation a liberal one, for underlying Keegan's theory is the view that man can change, that progress is possible, that culture without war is emerging. "War," writes Keegan, "may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents." He is hopeful about the prospects for international peace-making:

"[T]he fact that the effort is being made betokens a profound change in civilization's attitude to war. The effort at peace-making is motivated not by calculation of political interest but by a repulsion from the spectacle of what war does. The impulse is humanitarian, and though humanitarians are old opponents of war-making, humanitarianism has not before been declared a chief principle of a great power's foreign policy, as it now has been by the United States...."

By contrast, Clausewitz had a professional soldier's deep skepticism about the possibility that man would refrain from war; his view was completely conservative and realist, nearly Hobbesian. And he certainly would have recognized the brutality of Bosnia immediately. To Clausewitz, anger and hatred were at the core of all war-making:

"Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference, however, lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth....Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for one another."

We run a great risk in thinking that those who have a taste for war-making and combat--the Serbs and Chechens of this world--are somehow fundamentally different from us. Perhaps such peoples are to be restrained and endured more than reasoned with, but in fretting over why they fight we lose track of a more pressing concern: for what do they fight? In focusing on their aims, we can discover the means to moderate their violent behavior.

For Clausewitz, this was the end of strategy; while recognizing the need to master the military arts and sciences, he lampooned "erudite or scholarly officers" who lost sight of what the purpose of war was. What fascinated Clausewitz was the great worry of professional soldiers: not how wars were conducted, but why they ended.

War, for Clausewitz, possessed a dual nature. It was "an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will" and had its own "laws" and "grammar." In the philosophical language of his time, it was a Kantian "thing-in-itself." This sort of "pure" war had no limits; it was a simple "act of force, and there is no logical limit to an act of force." But pure war was impossible. War could have no reality, no "logic" without the political end for which it was waged, and these political ends would impose limits. Thus, mere military balances could not bring war to an end, or more precisely, "suspend military action." What was needed was a balance of political aims and war-making strength, provoking "a desire to wait for a better moment." As Malcolm observes of the current cease-fire in the former Yugoslavia, both sides feel the need for a quiet period in which to build up their forces.

This set of reasoning should appeal particularly in the post-Cold War world, as the shadow of nuclear annihilation retreats. American strategy-making now requires more than nuclear deterrence of the Soviet Union: where we once had one implacable enemy, we have an increasing number of potential enemies-for-the-moment; they are largely unaffected by our nuclear arsenal, so we must compel them to behave as we wish. Normal, complex ways of strategy-making should return, replacing Cold War crisis management or the empty diplomacy that Malcolm chastises.

Not that we should expect permanent results or rapid successes. "War does not consist of a single short blow," warned Clausewitz, apparently less than impressed with the popular lessons learned from Operation Desert Storm. He considered that in war the result was never final, for "the defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found in political conditions at some later date." Just as the Russians have never heard the last of the Chechens, nor we the last of Saddam Hussein, nor the Bosnians, Croats and Serbs the last of each other, people will turn to war, not to reconcile their discontents, but to seek redress for their political grievances.

Essay Types: Essay