On the Origins of War

In his outstanding work, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, Donald Kagan pontificates on the interminable questions of how wars come about and how can they be prevented. Kagan processes these questions through his examination of selected cases, the Peloponnesian War, the Second Punic War, the First and Second World Wars, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kagan observes, that most authors who have written on the subject focus on decisions to resort to war as flowing from some calculation of material or ideological self-interest. However, the scale of destruction and the impairment to the prosperity of nations seeking war makes the notion of war seem irrational but wars continue to take place. Thucydides, Kagan notes, saw war as emerging from not only the pursuit of interest but from considerations of honour and out of fear and insecurity. Kagan also departs from convention by approaching the question not so much as "What happened to disrupt some natural tendency toward peace?" but as "How can the conditions necessary for the preservation of peace be constructed as an objective of foreign and defence policy?."

Kagan is, in some sense, very Hobbesian. He harbours few illusions about either human nature or alleged natural tendencies in international politics toward peace. His descriptions of war and his account of nations competing with each other are unrelentingly realist. He argues that States facing threats must if war is to be averted, be prepared either to deter with a credible and adequate show of force or to resolve differences and ameliorate grievances while making concessions from a position of strength. What must be avoided, he insists, is either attempts to deter with inadequate or purely nominal force, or attempts to resolve differences through making concessions from a position of weakness; he cautions that either which way these recourses are likely to be counterproductive and encouraging, rather than deterring, potential aggression.

Moving onto the cases that have been examined by Kagan. The hypothesis that Donald Kegan presents is that war results from a small set of motives as originally formulated by the ancient Greek Thucydides. These motives are honour, fear, and interest. He challenges revisionist accounts of the origin of World War I that raised doubts about the responsibility of decision-makers in the German government for the outbreak of war, and, in his view, laid the groundwork for sympathy for German grievances in the 1920s and 1930s that led to the misguided effort to appease the Hitler regime. He is strongly critical of Neville Chamberlain for first denying sufficient resources to the maintenance of military preparedness because he saw no imminent threat, and then pursuing appeasement when a threat arose because Britain was militarily unprepared to challenge potential aggressors.

He expresses reservations about the positive assessment afforded to President Kennedy for his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, suggesting that Kennedy's concern with avoiding the possibility of conflict through Soviet miscalculation based on a misreading of American intentions led him to adopt a softer position than appropriate. Kagan's reading of events leads him to speculate that the Kennedy Administration was prepared to remove missiles from Turkey in return for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, provided that it could be made to appear like the Soviets were simply withdrawing the missiles in return for an American commitment not to invade Cuba. Kennedy’s weak performance in a series of foreign-policy events—the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vienna summit, and the construction of the Berlin Wall—all tempted Nikita Khrushchev into deploying missiles in Cuba. The Soviet leader seems to have decided that this advance would provoke only another ineffectual response: and, according to Kagan, Khrushchev was nearly right. Were it not for overwhelming domestic political pressures, Kennedy might have been simply willing to accept Soviet rockets in Cuba in the strategically dubious belief that the location of such weapons was unimportant. (Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, is said to have enunciated the erroneous principle justifying this position with the following words: “A missile is a missile is a missile.”)

Whether or not one shares his interpretations of historical events, one cannot but be impressed by the breadth of his erudition. He makes a strong case for the need to maintain an adequate level of military preparedness. In practical terms, two questions remain; what level of resources is genuinely required for defence, and how can this be balanced against other pressing priorities within society? For any civilized society, peace is always central to its existence. Kagan believes that military preparedness is the most effective way to maintain peace. He sees it as essential if any effort at conciliation is to inspire peace, rather than to encourage aggression. There is something to be said for this view. How far, however, it can be taken without either breeding fear and insecurity in other states or jeopardising other needs in society remains a vital issue for dialogue and debate.

As causal factors, Kagan emphasises a "Thucydidean triad" of honour, fear, and interest. The triad grows out of the inherently anarchical character of international systems, which are fundamentally shifting patterns of power. The problem is to ameliorate the fears of security that changing patterns generate and satisfy a state's need for prestige power confers. Rationality does not rule, as Kagan analyses how a revolt in Epidamnus in 431 B.C., a Carthaginian siege of Saguntum in 218 B.C., an assassination in 1914, a medley of mistakes in the 1920s and '30s, or a few nuclear-tipped missiles in 1962--each one objectively not worth a war-degenerated into a fearsome stare down over relative power.

Can democracies remain strong and determined over long periods? On this score, Kagan has some doubts. When sufficiently provoked, democratic regimes are quite capable of defending themselves, their interests, and their honour. But modern liberal democracies also have a deep-seated ambivalence about the acquisition and use of power (which flows from what Kagan describes as “an ethical system that is commercial, individualistic, libertarian, and hedonistic”), and their governments are under continual pressure to “satisfy domestic demands at the expense of the requirements of defense.” Modern democracies thus may find themselves in a dangerous double bind. Hampered in the maintenance and use of their power by internal constraints, they can invite challenges because of their apparent weakness. And when such challenges come, they are not always prepared, even as they find it difficult to turn away.

While I do not consider myself qualified enough to criticise a book of such remarkable scholarship. I have found the following references from other authors. His analysis of the reasons for the two great wars could be flawed, as he lays a lot of the blame for both of these wars on Britain, but for possibly the wrong reasons. Kagan’s view of German actions, post-Bismarck, and pre-Hitler, as well as his judgement of Kennedy and Pericles, are all considerably more negative than the consensus of most historians.

The merit of the book is captured in the marvellous quote below:-

"A persistent and repeated error through the ages has been the failure to understand that the preservation of peace requires active effort, planning, the expenditure of resources, and sacrifice, just as war does. In the modern world especially the sense that peace is natural and war an aberration has led to a failure in peacetime to consider the possibility of another war, which, in turn, has prevented the efforts needed to preserve the peace." (pg. 567)

Overall, a prodigious book that deserves a reading by those inclined to further their understanding of the fundamental questions of the origins of war and the preservation of peace. The book is lucidly written and thoroughly researched. The section on the Peloponnesian War is probably the most wellwritten largely because of his earlier authorship on the subject. His command over language, ability to synthesis arguments and his teaching background shine through in a masterpiece of a book.